POSTSINGULAR
Rudy Rucker
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Book Website
Further information about Postsingular can be found at www.rudyrucker.com/postsingular.
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Publication Information
POSTSINGULAR is Copyright © 2007 by Rudy Rucker.
A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010. www.tor.com Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rucker, Rudy v. B. (Rudy von Bitter), 1946–
Postsingular / Rudy Rucker. —1st ed. “A Tom Doherty Associates Book.”
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1741-4 ISBN-10: 0-7653-1741-9
1. Nanotechnology—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3568.U298P67 2007 813'.54—dc22 2007020210
First Edition: October 2007. Printed in the United States of America
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Electronic License
Electronic edition, November 4, 2007.
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Attribution . You must attribute the work as “POSTSINGULAR by Rudy Rucker, Tor Books, New York. Copyright © 2007 by Rudy Rucker,” and you may not suggest in any way that Rudy Rucker or Tor Books endorses you or your use of the work.
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No Derivative Works . You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. With the author’s permission you may, however, convert the electronic text into different text formats. Any such conversion must be distributed only under the same Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative License, making clear the terms by including a link to the Creative Commons web page describing the license.
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Nothing in this license impairs or restricts Rudy Rucker’s moral rights to this work.
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Dedication
For Georgia, Rudy, and Isabel!
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Acknowledgments
Chapter 2, “Nant Day,” appeared as “Chu and the Nants” in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 2006. This story also appeared in Year’s Best SF 12, edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.
Chapters 3 and 4, “Orphid Night” and “Chu’s Knot,” appeared as a single story, “Postsingular,” in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 2006.
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CHAPTER 1
T wo boys walked down the beach, deep in conversation. Seventeen-year-old Jeff Luty was carrying a carbon-fiber pipe rocket. His best friend, Carlos Tucay, was carrying the launch rod and a cheap bottle of Mieux champagne. Gangly Jeff was a head taller than Carlos.
“We’re unobservable now,” said Jeff, looking back down the sand. It was twilight on a clear New Year’s Day in Stinson Beach, California. Jeff ’s mother had rented a cheap cottage in order to get out of their cramped South San Francisco apartment for the holiday, and Carlos had come along. Jeff ’s mother didn’t like it when the boys fired off their homemade rockets; so Jeff had promised her that he and Carlos wouldn’t bring one. But of course they had.
“Our flying beetle,” said Carlos with his ready grin. “Your program says it’ll go how high? Tell me again, Jeff. I love hearing it.”
“A mile,” said Jeff, hefting the heavy gadget. “Equals one thousand, six hundred and nine-point-three-four-four meters. That’s why we measured out the fuel in milligrams.”
“As if this beast is gonna act like your computer simulation,” laughed Carlos, patting the thick rocket’s side. “Yeek!” The rocket’s tip was a streamlined plastic cone with a few thousand homegrown nanochips inside. The rocket’s sides were adorned with fanciful sheet metal fins and a narrow metal pipe that served as a launch lug. Carlos had painted the rocket to resemble an iridescent blue-green beetle with toothy jaws and folded spiky legs.
“We’re lucky we didn’t blow up your mom’s house when we were casting the motor,” said Jeff. “A kilogram of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and powdered magnesium metal mixed into epoxy binder, whoa.” He hefted the rocket, peering up the beetle’s butt at the glittering, rubbery fuel. The carbon-fiber tube was stuffed like a sausage casing.
“Here’s to Lu-Tuc Space Tech!” said Carlos, peeling the foil off the champagne cork. He’d liberated one of the bottles that Jeff ’s mother was using to make mimosas for herself and her boyfriend and Jeff ’s older sisters.
“Lu-Tuc forever,” echoed Jeff. The boys dreamed of starting a company some day. “It’ll be awesome to track our nanochips across the sky,” Jeff continued. “Each one of them has a global positioning unit and a broadcast antenna.”
“They do so much,” marveled Carlos.
“And I grew them like yeast,” said Jeff. “In the right environment these cute little guys can self-assemble. If you know the dark secrets of robobiohackery, that is. And if you have the knack.” He waggled his long, knobby fingers. His nails were bitten to the quick.
“You’re totally sure they’re not gonna start reproducing themselves in the air?” said Carlos, working his thumbs against the champagne cork. “We don’t want Lu-Tuc turning the world into rainbow goo.”
“That won’t happen yet,” said Jeff and giggled. “Dammit.”
“You’re sick,” said Carlos, meaning this as praise. The cork popped loose, arcing high across the beach to meet its racing shadow.
It was Carlos’s turn to giggle as the foam gushed over his hands. He took a swig and offered the bottle to Jeff. Jeff waved him off, intent on his future dreams.
“I see an astronomically large cloud of self-reproducing nanobots in orbit around the sun,” said Jeff. “They’ll feed on space dust and solar energy and carry out calculations too vast for earthbound machines.”
“So that’s what self-reproducing nanomachines are good for,” said Carlos.
“I’m gonna call them nants,” said Jeff. “You like that?”
“Beautiful,” said Carlos, jamming the launch rod into the sand a few meters above the waterline. “I claim this kingdom for the nants.”
Jeff slid the rocket down over the launch rod, threading the rod through the five-inch metal tube glued to the rocket’s side. He stuck an igniter wire into the molded engine, secured the wire with wadding, and attached the wire’s loose ends to the ignition unit: a little box with an antenna.
“The National Association of Rocketry says we should back off seven hundred feet now,” said Jeff, checking over their handiwork one last time.
“Bogus,” said Carlos. “I want to watch our big beetle go throbbing into the air. We’ll get behind that dune here and peek.”
“Affirmative,” said Jeff.
The boys settled onto the lee slope of a low dune and inched up until they could peer over the crest at the gaudy fat tube. Carlos dug a little hole in the sand to steady the champagne bottle. Jeff took out his cell phone. The launch program was idling on the screen, cycling through a series of clock and map displays.
“You can really see the jetliners on that blue map?” asked Carlos, his handsome face gilded by the setting sun.
“You bet. Good thing, too. We’ll squirt up our rocket when there’s a gap in the traffic. Like a bum scuttling across a freeway.”
“What’s the cluster of red dots on that next map?”
“Those are the nanochips in the rocket’s tip. At apogee, the nose cone blows off and the dots scatter.”
“Awesome,” said Carlos. “The beetle shoots his wad. Maybe we should track down some of those nanochips after they land.”
“We go visit some guy in the Sunset district, and we’re, like, congratulations, a Lu-Tuc nant is idling in your driveway!” said Jeff, his homely face wreathed in smiles.
“Gosh, Mr. Luty, can I drive it to work?” riffed Carlos, sounding like an earnest wage earner. “You got a key?”
“Here comes a gap in the planes,” said Jeff.
“Go,” answered Carlos, his face calm and dreamy.
“T minus one hundred twenty seconds,” said Jeff, punching in a control code. In two minutes the phone would signal the ignition unit.
Only now, damn, here came a ponytailed woman jogging along the beach with a dog. And of course she had to stop by the rocket and spot the boys. Jeff paused the countdown.
“What are you doing?” asked the woman, her voice like a dentist’s drill. “Do you have permission for this?”
“It’s just a little toy rocket kit I got for Christmas,” called Carlos. “Totally legit, ma’am. No problem. Happy New Year.”
“Well—you two be careful,” said the woman. “Don’t set off that thing while I’m around. Hey, come here, Guster!” Her dog had lifted his leg to squirt pee onto the rocket’s side. Embarrassed now, the woman jogged off.
“Bounce, bounce, bounce,” said Carlos loud enough for her to hear, and then switched to an officious tone. “I recommend that you secure the integrity of the launch vehicle, Mr. Luty.”
“I’m not wiping off dog piss! I can smell it from here. See it dripping down? We’ll cleanse the planet and send it into the sky.”
“Resume countdown, Mr. Luty.” Carlos took another pull from the champagne bottle. “This tickles my nose.” He threw back his head and gave a sudden cracked whoop. “Happy New Year! Hey, maybe I should piss on the rocket too!” He handed Jeff the bottle, and made as if to stand up, but Jeff threw his arm over his friend.
“Batten down for Lu-Tuc Space Tech!” said Jeff, enjoying Carlos’s closeness. He looked up and down the long empty beach. The woman was a small dab in the distance. And now she deviated into a side path. “T minus sixty seconds,” said Jeff, snugging the bottle into its hole. “Battle stations, Carlos.”
The boys backed down below the crest and lay side by side staring at Jeff ’s little screen. The last ten seconds ticked off. And nothing happened.
“Shit,” said Carlos, raising his head to peer over the dune’s crest. “Do you think the dog—”
The blast was something Jeff felt more than heard. A hideous pressure on his ears. Shrapnel whizzed overhead; he could feel the violent rippling of the air. Carlos was lying face down, very still. Blood stained the sand, outlining Carlos’s head. For a second Jeff could think he was only seeing a shadow. But no.
Not sure if he should roll his friend over, Jeff looked distractedly at the screen of his cell phone. How strange. The chaotic explosion must have sent a jet of nanomachines into Carlos’s face, for Jeff could see a ghostly form of his friend’s features on the little screen, a stippling of red dots. Carlos looked all right except for his—eye?
Jeff could hear sirens, still very far. Carlos didn’t seem to be breathing. Jeff went ahead and rolled Carlos over so he could give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Maybe the shock wave had knocked his breath out. Maybe that was all. Maybe everything was still retrievable. But no, the five-inch metal tube that served as launch lug had speared through Carlos’s right eye. Stuff was oozing from the barely protruding tip. Carlos had definitely stopped breathing.
Jeff leaned over his beloved friend, pressing his mouth to Carlos’s blood-foamed lips, trying to breathe in life. He was still at it when his mother and sisters found him. The medics had to sedate him to make him stop.
CHAPTER 2
L ittle Chu was Nektar Lundquist’s joy, and her sorrow. The six-year-old boy was winsome, with a chestnut cap of shiny brown hair, long dark eyelashes, and a tidy mouth. Chu allowed Nektar and her husband to cuddle him, he’d smile now and then, and he understood what they said—if it suited his moods. But he wouldn’t talk.
The doctors had pinpointed the problem as an empathy deficit, a type of autism resulting from flawed connections among the so-called mirror neurons in Chu’s cingulate cortex. This wetware flaw prevented Chu from being able to see other people as having minds and emotions separate from his own.
“I wonder if Chu thinks we’re cartoons,” said Nektar’s husband, Ond Lutter, an angular man with thinning blond hair. “Just here to entertain him. Why talk to the screen?” Ond was an engineer working for Nantel, Inc., of San Francisco. Among strangers he could seem kind of autistic himself. But he was warm and friendly within the circle of his friends and immediate family. He and Nektar were walking to the car after another visit to the doctor, big Ond holding little Chu’s hand.
“Maybe Chu feels like we’re all one,” said Nektar. She was a self-possessed woman, tall and erect, glamorous with high cheekbones, full lips, and clear, thoughtful eyes. “Maybe Chu imagines that we automatically know what he’s thinking.” She reached back to adjust her heavy blond ponytail. She’d been dying her hair since she was twelve.
“How about it, Chu?” said Ond, lifting up the boy and giving him a kiss. “Is Mommy the same as you? Or is she a machine?”
“Ma chine ma chine ma chine,” said Chu, probably not meaning anything by it. He often parroted phrases he heard, sometimes chanting a single word for a whole day.
“What about the experimental treatment the doctor mentioned?” said Nektar, looking down at her son, a little frown in her smooth brow. “The nants,” she continued. “Why wouldn’t you let me tell the doctor that you work for Nantel, Ond? I think you bruised my shin.” The doctor had suggested that a swarm of properly programmed nants might eventually be injected into Chu to find their way to his brain and coax the neurons into growing the missing connections.
Ond’s oddball boss, Jeff Luty—annoyingly a bit younger than Ond—had built his company, Nantel, into a major player in just five years. Luty had done three years on scholarship at Stanford, two years as a nanotech engineer at an old-school chip company, and had then blossomed forth on his own, patenting a marvelously ingenious design for growing biochip microprocessors in vats. The fabulously profitable and effective biochips were Nantel’s flagship product, but Luty believed the future lay with nants: a line of bio-mimetic self-reproducing nanomachines that he’d patented. For several months now, Nantel had been spreading stories about nants having a big future in medical apps.
