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"Cyberpunk worked when the Internet was in its hand-wound crystal radio phase, when you had to be a sort of hobbyist to do e-mail, and it all had a very steep learning curve. Those days are over."
- William Gibson

Bulerite  
  A building material, too good to be true, with hidden properties.  

Richard ran a hand through his hair. “The Bulero Complex outside Chicago is falling apart. All three tiers are—well, glowing strangely, as if burning inside.”

“The whole three-thousand-foot pyramid?” Sam asked, trying to imagine the event.

“Yes. There are a lot of electromagnetic phenomena. There’s smoke. Everyone has been evacuated.” Richard took an unsteady step forward.

“It must be on the evening news,” Sam said, looking around for the remote control.

“No! Listen—we don’t have time. It’s the bulerite—it’s unstable. When our two ore haulers were destroyed in space…we found the same kind of ash in Jack’s yacht and around his disintegrated coffin. When they refloated what was left of the yacht, the bulerite statuettes of Prometheus were gone, together with all the bulerite on the vessel.”

Sam saw fear in Richard’s tired eyes, as if something of Jack had taken possession of him.

Jack killed himself, Sam thought, feeling a guilty satisfaction.

“Earth-moon,” Richard said softly, “it’s all built up with bulerite. All our major cities and hundreds of lesser ones, sea-bed communities, the magma and geothermal taps—patients walking around with bulerite hearts and bones.” He looked at Sam with despair. “Even if we could take it all apart by tearing it loose at the adherence joints, which we don’t know how to do easily, what could we do with the stuff? It would take years to ferry it off-planet.”

Technovelgy from Macrolife, by George Zebrowski.
Published by Harper and Row in 1979
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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Macrolife
  More Ideas and Technology by George Zebrowski
  Tech news articles related to Macrolife
  Tech news articles related to works by George Zebrowski

Bulerite-related news articles:
  - SUCHO Saving Ukraine's Libraries Digitally

Articles related to Material
'Mooncrete' Lunar Regolith Concrete (LRC)
Harvard Metamaterials Change Structure Instantly
Nano-Chainmail 2D Mechanically Interlocked Polymer
Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick

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