Asimov's SF, September 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “And I showed her how to plug into what Chu's seeing,” said Ond. “So she can keep a webeye on him. 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 positions of Craigor's things with his GPS, Momotaro's telling him where the newer things came from, 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, non-filter cigarette from her purse. “As long as the coast is clear, let's have a smoke. I got this number 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 cleaned up a few years back. I thought I told you?"

  “Yeah,” said Nektar, exhaling. “Did you have, like, a big after-school-special 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 loving myself and I got well."

  “And then, the reward,” said Craigor. “She meets me. It is written."

  “I'll have a puff, Nektar,” said Ond. “This might be the biggest day for me since we reversed the nants."

  “You already said that this morning,” said Nektar irritably. “Are you finally going to tell me what's up? Or does your own wife have to sign a freaking non-disclosure?"

  “Ond's on a secret project for sure,” said Jil, trying to smooth things over. “I went to ExaExa to dance a 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."

  “What is a fab exactly?” asked Craigor.

  “It's where they fabricate the chips,” said Jil. “Most of the building is sealed off, with anything bigger than a carbon-dioxide molecule filtered out of the air. All these big hulking machines are in there turning out tiny precise objects. The machines reach all the way down to the molecular level—for nanotech.” She fixed Ond with her bright gaze. “You're making nanobots again, aren't you 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 scampering back, her dark straight hair flopping around her face. “Chu made a list of what Daddy moved,” she reported. “But I told Chu my Daddy can leave his toys wherever he likes.” She hopped onto Jil's lap, cuddly as a rabbit, lively as a coiled spring. She resembled a small version of her mother.

  “We await Comptroller Chu's report,” said Craigor. He was busy with the coals in his fanciful grill, constructed from an old-timey metal auto fender.

  Chu and Momotaro came pounding into the cleared area together. Momotaro thought Chu was great: an older boy who took him seriously.

  “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."

  “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. The Chinese gong has moved forty-four centimeters. 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 is—"

  “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?"

  “Of course,” said Chu. “But I'm not done listing the, uh,——” Bixie, still perched on her mother's lap, had just stuck out her tongue at Chu, which made Chu stumble uncertainly to a halt.

  “Email me the list,” said Craigor with a wink at Bixie. But then, seeing how crushed the boy was, he softened. “Oh, go ahead Chu, tell me now. And no more rude faces, Bixie. I'll keep cooking while I listen."

  “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 my stack of three fluorescent plastic car-tires?"

  “Yes.” Chu recited the rest of his list while Craigor set out the plates.

  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 tiramisu that Nektar had brought for dessert.

  “The license thing is coming to a head,” said Jil, looking worried. “Those damned forms. I tried to file them myself, but the feds’ sites are 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. “My big surprise.” Whatever was in the vial was too small to see with the naked eye, but the watchers’ webeyes were sketching tiny balls of light inside the vial, little haloes around objects in rapid motion. “Orphids are to barcodes as velociraptors were to trilobites,” said Ond. “The orphids are gonna change the world."

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

  “They're not nants never,” said pear-shaped Ond, his tongue a bit thick with the beer and tobacco. “Orphids good, nants bad. I realize now that it's got to happen, Nektar. I want to get in first and do it right. 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, slowing down to maybe one doubling every half hour, and after a day, the population will plateau and stop growing. You'll see, like, fifty thousand of them on this chair and a 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.

  “Orphids use quantum computing; they propel themselves with electrostatic fields; they understand natural language; and of course they're networked,” continued Ond. “The orphids will communicate with us much better than the nants. 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 the orphids all along?"

  “In a way, the nants designed them,” said Ond. “Before I rolled back the nants,
they sent Nantel some unbelievable 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 pull the trigger. They say they don't want to get the death penalty like Joe Doakes. Of course Doakes's oil-biz backers saved off his wetware and software, but never mind about that. The real issue is that ExaExa can't figure out a way to make a profit. So there's been a lot of company politics; a lot of in-fighting. If we do it my way, the orphids will be autonomous, incorruptible, cost-free. In the long run, that's the right path; profits will emerge. Not everyone sees that, but one of the factions has given me informal approval to go ahead."

  “Ha,” said Nektar. “You're the faction. 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 picture-perfect face was 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—an IP address—and an orphid interface appeared within the webeyes of Chu and the four adults.

  For now the orphids 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,” said Jil. Bixie looked up curiously at her mother. To Jil, her daughter's face looked ineffably sweet and vulnerable behind the ranks of dancing orphids.

  “Hello, Jil,” sang the orphids. Chu and the adults could hear them in their earbuds.

  “I want you fellows to find all the cuttlefish in the South Bay,” Ond told the orphids. “Ride them and send a steady stream of telemetry data to, uh, ftp.exaexa.org/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 each other.

  “These are cuttlefish,” Ond instructed the orphids, pointing to the tank. “Settle on them, and we'll release them into the bay. Okay, 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. And we'll let some orphids loose on 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."

  “We're doomed if Ond opens the vial,” said Nektar, angrily lunging 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 do my big release 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 as usual. “And tagging my stuff is good, too. My assemblages can wake up and think!"

  “Thank you, Craigor,” said Ond. He turned clumsily towards 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 towards the tank.

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

  Through their webeyes, Chu and the adults saw illuminated orphid-dots spiraling out of the vial in mid-air, the paths forking and splitting in two. And now the webeyes overlaid the scene with a tessellated grid showing each orphid's location. Some were zooming towards the cuttles, but others were homing in on the curios crowding the aft. Additional view-windows kept popping up as the nanomachines multiplied.

  Jil hugged Bixie to her chest, covering the little girl's dark cap of hair with her hands as if to keep the orphids off her. Ond bent forward, rubbing his wrist. Perhaps it was broken. Craigor 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, tensely staring into the sky, soaking up orphid info from his webeyes. For her part, Nektar was fumbling to remove the special contact lenses from her eyes.

  4.

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

  “Quantum computations aren't reversible,” said Ond. “Not when the world is all the time collapsing states to get information out of the orphids. Never mind about that. I think I might need a doctor."

  “Tell your precious orphids to fix your wrist,” snapped Nektar.

  “Good idea!” said Ond, holding out his arm. “Burrow in,” he said to the orphids. “Patch up the crack—there's not a crack? Well, loosen up the clots for me anyway. Ah, that feels better. Good to go."

  “I want you off our boat,” repeated Jil. “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. “It's historic. I've been vlogging this for the record. In fact it's already on the Web. Wireless, you know."

  Craigor hustled Ond, Nektar, and Chu onto one of the Merz Boat's piezoplastic dinghies, which would ferry them to the Alviso 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. Jil lost her cool enough to give him the finger.

  “Are we right to just sit around?” Jil asked Craigor next. “Shouldn't we be calling for an emergency environmental clean-up? 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 orphi
d viewpoints had become a disc-like Escher tessellation that 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.

  “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, Craigor, Momotaro, and Bixie. 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.” Jil's 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."