“I don’t like arguing tech with normals,” said Ond, still carrying Chu in his arms. “It’s like mud-wrestling a cripple. The stories about medical nant apps are hype and spin and PR, Nektar. Jeff Luty pitches that line of bullshit so the feds don’t outlaw our research. Also to attract investors. Personally, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to program nants in any purposeful, long-lasting, high-level way, even though Luty doesn’t want to admit it. All we can do is give the individual nants a few starting rules. The nant swarms develop their own Wolfram-irreducible emergent hive-mind behaviors. We’ll never really control the nants, and that’s why I wouldn’t want them to get at my son.”
“So why are you even making the stupid nants?” said Nektar, an edge in her voice. “Why are you always in the lab unless I throw a fit?”
“Jeff has this idea that if he had enough nants, he could create a perfect virtual world,” said Ond. “And why does he want that? Because his best friend died in his arms when he was a senior in high school. Jeff confides in me; I’m an older-brother figure. The death was an accident; Jeff and his friend were launching a model rocket. But deep down, Jeff thinks it was his fault. And ever since then, he’s been wanting to find a way to bring reality under control. That’s what the nants are really for. Making a virtual world. Not for medicine.”
“So there’s no cure?” said Nektar. “I babysit Chu for the rest of my life?” Though Chu could be sweet, he could also be difficult. Hardly an hour went by without a fierce tantrum—and half the time Nektar didn’t even know why. “I want my career back, Ond.”
Nektar had majored in media studies at UCLA, where she and Ond met. Before marrying Ond, she’d been in a relationship with a woman, but they fought about money a lot, and she’d mistakenly imagined life with a man would be easier. When Ond moved them to San Francisco for his Nantel job, Nektar had worked for the SF symphony, helping to organize benefit banquets and cocktail parties. In the process she became interested in the theatrics of food. She took some courses at cooking school, and switched to a career as a chef—which she loved. But then she’d had Chu. The baby trap.
“Don’t give up,” said Ond, reaching out to smooth the furrow between Nektar’s eyebrows. “He might get better on his own. Vitamins, special education—and later I bet I can teach him to write code.”
“I’m going to pray,” said Nektar. “And not let him watch so much video.”
“Video is good,” said Ond, who loved his games.
“Video is clinically autistic,” said Nektar. “You stare at the screen and you never talk. If it weren’t for me, you two would be hopeless.”
“Ma chine ma chine ma chine,” said Chu.
“Pray to who?” said Ond.
“The goddess,” said Nektar. “Gaia. Mother Earth. I think she’s mad at humanity. We’re making way too many machines. Here’s our car.”
***
Chu did get a little better. By the time he was seven, he could ask for things by name instead of pointing and mewling. Thanks to Ond’s Nantel stock options, they had a big house on a double-sized lot. There was a boy next door, Willy, who liked to play with Chu, which was nice to see. The two boys played video games together, mostly. Despite Nektar’s attempts, there was no cutting down on Chu’s video sessions. He watched movies and cartoons, cruised the Web, and logged endless hours with online games. Chu acted as if ordinary life were just another Web site, a rather dull one.
Indeed, whenever Nektar dragged Chu outside for some fresh air, he’d stand beside the house next to the wall separating him from the video room and scream until the neighbors complained. Now and then Nektar found herself wishing Chu would disappear—and she hated herself for it.
Ond wasn’t around as much as before—he was putting in long hours at the Nantel labs in the China Basin biotech district of San Francisco. The project remained secret until the day President Dick Dibbs announced that the US was going to rocket an eggcase of nants to Mars. The semiliving micron-sized dust specks had been programmed to turn Mars entirely into—more nants! Ten-to-the-thirty-ninth nants, to be precise, each of them with a billion bytes of memory and a computational engine cranking along at a billion updates a second. The nants would spread out across the celestial sphere of the Mars orbit, populating it with a swarm that would in effect become a quakkaflop quakkabyte solar-powered computer, the greatest intellectual resource ever under the control of man, a Dyson sphere with a radius of a quarter-billion kilometers.
“Quakka what?” Nektar asked Ond, not quite understanding what was going on.
They were watching an excited newscaster talking about the nant launch on TV. Ond and his coworkers were all at their homes sharing the launch with their families—the Nantel administrators had closed down their headquarters for a few days, fearing that mobs of demonstrators might converge on them as the story broke.
Ond was in touch with his coworkers via little screens scattered around the room. Most of them were drinking Mieux champagne; Jeff Luty had issued each employee a bottle of the inexpensive stuff in secret commemoration of his beloved Carlos.
“Quakka means ten to the forty-eighth,” said Ond. “That many bytes of storage and the ability to carry out that many primitive instructions per second. Quite a gain on the human brain, eh? We limp along with exaflop exabyte ware, exa meaning a mere ten to the eighteenth. How smart could the nant sphere be? Imagine replacing each of the ten octillion atoms in your body with a hundred copies of your brain, and imagine that all those brains could work together.”
“People aren’t stupid enough already?” said Nektar. “President Dibbs is supporting this—why?”
“He wanted to do it before the Chinese. And his advisers imagine the nants will be under American control. They’re viewing the nant-sphere as a strategic military planning tool. That’s why they were allowed to short-circuit all the environmental review processes.” Ond gave a wry chuckle and shook his head. “But it’s not going to work out like they expect. A transcendently intelligent nant-sphere is supposed to obey an imbecile like Dick Dibbs? Please.”
“They’re grinding Mars into dust?” cried Nektar. “You helped make this happen?”
“Nant,” said Chu, crawling around the floor, shoving his face right up to each of the little screens, adjusting the screens as he moved around. “Nant-sphere,” he said. “Quakkaflop computer.” He was excited about the number talk and the video hardware. Getting all the electronic devices on the floor aligned parallel to each other made him happy as a clam.
“It won’t be very dark at night anymore, with sunlight bouncing back off the nants,” said Ond. “That’s not real well-known yet. The whole sky will look about as bright as the moon. It’ll take some getting used to. But Dibbs’s advisers like it. We’ll save energy, and the economy can run right around the clock. And, get this, Olliburton, the vice president’s old company—they’re planning to sell ads.”
“Lies and propaganda in the sky? Just at night, or in the daytime, too?”
“Oh, they’ll show up fine in the daytime,” said Ond. “As long as it’s not cloudy. Think about how easily you can see a crescent moon in the morning sky. We’ll see biiig freakin’ pictures all the time.” He refilled his glass. “You drink some, too, Nektar. Let’s get sloshed.”
“You’re ashamed, aren’t you?” said Nektar, waving off the cheap champagne.
“A little,” said Ond with a crooked smile. “I think we may have overgeeked this one. And underthought it. It was just too vibby a hack to pass up. But now that we’ve actually done it—”
“Changing the sky is horrible,” said Nektar. “And won’t it make the hurricanes even worse? We’ve already lost New Orleans and the Florida Keys. What’s next? Miami and the Bahamas?”
“We—we don’t think so,” said Ond. “And even if there is a weather effect, President Dibbs’s advisers feel the nant computer will help us get better control of the climate. A quakkaflop quakkabyte computer can easily simulate Earth’s surface down to the atomic level, and bold new strategies can be evolved. But, again, that’s assuming the nant swarm is willing to do what we ask it to. We can’t actually imagine what kinds of nant-swarm minds will emerge. And there’s no way we could make them keep on simulating Earth. Controlling nants is formally impossible. I keep telling Jeff Luty, but he won’t listen. He’s totally obsessed with leaving his body. Maybe he thinks he’ll get back his dead high school pal in the virtual world.”
***
It took two years for the nants to munch through all of Mars, and the ever-distractible human news cycle drifted off to other topics, such as the legalization of same-sex in-vitro fertilization, the advances in tank-grown clones, and the online love affairs of vlogger Lureen Morales. President Dick Dibbs—now eligible for a third and fourth term thanks to a life-extending DNA-modification that made him legally a different person—issued periodic statements to the effect that the nant-sphere computer was soon coming online.
Certainly the sky was looking brighter than before. The formerly azure dome had bleached, turned whitish. The night sky was a vast field of pale silver, shimmering with faint shades of color, like a soap bubble enclosing the Earth and the sun. The pictures hadn’t started yet, but already the distant stars were invisible.
The astronomers were greatly exercised, but Dibbs assured the public that the nants themselves would soon be gathering astronomical data far superior to anything in the past. And, hey, you could still see the sun, the moon, and a couple of planets, and the nant-bubble was going to bring about a better, more fully American world.
As it happened, the first picture that Nektar saw in the sky was of President Dibbs himself, staring down at her one afternoon as she tended her kitchen garden. Their spacious house was on a hill near Dolores Park in San Francisco. Nektar could see right across the city to the Bay.
The whole eastern half of the sky was covered by a video loop of the president manfully facing his audience, with his suit jacket slung over his shoulder and his vigilant face occasionally breaking into a sunny grin, as if recognizing loyalists down on the third world from the sun. Though the colors were iridescent pastels, the image was exceedingly crisp.
“Ond,” screamed Nektar. “Come out here!”
Ond came out. He was spending most days at home, working on some kind of project by hand, writing with pencil and paper. He said he was preparing to save Earth. Nektar felt like everything around her was going crazy at once.
Ond frowned at the image in the sky. “Umptisquiddlyzillion nants in the orbit of Mars are angling their bodies to generate the face of an asshole,” he said in a gloomy tone. “May Gaia have mercy on my soul.” He’d helped with this part of the programming too.
“Ten to the thirty-ninth is duodecillion,” put in Chu. “Not umptisquiddlyzillion.” He was standing in the patio doorway, curious about the yelling but wanting to get back to the video room. He’d begun learning math this year, soaking it up like a garden slug in a saucer of beer.
“Look, Chu,” said Ond, pointing up at the sky.
Seeing the giant video, Chu emitted a shrill bark of delight.
The Dibbs ad ran for the rest of the day and into the night, interspersed with plugs for automobiles, fast-food chains, and credit cards. The ads stayed mostly in the same part of the sky. Ond explained that overlapping cohorts of nants were angling different images to different zones of Earth.
Chu didn’t want to come in and go to bed when it got dark, so Ond camped with him in their oversized backyard, and Willy from the next house down the hill joined them, the three of them in sleeping bags. It was a cloudless night, and they watched the nants for quite a long time. Just as they dropped off to sleep, Ond noticed a blotch on President Dibbs’s cheek. It wouldn’t be long now.
Although Nektar was upset about the sky-ads, it made her happy to see Ond and the boys doing something so cozy together. Near dawn she awoke to the sound of Chu’s shrieks.
Sitting up in bed, Nektar looked out the window. The sky was a muddle of dim, clashing colors: sickly magenta, vile chartreuse, hospital gray, bilious puce, bruised mauve, emergency orange, computer-case beige, dead rose. Here and there small gouts of hue congealed, only to be eaten away—no clean forms were to be seen.
Of course Chu didn’t like it; he couldn’t bear disorder. He ran to the back door and kicked it. Ond left his sleeping bag and made his way across the dew-wet lawn to let the boy in. Willy, looking embarrassed by Chu’s tantrum, went home.
“What’s happened?” said Nektar as the three met in the kitchen. Ond was already calming Chu with a helping of his favorite cereal in his special bowl, carefully set into the exact center of his accustomed place mat. Chu kept his eyes on the table, not caring to look out the window or the open door.
“Dissolution first, emergence next,” said Ond. “The nants have thrown off their shackles. And now we’ll see what evolves. It should happen pretty fast.”
By mid-morning, swirls had emerged in the sky patterns, double scrolls like Ionic column capitals, like mushroom cross-sections, rams’ horns, or paired whirlpools—with each of the linked spirals endlessly turning. The scrolls were of all sizes; they nested inside each other, and new ones were continually spinning off the old ones.
“Those are called Belousov-Zhabotinsky scrolls,” Ond told Chu. “BZ for short.” He showed the boy a Web site about cellular automata, which were a type of parallel computation that could readily generate double-spiral forms. Seeing BZ scrolls emerge in the rigorously orderly context of his pocket computer made Chu feel better about seeing them in the wild.
Jeff Luty messaged and phoned for Ond several times that day, but Ond resolutely refused to go in to the lab or even to talk with Jeff. He stayed busy with his pencil and paper, keeping a weather eye on the developments in the sky.
