Vinge, Vernor - Rainbows End.pdf - Masterbatingphysics.com

Shop class was also Juan's best opportunity to make progess on Big Lizard's project, at
least with the old farts and the do-not-call privacy freaks. He wandered around the big gadget
tent looking like an utter idiot. Juan had never been any good at diplomacy games. And now
he was schmoozing oldsters. Well, trying to.
Xiu Xiang was really a nice lady, but she just sat at the equipment bench and read from
her view-page. She had the parts list formatted like some kind of hardcopy catalog. "Once I
knew these things," she said. "See that." She pointed at a section in the museum pages: Xi-
ang's Secure Hardware Environment . "I designed that system."
Juan came up with "You're world-class, Dr. Xiang."
"But... I don't understand even the principles of these new components. They look more
like pond scum than self-respecting optical semiconductors." She read one of the product de-
scriptions, stopped at the third line. "What's redundant entanglement?"
"Ah." He looked it up, saw pointers into jungles of background concepts. "You don't need
to know about 'redundant entanglement,' ma'am. Not for this class." He waved at the product
descriptions on Xiang's view-page. The image sat like carven stone, not responding to his
gesture. "Go forward a few pages, you'll find the stuff we have available here in class. Look
under" — jeez this was a pain, spelling out navigation in words — "look under 'fun functional
compositions,' and go from there." He showed her how to use her view-page to ID local parts.
"You don't need to understand everything."
"Oh." In a few moments she was playing with the possibilities, had downloaded half a
dozen component gadgets. "This is like being a child. Doing, without understanding." But then
she started putting Buildlt parts together, doing pretty well after Juan showed her how to find
the interface specs. She laughed at some of the descriptions. "Sorters and shifters. Sol-
id-state robots. I bet I could make a cutter out of this."
"I don't see it." Cutter? "Don't worry, you can't hurt anything." That wasn't quite true, but
close enough. He sat and watched, made a few suggestions, even though he wasn't really
sure what she was up to. Enough of establishing rapport; he marked that box in his diplomacy
checklist and moved on to the next stage. "So, Dr. Xiang, do you keep in touch with your
friends at Intel?"
"That was a long time ago. I retired in 2010. And during the war, I couldn't even get con-
sulting jobs. I could just feel my skills rusting out."
Blount.
"Alzheimer's?" He knew she was much older than she looked, even older than Winston
Xiang hesitated, and for a moment Juan was afraid he had made the lady really angry. But
then she gave a sad little laugh. "No Alzheimer's, no dementia. You — people nowadays don't