I knew all that before I asked to see the Earth.

I thought I was sufficiently detached, and sufficiently adult, to be prepared for anything.

I had expected the hood I’d called for to grow out of the back of my armchair but it didn’t. It materialized from the room’s ceiling. It was nothing like the clumsy devices I’d used in my own time, being slightly reminiscent of a cobweb drifting down on the end of a thread of spidersilk. When it settled over my head it was hardly tangible; I didn’t even feel it on the surfaces of my eyeballs — which was actually the surface of the part of my suitskin overlying my own conjunctiva.

I could move my head easily in any direction, but I was no longer looking out into my cell. The “place” I was in was recognizable as a VE holding pattern, but there were no menus written in blood-red upon its walls, waiting to be pointed at by my index finger. All my oral requests had to be fed through an invisible listener hooked into Excelsior’s nervous system.

First I asked for a live feed from an orbiting satellite, so I could look down on my homeworld from above.

There was a time delay of several minutes while the signal made its way across the hundred-and-eighty-six-million-mile gap, taking a dogleg route to avoid the sun, but it was still “live,” relatively speaking.

There was a lot of cloud, but not so much that I couldn’t see that the colors were all wrong. There was way too much green, in all the wrong places, and too much black everywhere else. The outlines were wrong too.

I asked to look at an inset map, but the request wasn’t specific enough; I got one with a crazy projection.

It took me a few minutes to figure out that the center of the flower-shaped design at which I was staring was the south pole. The equator was the ring drawn around the mid points of the “petals.”

I still couldn’t connect the landmasses to their “originals.” I was out of my depth, floundering in uncertainty.

I had expected that the outlines of the continents might have changed slightly, but not to anything like the extent that they had. New islands had been raised from the seabed even in my day, but I’d expected to be able to see the fundamental shapes of Australia, Africa, and the Americas, the open expanses of the Pacific and the South Atlantic and the vast clotted mass of Eurasia.

They were all gone; coastlines had obviously become negotiable, and continental shelves prime development sites.

I figured out, eventually, that the differences were mainly a matter of three new continents having been constructed and some of the older ones split by artificial straits, but so many coastlines had been amended — sometimes drastically — that the shapes I knew had simply been obliterated.

When I asked for a new inset of a 3-D globe pivoted at the poles it became a little easier to see what had been what, and to reassure myself that the Continental Engineers hadn’t actually won control of continental drift, but it was an alien world just the same.

I asked to be connected to a series of ground-level feeds.

Given that a mere ninety-nine years had elapsed since the planet had been shrouded in volcanic ash I expected to find the remains of North America in a bad way. Even if the atmosphere had cleared within a decade, I reasoned, ecosystemic recovery must be at a very early stage. I expected an underpopulated wilderness still struggling to establish itself, but that wasn’t what I found.

I found a riot of exotic gardens, and a hundred brand-new cities, all competing to outdo one another in the craziness of their architecture. There were towers sculpted out of all manner of gemlike stones; sprawling multichambered branching growths like thousand-year-old trees; walls of metal and roofs of glass; piazzas lined with all kinds of synthetic hide; roadways of smart fabric; and much more.

It was an unholy mess, but it certainly wasn’t a wilderness and it was anything but underpopulated.

The Los Angeles in which I had grown up had been in recovery from its own ecocatastrophe, and I’d always thought of it as a living monument to the efficiency and capability of gantzing nanotech. Maybe it had been, by the standards of its own century, but history had moved on and technology had undergone a thousand years of further progress.

As I settled my virtual self into an artificial eye gazing out upon the streets of the city nearest to the now-drowned coordinates that LA had once occupied I saw that it wasn’t just VE tech that had undergone more than one phase-shift. I had to suppose that the buildings I was staring at had been raised by a process analogous to gantzing, but they certainly hadn’t been aggregated out of commonplace materials or embellished with the synthetic cellulose, lignin, and chitin derivatives that had surrounded me in my former incarnation. Here, once-precious stones and once-precious metals seemed to be everyday building materials, and they were augmented by all manner of fancy organics.

When I asked, a whispering voice told me that there were more than a hundred different kinds of “incorruptible” organic construction materials on display, as well as inorganic crystallines.

My informant wasn’t a human voice — it was a machine whose responses were filtered through a sim of some sort — but that didn’t mean that the member of the sisterhood commissioned to monitor me had packed up her kit and gone home. My questions were still being mediated by actual listeners, even though I was getting the answers direct from the data bank.

“They were experimenting with dextrorotatory proteins in my day,” I said. “There was the stuff Damon’s father and foster mother invented as well: para-DNA, they called it. Damon told me that PicoCon had big plans for that, once he and Conrad had sold out to them. Are those the kinds of things I’m looking at?”

The mechanical voice informed me that dextrorotatory organics had become effectively obsolete once they had begun spinning off dextrorotatory viruses and nanobacteria. The artificial genomic system designed by Conrad Helier and Eveline Hywood had proved to be much more versatile, and its derivatives were still used in a wide range of nanomachines — especially gantzing systems — but more complicated genomic systems devised for use in extreme environments had proved more generally useful when reimported to Earth.

I was assured that the next generation of technologies would be even more versatile, having taken aboard key features of the natural systems evolved on the colonized worlds of Ararat and Maya.

“And I guess you can make all the gold you want from lead,” I suggested. “Everybody’s an alchemist now.”

The humorless voice told me that transmutation wasn’t routinely practiced on Earth because there was no economic imperative. So I asked where it wasroutinely practiced, and was told that Ganymede, Io, and Umbriel were the principal research and development centers.

I had to put in a prompt to get more data, but I elicited an admission that transmutation research was “controversial,” because fusion-generated transmutation was the technological basis of “macroconstruction.”

A demand for further elaboration brought the revelation that a majority of the Earthbound was currently opposed to all kinds of macroconstructional development, and that “the major outer system factions” were divided even as to the most rudimentary aspects of their various development plans.

I looked around at the fanciful buildings that surrounded my viewpoint, knowing that they could not possibly be what the voice meant by “macroconstruction.” Given that the people of Earth seemed perfectly happy to design and build new continents, and to make drastic amendments to the outlines of the existing ones, I knew that the voice had to be talking about at least one further order of magnitude.

Davida had already told me that there were a dozen microworlds in the Counter-Earth Cluster, two hundred more scattered around the orbit, and a further two hundred located in Luna’s orbit around the Earth. I figured that the voice had to be talking about building much bigger things than that, perhaps in pursuit of the visionary quest of the type-2 crusaders who wanted to build a shell around the sun so that none of its energy output would go to waste. If so, there were only two likely sources of raw material: Jupiter and Saturn.