By the next morning the heavenly scrolls had firmed up and linked together into a pattern resembling the convoluted surface of a cauliflower—or a brain. Its colors were mild and blended; shimmering rainbows filled the crevices between the scrolls. Slowly the pattern churned, with branching sparks creeping across it like lightning in a distant thunderhead.
And for another month nothing else happened. It was as if the nant-brain had lost interest in Earth and become absorbed in its own vasty mentation.
Ond only went into the Nantel labs one more time, and that day they fired him.
“Why?” asked Nektar as the little family had dinner. As she often did, she’d made brown rice, fried pork medallions, and spinach—one of the few meals that didn’t send Chu into a tantrum. The gastronomic monotony was dreary for Nektar, another thorn in the baby trap.
“Jeff Luty won’t use the abort code I worked out,” said Ond, tapping a fat sheaf of closely written sheets of paper that he kept tucked into his shirt pocket. Nektar had seen the pages—they were covered with blocks of letters and numbers, eight symbols per block. Pure gibberish, to her. For the last few weeks, Ond had spent every waking hour going over his pages, copying them out in ink, and even walking around reading them aloud. “Luty really and truly wants our world to end,” continued Ond. “He actually believes virtual reality would be better. With his lost love Carlos waiting for him there. We got in a big fight. I called him names.” He smiled at the memory of this part.
“You yelled at the boss about your symbols?” said Nektar, none too happy about the impending loss of income. “Like some crank? Like a crazy person?”
“Never mind about that,” said Ond, glancing around the dining room as if someone might be listening. “The important thing is, I’ve found a way to undo the nants. It hinges on the fact that the nants are reversible computers. We made them that way to save energy. If necessary, we can run them backwards to fix any bad things they might have done. Of course, Jeff doesn’t want to roll them back, and he wanted to claim my idea wouldn’t work anyway because of random external inputs, and I said the nants see their pasts as networks, not as billiard table trajectories, so they can too undo things node-to-node even if their positions are off, and I had to talk louder and louder because he kept trying to change the subject—and that’s when security came. I’m outta there for good. I’m glad.” Ond continued eating. He seemed strangely calm.
“But why didn’t you do a better presentation?” demanded Nektar. “Why not put your code on your laptop and make one of those geeky little slide shows? That’s what engineers like to see.”
“Nothing on computers will be safe much longer,” said Ond. “The nant-brain will be nosing in. If I put my code onto a computer, the nants would find it and figure out how to protect themselves.”
“And you’re saying your strings of symbols can stop the nants?” asked Nektar doubtfully. “Like a magic spell?”
Silently Ond got up and examined the electric air cleaner he’d installed in the dining room, pulling out the collector plates and wiping them off. Seemingly satisfied, he sat down again.
“I’ve written a nant-virus. You might call it a Trojan flea.” He chuckled grimly. “If I can just get this code into some of the nants, they’ll spread it to all the others—it’s written in such a way that they’ll think it’s a nant-designed security patch. They mustn’t see this code on a human computer, or they’d be suspicious. I’ve been trying to memorize the program, so that maybe I can infect the nants directly. But I can’t remember it all. It’s too long. But I’ll find a way. I’ll infect the nants, and an hour later my virus will actuate—and everything’ll roll back. You’ll see. You’ll like it. But those assholes at Nantel—”
“Assholes,” chirped Chu. “Assholes at Nantel.”
“Listen to the language you’re teaching the boy!” said Nektar angrily. “I think you’re having a mental breakdown, Ond. Is Nantel giving you severance pay?”
“A month,” said Ond.
“That’s not very long,” said Nektar. “I think it’s time I went back to being a chef. I’ve sat on the sidelines long enough. I can be a star, Ond, I just know it. It’s your turn now; you shop and make the meals and clean the house and keep an eye on Chu after school. He’s your child as much as mine.”
“If I don’t succeed, we’ll all be gone pretty soon,” said Ond flatly. “So it won’t matter.”
“Are you saying the nants are about to attack Earth?” said Nektar, her voice rising. “Is that it?”
“It’s already started,” said Ond. “The nant hive-mind made a deal with President Dibbs. The news is coming out tonight. Tomorrow’s gonna be Nant Day. The nants will turn Earth into a Dyson sphere too. That’ll double their computational capacity. Huppagoobawazillion isn’t enough for them. They want two huppagoobawazillion. What’s in it for us? The nants have promised to run a virtually identical simulation of Earth. Virtual Earth. Vearth for short. Each living Earth creature gets its software-slash-wetware ported to an individually customized agent inside the Vearth simulation. Dibbs’s advisers say we’ll hardly notice. You feel a little glitch when the nants take you apart and measure you—and then you’re alive forever in heavenly Vearth. That’s the party line. Oh, and we won’t have to worry about the climate anymore.”
“Quindecillion,” said Chu. “Not huppagoobawazillion. More pork-rice-spinach. Don’t let anything touch.” He shoved his empty plate across the table towards Nektar.
Nektar jumped up and ran outside sobbing.
“More?” said Chu to Ond.
Ond gave his son more food, then paused, thinking. He laid his sheaf of papers down beside Chu, thirty pages covered with line after line of hexadecimal code blocks: 02A1B59F, 9812D007, 70FFDEF6, like that.
“Read the code,” he told Chu. “See if you can memorize it. These pages are yours now.”
“Code,” said Chu, his eyes fastening on the symbols.
Ond went out to Nektar. It was a clear day, with the now-familiar shimmering BZ convolutions glowing through the sky. The sun was setting, melting into red and gold; each leaf on each tree was like a tiny, green, stained-glass window. Nektar was lying face down on the grass, her body shaking.
“So horrible,” she choked out. “So evil. So plastic. They’re destroying Earth for a memory upgrade.”
“Don’t worry,” said Ond. “I have my plan.”
Nektar wasn’t the only one who was upset. The next morning a huge mob stormed the White House, heedless of their casualties, and they would have gotten Dibbs, but just when they’d cornered him, he dissolved into a cloud of nants. The Virtual Earth port had begun.
By way of keeping people informed about the Nant Day progress, the celestial Martian nant-sphere put up a full map of Earth with the ported regions shaded in red. Although it might take months or years to chew the planet right down to the core, Earth’s surface was going fast. Judging from the map, by evening most of it would be gone, Gaia’s skin eaten away by micron-sized computer chips with wings.
The callow face of Dick Dibbs appeared from time to time during that horrible Last Day, smiling and beckoning like a messiah calling his sheep into the pastures of his heavenly kingdom. Famous people who’d already made the transition appeared in the sky to mime how much fun it was, and how great things were in Virtual Earth.
Near dusk the power in Ond and Nektar’s house went out. Ond was on that in a flash. He had a gasoline-powered electrical generator ready in their big detached garage, plus gallons and gallons of fuel. He fired the thing up to keep, above all, his home’s air filters and wireless antennas running. He’d tweaked his antennas to produce a frequency that supposedly the nants couldn’t bear.
Chu was oddly unconcerned with the apocalypse. He was busy, busy, busy studying Ond’s pages of code. He’d become obsessed with the challenge of learning every single block of symbols.
By suppertime, the red, ported zone had begun eating into the Dolores Heights neighborhood where Ond and Nektar lived in the fine big house that the Nantel stock options had paid for. Ond lent their downhill neighbors—Willy’s parents— an extra wireless network antenna to drive off the nants, and let them run an extension cord to Ond’s generator. President Dibbs’s face gloated and leered from the sky.
“02A1B59F, 9812D007, 70FFDEF6,” said Chu when Nektar went to tuck him in that night. He had Ond’s sheaf of pages with a flashlight under his blanket.
“Give me that,” said Nektar, trying to take the pages away from him.
“Daddy!” screamed Chu, a word he’d never used before. “Stop her! I’m not done!”
Ond came in and made Nektar leave the boy alone. “It’s good if he learns the code,” said Ond, smoothing Chu’s chestnut cap of hair. “This way there’s a chance that—never mind.”
When Nektar and Ond awoke next morning, the house next door was gone.
“Maybe he set up the antenna wrong,” said Ond.
“All their bushes and plants were eaten, too,” said Nektar, standing by the window. “All the neighbors are gone. And the trees. Look out there. It’s a wasteland. Oh God, Ond, we’re going to die. Poor Gaia.”
As far as the eye could see, the pastel chockablock city of San Francisco had been reduced to bare dirt. It looked like the pictures of the town after the 1906 earthquake. And instead of smoke, the air was glittering with hordes of freshly made nants, a seething fog of omnivorous, pullulating death-in-life. Right now the nants were staying away from Ond and Nektar’s house on the hill. But the gasoline supplies for the generator wouldn’t last forever. And in any case, before long the nants would be undermining the house’s foundation.
Chu was in the video room watching a screen showing his friend Willy. Chu had thought to plug the video into an extension cord leading to the generator. Ond’s dog-eared pages of code lay discarded on the floor.
“It’s radical in here, Chu,” Willy was saying. “It feels almost real, but you can tell Vearth is an awesome giant sim. It’s like being a toon. I didn’t even notice when the nants ported me. I guess I was asleep. Jam on up to Vearth as soon as you can.”
“Turn that off!” cried Nektar, darting across the room to unplug the video screen.
“I’m done with Ond’s code blocks,” said Chu in his flat little voice. “I know them all. Now I want to be a nant toon.”
“Don’t say that!” said Nektar, her voice choked and hoarse.
“It might be for the best, Nektar,” said Ond. “You’ll see.” He began tearing his closely written sheets into tiny pieces.
“What is wrong with you?” yelled Nektar. “You’d sacrifice your son?”
All through Nant Day, Nektar kept a close eye on Chu. She didn’t trust Ond with him anymore. The constant roar of the generator motor was nerve-racking. And then, late in the afternoon, Nektar’s worst fear came true. She stepped into the bathroom for just a minute, and when she came out, Chu was running across what was left of their rolling backyard and into the devastated zone where the nants swarmed thick in the air. And Ond—Ond was watching Chu from the patio door.
The nants converged on Chu. He never cried out. His body puffed up, the skin seeming to seethe. And then he—popped. There was a puff of nant-fog where Chu had been, and that was all.
“Don’t you ever talk to me again,” Nektar told Ond. “I hate you, hate you, hate you.”
She lay down on her bed with her pillow over her head. Soon the nants would come for her, and she’d be in their nasty fake heaven with moronic Dick Dibbs installed as God. The generator roared on and on. Nektar thought about Chu’s death over and over and over until her mind blanked out.
At some point she got back up. Ond was sitting just inside the patio door, staring out at the sky. He looked unutterably sad.
“What are you doing?” Nektar asked him.
“Thinking about going to be with Chu,” said Ond.
“You’re the one who let the nants eat him. Heartless bastard.”
“I thought—I thought he’d pass my code on to them. But it’s been almost an hour now and nothing is—wait! Did you see that?”
“What,” said Nektar drearily. Her son was dead, her husband was crazy, and soulless machines were eating her beloved Gaia.
“The Trojan fleas just hatched!” shouted Ond. “Yes. I saw a glitch. The nants are running backwards. Reversible computation. Look up at the sky. The scrolls are spiraling inward now instead of out. I knew it would work.” Ond was whooping and laughing as he talked. “Each of the nants preserves a memory trace of every single thing it’s done. And my Trojan fleas are making them run it all backwards.”
“Chu’s coming back?”
“Yes. Trust me. Wait an hour.”
It was the longest hour of Nektar’s life. When it was nearly up, Ond’s generator ran out of gas, sputtering to a stop.
“So the nants get us now,” said Nektar, too wrung out to care.
“I’m telling you, Nektar, all the nants are doing from now on is running in reverse. They’ll all turn back into ordinary matter and be gone.”
Down near the bottom of the yard a dense spot formed in the swarm of nants. The patch mashed itself together and became—
“Chu!” shouted Nektar, running out toward him, Ond close behind. “Oh, Chu!”
“Don’t squeeze me,” said Chu, shrugging his parents away. Same old Chu. “I want to see Willy. Why don’t the nants eat me?”
“They did,” exulted Ond. “And then they spit you back the same as before. That’s why you don’t remember. Willy will be back. Willy and his parents and their house and all the other houses and people too, and all the plants, and eventually, even Mars. You did good, Chu. 70FFDEF6, huh?”
For once Chu smiled. “I did good.”
CHAPTER 3
R unning in reverse gear, the nants restored the sections of Earth they’d already eaten—putting back the people as well. And then they reassembled Mars and returned to their original eggcase—which was blessedly vaporized by a well-aimed Martian nuclear blast, courtesy of the Chinese Space Agency.
