by Rudy Rucker
“Let’s call it the Hibrane,” said Chu. “And we can be the Lobrane. Can we see a Hibrane person catching a cuttlefish?”
“Let’s try,” said the mushroom. “Aha.” A moment later she was showing Chu some shiny figures like big, slow-moving people made of light. “They’re popping in and out of our world all the time!” exclaimed the mushroom. “And our good, smart, quantum-computing orphids are landing on them. No more sneaking. Look, look, there’s a Hibraner taking a cuttlefish! He’s slow, but he puts himself in just the right place. He’s a cuttlefisher! It’s lucky we looked at the cuttlefish data stream.”
“My good idea,” said Chu.
The orphidnet showed him scenes of glowing figures that oozed about, cunningly managing to catch hold of the rapid but bewildered cuttlefish. And in other scenes the gauzy, monumental figures displayed themselves to little groups of worshipful virtual humans. Chu glimpsed his mother in one of these worship groups, but then she disappeared.
Chu watched the little congregation a bit longer anyway. The Hibraner in the center was a giant old woman of light, silently moving in slow motion. Linking his virtual self into the site, Chu realized the woman was speaking via the orphidnet. She said she was from a better world where people didn’t use computers and didn’t endanger their homes with nants. Noticing Chu, she pointed at him, which made him uneasy. He pulled away, although he would have liked to find out where his mother had gone.
“The Hibraners have always been around,” said the smart mushroom who was guiding Chu. “I’m data-mining the info. People have never been sure if Hibraners are real; they called them fairies or spirits or angels. They’re out of quantum phase with your reality; people just see them as patches in their peripheral vision. The Hibraners may sometimes have caused people to hear voices or see visions. But now they’re easy to see via the orphidnet.”
“Can I go to the Hibrane and visit?” asked Chu. That would teach Nektar a lesson for yelling at him about wetting his pants while he was being a cuttlefish. He’d run away to another world.
“Maybe,” said the smart mushroom. “Traveling to the Hibrane would be an—encryption problem. You’d get your mind into a special state and encrypt yourself into a superposition capable of jumping you to the Hibrane.”
“Encryption!” exclaimed Chu. “I like breaking codes. Tell me more.”
“To travel between the two worlds, a Hibraner turns off self-observation and spreads out into an ambiguous superposed state, and then she observes herself in such a way so as to collapse down into the other brane.”
“Which part of that is encryption?” asked Chu.
“The encryption lies in the way in which the Hibraner does the self-observation,” said the mushroom. “We can view it as being a quantum-mechanical operator based on a specific numerical pattern. And that would be the encryption code. Think of the code as the orientation of a higher-dimensional vector connecting the branes. It’s a very short distance, but you have to travel in the right direction. I believe the direction code is over a million digits long.”
“Goody,” said Chu. He’d studied an online tutorial on cryptography this summer. “Let’s figure out that code right now. We’ll use a timing-channel attack.”
“It’s fun working with you,” said the mushroom.
Ond took a circuitous route toward his house in the Dolores Heights district of San Francisco. Whenever his enemies got too close, the orphids warned him.
Meanwhile the new world of the orphidnet was opening up around him. Every word, thought, or feeling brought along a rich association of footnotes and commentary. He could see, after a fashion, with his eyes closed. Every single object was physically modeled in the orphidnet: not just the road around him but also the interiors of the houses, the people inside them, the contents of the people’s pockets, and their bodies under their clothes.
Ond wasn’t alone in the orphidnet. There were other people, quite a few of them, many wanting to harangue, threaten, interview, or congratulate him. And, just as Ond had hoped, artificial intelligences were emerging in the orphidnet as spontaneously as von Karman vortex streets of eddies in a brook, as naturally as three-dimensional Belousov-Zhabotinsky scrolls in an excitable chemical medium. Just like the BZ patterns in the Martian nant-sphere. Nobody had ever really talked to those nant-based AIs, but these orphidnet guys seemed approachable and even friendly. Ond decided to call them beezies.
The beezies were offering Ond their information services. They wanted to share whatever intellectual adventures he could cook up. The scroll-shaped AIs looked like colored jellyfish, and they spoke in compound glyphs that Ond’s brain turned into words.
