Free The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

cuddly, uplifted faces illuminated by the light streaming from the center, liberated (as Hackworth the engineer literal-mindedly supposed) by the binding energy of the atoms as they plummeted into their assigned potential wells.
      The children in the center had their backs to Hackworth and were mostly seen in silhouette, looking directly up and raising their arms toward the light. The kids in bottom right balanced the angelic host on the bottom left; these were the spirits of unborn children yet to benefit from the Engineer's work, though they certainly looked eager to get born as soon as possible. Their backdrop was a luminescent, undulous curtain, much like the aurora, which was actually a continuation of the flowing skirts of Victoria II seated on her throne above.
      "Pardon me, Mr. Cotton," Hackworth said, almost sotto voce. He had worked here once, for several years, and knew the etiquette. A hundred designers were sitting in the hall, neatly arranged in rows. All had their heads wrapped up in phenomenoscopes. The only persons who were aware of Hackworth's presence in the hall were Supervising Engineer Dung, his lieutenants Chu, DeGrado, and Beyerley, and a few water-boys and couriers standing erect at their stations around the perimeter. It was bad form to startle the engineers, so you approached them loudly and spoke to them softly.
      "Good morning, Mr. Hackworth," Cotton said.
      "Good morning, Demetrius. Take your time."
      "I'll be with you in a moment, sir."
      Cotton was a southpaw. His left hand was in a black glove. Laced through it was a network of invisibly tiny rigid structures, motors, position sensors, and tactile stimulators. The sensors kept track of his hand's position, how much each joint of each knuckle was bent, and so on. The rest of the gear made him feel as though he were touching real objects.
      The glove's movements were limited to a roughly         hemispherical domain with a radius of about one cubit; as long as his elbow stayed on or near its comfy elastomeric rest, his hand was free. The glove was attached to a web of infinitesimal wires that emerged from filatories placed here and there around the workstation. The filatories acted like motorized reels, taking up slack and occasionally pulling the glove one way or another to simulate external forces. In fact they were not motors but little wire factories that generated wire when it was needed and, when slack needed to be taken up or a wire needed a tug, sucked it back in and digested it. Each wire was surrounded by a loose accordion sleeve a couple of millimeters in diameter, which was there for safety, lest visitors stick their hands in and slice off fingers on the invisible wires.
      Cotton was working with some kind of elaborate structure consisting, probably, of several hundred thousand atoms. Hackworth could see this because each workstation had a mediation providing a two-dimensional view of what the user was seeing. This made it easy for the supervisors to roam up and down the aisles and see at a glance what each employee was up to.
      The structures these people worked with seemed painfully bulky to Hackworth, even though he'd done it himself for a few years. The people here in Merkle Hall were all working on mass-market consumer products, which by and large were not very demanding. They worked in symbiosis with big software that handled repetitive aspects of the job. It was a fast way to design products, which was essential when going after the fickle and impressionable consumer market. But systems designed that way always ended up being enormous. An automated design system could always make something work by throwing more atoms at it. Every engineer in this hall, designing those nanotechnological toasters and hair dryers, wished he could have Hackworth's job in Bespoke, where concinnity was an end in itself, where no atom was wasted and every subsystem was designed specifically for the task at hand. Such work