The three of them made their way towards Mrs. Kane's room. It was a little bigger than what the two of them head, but by design it was identical. A circular room with a single door set into the drab reinforced concrete walls. There were now windows, and just one singular light at the center to provide all the light.
Directly below the light was the bed, a flat metal sheet raised about a foot off the ground on thin legs. The room was essentially devoid of furniture besides that, the only other thing being a small metal cupboard set into the wall and filled with the few clothes they were allowed to wear. On top of the cupboard lay the few extra possessions that Mrs. Kane owned.
The three of them made their way to the bed in the center and sat down, Aria and Harry settling down on either side of their mother.
"So where do we begin?" said Mrs. Kane, "I suppose I'll tell you about the operation first. So as you guys it was called Trash Dive, which is a pretty accurate and self explanatory name."
"You sent people to dive into the trash chute?" asked Harry.
"Well, in a way yes, but not just into it, as you two should know, the trash chutes either send things off to recycling or instantly incinerate the things you throw in. Besides, I'm not talking about the regular trash chutes anyway, those just contain our junk, we wanted to get our hands on their junk, and around the beginning of last year, we found out where that went," said Mrs. Kane.
"How?" asked Harry.
"That's not an explanation for tonight," said Mrs. Kane," I'm telling you the short version here, ask me about that some other time. Essentially the alien's trash was connected to our own, just quite deep down at a point they thought we'd never get to, but we managed to tunnel in and sneak three people into the alien's recyclable trash."
"Soo.." began Harry, but Mrs. Kane held up a hand.
"Wait a minute, lemme finish Harry, I'm getting to the part you want to know," said Mrs. Kane,"so, we got people into it because we wanted to salvage some pieces of the alien's equipment."
"And you found a drone?" asked Harry.
"No, Harry, of course not, it was the trash, we gathered pieces to use for the drone, mostly just a frame and power. And a camera. We couldn't do too much else. That's one reason we can't truly explore everywhere in safety, the drone is basically a robot that needs to be programmed beforehand, we couldn't find the parts needed for a remote, or even a stabilization system for the camera, hence all the ridiculous shaking."
"Well it is impressive for what it is," said Aria, shaking her head. She hadn't imagine there could be any more surprises left in the day. To think that the device that managed to do the impossible was essentially a mashup of pieces from the trash.
"Yup, its built on a very simple concept, and I think this is what you two really want to know," said Mrs. Kane, "so, this was actually an idea brought up by Frederick Myers way back in the day, one that Alex improved upon and perfected. I won't go into too much detail, but the gist is that Fredrick hypothesized that the laser system worked based on identifying certain materials, more specifically it would vaporize all organic matter and any materials that were not in the current alien tech. He thought the fact that some of our technology from the 22nd century and beyond had some materials in common with the alien tech supported this theory because as you guys know, we only get 21st century or earlier tech to work with in our tasks. He believed this was because the laser system was programmed that way."
Harry gasped. "So that's how."
"Huh?" said Aria, still confused.
"I think Harry is onto something," said Mrs. Kane, "so yeah while Frederick back in the 2140's had no way of acquiring alien material, we did with the discovery of the trash chute so Mr. Summers managed to come up with a plan to build a robot of some kind using possible items found in the trash and well, as they say, the rest is history."
"Ohh," said Aria, nodding along. "That is a lot."
"Yeah, well, time for bed then, you two, you've got a job to do," said Mrs. Kane, standing up.
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