Bogus to Bubbly

by Scott Westerfeld

  Buckyballs come in all sizes. This one is a single nanometer across and contains sixty carbon atoms. For comparison, your body has about this many carbon atoms in it: 700,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

  Scientists are still working out what to do with buckyballs. It’s sort of like discovering the wheel—to get any use out of it, you still need to invent wheelbarrows, horse carts, and racing cars. But so far buckyballs have shown promise in treating illness, making microscopic batteries, building superhard substances, and conducting electricity. That’s a lot of potential for sixty atoms.

  SELF-ASSEMBLY AND SELF-REPLICATION

  Once humans had built our first buckyballs, something odd happened: We started finding them in nature. They appeared in the soot of trees struck by lightning and in the remains of ancient volcanos. And very “large” buckyballs, up to four hundred carbon atoms, were found wherever meteors hit the earth.

  That brings up the coolest thing about nanomachines—the pieces can assemble themselves. Like any chemical process, if you create the right conditions, nanos can happen on their own. Just jolt a pair of carbon rods with electricity, and buckyballs form like magic.

  The fact that nanos self-assemble leads to another wonderful, and horrifying, possibility. One day we might be able to create nanos that replicate themselves. Like living cells, nanos could contain the information they need to build a copy of themselves. The advantages would be huge—what if we could invent medicines, clothing, and other useful stuff that would build free copies of themselves?

  Everyone wins, right?

  Here’s the problem: If a nano makes an exact copy of itself, then that copy will also make a copy of itself. And that copy will make a copy of itself . . . and so on. If you don’t build a limiting factor into your self-replicating nanos, they could wind up devouring the entire world!

  This is called the “grey goo” problem, because if the entire planet were turned into copies of a single tiny machine, everything would resemble a featureless goo. Even if the runaway nanos only consumed carbon, that would be enough to kill all carbon-based life forms, which means you, me, and every other living creature in the world.

  Most scientists believe that this outcome is unlikely. After all, living creatures have been self-replicating for billions of years, and no bug has yet figured out how to eat the whole planet. But still . . .

  NANOS IN TALLY’S WORLD

  In Tally’s world, nanotechnology is part of everyday life. Because it’s so omnipresent, Tally and her friends often don’t even notice when they interact with nanos. So here’s a full list of all the times nanos pop up:

  The Hole in the Wall

  Pretties are allowed to have all the cool clothes and toys they could ever want, thanks to the “hole in the wall.” When they get tired of anything, they just toss it in the recycler, which breaks it back down to raw material. But where do these clothes come from?

  As Hiro explains in Extras, the hole in the wall is a self-contained nanotech factory. It turns patterns (called “nano-frames”) into physical objects. For example, invisible nanos would weave carbon molecules into threads, which would be programmed to weave themselves together to make clothing.

  You can think of the hole in the wall as a kind of three-dimensional printer. These days if you want a photo of a pair of shoes, you can download a photo from the Internet and print it. But in Tally’s world you can “print” things in three dimensions, so you can actually print the shoes themselves.

  FAQ 1: So why don’t uglies have holes in their walls?

  Answer: To make them even more desperate to have the operation. Clever, huh?

  FAQ 2: If everyone has a hole, what’s the factory belt for?

  Answer: Stuff made in the hole isn’t the best quality, and the hole can’t make big, complicated stuff like hovercars and boards. That’s why you have to requisition certain things.

  FAQ 3: Who designs the stuff that the hole makes?

  Answer: Whoever wants to, and everyone shares their work. It’s sort of like making music, fan fiction, or Lolcats and putting them up on the Internet. (In Aya’s city, whenever anyone “prints” something that you designed, your face rank goes up.)

  FAQ 4: Why was stuff rationed in Aya’s city?

  Answer: Everything takes energy, and the raw materials (the “paper” for the printer) have to be taken from the environment. So as the population rises and non-bubbleheaded people get more creative, the cities all need systems to limit consumption.

  Brain Surge

  One of the great promises of nanos is their use in medicine. They’re small enough to inject into a human body and are “smart” enough to do what we want when they get where they’re going.

  For example, buckyballs can trap other molecules inside them—the “caged” molecules don’t affect anything outside the buckyball. So if you put a toxic medicine inside a buckyball cage, you can safely inject it into a person. Then the buckyball carries the poison around the body until it bumps into a certain kind of target—let’s say a cancer cell. The buckyball is programmed to open up when it meets that kind of cell, spilling the toxin in exactly the right place.

  The bubblehead nanos act in pretty much the same way, except that they don’t attack cancer—they target certain parts of the brain, creating the lesions that make people bubbleheaded.

  Scientists have discovered that human brains are divided by function. In other words, there’s a part of your brain for seeing, another for hearing, and another for smelling. There are also parts of your brain that are active when you make moral decisions, analyze risks, and laugh at jokes. The parts of the brain that rule creativity haven’t been pinned down yet, but once they are, it will be possible to create bubbleheads. (Don’t try this at home.)

