Asimov's SF, September 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “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 towards 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 thoughts. This orphidnet link is like telepathy. I better be a good boy. There's meshes all over you, Jil. In case you didn't know."

  “Already?” said Jil, holding out her hand. She'd been blocking out perceiving 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 Jil's 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 Jil's kids.

  Yes, the orphids had peppered Momotaro and Bixie like chicken pox. Oh, this was happening way too fast. God damn that Ond. Jil knelt beside Bixie, trying to wipe one of the dots off her little girl's round 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, far too tiny to dislodge.

  “We're like cuttlefish in a virtual net,” said Craigor, shaking his head. He sat down next to Jil on the deck, each of them holding one of the kids.

  “Look out there,” said Jil, pointing.

  The orphids were twinkling in the bay waters, on the freeways and buildings of San Jose, and even on the foothills and mountains surrounding the bay. Jil and Craigor hadn't really believed it when Ond had said it would only take a day for the orphids to cover Earth. But everything as far as the eye could see was already wrapped in meshes of orphid dots.

  “I don't know whether to shit or go snowblind,” said Craigor, forcing a hick chuckle. “Where does that expression comes from? Like, why those two particular options?

  “I'm so scared,” said Jil in a tight voice.

  “How about the way Ond and Nektar were fighting?” said Craigor, skating around the subject. “What a pair of lovebirds, hey?"

  “I guess Chu puts them under a lot of stress,” said Jil weakly.

  “Yeah,” said Craigor, patting Jil's cheek. “I enjoy Ond, but, please, don't be a geek and a drunken maniac. And this is the same guy who saved Earth three years ago. Weird. Did you notice the way Nektar was talking about her new friend Jose? I see an affair taking shape. Adultery will get even harder, with orphids tracking every inch of everyone's body. Not that you and I have to worry."

  The world as they'd known it was over, but Craigor was gossiping as if nothing about human nature would really change. “You okay?” he said, wrapping his arm around Jil.

  “Oh, Craigor,” said Jil, leaning her head on her husband's familiar shoulder. Drained by shock and fear, the two of them dozed off there, sitting on the soft deck with the kids.

  5.

  After the orphids got loose on the Merz Boat, Jil yelled and Craigor made Chu's family get in a soft dinghy and leave. Chu would have liked to bring Bixie home with them; she was such a cutie-pie.

  The orphidnet hookup got better and better all the way home. Chu realized that, with his eyes closed, he could still see Bixie there on her parents’ scow. Having orphids blanket the world made it so your eyes were everywhere. Chu liked seeing with his eyes closed.

  Before they got home, Chu saw police waiting at their house. He told Ond, but Ond said he didn't mind. When they got out of the car, one of the policemen touched Chu, and Chu screamed and acted crazy so they'd leave him alone. Chu and Nektar went in the house and Ond got in the police car. Nektar was mad, she said the Pigs could keep Ond for all she cared. She said Chu could watch video, and then she went and lay down on her bed with her pillow over her head like she always did when she was upset.

  Chu didn't bother with the video, he just lay on his back and explored the orphidnet. He saw Ond in the police car. He saw Bixie and Momotaro playing on the Merz Boat. And he swam around inside one of the cuttlefish Craigor had thrown back into the bay.

  It was both dreadful and fascinating to be a cuttlefish, especially when Chu's host began rubbing up against another cuttlefish, tangling his tentacles with hers. The cuttlefish were doing reproduction. Chu's cuttlefish girlfriend squirted out some eggs, and Chu's heart beat really fast. Then he and his cuttlefish girlfriend started eating algae off the rocks, scraping it up with their beaks. And then, all of a sudden, Chu's cuttlefish girlfriend was gone. He jetted about looking for her, to no avail.

  In the real world, Chu's arms were hurting. Nektar was shaking him and asking him if he were having a fit. She was angry. Chu realized he'd been beating his arms on the floor to imitate the cuttlefish's tentacles, and chewing on the rug with his teeth. He'd wet his pants. He felt silly. Nektar helped him into some dry clothes. Chu promised he wouldn't be a cuttlefish anymore, and Nektar went back to her room.

  Nektar felt guilty and bad about yelling at Chu for wetting his pants again. Her family life was an endless round of lose-lose. She lay back down on her bed, closed her eyes and watched Ond arriving at the jail. But then she got distracted.

  Thanks to the orphidnet, she could see the insides of all the neighbors’ houses. She'd always wondered about that crabby Stephanie Cally across the street; was she on meds or what? With the slightest touch of will, Nektar was able to examine Stephanie's orphid-outlined medicine cabinet, and yes, it was loaded with prescription pseudocoke. As long as Nektar was there, she looked at Stephanie's jewelry, her shoes, and her surprisingly large array of sex-toys.

  The thought of sex turned Nektar's thoughts to her cute new friend Jose. She sent a virtual copy of herself to his apartment on the second floor of a retrofitted yellow-brick building on Santa Clara Avenue, right across the street from Ririche, the restaurant where they worked together.

