NANOMACHINES
At your feet is a ribbed, ringed cylindrical object about the size of a soup can-not a messy, loosely folded strand like the protein (before it fell apart), but a solid piece of modern nanotechnology. In the gear, everything is held in place by bonds as strong as those that strung together the beads of the protein chain. It can't unfold, and you'd have to cheat again to break its perfect symmetry. Like those in the wall of the nanocomputer, its solidly attached atom vibrate only slightly. There's another gear nearby, so you fit them together and make the atomic teeth mesh, with bumps on one fitting into hollows on the other.
They stick together, and the soft, slick atomic surfaces let them roll smoothly. Underfoot is the nanocomputer itself, a huge mechanism built in the same rigid style. Climbing down from it, you can see through the transparent layers of the wall to watch the inner works. An electric motor an arm-span wide spins inside, turning a crank that drives a set of oscillating rods, which in turn drive smaller rods. This doesn't look like a computer; it looks more like an engineer's fantasy from the nineteenth century. But then, it is an antique design-the tour guide said that the original proposal was a piece of exploratory engineering dating from the mid-1980s, a mechanical design that was superseded by improved electronic designs before anyone had the tools to build even a prototype. This simulation is based on a version built by a hobbyist many years
later. The mechanical nanocomputer may be crude, but it does work, and it's a lot smaller and more efficient than the electronic computers of the early 1990s. It's even somewhat faster. The rods slide back and forth in a blur of motion, blocking and unblocking each other in changing patterns, weaving patterns of logic. This nanocomputer is a stripped-down model with almost no memory, useless by itself. Looking beyond it, a machine is powerful enough to compete with most computers built in 1990. This computer is a millionth of a metre on
a side, but from where you stand, it looks like a blocky building looming over ten stories tall. The tourguide says that it contains over 100 billion atoms and stores as much data as a room full of books. You can see some of the storage system inside: row upon row of racks containing spools of molecular tape somewhat like the protein chain, but with simple bumps representing the 1s and Os of computer data.
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