Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [54]
Maya frowned. “ ‘Any job worth doing is worth doing well.’ ”
Therese thought this over. The tone and the sentiment didn’t agree with her at all. “That’s like something my grandmother would say. I think I know some people who can help you, darling. Let’s stop this nonsense, it’s a slow day anyway.”
Therese made some net calls, and then shut up shop. They took the tube into Landsbergerstrasse and crossed the Hacker-Brucke. Maya saw the distant towers of the cathedral rising behind the train station. The ancient permanence of Munchen—combined with the seductive possibility of instant escape. The contrast gave her a deep moment of intense inexpressible pleasure.
All the young people in Munchen seemed to know Therese. Therese had a thousand vivid friends. Therese even personally knew some old people, and it was touching to see that they treated her almost as an equal. It often seemed that Therese’s little clothing store scarcely existed as a shop per se. The shop was just the physical instantiation of her vast and tenuous gray-market web of tips, barters, bribes, pawns, trade-offs, swaps, hand-me-downs, subtle obligations, and frank kickbacks.
Today’s particular friends of Therese had a production studio in the basement of a low-rise in Neuhausen. There were strict laws in central München about obscuring the skyline with high-rises, so the local real-estate entrepreneurs had tried burrowing into the earth. The faddish subterranean buildings had a big overhead from ventilation and heat pollution, and they’d gone broke so repeatedly that they were forced to rent out to kids.
Therese’s friends were sculptors. Their studio was down in the bowels of the place, oddly shaped and full of coughing lunglike racket from the ventilator next door. “Ciao Franz.”
“Ciao Therese.” Franz was a stout Deutschlander with a brown beard and a rumpled lab coat. He wore spex on a neck chain. “[So this is the new mannequin?]”
“Ja.”
Franz fiddled with his spex, scanning Maya as she strolled into the studio. He smiled. “[Interesting bone structure.]”
“[What do you think?]” Therese said. “[Can you cast her for me? Maybe a nice porous plastic?]” They started bargaining, in a vivid Deutsch so thick with argot that Maya’s translator choked.
Another guy showed up from the back of the lab. “Hey, hello, beautiful.”
“Ich heisse Maya. And yes, I speak English.” She shook the new guy’s plastic-gloved hand.
“Ciao Maya. I’m Eugene.” Eugene removed his spex, let them dangle on the neck chain, and looked her up and down bare eyed. “I like your color sense. You’ve got a lot of nerve.”
“Are you American?”
“Toronto.” Eugene looked pretty good without his spex on. A bit gawky and hawk faced, but with a lot of energy. Eugene hadn’t bathed in a long time, but he was giving off an intriguing scent, like warm bananas. “You’ve never been in our studio before, right? Let me give you the tour of the works.”
Eugene showed her a camera-crowded scanning pit and a pair of big, translucent assembler tanks. “We map out our various models here,” said Eugene, “and this is how we do physical instantiation. This old classic,” he patted the transparent wall of the tank, “is a laser-cured thermoplastic instantiator. Modern industrial standards passed her by some time ago. But we’re not industrial people here in the lab. We do artifice. Franz has worked some intriguing culturotechnical variations.”
“Really? Wunderbar.”
“You know how thermocuring works?”
“Nein.”
Eugene was very patient. He was obviously taken with her. “You fill this tank with a special liquid plastic. Then you fire lasers through the plastic, and the lasers cause the liquid plastic to cure into a durable solid object. The object’s proportions are defined by the movements of the beam—sculpted from liquid into solid, at the focus of coherent light. Naturally the beam is an output from our design virtuality—so we can design physical objects