The corners of the fresco were occupied with miscellaneous busywork; in 
the upper left, Feynman and Drexler and Merkle, Chen and Singh and 
Finkle-McGraw reposed on a numinous buckyball, some of them reading books and 
some pointing toward the work-in-progress in a manner that implied constructive 
criticism. In the upper right was Queen Victoria II, who managed to look serene 
despite the gaudiness of her perch, a throne of solid
diamond. The bottom fringe of the work was crowded with small figures, mostly 
children with the occasional long-suffering mom, ordered chronologically. On 
the left were the spirits of generations past who had shown up too early to 
enjoy the benefits of nanotechnology and (not explicitly shown, but somewhat 
ghoulishly implied) croaked from obsolete causes such as cancer, scurvy, boiler 
explosions, derailments, drive-by shootings, pogroms, blitzkriegs, mine shaft 
collapses, ethnic cleansing, meltdowns, running with scissors, eating Drano, 
heating a cold house with charcoal briquets, and being gored by oxen. 
Surprisingly, none of them seemed sullen; they were all watching the activities 
of the Engineer and his cherubic workforce, their cuddly, uplifted faces 
illuminated by the light streaming from the center, liberated (as Hackworth the 
engineer literal-mindedly supposed) by the binding energy of the atoms as they 
plummeted into their assigned potential wells.