"What do you make of those things over there, that look like, oh, triangular plaques?"
A.J. studied the thirty or so glittering bronze-tinted plates that were piled in ages-old shallow drifts against the wall, probably due to Phobos' rotation. "My guess? Printouts of important data."
"Printouts? But they're metal. And they don't appear to be stamped or inscribed in any way. So why do you think they're printouts?"
"Hard to prove it right now, but on some wavelengths, just at the edge of maximum enhancement, I get hints of structure. Remember, these guys were sitting in a pretty limited environment here, so you gotta think about it. If they did prefer using hard copy, like we do, how're they going to do it? It'd be insane to bring along masses of paper, and it's not like you're going to be growing trees here. Or papyrus reeds. So you need something else.
"What would be ideal would be something sorta like an Etch-a-Sketch that doesn't go away at a shake but only at a specific signal. It'd be a physical display, but one you could use over and over again. And with a lot better resolution and control than an Etch-a-Sketch, of course."
Helen nodded. "Okay. But how would that work?"
"Remember when you first met me? My halo?"
"Yes. So?"
"Well, if you have miniature active agents like my sensor motes, only a lot smaller—real nanotech like they've been working on for years—you could make the surface of some object, like those plates, be composed of these agent-motes. They'd be networked together on the local level and could rearrange the surface physically to conform to whatever you wanted to display. Then, when you wanted to change the surface, you'd send another code to have them move around again. Properly designed, it could be pretty energy efficient. Everyone would be able to have a few of these little babies and they'd have permanent records without physical waste. If you ever really decided that a book or whatever wasn't needed any more, you just erase it."
He pondered a moment. "The things probably would scavenge power from transmissions in the air. You might even be beaming out some signal that was harmless to you and that didn't interfere with your other devices, just in order to keep 'em powered. Of course, once the power failed, the motes shut down. And by now, they're almost certainly vacuum-welded into a single mass. Not to mention that with sixty-five megayears having gone by since then, radiation probably hasn't done 'em any good either."
Helen thought about the bronze-colored tablets having a surface mutable as water, changing and freezing on command. It was a nice image, and it did make sense the way A.J. put it. But it was awfully speculative, based just on a faint trace of microstructure.
"Do you always jump to conclusions on that little evidence?"
"Well, yeah," he said, grinning a little sheepishly. "I like having a guess at anything I run into. Besides, I have a reputation to maintain." More seriously: "But they do seem to have a lot of the symbols on the keyboards and signs, and other things that might be sketches or something. So the tablets look a lot to me like sorta triangular clipboard type things, but they're also pretty much solid."
"I think I understand you," Helen said slowly. "Unless we postulate some odd religious requirement, it's hard to imagine they were spending their time carving or casting metal symbol-plates like this. It's not like they had to write in cuneiform. So you're saying that if they used these things as you're guessing, then obviously the tablets couldn't be as simple as they look."
"Right in one, Doc. Hey, here we go, the first stereo imaging of the interior of a Bemmie."
The combination of wavelengths the Faeries could scan in had given A.J. an extensive array of methods for analyzing the interior of just about anything. Helen didn't understand how it worked, but she knew that when A.J. was dealing with an organic, mummified target, he could tailor the approach for exactly that sort of object.
The image that materialized on-screen was a detailed, layered outline of structures down to a fraction of an inch in size, all done without having to touch the specimen. That was a good thing, too. It was quite possible that at least parts of the sixty-five-million-year-old Bemmie would disintegrate at a touch.
"There it is!"
The "it" Helen referred to was a large, three-lobed organ protected by the bony structure they had long since decided was effectively a skull combined with part of a rib cage—sort of a cephalothorax. The tripartite object bulged towards the front of Bemmie and extended back a considerable distance. Lines of tissue branched from it at regular intervals, and it swelled again about halfway down the body and then trailed off.