by Rudy Rucker
Quintillionth
0.000000000000000001
Atto-
Sextillionth
0.000000000000000000001
Zepto-
Septillionth
0.000000000000000000000001
Yocto-
“Yawn yawn, I’ve seen that,” says Joe.
“Seen but not understood,” says Harry. “To grasp the meaning of the word ‘femtotechnology,’ you should first think about the word ‘nanotechnology.’ A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. An big molecule might be ten or twenty nanometers across, maybe a little more. A water molecule is smaller, about a fifth of a nanometer. Nanometers are a natural size-unit for measuring molecules, so when people developed the technology for manipulating molecules they called it nanotechnology.”
“Then how come the dooks who work with molecules say they’re doing wetware engineering?” asks Joe.
“That’s a historical accident,” says Harry. “The original nanotechnologists—we’re talking about nearly a thousand years ago—thought they were going to be making tiny machines. But that idea turned out to be bogus. Biology has the lock on nanometer-scale fabrication. The word ‘nanotechnology’ died because the first guys to use it had some wrong ideas. It’s sort of like the way the alchemists thought substances had philosophical virtues, and then a few centuries later it turned out they’d been trying to do chemistry. The old-time nanotechnologists thought molecules were like machines, and then a few centuries later it turned out they’d been trying to do wetware engineering. Nobody wants to be branded an alchemist or a nanotechnologist because those original groups were wrong in important ways. But my point, Joe, is that wetware engineering is indeed nanotechnology. It’s what’s going on when you use medi-germs to clean out your arteries. It’s what’s happening when a diamond-spider spins carbon fibers for construction. It’s what happens when a cloth-plant weaves cellular automaton fabric for your shirts.”
“Don’t hurt yourself, man,” says Joe. “You’re explaining too hard. Try this one: according to the chart, picotechnology should come before femtotechnology. Why don’t we do picotechnology first?”
“There isn’t much happening at the picometer size scale,” says Harry. “The next really solid thing below molecules is the nucleus of an atom. And that turns out to be about twenty femtometers. So if we start doing things directly to atomic nuclei we’re talking about femtotechnology. There isn’t going to be any picotechnology because there’s nothing interesting that’s a picometer in size.”
“Very clean,” say Joe. “Femtotechnology. I’m down with it, brah. But what are we going to do to the atoms?”
“Transmute them, Joe. Dirt into gold. Gold into water. Water into air. Air into chicken soup. Making stuff out of ‘thin’ air is quite practical, you know. Air has more mass than people realize. A cubic meter of it weighs a kilogram. The air in your bedroom weighs about as much as your body.”
“But how does transmutation work?”
“Transmutation is mostly a matter of changing protons into neutrons and vice-versa. An atom’s nucleus is a bunch of protons and neutrons. Take oxygen, it’s got eight neutrons and eight protons. And hydrogen has one proton. If you could change protons into neutrons, you could stick sixteen hydrogens together, flip half of their protons to neutrons and you’d have a molecule of oxygen. Like that. And by the way, when you change the nuclei, the electrons take care of themselves.”
“But how do you change a proton into a neutron? Smash it or something?”
“That’s the crude old nuclear physics way. Instead of that, we femtotechnologists are going to use quark-flipping. Takes much less energy. What’s quark-flipping? A proton is a quark-bag holding two up quarks and one down quark, while a neutron is a quark-bag with two down quarks and one up quark. To change from one to the other, you just need to go into the bag and flip the one quark.”
“Aren’t there other kinds of quarks, too?” asks Joe. “Besides up and down?”
“Strange quarks,” says Harry, smiling wetly. “We’ll get to those later, my man. But first we need to get the femtotechnology matter transmuter working.”
“What do you want to call it?”
“I don’t know,” says Harry. “Horne O’ Planty? Spelled weird to make it a trademark, you understand. Or maybe a Polish Knife? My mother’s people are Polish. Or call it an alef? Or maybe a cradle or a loom?”
