They found a lot of mites, of course, both natural and artificial. The 
natural ones looked like little crabs and had been quietly inhabiting the outer 
layers of other creatures' bodies for hundreds of millions of years. The 
artificial ones had all been developed in the past few decades. Most of them 
consisted of a spherical or ellipsoidal hull with various attachments. The hull 
was a vacuole, a wee bit of the eutactic environment to coddle the mite's 
machine-phase innards. The hull's diamondoid structure was protected from the 
light by a thin layer of aluminum that made mites look like miniature 
spaceships—only with the air on the outside and the vacuum inside.