Nanofabrication

Source: Everything, Forever: A New Maker’s Primer, by Silvia Lugo

While nanofabrication was common before the Fall, its ubiquity in the present may come as a surprise. Today, nearly every object you interact with was made with a nanofabber. It’s possible that your sleeve itself was the product of one of these miraculous devices.

Nanofabbers

At its core, a nanofabricator is a 3D printer that works at the molecular level. It takes a stock of raw materials and uses nanobots to assemble an object according to the specifications of an input blueprint. Virtually any object or device can be constructed in such a manner, from the simplest handheld hammer to a space-going vessel — though larger objects are fabricated in parts by sub-assemblies, not a single machine.

Fabbers come in many shapes and forms. It’s likely that your personal living space or shared residence is equipped with a small kitchen autocook, a specialized wet fabber that only produces food and liquids. At the lower end, these models simply produce a generic nutrient paste that is dressed up in a variety of tastes and textures. Better quality autocooks manufacture gourmet meals and complex drinks molecule by molecule, as well as similar organic substances, including leather, alcohol, and some drugs. Innersystem restaurants thrive on their high-end autocooks and proprietary recipe designs.

General-purpose fabbers can make almost anything that fits inside their volume, assuming you have the blueprint and necessary raw materials. They range in size from portable, handheld units to desktop models to industrial units several tons in weight. These are referred to by many names — makers, replicators, forges, compilers, cornucopia machines, and so on. They can be found in offices, shops, and schools; some habitats maintain street-corner makers for public use.

Specialized fabbers are similar, but only produce categorically similar items. A specific forge may produce a related suite of personally tailored medications, a proprietarily linked set of consumer electronics, a particular line of handguns and related peripherals, or components for a certain piece of machinery.

Hives are a particular type of specialized fabber used to manufacture and maintain a single type of nanoswarm, such as fixers or engineers. Hives are portable and used to program a swarm as well as replenish the nanobots that are lost to normal daily attrition. Fixer hives are often incorporated into devices and structures for ongoing self-repair functions.

Blueprints

No matter what kind of nanofabber you may find yourself using, you’ll need a blueprint — a three-dimensional software plan for the design. Printers come pre-loaded with an assortment of simple blueprints appropriate to the device’s purpose. Most polities, habs, and hypercorps also provide basic blueprints free for use by everyone, released into the public domain. This means that almost everyone has access to mundane tools, clothing designs, and foods.

These free blueprints are widely regarded as signs of lower social status in the inner system. The old and transitional economies there rely on people purchasing proprietary blueprints online for whatever they need. Hypercorp boutiques compete to offer the latest designs and upgrades, sold through subscription channels and ecosystems designed to lock customers into brand loyalty. These digital plans are accompanied by stringent copyright protections, limiting the number of prints to deter sharing and piracy and preventing any modifications of the designs outside allowed parameters.

There are many open-source projects, however, in which generous programmers make their blueprints available for free. There are numerous communities devoted to tinkering and improving upon blueprints in a variety of fields, many entertainment or fashion related. Autonomist cooperatives and Titanian microcorps also code and distribute freeware designs, sometimes based on cracked properietary plans. Inner-system authorities, however, do their best to limit the availability of these freeware blueprints, and fabber controls may prevent their use.

Naturally, blueprints to manufacture dangerous or illegal goods are unavailable for sale to the general public, except on the black market. Weapons, drugs, deadly chemical compounds, or biohazardous materials are not freely distributed. Software locks on the fabbers themselves prevent them from producing items or materials on prohibited lists. Individuals who bring their own nanofabrication devices to a new hab are likely to find it inspected and made compliant with local ordinances regarding prohibited printing requirements. These practices differ greatly in many outer-system habs, however. While fabbers are available for public, unrestricted use there, they are monitored by local volunteers to ensure that no one is manufacturing items that could endanger the community.

