"Mary A. Turzillo - Thumbkin, Caesar, Princess, and Troll" - читать интересную книгу автора (Turzillo Mary A)

Thumbkin, discouraged, trudged back to his apartment, which was on the
top of his best buddy's microwave oven, and followed the antics of his
classmates as they tried to earn Caesar's reward.
Gumbon Carlsbad, the class cut-up, tried to reclaim the slums of Great
Lakes City by using assemblers to change all the paving materials in the
poorer neighborhoods to white chocolate. He apparently believed the endorphins
would assuage the anger of the unemployed and disaffected. He then passed out
fifty dollar bills made by other assemblers, ones which were programmed to
give each bill a different serial number. His scheme would have worked, had
Caesar not been a law-abiding man. Counterfeiting is still a crime.
Millicent Kratchett, who wanted to bed Caesar rather than marry his
daughter, tried introducing a retrovirus which changed all the dope in
northeast Ohio to vitamin B12. The ensuing riots were particularly difficult
to control because all the participants were completely lucid and out-thought
the police at every turn.
The local TV gods and goddesses sneered so hatefully at Millicent and
Gumbon that no more candidates were willing to try their luck. This was
Thumbkin's cue.
He first put an ad in the paper calling for a collection of all
firearms in the city. He promised these would be converted, by his assemblers,
into televisions with free satellite links.
When the televisions were delivered (and they were very thin, elegant
ones, massing no more than the guns they had been made from), they turned out
to have free Internet connections, with special search engines which, when
they opened X-rated sites or chain e-mail jokes, would artfully segue into
instructional material.
"I don't know," said Caesar. "They seem happy, but let's see what you
can do to solve world hunger."
This proved an easier task, although it took longer. Thumbkin created a
fleet of self-replicating robots to deliver what he called Mother Cupboards to
the poor of the world. The cupboards themselves were self-replicating, usually
creating their mass from sand or rock. Then, as a third generation replicator,
each Mother Cupboard was capable of converting whatever was on hand -- dirt,
weeds, used tires, discarded compact discs -- to a beans-and-rice mix that
looked and tasted like pizza. Problems arose when it was discovered that a bad
LDL-HDL cholesterol ratio could result from the fact that the pizza lacked
omega-3 oils, but by this time many young people of Great Lakes City had
gotten advanced degrees in Replicator Programming as a result of their new
Internet connections. They volunteered their services to add anchovies. And,
by a clever feat of engineering, these were a new type of anchovies that
didn't taste like anchovies.
Buckeye State had allowed Thumbkin laboratory space as a publicity
stunt to make the public forget about Millicent and Gumbon's gaffes. Caesar
came to him there one afternoon. Thumbkin knew he had the wealthy man in the
palm of his hand (to use a ridiculous metaphor), because Caesar had come alone
rather than having his secretary call.
"There's the matter of my Sibeliuswagen X-03," Caesar said. "I can't
find a local mechanic who knows what's wrong. They want me to send it back to
Finland."
Thumbkin discovered the problem after only an hour of investigation.