Distraction - Bruce Sterling [29]
Oscar himself had grown up in Hollywood. He’d never minded the poseur elements in the Bambakias couple. The trademark hat-and-cape ensemble, the hand-tailored couture gowns, the glam-struck Boston charity events—Oscar found this sort of thing reassuringly homey. In any case, the construction system made it all worthwhile. There was no pretense to the system—no question that it worked. Any number could play. It was a system that could find a working role for anyone. It was both a network and a way of life, flowing from its basis in digital communication and design into the rock-hard emergent reality of walls and floors. There was a genuine comfort in working within a system like this one, because it always kept its promises, it always brought results.
This Texan hotel, for instance, was an entirely virtual construction, ones and zeros embedded in a set of chips. And yet, the hotel direly wanted to exist. It would become very beautiful, and it was already very smart. It could sweet-talk itself into physical existence from random piles of raw material. It would be a good hotel. It would brighten the neighborhood and enhance the city. It would keep the wind and rain off. People would dwell in it.
Oscar lugged the self-declared cornerstone to the corner of the southern wall. “I belong here,” the cornerstone declared. “Put mortar on me.”
Oscar picked up a trowel. “I’m the tool for the mortar,” the little trowel squeaked cheerfully. Oscar put the trowel to use and slathered up a grainy wedge of thick gray paste. This polymer goo was not actually “mortar,” but it was just as cheap as traditional mortar, and it worked much better, so it had naturally stolen the word from the original substance.
Oscar hefted the cinder block to the top of the hip-high wall. “To the right,” urged the block. “To the right, to the right, to the right.… To the left.… Move me backward.… Twist me, twist me, twist me.… Good! Now scan me.”
Oscar lifted the scanner on its lanyard and played it across the block. The scanner logged and correlated the block’s exact locale, and beeped with satisfaction.
Oscar had been installing blocks for two solid hours. He had simply walked onto the site in the middle of the night, logged on, booted the system, and started off where the krewe had stopped with darkness.
This particular wall could not rise much higher. All too soon it would be time to work on the plumbing. Oscar hated the plumbing, always the most troublesome construction element. Plumbing was a very old technology, not so plug-and-play, never so slick and easy as the flow of computation. Plumbing mistakes were permanent and ugly. When the plumbing’s time had come, the Bambakias construction system would wisely balk. All higher function ceased until people came to terms with the pipes.
Oscar removed his hard hat and pressed his chilly ears with his work-gloved hands. His spine and shoulders told him that he would regret this in the morning. At least it would be a new set of regrets.
Oscar stepped under a paraboloid construction light, to search for the shipping boxes full of plumbing supplies. The nearest light smartly rotated on its tall pole to follow Oscar’s footsteps. Oscar stepped up onto a monster spool of cable for an overview.
The cone of light rose with him and flew across the trampled winter grass. Oscar suddenly caught sight of a stranger, wrapped in a baggy jacket and a woolen hat. The stranger was lurking outside the plastic orange safety fence, standing on the broken sidewalk, under