It was a pleasant night, very warm, the first day of September, with a bright full moon. As Ond rode the bicycle and dodged his pursuers, he began organizing a workspace for himself in the orphidnet. He visualized himself as a Christmas-tree trunk with his thoughts like branches. With the orphidnet agents helping him, he effortlessly added all his digital documents, e-mails, and blogs to the tree construct, which now took on a life of its own, automatically answering some of the questions people were messaging him. Ond busied himself hanging links to favorite bits of info on his branches—trimming the mind-tree. He was having fun.
Passing the old, brick Mission Street Armory a mile from his house, it occurred to Ond to see how things were going at home. It would be horrible if his enemies got there before him. Thank God the orphids had hidden his house’s address.
In his mind’s eye, Ond saw his family in the orphidnet. Nektar was lying on their bed—sulking? No, she was in the orphidnet. Nektar didn’t know about setting up a privacy barrier; Ond was able to follow her path. He found virtual Nektar doing something with her friend Jose. Ond didn’t like seeing his wife with the swarthy, virile chef.
Nektar and Jose were attending some kind of virtual gathering, an impromptu religious service with a choir of beezies surrounding a luminous womanlike form upon an altar. The glowing being was definitely conscious, but she seemed neither like a human nor like an orphidnet AI. A third kind of mind? Other bright forms lay in every direction, drifting amid the fringes of his thoughts—
Just then three virtual humans plowed into Ond’s mind-tree, distracting him. The first two wanted to kill him, but the third was his scientist-friend Mitch from MIT, already in the orphidnet from the East Coast. Ond had an intense and rewarding chat with Mitch; bandwidth was so much higher in the orphidnet than in normal human conversation. Mitch formulated a theory about how the emerging orphidnet minds would scale up. Quite effortlessly, Ond and Mitch set some obliging orphidnet agents in motion to gather data to test Mitch’s thesis—and awaited the results.
Although Nektar appreciated the theatrical setting of the virtual domed temple, she didn’t like the so-called angel at its center. She’d never liked religion. Just after she’d left the family home in Arizona for UCLA, Nektar’s mother, Karen Lundquist, had given the family’s savings to a TV evangelist. Nektar had to go up to her neck in debt to finish her degree. At least Ond had paid off the debt.
The old angel made molasses-slow gestures, all the while messaging pictures and words via the orphidnet. Her name was Gladax. She said her people were as gods compared to Nektar’s race—which seemed a little dubious given that the angel was wearing dark green sweatpants and a cheap T-shirt with a dragon on it. She was dressed like a homeless person you’d see in a laundromat, although somehow Nektar could tell that the giant old woman was really quite well off. She was stingy rather than poor.
She said that her people had been visiting Earth for centuries, although this happened to be her first trip. She said she’d come because now the two races could talk, thanks to the orphids, and she wanted to be in on the big night. Also she had a message to share. Nektar’s people should learn to live with no digital technology at all. She said there was a higher path—she called it lazy eight. To Nektar, Gladax’s admonitions sounded like the same line of crap she’d always heard in church: give
up something you like for something you can’t imagine.
Nektar must have been unconsciously messaging her thoughts to the angel, for now the angel turned her great slow head to stare at her. The angel messaged that although she did like to dress economically, she was in fact the mayor of San Francisco in her world. The angel added that she was seventy-two years old, and that she would give Nektar some good advice. Nektar seemed to amuse her.
“Take your boyfriend and enjoy your bodies, little doubter,” Gladax prescribed, moving her hand in a languid trail that sent a shower of energy-sparks to settle down upon Nektar and Jose. Her words came across deep and slow, with a musical Asian accent. “Wake up from the machines.”
The sparks energized Jose; he stopped staring at the angel and tugged Nektar into a side room whose walls were covered by marblelike slabs patterned in slowly flowing scrolls and swirls. Nektar and Jose laid down and made love. It was over too soon, like a wet dream.
