It's 2010, and an ordinary day on an assembly line. A bottle of root beer gets stamped with an innocuous little tag that immediately begins sending messages into cyberspace. The tag radios the soda company's Web site to report the bottle's whereabouts, allowing computers to track the bottle as it moves from the factory, through warehouses and distribution centers, and into a refrigerator at a corner drugstore. When the bottle is sold, the manufacturer is alerted and makes a new one to take its place. Finally, facing reincarnation at a recycling plant, the bottle radios its "last words" to a robotic separator that lifts it from a pile of plastic and newspaper and tosses it into a container of broken glass.

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