"Tell you later," he shot back at Lunge. When they'd hit the lab and he was watching Mr. Hacker From The Future dick around with the PC in the lab. S.T. would be worse than useless. Twenty years or so back, a guy named Moore had made a prediction that sounded like pipe dream. That for ten years, the number of transistors you could acid-etch into a chunk of silicon would double annually. Transistors -- well, the math was complicated, but calling it a doubling in everything a computer could do was close enough. The manufacturing guys practically pissed themselves in excitement, as it had been tough to sell people a new typewriter every year when all they needed was a new ribbon. Now they could convince people to treat computers like annual planners with fancier guts -- by the time you'd worked out a system, the damn thing was obsolete.
After twice as long as postulated, the only thing he'd fucked up was the duration. Moore's Law was still tracking so steady S.T. suspected collusion, but even if the curve eventually went flaccid, a desktop here could run a cut and paste word processor for every man, woman, child, and zombie in a five mile radius and not blow a capacitor. Sangamon's knowledge belonged in a museum, as far as these computers were concerned.
Then the radio did its sympathetic resonance thing and produced sound of thin (and more importantly highly compressible) air out of a little radiation. Or electromagnetic waves, when talking to people who heard "radiation" and started building bomb shelters out of canned processed meat food. Never mind that they'd all die of scurvy before they ran out of SPAM.
Marc tried to one-up the Head Bastard in a contest of stating the obvious, threw in some cryptic bullshit for good measured, and switched off without even a sign-off. The static alone could have told them there were electrical disturbances. Even if they hadn't been able to see the lights. Or maybe he meant the beam-me-down-Scotty trick some suit had just pulled. L recognized him, which meant brainwashed patient rather than thrilling radio spy drama. The guy looked absolutely confident, which S.T. was willing to take at face value.
"There's other PCs in the building, unless you two had your hearts set on inconclusive amateur forensics." He stepped back a little, giving Howell an extra buffer of personal space to avoid backsplash in case Lunge lived up to his name or Howell got bored.
no subject
After twice as long as postulated, the only thing he'd fucked up was the duration. Moore's Law was still tracking so steady S.T. suspected collusion, but even if the curve eventually went flaccid, a desktop here could run a cut and paste word processor for every man, woman, child, and zombie in a five mile radius and not blow a capacitor. Sangamon's knowledge belonged in a museum, as far as these computers were concerned.
Then the radio did its sympathetic resonance thing and produced sound of thin (and more importantly highly compressible) air out of a little radiation. Or electromagnetic waves, when talking to people who heard "radiation" and started building bomb shelters out of canned processed meat food. Never mind that they'd all die of scurvy before they ran out of SPAM.
Marc tried to one-up the Head Bastard in a contest of stating the obvious, threw in some cryptic bullshit for good measured, and switched off without even a sign-off. The static alone could have told them there were electrical disturbances. Even if they hadn't been able to see the lights. Or maybe he meant the beam-me-down-Scotty trick some suit had just pulled. L recognized him, which meant brainwashed patient rather than thrilling radio spy drama. The guy looked absolutely confident, which S.T. was willing to take at face value.
"There's other PCs in the building, unless you two had your hearts set on inconclusive amateur forensics." He stepped back a little, giving Howell an extra buffer of personal space to avoid backsplash in case Lunge lived up to his name or Howell got bored.