  The Cure

  Maddy’s cure also uses nanos, tiny machines that are targeted to repair the lesions. The cure actually wasn’t so hard to create, because the bubblehead operation was designed to be reversed. Even during the Prettytime, firefighters, Rangers, and surgeons were all de-bubbleheaded so that they could do their jobs better.

  The problem was that the nanos that Zane took in Pretties weren’t designed to stop on their own. (He was supposed to take the other pill, which Tally took.) Like the grey goo, they just kept eating. This gave him headaches and ultimately brain damage. It’s just luck that Maddy cured him in time.

  FAQ: So how did Tally cure herself?

  Answer: When one part of the brain is damaged, the rest of it tries to take over the missing functions. Here in the real world, people with brain damage rewire themselves all the time without nanos. People sometimes come out of comas after hearing their favorite music, which makes scientists think that stimulation is very important in this process. (Zane was all about stimulation—pulling tricks and trying to remember his ugly days—which he called “staying bubbly.”)

  Hungry Nanos

  In Specials, Tally and Shay break into the Armory, a storehouse of ancient Rusty weapons. One of these is a beaker of silvery nanos with only one purpose: to re-create themselves. They consume anything they touch, spreading like a cancer and finally eating the entire building. This is my version of the “grey goo” scenario discussed above. Of course, I made my nanos silver, because that’s more dramatic and intense than boring old gray.

  FAQ: Why didn’t the hungry nanos eat the whole world?

  Answer: My goo was a weapon, not an accidental mutation. So its designers made sure that it wouldn’t destroy the entire planet. They programmed it to eat everything except:

  1. The beaker it was stored in. (Duh.)

  2. A special “antidote” foam, so that an accidental spill wouldn’t doom its makers.

  3. Dirt—that’s right, plain old dirt. That way, the nanos would stop spreading once an entire building (or city) was gone.

  Smart Matter

  In Extras a new invention has resulted from the mind-rain: smart matter. Smart matter is basically a big pile of general-purpose nanos that can be p
rogrammed on the fly. They’re sort of like Legos: building blocks that you can use to make anything you want.

  A matter hacker broadcasts instructions to smart matter, like sending software to a computer. So you can see why matter hackers are illegal except in the hands of authorized people. If you’ve just created a cool new building that uses smart matter supports, you don’t want someone coming along and turning that matter into, say, liquid. Because that would be bad.

  Other Examples

  In Uglies, David uses nano-glue when they break into Special Circumstances headquarters. These nanos analyze whatever they come into contact with, then become the right sort of glue to stick to it.

  In Pretties, Tally remembers the Smokies using nanos in their outdoor toilets to break down sewage into fertilizer (and to make the whole business less smelly).

  Also in Pretties, Maddy explains that pretty teeth are unbreakable, unless you use special “dental nanos” to soften them up.

  In Specials, Tally has repair nanos stored in her body, so that her muscles and tissues heal very quickly when damaged.

  Also in Specials, the surge tank is full of “nutrients and nanos to keep her tissues alive while the surgeons were shredding her to pieces.” So clearly nanos are a part of every major operation.

  REPUTATION ECONOMIES

  No one famous lived in Akira Hall, just loads of face-missing extras, wearing generic designs. A few ego-kickers sat talking into their cams, watched by no one. The average face rank here was six hundred thousand, despair-making and pathetic.

  Reputation has always been important to human beings. We’re all hardwired to seek approval from others and to be wary of people who everyone else seems not to like. Some of our great works of fiction—The Scarlet Letter, Dangerous Liaisons, School for Scandal—are about ruined reputations.

  Of course, if you’re in high school or junior high, I probably don’t have to tell you about the importance of reputation. But how did I get the idea of having a whole city obsessed with fame and an economy based on reputation?

  “DO YOU KNOW PARIS HILTON?”

  In this neighborhood, all the buildings moved. They hovered and transformed and did other flabbergasting things, and everyone who lived here was legendarily bored by it all. . . . Hiro lived in the famous part of town.

  Sometimes when I’m at bookstores or schools, I get weird questions like, “Do you live in a mansion?” or “Do people recognize you on the street?” or even “Do you know Paris Hilton?” These questions used to surprise me, until I figured out where they were coming from. Fans were trying to figure out how I, their favorite author, fit into the world of fame and celebrity.

  After all, fame is important to us. We’re surrounded by images of famous people every day. The sales of movies, books, and CDs all are tracked, as if art were one big popularity contest. And it’s not like I don’t read the bestseller lists myself (especially when I’m on them). Fame does matter, after all—if nothing else, it’s nice to know that our favorite moviemakers, musicians, and novelists won’t starve before they finish their next project.

  Of course, most of us run into reputation systems every day. The top-selling novel sits at the front of the bookstore; the number one movie gets more ads on TV; the most-viewed YouTube video is the easiest one to find. In fact, most of you probably started reading Uglies because of some sort of reputation system: It was featured in a store, sold in a club, or recommended to you by a friend.

  So reputation systems can’t be all bad, can they?

  Note: I have no mansions, no one recognizes me on the street (unless I’m at a library convention), and I don’t know Paris Hilton—but I do know Holly Black, which is way cooler.