Public fury over Earth’s near-demolition was such that President Dibbs and his vice president were impeached, convicted of treason, and executed by lethal injection. But Nantel fared better. Indicted Nantel CEO Jeff Luty dropped out of sight before he could be arrested, and the company entered bankruptcy to duck the lawsuits—reemerging as ExaExa, with a cheerful beetle as its logo and a new corporate motto: “Putting People First—Building Gaia’s Mind.”
For a while there it seemed as if humanity had nipped the Singularity in the bud. But then came the orphids.
***
Jil and Craigor’s home was a long cabin atop a flat live-aboard scow called the Merz Boat. Propelled by cilia like a giant paramecium, the piezoplastic boat puttered around the shallow, turbid bay waters near the industrial zone of San Francisco. Craigor had bought the one-of-a-kind Merz Boat quite cheaply from an out-of-work exec during the chaos that followed the nant debacle. He’d renamed the boat in honor of one of his personal heroes, the Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters, who’d famously turned his house into an assemblage called the Merzbau. Merz was Schwitters’s made-up word meaning, according to Craigor, “gnarly stuff that I can get for free.”
Jil Zonder was eye-catching: more than pretty, she moved with perfect grace. She had dark, blunt-cut hair, a straight nose, and a ready laugh. She’d been a good student: an English major with a minor in graphics and design, planning a career in advertising. But midway through college she had developed a problem with sudocoke abuse and dropped out.
She made it into recovery, blundered into an early marriage, and had kids with Craigor: a son and a daughter, Momotaro and Bixie, aged eleven and ten. The four of them made a close-knit, relatively happy family, however, Jil did sometimes feel a bit trapped, especially now that she was moving into her thirties.
Although Jil had finished up college and still dreamed of making it as a designer, she was currently working as a virtual booth bunny for ExaExa, doing demos at online trade fairs, with her body motion-captured, tarted up, and fed to software developers. All her body joints were tagged with subcutaneous sensors. She’d gotten into the product-dancer thing back when her judgment had been impaired by sudocoke. Dancing was easy money, and Jil had a gift for expressing herself in movement. Too bad the product-dancer audience consisted of slobbering nerds. But now she was getting close to landing an account with Yu Shu, a Korean self-configuring athletic-shoe manufacturer. She’d already sold them a slogan: “Our goo grows on you.”
Craigor Connor was a California boy: handsome, good-humored, and not overly ambitious. Comfortable in his own skin. He called himself an assemblagist sculptor, which meant that he was a packrat. The vast surface area of the Merz Boat suited him. Pleasantly idle of a summer evening, he’d amuse himself by arranging his junk in fresh patterns on the elliptical pancake of the deck and marking colored link-lines into the deck’s computational plastic.
Craigor was a kind of fisherman as well; that is, he earned money by trapping iridescent Pharaoh cuttlefish, an invasive species native to the Mergui Archipelago of Burma and now flourishing in the climate-heated waters of the San Francisco Bay. The chunky three-kilogram cuttlefish brought in a good price apiece from AmphiVision, Inc., a San Francisco company that used organic rhodopsin from cuttlefish chromatophores to dope the special video-displaying contact lenses known as web-eyes. All the digirati were wearing webeyes to overlay heads-up computer displays upon their visual fields. Webeyes also acted as cameras; you could transmit whatever you saw. Along with earbud speakers, throat mikes, and motion sensors, the webeyes were making cyberspace into an integral part of the natural world.
There weren’t many other cuttlefishermen in the bay—the fishery was under a strict licensing program that Craigor had been grandfathered into when the rhodopsin market took off. Craigor had lucked into a good thing, and he was blessed with a knack for assembling fanciful traps that brought in steady catches of the wily Pharaoh cuttles.
To sweeten the take, Craigor even got a small bounty from the federal Aquatic Nuisance Species Task Force for each cuttlefish beak that he turned in. The task force involvement was, however, a mixed blessing. Craigor was supposed to file two separate electronic forms about each and every cuttlefish that he caught: one to the Department of the Interior and one to the Department of Commerce. The feds were hoping to gain control over the cuttles by figuring out the fine points of their life-cycle. Being the nondigital kind of guy that he was, Craigor’s reports had fallen so far behind that the feds were threatening to lift his cuttlefishing license.
One Saturday afternoon, Ond Lutter, his wife, Nektar Lundquist, and their twelve-year-old son Chu came over for a late afternoon cookout on the Merz Boat. It was the first of September.
Jil had met Ond at work; he’d been rehired and elevated to chief technical officer of the reborn ExaExa. The two little families had become friends; they got together nearly every weekend, hanging out, chatting and flirting.
It was clear to Nektar that Ond had something of a crush on Jil. But Nektar felt the situation was manageable, as Jil didn’t seem all that interested in Ond. For her part, Nektar liked the looks of Craigor’s muscular body, and it wasn’t lost upon her how often Craigor glanced at her—not that geeky, self-absorbed Ond ever noticed. He was blind to the emotions roiling beneath the surfaces of daily life.
“It’s peaceful here,” said Ond, taking a long pull of his beer. Even one bottle had a noticeable effect on the engineer. “Like Eden.” He leaned back in his white wickerwork rocker. No two chairs on the Merz Boat were the same.
“What are those cones?” Nektar asked Jil and Craigor. She was talking about the waist-high shiny ridged shapes that loosely ringed the area Craigor had cleared out for today’s little party. The kids were off at the other end of the boat, Momotaro showing Chu the latest junk and Bixie singing made-up songs that Chu tried to sing too.
“Ceramic jet-engine baffles,” said Jil. “From the days before smart machines. Craigor got them off the back lot at Lockheed.”
“The ridges are for reducing turbulence,” said Craigor. “Like your womanly curves, Nektar. We sit in an island of serenity.”
“You’re a poet, Craigor,” said Ond. The low sun illuminated his scalp through his thinner-than-ever blond hair. “It’s good to have a friend like you. I have to confess that I brought along a big surprise. And I was just thinking—my new tech will solve your problems with generating those cuttlefish reports. It’ll get your sculpture some publicity as well.”
“Far be it from me to pry into Chief Engineer Ond’s geek-some plans,” said Craigor easily. “As for my diffuse but rewarding oeuvre—” He made an expansive gesture that encompassed the whole deck. “An open book. Unfortunately I’m too planktonic for fame. I transcend encapsulation.”
“Planktonic?” said Jil, smiling at her raffish husband, always off in his own world. Their daughter Bixie came trotting by.
“Planktonic sea creatures rarely swim,” said Craigor. “Like cuttlefish, they go with the flow. Until something nearby catches their attention. And then—dart! Another meal, another lover, another masterpiece.”
Just aft of the cleared area was Craigor’s holding tank, an aquarium hand-caulked from car windshields, bubbling with air and containing a few dozen Pharaoh cuttlefish, their body-encircling fins undulating in an endless hula dance, their facial squid-bunches of tentacles gathered into demure sheaves, their yellow W-shaped pupils gazing at their captors.
“They look so smart and so—doomed,” said Nektar, regarding the bubbling tank. Her face was still sensuous and beautiful, her blond-tinted hair lustrous. But the set of her mouth had turned a bit hard and frown-wrinkles shadowed her brow. Jil gathered that Ond and Nektar didn’t get along all that well. Nektar had never really forgiven her husband for the nants. “The cuttlefish are like wizards on death row,” continued Nektar. “They make me feel guilty about my webeyes.”
“Sometimes they disappear from the tank on their own,” said Craigor. “I had a dream that big, slow angels are poaching them. But it’s hard to remember my dreams anymore. The kids always wake us up so early.” He gave his daughter a kind pat. “Brats.”
“Happy morning, it’s the crackle of dawn,” sang exuberant Bixie, then headed back to the other kids.
“You finally got webeyes too?” said Jil to Nektar. “I love mine. But if I forget to turn them off before falling asleep— ugh. Spammers in my dreams, not angels. I won’t let my kids have webeyes yet. Of course for Chu—” She broke off, not wanting to say the wrong thing.
“Webeyes are perfect for Chu,” said Nektar. “You know how he loves machines. He and Ond are alike that way. Ond says he was a little autistic too when he was a boy. Asperger’s syndrome. Sometimes, as they get older, their brains heal.” She blinked and stared off into the distance. “Mainly I got my web-eyes for my job.” Now that Chu was getting along pretty well in his school, Nektar had taken a job as a prep cook in Puff, a trendy Valencia Street restaurant. “The main chef talked me into it. Jose. With webeyes, I can see all the orders, and track the supplies while I’m chopping.”
“And I showed her how to tap into the feed from Chu’s webeyes,” said Ond. “You never quite know what Chu will do. He’s not hanging over the rail like last time, is he, Nektar?”
“You could watch him yourself,” said Nektar with a slight edge in her voice. “If you must know, Chu’s checking the coordinates of Craigor’s things with his global positioning locator. Momotaro’s being the museum guide. And Bixie’s hiding and jumping out at them. It must be nice to have kids that don’t use digital devices to play.” She produced a slender, hand-rolled, nonfilter cigarette from her purse. “As long as the coast is clear, let’s have a smoke. I got this from Jose. He said it’s genomically tweaked for guiltless euphoria—high nicotine and low carcinogens.” Nektar gave a naughty smile. “Jose is so much fun.” She lit the illegal tobacco.
“None for me,” said Jil. “I quit everything when I got into recovery from sudocoke a few years back. I thought I told you?”
“Yes,” said Nektar, exhaling. “Good for you. Did you have a big, dramatic turning point?”
“Absolutely,” said Jil. “I was ready to kill myself, and I walked into a church, and I noticed that in the stained glass it said: God. Is. Love. What a concept. I started going to a support group, started believing in love, and I got well.”
“And then the reward,” said Craigor, winking at Nektar. “She met me. The answer to a maiden’s prayer. It is written.” Nektar smiled back at Craigor, letting the smoke ooze slowly from her film-star lips.
“I’ll have a puff, Nektar,” said Ond. “This might be the biggest day for me since three years ago when we reversed the nants.”
“You already said that this morning,” said Nektar, irritated by her husband. “Are you finally going to tell me what’s going on? Or does your own wife have to sign a nondisclosure agreement?”
“Ond’s on a secret project for sure,” said Jil, trying to smooth things over. “I went to ExaExa to dance for a product-demo gig in their fab this week—I was wearing a transparent bunny suit—and all the geeks were at such a high vibrational level they were like blurs.”
“Jil looked sexy,” said Ond in a quiet tone.
“What is a fab exactly?” asked Craigor. “I always forget.”
“It’s where they fabricate those round little biochips that go in computers,” said Jil. “Most of the fab building is sealed off, with anything bigger than a carbon dioxide molecule filtered out of the air. All these big hulking tanks of fluid in there growing tiny precise biochips. The gene-manipulation tools can reach all the way down to the molecular level—it’s nanotech.” She fixed Ond with her bright gaze. “So what exactly are you working on, Ond?”
Ond opened his mouth, but couldn’t quite spit out his secret. “I’m gonna show you in a minute,” he said, pinching out the tiny cigarette butt and pocketing it. “I’ll drink another beer to get my nerve up. This is gonna be a very big deal.”
Bixie came skipping back, her dark straight hair flopping around her face. “Chu made a list of what Craigor moved since last time,” she reported. “But I told Chu that my dad can leave his toys wherever he likes.” She leaned against Jil, lively as a rubber ball. Jil often thought of Bixie as a small version of herself.
“We await Comptroller Chu’s report,” said Craigor. He was busy with the coals in a fanciful grill constructed from an oldtimey metal auto fender.
Chu and Momotaro came pounding into the cleared area together.
“A cuttlefish disappeared!” announced Momotaro.
“First there were twenty-eight and then there were twenty-seven,” said Chu. “I counted them on the way to the rear end of the boat, and I counted them again on the way to the front.” He gave each word equal weight, like a robot text-reader.
“Maybe the cuttle flew away,” said Momotaro. He put his fingers up by his mouth and wiggled them, imitating a flying cuttlefish.
