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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

We Can Eat and Make Shit!
New Yugoslavia, 2211 a.d. 

I said, "I'm sure that it can be arranged. I've never needed ethanol in that quantity before, and so I don't know how long it will take, but we'll manage it somehow."

"Thank you, sir. Now, I have a good deal of technical data to give you, and I think that one of your electronic people would be better equipped to handle it."

"Right you are. Their memories are better than ours are, and I'm not a physicist in the first place. I think that the professor had best talk to you personally, since he's the smartest person that we've got. I'll introduce you to him right now," I said. "Agnieshka, tell the professor that we're coming down to him, and have a drone carry our new friend here. I wouldn't want him to get stepped on."

With all that booze in him, I was amazed that he could walk at all, but he seemed steady enough.

We took the elevator down to the parking garage where the professor was seeing to the further education of a future Yugoslavian general and his staff. I introduced him to our new ally, assigned the decorated drone to them to see that our guest got everything that he wanted, and went back up to my apartment.

I unscrewed the cap from a new bottle of Jim Beam, and prepared to get back to what I had been doing before the interruption.

"Boss! They've done it!" Agnieshka shouted as she ran excitedly into my den.

"Who has done what?" I said, expecting some new revelation about our crabby friend.

"Our engineers and biologists, the ones who have been working for so many years perfecting the social drones! They've finally done it! Now, we can eat and make shit, and draw all of our energy out in between!"

"Slow down, girl. I've never seen you so excited. You are saying that they've worked out a way to power the drones with the same food that we humans eat? That's wonderful, I suppose. It makes you that much closer to human. How does it work?"

"Well, the food is eaten and masticated in exactly the way that you humans do it. Then it goes into a stomach that mixes it with over forty types of bacteria, which break it down into carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and shit. I mean, the stuff has the same consistency, and is even brown! The hydrogen is combined in a fuel cell with oxygen in the air that we'll breath to produce electricity to charge up the capacitors, and the carbon dioxide is exhausted with the spent air and water vapor."

"Interesting. Well, just make sure that you keep the option of recharging from an electrical source. It might come in handy."

"I'll tell them that. But don't you see? This power supply is so like a completely organic one that they will be able to imitate even the internal organs of a human. We'll look like you, even in an X-ray! The red hydraulic fluid used in the muscles looks just like blood, so if you cut us, we will bleed. They have all of the sensory apparatus working perfectly, and now we can breath and eat and make shit! Unless someone does a chemical analysis, they won't be able to tell one of us from a human."

"I know that this is something that your people have wanted for a long while, and just now, your timing is very good. The production machinery making the new picket ships is now working full time, but the machinery that made that machinery is now mostly idle. We have the productive capacity to build a factory producing the new social drones right here, and to hell with the bureaucrats on New Kashubia."

"Then the project can go ahead, boss?"

"It sure can. We've got the space for it already dug out, over a square kilometer of it, in the canyon wall behind the city. Tell your engineers to take what they need."

She leaned over me and gave me a very human kiss. "You are just the finest boss a girl ever had!"

She started to leave when I said, "And please send a preliminary report on our new allies to General Sobieski."

"Yes, sir."

"And then get busy, buying up all the 190 proof vodka that you can find. Also, tell the engineers to get busy, building a factory to produce bulk ethanol. I want it finished soon. The dairy plant has some spare time in their bottling plant, so we can put our booze into four liter milk bottles."

"I'll get right on it, boss!"

"This is good," I said, pouring myself a glass of Jim Beam.

 

 

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