Short story – “Dust to Dust”

Warning, while not graphic, this story does contain content that many will find disturbing.

“Dust to Dust”

Three juvenile delinquents stood in the small waiting room when Maria Cuevas walked in carrying three small buckets.  She walked up to the nearest boy whose name tag read “Cyril Motlanthe” and handed him a bucket.

“What’s this for?” Cyril asked, not taking the bucket.

“Did you eat breakfast this morning?” Maria asked.

“Yeah.”

“Then this is for when you puke.” When Cyril still didn’t take the bucket, Maria said, “You either puke in the bucket, or stay and mop the floor.”

Cyril glanced at the other two kids with a smirk before snatching the offered bucket. 

Maria then handed buckets to Soad Kaya and Vladimir Kopacz who only grinned when they took theirs.

Maria stepped back and looked at them.  “My name is Maria Cuevas.  I’m the Assistant Plant Manager here.  Now I don’t care how you screwed up to get sent to the Pedogenesis Department, or as we call it PedDep, on Career Day.  Instead of going to the hydroponic farms, or to Apollo to study governance, or one of the spaceports to watch a launch, you were sent to the department you’ve probably never heard of before.  But PedDep is one of the most important departments on Mercury.  It’s also the shittiest.  Which makes it the perfect place to punish those convicted of minor offenses.”

“So why are you here?” Soad asked, to grins from her compatriots.

Maria chuckled.  She had lost track of how many such youngsters had stood before her, thinking they had asked such an original question.  “Oh,” she replied, “I guess I’m a bit of a sadist.” She paused to let that sink in a bit, before adding, “I don’t know how many kids I’ve seen standing there thinking they’re so tough and important, only to watch them leave with their shoes squishing with vomit.”

That wasn’t the kind of response they had expected.  It knocked some of the arrogant glow from their faces, replacing it with the slightest touch of green.

“Now,” Maria continued, “when you discovered you were being sent to the Pedogenesis Department, did any of you bother finding out what we do here?”

“You make dirt,” Vladimir said.

Maria stepped forward and glared down at him, even though he was only a few centimeters shorter.  “How old are you?”

Vladimir glanced at the other two then replied, “63 Revs.”

“If you were an adult I would slap you.” Stepping back she told all of them, “We do not use the ‘D-word’ here because it is too base.  In PedDep we create soil.”

Maria watched the three share confused looks with one another, then said, “Follow me,” and led them into the Main Shredding Room.  The room was ten meters by five with double doors on each of the short sides.  Along the long wall opposite of the door they entered, was a metal panel that could slide up and down.  It was up and blocked the view of the shredder and what was to be shredded. 

Maria let the kids look around the nearly bare room before beginning, “In simplest terms, soil is a combination of minerals from rocks and organic matter.  Every day, over a kilometer’s worth of tunnels are excavated around the planet.  Any metal or mineral useful for industry are extracted from the debris, we collect what we want, and the rest is dumped up on the surface.  So we have plenty of rock minerals, but very little organic matter.  It wasn’t much of a problem for the first colonists because they set up hydroponic greenhouses which don’t need soil.  While most of our food is still grown hydroponically, it’s hard to make a hydroponic football pitch.  So all the public parkland on Mercury is planted in soil we make here.  As well as all the potted plants people have in their homes, since soil for them is just easier than a bunch of little hydroponic systems.

“At first, soil was made using ground up rocks mixed with composted sewage and plant wastes; those being the only sources of excess organic material in the early days.  But humans weren’t the only animals to come to Mercury.  Early colonists brought chickens, rabbits, even goats.  Their manure is also used to make soil, but what were we to do when those animals died, or were butchered for meat?  All those bones and organs like brains and lungs became a new stream of organic material to create soil.”

Maria pointed to one of the double doors.  “Through there,” she explained, “is the Receiving Room where material to be processed is loaded onto a conveyor belt.  The belt comes in to here,” she patted the metal cover and continued, “where it comes to our first shredder.  The shredders are a series of rotating drums with diamond coated teeth.  In a couple of minutes this first one can chop a truckload of animal carcasses into chunks no bigger than ten centimeters by two.  Further drums breaks things down into pieces only a few millimeters in size.  These are the first steps of turning waste organic material into soil.” As Maria had spoken, the kid’s faces had lit up.  It was somewhat disturbing how the Career Day kids always seemed interested in watching stuff be shredded.  But she knew they would quickly change their minds.

“Every few days we process a truckload of animal carcasses from the various farms and butcher shops around the planet.   We also handle animals from the zoo as well as pets.  But there is one other item we process which you’ll see today.

“Some people,” Maria explained, “usually for religious reasons, request that when they die they be put out onto the surface.  When the sun rises, it incinerates their body and their atoms can be carried away by the solar wind across the solar system, even out into interstellar space.  Other people, knowing of our constant shortage of organic matter for soil, choose another option.”