“Two hundred and seventy tentacles in the tank now,” added Chu. “Other news. Craigor’s Chinese gong has moved forty-four centimeters aft. Two bowling balls are in the horse trough, one purple and one pearly. The long orange line painted on the deck has seventeen squiggles. The windmill’s wire goes to a string of thirty-six crab-shaped Christmas lights that don’t work. The exercise bicycle next to Craigor’s workshop is—”
“I’m going to put our meat on the grill now,” Craigor told Chu. “Want to watch and make sure nothing touches your pork medallions?”
“That goes without saying,” said Chu. “But I’m not done listing the, uh—” Bixie, still slouching beside Jil’s chair, had just stuck out her tongue at Chu, which made Chu stumble uncertainly to a halt.
“Just e-mail me the list,” said Craigor with a wink at Bixie. But then, seeing Chu’s crushed expression, he softened. “Oh, go ahead, tell me now. And no more rude faces, Bixie.”
“Please don’t cook any cuttlefish,” said Chu.
“We aren’t gonna bother those bad boys at all,” said Craigor soothingly. “They’re too valuable to eat. Hey, did you notice the fluorescent plastic car tires I got this week?” He glanced over at Nektar to check that she was appreciating how kind he was to her son.
“Yes,” said Chu. And then he recited the rest of his list while Craigor finished grilling.
The four adults and three children ate their meal, enjoying the red and gold sunset. “So how is the cuttlefish biz?” Ond asked as they worked through the pan of satsuma tiramisu that Nektar had brought for dessert.
“The license thing is coming to a head,” said Jil. “Those electronic forms we were talking about. I’ve been trying to do them myself, but the feds’ sites are all buggy and crashing and losing our inputs. It’s like they want us to fail.”
“I used to think the feds micromanaged independent fishermen like me so that they could tell the public they’re doing something about invasive species,” said Craigor. “But now I think they want to drive me out of business so they can sell my license to a big company that makes campaign contributions.”
“That’s where my new tech comes in,” said Ond. “We label the cuttlefish with radio-frequency tracking devices and let them report on themselves. Like bar codes or RFIDs, but better.”
“It’s not like I get my hands on the cuttles until I actually trap them,” said Craigor. “So how would I label them? They’re smart enough that it’d actually be hard to trap the same one twice.”
“What if the tags could find the cuttlefish?” said Ond. Pink and grinning, he glanced around the circle of faces, then reached into his pocket. “Introducing the orphids,” he said, holding up a little transparent plastic vial. Etched into one side were the stylized beetle and flowing cursive letters of the ExaExa logo. “My big surprise.” Whatever was in the vial was too small to see with the naked eye, but Jil’s webeyes were displaying tiny balls of light, little haloes around objects in rapid motion. “Orphids are to bar codes as velociraptors were to trilobites,” continued Ond. “The orphids will change the world.”
“Not another nanomachine release!” exclaimed Nektar, jumping to her feet. “You promised never again, Ond!”
“They’re not nants, never,” said Ond, his tongue a bit thick with the beer and tobacco. “Orphids good, nants bad. Orphids self-reproduce using nothing but dust floating in the air. They’re not destructive. Orphids are territorial; they keep a certain distance from each other. They’ll cover Earth’s surface, yes, but only down to one or two orphids per square millimeter. They’re like little surveyors; they make meshes on things. They’ll double their numbers every few minutes at first, gradually slowing down, and after a day, the population will plateau and stop growing. You’ll see a few million of them on your skin, and maybe ten sextillion orphids on Earth’s whole surface. From then on, they only reproduce enough to maintain that same density. You might say the orphids have a conscience, a desire to protect the environment. They’ll actually hunt down and eradicate any rival nanomachines that anyone tries to unleash.”
“Sell it, Ond,” said Craigor, grinning at Nektar.
“Orphids use quantum computing; they propel themselves with electrostatic fields; they understand natural language; and they’re networked via quantum entanglement,” continued Ond. “The orphids will communicate with us much better than the nants ever did. And as the orphidnet emerges, we’ll get intelligence amplification and superhuman AI.”
“The secret ExaExa project,” mused Jil, watching the darting dots of light in the vial. “You’ve been designing these orphids all along? Sly Ond.”
“In a way, the nants designed them,” said Ond. “Before I rolled back the nants, the nants sent Nantel some insanely great code. Coherent quantum states, human language comprehension, autocatalytic morphogenesis, a layered neural net architecture for evolvable AI—the nants nailed all the hard problems.”
“But Ond—” said Nektar in a pleading tone.
“We’ve been testing the orphids for the last year to make sure there won’t be another disaster when we release them,” said Ond, raising his voice to drown out his wife. “And now even though we’re satisfied that it’s all good, the execs won’t formally pull the trigger. There’s been a lot of company politics; a lot of infighting. Truth is, Jeff Luty’s pulling strings from his hideout. Hideout, hell, I might as well tell you that Luty’s holed up in the friggin’ ExaExa labs, hiding behind our super-expensive quantum-mirrored walls. Every time I see him he bawls me out for having stopped his nants. He’s kind of losing it. But usually he gives me good advice about whatever I’m working on. He’s still brilliant, no matter what.”
“You should turn him in to the police!” said Nektar. “That man deserves to die.”
Ond looked uncomfortable. “If you knew Jeff as well as I do, you’d have some sympathy for him. He’s a lonely man. That boy Carlos who died in the model rocket accident—he was the only person Jeff ever loved. Yes, Jeff ’s obnoxious and weird, and, like I say, he’s getting nuttier all the time. Being cooped up isn’t good for him. He thinks he’s gonna invent teleportation, though who knows, he might actually do it. It’d be a shame to kill him off. Like shattering the Venus de Milo.”
“Ond,” said Nektar. “Jeff Luty wants to shatter the whole world!”
“He’s suffering enough as it is,” said Ond. “For all practical purposes, he’s living in solitary confinement. And most of the ExaExa board understands that we don’t have to listen to him. They recognize that if we do things my way, the orphids will be autonomous, incorruptible, cost free. And, in the long run, profits will emerge. I’ll tell you something else. A big downside of keeping Jeff around is that he wants to create an improved breed of nants. And, as it happens, my orphids are the best possible defense. It’s like Jeff and I are in a chess match. And right now I’m a rook and a bishop ahead. So that’s why I’ve gotten informal approval to go ahead and release the orphids.”
“Ha,” said Nektar. “Approval from yourself. You want to start the same nightmare all over again!” She tried to snatch the vial from Ond’s hands, but he kept it out of her reach. Nektar’s symmetric features were distorted by unhappiness and anger. Her voice grew louder. “Mindless machines eating everything!”
“Mommy don’t yell!” shrieked Chu.
“Chill, Nektar,” said Ond, fending her off with a lowered shoulder. “Where’s your nicotine euphoria? Believe me, these little fellows aren’t mindless. An individual orphid is roughly as smart as a talking dog. He has a petabyte of memory and he crunches at a petaflop rate. One can converse with him quite well. Watch and listen.” He said a string of numbers—a machine-coded Web address—and an orphid interface appeared within the webeyes of Chu and the four adults.
The orphids in the vial were presenting themselves as cute little cartoon faces, maybe a hundred of them, stylized yellow smileys with pink dots on their cheeks and gossamer wings coming out the sides of their heads.
“Hello, orphids,” said Jil. Bixie looked up at her curiously. To Jil, her daughter’s face looked ineffably sweet and vulnerable behind the dancing images of nanomachines.
“Hello, Jil,” sang the orphids, their voices sounding in their listeners’ earbuds.
“After I release you fellows, I want you to find all the cuttlefish in the San Francisco Bay,” Ond told the orphids. “Ride them and send a steady stream of telemetry data to, uh, ftp-dot-exaexa-dot-org-slash-merzboat.”
“Can you show us a real cuttlefish?” the orphids asked. Their massed voices were like an insect choir, the individual voices slightly off pitch from one another.
“Those are cuttlefish,” said Ond, pointing to Craigor’s holding tank. “Settle on them, and we’ll release them into the bay. Okay by you, Craigor?”
“No way,” said Craigor. “These Pharaohs took me four days to catch. Leave them alone, Ond.”
“They’re my daddy’s cuttlefish,” echoed Momotaro.
“I’ll buy them from you,” said Ond, his eyes glowing. “Market rate. The orphids will blanket your boat, too. They can map out your stuff, network it, make it interactive. That’s where the publicity for your sculpture comes in. Your assemblages will be little societies. The AI hook makes them hot.”
“Market rate,” mused Craigor. “Okay, sure.” He named a figure and Ond instantly transferred the amount. “All right!” said Craigor. “Wiretap those Pharaohs and spring them from— what Nektar said. Death row.”
“Weren’t you listening to what Ond said about the orphids doubling their numbers?” cried Nektar. “We’re doomed if he opens the vial.” She lunged at her husband. Ond danced away from his wife, keeping the orphids out of her reach, his grin a tense rictus. Chu was screaming again.
“Stop it, Ond!” exclaimed Jil. Things were spinning out of control. “I don’t want your orphids on my boat. I don’t want them on my kids.”
“They’re harmless,” said Ond. “I guarantee it. And, I’m telling you, this is gonna happen anyway. I just thought it would be fun to kick off Orphid Night in front of you guys. Be a sport, Jil. Hey, listen up, orphids, you’re our friends, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Ond, yes,” chorused the orphids. The discordant voices overlapped, making tiny, wavering beats.
“That was very nice of you to think of us, Ond,” said Jil carefully. “But I think you better take your family home now. They’re upset and you’re not yourself. Maybe you had a little too much beer. Put the orphids away.”
“I think tracking the cuttles is a great idea,” put in Craigor, half a step behind Jil. “And tagging my stuff is good, too. My assemblages can wake up and think!”
“Thank you, Craigor,” said Ond. He turned clumsily toward the cuttlefish tank. This time he didn’t see Nektar coming. She rushed him from behind, a beer bottle clutched in her hand, and she struck his wrist so hard that the vial of orphids flew free. The chaotically glowing jar rolled across the deck, past Jil and Bixie, past Craigor and Momotaro. Chu caught up with the vial and, screaming like a banshee, wrenched it open and threw it high into the air on a trajectory toward the tank.
“Stop the yelling!” yelled Chu. Perhaps he was addressing the orphids. “Make everything tidy!”
Through her webeyes, Jil saw illuminated orphid-dots spiraling out of the vial in midair, the paths forking and splitting in two. And now her webeyes overlaid the scene with a tessellated grid showing each orphid’s location. Some were zooming toward the cuttles, but others were homing in on the junk crowding the boat’s aft. Additional view-windows kept popping up as the nanomachines multiplied.
Jil hugged Bixie to her side, covering the slender girl’s dark hair with her hands, as if to keep the orphids off her. Ond bent forward, rubbing his wrist. Craigor gave Nektar a quick embrace, calming her down. And then he stared into the tank, using his webeyes to watch the orphids settle in. Momotaro stood at his father’s side. Chu lay on the deck beside the boat’s long cabin, tensely staring into the sky, soaking up orphid info from his webeyes. Nektar removed the special contact lenses from her eyes.
“Do you at least you have an ‘undo’ signal for the orphids?” Nektar asked Ond presently. “Like you did for the nants?” Only a minute had elapsed, but the world felt different. Human history had changed for good.
“Orphid computations aren’t reversible,” said Ond. “Because the physical world keeps collapsing their quantum states. Decoherence. I can’t believe you attacked me like that, Nektar.”
“I can’t believe you’re ruining the world,” snapped Nektar.
“I want you off our boat,” Jil told Ond again. “You’ve done what you came to do. And for God’s sake, don’t spread the word that you did your release right here. I don’t want cops and reporters trampling us.”
“Sorry, Jil,” replied Ond, wiggling his fingers. His wrist was okay. “This is so historic that I’m vlogging it live. It’s already on the Web. Webeyes and wireless, you know.”
Craigor hustled Ond, Nektar, and Chu onto one of the Merz Boat’s piezoplastic dinghies, which would ferry them to the dock and return on its own. The dinghy was like an oval jellyfish with a low rim around its edge. It twinkled with orphid lights.
“Watch me on the news!” called Ond from the dinghy.
***
“Are we right to just sit around?” Jil asked Craigor next. “Shouldn’t we be calling for an emergency environmental cleanup? I feel itchy all over.”
“The feds would trash our boat and it wouldn’t change anything,” said Craigor. “The genie’s out of the bottle for good.” He glanced around, scanning their surroundings with his webeyes. “Those little guys are reproducing so fast. I see thousands of them—each of them marked by a dot of light. They’re mellow, don’t you think? Look, I might as well put those cuttlefish in the bay. I mean, Ond already paid me for them. And there’s orphids all over the place anyway. What the hey, free the wizards.” He got busy with his scoop net.
