Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [136]
“How did you know I’d come here?” Her glass is half-empty.
“I followed your weblog; I’m your diary’s biggest fan. Is that for me? You shouldn’t have!” Her eyes light up, re-calculating his reproductive fitness score according to some kind of arcane fin-de-siècle rulebook.
“Yes, it’s for you.” He slides the package toward her. “I know I shouldn’t, but you have this effect on me. One question, Pam?”
“I—” she glances around quickly. “It’s safe. I’m off duty, I’m not carrying any bugs that I know of. Those badges—there are rumors about the off switch, you know? That they keep recording even when you think they aren’t, just in case.”
“I didn’t know,” he says, filing it away for future reference. “A loyalty test thing?”
“Just rumors. You had a question?”
“I—” it’s his turn to lose his tongue. “Are you still interested in me?”
She looks startled for a moment, then chuckles. “Manny, you are the most outrageous nerd I’ve ever met! Just when I think I’ve convinced myself that you’re mad, you show the weirdest signs of having your head screwed on.” She reaches out and grabs his wrist, surprising him with a shock of skin on skin: “of course I’m still interested in you. You’re the biggest, baddest bull geek I’ve ever met. Why do you think I’m here?”
“Does this mean you want to reactivate our engagement?”
“It was never de-activated, Manny, it was just sort of on hold while you got your head sorted out. I figured you need the space. Only you haven’t stopped running; you’re still not — ”
“Yeah, I get it.” He pulls away from her hand. “Let’s not talk about that. Why this bar?”
She frowns. “I had to find you as soon as possible. I keep hearing rumors about some KGB plot you’re mixed up in, how you’re some sort of communist spy. It isn’t true, is it?”
“True?” He shakes his head, bemused. “The KGB hasn’t existed for more than twenty years.”
“Be careful, Manny. I don’t want to lose you. That’s an order. Please.”
The floor creaks and he looks round. Dreadlocks and dark glasses with flickering lights behind them: Bob Franklin. Manfred vaguely remembers that he left with Miss Arianespace leaning on his arm, shortly before things got seriously inebriated. He looks none the worse for wear. Manfred makes introductions: “Bob: Pam, my fiancèe. Pam? Meet Bob.” Bob puts a full glass down in front of him; he has no idea what’s in it but it would be rude not to drink.
“Sure thing. Uh, Manfred, can I have a word? About your idea last night?”
“Feel free. Present company is trustworthy.”
Bob raises an eyebrow at that, but continues anyway. “It’s about the fab concept.
I’ve got a team of my guys running some projections using Festo kit and I think we can probably build it. The cargo cult aspect puts a new spin on the old Lunar von Neumann factory idea, but Bingo and Marek say they think it should work until we can bootstrap all the way to a native nanolithography ecology; we run the whole thing from earth as a training lab and ship up the parts that are too difficult to make on-site, as we learn how to do it properly. You’re right about it buying us the self-replicating factory a few years ahead of the robotics curve. But I’m wondering about on-site intelligence. Once the comet gets more than a couple of light-minutes away —”
“You can’t control it. Feedback lag. So you want a crew, right?”
“Yeah. But we can’t send humans — way too expensive, besides it’s a fifty-year run even if we go for short-period Kuiper ejecta. Any AI we could send would go crazy due to information deprivation, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah. Let me think.” Pamela glares at Manfred for a while before he notices her: “Yeah?”
“What’s going on? What’s this all about?”
Franklin shrugs expansively, dreadlocks clattering: “Manfred’s helping me explore the solution space to a manufacturing problem.” He grins. “I didn’t know Manny had a fiancée. Drink’s on me.”
She glances at Manfred, who is gazing into whatever weirdly