“How about an alla,” says Joe.
“I like it,” says Harry after a moment’s thought. “Alla. Fine. Now what’s still missing, Joe?”
“I dunno.”
“How to make it work is what’s missing.”
“I was gonna say that. How’s it gonna work?”
“Incommensurable magnitudes,” says Harry. “We’ll use three titanium bars of slightly different irrational lengths. The square root of two, the cube root of three, and the fifth root of five will work. Each bar will have a matter-lens that grows quark whiskers, and the whiskers will embody a one-dimensional nonlinear wave pattern that tells them where to turn. The whiskers will split and grow along all the edges of a parallelopiped control volume. Within this box we’ll use a chaotic cascade to fuse all the nucleons’ quark-bags into a quark-gluon plasma that we’re free to flip, shuffle and regroup. The process will be directed by high-level user request patterns made via a custom-designed radiotelepathic uvvy which incorporates low-level implementation instructions for a few thousand basic substances. You can help with that part, Joe. And in our commercial release, the control uvvy can act as a carrying case. The alla!”
“Wavy,” says Joe. “I’m there, dude.”
Life In The Asteroid Belt
Frank and the aliens skim through the ensuing events.
Although it’s a shockingly expensive gizmo, the Femtotechnology Unlimited alla is a big hit. Initially, however, its uses are somewhat limited. The first allas are only able to make sheets and blocks of fairly simple substances: the few hundred recipes which Joe managed to program into the control uvvy. But three key improvements follow.
First, the alla control language is provided as shareware to all users, and people quickly add new recipes. Porridge, gasoline, watermelon, tofu, ice, perfume, and—most important of all—piezoplastic.
Second, it becomes possible to program the shape of the alla-box, that is, to design the shape of the region where the transmutation takes place. While the first allas only transmute regions which are either blocks of space or Boolean differences of blocks (like a square cup), Harry and Joe soon find a way to make the quark-whiskers sketch out all sorts of polyhedral and curved-line forms, including spheres and cylinders. Before long, the users can form the alla-box into arbitrary shapes.
Third, it becomes easier to specify different kinds of materials for different parts of the target shape. Although this was already possible in a limited way with the first release of the alla (cf. the broth in the gold cup), it now becomes much easier to do. This means it’s now simple to make a compound object such as, say a folding pocket-knife. Or a gem-studded silver chair with an embroidered silk cushion. Or even an old-fashioned mechanical watch, although alla-made watches tend not to run—the tension in the springs is never right.
Highly complex kinds of objects are still out of reach for the alla. For instance, you can’t use an alla to make an alla. Or an uvvy. Or a full-grown living organism. Yes, the maps of the wetware engineers can be fed into the alla so as to make custom DNA, and this is in fact a cheaper method of DNA fabrication than the old-fashioned mechanical nanomanipulators. But the ongoing vital processes of a complete living organism can’t yet be captured by an alla blueprint.
Running an alla is expensive. The alla can draw its power from almost any kind of clea
n energy source, but you need a lot of it. If you need portability, you have to use the quantum dot batteries known as glorks, which also happen to be the international unit of currency. The alla is actually able to transmute, say, a wooden nickel into a glork disk, but it costs a little more than a glork’s worth of energy to make the glork, so the basic monetary system is undisturbed.
There is a certain amount of economic dislocation due to the fact that a kilogram of any kind of substance at all is now worth no more than a kilogram of dirt along with enough power to run the dirt through an alla. Given an alla and an energy supply, diamonds and gold, for instance, are no more expensive than salt and mud. Though of course, diamonds are cheap already thanks to the biotech diamond trees, whose papaya-like fruits have centers filled with moist, sparkling gems.
There is a brief mania for furniture and houses which are made out of (formerly) precious metals such as gold, palladium, rhodium, and yttrium. But the superior comfort of biotech’s organic homes can’t be denied, any more than the convenience of making furnishings from sluggies—especially now that the alla has made piezoplastic relatively cheap.
