“Right.” Rachel sat. She made a steeple of her fingers, then sighed. “How sure are you that this is genuine?”
“The first thing anyone knew about it was when the building’s passive neutron sniffer jumped off the wall. At first the block manager thought it was malf-ing, but it turns out yon Idiot was tickling the dragon’s tail. He’d got a cheap-ass assembler blueprint from some anarchist phile vault, and he’s been buying beryllium feedstock for his kitchen assembler over the past six months.”
“Shit. Beryllium. And nobody noticed?”
“Hey.” MacDougal spread her hands. “Nobody here is paying us for sparrow-fart coverage. Private enterprise doesn’t stretch to ubiquitous hand-holding. We go poking our noses in uninvited, we get sued till we bleed. It’s a free market, isn’t it?”
“Huh.” Rachel nodded. It was an old, familiar picture. With nine hundred permanent seats on the UN Security SIG, the only miracle was that anything ever got done at all. Still, if anything could stimulate cooperation, it was the lethal combination of household nanofactories and cheap black-market weapons-grade fissiles. The right to self-defense did not, it was generally held, extend as far as mutually assured destruction — at least, not in built-up areas.
Don't be joking that way. I would not be surprised if some consulting futurist convinced some general that, unless everyone is under constant surveillance, some anarchist is going to turn his precious bodily fluids into self-replicating gray goo.
Downloadable 3D-printable isotope separators are coming. We will want to have had extensive surveillance decades before they arrive.