Postsingular

by Rudy Rucker

  “I’m going to put our meat on the grill now,” Craigor told Chu. “Want to watch and make sure nothing touches your pork medallions?”

  “That goes without saying,” said Chu. “But I’m not done listing the, uh—” Bixie, still slouching beside Jil’s chair, had just stuck out her tongue at Chu, which made Chu stumble uncertainly to a halt.

  “Just e-mail me the list,” said Craigor with a wink at Bixie. But then, seeing Chu’s crushed expression, he softened. “Oh, go ahead, tell me now. And no more rude faces, Bixie.”

  “Please don’t cook any cuttlefish,” said Chu.

  “We aren’t gonna bother those bad boys at all,” said Craigor soothingly. “They’re too valuable to eat. Hey, did you notice the fluorescent plastic car tires I got this week?” He glanced over at Nektar to check that she was appreciating how kind he was to her son.

  “Yes,” said Chu. And then he recited the rest of his list while Craigor finished grilling.

  The four adults and three children ate their meal, enjoying the red and gold sunset. “So how is the cuttlefish biz?” Ond asked as they worked through the pan of satsuma tiramisu that Nektar had brought for dessert.

  “The license thing is coming to a head,” said Jil. “Those electronic forms we were talking about. I’ve been trying to do them myself, but the feds’ sites are all buggy and crashing and losing our inputs. It’s like they want us to fail.”

  “I used to think the feds micromanaged independent fishermen like me so that they could tell the public they’re doing something about invasive species,” said Craigor. “But now I think they want to drive me out of business so they can sell my license to a big company that makes campaign contributions.”

  “That’s where my new tech comes in,” said Ond. “We label the cuttlefish with radio-frequency tracking devices and let them report on themselves. Like bar codes or RFIDs, but better.”

  “It’s not like I get my hands on the cuttles until I actually trap them,” said Craigor. “So how would I label them? They’re smart enough that it’d actually be hard to trap the same one twice.”

  “What if the tags could find the cuttlefish?” said Ond. Pink and grinning, he glanced around the circle of faces, then reached into his pocket. “Introducing the orphids,” he said, holding up a little transparent plastic vial. Etched into one side were the stylized beetle and flowing cursive letters of the ExaExa logo. “My big surprise.” Whatever was in the vial was too small to see with the naked eye, but Jil’s webeyes were displaying tiny balls of light, little haloes around objects in rapid motion. “Orphids are to bar codes as velociraptors were to trilobites,” continued Ond. “The orphids will change the world.”

  “Not another nanomachine release!” exclaimed Nektar, jumping to her feet. “You promised never again, Ond!”

  “They’re not nants, never,” said Ond, his tongue a bit thick with the beer and tobacco. “Orphids good, nants bad. Orphids self-reproduce using nothing but dust floating in the air. They’re not destructive. Orphids are territorial; they keep a certain distance from each other. They’ll cover Earth’s surface, yes, but only down to one or two orphids per square millimeter. They’re like little surveyors; they make meshes on things. They’ll double their numbers every few minutes at first, gradually slowing down, and after a day, the population will plateau and stop growing. You’ll see a few million of them on your skin, and maybe ten sextillion orphids on Earth’s whole surface. From then on, they only reproduce enough to maintain that same density. You might say the orphids have a conscience, a desire to protect the environment. They’ll actually hunt down and eradicate any rival nanomachines that anyone tries to unleash.”

  “Sell it, Ond,” said Craigor, grinning at Nektar.

  “Orphids use quantum computing; they propel themselves with electrostatic fields; they understand natural language; and they’re networked via quantum entanglement,” continued Ond. “The orphids will communicate with us much better than the nants ever did. And as the orphidnet emerges, we’ll get intelligence amplification and superhuman AI.”

  “The secret ExaExa project,” mused Jil, watching the darting dots of light in the vial. “You’ve been designing these orphids all along? Sly Ond.”

  “In a way, the nants designed them,” said Ond. “Before I rolled back the nants, the nants sent Nantel some insanely great code. Coherent quantum states, human language comprehension, autocatalytic morphogenesis, a layered neural net architecture for evolvable AI—the nants nailed all the hard problems.”

  “But Ond—” said Nektar in a pleading tone.

