Meewee gave it a try. Arrow, tell me how to tell you in Starkese to locate Ellen’s head.
Arrow replied without hesitation, I feel like watching a vid or something, Arrow. Maybe the evening news. Find something interesting for me.
Meewee parroted the mentar, “I feel like watching a vid or something, Arrow. Maybe the evening news. Find something interesting for me.”
“Complying,” Arrow said, and the Orange mechs raced out of the apartment through the slugway.
Well, that got a response, Wee Hunk said, and what’s this?
A large spinning globe, as viewed from space, appeared in the middle of the living room. Around the globe’s equator hung sixteen satellites, attached to it with a web of strings. Meewee recognized them immediately as the Heliostream relay stations and the microbeams they directed at ground targets. As he watched, the microbeams, starting at the orbital stations, became coated with a silvery sheath that traveled down their length to the ground stations. At the ground, powdery clouds billowed up and spread out like ripples on a pond.
What is that stuff? Meewee said.
I don’t know yet. I’m sampling it via meteorological drones. It’s a kind of dust particle, streaming down the static flux of the beams. I can’t tell much more than that yet.
Over the next half hour, silver puddles spread outward across continents until they intersected with each other and merged. Meanwhile, clouds of the dust rose into the atmosphere and shrouded Earth in a silvery fog. The prevailing winds mixed and churned it up. It was denser in the temperate zones and almost absent at the poles.
Well?
I think it’s nust.
Which is?
Microscopic network repeater nodes. Nodal dust. Microscopic particles that link with all the particles around them.
I don’t understand, said Meewee. What do they do?
That’s all they do. Imagine if ten particles of nust landed on your hand and networked themselves. Anything that could read them would see a rough approximation of your hand in real time as it moved through space. Wait a few minutes until ten more particles landed and linked up. With every addition, the image of your hand gets sharper. Eleanor is coating every blessed thing on the face of Earth with interactive dust!
By now the entire globe, suspended in Meewee’s living room, was completely obscured by a bright cloud of churning nust. Meewee went to the skylight where the evening sky seemed a little more orange than usual, but nothing out of the ordinary. I can’t see it.
That’s because its density is only about twenty to forty micrograms per cubic meter, depending on latitude and altitude, less than common air pollution. I’m not sure what kind of picture resolution that would give you. But it seems to me it would take an incredible number of attention units to read it. A whole battalion of superluminaries.
Suddenly a pocket of nust at the equator flashed and seemed to liquify. The transformation raced around the globe until the planet seemed covered by a flood of swirling quicksilver.
They’ve just linked up, Wee Hunk said. Eleanor has just achieved the first global handshake. Shall we dive in and see if Arrow knows what it’s doing?
The caveman reached out his arms and pulled, like pulling an invisible rope. Meewee, in his armchair, did the same, and seemed to pull himself down toward the planetary surface. The Baja Peninsula appeared below him like a silver icicle. He pulled until he could distinguish the San Bernadino Mountains and Southern California. Aircraft disturbed enough nust in the atmosphere to be visible, but the resolution at ground level wasn’t high enough to make out anything smaller than a building.
Come down here, Wee Hunk said.
Down where?
Bolivia—the crash site.
2.21
Bogdan slipped out of Green Hall, leaving his housemeets to linger over the fruitish and coffeesh and went down to the NanoJiffy for an Icy. On the other side of the wall, he could hear the shattering crunch of the predigester in the kitchen as Francis and Barry fed it dirty plates and cutlery, food scraps, and table linen. By tomorrow morning, all their day’s waste would be masticated, dissolved and filtered, and reconstituted into fresh ugoo precursor, ready to be rewoven into new plates, clothes, and food. The cycle of life.
As he enjoyed his dessert, Bogdan checked his messages with his new throat phone and discovered that it had no built-in filter sets, and so he had a queue of tens of thousands of calls. Without a graphical interface or helpful valet, he’d have to sift through them individually to find any that mattered. He needed his editor in his room, so he climbed the nine and three-quarter floors to retrieve it.
The door to Bogdan’s room, his loyal diaron-plated, titanium-bolted, clinker core door that not even a tank could penetrate was ajar. That was not possible. He pulled the door open enough to peek inside. There was a boy lying on Bogdan’s mattress. It was Troy Tobbler. Bogdan pulled the door wide open and burst in shouting, “What the feck! How the feck did you get in here?”
Troy rubbed his eyes. “You woke me up.”
“Did you hack my door?”
“I said, you woke me up.”
“I don’t care,” Bogdan said and went around the elevator cable housing to stand over his bed and unwelcome visitor.
“I didn’t hack your door,” Troy yawned, grinding the gritty footpads of his boots into Bogdan’s sheets. “Slugboy did.”
“And who the feck is Slugboy?”
Bogdan felt a sharp blow to the back of his head that sent him reeling. He lurched around, but there was no one there. When he turned back, however, he was confronted by a small boy. The boy was a head shorter than Bogdan, and though he had cherubic cheeks and a freckled nose, there was a menacing something about him that made Bogdan think twice about hitting him back.
“Are you Slugboy?” he demanded.
“The one and only,” answered the boy, “and you must be—holy crap!” He walked around Bogdan, staring at his bottom. “What are they poking you with? Hey, Troy, you gotta see this. Use Filter 32. I’ve never seen an ass glow so bright.”
“Yeah, I know,” Troy said, standing up on Bogdan’s mattress. “He’s a hole for hire.”
“His ass is like a mood lamp,” Slugboy continued. “We should call him the ‘Golden Be-Hind.’ Get it? The Golden Be-Hind.”
“That was a pirate ship,” Troy explained to Bogdan, “in the olden days.”
“I don’t care!” Bogdan shouted. “Get out of my room this instant!”
“Your room?” Troy replied. “That’s a good one. Come on, Slug. Let’s go down and tell Houseer Dieter we hacked the door. He’ll be real happy.” As the two boys made their way to the door, Bogdan fought back a panicky urge to beg them not to tell.
Troy snickered and said, “What’sa matter, Goldie? You look sick.”
Slugboy said, “Yeah, but he shines like the setting sun behind two cheeky clouds.”
“Don’t worry,” Troy said, “I won’t give your room to Dieter. I’ll let you do that all by yourself.” With that, the boys disappeared through the doorway. Bogdan hurried to follow, but stopped and glanced back into his room. He had a weird feeling that something was different, but what?
Bogdan’s bedroom was little more than a machinery closet. The huge old electric elevator motor filled most of the space, together with its cable drums and pulleys. Electrical control boxes occupied two walls, and wire conduits snaked in all directions. Bogdan used the cable housing for his shelves and the small tool bench for a desk. What passed for his worldly possessions were piled in one corner, and his ratty old mattress was scooched into another. It wasn’t much, but it was all his, and he loved it. Then it hit him—the room was too quiet. “You shut off the elevator!”