'“For special events like this, we sometimes go nuclear. So I thought I'd ask whether you'd like to join us.” Cass froze, and stared at him. “Nuclear? How? Has someone solved all the problems?” Femtomachines built from exotic nuclei had been employed as special-purpose computers ever since the basic design had been developed, six thousand years before. For sheer speed, they left every other substrate in the dust. But as far as Cass knew, no one could make a femtomachine stable for more than a few picoseconds; they could perform a great many calculations in that time, but then they blew themselves apart and left you hunting through the debris for the answer. Gamma-ray spectroscopy could only extract a few hundred kilobytes, which was orders of magnitude too small even for a differential memory — a compressed description of experience that could be absorbed by a frozen reference copy of the person who'd actually lived through it. '