It had taken The Gatherer four-hundred years to get here. Four-hundred and twenty-four to be precise. In this instant he had one knee on the floor and his second knee set as a perch for his hand as he rested. His gaze was fixed on a small scuttling smear. It zipped through his leg and around his boot as if lost in the jungle of his two appendages. To this man, it was neither alive nor dead, it was an object of desire. On his back was a cube. Pressing a finger within a small inlet triggered a whir – some internal mechanism getting to work. The cube hummed and unfolded in a dazzling liquid blue, sending platforms around his body here and there. He became a walking bookshelf. Each shelf offered him it’s service. This one here by his shoulder quietly presented its hidgets and orficators for molecular smelling. That one there buzzed about the vermilion vials – both monstrous and nano – for storing all manner of objects. Another promised to capture time segments in sticky ribbons, good for infinite looping. And right next to it was the flanker, a shelf covered in tiny dots the size of a hair strand and that could extract color directly from photon trajectories. The Gatherer massaged his dry lips and grumbled a tune. He didn’t enjoy having to converse with his tools, but such was the standards of the trade now. Even tools had little brains full of their little emotions, little self-doubts, and little opinions. A tool with a brain could be right or wrong, it wasn’t as simple as the tool performing one job well anymore. On the upside, the tools could do far more than engineers of the old could ever have conceived. Those old engineer minds had been so stuck on the unimaginative task of recreating intelligence in human likeness they were practically running around their field like horses with blinders.

Have you heard of a hamker? The Gatherer had one right now on a shelf worming out near the side of his hip. He didn’t need it right now, of course. Just like hammers, screws, screwdrivers, and pins all have inventors who are lost to time, so too have these modern tools lost their originators. The popular opinion is that the hamker was made by the famous Chii Lezones, an air-pilot who, in his spare time, made tools for improving his work life. He was a pilot who detested piloting. All those switches to switch, toggles to toggle, and buttons to button; all of these demanding the pilot’s eyes for fourteen hours at forty-thousand feet! Lezones was a clued in man, brought up by a mother who had a ‘build-it-yourself’ attitude. She built their house, their first car, and even built Lezones’s father. So when Lezones had something that frustrated him, he would try to build his way out of it. That’s what the hamker was built for. Lezones didn’t want to toggle all these toggles and button all these buttons. Human fingers were so tiny and imprecise. They’re all stuck so close together and they’re so slow to move around when you need to move them fast. In contrast, a hamker is like lightning. The hamker does what a finger cannot. It presses with an immeasurable acuteness, it pokes with forces whose margins are detectable only be electron fields, and it lifts to heights even the tallest beings can’t look to. And it does this enclosed in the space of half a foot. The hamker looks like a pickle. Lezone was famous for waving the hamker to passersby and exclaiming joyfully, “Here comes the pickle train boys and girls. Get yer pickles to solve all your trickles.” He liked to call problems ‘trickles’ after his father, Papa Trickle. His dad wasn’t a problem as much as he always made problems. Lezone’s mother had designed him that way so that she could have an endless stream of ‘built-it-yourself’ problems to build things for. Such is the way of the builder addict.

But The Gatherer had no use for his hamker right now. The hamker was being stubborn today – it demanded that The Gatherer use it. Tools with brains have emotions and the baggage of history. His hamker was currently working through a long bout of depression brought on by co-dependence. Generally, a tool vet would prescribe a few week’s worth of antidepressants and a daily polish to lift the spirits of tools that suffered from neglect. The Gatherer hadn’t had the time and the hamker didn’t have the benefit of a psychologist or a friend to help it work through these difficult mind states. Would it ever be put to use again? Had it done something wrong? He always ignores me, am I being annoying? The hamker lacked confidence. A confident hamker is a confident pickle. That’s also a phrase that Lezones was known to say often. For a lifetime supply of Helen Grazers, Lezones was offered an advertisement gig with the Global Intelligent Tools association. That’s GIT for short. A lifetime supply of Helen Grazers is no small offering and would alleviate Lezones of all that arduous chewing he found himself doing all the time. He accepted the gig and GIT videoed him wielding a hamker in all sorts of situations. For each situation they asked him to say: “A confident hamker is a confident pickle.” Such is the way of the builder addict.

The Gatherer ignored the wailing hamker and picked up a vermilion vial that started pulsing between sizes large and small in an expression of pleasure. The vermilion vial was on antidepressants and visited a psychologist twice weekly. The Gatherer put the vermilion vial into the path of the dancing, scuttling smear that was still pinwheeling around his ankle. Plop! The tool, using it’s brain wired for ensnaring objects small and large completely encased the smear as it smudged its way too close. The smear hesitated and then expanded, like a cloud that realized the sky might be falling and needed to hold it up. But the smear was too late for the glass cage held fast and the vermilion vial purred. The Gatherer pinned the vial between two stumpy fingers (that he wished weren’t so close) and brought it to his eye. He squeezed out a doughy grin and then popped his vermilion vial back on its home shelf and closed up all the shelves around him with a whir. He continued on down the road.