In its place, on a velvet pad, sat a droplet of liquid indium—shiny, precious, ductile. Mira picked it up with tweezers. It weighed exactly the same as the sand. Same number of protons, neutrons, electrons. But the configuration had changed.
“Worth it?”
Mira stared at the liquid metal. It reflected her face in fractured silver. She thought of the desert she’d taken the grain from. A billion years of wind and pressure, reduced to a circuit board component in sixty seconds.