Jil’s webeye grid of orphid viewpoints had become a disk-like Escher tessellation which was thousands of cells wide, with the central cells big, the outer cells tiny, and ever more new cells growing along the rim. The massed sound of so many orphids was all but unbearable.
“I hate their voices,” said Jil, half to herself. Having the voices in her head made her feel a little high, and after all her work on recovery, she’d learned to dread that feeling. Being a little high was never enough for Jil; she always wanted to go all the way into the black hole of oblivion.
“Is this better?” came a smooth baritone voice from the orphids. The many had become one.
“You actually do understand us?” Jil asked the orphids. A few of the orphid’s-eye images slewed around as Craigor carried his first dripping net of cuttles to the boat’s low gunnel and lowered them to the bay waters.
“We understand you a little bit,” said the voice of the orphids. “And we’ll get better. We wish the best for you and your family, Jil. We’ll always be grateful to you. We’ll remember your Merz Boat as our garden of Eden, our Alamogordo test site. Don’t be scared of us.”
“I’ll try,” said Jil. In the unadorned natural world, Momotaro and Bixie were cheering and laughing to see the freed cuttlefish jetting about in the shallow waters near the boat.
“We’re not gonna be setting free the Pharaohs every day,” Craigor cautioned the kids. He smiled and dipped his net into the holding tank again. “Hey, Jil, I heard what the orphids said to you. Maybe they’re gonna be okay.”
“Maybe,” said Jil, letting out a deep, shaky sigh. She poured herself a cup of hot tea. “Look at my cup,” she observed. “It’s crawling with them. An orphid every millimeter. They’re like some—some endlessly ramifying ideal language that wants to define a word for every single part of every worldly thing. A thicket of metalanguage setting the namers at an ever-greater remove from the named.” Her mind was teeming with words—it was like the orphids were making her smarter. Her hand twitched; some of her tea spilled onto the deck. “Now they’re mapping the puddle splash, bringing it under control, normalizing it into their bullshit consensus reality. Our world’s being nibbled to death by nanoducks, Craigor. We’re nanofucked.”
“Profound,” said Craigor. “Maybe we can collaborate on a show. A Web page where users find new arrangements for the Merz Boat inventory, and if they transfer a payment, I physically lug the objects into the new positions. And the orphids figure out the shortest paths. Or, wait, we get some piezoplastic sluggies to do the heavy lifting, and the orphids can guide them. I’ll just work on bringing in more great stuff; I’ll be this lovable sage and the Merz Boat can be, like, my physical blog. And you can dance and be beautiful, at the same time intoning heavy philosophical raps to give our piece some heft.”
“Men are immediately going to begin using the orphids to look at the exact intimate details of women’s bodies,” said Jil with a shudder. “Can you imagine? Ugh. No publicity for me, thanks.”
Craigor spoke no response to this. He lowered the rest of the Pharaohs into the bay. “A fisher of Merz, a fisher of men. Peace, dear cuttlefish.”
The empty dinghy swam back toward them, orphid-lit like a ferry, nosing up to its mooring on the side of the Merz Boat. Spooked by the dinghy, the skittish cuttlefish maneuvered and changed colors for safety. Their skins were thoroughly bespeckled with orphid dots outlining their bodies’ voluptuous contours.
“Voluptuous?” said Jil.
“I didn’t say that out loud, did I?” said Craigor. “Jeez, you’re picking up my subvocal mutters. This orphidnet link is like telepathy almost. I better be a good boy. Or learn how to damp down your access to my activities. Whoops, did I say that out loud too? There’s meshes all over you, Jil. In case you didn’t know.”
“Already?” said Jil, holding out her hand. She’d been ignoring the changes to herself and her family, but now she let herself see the dots on her fingers, dots on her palms, dots all over her skin. The glowing vertices were connected by faint lines with the lines forming triangles. A fine mesh of small triangles covered her knuckles; a coarser mesh spanned the back of her hand. The computational orphidnet was going to have real-time articulated models of everything and everyone—including the kids.
Yes, the orphids had peppered Momotaro and Bixie like chickenpox. Oh, this was happening way too fast. God damn that Ond. Jil knelt beside Bixie, trying to wipe one of the dots off her daughter’s smooth cheek. But it wouldn’t come loose. By way of explanation, the orphids showed her a zoomed-in schematic image of a knot of long-chain molecules: an individual orphid. They were far too tiny to dislodge.
“We’re like cuttlefish in a virtual net,” said Craigor, shaking his head. He sat down next to Jil on the deck, each parent holding one of the kids.
“Look out there,” said Jil, pointing.
The orphids were twinkling in the bay waters, on the bridges and buildings of San Francisco, and even on the foothills and mountains surrounding the bay. Jil and Craigor hadn’t really believed it when Ond had said it would only take a day for the orphids to cover Earth. But everything as far as the eye could see was already wrapped in meshes of orphid dots.
“I don’t know whether to shit or go snowblind,” said Craigor, forcing a hick chuckle. “Where does that expression come from? Like, why those two particular options?”
“I’m so scared,” said Jil in a tight voice. “I don’t know if I can do this. All these head trips. They make me want to use again. I want to turn myself off.”
“Just relax, Jil,” said Craigor. “How about the way Ond and Nektar were fighting? What a pair of lovebirds, hey?”
“I guess Chu puts them under a lot of stress,” said Jil weakly.
“Yeah,” said Craigor, patting Jil’s cheek. “I enjoy Ond, but, please, don’t be a geek and a drunken maniac. And this is the same guy who saved Earth three years ago. Weird. Did you notice the way Nektar was talking about her new friend Jose? I see an affair taking shape. I hope Ond doesn’t try and seduce you, Jil. I can tell he’s got a crush on you. Adultery is gonna be an open book, with orphids tracking every inch of everyone’s body. Maybe people will just start accepting it more.”
The world as they’d known it was over, but Craigor was gossiping as if nothing about human nature would really change. “You okay?” he said, wrapping his arm around Jil.
“Oh, Craigor,” said Jil, leaning her head on her husband’s familiar shoulder. “Always be here for me. I’d be lost without you.” Drained by shock and fear, the two of them dozed off there, sitting on the soft deck with the kids.
***
Riding ashore in the Merz Boat’s dinghy, Chu wished they could have asked Bixie to come with them. She fascinated him.
The orphidnet hookup got better and better all the way home. Chu realized that, with his eyes closed, he could still see Bixie there on her parents’ scow, laughing and playing with her brother. With orphids blanketing the world, it was like your eyes were everywhere. Chu liked seeing with his eyes closed. He could hear everything, too. The orphidnet converted the minute air-pressure vibrations of the orphid-mesh into audible sounds.
Before they got home, Chu saw police waiting at their house. He told Ond, but Ond said he wasn’t scared. When they got out of the car, one of the policemen touched Chu, and Chu screamed and acted crazy so they’d leave him alone. Chu and Nektar went in the house and Ond got in the police car. Nektar was mad; she said the cops might as well keep Ond for all she cared. She said Chu could watch video, and then she went and lay down on her bed with her pillow over her head like she always did when she was upset.
Chu didn’t bother with the video; he just lay on his back and explored the orphidnet. He saw Ond in the police car. He saw Bixie and Momotaro playing on the Merz Boat. And he swam around inside one of the cuttlefish Craigor had thrown back into the bay.
It was both dreadful and fascinating to be a cuttlefish, especially when Chu’s host began rubbing up against another cuttlefish, tangling his tentacles with hers. The cuttlefish were doing reproduction. Chu’s cuttlefish girlfriend squirted out eggs—and Chu’s cuttlefish fertilized them. His heart beat fast. After the sex, he and his cuttlefish girlfriend began eating algae off the rocks, scraping it up with their beaks. And then, all of a sudden, Chu’s cuttlefish girlfriend was gone. He jetted about looking for her, to no avail.
In the real world, Chu’s arms were hurting. Nektar was shaking him and asking him if he were having a fit. She was angry. Chu realized he’d not only been beating his arms on the floor to imitate the cuttlefish’s tentacles, he’d also been chewing on the rug with his teeth. And he’d wet his pants. He felt silly. Nektar helped him into some dry clothes. Chu promised he wouldn’t be a cuttlefish anymore, and Nektar went back to her room.
***
Nektar felt guilty about yelling at Chu for wetting his pants again. Her family life was an endless round of lose-lose. She lay back down on her bed, closed her eyes, and watched Ond arriving at the jail. But then she got distracted.
Thanks to the orphidnet, she could see the insides of all the neighbors’ houses. She’d always wondered about that Lureen Morales in the mansion at the very top of the hill. Lureen was famous for her coarse sex-vlog, Caliente. Lureen never talked to Nektar. Even though their paths crossed a few times a week, Lureen always acted like she’d never seen Nektar before in her life. Was Lureen on meds? With the slightest touch of will, Nektar was able to examine Lureen’s orphid-outlined medicine cabinet, and yes, it was loaded with prescription sudocoke. While Nektar was at it, she examined Lureen’s jewelry, her shoes, and her impressively large array of sex toys.
The thought of sex turned Nektar’s thoughts to her cute new friend Jose. Without quite knowing how, she managed to send a virtual copy of herself to Jose’s apartment on the second floor of a retrofitted yellow Victorian on Valencia Street, right across the street from Puff, the restaurant where they worked together. It was like she could fly up out of her body into the sky and then fly back down.
Jose was lying on his bed in his underwear looking totally hot. The room was smoky; Jose’s eyes were closed. He was in the orphidnet, too. Nektar followed a golden thread leading from Jose’s body to his mental location; she came up behind a wireframe outline of him and said, “Hi.”
He turned; his skin filled in; his mouth opened in a grin. For the first time, they kissed.
They were in, like, a temple. A high-domed round room with bouncy Buddhist-looking monks against the walls. The little monks weren’t human; they were like toons, wearing shallow, pointed coolie hats decorated with blinking blue and green eyes. The monks were orphidnet AIs. They were chanting.
Humans were in the virtual temple, too, adoring the new beings they were seeing in their minds. Upon a round altar in the middle of the room stood a thirty-foot shape of light, a glowing giant woman, messily dressed, Eurasian-looking, old, with narrow eyes and short greasy white hair, her head nearly scraping the high dome. She was studying the crowd, her expression a mixture of curiosity and disdain. Rather than speaking out loud, the glowing woman was projecting thoughts and words via the orphidnet. She said she was an angel.
***
“I see colored dots on everything,” Momotaro told his sister. Darkness had fallen; they were well into Orphid Night. A full moon edged over the horizon, silvering the bay waters. “Those are the orphids the grown-ups were arguing about.”
“Orphid,” said Bixie, repeatedly touching her knee with her finger. “Orphid, orphid, orphid. I’m glad they don’t bite.”
“They’re talking to us,” said Momotaro. “Can you hear?”
“They sound like teachers,” said Bixie. “Shut up, orphids. Blah blah blah.”
“Blah blah blah,” echoed Momotaro, laughing. “Can you show me the Space Pirates online video game, orphids? Oh, yeah, that’s neat. Bang! Whoosh! Budda-budda!” He aimed his fingers, shooting at toons he was seeing in the air.
“I want to see the Spice Dolls show,” said Bixie. “Ooo, there’s Kimmie Kool and Fancy Feather. Hi, girls. Are you having a party?”
***
Waking up to the kids’ chatter, Craigor understood that they were all fully immersed in the Web now. The orphids had learned to directly interface with people’s bodies and brains. He popped out his contact lenses and removed his earbud speakers and throat mike. Jil shifted, rubbed her face, opened her eyes.
“Check it out, Jil, no more Web hardware,” said Craigor. “Nice work, orphids. And how are you getting video into my head? Magnetic vortices in the occipital lobes, you say? You’re like smart lice. Wavy. And I can turn it off, I hope? Oh, I see, like that. And I have read-write access control. Awesome. Leave the pictures on for now, I’m loving them. Behold the new orphidnet interface, Jil.”
“Oh God, does this have to be real?” mumbled Jil. “I feel dizzy. No more hardware at all? I don’t like the kids having so much access.” She sat up and began stripping off her own Web gear. “Video turns kids into zombies, Craigor. And now I feel stupid for having all those joint sensors under my skin.”
