The WaterNet Regulatory Agreement Has Been Violated (Again)

"Normally Kirby never noticed the motes—the micro-drones floated through the atmosphere, tiny and diffuse, gathering sensor data. Kids sometimes collected them for school with special cotton filters. But they were so thick in here that he could actually feel them crawling across his skin like gnats. Slapping them was an instinct. When the tiny devices shattered from the impact, each released a droplet of water, leaving his arms a little muddy. [...]

Kirby didn’t want to lie about something as important as the WaterNet. Every kid learned in school about the system of motes whose tiny freights of H2O formed a network that could detect antineutrinos emanating from nuclear weapons caches. The WaterNet kept everyone safe. [...] No matter how deeply buried your warhead was, or how shielded your uranium enrichment facility, it would leak antineutrinos. And eventually one of those antiparticles would collide with a mote."

//_ excerpts from the short story "The WaterNet Regulatory Agreement Has Been Violated (Again)" by Annalee Newitz.

This artwork is one of several cover arts I've made for the short stories presented in the Far Futures initiative by the Horizon 2045 Foundation in partnership with Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination. Far Futures invites science fiction authors, visual artists, musicians, and other creatives to explore a future in which we successfully manage our way through a combination of natural and anthropogenic threats—with a durable nuclear weapons prohibition as a cornerstone of that future.