The ball contained a machine-phase tape drive system, eight reels of tape 
rigged in parallel, each with its own read/write machinery. The tapes 
themselves were polymer chains with different side groups representing the 
logical ones and zeroes. It was a standard component, and so Dr. X already 
knew that when it was told to dump, it would spew out about a billion bytes a 
second. Hackworth had just told him that the total stored on the tapes was a 
trillion bytes, so they had a thousand seconds to wait. Dr. X took advantage 
of the time to leave the room, supported by assistants, and tend
to some of the other parallel threads of his enterprise, which was known 
informally as the Flea Circus.