The marble room morphed into Jose’s apartment. The real Jose was sitting up, eyes open, trying to keep talking to Nektar. Jose was puzzled why Nektar wasn’t physically there. He began freaking out. He couldn’t remember things right. He said that if he’d seen an angel, maybe that meant he should kill himself and go to heaven for good. Nektar messaged him to please wait, she was going to come to his apartment in the flesh, and that he hadn’t felt anything like the real heaven yet.
And then she too was sitting up, eyes open, alone in her bedroom. She couldn’t remember all the details of what had just happened. But she knew two things. She needed to be with Jose in his apartment on Valencia Street. And she needed to leave Ond forever. She would never forgive him for ruining the cozy, womany real world and making life into a giant computer game. Quickly she packed a suitcase with her essentials. She felt odd and remote, as if her head were inside a glass bubble. She didn’t want to face what she was about to do. Better to think of Jose.
Jose wasn’t a world-wrecker. She could save him; together they could make a new life. Why had he wanted to kill himself just now? A strong, sexy man like that. Nektar shook her head, feeling that same mixture of tenderness and contempt that she always felt when confronted by men’s wild, unrealistic ideas. She’d give Jose something to live for. He’d appreciate her. Ond wouldn’t miss her one bit.
But, oh, oh, oh, what about Chu? Leaving her bedroom, Nektar regarded her son, lying on the rug. He wasn’t trembling anymore; he looked content, his eyes closed, his lips moving. The orphidnet was catnip for him. If she interrupted him, he’d probably have a tantrum. Was it really possible to leave him here?
She leaned close to kiss Chu good-bye. Little Chu, her own flesh, how could she abandon him? He twisted away, muttering about numbers and cuttlefish. Oh, he’d do fine with Ond; he was much more like Ond than like Nektar. Ond would be home any minute to watch over him.
The invisible bubble around Nektar’s head felt very tight. If she didn’t leave right now, she was going to lose her mind. Tears wetting her face, she ran out to her car and headed for Jose. She passed Ond on his bike without even slowing down. Hurry home, Ond, and take care of our Chu. I can’t do it anymore. I’m bad. I’m sorry. Good-bye.
A mob of some kind was blocking the road two blocks downhill. Nektar went down a side street to avoid the jam.
While Ond and his scientist friend Mitch waited for the beezies to report back with information about the upper levels of the orphidnet, Ond sent a virtual self to check on Nektar. She wasn’t in that cultish group gathering anymore. She and Jose were in a marble room and—Ond was interrupted again. A realworld dog was chasing his bike, barking and baring his teeth as if he meant to bite Ond’s calf. Ond screamed and snapped fully into the material plane. He had a phobia about dogs. He hopped off the bike, nearly falling on his face. Frantically he began throwing gravel at the brute, which was sufficient to send him skulking back into the shadows. Standing there, Ond had the strange realization that he could hardly remember any of the things he’d just been doing in the orphidnet. The memories weren’t in his head; they were out—there. Just now Nektar had been doing—what? And Ond had been talking to—who? When he was offline, Ond’s memories of the orphidnet were like Web links without a browser to open them.
On his bike, Ond let his mind expand again. Ah, yes, his investigations with Mitch. The results were coming in. There was indeed an upward cascade of intelligences taking place in the orphidnet; each eddy was a part of a larger swirl, up through a few dozen levels, and ending with an inscrutable orphidnet-spanning super-beezie at the top. Quite wonderful.
As for those luminous humanoid beings—the AIs now reported that these were so-called angels from a parallel sheet of reality that had recently been dubbed the Hibrane. The best current models indicated the higher-space distance to the Hibrane must be about a thirtieth of a vatometer, that is, 0.03 decillionths of a meter. Due to the Randall–de Sitter interbrane warp factor, Hibraners at this remove would be scaled six times larger than regular humans and would move six times slower.
In addition, the Hibraners’ quantum phases were almost totally orthogonal to ours; this meant that Hibraners barely interacted with normal light or matter, which in turn explained why hardly anyone had noticed them before the orphids had begun sticking to them. Viewing alien angels in the orphidnet seemed both mind-boggling and natural. It made a kind of sense that the quantum-computing mental space of the orphidnet could serve as a meeting ground between two orders of being.
