Fiction
In an abandoned Florida mall, Perry and Lester continue their high-tech tinkering. Chapter 3 of "Themepunks."
Editor's note: Salon is serializing a new science fiction novella by Cory Doctorow. Read Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.
By Cory Doctorow
"Why? Why build a toast robot?"
Perry stopped working and dusted his hands off.
"Well, that's the question, isn't it? The simple answer: people buy them. Collectors. So it's a good hobby business, but that's not really it.
"It's like this: engineering is all about constraint. Given a span of foo feet and materials of tensile strength of bar, build a bridge that doesn't go all fubared. Write a fun video-game for an eight-bit console that'll fit in 32K. Build the fastest airplane, or the one with the largest carrying capacity... But these days, there's not much traditional constraint. I've got the engineer's most dangerous luxury: plenty. All the computational cycles I'll ever need. Easy and rapid prototyping. Precision tools.
"Now, it may be that there are is a suite of tasks lurking in potentia that demand all this resource and more -- maybe I'm like some locomotive engineer declaring that 60 miles per hour is the pinnacle of machine velocity, that speed is cracked. But I don't see many of those problems -- none that interest me."
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