Feedstock

Fabbers are useless without raw materials, commonly termed feedstock. Most habitats make basic feedstock readily available through utility lines. In the inner system, your feedstock usage is likely limited according to your payment plan. For areas outside of a public utility infrastructure, feedstock is also available in bricks of either single elements or in conveniently bonded compounds when elements are dangerously reactive in their simplest states. Almost all habitats recycle or scavenge the vast majority of their waste for use as feedstock. When you toss your garbage down the chute, it’s not just going to the dump, it’s being fed to disassembler nanoswarms to be used as the raw materials for the hab’s feedlines. Fabbers often incorporate disassembly ports into their chassis, such as the organic-waste disposal unit on your kitchen’s autocook.

Aside from blueprint availability, feedstock is ultimately the biggest limiting factor in nanofabrication. Miraculous though the technology is, it’s not just conjuring goods out of nothing. While the economies of different habitats or solar-system regions vary greatly, they are still rooted in the relative scarcity of material goods. Carbon, iron, and the like are relatively abundant, but many of the most exotic elements of the periodic table are used in modern equipment. Dangerous heavy metals or gases are regularly used for industrial applications and in trace amounts to produce consumer-grade alloys or plastics. Habitats typically restrict access to hazardous and rare-element feedstocks, requiring explicit permission and a high credit cost.

Printing

The final limiting factor of nanofabrication is time. It goes without saying that the bigger or more complex the item to be produced, the longer it takes to manufacture. Most prints take a matter of hours, but complex designs can take up to a day or even more.

Thankfully, replicators primarily run themselves. Each fabber is equipped with a dedicated ALI that works to optimize blueprints and troubleshoot flaws in assembly as they occur. This ALI is sometimes even capable of programming new designs or modifications for you.

Doing it the Hard Way

If you lack the proper blueprint, it’s theoretically possible to make your own. 3D design, however, takes days for even simple objects, weeks or months for anything complex. It also requires not just a thorough knowledge of software encoding, but also an artisinal familiarity with whatever it is you're designing. You want a sheet of steel capable of withstanding the heat of planetary re-entry? You’ll need to be a metallurgist as well as a programmer. Thankfully, accelerated time in a VR simulspace can shorten the process.

Remaking Society

Despite the limitations of nanofabbers, their effects upon transhumanity cannot be overstated. Society has been transformed by the ubiquitous availability of goods. Starvation is nearly a thing of the past; almost no one goes with want of basic needs. Creators of high-demand and bespoke blueprints gain tremendous wealth and rep from the sale of their designs in the inner system. The very existence of many outer-system settlements and extrasolar colonies might be threatened were it not for their ability to produce needed goods on the spot, without the lengthy wait of physical shipping.

You are also sure to notice that there is much less trash and litter. Near-ubiquitous disassembly of waste materials has resulted in cleaner habitats across the Solar System. As a rule, transhumans personally own far fewer personal belongings than they did before the Fall. Citizens simply do not accumulate goods, and almost all of the wasteful packaging you may recall from your previous life on Earth has been eliminated. Even personal travel is easier, as you are no longer required to bring everything you need with you. Virtually any item is now disposable and replaceable, since it can be disassembled into its constituent molecules and reassembled brand new as required.

Artisanal Goods

This is not to say that nanofabrication has completely replaced all other manufacturing processes. In fact, handcrafted goods have become status symbols. Chefs who produce traditional meals made with naturally occurring ingredients are in high demand. Artists who work with hard-to-acquire irreproducible materials, such as marble reclaimed from specific ancient buildings on Earth, can garner wealth and acclaim for their work. Other handmade goods are valued for the personal investment applied to their making.

Solarchive Search :: The Invisible Masses

One way that nanotechnology has changed society is also the hardest to see: nanoswarms. Clouds of invisible nanobots now surround us on a daily basis, undertaking unseen tasks. These range from purposes as utilitarian as cleaning, maintenance, and repair to insidious ones such as spying, sabotage, and hostile disassembly. Carrying a nanodetector is a common practice when you wish to be appraised of the invisible mites in your presence. Heavy use of swarms in an area sometimes builds up a dust-like “toner” residue as nanobots die off en masse.