Did I Call It Or What Dept.

OK, I can't help myself here.

The first thing that leapt to mind when I saw the article "Make Your Own World With Programmable Matter":protomics.

For those who just walked in, protomics was the name of the fictional in-universe technology I created forFlight of the Vajra, where various forms of matter have been created that are programmable and malleable. (I started writing that story over three years ago.)

The researchers call the building blocks "catoms" (or "claytronic atoms"), but even the c...