“Oh, God,” Janine mumbled, a look of horror overcoming her youthful features. “He may have invented the coolest technology since the printing press and he’s going Boy Scout on us.”

Dresner seemed to read her mind. “But don’t worry. We’ve done some fun stuff too.”

On screen, the doors of the convention center burst open and a horde of blood-drenched vampires rushed in. It was realistic enough to elicit more than a few screams from the audience as they spun in their chairs to take in the empty room behind them. When they turned back to Dresner, he was holding his hand like a gun, happily picking off the ghouls as they charged up the aisle.

“No way!” Janine said, attacking her Twitter account again. “That’s the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And I once saw George Clooney in a Speedo.”

The monsters faded and Dresner looked out over the slightly ruffled crowd. “The strange truth is that the main idea here wasn’t the hardware—I just needed something to run the search engine I had in my head.” He paused for a moment, seeming to ponder his next words. “The problem with the Internet—and the world in general—isn’t the availability of information, it’s that there’s too much information. And most of it’s nonsense. But what if we had a way of instantly vetting the quality of what we’re taking in? And I’m not just talking about things we look up on the ’net, I’m talking about everything around us.”

He motioned to Bob Stamen again. “Could you stand up one more time?”

He did, if a bit reluctantly, and an icon on the screen that looked like a listing wedding cake activated. Suddenly Stamen was surrounded by a hazy green aura, and his name hovered over his head in subtle lettering.

“We’ve managed to crack the facial recognition problem by hijacking the brain’s built-in software for it. So you can see that my new search engine—LayerCake—knows who Bob is and gives him a nice green glow to tell me that he’s a good guy. Based on what, you’re probably asking. Well, based on everything available in the public record—Wikipedia, news articles, and so on. LayerCake goes through all those things, combines them to some extent with what it knows about my own personal values, and then gives me the benefit of its analysis. Now, why did I pick on Bob? Because he’s the very image of the person you want to marry your daughter—he runs a terrific charity, he has no criminal record, he has a perfect credit rating, and so on.” Dresner grinned. “Not everyone here would probably get quite that deep a shade of green.”

The laughter from the crowd was polite, but also a little nervous. Everyone was obviously pondering the same thing Smith was. What would LayerCake think of them?

The color of the icons running down the left side of the screen now made more sense, too. The stock market icon that had been pale green a few minutes ago darkened perceptibly, undoubtedly reflecting the real-time movement in Dresner Industries’ stock price as the texts and tweets of people in the crowd flew around the world. The weather icon went from green on the left to red on the right, probably reflecting the current sunny skies over Las Vegas and the storm front predicted to arrive that night.