The biggest change brought about by the alla is that it finally becomes feasible for people to move out into space in a big way.The aliens help Frank take a quick uvvy-look through the Net to get a history of space-travel thus far. With the coming of the quantum dot energy source in the 2100s it became quite easy to build inexpensive space ships. The first big off-earth colony was the Wubbo base at the South Pole of the Moon, which drew on the ice deposits found there, cracking ice into water and air. A similar kind of base was established at the North Pole of Mars where, again, a lot of water ice was to be found beneath the ground. And in the asteroid belt there were some water-rich planetoids as well. The burgeoning of biotech in the latter part of the Third Millennium made life fairly comfortable in these ice-mining bases.
But it’s the coming of femotechnology in the Fourth Millennium that really opens the door to space. The new technology of matter transmutation obviates the stark, grinding problems of no water and no air. Thanks to the alla, humanity can now move with ease to the rest of the Moon, and to the planets and the asteroids.
It’s not convenient for Frank’s saucer to follow the Robinsons, but the aliFrank and the aliens go watch a little group of settlers emigrating to the asteroid belt. There’s three men and three women, each of a different race for maximum genetic diversity. For the high earnestness of their endeavor, they’ve chosen to take the same last name—Robinson—and they’ve adopted short, neatly geometric first names: Ali, Ala, Ben, Bea, Cus, and Cis.
The six Robinsons gather in a field near the top of Mount Hamilton by San Jose. Each of them wears an uvvy and holds an alla. They disrobe and stand there nude, preparing to put on some kind of plastic rocket-suits.
For this unusual occasion a few journalists are actually present in the flesh. “Why aren’t you taking more supplies?” asks a news-lady.
Figure 45: A piezoplastic Rocket-Suit
“With our uvvies we can get all the software we’ll ever need off the Net,” says Ala Robinson, a handsome young Black woman.
“And the allas can make us our hardware and raw materials from the material of the asteroid,” chimes in Cus.
“And our bodies have all the wetware seed cells we’ll need,” says voluptuous Bea.
“Let’s put on our suits,” says Ali.
The six pioneers slip on limp piezoplastic suits that are something like mirror-finished wet-suits. They put their hands down their sides, the suits grow rigid, and now the six shiny, statue-like forms jet up into the air, vanishing high overhead.
The aliens patch Frank into a pay-per-view news-feed from the pioneers. Skipping forward through time, he watches as the Robinsons coast along the long spacetime geodesic to the asteroid belt. He’s there when they finally land on the asteroid Xerxes, a potato-shaped rock proportioned like a brick that’s eight kilometers long. And Frank and the aliens watch from Bea’s point of view as the Robinsons use their allas to tunnel into the interior of Xerxes. Rather than using any kind of cameras, the Robinsons are sending direct radiotelepathic feeds of what their own eyes see.
In a few months, Xerxes is hollowed out like an insect’s egg-case, with a kilometer-thick hull, and an ellipsoidal internal space six kilometers long. A condition of near weightlessness prevails within the immense stone space-station that the asteroid has become—although there is a very weak gravitational effect tending to make things drift to the end caps.
Through clever use of the alla, the last half kilometer of space at each end of the hollow potato has been partitioned off with stone lattice-work, and beyond these lattices lie two great, wobbling internal seas. And all over the potato’s interior, scattered little bulging ponds are fastened to the walls with domes of golden mesh.
The vast space’s interior is lit by great polka-dot portholes of ten-meter-thick diamond that the alla has set into holes in the asteroidal rind. In the process of casting off the extra mass from the asteroid’s interior, the Robinsons have replaced the asteroid’s original random tumbling with a very slow rotation along its long axis—like a chicken on a spit. To give a familiar sense of time, the rotation speed is tuned to one complete cycle per twenty-four hours. As the spotted asteroid turns, beams of brightness play about the interior like shafts of sunlight from a cloud-dappled sky.