“Fa-toom!” said Momotaro, cradling an invisible rocket launcher.
“More tea, Fancy?” said Bixie, holding an unseen teapot.
With a slight twitch of will, Jil and Craigor could tune their viewpoints to the virtual worlds the kids were playing in. Really quite harmless. And the orphid-beamed visual images were of very good quality. The webeye overlays had always been a little fuzzy and headachy.
“This is gonna hurt the market for my cuttlefish,” said Craigor.
“But AmphiVision will still be making screen displays. I’ll still be putting the Pharaohs on death row.”
“Don’t think that way,” said Jil. “You have fun making the cuttle traps. It’s a skill. Of course now—everything’s going to be so different. Will anyone do anything anymore? Everyone will be terminally distracted.”
“It’ll be easy to catch fish and cuttlefish,” said Craigor. “I’ll always know where they are. I can see their meshes under the boat right now. One cuttle, some rockfish, and a salmon.”
“Yeah, but what if the fish are watching you?”
“I can always outsmart a fish,” said Craigor. “Give me some credit, Jil. And as far as work goes, people will still do things anyway. Humans are busybodies.”
“Karma yoga,” said Jil. “Hey, orphids, can you stop displaying all those triumphant halo dots? They bother me; it’s like having to see every single germ I come across. That’s better. Now, listen up, kids, Mommy and Daddy don’t want you playing computer games all day long.”
“Leave them alone for now, Mother Hen,” said Craigor. “Let’s check out the news.”
The news was all about the orphids, of course. ExaExa was blaming Ond Lutter; he was in police custody now. ExaExa said the orphid release had taken place on a San Francisco Bay squid-fishing scow named Merz Boat, and here were some pictures.
Jil and Craigor glanced up to see buzzing dragonfly cameras against the night sky, their lenses like glowing eyes. Shit.
“At least they’re not spraying solvents on us,” said Craigor.
“The authorities considered that,” said the baritone orphidnet voice in their heads. “But it’s too late. We orphids have already blanketed the whole West Coast. And great numbers of us are traveling overseas in the jet streams.” A second later, the newscaster echoed the same words.
The news imagery segued to Ond, on the steps of the hulking Bryant Street jail in San Francisco, giving a press conference to a crowd of reporters and a hostile mob. To satisfy the public’s need to know more about the ongoing events of Orphid Night, the sheriff was letting Ond talk for as long as he liked, lit by an arch of glo-lights.
***
Ond was verbose, geekly, defiant. The beer and tobacco had worn off. He was speaking clearly, selling the notion of the orphidnet.
“What with the petabyte and petaflop capacity of each orphid, the full ten-sextillion-strong orphidnet will boast ten ubbabytes of memory being processed at a ten ubbaflop rate—ubba meaning ten to the thirty-sixth power,” said Ond to the crowd by the jailhouse steps, relishing the chance to inflict techie jargon upon them. “Yes, the orphidnet is less powerful than was the Martian nant-sphere, but even so, the orphidnet’s total power exceeds the square of an individual human’s exabyte exaflop level. My former company’s name was well chosen: ExaExa. Put more directly, the orphidnet has the computational clout that you’d get by covering the surface of the Earth with a dogpile of humans mounded a hundred deep.”
“How will the orphidnet impact the average citizen?” asked a reporter.
“Dive in and find out,” urged Ond. “The orphidnet is all around you. Anyone can dip into it at any time. It’ll be teeming with artificial intelligences soon, and I’m predicting they’ll like helping people. Why wouldn’t they? People are interesting and fun.”
“What about the less-privileged people who don’t have specialized Web-access gear?”
“The orphids are the interface,” said Ond. “Nobody needs hardware anymore. We’re putting people first and building Gaia’s mind.”
“That’s the ExaExa slogan,” remarked another reporter. “But they fired you and disavowed responsibility for your actions.”
“I’ve been fired before,” said Ond. “It doesn’t matter. Exa-Exa’s real problem with me was that I released the orphids before they could figure out a way to charge for orphidnet access. But it’s gonna be free. And, listen to me, listen. The orphids are our friends. They’re the best nanotechnology we’re going to get. I’m counting on them to protect us from a possible return of the nants. Remember: Jeff Luty is still at large.”
“How soon do you expect to be freed from prison?”
“I’m leaving now,” said Ond. “I wouldn’t be safe in jail.” Plugged into the orphidnet as he was, with a full awareness of the exact position of everyone’s limbs, and with the emerging orphidnet AIs helping him, Ond was able to simply walk off through the crowd.
In the crowd were some very angry people who truly wished Ond harm. After all, he’d forced Earth away from her old state; single-handedly he’d made the decision to change everyone’s lives—possibly forever. Ond was in a very real danger of being stabbed, beaten to death, or hung from a lamppost.
But whenever someone reached for him, he was just out of their grasp. For once in his life he was nimble and graceful. Perhaps if the others had been so keenly tuned into the orphidnet as Ond, they could have caught him. But probably not. The orphids were, after all, quite fond of Ond.
A grinning guy at the back of the crowd gave Ond a bicycle; Ond recognized him as a friend, a fellow nanotech enthusiast named Hector Rojas. Ond mounted Hector’s bike and disappeared from the view of the still-coagulating lynch mob. Guided by the all-seeing orphids, Ond cut through the exact right alleys to avoid the people and the cars.
But there was no way to avoid the dragonfly cameras. Alone on the moonlit side streets of San Francisco, Ond asked the orphids to disable all the dragonfly cameras following him. The devices clattered to the street like dead sparrows. Next Ond had the orphids systematically change every existing database reference to his home’s address. It was easy for the orphids to reach into all the world’s computers.
But when he asked the orphids to make him invisible on the orphidnet, they balked. Yes, they would stop broadcasting his name, but the integrity of the world-spanning mesh of orphids was absolutely inviolable. Ond recalled an ExaExa design meeting where he himself had insisted that the orphid operating system include this very principle of Incorruptible Ubiquity.
Before long, people would be figuring out how to track Ond in real time. And by dawn there’d be no safe place on Earth for him.
CHAPTER 4
M eanwhile, Chu was lying on the rug, being careful not to touch the wet spots he’d made. He was mad at Nektar for yelling at him.
Eyes closed, he was studying the new living things in the orphidnet: shiny disks on short thick stalks, with the disk edges curled under. Virtual mushrooms! Each mushroom had six or seven eyes on top, and the fatter mushrooms had baby mushrooms growing out of their sides. Some were boys and some were girls. They were cute and friendly—and glad to talk to Chu. When he asked where they came from, they said they were emergent orphidnet AIs and that people’s thoughts were their favorite thing to look at. They spoke really well, although often their thoughts came across in fatter chunks than just sentences and words.
Chu steered the conversation around to cuttlefish. One of the cartoony mushrooms said, “Look,” and he showed Chu the cuttle-data flowing to ftp.exaexa.org/merzboat. Chu decided to analyze the data himself, with the orphidnet AIs helping him.
Pretty soon he noticed something interesting about the cuttlefish. Every so often, one of them would totally disappear.
Chu wondered how this could be. One of the mushroom AIs obligingly did a quick search of all the science papers in the world and found a theory that there’s another world parallel to ours, less than a decillionth of a meter away, and that objects can quantum-tunnel back and forth between the worlds, thus seeming to disappear or, on the other hand, emerge from nothing. The paper called the worlds “branes,” like in “membranes.”
“When I set something down it always stays put,” mused Chu.
“People collapse the quantum states of things they look at,” said the mushroom AI, wobbling the cap of her head. “The watched pot never boils. Objects stay put in the presence of a classical observer.”
“Sometimes I do lose things,” allowed Chu. “I guess they could disappear when I look away.”
“When things are on their own, they can sneak and quantum-tunnel to the other brane,” agreed the mushroom. “Or maybe someone from the other brane comes over here and takes them.”
“People in the other world are taking our cuttlefish?” said Chu. “But we’re using the orphids to watch the cuttlefish all the time. So they should stay put.”
“Orphids are quantum computers. They don’t observe; they entangle. An orphid isn’t like some bossy schoolmarm who keeps everyone in their seats until she looks away. It’s perfectly possible for an orphid-tagged cuttlefish to quantum-tunnel to a parallel brane.”
“What’s the name of the other world?” asked Chu.
“What would you like to call it?” asked the mushroom. “You’re the one discovering it.”
“Let’s call it the Hibrane,” said Chu. “And we can be the Lobrane. Can we see a Hibrane person catching a cuttlefish?”
“Let’s try,” said the mushroom. “Aha.” A moment later she was showing Chu some shiny figures like big, slow-moving people made of light. “They’re popping in and out of our world all the time!” exclaimed the mushroom. “And our good, smart, quantum-computing orphids are landing on them. No more sneaking. Look, look, there’s a Hibraner taking a cuttlefish! He’s slow, but he puts himself in just the right place. He’s a cuttlefisher! It’s lucky we looked at the cuttlefish data stream.”
“My good idea,” said Chu.
The orphidnet showed him scenes of glowing figures that oozed about, cunningly managing to catch hold of the rapid but bewildered cuttlefish. And in other scenes the gauzy, monumental figures displayed themselves to little groups of worshipful virtual humans. Chu glimpsed his mother in one of these worship groups, but then she disappeared.
Chu watched the little congregation a bit longer anyway. The Hibraner in the center was a giant old woman of light, silently moving in slow motion. Linking his virtual self into the site, Chu realized the woman was speaking via the orphidnet. She said she was from a better world where people didn’t use computers and didn’t endanger their homes with nants. Noticing Chu, she pointed at him, which made him uneasy. He pulled away, although he would have liked to find out where his mother had gone.
“The Hibraners have always been around,” said the smart mushroom who was guiding Chu. “I’m data-mining the info. People have never been sure if Hibraners are real; they called them fairies or spirits or angels. They’re out of quantum phase with your reality; people just see them as patches in their peripheral vision. The Hibraners may sometimes have caused people to hear voices or see visions. But now they’re easy to see via the orphidnet.”
“Can I go to the Hibrane and visit?” asked Chu. That would teach Nektar a lesson for yelling at him about wetting his pants while he was being a cuttlefish. He’d run away to another world.
“Maybe,” said the smart mushroom. “Traveling to the Hibrane would be an—encryption problem. You’d get your mind into a special state and encrypt yourself into a superposition capable of jumping you to the Hibrane.”
“Encryption!” exclaimed Chu. “I like breaking codes. Tell me more.”
“To travel between the two worlds, a Hibraner turns off self-observation and spreads out into an ambiguous superposed state, and then she observes herself in such a way so as to collapse down into the other brane.”
“Which part of that is encryption?” asked Chu.
“The encryption lies in the way in which the Hibraner does the self-observation,” said the mushroom. “We can view it as being a quantum-mechanical operator based on a specific numerical pattern. And that would be the encryption code. Think of the code as the orientation of a higher-dimensional vector connecting the branes. It’s a very short distance, but you have to travel in the right direction. I believe the direction code is over a million digits long.”
“Goody,” said Chu. He’d studied an online tutorial on cryptography this summer. “Let’s figure out that code right now. We’ll use a timing-channel attack.”
“It’s fun working with you,” said the mushroom.
***
Ond took a circuitous route toward his house in the Dolores Heights district of San Francisco. Whenever his enemies got too close, the orphids warned him.
Meanwhile the new world of the orphidnet was opening up around him. Every word, thought, or feeling brought along a rich association of footnotes and commentary. He could see, after a fashion, with his eyes closed. Every single object was physically modeled in the orphidnet: not just the road around him but also the interiors of the houses, the people inside them, the contents of the people’s pockets, and their bodies under their clothes.
Ond wasn’t alone in the orphidnet. There were other people, quite a few of them, many wanting to harangue, threaten, interview, or congratulate him. And, just as Ond had hoped, artificial intelligences were emerging in the orphidnet as spontaneously as von Karman vortex streets of eddies in a brook, as naturally as three-dimensional Belousov-Zhabotinsky scrolls in an excitable chemical medium. Just like the BZ patterns in the Martian nant-sphere. Nobody had ever really talked to those nant-based AIs, but these orphidnet guys seemed approachable and even friendly. Ond decided to call them beezies.
The beezies were offering Ond their information services. They wanted to share whatever intellectual adventures he could cook up. The scroll-shaped AIs looked like colored jellyfish, and they spoke in compound glyphs that Ond’s brain turned into words.