Maria pushed a button and the metal panel dropped away.  Behind thick safety glass was a conveyor belt leading to the two massive drums, all motionless.  On the belt lay three naked, human corpses.  The youngest was over eighty Earth years old. 

“You’ve got to be joking,” Soad said.

“Why would I joke about such a solemn business?”

“They’re people,” Soad said.

Maria waited for a moment, then stated, “They were people.  Now, they’re just several hundred kilos of dead, organic matter.”

Maria turned away from the kids and explained, “Their families have already said their goodbyes, so we can get started.” She hit another button and the two drums began spinning.  Despite the thick glass, a low whine came into the room.

Once the drums got up to speed, the conveyor belt began carrying the corpses towards them.  Maria was watching the conveyor belt and seconds before the first body went in she heard the distinctive sound of someone vomiting behind her.  This was quickly followed by two more.

Maria waited until the three bodies had gone through before turning around.  All three kids were standing at the opposite wall with their backs turned.  Maria frowned when she saw several splashes of vomit that had missed the buckets.

With a sigh, she went to a storage cupboard and grabbed three new buckets.  She told them to set their buckets down and take a new one.  While Soad and Vladimir didn’t look anywhere near the Shredder, Cyril just glanced at it and retched into his new bucket.  That almost made Soad and Vladimir vomit into theirs.  Maria rolled her eyes and went back to the cupboard and got three more buckets.  Maria had learned long ago it was better to leave even partially filled buckets with their odors behind. 

She led the kids into the next room.  Here, the smaller shredders made smaller pieces, but they were set close enough together that one couldn’t really see what was being shredded.  Not that the kids even looked.

“At this stage of the process,” Maria explained, “water is added to the material stream creating a slurry.  This makes further processing easier.”

Something about that made Vladimir retch. 

After grabbing a new bucket from another cabinet, Maria led them down a flight of stairs to the next room.  “Here the slurry comes to series a settlement pools,” she explained.  “In this first one, bits of bone, teeth, beaks, hoofs, whatever fall to the bottom where they are recovered.  There really isn’t much we can do with them – any minerals that we could extract we already have plenty of from excavating tunnels – so they are ground into a powder which is then usually mixed in with cement for use in general construction.”

Before leading them to the next stage of the process, she said, “If it makes things easier, from this point on you’ll just being seeing material from earlier runs.  The last load we ran yesterday came from a chicken farm.”

In the next room there were a couple of technicians checking some equipment.  They shared a brief smile with Maria about the look of the kids.  While they still looked a tad green, they’d apparently already vomited everything in their stomachs. 

Maria pointed through a thick window at a five meter long cylinder.  It was on a slant, with the bottom a meter lower than the top.  “That’s the Solid Separator Cylinder.  Inside is a smaller cylinder with walls made of a very fine mesh.  The remaining material from the settling tanks it pumped in at the top, and the inner cylinder rotates at a high speed.  The centrifugal force squeezes most of the fluids through the mesh and into the outer cylinder where it’s collected.  The remaining material – or pulp – falls out of the bottom onto a conveyor belt.”

Maria pointed to a technician working near the cylinder, but she wasn’t sure if any of the kids even looked.  “Do you see that technician?  They’re wearing ear protection because the Separator is very loud when it’s running.  The reason we can’t hear it is because,” here she tapped the window, “this isn’t just one window.  The Separator is actually in its own room that’s surrounded by a two centimeter vacuum gap.  A vacuum is the best sound proofer in the universe.”

Vladimir actually chuckled at that, which brought a slight smile to Maria.

“The fluid that is collected,” she continued, “is pumped into huge storage tanks.  Its processing is pretty interesting, but can only be done when the sun’s in the sky.  Up on the surface, we’re still some two weeks from dawn, and I doubt you want to wait that long.  But once the sun rises, the fluid will be pumped under pressure through specialized pipes on the surface.  Inside the pipes, the fluid will be heated to several hundred degrees.  The intense heat breaks apart most of the chemical bonds of the complex molecules.  In goes a mix of blood, fats, even microbes, and out comes a stream of carbon dioxide, methanol and other smaller molecules.  They’re sorted and collected to be used however they are needed.  Even the iron from the hemoglobin in blood is collected, but more as a way to keep it from contamination other processes than for industrial use.

“Our next stop is to view some of the composting rooms.” Maria led them down another flight of stairs and along a short hallway.  The room they entered was five by twenty meters.  Along one long wall were five observation windows, each looking into a circular room.  Each contained a mound of dark material.  In one room, a slowly rotating blade was turning over and mixing the mound, while water was being sprayed onto another.

