“The thing that looks like a Buckyball seems to be using a similar trick.”
“You nailed the name. We do in fact call those Buckies. Technically speaking, it’s a thing called a—”
“Tensegrity.”
Dinah felt herself blushing. “Of course, you’d know all about those. Anyway, because it’s big and roughly spherical, it can roll in any direction by playing tricks with electromagnetics and making its struts get longer or shorter. The brains live in that sort of nucleuslike package suspended in the middle.”
“Grabbs, Siwis, and Buckies. What do you call the tiny ones?”
“Nats. Our attempt to build a swarm. Lina’s been moonlighting on it.”
There was a little gap in the conversation while both of them considered the unfortunate choice of wording.
“It’s pretty experimental still,” Dinah continued. “But the idea is that they can latch on to each other as needed, like ants making an ant-ball to cross a river. I know this must all seem pretty weird. It’s not normal engineering.”
“I’m not a normal engineer. I’ve been doing biomimetics—which is what you are doing—for a while. Except I build things that stand still.”
“Okay. You get it then.” Dinah peeled off the 3-D goggles she’d been using to see through the eyes of the Grabb. The second robot, the Siwi, had perched itself in the tunnel behind the Grabb and raised its head, cobralike, to shine light on it and shoot video. Gazing at the flat-panel screen, Dinah made the Siwi pan back and forth to inspect the Grabb’s position, ensuring there was no way those circuit boards could drift away.
“Yes. I get it,” Rhys said. Then he added, “It’s not for me to tell you your business. But you know what hermit crabs do, don’t you?”
It took Dinah a few moments to access the memory. She had never been a beach kind of person. “They use the discarded shells of other crabs as shelter.”
“Not of other crabs, but of mollusks. But yes, you have it.”
Dinah thought about it for a moment, then turned to look at him. He seemed slightly less green and sweaty than before. “I think I see where you are going.”
“Better yet,” Rhys said, “consider the foraminifera.”
“What are they?”
“The biggest single-celled organisms in the world. They live beneath the Antarctic ice. And as they grow, they take grains of sand from their environment and glue them together to form hard outer skins.”
“Sort of like Ben Grimm?” she asked.
It was a throwaway reference to a comic book character, the armor-plated member of the Fantastic Four. She didn’t expect him to pick up on it. But he shot back: “To name another cosmic ray victim, yes. But without the alienation and self-pity.”
“I always wanted skin like the Thing.”
“It wouldn’t suit you nearly as well as the skin God gave you. But as a way for you to protect your robots from cosmic rays, while giving them the freedom to roam around—”
“I think I’m in love,” she said.
He clapped a bag over his mouth and threw up.
HOW DO YOU TELL THE WORLD THAT IT’S GOING TO DIE? DOOB WAS glad he didn’t have to say it. Instead he just stood behind the president of the United States. His job was to look serious—which wasn’t difficult—as part of a Mount Rushmore of eminent scientists lined up behind a semicircle of world leaders. He stared at the back of J.B.F.’s head as she explained it into a teleprompter. Bracketing her were the Chinese and the Indian presidents, saying the same things at the same time in Mandarin and Hindi. Fanning out into the wings were the prime ministers of Japan, the United Kingdom, France, and (acting as a sort of proxy for most of Latin America, as well as his own country) Spain; the chancellor of Germany; the presidents of Nigeria, Russia, and Egypt; the pope; prominent imams from the main branches of the Islamic faith; a rabbi; and a lama. The announcements were made simultaneously, so that as much of the human race as possible would hear the news at the same instant, and not have to await translations.
If the task had fallen to Dubois Jerome Xavier Harris, Ph.D., he would have said something like this: Look, everybody dies. Of the seven billion people now living on Earth, basically all will be dead a hundred years from now—most a lot sooner. No one wants to die, but most calmly accept that it’s going to happen.
A person who died two years from now in the Hard Rain would be no deader than someone who died seventeen years from now in a car crash.
The only thing that had changed now was that everyone knew the approximate time and manner of their death.