  “We’ve been testing the orphids for the last year to make sure there won’t be another disaster when we release them,” said Ond, raising his voice to drown out his wife. “And now even though we’re satisfied that it’s all good, the execs won’t formally pull the trigger. There’s been a lot of company politics; a lot of infighting. Truth is, Jeff Luty’s pulling strings from his hideout. Hideout, hell, I might as well tell you that Luty’s holed up in the friggin’ ExaExa labs, hiding behind our super-expensive quantum-mirrored walls. Every time I see him he bawls me out for having stopped his nants. He’s kind of losing it. But usually he gives me good advice about whatever I’m working on. He’s still brilliant, no matter what.”

  “You should turn him in to the police!” said Nektar. “That man deserves to die.”

  Ond looked uncomfortable. “If you knew Jeff as well as I do, you’d have some sympathy for him. He’s a lonely man. That boy Carlos who died in the model rocket accident—he was the only person Jeff ever loved. Yes, Jeff’s obnoxious and weird, and, like I say, he’s getting nuttier all the time. Being cooped up isn’t good for him. He thinks he’s gonna invent teleportation, though who knows, he might actually do it. It’d be a shame to kill him off. Like shattering the Venus de Milo.”

  “Ond,” said Nektar. “Jeff Luty wants to shatter the whole world!”

  “He’s suffering enough as it is,” said Ond. “For all practical purposes, he’s living in solitary confinement. And most of the ExaExa board understands that we don’t have to listen to him. They recognize that if we do things my way, the orphids will be autonomous, incorruptible, cost free. And, in the long run, profits will emerge. I’ll tell you something else. A big downside of keeping Jeff around is that he wants to create an improved breed of nants. And, as it happens, my orphids are the best possible defense. It’s like Jeff and I are in a chess match. And right now I’m a rook and a bishop ahead. So that’s why I’ve gotten informal approval to go ahead and release the orphids.”

  “Ha,” said Nektar. “Approval from yourself. You want to start the same nightmare all over again!” She tried to snatch the vial from Ond’s hands, but he kept it out of her reach. Nektar’s symmetric features were distorted by unhappiness and anger. Her voice grew louder. “Mindless machines eating everything!”

  “Mommy don’t yell!” shrieked Chu.

  “Chill, Nektar,” said Ond, fending her off with a lowered shoulder. “Where’s your nicotine euphoria? Believe me, these little fellows aren’t mindless. An individual orphid is roughly as smart as a talking dog. He has a petabyte of memory and he crunches at a petaflop rate. One can converse with him quite well. Watch and listen.” He said a string of numbers—a machine-coded Web address—and an orphid interface appeared within the webeyes of Chu and the four adults.

  The orphids in the vial were presenting themselves as cute little cartoon faces, maybe a hundred of them, stylized yellow smileys with pink dots on their cheeks and gossamer wings coming out the sides of their heads.

  “Hello, orphids,” said Jil. Bixie looked up at her curiously. To Jil, her daughter’s face looked ineffably sweet and vulnerable behind the dancing images of nanomachines.

  “Hello, Jil,” sang the orphids, their voices sounding in their listeners’ earbuds.

  “After I release you fellows, I want you to find all the cuttlefish in the San Francisco Bay,” Ond told the orphids. “Ride them and send a
steady stream of telemetry data to, uh, ftp-dot-exaexa-dot-org-slash-merzboat.”

  “Can you show us a real cuttlefish?” the orphids asked. Their massed voices were like an insect choir, the individual voices slightly off pitch from one another.

  “Those are cuttlefish,” said Ond, pointing to Craigor’s holding tank. “Settle on them, and we’ll release them into the bay. Okay by you, Craigor?”

  “No way,” said Craigor. “These Pharaohs took me four days to catch. Leave them alone, Ond.”

  “They’re my daddy’s cuttlefish,” echoed Momotaro.

  “I’ll buy them from you,” said Ond, his eyes glowing. “Market rate. The orphids will blanket your boat, too. They can map out your stuff, network it, make it interactive. That’s where the publicity for your sculpture comes in. Your assemblages will be little societies. The AI hook makes them hot.”

  “Market rate,” mused Craigor. “Okay, sure.” He named a figure and Ond instantly transferred the amount. “All right!” said Craigor. “Wiretap those Pharaohs and spring them from—what Nektar said. Death row.”

