Air fizzes into innumerable bubbles, parting around you as you submerge. As you sink into the water, the crackling sounds of the living reef below animates the landscape. The soundscape is punctuated by your breathing. It resonates through the water to your ears, each breath inwards announced by a spacious velar consonant sound, each breath outwards plosive, released slowly. The silicone mouthpiece of your diving gear squeaks slightly between your teeth.

You're horizontal, weightless, and your shadow mingles with the caustics cast by the sun upon the sea floor – they ripple with the waves above you. Amidst fish darting back and forth, anemones waving, and coral quivering in a multiplicity of colour: imitations of shells patrol with an unwavering tenderness. With robotic arms the shells pluck tufts of algae from the reef like a quiet child, methodically collecting daisies.

You gaze as small flurries of bubbles meander up from the shells like communications. As these things un-smother the reef and the algae unravels, the architecture of coral emerges further. Its polyps gasp as they're untangled. Shellfish trace its uncovered contours with their spiny legs. They all seem a bit higgldy-piggldy, these shell-things, despite their steadiness in the water. Their mismatched arms look almost improvised, their paint-jobs hand-done, but there's some ineffable quality about them which says they belong here. You look up, and off into the distance; the direction in which the shells are gradually moving. They hang in the water like remnants of something, almost still above the monotony of algae, always occupying that liminal boundary between the bustling metropole of coral and a sprawling desert of green. In their wake the reef wakes up.

Microbial Fuel Cell technology has the potential to enable machine 'creatures' to power themselves by decontaminating their habitats and, in order to engineer more complex devices, prototypes must be created which will allow various MFC-powered functions to be monitored and tested while embedded in the ecosystems they are designed to occupy.

The present brims with potential. We have the means to engineer biotechnology capable of sustaining ecosystems, and to implement it on a modular 'creature-by-creature' basis – meaning as much or as little interference in the natural order of entropy can be made as required, and as best fits a given environmental context.

These three Microbial Fuel Cells (below) produce 1.5V. Collaboration with other organisms, in this case microorganisms, will be instrumental in helping to build a new kind of environment; a hybrid, cyborg environment co-created by many different species on non-anthropocentric terms.

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