Sunday, January 22, 2006

Things that may have happened in the mid-pacific

Taking a walk in the cold before twilight the last pale light of the day shining on the hill across the valley.
Sparky was looking for jets.
I got an intimation of a sci-fi story. 4 or 6 years ago I can't remember exactly when, the Apple Corporation lost a shipment of several boxcars full of their Macintosh computer's CPU. They fell overboard in heavy storm weather.
This is like hundreds of thousands of processors. This adversely affected Apple stocks.
Though I don't know where in the pacific this event transpired my mind pictured the boxcars falling through deep water. Eventually any air trapped in the packaging would reach crush pressures. Perhaps the boxcars broke open as they fell.
Beneath them there was an extent of active volcanic vents, the so-called "black smokers" of the ring of fire. The CPUs blown free of the boxcars by currents would drift down like plastic wrapped black snowflakes. Surrounding most black smokers are thriving communities of diverse organisms adapted to the darkness, heat and pressure as well as the intense chemistries.
How would thousands of advanced late 20th century technological devices interact with such a dynamic environment? Water temperature ranging from hot enough in some places to melt away any plastic to cold enough to freeze methane. Highly acidic sulfur chemistries mixing with the chloride chemistries of deep ocean water sucked into the vent system. Even in the cold regions the saline environment would work on the tiny connection points intended to attach to motherboards. Near the vents tens of thousands of chips and their plastic wrappers would melt and congeal as they were sucked into plume of superheated water. Streamers of polymer and doped silicon would drape the rising stone columns that were the throats of the black smoker communities.
In one place a boxcar still half full crashed into a stone pillar, bursting open a spewing vent and partially crushing a colony of tube worms. One end of the box car was quickly eaten away by the vicious hot acidic vent water. Chips and polymers formed a viscous pool beneath and within the canted boxcar.
Over the years the copper and aluminum contacts of the chips near the metal rich sulfide plume reacted to produce spurious currents that would partially charge buffer memory or activate a pipeline. Metal deposited on the most negative contacts and slowly ate away from the most positive ones. Some chips were compromised by saline others destroyed by heat. But what about the tens upon tens of thousands still left, tucked into every nook and cranny of this tiny biome? Bits of code and circuitry designed by evolutionary algorhythms and optimization theory. Flickering briefly into activity. Gigabyte after gigabyte of cache memory being read and written by the charges migrating through salinated mats of bacteria. Crystals of metal and metal sulfide slowly growing through films of polyethylene. Nearly pure silicon partially dissolving, entering the food chain and metabolism of a rapidly evolving ecology.

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