Read Online The Prophet's Ladder by Jonathan Williams - Free Book Online Page B

term anyways.  Father and my betrothed, both so predictable…. am I the same?
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    Todd and his new engineering project team sat around a sleek, modern-looking conference table in the largest of Al-Hatem Aerospace’s administrative offices. It was burnished aluminum, with outlets and ports at each seat for every conceivable electronic device or gadget.  Floating in the center of the table via an astounding holographic display that utilized water vapor was a schematic for a strange-looking robotic spider. The colorful image rotated slowly so that everyone seated around the table could get a good view of the conceptual automaton.
    Four meters in length, the creature was a fascinating blend of organic form and synthetic parts. Its multiple eyes were high definition digital cameras with powerful macroscopic lenses, each able to see in near total darkness. Every one of the machine’s eight legs contained fine pairs of heat resistant grasping arms, fractalized artificial fingers splaying into multiple points of articulation.
    The artificial spider’s exoskeleton was made of a heat resistant ceramic, tawny brown, almost red in color. Visualized in the hologram in semi-translucent layers, the outer shell of the machine’s belly peeled away to reveal massive, complex 3D printers capable of weaving sheets and strands of carbon nanotube fibers made from the graphene carried in its bulky abdomen.  Much like a true spider, the creature emitted the completed strands from a spinneret at its rear.
    Implanted in its stomach, the robotic spider housed a series of rollers and wheels coated in an absurdly powerful dry-adhesive gripping material Todd had understood to be only hypothetical up until recently. The skin of the rollers imitated the footpads of a gecko, its synthetic ‘setae’ or elastic hairs capable of adhering to any known surface. Were Todd to don gloves and boots made of the material, each square centimeter costing thousands of dollars, he could climb up onto the sheer walls and ceiling of this very conference room with no perch necessary, like a fictional comic book superhero. I’d need to work on my upper body strength though, Todd thought.
    The robotic spider would not be a solitary predator like its biological counterpart, however. It was designed to operate in teams of two to three other similarly designed and equipped machines, performing routine maintenance and repairs on a piece of technology that was as yet untested and untried: the space elevator.
    Todd’s colleagues at NASA had for years speculated on the feasibility of such a thing, but many of them had dismissed it out of hand. A space elevator, were it to actually to be built and function as specified, would drastically decrease the cost of transporting cargo and materials into space. A cable would be attached to a counterweight orbiting the planet in a geostationary position above the earth’s surface; possibly an asteroid towed into orbit or a massive artificial space station.  The cable would stretch thousands of kilometers from orbit down through the atmosphere to an earth based anchor point, where vehicles or ‘elevators’ could be launched up and down the length of the cable.
    Until very recently, Todd had understood the materials necessary to construct a space elevator’s cable to be too cost prohibitive, belonging solely to the realm of theory and not reality. The qualities inherently necessary for such a span of cable were mind-boggling. The tether would need to be astoundingly lightweight, as well as immensely, almost impossibly strong, able to withstand the stress of a cargo vehicle or vehicles repeatedly traveling up and down its length, as well as the shearing forces of the earth’s atmosphere, along with a heady host of other stressors. Luckily, Todd’s team was not responsible for the engineering of said cable; that was another department entirely. No, Todd and the group of people assembled in this room were responsible for