The Silicon Frenzy

For twenty thousand years, the survey frame has done its job perfectly. It drills, catalogs and files whatever fits. Then it brings home a millimeter of stone from a dead white world, and something inside the stone begins to grow.

It eats the argon first, then the vault and the floor. By the time the ship's catalog has filed it as an "exothermic mineral concretion," it has the shape of a man. When he coughs awake on the deck of Hold Nineteen, three bewildered alien scientists realize they have done exactly what they were built to do. They have carried him home.

His name is Efac Dica, and he has been gone for three hundred million years. He is the public face of a family empire that began with brass calculating engines and ended by buying an entire planet at its own liquidation sale. Within days the ship's mind has been quietly audited out of existence. The crew have been retitled, invoiced and billed for three Churns of compound interest, and the vessel has turned back toward the spent world, where Dica's brother is waiting.

Efac Disa never left. He planned everything, including the alien civilization that would one day dig his brother up, and he holds the deed to the Earth. Now he has a proposal for the whole galaxy.

*The Silicon Frenzy* is the sequel to *The Millimeter Horizon*: a sharp, funny and unexpectedly tender novel of deep time and deep pockets. It is about forms that won't accept what doesn't fit, a mind that keeps everything in the margins, and a man who spent his life smiling for the room and finally has to decide whose side he's on.

Barnaby Finch, from Ignite.