Garbage

WS-6647854 sorts garbage. Like several other similar units in both directions along the ever-moving conveyor belt, it has an arm, ending in a two-fingered hand, which it mostly uses to pick items of garbage off the conveyor. It has other appendages, too, which have other uses.

Items pass by, including a can of soft drink still containing some Coke. The can’s former owner had to rush to a job interview; she left the can in the street, and it was eventually picked up by a garbage collector, a robot similar to WS-6647854, but mobile, and less intelligent. WS-6647854 does not pick it up, as it is busy with another item.

WS-6647854 is a sorting robot, a combination of advanced and versatile hardware, along with a variety of sensors and a processor which serves as a brain, to enable its sorting function. Some of the others are the same model, but others are of a different age. There used to be an older model just next to WS-6647854, but a while ago it was replaced; it was no longer able to properly feel surfaces, and truth be told, it had never really been very good at it anyways.

A few seconds pass by with nothing on the conveyor. A single clump of soft paper is next, on its own. Tissue or toilet paper, but it appears dry even though it had been soaking wet. This is because it had been blown dry with warm nitrogen just a few minutes earlier. Poking out of the paper is a yellowish metallic object. A ring, fine and gold, with a date inscribed in script lettering on its inside. The date is sixteen years in the past. The last person to touch it was the woman who, in a moment of rage and hurt and hate, flushed it down her own toilet, using the larger flush button to ensure its exodus from her life. Sixteen years previously it had been donned, a flash of gold and white and a smell of heather. That, preceded by two years with flights to the Caribbean, plenty of alcohol, some vaped substances, music, dancing, and no small amount of parental meddling, made it seem infinite, its meaning ineffable but somehow so solid, harder than the diamond it would for so long share a finger with.

WS-6647854 has finished scanning its current item, weighing it, determining its moment of inertia, its surface reflectivity and color, its odor, its sound characteristics, and other properties; it has determined that the item is metallic. Now its job is to determine what kind of metal or metals it is made of. It uses a large database to find the piece’s original purpose and function, which in turn suggest a small set of likely material candidates and disposal options. One final test, a scratch test by WS-6647854’s hard involute-shaped spatulette which has just popped out of its main arm, will be done and that might just be enough to finalize the determination of this item’s fateful next step. The robot brings the spatulette across the surface of the object, twisting it slowly, and the determination is made. Without ceremony or, indeed, any delay at all after the decision, the robot holds firmly onto the object while it lifts it further from the conveyor and places it on another conveyor, which immediately activates, and then carries the object to Bin 43.

A cloth bag, made of biodegradable bamboo, appears next on the conveyor and WS-6647854 picks it up. After feeling it gently for contents, the robot produces a small flat plate which it places the bag on. Then scissors emerge from the hand and cut off the top of the bag, exposing what is inside. Odor sensors are triggered, as the meal inside has gone off, somewhat. The meal was something ordered and delivered to a middle aged woman; mother of four, grandmother of five with another on the way. She'd had a busy day, volunteering at the local elementary school, teaching music to children during lunch hour, and had stayed at the school library to organize books and other resources. Returning home tired, with one of her grandchildren, she had ordered some food, an Asian fusion of noodles, vegetables, shrimp, chicken and sauces to go with them. It had arrived and been paid for, when she had had to sit down, her vision blurry, her speech slurred; something in her brain had burst, and it soon shut down half her body. Her grandchild would remember this always, and the funeral, which has not yet occurred.

The robot WS-6647854 uses several of its tools to check all the materials in the meal, ensuring the food and the containers are all organic material and biodegradable. This takes several minutes, as it runs destructive tests on all parts of the package. It discovers two forks and two spoons which are plastic and recyclable, and it removes them, sending them to Bin 12. It then places the rest of the bag and its contents into Compostable. A newer model robot would do the same thing in seconds, with its modern biometric odor sensors. It is one area in which WS-6647854 is least specialized compared to newer units, but since its processor is over four years old, it tends to be slower at most of the tasks. Truth be told, the processor is the newest part of WS-6647854; most of the unit has been in this tunnel for eleven years, and has not seen the light of day since being deployed. Keeping the planet clean is a demanding job.

An electronic box, used for creating interesting visual and audio effects, pushes past WS-6647854. It has been partially ripped apart by an upstream robot. That robot saw after opening it that the box contained bioelectronics, a combination of organic and inorganic materials it does not have the hardware or programming to deal with; so it put it back on the belt for another, more specialized, robot to deal with. The original owner of the box would have cried if he'd seen it torn up, so casually, like that. When he'd received it for his fourteenth birthday he had shouted out and cried tears of elation. It had served him well, enabling him to produce many pieces; some he still had, others he eventually sold. A new art form had emerged from him and others like him; he had been an early invoker of it, a teenaged pioneer. He had received several newer, more sensitive such boxes with wider ranges of sounds, color and motion, since he had last used this box. Their existence made this box garbage.

WS-6647854 pauses, imperceptibly, and then finishes off its current item, directing it to the proper bin, and then waits. Shortly a mobile robot appears, and WS-6647854 simultaneously shuts off, a directive from its supervisory process on the network. The newly arrived herald produces an arm ending in a simple hex wrench, and starts removing the bolts holding WS-6647854 to the floor. As a precaution against falling or twisting, it also holds onto the old robot. Before long WS-6647854 has been supplanted by the newest model, unit WRR9-93451112. WS-6647854 will soon be disassembled and its useful parts will be used where practical. And the remainder will enter the system of garbage before the start of the conveyor belt.