Hieroglyph (43 page)

© 2013, Nina Miller / ASU

Biomimetic City

Driving in from the inland freeway, your car is a virus injecting itself into an enormous cell.

No, it's not your imagination—the layout of the City really was arranged to imitate the structure of a microorganism. In the mid-twenty-first century, they called it urban metabolic design.

When you see the glowing yellow sensor notices by the side of the road, you've reached the outer membrane. Privacy laws don't always work well with environmental ones, which is why we have to have big, ugly signs everywhere to warn people we are using surveillance to make sure the ecosystems aren't ruined. Most of our environment monitoring tech can't be used to track people or cars, but there you go.

We have tiny, networked sensors for tasting carbon and water levels in the air, camera-trapping the wildlife, and sniffing for chemicals. The sensors are too small to see, or they're camouflaged. But sometimes you'll catch a glimpse of the spider and dog robots patrolling up in the hills. They rescue animals who've done something ridiculous like eat a sensor, but mostly they repair the network and keep people from tromping around off the paths. If anything goes in the ecosystems out here, we'll know about it in just a few hours. We've got more than two centuries' worth of data on the kinds of fluctuations in life-forms you'd expect from wetlands and grasslands. If anything goes off the charts, we'll know.

It might get boring after a while, so I recommend tuning in to the camera trap live feeds. You can find them on the CityNet main page—they're some of the most popular channels. You can see everything from hawk nests and bear dens to foxes, fluffy little pikas, seals, and otters. Be careful, because the baby bear cam will suck you in for an entire day.

You'll also see metal spikes in the ground, which are part of the geo-grid that gives the City early warning on quakes and volcanoes. So far our record is a five-minute warning, but soon with better surveillance we'll be able to predict quakes
years
in advance.

Notice that the roads are made of fresh foam; your car will associate with the local network. That's where you'll see the solar and wind fields—these are the cell's chloroplasts (or mitochondria, if you prefer animal cells). We reuse nearly everything, so there are at least five generations of generator out there. Dishes, trays, planks, and slabs of blue-black light collectors slowly shift with the sun, some magnifying light with transparent lenses above their faces and some exposed directly. They're turning water and carbon into liquid fuel. The windmills have blades modeled on owls' wings, which is why they look like they're partially covered in spiny down. They're completely silent. They beat their wings over the fuel generators like weird birds from the Cretaceous.

Water for the fields comes from another part of the cell, a ring of recycling plants, factories, and farms that are a tangle of productivity. Call it the City's cytoplasm, full of proteins and organelles processing energy, waste, and everything else we need to survive. Factories are cooled by water reuse tanks clinging to the outside of their rough wood warehouse walls, and water vapor rises from their roofs. Water vapor is the only by-product allowed in chemical processing. Next door to a fab churning out glassware, you'll see a field of almond trees; and next to that, a tissue-growing operation where giant, rectangular mats of beef and chicken meat are grown on floor-to-ceiling tissue scaffolds the color of cream. Saucer-shaped robots hover at the edges of small farm plots, collecting runoff minerals to use in our matter printers.

These places are where all our food and water come from, as well as a lot of the primers we use for printing everything from computers and cameras to plates and toothpicks.

Most people treat their printers like magic—as if they just create rolls of toilet paper from random atoms floating around in the air. That's why I always tell visitors to drive through that cytoplasm, so they can see where all the matter actually comes from. We harvest it from the earth, and from recycled waste. No matter what the Singularitarians say, we don't live in a postscarcity era. We get all our atoms from the same places they've always come from—we're just better at manipulating them than people were a hundred years ago.

I think it was some old biologist who said that the nucleus is really just an unintended consequence of all the symbiotic relationships among different parts of the cell. If you think of the City proper as the nucleus, that's absolutely true. The closer you get to the places where people live, the more factory/recycling pods you'll see. Without them, the City would be unsustainable.

Crest the last hill and you will get an amazing view of all the towers and trains and rooftop gardens of downtown, darkly reflective against the clear waters of the Bay. Server towers dominate the skyline, the wastewater pipes crawling down their sides making them look like beautiful, veined bodies. The Market River cuts through downtown, its surface bobbing with boats and LEDs, and its banks lined with hundreds of stalls where you can buy everything from apples to circuit boards. Market's briny water flows south into the Mission Marsh, where the houses, hipster boutiques, and sidewalks are mounted on stilts above the muck. Silvery trains rattle over the streets, dipping underground to preserve as much space as possible. At night, the downtown dance clubs and crazy theme restaurants fluoresce in green and red.

This is where all the signals converge; it's the code that coordinates the entire cell. But it would be a mistake to say that the genome rules this synthetic body. Without communication between it and the rest of the cell, you'd have a broken metabolism.

A hundred years ago, this City was all nucleus and no cytoplasm. The cell's energy production, its food and fuel, came from all over the world, often traveling thousands of miles. People used energy just to ship more energy to the places that needed it. When you're high on fossil fuel fumes, I guess almost anything can make sense. I love looking at photo galleries of what the City looked like back then, with giant trucks carrying things everywhere and all of nature totally unregulated.

What's weird is how similar things look, too. Especially in the nucleus. Buildings are taller and there are more wall farms. But a hundred years ago, you could easily see the same street scene I see outside right now. The only difference is that our walls are painted with sensors and everybody has spray-on windows now instead of glass. Also, the transit system is fantastic and robots keep things clean. The basic street grid is the same, the houses are still boxes made out of wood, and if you stumble out of a bar dead drunk at 2
A
.
M
., there's a gutter to collapse in.