  “Weren’t you listening to what Ond said about the orphids doubling their numbers?” cried Nektar. “We’re doomed if he opens the vial.” She lunged at her husband. Ond danced away from his wife, keeping the orphids out of her reach, his grin a tense rictus. Chu was screaming again.

  “Stop it, Ond!” exclaimed Jil. Things were spinning out of control. “I don’t want your orphids on my boat. I don’t want them on my kids.”

  “They’re harmless,” said Ond. “I guarantee it. And, I’m telling you, this is gonna happen anyway. I just thought it would be fun to kick off Orphid Night in front of you guys. Be a sport, Jil. Hey, listen up, orphids, you’re our friends, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, Ond, yes,” chorused the orphids. The discordant voices overlapped, making tiny, wavering beats.

  “That was very nice of you to think of us, Ond,” said Jil carefully. “But I think you better take your family home now. They’re upset and you’re not yourself. Maybe you had a little too much beer. Put the orphids away.”

  “I think tracking the cuttles is a great idea,” put in Craigor, half a step behind Jil. “And tagging my stuff is good, too. My assemblages can wake up and think!”

  “Thank you, Craigor,” said Ond. He turned clumsily toward the cuttlefish tank. This time he didn’t see Nektar coming. She rushed him from behind, a beer bottle clutched in her hand, and she struck his wrist so hard that the vial of orphids flew free. The chaotically glowing jar rolled across the deck, past Jil and Bixie, past Craigor and Momotaro. Chu caught up with the vial and, screaming like a banshee, wrenched it open and threw it high into the air on a trajectory toward the tank.

  “Stop the yelling!” yelled Chu. Perhaps he was addressing the orphids. “Make everything tidy!”

  Through her webeyes, Jil saw illuminated orphid-dots spiraling out of the vial in midair, the paths forking and splitting in two. And now her webeyes overlaid the scene with a tessellated grid showing each orphid’s location. Some were zooming toward the cuttles, but others were homing in on the junk crowding the boat’s aft. Additional view-windows kept popping up as the nanomachines multiplied.

  Jil hugged Bixie to her side, covering the slender girl’s dark hair with her hands, as if to keep the orphids off her. Ond bent forward, rubbing his wrist. Craigor gave Nektar a quick embrace, calming her down. And then he stared into the tank, using his webeyes to watch the orphids settle in. Momotaro stood at his father’s side. Chu lay on the deck beside the boat’s long cabin, tensely staring into the sky, soaking up orphid info from his webeyes. Nektar removed the special contact lenses from her eyes.

  “Do you at least you have an ‘undo’ signal for the orphids?” Nektar asked Ond presently. “Like you did for the nants?” Only a minute had elapsed, but the world felt different. Human history had changed for good.

  “Orphid computations aren’t reversible,” said Ond. “Because the physical world keeps collapsing their quantum states. Decoherence. I can’t believe you attacked me like that, Nektar.”

  “I can’t believe you’re ruining the world,” snapped Nektar.

  “I want you off our boat,” Jil told Ond again. “You’ve done what you came to do. And for God’s sake, don’t spread the word that you did your release right here. I don’t want cops and reporters trampling us.”

  “Sorry, Jil,” replied Ond, wiggling his fingers. His wrist was okay. “This is so historic that I’m vlogging it live. It’s already on the Web. Webeyes and wireless, you know.”

  Craigor hustled Ond, Nektar, and Chu onto one of the Merz Boat’s piezoplastic dinghies, which would ferry them to the dock and return on its own. The dinghy was like an oval jellyfish with a low rim around its edge. It twinkled with orphid lights.

  “Watch me on the news!” called Ond from the dinghy.

  “Are we right to just sit around?” Jil asked Craigor next. “Shouldn’t we be calling for an emergency environmental cleanup? I feel itchy all over.”

  “The feds would trash our boat and it wouldn’t change anything,” said Craigor. “The genie’s out of the bottle for good.” He glanced around, scanning their surroundings with his webeyes. “Those little guys are reproducing so fast. I see thousands of them—each of them marked by a dot of light. They’re mellow, don’t you think? Look, I might as well put those cuttlefish in the bay. I mean, Ond already paid me for them. And there’s orphids all over the place anyway. What the hey, free the wizards.” He got busy with his scoop net.

  Jil’s webeye grid of orphid viewpoints had become a disk-like Escher tessellation which was thousands of cells wide, with the central cells big, the outer cells tiny, and ever more new cells growing along the rim. The massed sound of so many orphids was all but unbearable.

