"Oh, for the love of-A.J., you showoff!" Joe snorted. "And there's no way it should be a halo, anyway. Why not horns?"

"How do you do that?" Jackie demanded.

A.J. patted the large pouch on his belt. "Fairy Dust. From Dust-Storm Tech. Finest intelligent dust sensor motes on the planet. These are integrated with micromotile units to let them fly, as long as I can either keep' em supplied with enough power to scavenge-or I'm willing to let them drain the hell out of the onboard batteries for the sake of a few seconds of showing off. Yeah, that's a cheap stunt using their illuminators, but it's fun."

He opened the flap. The halo, which at closer range appeared to be made up of hundreds or even thousands of individual tiny sparks of light, poured itself into the pouch.

"These things aren't toys, though. It's the heart of my approach. Thousands of ultrasensitive sensors all over the survey area, networking themselves together automatically, then using all that data to pull out a really detailed picture of whatever lies below. The trick is knowing what sensors and modalities to use and how to combine them and process the data the right way. Now, let's take a look at this dig of yours."

As they headed to the dig area, Jackie glanced at the belt pouch curiously. "I've heard of them being used for things like inventory tracking and so on, but…"

"That's just the tip of the iceberg," A.J. said. "Even back in the first decade of this century, when Dust, Incorporated, Ember, and a few others first started making intelligent sensor motes, it was clear there were a lot of potential uses for distributed sensor and computing networks that were embodied as near-microscopic motes that each had their own power, communication, computation, sensor, and memory capacity. I honestly don't think I could list every use I've thought of for these things in the past few years."