Read Online The Wellstone by Wil McCarthy - Free Book Online

inscrutable little smile.
    “That’s all?” Her eyes flicked downward, then settled on the only jewelry Bascal was wearing: the wellgold signet ring on the middle finger of his left hand.
    “Pretty, eh?”
    “It’s not an ordinary ring.”
    Now there was an edge to Bascal’s voice. “Of course it’s not an ordinary ring. I’m the prince of the fucking solar system. What do I wear, gold? Tin? It’s
information
, darling—quadrillions of terabytes in quantum storage. It wants out.”
    With a shiver of excitement and dread, Conrad realized that they weren’t just playing at being bad here. They were
being
bad; they were going to be bad. Bascal was really pissed off about something. Hell, they all were. As fugitives from adult supervision, they had a fucking point to make.
    This girl Xmary, hearing the tone of Bascal’s voice, huffed once and then said, “I know some people. I can ask for you. It sounds pretty serious, though.”
    “It is.”
    Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Finally, the girl got up again. Before turning to go she asked, “Am I going to get in trouble?”
    “Yes,” Bascal replied. “We all are. The question is whether anything useful is accomplished beforehand.”
    “Great.”
    She disappeared. Doing as she was told, choosing to go along with Bascal and against her own better judgment.
    “So what’s in the ring?” Steve Grush asked.
    “Garbage,” Bascal said.
    “Garbage?”
    “Garbage. Reorganization of matter at the atomic level. Into garbage.”
    “You mean
programmable
matter, right?” Conrad asked, because otherwise that made no sense at all.
    “Duh. Any wellstone surface. But that’s everything, right?”
    Well, sort of. There were still an awful lot of natural materials around, especially in Denver. But Conrad remained confused, because wellstone was fundamentally a form of silicon. Woven nanofiber, right? Quantum dots to confine electrons in atomlike structures. In raw form the stuff looked and felt like some heavy, impermeable, beetle-shiny plastic, but by sending the right signals through it you could fill it with artificial pseudoatoms of any type. Silicon and gold, silicon and sulfur, silicon and plaster of fucking Paris. Then there were the transuranic pseudoatoms, and the asymmetric ones, and the ones that incorporated exotic particles. You could alter wellstone’s apparent composition in so many ways that even after three hundred years, a Queendom full of pseudo-chemists and hypercomputer search algorithms had barely cataloged even the fundamentals.
    But pseudoatoms weren’t real, and silicon was.
    Bascal was looking smug. “It’s Garbage Day in Denver, me boyos. If we each have one of these, and we spread out, we can make a lot of frigging garbage. We can even threaten infrastructure, which after all is the thing that separates us from the animals. If our demands aren’t met, they will at least be remembered.”
    “Raw!” Steve said approvingly, and a number of the boys echoed him.
    “Where did this software come from?” Conrad couldn’t help asking.
    “Wrote it myself. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”
    Conrad proceeded warily, not wanting to sound negative. “How does it work?”
    “I archived a year’s worth of patterns from the palace waste chutes, and fit them together with a tesselationtiler. Any surface is mapped with the best possible fit in stored garbage, and the boundaries between garbage objects are heated and acoustically shocked to cut them away from the parent body. Slap it on a wall, and you get a pile of steaming garbage.”
    “Except that it wouldn’t steam,” Conrad said. “It wouldn’t stink. It might look like shit, or half-eaten food, or whatever. Probably even feel like it. But pseudoatoms don’t have a smell. They can’t leak out into the air, like real atoms and molecules do.”
    “Oh,” Bascal said, suddenly uncertain. It wasn’t a look that fit his face.
    “Still, that’s pretty amazing that