"Virtual reality setup," I said. "Nice trick."
"We can set reality levels here," she said, "even making things more real than your own reality, should we wish. I usually just call it the multi-purpose room."
"More real than real. Now that might be worth experiencing," I said, as I helped her unpack the basket and spread our fare. "How real is it right now?"
"If you were to fall into the stream you could drown in it," she replied.
"What do you use it for, besides picnics?"
"It's multi-purpose," she said.
"You already told me that. Show me what it can do."
"All right."
She looked past me, out from the grove, across the field toward the hills. Abruptly, the countryside vanished.
We stood in a gray place of diffuse lighting, three-dimensional clusters of variously-colored tubes extending in most directions. Globes of yellow light drifted within the tubes, taking turns at their junctions.
"It looks like a big schematic," I said, "only at an enormous level of complexity. The insides of a microprocessor, perhaps."
"These, I believe, might have been distant ancestors."
With her fingertip, she traced a small rectangle in the air before her. It assumed a bright, metallic opacity, covered with numbers or letters in a language I could not read. She touched a small red spot at its lower right-hand corner then, and the characters changed each time her finger moved. As they did, the area about us flowed from one prospect to another. Finally, she simply held it depressed and the characters flowed. So did our surroundings. I clenched my teeth and fists and waited. At length, she slowed it, then stopped it. I beheld another set of schematics.
"There," she said. "Name a primary or secondary color."
"Green," I said.
"All right," she told me. "That shall be the color of its walls and spires."
"What's walls and spires?"
"This city," she replied.
Then her hands began to move, darting forward, passing somehow into the tubes, pushing glowing balls through junctions, creating new tubes and junctions as if she were shaping dough. She directed some of the spheres down these new courses.
"What are they?" I asked. "The glowing balls?"
"What you would call electrons," she replied, extracting , One and tossing it to me. I caught it. It was near-weightless, neither hot nor cold, and yielded to pressure like a tennis ball.
I tossed it back.
"What are you making?"
"The shaping of a seed," she replied. "I chose this one because I've worked with the model before and recalled some easy ways to make minor changes."
I shook my head.
"Is it all simulation?" I said. "Or were you doing something real?"
"Both," she said. "Either. You'll see. We can use it however we would. This is a design and manufacturing center, among other things. Multi-purpose."
"And you just edited an existing design?"
"Yes."
"To what?"
"Those things you spoke of ... ?"
"Microprocessors?"
"Yes. Think of a complex of billions of them, each serving special ends. Think of them as having access to tiny manipulators which can be ordered to create more of themselves. Think of a master program which switches them on and off in various appropriate sequences. Now imagine them as having access to the necessary raw materials to fulfill their programs."
I laughed.
"It sounds like a genetic code. But since you said 'city' it must be an inorganic artifact."
She raised her hand and traced the rectangle again. This time she pressed a sequence of colored places along its top. Immediately she had finished, the structure collapsed in upon itself, imploding to a bright point, leaving us to regard it there in the gray place of diffuse lighting.
"Yes," she said, and she stooped and picked up the olden mote. Rising, she touched my right fist, which I had not noticed was still clenched. "Open," she said.
I did so, and she deposited a tiny seed on the palm of my band.
"Don't lose it," she said. So I closed my hand and held it.
Then, taking my arm, "This way."
We took only a few paces along a rocky trail which had suddenly appeared beneath our feet, blue sky overhead, bright sun behind. Looking back and downward, I beheld a greener plain, perhaps a half-mile distant, running up to a line of trees.
"Is that our picnic area way over there?" I asked.
"Yes."
"I hope the virtual ants didn't get at the sandwiches. If they can be as real to them as the tablecloth is to the table—"
"Pick a spot," she said.
"Is that a proposition?"
"No. I want you to cast your seed upon the ground."
"There's a biblical injunction against that sort of thing."
"Plant that designer seed anywhere you wish—or just toss it onto a likely spot around here."
"Okay."
I knelt, brushed back a little dirt, laid the seed on that spot, brushed some over it.
"Now what?" I asked.
"That's it. You're finished."
I rose.
"What now?"
"We walk back and have our lunch."
She took my hand and we walked the walk.
From our picnic area, we did have a view of the rocky hill where I'd planted the thing. Nothing untoward occurred during the next half-hour or so, though, and I almost forgot about it.
"Shall I uncork the wine now?"
"Please."
Then, almost between eyeblinks, the surface of the distant hill was altered, losing its gentle curves.
"Damn!" I said.
"Here. Let me." She reached for the bottle.
"No. It's that hilltop." I gestured.
"Ah. Yes, it's starting."
An irregular line worked its way across the hill, continuing a constant stirring along its length. It pushed itself higher, also.
I finally opened the bottle, poured us two glasses.
The city's pace of development seemed to increase as we watched. Slow at first, it rose higher, beating out the rate at which the hilltop sank. Soon its towers grew visibly, almost swaying, as its walls broadened and rose.
"Now this has to be a virtual readout of the seed's program, right?" I asked.
She sipped her wine.
"It is whatever I want it to be, dear Alf, whatever I choose to make it. This is omniality, remember? I could even reverse it and make the city go to seed."
"Most cities do that on their own, anyway. Says more about citizens, though, than it does about cities."
The sunlight glinted on the spires, which had taken on a distinctly greenish coloration.
"One can set up a world for habitation in a day's time, this way," she said.
"I'll bet you have other seeds you might sow that could overwhelm the other guy's," I said.
"Yes, and there are counters to those, and counters to those," she said. "It's a memorable sight to see an entire planetary surface awash in colors—overwhelming each other, falling back, rising to the top."
"How might something like that end?"
"I once saw a totally furnished world. Every possible spot was taken. But no one could live there. Too much had been planted by the warring factions. The planet's resources were exhausted."
"A whole world—wasted."
"Well, no. The matter was settled elsewhere—whether by war or money, I forget—and the winner came back and seeded a total breakdown for a return to basics, then started over again on a smaller scale. Place needed a lot of landscaping later, though."
I took another drink and watched the spreading city.
"Could we have taken that seed and planted it somewhere on the surface of the Earth and still produced the city?"