Текст книги "Postsingular"

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Further information about Postsingular can be found at www.rudyrucker.com/postsingular.

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Publication Information

POSTSINGULAR is Copyright (c) 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.

The electronic version of the text is distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative License. Go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0 to see a full description of the license. In brief, the license has the following terms. You are free * to Share – that is, to copy, distribute and transmit the work under the following three conditions. * 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. * Noncommercial . You may not use this work for commercial purposes. * 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.

This license specification supersedes any license specification made prior to November 4, 2007.

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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Contents

PART I

Ignition

Nant Day

Orphid Night

Chu's Knot

PART II

The Big Pig Posse

Nektar's Beetles

The Grill in the Wall

PART III

Thuy's Metanovel

The Attack Shoons

The Ark of the Nants

PART IV

The Hibrane

Lazy Eight

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PART I CHAPTER 1

Ignition

Two 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

Nant Day

Little 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.