Crystal Nights — Greg Egan
Crystal Nights
by Greg Egan
“Bit Players” | “Closer” | “Crystal Nights” | “The Moral Virologist” | “Oracle” | “In the Ruins” | “Singleton” | “Tangled Up” | “Worthless”
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Publication history<br>Interzone #215, April 2008.
Free podcast at Transmissions From Beyond. [Site no longer active]
Oceanic (collection, Orion)
Crystal Nights and Other Stories (collection, Subterranean Press) [Out of print.]
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Three , edited by Jonathan Strahan; Night Shade Books, San Francisco, 2009.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection , edited by Gardner Dozois; St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2009.
Hayakawa’s SF Magazine, January 2010. (Japanese translation)
The Planck Dive and Other Stories (collection, Hayakawa) Translated by Makoto Yamagishi. (Japanese translation)
“Krystalové noci” in XB-1, December 2011. Translated by Petr Kotrle. (Czech translation)
Digital Rapture , edited by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel; Tachyon, San Francisco, 2012.
Oceanic (collection, Greg Egan)
“Noches de cristal” in Terra Nova Volume 2 , edited by Mariano Villarreal and Luis Pestarini; Fantascy / Random House Mondadori, Barcelona, 2013. Translated by Carlos Pavón. (Spanish translation)
“Nuits cristallines” in Bifrost #79, July 2015. Translated by Erwann Perchoc, Quarante-Deux and Olivier Girard. (French translation)
Science Fiction World, May 2017. (Chinese translation)
The Best of Greg Egan (collection, Subterranean Press)
The Best of Greg Egan (collection, Chengdu) (Chinese translation)
Oceanic (collection, Dook) (Chinese translation)
“More caviar?” Daniel Cliff gestured at the serving dish and the cover irised from opaque to transparent. “It’s fresh, I promise you. My chef had it flown in from Iran this morning.”
“No thank you.” Julie Dehghani touched a napkin to her lips then laid it on her plate with a gesture of finality. The dining room overlooked the Golden Gate Bridge, and most people Daniel invited here were content to spend an hour or two simply enjoying the view, but he could see that she was growing impatient with his small talk.
Daniel said, “I’d like to show you something.” He led her into the adjoining conference room. On the table was a wireless keyboard; the wall screen showed a Linux command line interface. “Take a seat,” he suggested.
Julie complied. “If this is some kind of audition, you might have warned me,” she said.
“Not at all,” Daniel replied. “I’m not going to ask you to jump through any hoops. I’d just like you to tell me what you think of this machine’s performance.”
She frowned slightly, but she was willing to play along. She ran some standard benchmarks. Daniel saw her squinting at the screen, one hand almost reaching up to where a desktop display would be, so she could double-check the number of digits in the FLOPS rating by counting them off with one finger. There were a lot more than she’d been expecting, but she wasn’t seeing double.
“That’s extraordinary,” she said. “Is this whole building packed with networked processors, with only the penthouse for humans?”
Daniel said, “You tell me. Is it a cluster?”
“Hmm.” So much for not making her jump through hoops, but it wasn’t really much of a challenge. She ran some different benchmarks, based on algorithms that were provably impossible to parallelise; however smart the compiler was, the steps these programs required would have to be carried out strictly in sequence.
The FLOPS rating was unchanged.
Julie said, “All right, it’s a single processor. Now you’ve got my attention. Where is it?”
“Turn the keyboard over.”
There was a charcoal-grey module, five centimetres square and five millimetres thick, plugged into an inset docking bay. Julie examined it, but it bore no manufacturer’s logo or other identifying marks.
“This connects to the processor?” she asked.
“No. It is the processor.”
“You’re joking.” She tugged it free of the dock, and the wall screen went blank. She held it up and turned it around, though Daniel wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Somewhere to slip in a screwdriver and take the thing apart, probably. He said, “If you break it, you own it, so I hope you’ve got a few hundred spare.”
“A few hundred grand? Hardly.”
“A few hundred million.”
Her face flushed. “Of course. If it was a few hundred grand, everyone would have one.” She put it down on the table, then as an afterthought slid it a little further from the edge. “As I said, you’ve got my attention.”
Daniel smiled. “I’m sorry about the theatrics.”
“No, this deserved the build-up. What is it, exactly?”
“A single, three-dimensional photonic crystal. No electronics to slow it down; every last component is optical. The architecture was nanofabricated with a method that I’d prefer not to describe in detail.”
“Fair enough.” She thought for a while. “I take it you don’t expect me...