Wait a minute!
I checked the folio in the upper-right-hand corner of the cardboard. Sure enough: it said page four. But I was holding a sheet of cardboard that had only TWO sides!
I flipped it over again, to the other side of the sheet, turning the page in both hands with the same clockwise motion. This time the folio in the top right-hand comer distinctly read page five. I turned it over again. Page six. And the typewritten words were different on each page.
On a hunch, I turned the cardboard over again with both hands. But this time I reversed my gesture, turning over page six counter-clockwise instead of clockwise. Aha! Sure enough, I had turned the manuscript back to page five. I turned it over again, same direction, and now I was back to page four, where I’d left off. I kept rotating the page, watching the folio in the corner as it counted downward from page three to page two to page one to… I flipped it over one more time. Now it claimed to be page 386. The text had changed again; this time it ended halfway down the page, and at the bottom of the page was typed THE END. Obviously I’d scrolled to the last page of the document.
I flipped the page again, reversing direction to go clockwise this time, and I found myself back on page one.
Somehow this fellow Max Porlock had stored the text of an entire novel on both sides of a single sheet of cardboard.
That’s one hell of a way to save on mailing costs.
I looked at the thing carefully, wondering if it was really some kind of high-tech display monitor disguised as a sheet of cardboard. No; it really did seem to be ordinary cardboard. Why was Porlock outputting his text on cardboard instead of paper? And more importantly: how did he manage to store 386 pages of continuous scrolling text on a piece of cardboard in the first place?
I went down the hall, borrowed a hand mirror from Wendy, and set it up on my desk. Now I picked up the manuscript of Nano Nanette again and held it up so that I was looking at page one. I glanced over the top of the page: in the mirror, I could see the backside of the document. Yes, it was page two, upside down and reflected into mirror-writing. I started reading page one again. Every few seconds, I glanced up from page one and looked into the mirror. Page two was sitting there quietly, waiting for me.
I got to the end of page one, and turned the sheet over to page two… but this time, as I turned the page over, I kept my eyes aimed squarely at the mirror.
Caught it! As soon as I turned the sheet over, so that page one became the backside… immediately, the words on the first page dissolved. I saw the letters ripple across the page, like swarming ants, separating and then realigning themselves in new configurations along the doublespaced lines. As soon as page two became uppermost, page one neatly changed itself into page three. The sheet of cardboard was rigged somehow, so that whichever side I wasn’t reading would scroll forward or backward to become the next page after the one that I was reading. By using a mirror so that I could watch the front and back sides both at once, I caught the words while they were changing on the back page.
My thumb was itching where I’d given myself the paper cut. I put down the pixilated cardboard, picked up my phone, and punched the number for the Scott Richards Literary Agency. Not the switchboard; I called his unlisted personal cellphone.
“Scott Richards here.”
“Sam Kurtz, at Augean Press,” I said.
Scott chuckled that annoying little chuckle of his. “I gather you’re calling me about Nano Nanette.” Here came the chuckle again. “Good plotline, isn’t it?”
“Skip the plot; let’s talk about the presentation,” I told him. “Your client’s whole novel is crammed into two sides of a page. How the hell did he do it?”
The chuckle again, and then Scott answered: “Max Porlock is not a fulltime novelist. He’s a biochemical engineer specializing in nanotechnology.”
I edit a line of science fiction novels, but most so-called science fiction doesn’t contain much real science, so I’m not always well-versed in tech-speak. “What’s nanotechnology?” I asked.
“My client Porlock designs and builds microbots,” Scott told me. “Microscopic robots, each of them less than a micron in diameter.”
I vaguely remembered reading an article about something like this. “Shouldn’t nanotech robots be called nanobots?” I asked Scott.
He made a sound that was the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “Nanobots, microbots, ittybittybots; call ’em whatever you want. Porlock makes microscopic robots, so I call them microbots. He programs them to perform multiple dedicated tasks in distinct logic states.”
“Hold on a minute, Scott.” I hunted around in my desk drawer, which contains a branch office of the Bermuda Triangle, and finally I found a magnifying glass. I picked up the sheet of cardboard and did the mirror trick again, but this time I was watching through the magnifying glass.
My hunch was right. Looking through the magnifying lens as I turned the page, it seemed as if I could see each letter of the text breaking up into thousands of tiny individual black pinpoints. They scurried across the page and rearranged themselves into new letters, sharply black against the white cardboard surface. I picked up the phone again. “Scott, are you saying that you mailed me a package containing thousands of teensy-weensy robots?”
He chuckled again. “Millions of robots would be more accurate, Sam. My client told me the precise number, but I didn’t write it down. Clever, aren’t they? The microbots are programmed to be phototropic.”
I may be low-tech, but I’m not illiterate. “They respond to light?”
“Precisely. When you hold the sheet of cardboard, the microbots on the upper side—the page facing the light—will stand still and behave themselves. It’s the ones underneath, on the dark side, who carry out their programming and convert to the next page of the text.” Scott chuckled once more. “Those little buggers have the text of a complete novel downloaded into their programming in the form of a dot matrix, with a microbot assigned to each dot. Each individual microbot is programmed to occupy a specific position on page one, page two, page three…”
I held the cardboard sheet within an inch of my eye. The black marks looked like ordinary typing; it was hard to believe that each letter was actually several thousand individual mechanisms. “You mean the letters on the page are little metal robots?” I asked Scott over the phone.
“Not metal, no.” Across the phone link, I heard Scott ransacking the papers on his desk in search of something. “Max Porlock told me that his microbots are made of… what’s this word here? Alkanethiols. Self-assembling hydrocarbon molecules. He tells me they’re easy to mass-produce; they feed on protein chains to replicate themselves.”
I picked up the cardboard again, starting to formulate a plan. “Why cardboard?” I asked Scott. “Why doesn’t your client just output his text on paper?”
“Too risky,” the agent told me. “The microbots eat proteins, remember? The first few prototype microbots kept eating the paper they were printed on. My client has developed a special acid-free cardboard made of chemically inert pulp. He says that the microbots think it tastes yucky.”