Attached to the hulls were various bits of gear: manipulators, sensors, locomotion systems, and antennas. The antennas were not at all like the ones on an insect— they were usually flat patches studded with what looked like close-cropped fuzz— phased-array systems for sweeping beams of visible light through the air. Most of the mites were also clearly marked with the manufacturer's name and a part number; this was demanded by Protocol. A few of them were unmarked. These were illicit and had been invented either by people like Dr. X; by outlaw phyles who spurned Protocol; or by the covert labs that most people assumed were run by all the zaibatsus.
During half an hour's rooting around through Hackworth's skin, roaming around an area perhaps a millimeter on a side, they observed a few dozen artificial mites, not an unusual number nowadays. Almost all of them were busted. Mites didn't last very long because they were small but complicated, which left little space for redundant systems. As soon as one got hit with a cosmic ray, it died. They also had little space for energy storage, so many of them simply ran out of juice after a while. Their manufacturers compensated for this by making a lot of them.
Nearly all of the mites were connected in some way with the Victorian immune system, and of these, most were immunocules whose job was to drift around the dirty littoral of New Chusan using lidar to home in on any other mites that might disobey protocol. Finding one, they killed the invader by grabbing onto it and not letting go. The Victorian system used Darwinian techniques to create killers adapted to their prey, which was elegant and effective but led to the creation of killers that were simply too bizarre to have been thought up by humans, just as humans designing a world never would have thought up tile naked mole rat. Dr. X took time out to zoom in on an especially freakish killer locked in a death-grip around an unlabeled mite. This did not necessarily mean that Hackworth's flesh had been invaded, rather that the dead mites had become part of the dust on a table somewhere and been ground into his skin when he touched it.
To illustrate the kind of mite he was presently looking for, Hackworth had brought along a cocklebur that he had teased from Fiona's hair after they had gone for a walk in the park. He had shown it to Dr. X, who had understood immediately, and eventually he found it. It looked completely different from all the other mites, because, as a cocklebur, its sole job was to stick to whatever touched it first. It had been generated a few hours previously by the matter compiler at Bespoke, which, following Hackworth's instructions, had placed a few million of them on the outer surface of the Illustrated Primer. Many of them had been embedded in Hackworth's flesh when he had first picked the book up. Many remained on the book, back at the office, but Hackworth had anticipated that.
He made it explicit now, just so Dr. X and his staff wouldn't get any ideas: "The cocklebur has an internal timer," he said, "that will cause it to disintegrate twelve hours after it was compiled. We have six hours left in which to extract the information. It's encrypted, of course."
Dr. X smiled for the first time all day.
Dr. X was the ideal man for this job because of his very disreputability. He was a reverse engineer. He collected artificial mites like some batty Victorian lepidopterist. He took them apart one atom at a time to see how they worked, and when he found some clever innovation, he squirreled it away in his database. Since most of these innovations were the result of natural selection, Dr. X was usually the first human being to know about them.
Hackworth was a forger, Dr. X was a honer. The distinction was at least as old as the digital computer. Forgers created a new technology and then forged on to the next project, having explored only the outlines of its potential. Honers got less respect because they appeared to sit still technologically, playing around with systems that were no longer start, hacking them for all they were worth, getting them to do things the forgers had never envisioned.
Dr. X selected a pair of detachable manipulator arms from his unusually large arsenal. Some of these had been copied from New Atlantan, Nipponese, or Hindustani designs and looked familiar to Hackworth; others, however, were bizarre naturalistic devices that seemed to have been torn loose from New Atlantan immunocules— evolved structures, rather than designed. The Doctor employed two of these arms to grip the cocklebur. It was an aluminum-covered megabuckyball in a sunburst of barbed spines, several of which were decorated with fragments of shishkebabed skin.
Under Hackworth's direction he rotated the cocklebur until a small spine-free patch came into view. A circular depression, marked with a regular pattern of holes and knobs, was set into the surface of the ball, like a docking port on the side of a spacecraft. Inscribed around the circumference of this fitting was his maker's mark: IOANNI HACVIRTUS FECIT.
Dr. X did not need an explanation. It was a standard port. He probably had half a dozen manipulator arms designed to mate with it. He selected one and maneuvered its tip into place, then spoke a command in Shanghainese. Then he pulled the rig off his head and watched his assistant pour him another cup of tea. "How long?" he said.
"About a terabyte," Hackworth said. This was a measure of storage capacity, not of time, but he knew that Dr. X was the sort who could figure it out.
The ball contained a machine-phase tape drive system, eight reels of tape rigged in parallel, each with its own read/write machinery. The tapes themselves were polymer chains with different side groups representing the logical ones and zeroes. It was a standard component, and so Dr. X already knew that when it was told to dump, it would spew out about a billion bytes a second.
Hackworth had just told him that the total stored on the tapes was a trillion bytes, so they had a thousand seconds to wait. Dr. X took advantage of the time to leave the room, supported by assistants, and tend to some of the other parallel threads of his enterprise, which was known informally as the Flea Circus.
Hackworth departs from Dr. X's laboratory;
further ruminations;
poem from Finkle-McGraw;
encounter with ruffians.
Dr. X's assistant swung the door open and nodded insolently. Hackworth swung his top hat into place and stepped out of the Flea Circus, blinking at the reek of China: smoky like the dregs of a hundred million pots of lapsang souchong, mingled with the sweet earthy smell of pork fat and the brimstony tang of plucked chickens and hot garlic. He felt his way across the cobbles with the tip of his walking-stick until his eyes began to adjust. He was now poorer by several thousand ucus. A sizable investment, but the best a father could make.
Dr. X's neighborhood was in the Ming Dynasty heart of Shanghai, a warren of tiny brick structures sheathed in gray stucco, topped with tiled roofs, frequently surrounded by stucco walls. Iron poles projected from the second-story windows for drying clothes, so that in the narrow streets the buildings appeared to be fencing with each other. This neighborhood was near the foundation of the ancient city wall, built to keep out acquisitive Nipponese ronin, which had been torn down and made into a ring road.
It was part of the Outer Kingdom, which meant that foreign devils were allowed, as long as they were escorted by Chinese. Beyond it, deeper into the old neighborhood, was supposedly a scrap of the Middle Kingdom proper— the Celestial Kingdom, or C.K., as they liked to call it— where no foreigners at all were allowed.