Much of the remaining parts of the outer surface of Xerxes is covered with photoelectric materials; the Robinsons have done a bootstrapping process of using their allas to make photocells, using the photocells’ energy to recharge the allas, making still more photocells, and so on.
Figure 46: Eden In A Hollow Asteroid
The air within Xerxes is sweet and clear, the women are pregnant, yet the environment is blandly sterile, for there are no plants and animals other than the six Robinsons and whatever minute life-forms inhabit their bodies. So now they get to work populating their world.
They use the allas to create some wetware engineering equipment, such as cell-surgery pipettes, and amniotic baths. And then they use the allas to instantiate a number of DNA maps that they download via the uvvy—DNA for fruits, vines, insects, lizards, birds, and the like. The alla-created DNA strands are implanted into live cells scraped off the insides of the Robinsons’ lips—each of the settlers is eager to have some of his or her cells used, eager to be an Adam or an Eve for this new world.
Within two years, the interior of Xerxes is a complete Eden, with great flowering vines, flapping birds, fish in the cap seas, and bioengineered pod homes for the growing families Robinson.
When the Robinsons need something from earth—such as new model allas, or more uvvy time—they pay off the Earthlings by capturing small asteroids and launching them into orbit near Earth. One natural resource still needed in this new femtotechnological age is raw matter, and Earth’s environmentalists don’t feel good about alla-converting entire cubic kilometers of Gaia’s substance.
Frank muses upon the simple trinity of things the settlers need besides mass and energy: uvvy for software, alla for hardware, and their own bodies for wetware.
“This is perfection,” he says to Steffi. “People could go anywhere like this. If they wanted to they could even use the asteroid as a multi-generation starship. Aim all the jets one way, and power it out towards Alpha Centauri! Your great-grandchildren will do the landing.”
“That would be stupid,” says Steffi. “First of all, I’ve been to Alpha Centauri and there’s no planet there you’d like. And even if there was, by the time any fat starship got there, people probably will have traveled there the easy way.”
“You mean as personality waves?”
“Right” says Steffi. “The uvvy, alla and biotech are big discoveries, but they’re nothing compared to soul transmission. That’s the most important breakthrough we of d yet know of. Why don’t we look a little look
further, and see if Earthlings will find the way.”
3oxing
Joe and Harry eating food they can change. Alla on a thin stick. Strange quark golf ball from an asteroid. It tears off a new thumb.
This dweeb gets a 3ox of a china figurine. Agent lives in a shell on a cliff. People 3oxing antiques. The rich man is bug-zapped into two. How would it feel?
Steffi says she’ll put me back at Mount Rushmore, hooray!
Lulu figures out matter maps. Her alla’s a magic wand now: a baby in the shuffle-board court. I’m getting overloaded.
Strange Matter
The saucer goes into the lab of Femtotechnology Unlimited to watch Harry and Joe. They’re eating a meal of alla-made spaghetti, preternaturally smooth tubes of pasta topped by mathematically perfect polyhedra of shimmering tofu. They’re drinking out of water glasses which never get empty, a bit like Frank’s alien water-mug.
Joe sets down his fork with his plate still half full. He takes out a little alla that’s mounted on the tip of a stick like a wand. He waves his alla over his plate, turning the leftover spaghetti into ice-cream. And then he uses the alla to turn his fork into a spoon.
“Actually this food sucks,” Joe says to Harry. “It’s too smooth. Isn’t there some way to put in more texture—like natural things have?”
“Natural things are fractals,” says Harry. “They have layer upon layer of detail. The alla can generate random fractals, but organic things have more structure than that. It’s too hard to write an algorithm to properly represent an organic form. The Holy Grail would be to make a living creature with an alla. But so far we have to fake it.” Harry’s thick lips spread in a smile, and while he’s smiling, he reaches his alla across the table and turns Joe’s ice-cream into something like spinach. “Level four random fractal there, Joe. Good for you.”