The smart coral burst out of the depths with violence that shocked 
Hackworth, even though he'd been in on the design, seen the trial runs. Viewed 
through the dark surface of the Pacific, it was like watching an explosion 
through a pane of shattered glass. It reminded him of pouring a jet of heavy 
cream into coffee, watching it rebound from the bottom of the cup in a 
turbulent fractal bloom that solidified just as it dashed against the surface. 
The speed of this process was a carefully planned sleight-of-hand; the smart 
coral had actually been growing down on the bottom of the ocean for the last 
three months, drawing its energy from a supercon that they'd grown across the 
seafloor for the occasion, extracting the necessary atoms directly from the 
seawater and the gases
dissolved therein. The process happening below looked chaotic, and in a way it 
was; but each lithocule knew exactly where it was supposed to go and what it 
was supposed to do. They were tetrahedral building blocks of calcium and 
carbon, the size of poppyseeds, each equipped with a power source, a brain, and 
a navigational system. They rose from the bottom of the sea at a signal given 
by Princess Charlotte; she had awakened to find a small present under her 
pillow, unwrapped it to find a golden whistle on a chain, stood out on her 
balcony, and blown the whistle.