  Nanodevices exploiting quantum effects are critically important elements of
future quantum technologies (QT), but their real-world performance is strongly
limited by decoherence arising from local `environmental' interactions.
Compounding this, as devices become more complex, i.e. contain multiple
functional units, the `local' environments begin to overlap, creating the
possibility of environmentally mediated decoherence phenomena on new
time-and-length scales. Such complex and inherently non-Markovian dynamics
could present a challenge for scaling up QT, but -- on the other hand -- the
ability of environments to transfer `signals' and energy might also enable
sophisticated spatiotemporal coordination of inter-component processes, as is
suggested to happen in biological nanomachines, like enzymes and photosynthetic
proteins. Exploiting numerically exact many body methods (tensor networks) we
study a fully quantum model that allows us to explore how propagating
environmental dynamics can instigate and direct the evolution of spatially
remote, non-interacting quantum systems. We demonstrate how energy dissipated
into the environment can be remotely harvested to create transient
excited/reactive states, and also identify how reorganisation triggered by
system excitation can qualitatively and reversibly alter the `downstream'
kinetics of a `functional' quantum system. With access to complete
system-environment wave functions, we elucidate the microscopic processes
underlying these phenomena, providing new insight into how they could be
exploited for energy efficient quantum devices.
