Highly Empathic Modified African Honeybees

excerpt from Accelerando, by Charles Stross, 2005

Micro-Meteorites, Lucien Rudaux(?)

(micro-meteorites can be collected from your drainpipe  using a magnet, btw)

The pre-election campaign takes approximately three minutes and consumes more bandwidth than the sum of all terrestrial communication channels from prehistory to 2008. Approximately 6 million ghosts of Amber individually tailored to fit the profile of the targeted audience fork across the dark fiber network underpinning of the lily-pad colonies, then out through ultrawideband mesh networks, instantiated in implants and dust motes to buttonhole the voters. Many of them fail to reach their audience, and many more had fruitless discussions, about six actually decide they’ve diverged so far from their original that they constitute separate people and register for independent citizenship, two defect to the other side and one elopes with a swarm of highly empathic modified African honeybees. (p393)