by Rudy Rucker
“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 fe
el 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.
