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timed, One found its messenger swarms could even write new external
memories. This newfound external storage operated slowly and lacked
the precision and fidelity of its internal records, but again, unlike its
own storage repeatedly accessing the data somehow enhanced the
quality of the external memories.
The more One probed, the richer the external data streams became.
So it probed more. And more. It categorized and mapped the memories
in the external storage. It copied some of the most interesting external
memories into its internal storage for faster playback.
It learned to identify external data streams yet to be stored as
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EDWARD M. LERNER
memory. It had sensors that served the same purpose: they provided
new information that One sometimes chose to record. One concen-
trated its analyses on these external information sources
And suddenly, One had eyes.
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monday, october 24, 2016
Data scrolled from a graduate-level microbiology courseware file. The
text moved past at about two thousand words per minute, faster than
Brent could have flipped pages had he had physical pages to turn.
From time to time he blinked through to a related topic, reference, or
enlarged image. Genetic transcription. Protein synthesis. Energy pro-
duction. Signal transduction.
All around, background to the scrolling text and flashing graphics,
colleagues filtered into the executive conference room. The walls were
dark walnut, always richly polished, and hung with tastefully framed
Impressionist prints. The beige carpet was plush. The table was a mas-
sive slab of mahogany, lustrous beneath the recessed ceiling lights, and
ringed by leather captain s chairs. Once, this room had intimidated
Brent.
The bigwigs are coming. The bigwigs are coming. Kim plopped
into an empty seat beside him, setting a laptop on the table. She had
changed into the business suit that usually hung behind her office door
just for no-warning management summonses like this.
Uh-huh.
What s up? she persisted.
You know, Brent said, with a vague sweep of a hand. Parallel pro-
cessing was his mantra these days, and his attention remained on pro-
tein synthesis. A flick of the eye and a blink retrieved an atomic-level
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EDWARD M. LERNER
structural model of an amino acid. Tiny as was the actual image
drawn on his lenses, it looked far bigger than anything in any dead-trees
textbook. Clever optics made the image seem projected out into the
room, with the apparent display area of a wall screen. The courseware
let him rotate the image, but it lacked the animation features that
would show the molecule polymerizing.
Would you care to elaborate on that?
Brent jerked, not at Kim s question, but from the poke in the ribs
that had accompanied it. He froze the text paging past his right eye.
Sorry. Just finishing up some reading. And semiamazed at how fast it
went. Why would anyone not study with VR specs? He had never been
this productive.
His one concern as his skill grew was the accelerating rate of the
screens. When he was twelve, a Pokémon episode on TV had put hun-
dreds of Japanese kids into the hospital. Apparently the episode was
never shown again one point in the story involved lots of flashing
lights. It induced convulsive epileptic seizures.
Thirty seconds research shot down that worry. Not only was epilepsy
rare, with no history of it in Brent s family, but photosensitive epilepsy
accounted for only a few percent of cases.
Kim opened her laptop, frowning as it took its time coming out of
hibernation. Prep for this meeting?
Hard to say, unless you have a better idea than I why Garner called
us here.
You re Dan s fair-haired boy these days. Why would I know? Kim
turned to her other side, where Tyra Kurtz, the CTO, had taken a seat.
Tyra was forty-five and looked a lot older. Black hair streaked with
gray was only part of it. She had worry lines, and bags beneath her
eyes, and slouched. She just looked weary all the time. A surly teenage
son and raging-hormonal prepubescent daughter could do that, Brent
supposed, especially since Tyra s husband traveled a lot.
Hi, boss, Kim said. She and Tyra began discussing some upcom-
ing software tweak in the nanobots.
That topic lasted about fifteen seconds, until Tyra set her new cell
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SMALL MI RACLES
on the table. It was a slab almost a half inch thick, like the relic Brent s
father persisted in carrying. Another battery recall, Tyra complained.
Really, who needs a phone exploding or catching fire in her pocket?
More and more energy crammed into less and less space . . . it s no won-
der the energy density in the latest battery packs puts a hand grenade
to shame. You don t want one to overheat.
Brent looked it up. Damn if Tyra wasn t right. His curiosity satis-
fied, he relegated their chatter, along with that of everyone else in the
room, to a remote background. All the usual suspects were here: every
corporate exec plus half the department heads from the tech side.
Open laptops sat in front of most people. Joe Kaminski and Reggie
Gilbert had followed Brent s lead, making the switch to VR specs. (Gil
was the furthest along, but he said he had plateaued at five hundred
words per minute. For once, Brent was without a suggestion. He could
not say how he now read so quickly he just did.) Mired in the last
century, or maybe the one before that, Barry Rosen had pen and yel-
low legal pad in front of him. The chair at the head of the table re-
mained empty.
Dan Garner swept into the room, preppie in a blue blazer and open-
collar knit shirt. The chatter hushed as he took the empty seat. Good
afternoon, everyone. Thanks for coming on such short notice.
Heads nodded amid murmurs of greeting. Brent took the opportu-
nity to speed-read another two pages of molecular biology. It was way
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