  “I hate their voices,” said Jil, half to herself. Having the voices in her head made her feel a little high, and after all her work on recovery, she’d learned to dread that feeling. Being a little high was never enough for Jil; she always wanted to go all the way into the black hole of oblivion.

  “Is this better?” came a smooth baritone voice from the orphids. The many had become one.

  “You actually do understand us?” Jil asked the orphids. A few of the orphid’s-eye images slewed around as Craigor carried his first dripping net of cuttles to the boat’s low gunnel and lowered them to the bay waters.

  “We understand you a little bit,” said the voice of the orphids. “And we’ll get better. We wish the best for you and your family, Jil. We’ll always be grateful to you. We’ll remember your Merz Boat as our garden of Eden, our Alamogordo test site. Don’t be scared of us.”

  “I’ll try,” said Jil. In the unadorned natural world, Momotaro and Bixie were cheering and laughing to see the freed cuttlefish jetting about in the shallow waters near the boat.

  “We’re not gonna be setting free the Pharaohs every day,” Craigor cautioned the kids. He smiled and dipped his net into the holding tank again. “Hey, Jil, I heard what the orphids said to you. Maybe they’re gonna be okay.”

  “Maybe,” said Jil, letting out a deep, shaky sigh. She poured herself a cup of hot tea. “Look at my cup,” she observed. “It’s crawling with them. An orphid every millimeter. They’re like some—some endlessly ramifying ideal language that wants to define a word for every single part of every worldly thing. A thicket of metalanguage setting the namers at an ever-greater remove from the named.” Her mind was teeming with words—it was like the orphids were making her smarter. Her hand twitched; some of her tea spilled onto the deck. “Now they’re mapping the puddle splash, bringing it under control, normalizing it into their bullshit consensus reality. Our world’s being nibbled to death by nanoducks, Craigor. We’re nanofucked.”

  “Profound,” said Craigor. “Maybe we can collaborate on a show. A Web page where users find new arrangements for the Merz Boat inventory, and if they transfer a payment, I physically lug the objects into the new positions. And the
orphids figure out the shortest paths. Or, wait, we get some piezoplastic sluggies to do the heavy lifting, and the orphids can guide them. I’ll just work on bringing in more great stuff; I’ll be this lovable sage and the Merz Boat can be, like, my physical blog. And you can dance and be beautiful, at the same time intoning heavy philosophical raps to give our piece some heft.”

  “Men are immediately going to begin using the orphids to look at the exact intimate details of women’s bodies,” said Jil with a shudder. “Can you imagine? Ugh. No publicity for me, thanks.”

  Craigor spoke no response to this. He lowered the rest of the Pharaohs into the bay. “A fisher of Merz, a fisher of men. Peace, dear cuttlefish.”

  The empty dinghy swam back toward them, orphid-lit like a ferry, nosing up to its mooring on the side of the Merz Boat. Spooked by the dinghy, the skittish cuttlefish maneuvered and changed colors for safety. Their skins were thoroughly bespeckled with orphid dots outlining their bodies’ voluptuous contours.

  “Voluptuous?” said Jil.

  “I didn’t say that out loud, did I?” said Craigor. “Jeez, you’re picking up my subvocal mutters. This orphidnet link is like telepathy almost. I better be a good boy. Or learn how to damp down your access to my activities. Whoops, did I say that out loud too? There’s meshes all over you, Jil. In case you didn’t know.”

  “Already?” said Jil, holding out her hand. She’d been ignoring the changes to herself and her family, but now she let herself see the dots on her fingers, dots on her palms, dots all over her skin. The glowing vertices were connected by faint lines with the lines forming triangles. A fine mesh of small triangles covered her knuckles; a coarser mesh spanned the back of her hand. The computational orphidnet was going to have realtime articulated models of everything and everyone—including the kids.

  Yes, the orphids had peppered Momotaro and Bixie like chickenpox. Oh, this was happening way too fast. God damn that Ond. Jil knelt beside Bixie, trying to wipe one of the dots off her daughter’s smooth cheek. But it wouldn’t come loose. By way of explanation, the orphids showed her a zoomed-in schematic image of a knot of long-chain molecules: an individual orphid. They were far too tiny to dislodge.