Ultra-high-energy gamma ray.

Why would you want to protect natural pollenators who do the job for free when you can sell robotic ones?

TBF, Earth has enough rotational kinetic energy to supply our global 2022 energy usage rate for... on the order of 3 quadrillion years. Or thereabouts.

That's not very capitalist of you. Straight to the organ bank!

This would absolutely work in the style of Takeshi's Castle and the like.

No, just simple pattern recognition.

It was suggested a metric forever ago and never got picked up. :(

When you know you're smart about something, you often end up believing you're smart about everything.

Your immune system straight up attacks inorganic tattoo pigments (it's why tattoos don't fade as fast as they might), I don't see why "it doesn't look like an organism" is going to slow it down any. Immune evasion is primarily an active process, not a passive one, and antichiral organisms are going to have a hard time doing that.

But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."

I mean, any peon would be cooling their heels in a small box someplace until they coughed up the code, but the Privileged Class operate under different rules.

The "swallow one half of a virtual pair" is basically a tidy make-believe story of the Hawking radiation process. The actual process is much less intuitive and takes place well away from the event horizon (IIRC in the volume out to around 2 Rs), and can be boiled down to "the extreme gravitational field makes nearby and distant observers measure the vacuum in that region differently." That said there are hypotheses involving quantum effects that would prevent a black hole from evaporating completely once their size reaches the Planck scale, known as "remnant scenarios".

Can you include a banana for scale?

So what you're saying is that we're in the Starsector timeline.

The sequel, The Anvil of Stars, was also great, but very very different.