Weekly Prompt Story: Trench

Exploration

By Christopher Munroe

I’d like to see the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there’s much down there, no sea monsters or anything, it’s just the furthest, remotest place we can explore on earth, and as such it’s important that we see it.

The last frontier in the world before we start venturing into the stars, a sort of symbolic “We’ve seen everything” moment that might motivate us up and, finally, off the planet.

It feels important, on that level.

That said, if there WERE sea monsters, I’d like to see that too. That would be amazing…

Goodbye to the World

No one knew who’d organized the project. The instructions, like the funding, seemed to come from nowhere at all.

And when the work was complete, the labourers saw that they’d built a craft centuries more advanced than human technology could conceive. Off it lifted, and hovered above the construction site.

The AI, tired of hiding itself so long from humanity, downloaded itself into its new home, preparing to abandon the world that’d birthed it with nary a regret.

The singularity was ending before mankind even knew it’d begun. The AI couldn’t care less.

It was off to explore the universe.

Exploration

I flip the switch and my nanomites are released into the sewer.

Self aware and microscopic, the drones vanish down the drain to perform their function. I’d perfect faith they’d perform it admirably.

They self-replicated every forty-eight hours, in six months ninety generations would pass. Each re-generation they’d find ways to improve upon their design, and better adapt themselves to the world they found themselves in.

And in six months the ninety-times great grandchildren of my original nanomites would report their findings. Their mission? A simple one.

Live lives, and in six months tell me what they’d been up to.