But before Ond could begin considering this more deeply, he was distracted by a news feed saying that the courts had dropped charges against him. The orphidnet beezies proudly told him they’d hacked the system to get Ond out of trouble. But there was still the matter of the torch-bearing lynch mob pushing toward Ond’s current location. By now, even the dimmest bulbs had figured out how to see Ond via the orphidnet.
An urgent message popped up from Hector Rojas, the guy who’d lent Ond the bicycle. Hector was on his way in his car to offer Ond a fresh means of escape.
Ond pumped his bike up the hill toward home.
Chu’s working hypothesis was that the quantum-mechanical operator at the heart of the angels’ world-to-world jumping technique involved raising a numerical representation of a given object, such as a cuttlefish, to a certain exponential power K, producing an encrypted result of the form cuttlefishK. Chu knew all about this style of encryption from the online cryptography tutorial he’d studied. The actual value of K was the secret code needed to break the encryption.
In search of K, Chu and the mushrooms delved into the ftp.exaexa.org/merzboat data stream. First of all, they figured out how to represent each of the disappeared cephalopods as a binary number. And then they studied exactly how long the encryption of each missing cuttlefish had taken. A delicate web of number theory led back from the time intervals to the bits of K, for the 0 bits of K munged faster than the 1 bits did. This timing-channel attack was a big problem, a heavy crunch, but the orphidnet made it feasible.
And pretty soon Chu had the integer K tidily laid out as a pattern in the orphidnet. With access to K, he now had some hope of jumping back and forth between the two worlds.
Written as a decimal number, K turned out, by the way, to be over three million digits long, having 3,141,573 digits, to be precise. Chu relished the fact that the orphidnet allowed him to visualize a gigundo number like that, and to smoothly revolve it in his mind. He was starting to realize that, while he was online, a lot of his thinking was happening outside of his physical brain.
For the sake of elegance, Chu and the AIs transformed the giant code number K into a picture and a sound: blue spaghetti with chimes. And in the course of the transformation, they crushed the code from millions of digits down to just a few thousand bits. But even this condensed pattern was too big to fit conveniently into Chu’s brain without his carrying out some time-consuming work of memorization. For now, when he “looked” at the pattern, he was really accessing a link to a secure orphidnet st
orage location. Chu gloated over the link, happy with the knowing. Although, hmm, given a little time, maybe he could find a pattern of just a few hundred bits that would allow him to generate the thousands-of-bits’ worth of chimes and blue spaghetti that in turn generated the original three-million-digit jump-code.
A gauzy shape crept into the room, bright and insistent, projecting an old woman’s voice via the orphidnet. She was a Hibraner, the same one Chu had seen in that temple where Nektar was.
“I’m Gladax,” messaged the big angel, her voice singing in Chu’s head. She was lying on her stomach to fit her head and shoulders into the living room. She was still wearing that crummy T-shirt with the blurry dragon. “The mayor of San Francisco in what you call Hibrane. One reason I’m here is to warn little troublemakers like you. Don’t go spreading around our jump-code, Chu. The last thing I want is a jitsy rat-plague of your peoples’ nasty machines. Really, you Lobraners act like you want to be wind-up toys. Don’t be a dummy. Give me access to your brain so I can erase that jump-code you stole.”
“No!” exclaimed Chu, battening down his mind.
The angel held up her sallow, knobby index finger and glared at Chu. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she said. “I’m sure you’re a very nice little boy. But you have to give me the jump-code now.”
Still Chu refused. Looking grim, Gladax extended a ray from her finger. Chu sat up, but Gladax was all around him. She poked the ray into his skull; it slid in like a skewer into butter; Chu froze. Gladax began slowly feeling around the core of his brain, trying to reach the link to his orphidnet storage location. Chu began twitching all over. Messaging that she was sorry, Gladax kept on all the same. Chu found his voice and screamed for Nektar. But she wasn’t home.
As Ond neared the house, he could see the lynch mob only a block behind him. Feeling for Nektar in the orphidnet, he was surprised to discover that she’d left home in her car and had driven right past him and, for that matter, past the mob. He hadn’t noticed. And now when he messaged her, she told him she was on her way to be in the physical presence of her friend Jose—and that she was leaving him for good. Before he could say anything, she’d closed the connection.
