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In the prequel to the Future.Novel, "Lev.UP", James Harding, electronics technician, invents the recycle chip.

He also devised the scheme to employ them. James Harding's plan was the keystone to his future success. His recycle chip became known as the "Messiah Chip".

This so-called Messiah Chip saved the world from its massive industrial and consumer waste problems. It also created a source of ultra-pure atomic elements with which to build an economic nano and bubble technology for humankind to reach out to the planets and on into deep space.

The recycle chip was simply a massive matrix made with thousands of individual, atomic manipulators. Each of these tiny arms built by the trillions onto acres of silicon chips could reach out and grab just one atom. Each arm could be tuned to only grab one kind of atom and then place it into a tiny channel where the atoms would then be transported to a collecting bin for storage with only like atoms collected by billions and billions of other tiny arms collecting more of the same atoms.

In this way even the most toxic and long-lived waste could be broken down into simple atoms so as to be safely, and completely recycled. The toxic materials used to build the recycle chips were the first molecules to be recycled. Even radioactive waste, the bulk of which was hard-to-remove non-radioactive atoms, could be refined to its absolute minimum volume without generating still more hazardous waste, at which point the longer half-life radioactive materials became usable again.

In what has been argued to be the first true application of photon technology the recycle chip was built atom by atom upon a substrate of photovoltaic atomic lattice which absorbed light photons from the surrounding environment to power the myriad of tiny little arms, and their attendant tiny atom pushers, and pumps.

John Harding was not just another techno-geek, he was a fist-fightin', square-shootin' hero, and he risked life and limb to realize his dream as the trillion dollar industrial interests engaged in old tech recycling methods fought to silence the man and his dream.

He traveled to strange lands, Where he won over the hardships of political and industrial sabotage, death threats, and the mistrust of the local people. Where, in the sun-bleached sands of the central Sahara Desert, James Harding forged a new industrial empire and era.

Of interest is the arithmetic of James Harding's recycle chip. Takes a huge amount of atoms just to make a gram of anything. Of hydrogen, it takes the most atoms. The approximate number of atoms in a gram of hydrogen is 6 with 23 zeros after it.

602,300,000,000,000,000,000,000

If you collect one atom every trillionth of a second that's still only 1 with 12 zeros of atoms every second. Tiny as these nano arms were they still could not move so quickly that just a few would do the job. So, the answer was to build not a trillion tiny arms but trillions upon trillions upon trillions of tiny arms on billions of chips.

That's a lot of diamond whiskers, and control circuits, with slotted nano-wheels to scrape collected atoms off of tiny diamond whiskers. Nearly a universe of tiny parts would be needed to lead to a galaxy of microscopic holding bins. And, we all know he was there to clean up tons of waste, not grams, and create tons, not grams of ultra-pures.

Factories were built to build machines to build machines to make machines to make and assemble nano-parts. For decades the building went on before the first chip was created.

It was worth the effort as only a few of these huge recycling complexes would take care of the waste of the entire planet.

If not for concurrent advances in biotechnology, James Harding would not have lived to see this dream's completion. As it turned out, James Harding lived an incredibly long time as one of the Solar System's most powerful and influential figures. Visit the InStar page to read about another of Harding's inventive adventures. Read about the creation of humankind's first planet(actually: planetoid), complete with inhabitable surface, and it's own tiny sun orbiting the planetoid as if proving possible the impossible assumptions of the pre-Keplerian astronomers' earth-centric teachings.

It's surprising it only took fifty acres of chip surface area to build the first recycling test facility.

Of course, we all know the incredible effort was worth the task. It gave the world mass production of ultra-pure elements. Total recycling of any type of waste, all without creating a new environmental burden somewhere else.

From this huge beginning, James Harding grew to become the planet's, no, the solar system's richest individual, and that's including individual corporations. And, he ends up taking the entire earth's population to heaven, hell and back as his wild life filled with fantastic discoveries and even more incredible creations, unfolds.