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“And what field is that?”

“The art world. After graduation, I realized my heart just wasn’t in the theoretical, R&D side of I2. I was more interested in the creative, out-of-the-box uses the street had for stuff like proteopape than in any kind of engineering. I wanted to use nifty new tools to express myself, not make them so others could. So I split to the West Coast in ′17, and I’ve been mostly there ever since. Oh, I travel a lot—the usual swirly emergent nodes like Austin, Prague, Havana, Hong Kong, Helsinki, Bangor. But generally you can find me working at home in LA.”

The list of exciting cities dazzled Bash more than he expected it to, and he realized that for all his immense wealth he had truly been leading a cloistered existence.

“What brings you to stuffy old Boston then?”

“The Woodies. It’s an awards ceremony for one of the things I do, and it’s being held here this year. A local group, the Hubster Dubsters, is sponsoring the affair. It’s kind of a joke, but I have to be there if I want to front as a player. So I figured, Bash lives out that way. What if I look him up and invite him to come along.”

“But why?”

Dagny fixed Bash with an earnest gaze. “I won’t pretend you meant anything to me at MIT, Bash. But I knew who you were, boy genius and all. And when you invented proteopape — well, I was kinda proud to have known you even a little bit. Proteopape is a real wizard wheeze, you know. It tumbled a lot of tipping points, sent some real change waves through the world. I admire you for that. So I guess what I’m saying is I’d like to map your gedankenspace, and maybe help wake you up a little bit.”

Bash considered this speech for a short time.

“You were proud of me?”

Dagny grinned. “Do porn stars have sex?”

Bash blushed. “So, when is this awards thing?”

4

Valley of the Dolls

Some years back, Kenmore Square had been turned into a woonerf. The Dutch term meant literally “living yard,” and referred to the practice of converting urban streets from vehicular to pedestrian usage. The formerly confusing nexus of several Boston avenues beneath the famed Citgo sign (now a giant sheet of laminated proteopape, like all modern billboards and exterior signage) had been transformed into a pleasant public venue carpeted with high-foot-traffic-sustaining redactive grasses and mosses and crisscrossed by flagstone paths.

On this early evening of June 12, the temperature registered typical for Neo-Venusian New England, a balmy ninety-two-degrees Fahrenheit. The Square was crowded with strolling shoppers, picnickers, café patrons, club and moviegoers. Children squealed as they played on the public squishy sculptures and under the spray of intricately dancing cyber-fountains. Patrolling autonomes — creeping, hopping and stalking, their patternizing optics and tanglefoot projectors and beanbag-gun snouts and spray-nozzles of liquid banana peel swivelling according to odd self-grown heuristics — maintained vigilance against any possible disrupters of the peace. A lone cop mounted on his compact StreetCamel added a layer of human oversight (the random manure dumps were a small price to pay for this layer of protection).

Bash and Dagny had parked her fuel-cell-powered Argentinian rental, a 2027 Gaucho, several blocks away. They entered the Square now on foot from the south, via Newbury Street, engaged in earnest conversation.

“Mutability, Bash! Mutability rules! We’re all Buddhists now, acknowledging change as paramount. Nothing fixed or solid, no hierarchies of originals and copies, nothing stable from one minute to the next. Every variant equally privileged. That’s what proteopape’s all about! Media and content are one. Can’t you see it? Your invention undermined all the old paradigms. First editions, signed canvases, original film negatives—Those terms mean nothing anymore, and our art should reflect that.”

Bash struggled to counter Dagny’s passionate, illogical and scary assertions. (Carried to its extreme, her philosophy led to a world of complete isotropic chaos, Bash