  THE WISDOM OF THE INTERNET

  The wisdom of the crowd, Aya. If a million people look at a puzzle, chances are that one of them knows the answer. Or maybe ten people each know one piece, and that’s enough to put it all together.

  —HIRO

  In the early Rusty days, information mostly came from authorities: the editors of newspapers, the folks who write encyclopedias, and our wise friends on TV. Back then, bank buildings had giant stone columns to show how serious they were. And when you bought something from a store and it didn’t work, you could go back and complain in person.

  But these days, thanks to the Internet, we’re constantly hearing opinions from people we’ve never heard of and buying stuff from people we’ve never met. With credit cards and online banking, our money lives in some weird electronic wonderland we can’t even see.

  So how do we know who to trust?

  Luckily, the Internet happens on computers, which are really good at counting up votes, reviews, and other kinds of ratings. When you’re buying a book, looking for a new band, or picking a movie to see, a ranking system will probably pop up to steer you toward the good and away from the bad.

  One model of Internet reputation is eBay’s. Every time you buy something, you rate the seller. As votes accumulate it’s easy to tell who’s trustworthy. And the system makes sellers behave, because no one wants to read nasty reviews about themselves. (We authors certainly don’t.)

  Slashdot.org is an example of an intellectual reputation system. Every post on Slashdot is rated by readers according to how interesting and relevant it is, and higher-ranked posts “bubble up” so that still more people can read them. Smart is rewarded; boring is not.

  All of these systems use “the wisdom of the crowd.” Instead of one authority, like a newspaper editor, deciding what’s true, large numbers of people contribute.

  Even anti-spam filters use this concept. Servers that send a lot of spam get a “bad reputation,” and their e-mails are scrutinized more closely. So every time you click on JUNK to delete an e-mail, you’re part of the “wisdom of the crowd.” Just like with fame in Aya’s city, you contribute to the process without even noticing you’re doing so.

  Perhaps these reputation systems are the testing grounds for the economies of the future.

  REPUTATION IN EXTRAS

  “It’s just . . . that cam cost me a lot of merits.”

  “It’s a toy. Like face ranks and merits, it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t let it.”

  —AYA AND JAI

  The key thing about the people in Aya’s city is that they use two kinds of reputation. You can collect merits, given out by a committee to teachers, doctors, and other nonfamous contributors to society. Or you can worry about your face rank, which everyone has a part in making: Every time someone talks about you, copies the way you dress, hums a song you wrote, or watches your feed, the city interface makes you a little bit more famous—pure crowd logic.

  In this way, Aya’s city is both old-fashioned and newfangled. They use a panel of authorities, the Good Citizen Committee, and the wisdom of the crowd. I figured this would work better than an economy with only one kind of reputation. And it also makes Aya’s life more complicated, because she has to do her homework as well as try to become famous.

  The debate over expert opinions versus that of the masses actually goes back a long way. (A lot of people argued against democracy at first, because, like, anybody could vote.) But how well these two kinds of systems balance each other is a huge topic right now, and will probably remain one throughout your lifetime: Wikipedia or encyclopedia? Blogs or newspapers? Merits or face rank?

  The choice is yours.

  MISCELLANY

  LAST LINES

  Notice anything about these three last lines?

  “I’m Tally Youngblood. . . . Make me pretty.”

  —Tally

  “Face it, Tally-wa, you’re Special.” —Shay

  “Be careful with the world, or the next time we meet, it might get ugly.” —Tally

  That’s right, you guessed it! The last word in Uglies is “pretty,” the last word in Pretties is “special,” and the last word in Specials is “ugly.” Thanks to all the readers who spotted my little trick. There’s no point in us writers putting stuff like that
in if you don’t notice!

  Of course, the last word in Extras is “cake,” so if I ever write a fifth book, it will have to be called, um, Cakes.

  I LOVE YOU

  The phrase “I love you” appears exactly twice in the trilogy:

  Zane says it to Tally in Pretties, right before he jumps out of the balloon during their escape. (She never sees him healthy again!)

  Tally says it to David at the end of Specials, but only as a message from his mom. (Ouch.)

  PARTY CRASHING

  Be careful, Moggle. We’re not wanted here.

  —AYA

  All four books in the series start the same way, with someone crashing a party. The series starts with ugly Tally crashing a pretty party. Then, in Pretties, Croy crashes a pretty party as a Smokie. After they become Special, Tally and friends crash an ugly party. Finally, Aya crashes a tech-head party as an extra/ugly.

  What’s up with that? Am I condoning party crashing?

  Actually, I didn’t realize what was going on until the third book, and by then the pattern was set. But I’m glad the party crashing kept happening, because the series is fundamentally about being uncomfortable, both in your own skin and in your society. Having my characters party crash generates those intense feelings of not belonging that drive the books.

  Also, the societies that Tally and Aya are growing up in are very much about manners and propriety. Everyone is supposed to know their rightful place in life (or at least their face rank). So the moment someone shows up at the wrong party, the plot thickens.