by Rudy Rucker
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 webeyes. 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 webeyes 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 old-timey 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—”
