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she now had to make worthwhile. She slipped on her force gloves and prodded an icon, a wireframe of a cube, on the terminal's flatscreen -- and the three-dimensional workspace in front of the screen came to life, borders outlined by a faint holographic grid. For a second, it felt like she'd plunged her hand into some kind of invisible vortex: magnetic fields gripped and twisted her glove, as start-up surges tugged at the coils in each joint at random -- until the electronics settled into equilibrium, and a message flashed up in the middle of the workspace: you may now put on your gloves .
     
    She jabbed another icon, a starburst labeled FIAT. The only visible effect was the appearance of a small menu strip hovering low in the foreground -- but to the cluster of programs she'd invoked, the cube of thin air in front of her terminal now corresponded to a small, empty universe.
     
    Maria summoned up a single molecule of nutrose, represented as a ball-and-stick model, and, with a flick of a gloved forefinger, imparted a slow spin. The vertices of the crimped hexagonal ring zig-zagged above and below the molecule's average plane; one vertex was a divalent blue atom, linked only to its neighbors in the ring; the other five were all tetravalent greens, with two bonds left over for other attachments. Each green was joined to a small, monovalent red -- on the top side if the vertex was raised, on the bottom if it was lowered -- and four of them also sprouted short horizontal spikes, built from a blue and a red, pointing away from the ring. The fifth green held out a small cluster of atoms instead: a green with two reds, and its own blue-red spike.
     
    The viewing software rendered the molecule plausibly solid, taking into account the effects of ambient light; Maria watched it spin above the desktop, admiring the not-quite-symmetrical form. A real-world chemist, she mused, would take one look at this and say: Glucose. Green is carbon, blue is oxygen, red is hydrogen . . . no? No. They'd stare awhile; put on the gloves and give the impostor a thorough grope; whip a protractor out of the toolbox and measure a few angles; invoke tables of bond formation energies and vibrational modes; maybe even demand to see nuclear magnetic resonance spectra (not available -- or, to put it less coyly, not applicable). Finally, with the realization of blasphemy dawning, they'd tear their hands from the infernal machinery, and bolt from the room screaming, "There is no Periodic Table but Mendeleev's! There is no Periodic Table but Mendeleev's!"
     
    The Autoverse was a "toy" universe, a computer model which obeyed its own simplified "laws of physics" -- laws far easier to deal with mathematically than the equations of real-world quantum mechanics. Atoms could exist in this stylized universe, but they were subtly different from their real-world counterparts; the Autoverse was no more a faithful simulation of the real world than the game of chess was a faithful simulation of medieval warfare. It was far more insidious than chess, though, in the eyes of many real-world chemists. The false chemistry it supported was too rich, too complex, too seductive by far.
     
    Maria reached into the workspace again, halted the molecule's spin, deftly plucked both the lone red and the blue-red spike from one of the greens, then reattached them, swapped, so that the spike now pointed upward. The gloves' force and tactile feedback, the molecule's laser-painted image, and the faint clicks that might have been plastic on plastic as she pushed the atoms into place, combined to create a convincing impression of manipulating a tangible object built out of solid spheres and rods.
     
    This virtual ball-and-stick model was easy to work with -- but its placid behavior in her hands had nothing to do with the physics of the Autoverse, temporarily held in abeyance. Only when she released her grip was the molecule allowed to express its true dynamics, oscillating wildly as the