[ WP ] Two cyberhobos travel back in time to steal our time 's garbage , now a precious resource in the bright , eco-friendly , Utopian future .

Michelin had gotten his chosen epithet during one of his many previous dives. He had no idea where his mysterious conscripted counterpart, DQ Blizzard, had gotten his. Probably the inane ramble of a proto-hobo. The two of them dived in search of impurities, counter-intuitively. Their world of fabricated material was arranged in terms of mass and data -- an item's value was determined by the complexity of the code it took to recreate it -- the `` weight'' of an item's data. Because of this, 1 lb. of ancient medical waste had more subjective value than a quarter ton of the highly uniform fabrications of their day to day lives, assuming the energy expended during a dive did n't exceed the net energy they could recoup from scavenging and selling their `` treasure''. Doing so was questionably legal, and questionably profitable, but these two savvy hobros. knew the game at least as well as any of the wannabe hyperbuskers. 
 
 Every dive tantalized Michelin with nervous anticipation from fear of creating some sort of paradox, but he was fairly convinced he was caught up in one already, so he tried not to worry about it. This time, they were going to snatch a digital copy of an *entire dump* from the early 21st century. As far as the pair knew, such a feat had n't yet been attempted, and their preparations had eaten up most of their savings as they constructed a piecemeal fleet of scan drones retrieved from back-alleys and fab-lots. Michey and DQ plugged into their time-sinks, which I wo n't bother explaining here, and popped up in a previous time both faster and slower than they could blink. The dank air reeked of rotting biological matter and wet metal, and they loved it because it at least smelled like anything at all. Mich would have dove into the stinking filth like Scrooge McDuck in his money vault, had cartoon physics applied in that particular reality. 
 
 While Michelin soaked in his surroundings, The Blizz went about his business with about as much cool professionalism as could be expected considering his vocation. They both circumnavigated their quarry and deployed drones at particular intervals, trusting the dive's paradox inhibitors to keep them out of sight of any of the cars and dogs which could be heard in the distance. Their drones went about their tasks quickly and efficiently by present-day standards, and cheaply and awkwardly by future standards. They had almost completed their scans when a flash and a bang cracked one of their drones right off the top of some stink-vapors, because this story would n't be quite interesting enough otherwise. A wild and wooly dump denizen had noticed the two of them despite their inhibitors, and he had an effing shotgun. DQ had the wherewithal to duck behind an old washing machine, but Mich was stuck out in the open in front of an insane looking bum with what he presumed was an archaic weapon. 
 
 `` Y'all gad-blasted time lord incepticons ai n't be takin' my world out from here this time!'' 
 
 Mich panicked, as he feared for a moment that he was somehow meeting a past or future version of himself which he was n't aware of, but came to be relieved as the bum stepped out into the moonlight and it became clear that his insane rant merely happened to correlate with what was actually happening. 
 
 `` It's alright, friend! We only stopped by to see what these flying robots were doing. Please do n't shoot me.'' 
 
 Mich had assumed he'd be able to bullshit better than that under pressure, but it would have to do. 
 
 `` Let's go to... the *meat parlor*... um, and have some dinner.'' 
 
 Amazingly, Michelin's terrible improvisation also coincided with the bum's twisted delusions, and he lowered his weapon. DQ took the chance to wonk the bum with whatever the future equivalent of a stun-gun is, and the two of them grabbed the remains of their crapped drone and called back the remaining scanners. Mich complained bitterly about their wasted time as DQ queried the dive to float them back out, and they appeared back in their comparatively clean and dapper bum quarters, back in the future. Even more amazingly, as if by a miracle, the corrupted data from their scans compiled coherently in the form of a garbage dump which was slightly different from the one which they had actually visited. This was so unlikely that it only further convinced Mich that he was already involved in some kind of giant paradox which would n't be instigated until later. The two of them ate like kings for a month, and decided to get normal workaday jobs after they both nearly became their own grandpas for the third time. 