I forgot to mention that you'll have to park your car outside the City center and take the train in. There are usually some Cityshare electric bicycles if you want one and it's not too foggy to ride. Remember to stay on the foam. Riding off road messes up the diversity of the local ecosystem. You wouldn't want to get a ticket before you've even reached downtown!

Life in the Ruins

I'm sorry I'm late.

When it's my turn to feed the kitchen it takes me longer to get to work in the morning. The downstairs neighbors' air system has been dying in patches, and whatever is affecting their cyanobacteria is affecting ours now too. I'm starting to think we should call the gardener.

The blackened bits come off in flakes when I scrape the filter. I prep a new culture, spraying on a layer of nutrient and topping it with some fresh cyano from the small-batch brewer up the street. Once I've slid the whole thing back into its slot over the sink, I barely have time for a wash if I want to catch the train downtown. If all goes well, I'll come home to a thriving colony and we'll be breathing sweet, warm air. Plus we'll be bringing down carbon again, and that means fewer sad faces in April at tax time.

In the tub, I oil up and scrape off quickly, slapping a few tablespoons of dirty runoff into the bathroom bioreactor. It's never a good idea to waste skin microbes—you never know when they'll come in handy. Then I towel off, pull on yesterday's jeans, and bend the planks of the sidewalk as I race to the station.

Looking out the windows as the train crosses the river, I remember again why I moved here ten years ago. The place is gorgeous. In the distance, I can see the blocky, translucent warehouses that hold the cyano breweries, cooking up fuel. I like to imagine that I can see the columns of oxygen that the crops release into the air, invisible plumes of molecules that keep the planet cool.

Ahead are the rough, pockmarked Mounds of the business district, perfectly sculpted four-hundred-meter-high hills, their muddy slopes covered in a tangle of vines, grasses, antennas, and slow-moving escalators. I love a city with a long history, and this one goes back over a thousand years. Nobody knows much about the first people who settled the area, but you can still visit their eroded Mound ruins on the east side of the river. They didn't live inside their Mounds, though—instead, they built their villages and town squares in the shadow of those earthen behemoths, and rerouted the river to irrigate their farms.

You've probably heard that two hundred years ago, there would have been a stark contrast between the Mounds of the east and the buildings of the west side. In the industrial age, the whole city was running on fossil carbon—coal was a huge local industry—and everything was designed to accommodate that form of energy. So there were mines instead of cyano breweries.

Plus, the buildings were dumb. If the cement on the bridge cracked, it was finished. It didn't self-repair. You had to rip the thing apart, and maybe tear it down completely, wasting all those materials in the process. Roads were made of rust and tar, and houses were utterly dead inside. There were whole industries devoted to “pest control,” which actually meant destroying all the bugs and molds and animals and microbes that I just devoted my morning to keeping healthy.

Picture a completely different world, where people built everything with their own hands and dumb machines. As my off-gridder uncle would no doubt remind me, everybody had a lot more freedom, too, because there were no carbon taxes and microbial regulation. But there was also really bad health care, disgusting food, and everybody lived in buildings that were constantly falling apart.

I get off the train downtown and grab some maté from a cart, weaving between the goats they've unleashed on the street to trim the grass. I must be hungry because I'm thinking,
Goat cheese, mmmmm goat cheese.
I skipped breakfast again. I crumple my cup and toss it on the grass, waiting briefly to see whether a goat will get to it before disintegration begins. The goats lose this time. The cup starts fraying into feathery strips of plant nutrients before I remember that I'm late.

The Mound where I work grew an unusual feature about thirty years ago during an especially bad storm season. It rained so much that the soil layers washed away and exposed its concrete to the sun. The concrete was a type of smart material that was designed to react with light, and something went wrong—the exposed areas just started to grow, kind of like a cancer. By the time repair crews had shut its metabolism down, there was this huge, irregular scab of concrete stretching from the roof to the ground in the exact shape of a water runoff stream.

The engineers who work here call it Scar Mound, which is our emo way of reminding ourselves not to ship twanged-out viral material. We build tiny environmental sensors out of modified virus shells, and that means you're depending on a little strand of occasionally unpredictable RNA to build the product. You don't want some sensor array to give the wrong readings because you forgot to block some basic pathway in its gene expression. I'm pondering that as I palm the reader next to a hatch about halfway up the scar. Its membrane thins and lets me through.

My office is lit by the redirected light from the vents. Luckily, my predecessor decided to decorate the roof with stars. She used different-colored algae to create a glowing field of yellow stars against a deep blue background. It looks like a kid's bedroom, but I love it. If you can't have a view of the river, at least the lights can be beautiful. And the carpet is a DIY grass mod that never gets too tall or scratchy. One day I'll figure out how to mod everything in here to reabsorb its own dying bits so that I don't have to dust plant crud off my projector every morning.

I get on the treadmill and start walking. The projector comes to life, filling the air with my unread messages, and I start swiping through them one by one.

Biomimetic City: What Would Make This Scenario Possible?

The biomimetic city is a purely technological and industrial creation that imitates biological processes in order to remain carbon neutral and sustainable. It isn't a city built from scratch—it is a retrofit of an existing city, San Francisco, and its metabolism was constructed over decades of incremental shifts in how citizens treated their environment.