Hackworth had been catapulted out of the rank-and-file and into Bespoke's 
elite ranks by his invention of the mediatronic chopstick. He'd been working in 
San Francisco at the time. The company was thinking hard about things Chinese, 
trying to one-up the Nipponese, who had already figured out a way to generate 
passable rice (five different varieties, yet!) direct from Feed, bypassing the 
whole paddy/coolie rat race, enabling two billion peasants to hang up their 
conical hats and get into some serious leisure time—and don't think for 
one moment that the Nipponese didn't already have some suggestions for what 
they might do with it. Some genius at headquarters, stewing over Nippon's 
prohibitive lead in nanotechnological rice production, decided the only thing 
for it was to leapfrog them by mass-producing entire meals, from wonton all the 
way to digital interactive fortune cookies. Hackworth got the seemingly trivial 
job of programming the matter compiler to extrude chopsticks.