Текст книги "Postsingular"

Автор книги: Rudy Rucker

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

"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

Orphid Night

Running 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."