Cloudscape

Unlike nanorobots, which used atoms in their environment as building blocks, picorobots would produce particles as their building blocks. One way to do this is hadronization - a process in which hadrons duplicate. This process arises when the quarks which constitute hadrons (such as protons and neutrons) are taken at a sufficient distance from one another. Because the strong force is proportional to distance (unlike other forces), the farther quarks are taken from one another, the more energy it takes to keep them apart. At some point, this energy will create new quarks between the other quarks. So if one tries to separate the quarks in a meson (which has two quarks, one quark and one antiquark), all one manages to do as one splits them in two is to create two new mesons. In this way, with enough energy input, one can create new quarks indefinitely: the energy is materialized.
Picorobots could also concentrate light by adding up the energies of their photons. In this way, two photons could be combined to one photon with double energy, and therefore double frequency. In this way, the photons could eventually be made so energetic that upon colliding with each other they would create matter, which the picorobots could use to create atoms. In this way, light could, in essence, be converted into matter. We’d long learned to convert mass into energy, but it wasn’t too long ago we’d learned to do just the opposite.