DeMask won't let him spend any cash; his handshake is good for a redeemed favor, expert testimony in some free speech versus pornography lawsuit years ago and continents away. So he walks away with a discreetly wrapped package that is just about legal to import into Massachusetts as long as she claims with a straight face that it's incontinence underwear for her great aunt. As he walks, his lunchtime patents boomerang: Two of them are keepers, and he files immediately and passes title to the Free Infrastructure Foundation. Two more ideas salvaged from the risk of tide-pool monopolization, set free to spawn like crazy in the sea of memes.
On the way back to the hotel, he passes De Wildemann's and decides to drop in. The hash of radio- frequency noise emanating from the bar is deafening. He orders a smoked doppelbock, touches the copper pipes to pick up vCard spoor. At the back there's a table -
He walks over in a near trance and sits down opposite Pamela. She's scrubbed off her face paint and changed into body-concealing clothes; combat pants, hooded sweat shirt, DM's. Western purdah, radically desexualizing.
She sees the parcel. 'Manny?'
'How did you know I'd come here?' Her glass is half-empty.
'I followed your weblog – I'm your diary's biggest fan. Is that for me? You shouldn't have!' Her eyes light up, recalculating his reproductive fitness score according to some kind of arcane fin-de-siecle rulebook. Or maybe she's just pleased to see him.
'Yes, it's for you.' He slides the package toward her. 'I know I shouldn't, but you have this effect on me.
One question, Pam?'
'I -' She glances around quickly. 'It's safe. I'm off duty, I'm not carrying any bugs that I know of. Those badges – there are rumors about the off switch, you know? That they keep recording even when you think they aren't, just in case.'
'I didn't know,' he says, filing it away for future reference. 'A loyalty test thing?'
'Just rumors. You had a question?'
'I – ' It's his turn to lose his tongue. 'Are you still interested in me?'
She looks startled for a moment, then chuckles. 'Manny, you are the most outrageous nerd I've ever met!
Just when I think I've convinced myself that you're mad, you show the weirdest signs of having your head screwed on.' She reaches out and grabs his wrist, surprising him with a shock of skin on skin: 'Of course I'm still interested in you. You're the biggest, baddest bull geek I know. Why do you think I'm here?'
'Does this mean you want to reactivate our engagement?'
'It was never deactivated, Manny, it was just sort of on hold while you got your head sorted out. I figured you need the space. Only you haven't stopped running; you're still not -'
'Yeah, I get it.' He pulls away from her hand. 'And the kittens?'
She looks perplexed. 'What kittens?'
'Let's not talk about that. Why this bar?'
She frowns. 'I had to find you as soon as possible. I keep hearing rumors about some KGB plot you're mixed up in, how you're some sort of communist spy. It isn't true, is it?'
'True?' He shakes his head, bemused. 'The KGB hasn't existed for more than twenty years.'
'Be careful, Manny. I don't want to lose you. That's an order. Please.'
The floor creaks, and he looks round. Dreadlocks and dark glasses with flickering lights behind them: Bob Franklin. Manfred vaguely remembers with a twinge that he left with Miss Arianespace leaning on his arm, shortly before things got seriously inebriated. She was hot, but in a different direction from Pamela, he decides: Bob looks none the worse for wear. Manfred makes introductions. 'Bob, meet Pam, my fiancee. Pam? Meet Bob.' Bob puts a full glass down in front of him; he has no idea what's in it, but it would be rude not to drink.
'Sure thing. Uh, Manfred, can I have a word? About your idea last night?'
'Feel free. Present company is trustworthy.'
Bob raises an eyebrow at that, but continues anyway. 'It's about the fab concept. I've got a team of my guys doing some prototyping using FabLab hardware, and I think we can probably build it. The cargo-cult aspect puts a new spin on the old Lunar von Neumann factory idea, but Bingo and Marek say they think it should work until we can bootstrap all the way to a native nanolithography ecology: we run the whole thing from Earth as a training lab and ship up the parts that are too difficult to make on-site as we learn how to do it properly. We use FPGAs for all critical electronics and keep it parsimonious – you're right about it buying us the self-replicating factory a few years ahead of the robotics curve. But I'm wondering about on-site intelligence. Once the comet gets more than a couple of light-minutes away -'
'You can't control it. Feedback lag. So you want a crew, right?'
'Yeah. But we can't send humans – way too expensive, besides it's a fifty-year run even if we build the factory on a chunk of short-period Kuiper belt ejecta. And I don't think we're up to coding the kind of AI that could control such a factory any time this decade. So what do you have in mind?'
'Let me think.' Pamela glares at Manfred for a while before he notices her: 'Yeah?'
'What's going on? What's this all about?'
Franklin shrugs expansively, dreadlocks clattering: 'Manfred's helping me explore the solution space to a manufacturing problem.' He grins. 'I didn't know Manny had a fiance. Drink's on me.'
She glances at Manfred, who is gazing into whatever weirdly colored space his metacortex is projecting on his glasses, fingers twitching. Coolly: 'Our engagement was on hold while he thought about his future.'
'Oh, right. We didn't bother with that sort of thing in my day; like, too formal, man.' Franklin looks uncomfortable. 'He's been very helpful. Pointed us at a whole new line of research we hadn't thought of. It's long- term and a bit speculative, but if it works, it'll put us a whole generation ahead in the off-planet infrastructure field.'
'Will it help reduce the budget deficit, though?'
'Reduce the -'
Manfred stretches and yawns: The visionary is returning from planet Macx. 'Bob, if I can solve your crew problem, can you book me a slot on the deep-space tracking network? Like, enough to transmit a couple of gigabytes? That's going to take some serious bandwidth, I know, but if you can do it, I think I can get you exactly the kind of crew you're looking for.'
Franklin looks dubious. 'Gigabytes? The DSN isn't built for that! You're talking days. And what do you mean about a crew? What kind of deal do you think I'm putting together? We can't afford to add a whole new tracking network or life-support system just to run -'
'Relax.' Pamela glances at Manfred. 'Manny, why don't you tell him why you want the bandwidth? Maybe then he could tell you if it's possible, or if there's some other way to do it.' She smiles at Franklin: 'I've found that he usually makes more sense if you can get him to explain his reasoning. Usually.'
'If I -' Manfred stops. 'Okay, Pam. Bob, it's those KGB lobsters. They want somewhere to go that's insulated from human space. I figure I can get them to sign on as crew for your cargo-cult self-replicating factories, but they'll want an insurance policy: hence the deep-space tracking network. I figured we could beam a copy of them at the alien Matrioshka brains around M31 -'
'KGB?' Pam's voice is rising: 'You said you weren't mixed up in spy stuff!'
'Relax, it's just the Moscow Windows NT user group, not the FSB. The uploaded crusties hacked in and -'
Bob is watching him oddly. 'Lobsters?'
'Yeah.' Manfred stares right back. ' Panulirus interruptus uploads. Something tells me you might have heard of it?'
'Moscow.' Bob leans back against the wall: 'how did you hear about it?'
'They phoned me.' With heavy irony: 'It's hard for an upload to stay subsentient these days, even if it's just a crustacean. Bezier labs have a lot to answer for.'
Pamela's face is unreadable. 'Bezier labs?'
'They escaped.' Manfred shrugs. 'It's not their fault. This Bezier dude. Is he by any chance ill?'
'I -' Pamela stops. 'I shouldn't be talking about work.'
'You're not wearing your chaperone now,' he nudges quietly.
