Jay Campbell's turned in a great story for this month's Futurismic fiction feature, about a free energy source derived from the careful application of Victorian fractals. This is just the right kind of very short sf story: a big, transformative technology explored through a small, personal story of transformation.
Wolfram's generator plate face was hand-carved. Vince said it had taken a watchmaker 18 months to chisel the pattern out of a cardboard-thin slice of rare earth magnet. I had only worked out a 2-deep nesting of the Wolfram Pattern, as I called it, on graph paper before my hand cramped up. This artisan had gone 5 deep, the curves and corners of themes repeating within themes to the point of microscopy.
Forty years later, I was using off the shelf hardware, academic software and a quick ink hack to produce Patterns orders of magnitude more complex, in hours. When my print was done, I peeled the wax paper backing off and stuck it to the face plate on the generator's driver arm, jutting out a meter with a matching counterbalance on the other side of the main coil. I glued the hard wire leads to the dots on my freshly-printed Pattern and hit the On switch without ceremony. A 9 volt whisper of electricity pulsed through the Pattern, creating a billion trillion overlapping magnetic fields.
The demonstration machine of Wolfram's that my uncle had salvaged for my birthday produced enough kinetic power to accelerate a gram of mass at 28 millimeters an hour. I expected – well, hoped – that this model would give much more impressive results, but I was still unprepared for the force of the generator arm as it swung around and cracked across my left arm like a baseball bat.
