There was a card-shuffling buzz as the reader grabbed the edge of each page momentarily and extracted its contents. The flexible Feed line, which ran from the wall into the back of the cabinet, jerked and stiffened orgasmically as the computer's works sucked in a tremendous jolt of hypersonic ice and shot back warm water. A fresh sheet of paper appeared in the cabinet's output tray.
The top of the document read, 'RUNCIBLE VERSION 1.0– COMPILED SPECIFICATION.' The only other thing on the document was a picture of the final product, nicely rendered in Hackworth's signature pseudo-engraved style. It looked exactly like a book.
On his way down the vast helical stair in the largest and most central of Bespoke's atria, Hackworth pondered his upcoming crime. It was entirely too late to go back now. It flustered him that he had unconsciously made up his mind months ago without marking the occasion.
Though Bespoke was a design rather than a production house, it had its own matter compilers, including a couple of fairly big ones, a hundred cubic meters. Hackworth had reserved a more modest desktop model, one-tenth of a cubic meter. Use of these compilers had to be logged, so he identified himself and the project first. Then the machine accepted the edge of the document.
Hackworth told the matter compiler to begin immediately, and then looked through a transparent wall of solid diamond into the eutactic environment.
The universe was a disorderly mess, the only interesting bits being the organized anomalies. Hackworth had once taken his family out rowing on the pond in the park, and the ends of the yellow oars spun off compact vortices, and Fiona, who had taught herself the physics of liquids through numerous experimental beverage spills and in the bathtub, demanded an explanation for these holes in water. She leaned over the gunwhale, Gwendolyn holding the sash of her dress, and felt those vortices with her hands, wanting to understand them. The rest of the pond, simply water in no particular order, was uninteresting.
We ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars, especially if they seem to order themselves into constellations. 'Common as the air' meant something worthless, but Hackworth knew that every breath of air that Fiona drew, lying in her little bed at night, just a silver glow in the moonlight, was used by her body to make skin and hair and bones. The air became Fiona, and deserving– no, demanding– of love. Ordering matter was the sole endeavor of Life, whether it was a jumble of self-replicating molecules in the primordial ocean, or a steam-powered English mill turning weeds into clothing, or Fiona lying in her bed turning air into Fiona.
A leaf of paper was about a hundred thousand nanometers thick; a third of a million atoms could fit into this span. Smart paper consisted of a network of infinitesimal computers sandwiched between mediatrons. A mediation was a thing that could change its color from place to place; two of them accounted for about two-thirds of the paper's thickness, leaving an internal gap wide enough to contain structures a hundred thousand atoms wide.
Light and air could easily penetrate to this point, so the works were contained within vacuoles– airless buckminsterfullerene shells overlaid with a reflective aluminum layer so that they would not implode en masse whenever the page was exposed to sunlight. The interiors of the buckyballs, then, constituted something close to a eutactic environment. Here resided the rod logic that made the paper smart. Each of these spherical computers was linked to its four neighbors, north-east-southwest, by a bundle of flexible pushrods running down a flexible, evacuated buckytube, so that the page as a whole constituted a parallel computer made up of about a billion separate processors. The individual processors weren't especially smart or fast and were so susceptible to the elements that typically only a small fraction of them were working, but even with those limitations the smart paper still constituted, among other things, a powerful graphical computer.
And still, Hackworth reflected, it had nothing on Runcible, whose pages were thicker and more densely packed with computational machinery, each sheet folded four times into a sixteen-page signature, thirty-two signatures brought together in a spine that, in addition to keeping the book from falling apart, functioned as an enormous switching system and database. It was made to be robust, but it still had to be born in the eutactic womb, a solid diamond vacuum chamber housing a start matter compiler. The diamond was doped with something that let only red light pass through; standard engineering practice eschewed any molecular bonds that were tenuous enough to be broken by those lazy red photons, underachievers of the visible spectrum. Thus the growth of your prototype was visible through the window– a good last-ditch safety measure. If your code was buggy and your project grew too large, threatening to shatter the walls of the chamber, you could always shut it down via the ludicrously low-tech expedient of shutting off the Feed line.
Hackworth wasn't worried, but he watched the initial phases of growth anyway, just because it was always interesting. In the beginning was an empty chamber, a diamond hemisphere, glowing with dim red light. In the center of the floor slab, one could see a naked cross-section of an eight-centimeter Feed, a central vacuum pipe surrounded by a collection of smaller lines, each a bundle of microscopic conveyor belts carrying nanomechanical building blocks– individual atoms, or scores of them linked together in handy modules.
The matter compiler was a machine that sat at the terminus of a Feed and, following a program, plucked molecules from the conveyors one at a time and assembled them into more complicated structures. Hackworth was the programmer. Runcible was the program. It was made up of a number of subprograms, each of which had resided on a separate piece of paper until a few minutes ago, when the immensely powerful computer in Hackworth's office had compiled them into a single finished program written in a language that the matter compiler could understand.
A transparent haze coalesced across the terminus of the Feed, mold on an overripe strawberry. The haze thickened and began adopting a shape, some parts a little higher than others. It spread across the floor away from the Feed line until it had filled out its footprint: one quadrant of a circle with a radius of a dozen centimeters. Hackworth continued to watch until he was sure he could see the top edge of the book growing out of it.
In the corner of this lab stood an evolved version of a copy machine that could take just about any kind of recorded information and transmogrify it into something else. It could even destroy a piece of information and then attest to the fact that it had been destroyed, which was useful in the relatively paranoid environment of Bespoke. Hackworth gave it the document containing the compiled Runcible code and destroyed it. Provably.
When it was finished, Hackworth released the vacuum and lifted the red diamond dome. The finished book stood upright atop the system that had extruded it, which was turned into a junkheap as soon as it was touched by the air. Hackworth picked up the book in his right hand and the extruder in his left, and tossed the latter into a junk bin.
He locked the book in a desk drawer, picked up his top hat, gloves, and walking-stick, stepped into his walker, and set off for the Causeway. Toward Shanghai.
Nell & Harv's general living situation;
the Leased Territories;
Tequila.
China was right across the water, and you could see it if you went down to the beach. The city there, the one with skyscrapers, was called Pudong, and beyond that was Shanghai. Harv went there with his friends sometimes. He said it was bigger than you could imagine, old and dirty and full of strange people and sights.
They lived in the L.T., which according to Harv was short for Leased Territories in letters. Nell already knew the mediaglyphics for it. Harv had also taught her the sign for Enchantment, which was the name of the Territory where they lived; it was a princess sprinkling golden specks from a stick onto some gray houses, which turned yellow and bright when the specks touched them. Nell thought that the specks were mites, but Harv insisted that mites were too small to be seen, that the stick was a magic wand and the specks were fairy dust. In any case, Harv made her remember that mediaglyph so that if she ever got lost, she could find her way home.
'But it's better if you just call me,' Harv said, 'and I'll come and find you.'
'Why?'
'Because there's bad people out there, and you shouldn't walk through the L.T. alone, ever.'
'What bad people?'
Harv looked troubled, heaved multiple sighs, fidgeted. 'You know that ractive I was in the other day, where there were pirates, and they tied up the kids and were going to make them walk the plank?'
'Yeah.'
'There are pirates in the L.T. too.'
'Where?'
'Don't bother looking. You can't see 'em. They don't look like pirates, with the big hats and swords and all. They just look like normal people. But they're pirates on the inside, and they like to grab kids and tie 'em up.'
