"Is this the smart makeup?" Hackworth said, nodding at the screen.
"The next step beyond," Cotton said. "Remote-control."
"Controlled how? Yuvree?" Hackworth said, meaning Universal Voice Recognition Interface.
"A specialised variant thereof, yes sir," Cotton said. Then, lowering his voice, "Word has it they considered makeup with nanoreceptors for galvanic skin response, pulse, respiration, and so on, so that it would respond to the wearer's emotional state. This superficial, need I say it, cosmetic issue concealed an undertow that pulled them out into deep and turbulent philosophical waters-"
"What? Philosophy of makeup?"
"Think about it, Mr. Hackworth— is the function of makeup to respond to one's emotions— or precisely not to do so?"
"These waters are already over my head," Hackworth admitted.
"You'll be wanting to know about the power supply for Runcible," Cotton said, using the code name for the Illustrated Primer. Cotton had no idea what Runcible was, just that it needed a relatively long-lived power supply.
"Yes."
"The modifications you requested are complete. I ran the tests you specified plus a few others that occurred to me— all of them are documented here." Cotton grabbed the heavy brasslike pull of his desk drawer and paused for a fraction of a second while the embedded fingerprint-recognition logic did its work. The drawer unlocked itself, and Cotton pulled it open to reveal a timeless assortment of office drawer miscellany, including several sheets of paper— some blank, some printed, some scrawled on, and one sheet that was blank except for the word RUNCIBLE printed at the top in Cotton's neat draughtsman's hand. Cotton pulled this one out and spoke to it: "Demetrius James Cotton transferring all privileges to Mr. Hackworth."
"John Percival Hackworth in receipt," Hackworth said, taking the page from Cotton. "Thank you, Mr. Cotton."
"You're welcome, sir."
"Cover sheet," Hackworth said to the piece of paper, and then it had pictures and writing on it, and the pictures moved— a schematic of a machine-phase system cycling.
"If I'm not being too forward by enquiring," Cotton said, "will you be compiling Runcible soon?"
"Today most likely," Hackworth said.
"Please feel free to inform me of any glitches," Cotton said, just for the sake of form.
"Thank you, Demetrius," Hackworth said. "Letter fold," he said to the piece of paper, and it creased itself neatly into thirds. Hackworth put it in the breast pocket of his jacket and walked out of Merkle Hall.
Particulars of Nell & Harv's domestic situation;
Harv brings back a wonder.
Whenever Nell's clothes got too small for her, Harv would pitch them into the deke bin and then have the M.C. make new ones. Sometimes, if Tequila was going to take Nell someplace where they would see other moms with other daughters, she'd use the M.C. to make Nell a special dress with lace and ribbons, so that the other moms would see how special Nell was and how much Tequila loved her. The kids would sit in front of the mediatron and watch a passive, and the moms would sit nearby and talk sometimes or watch the mediatron sometimes. Nell listened to them, especially when Tequila was talking, but she didn't really understand all the words.
She knew, because Tequila repeated it often, that when Tequila got pregnant with Nell, she had been using something called the Freedom Machine— a mite that lived in your womb and caught eggs and ate them. Victorians didn't believe in them, but you could buy them from Chinese and Hindustanis, who, of course, had no scruples. You never knew when they'd all gotten too worn out to work anymore, which is how Tequila had ended up with Nell. One of the women said you could buy a special kind of Freedom Machine that would go in there and eat a fetus. Nell didn't know what a fetus was, but all of the women apparently did, and thought that the idea was the kind of thing that only the Chinese or Hindustanis would ever think up. Tequila said she knew all about that sort of Freedom Machine but didn't want to use one, because she was afraid it might be gross.
Sometimes Tequila would bring back pieces of real cloth from her work, because she said that the rich Victorians she worked for would never miss them. She never let Nell play with them, and so Nell did not understand the difference between real cloth and the kind that came from the M.C.
Harv found a piece of it once. The Leased Territories, where they lived, had their own beach, and Harv and his friends liked to go prospecting there, early in the morning, for things that had drifted across from Shanghai, or that the Vickys in New Atlantis Clave had flushed down their water-closets. What they were really looking for was pieces of stretchy, slippery Nanobar. Sometimes the Nanobar was in the shape of condoms, sometimes it came in larger chunks that were used to wrap things up and preserve them from the depredations of mites. In any case, it could be gathered up and sold to certain persons who knew how to clean it and weld one piece of Nanobar to another and make it into protective suits and other shapes.
Harv had quietly stuffed the piece of cloth into his shoe and then limped home, not saying a word to anyone. That night Nell, lying on her red mattress, was troubled by vague dreams about strange lights and finally woke up to see a blue monster in her room: It was Harv underneath his blanket with a torch, doing something. She climbed out very slowly so as not to disturb Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple, and stuck her head beneath the blanket, and found Harv, holding the little flashlight in his teeth, working at something with a pair of toothpicks.
"Harv," she said, "are you working on a mite?"
"No, dummy." Harv's voice was hushed, and he had to mumble around the little button-shaped torch he was holding in his teeth. "Mites are lots smaller. See, look!"
She crawled forward a little more, drawn as much by warmth and security as by curiosity, and saw a limp mottled brown thing a few centimeters on a side, fuzzy around the edges, resting on Hanv's crossed ankles.
"What is it?"
"It's magic. Watch this," Harv said. And worrying at it with his toothpick, he teased something loose.
"It's got string coming out of it!" Nell said.
"Sssh!" Harv gripped the end of the thread beneath his thumbnail and pulled. It looked quite short, but it lengthened as he pulled, and the fuzzy edge of the piece of fabric waffled too fast to see, and then the thread had come loose entirely. He held it up for inspection, then let it drift down onto a heap of others just like it.
"How many does it have?" Nell said.
"Nell," Harv said, turning to face her so that his light shone into her face, his voice coming out of the light epiphanically, "you got it wrong. It's not that the thing has threads in it— it is threads. Threads going under and over each other. If you pulled out all of the threads, nothing would be left."
"Did mites make it?" Nell asked.
"The way it's made— so digital— each thread going over and under other threads, and those ones going over and under all the other threads-" Harv stopped for a moment, his mind overloaded by the inhuman audacity of the thing, the promiscuous reference frames. "It had to be mites, Nell, nothing else could do it."
Security measures adopted by Atlantis/Shanghai.
Atlantis/Shanghai occupied the loftiest ninety percent of New Chusan's land area— an inner plateau about a mile above sea level, where the air was cooler and cleaner. Parts of it were marked off with a lovely wrought iron fence, but the real border was defended by something called the dog pod grid— a swarm of quasi-independent aerostats.