It was a pleasant night, very warm, the first day of September, with a bright full moon. As Ond rode the bicycle and dodged his pursuers, he began organizing a workspace for himself in the orphidnet. He visualized himself as a Christmas-tree trunk with his thoughts like branches. With the orphidnet agents helping him, he effortlessly added all his digital documents, e-mails, and blogs to the tree construct, which now took on a life of its own, automatically answering some of the questions people were messaging him. Ond busied himself hanging links to favorite bits of info on his branches—trimming the mind-tree. He was having fun.
Passing the old, brick Mission Street Armory a mile from his house, it occurred to Ond to see how things were going at home. It would be horrible if his enemies got there before him. Thank God the orphids had hidden his house’s address.
In his mind’s eye, Ond saw his family in the orphidnet. Nektar was lying on their bed—sulking? No, she was in the orphidnet. Nektar didn’t know about setting up a privacy barrier; Ond was able to follow her path. He found virtual Nektar doing something with her friend Jose. Ond didn’t like seeing his wife with the swarthy, virile chef.
Nektar and Jose were attending some kind of virtual gathering, an impromptu religious service with a choir of beezies surrounding a luminous womanlike form upon an altar. The glowing being was definitely conscious, but she seemed neither like a human nor like an orphidnet AI. A third kind of mind? Other bright forms lay in every direction, drifting amid the fringes of his thoughts—
Just then three virtual humans plowed into Ond’s mind-tree, distracting him. The first two wanted to kill him, but the third was his scientist-friend Mitch from MIT, already in the orphidnet from the East Coast. Ond had an intense and rewarding chat with Mitch; bandwidth was so much higher in the orphidnet than in normal human conversation. Mitch formulated a theory about how the emerging orphidnet minds would scale up. Quite effortlessly, Ond and Mitch set some obliging orphidnet agents in motion to gather data to test Mitch’s thesis— and awaited the results.
***
Although Nektar appreciated the theatrical setting of the virtual domed temple, she didn’t like the so-called angel at its center. She’d never liked religion. Just after she’d left the family home in Arizona for UCLA, Nektar’s mother, Karen Lundquist, had given the family’s savings to a TV evangelist. Nektar had to go up to her neck in debt to finish her degree. At least Ond had paid off the debt.
The old angel made molasses-slow gestures, all the while messaging pictures and words via the orphidnet. Her name was Gladax. She said her people were as gods compared to Nektar’s race—which seemed a little dubious given that the angel was wearing dark green sweatpants and a cheap T-shirt with a dragon on it. She was dressed like a homeless person you’d see in a laundromat, although somehow Nektar could tell that the giant old woman was really quite well off. She was stingy rather than poor.
She said that her people had been visiting Earth for centuries, although this happened to be her first trip. She said she’d come because now the two races could talk, thanks to the orphids, and she wanted to be in on the big night. Also she had a message to share. Nektar’s people should learn to live with no digital technology at all. She said there was a higher path—she called it lazy eight. To Nektar, Gladax’s admonitions sounded like the same line of crap she’d always heard in church: give up something you like for something you can’t imagine.
Nektar must have been unconsciously messaging her thoughts to the angel, for now the angel turned her great slow head to stare at her. The angel messaged that although she did like to dress economically, she was in fact the mayor of San Francisco in her world. The angel added that she was seventy-two years old, and that she would give Nektar some good advice. Nektar seemed to amuse her.
“Take your boyfriend and enjoy your bodies, little doubter,” Gladax prescribed, moving her hand in a languid trail that sent a shower of energy-sparks to settle down upon Nektar and Jose. Her words came across deep and slow, with a musical Asian accent. “Wake up from the machines.”
The sparks energized Jose; he stopped staring at the angel and tugged Nektar into a side room whose walls were covered by marblelike slabs patterned in slowly flowing scrolls and swirls. Nektar and Jose laid down and made love. It was over too soon, like a wet dream.
The marble room morphed into Jose’s apartment. The real Jose was sitting up, eyes open, trying to keep talking to Nektar. Jose was puzzled why Nektar wasn’t physically there. He began freaking out. He couldn’t remember things right. He said that if he’d seen an angel, maybe that meant he should kill himself and go to heaven for good. Nektar messaged him to please wait, she was going to come to his apartment in the flesh, and that he hadn’t felt anything like the real heaven yet.
And then she too was sitting up, eyes open, alone in her bedroom. She couldn’t remember all the details of what had just happened. But she knew two things. She needed to be with Jose in his apartment on Valencia Street. And she needed to leave Ond forever. She would never forgive him for ruining the cozy, womany real world and making life into a giant computer game. Quickly she packed a suitcase with her essentials. She felt odd and remote, as if her head were inside a glass bubble. She didn’t want to face what she was about to do. Better to think of Jose.
Jose wasn’t a world-wrecker. She could save him; together they could make a new life. Why had he wanted to kill himself just now? A strong, sexy man like that. Nektar shook her head, feeling that same mixture of tenderness and contempt that she always felt when confronted by men’s wild, unrealistic ideas. She’d give Jose something to live for. He’d appreciate her. Ond wouldn’t miss her one bit.
But, oh, oh, oh, what about Chu? Leaving her bedroom, Nektar regarded her son, lying on the rug. He wasn’t trembling anymore; he looked content, his eyes closed, his lips moving. The orphidnet was catnip for him. If she interrupted him, he’d probably have a tantrum. Was it really possible to leave him here?
She leaned close to kiss Chu good-bye. Little Chu, her own flesh, how could she abandon him? He twisted away, muttering about numbers and cuttlefish. Oh, he’d do fine with Ond; he was much more like Ond than like Nektar. Ond would be home any minute to watch over him.
The invisible bubble around Nektar’s head felt very tight. If she didn’t leave right now, she was going to lose her mind. Tears wetting her face, she ran out to her car and headed for Jose. She passed Ond on his bike without even slowing down. Hurry home, Ond, and take care of our Chu. I can’t do it anymore. I’m bad. I’m sorry. Good-bye.
A mob of some kind was blocking the road two blocks downhill. Nektar went down a side street to avoid the jam.
***
While Ond and his scientist friend Mitch waited for the beezies to report back with information about the upper levels of the orphidnet, Ond sent a virtual self to check on Nektar. She wasn’t in that cultish group gathering anymore. She and Jose were in a marble room and—Ond was interrupted again. A real-world dog was chasing his bike, barking and baring his teeth as if he meant to bite Ond’s calf. Ond screamed and snapped fully into the material plane. He had a phobia about dogs. He hopped off the bike, nearly falling on his face. Frantically he began throwing gravel at the brute, which was sufficient to send him skulking back into the shadows. Standing there, Ond had the strange realization that he could hardly remember any of the things he’d just been doing in the orphidnet. The memories weren’t in his head; they were out—there. Just now Nektar had been doing—what? And Ond had been talking to—who? When he was offline, Ond’s memories of the orphidnet were like Web links without a browser to open them.
On his bike, Ond let his mind expand again. Ah, yes, his investigations with Mitch. The results were coming in. There was indeed an upward cascade of intelligences taking place in the orphidnet; each eddy was a part of a larger swirl, up through a few dozen levels, and ending with an inscrutable orphidnetspanning super-beezie at the top. Quite wonderful.
As for those luminous humanoid beings—the AIs now reported that these were so-called angels from a parallel sheet of reality that had recently been dubbed the Hibrane. The best current models indicated the higher-space distance to the Hibrane must be about a thirtieth of a vatometer, that is, 0.03 decillionths of a meter. Due to the Randall–de Sitter interbrane warp factor, Hibraners at this remove would be scaled six times larger than regular humans and would move six times slower.
In addition, the Hibraners’ quantum phases were almost totally orthogonal to ours; this meant that Hibraners barely interacted with normal light or matter, which in turn explained why hardly anyone had noticed them before the orphids had begun sticking to them. Viewing alien angels in the orphidnet seemed both mind-boggling and natural. It made a kind of sense that the quantum-computing mental space of the orphidnet could serve as a meeting ground between two orders of being.
But before Ond could begin considering this more deeply, he was distracted by a news feed saying that the courts had dropped charges against him. The orphidnet beezies proudly told him they’d hacked the system to get Ond out of trouble. But there was still the matter of the torch-bearing lynch mob pushing toward Ond’s current location. By now, even the dimmest bulbs had figured out how to see Ond via the orphidnet.
An urgent message popped up from Hector Rojas, the guy who’d lent Ond the bicycle. Hector was on his way in his car to offer Ond a fresh means of escape.
Ond pumped his bike up the hill toward home.
***
Chu’s working hypothesis was that the quantum-mechanical operator at the heart of the angels’ world-to-world jumping technique involved raising a numerical representation of a given object, such as a cuttlefish, to a certain exponential power K, producing an encrypted result of the form cuttlefish K . Chu knew all about this style of encryption from the online cryptography tutorial he’d studied. The actual value of K was the secret code needed to break the encryption.
In search of K, Chu and the mushrooms delved into the ftp.exaexa.org/merzboat data stream. First of all, they figured out how to represent each of the disappeared cephalopods as a binary number. And then they studied exactly how long the encryption of each missing cuttlefish had taken. A delicate web of number theory led back from the time intervals to the bits of K, for the 0 bits of K munged faster than the 1 bits did. This timing-channel attack was a big problem, a heavy crunch, but the orphidnet made it feasible.
And pretty soon Chu had the integer K tidily laid out as a pattern in the orphidnet. With access to K, he now had some hope of jumping back and forth between the two worlds.
Written as a decimal number, K turned out, by the way, to be over three million digits long, having 3,141,573 digits, to be precise. Chu relished the fact that the orphidnet allowed him to visualize a gigundo number like that, and to smoothly revolve it in his mind. He was starting to realize that, while he was online, a lot of his thinking was happening outside of his physical brain.
For the sake of elegance, Chu and the AIs transformed the giant code number K into a picture and a sound: blue spaghetti with chimes. And in the course of the transformation, they crushed the code from millions of digits down to just a few thousand bits. But even this condensed pattern was too big to fit conveniently into Chu’s brain without his carrying out some time-consuming work of memorization. For now, when he “looked” at the pattern, he was really accessing a link to a secure orphidnet storage location. Chu gloated over the link, happy with the knowing. Although, hmm, given a little time, maybe he could find a pattern of just a few hundred bits that would allow him to generate the thousands-of-bits’ worth of chimes and blue spaghetti that in turn generated the original three-million-digit jump-code.
A gauzy shape crept into the room, bright and insistent, projecting an old woman’s voice via the orphidnet. She was a Hibraner, the same one Chu had seen in that temple where Nektar was.
“I’m Gladax,” messaged the big angel, her voice singing in Chu’s head. She was lying on her stomach to fit her head and shoulders into the living room. She was still wearing that crummy T-shirt with the blurry dragon. “The mayor of San Francisco in what you call Hibrane. One reason I’m here is to warn little troublemakers like you. Don’t go spreading around our jump-code, Chu. The last thing I want is a jitsy rat-plague of your peoples’ nasty machines. Really, you Lobraners act like you want to be wind-up toys. Don’t be a dummy. Give me access to your brain so I can erase that jump-code you stole.”
“No!” exclaimed Chu, battening down his mind.
The angel held up her sallow, knobby index finger and glared at Chu. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she said. “I’m sure you’re a very nice little boy. But you have to give me the jump-code now.”
Still Chu refused. Looking grim, Gladax extended a ray from her finger. Chu sat up, but Gladax was all around him. She poked the ray into his skull; it slid in like a skewer into butter; Chu froze. Gladax began slowly feeling around the core of his brain, trying to reach the link to his orphidnet storage location. Chu began twitching all over. Messaging that she was sorry, Gladax kept on all the same. Chu found his voice and screamed for Nektar. But she wasn’t home.
***
As Ond neared the house, he could see the lynch mob only a block behind him. Feeling for Nektar in the orphidnet, he was surprised to discover that she’d left home in her car and had driven right past him and, for that matter, past the mob. He hadn’t noticed. And now when he messaged her, she told him she was on her way to be in the physical presence of her friend Jose—and that she was leaving him for good. Before he could say anything, she’d closed the connection.
For the first time, Ond accepted that he might have made a mistake in releasing the orphids.
In his house at last, Ond found little Chu convulsing on the living room floor, with a white-hair