“Like with the Solid Separator Cylinder, the composting rooms are separated from the rest of the facility with vacuum gaps.  But it’s not for sound insulation, but odor insulation.  You may think your stomachs are empty now, but if you caught a whiff from any of those rooms you’d be surprised what you’d dredge up.” Over the last few minutes, the kids had been starting to look better, but that comment checked that.

“In the Composting Rooms we mix three streams of materials.  There’s the pulp from our Separator, there’s plant wastes from either the parks or hydroponic gardens, and there’s partially treated sewage.  The sewage plants take part of the sewage stream and send it to the hydroponic gardens and we get the rest.  But we don’t just throw everything we have together.  Soil to be used to grow grass on a playground is different than that needed to grow grass for a pasture, or soil used to grow trees.  There are different nutrients in the three material streams, so we adjust the amounts of each depending on what type of soil we need to make.

“Into the pile we add various bacteria which start to break down, or decompose, the material.  This turns complex structures like plant stems or flesh into small bits plants can use to grow.  The decomposition process releases heat which helps to kill off any pathogens that arrive through any of the streams.  The rooms are monitored to make sure the piles are at a temperature and oxygen level to the bacteria’s liking so they keep working.”

Maria pointed at the mound being watered.  “That pile started a week ago.  In less than a Rev, it will be turned into a rich compost.  Once it’s fully composted, it will be baked just to be sure no pathogens survived.  Then it can be used to help fertilize what’s already been planted, or it can be mixed with rocks ground up in a separate processing stream.  We then have a basic soil ready to fill in the parkland of new tunnels.”

Maria shrugged.  “That’s a quick overview of Soil Creation 101.  I could show you all of the various processes, but I’m sure you’ve seen more than you care to.  If you’ll follow me, I’ll take you where you can clean up and I’ll answer any questions you have.”

Five minutes later, they all sat in a small conference room.  The kids had washed their faces, and Maria had gotten herself a cup of coffee.  Taking a sip, she asked, “Now, do you have any questions?”

None of the three had been looking at her, but now Soad did and asked, “Why did you show us that?”

Maria took another sip of coffee before answering.  “For most of human history, humans lived in small bands of usually related individuals.  These tribes only survived if all the members knew that they could trust and rely upon one another.  That was also true for the early space colonies where one idiot screwing around could have killed everyone.  You three,” Maria’s finger swept passed all of them, “are idiots screwing around.  I don’t know the details of your cases, but the usual reason kids are sent here are for bullying the other students, selling narcotics, disorderly conduct, shit like that.  While stuff like that won’t kill everyone on the planet, it’s still thought best to nip such actions in the bud.  The reason we hold on to some bodies to run through on Career Day is to show screw-ups like you that some people – even in death – are doing more to advance life on this planet than you are.”

“All I did was cheat on a test,” Cyril said.

Vladimir barked out a laugh.  “You hacked the system to change your grades.”

After a moment, Cyril explained, “That’s a kind of cheating.  But being forced to watch someone be … shredded for that seems a tad cruel and unusual.”

“I thought you all turned away,” Maria said.  “Nobody was forcing you to watch.”

“Semantics,” Soad said.

Maria shrugged.  “True.” She looked at Cyril and said, “So, instead of just facing the consequences of not studying, you decided that the rules shouldn’t apply to you.  Back in the tribal days, someone like that was usually banished.”

“So seeing people being turned into … soil is supposed to keep me from hacking?”

“No.” Maria let the kids look confused while she took another sip of coffee.

“Then what was the point?” Soad asked.

Maria smiled.  “All three of you are from the Celaeno Corridor, yes?” After the three nodded, Maria continued, “The central park of Celaeno was planted about ninety Revs ago.  I can’t be certain, but it’s most likely that some of the first people to set foot on Mercury went into the soil there.  In life they opened up a new world.  In death, they gave us a way to make oxygen, and flowers, and a place for children to run and play.”

Pointing in a random direction, Maria said, “The majority of adults in the tunnels know what we do here, but they don’t want to think about it.  They want to think that soil is … just something that happens.  They don’t want to think about what, or who, goes into the soil because it reminds them of their mortality.  Thinking about one’s mortality makes one wonder what mark they’ll leave on the world.  At some point growing up, most people realize that their only bit of immortality will be in how they are remembered.  There are few Shakespeares and Gandhis who will be remembered for thousands of years, but even they will fade away in time.  Most of us just have to do our best with our families and friends and try to leave the world better than we found it. 

“So why show you people being shredded when you’re not yet adults?  In the hopes a large dose of mortality will make you reconsider your lives.  Just remember that one day – sooner than you would like – you’ll die.  Will you be remembered as a jerk who didn’t play by the rules, or will people actually miss you?”

Maria pointed at the door.  “Go out that door and turn to the left and you’ll be back at the entrance.  Whether you go and make the world a better place or not is all up to you.  Choose wisely, for you only get one shot at it.”