Free Black Swan by Bruce Sterling Page A

whipped his intense gaze from his laptop screen. He closely studied her curves, which were upholstered in Gucci.
    An Italian television presenter bears the relationship to news that American fast food bears to food. So I couldn’t feel sorry for her—yet I didn’t like the way he sized her up. Genius gears were turning visibly in Massimo’s brilliant geek head. That woman had all the raw, compelling appeal to him of some difficult math problem.
    Left alone with her, he would chew on that problem until something clicked loose and fell into his hands, and, to do her credit, she could feel that. She opened her dainty crocodile purse and slipped on a big pair of sunglasses.
    “Signor Montaldo,” I said.
    He was rapt.
    “Massimo?”
    This woke him from his lustful reverie. He twisted the computer and exhibited his screen to me.
    I don’t design chips, but I’ve seen the programs used for that purpose. Back in the 1980s, there were thirty different chip-design programs. Nowadays there are only three survivors. None of them are nativized in the Italian language, because every chip geek in the world speaks English.
    This program was in Italian. It looked elegant. It looked like a very stylish way to design computer chips. Computer chip engineers are not stylish people. Not in this world, anyway.
    Massimo tapped at his weird screen with a gnawed fingernail. “This is just a cheap, 24-K embed. But do you see these?”
    “Yes I do. What are they?”
    “These are memristors.”
    In heartfelt alarm, I stared around the café, but nobody in the Elena knew or cared in the least about Massimo’s stunning revelation. He could have thrown memristors onto their tables in heaps. They’d never realize that he was tossing them the keys to riches.
    I could explain now, in grueling detail, exactly what memristors are, and how different they are from any standard electronic component. Suffice to understand that, in electronic engineering, memristors did not exist. Not at all. They were technically possible—we’d known that for thirty years, since the 1980s—but nobody had ever manufactured one.
    A chip with memristors was like a racetrack where the jockeys rode unicorns.
    I sipped the Barolo so I could find my voice again. “You brought me schematics for memristors? What happened, did your UFO crash?”
    “That’s very witty, Luca.”
    “You can’t hand me something like that! What on Earth do you expect me to do with that?”
    “I am not giving these memristor plans to you. I have decided to give them to Olivetti. I will tell you what to do: you make one confidential call to your good friend, the Olivetti Chief Technical Officer. You tell him to look hard in his junk folder where he keeps the spam with no return address. Interesting things will happen, then. He’ll be grateful to you.”
    “Olivetti is a fine company,” I said. “But they’re not the outfit to handle a monster like that. A memristor is strictly for the big boys—Intel, Samsung, Fujitsu.”
    Massimo laced his hands together on the table—he might have been at prayer—and stared at me with weary sarcasm. “Luca,” he said, “don’t you ever get tired of seeing Italian genius repressed?”
    The Italian chip business is rather modest. It can’t always make its ends meet. I spent fifteen years covering chip tech in Route 128 in Boston. When the almighty dollar ruled the tech world, I was glad that I’d made those connections.
    But times do change. Nations change, industries change. Industries change the times.
    Massimo had just shown me something that changes industries. A disruptive innovation. A breaker of the rules.
    “This matter is serious,” I said. “Yes, Olivetti’s people do read my weblog—they even comment there. But that doesn’t mean that I can leak some breakthrough that deserves a Nobel Prize. Olivetti would want to know, they would have to know, the source of that.”
    He shook his head. “They don’t want to know, and neither