  Virtual Nektar flew in through Jose's window; he was lying on his bed in his underwear looking totally hot. The room was smoky; Jose's eyes were closed. He was in the orphidnet, too. Nektar followed a golden thread leading from Jose's body to his mental location; she came up behind a wireframe outline of him and said, “Hi."

  He turned; his skin filled in; his mouth opened in a grin. For the first time, they kissed.

  They were in, like, a temple. A domed round room with bouncy Buddhist-looking monks against the walls. The little monks weren't human, they were orphidnet agents, wearing shallow, pointed coolie hats decorated with blinking blue and green eyes. The monk AIs were chanting.

  Humans were in the temple too, orphidnet users come here to adore the new beings they were seeing in their minds. And in the middle of the room was a round altar holding a shape of light, a glowing woman. She was soaking up the worship. She said she was an angel.

  6.

  “I see colored dots on everything,” Momotaro told his sister. Night had fallen. “Those are the orphids the grown-ups were arguing about."

  “Orpid,” said Bixie, repeatedly touching her knee with her finger. “Orpid, orpid, orpid, orpid. Do they bite?"

  “No,” said Momotaro. “They're talking to us, Bixie. Can you hear?"

  “Be quiet, orpid,” said Bixie. “You sound like teachers. Blah blah blah."

  “Blah blah blah,” echoed Momotaro, laughing. “Can you show me the Space Pirates online video game, orphids? Oh, yeah, that's neat. Bang! Whoosh! Budda-budda!” He aimed his fingers, shooting at toons he was seeing in th
e air.

  “I want to see the Spice Dolls show,” said Bixie. “Ooo, there's Kayla Kool and Fancy Feather. Hi, dollies. Wanna have a tea party?"

  Waking up to the kids’ chatter, Craigor understood that they were all fully immersed in the Web now. The orphids had learned to directly interface with people's bodies and brains. He popped out his contact lenses and removed his earbud speakers and throat mike. Jil shifted, rubbed her face, opened her eyes.

  “Check it out, Jil, no more Web hardware,” said Craigor. “Nice work, orphids. And how are you getting video into my head? Magnetic vortices in the occipital lobes, you say? You're like smart lice. Wavy. I can turn off your feed into my head, I hope? Oh, I see, like that. But leave it on for now, I'm loving it. Behold the new orphidnet interface, Jil."

  “Oh God, does this have to be real?” mumbled Jil. “I feel dizzy. No more hardware, you say? Oh, I don't like the kids having so much access.” She sat up and began stripping off her own Web gear. “Too much video turns kids into zombies, Craigor. I feel stupid for having all those joint sensors under my skin."

  “Fa-toom!” said Momotaro, cradling an invisible rocket-launcher.

  “More tea, Fancy?” said Bixie, holding an unseen teapot.

  With a slight twitch of will, Jil and Craigor could tune their viewpoints to the virtual worlds the kids were playing in. Really quite harmless. And the orphid-beamed visual images were of very good quality. The webeye overlays had always been a little fuzzy and headachy.

  “Thus ends the market for my cuttlefish,” said Craigor. “Well, I never did feel that good about putting the Pharaohs on death row."

  “But you had fun making the traps,” said Jil. “It was a skill. Everything's going to be so different now. Will anyone do anything anymore? Everyone will be terminally distracted."

  “It'll be easy to catch fish to eat,” said Craigor. “I'll always know where they are. I can see their meshes under the boat right now. Some rockfish and a salmon."

  “Yeah, but what if the fish are watching you? And who'll grow rice and potatoes?"

  “Hey, I can always outsmart a fish,” said Craigor. “As far as work goes, I bet orphid-controlled piezoplastic sluggie bots can do the chores. But people will still do some labor anyway—for exercise."

  “Karma yoga,” said Jil. “Hey, orphids, can you stop displaying all those triumphant halo dots? They bother me; it's like having to see every single germ you come across. That's better. Now, listen up, kids, Mommy and Daddy don't want you playing computer games all day long."

  “Leave them alone for now, Mother Hen,” said Craigor. “Let's check out the news."

  The news was all about the orphids, of course. ExaExa was blaming Ond; he was in police custody now. ExaExa said the orphid release had taken place on a fishing scow named Merz Boat in the South Bay, and here were some pictures.

  Cursing, Jil and Craigor glanced up to see buzzing dragonfly cameras against the night sky, the cameras visible by their glowing infrared eyes.

  “At least they're not spraying solvents on us,” said Craigor.

  “The authorities considered that,” said the baritone orphidnet voice in their heads. “But we orphids have already blanketed the whole West Coast. And great numbers of us are traveling overseas in the jet streams. It's way too late to disinfect the Merz Boat.” A second later, the newscaster echoed the same words.

  The news imagery segued to Ond, giving a press conference on the steps of the San Jose jail to a crowd of reporters and a hostile mob. To satisfy the public's need to know more about the ongoing events, the sheriff was letting Ond talk for as long as he liked, lit by an arch of glo-lights.

  7.

  Ond was verbose, geekly, defiant. The beer and tobacco had worn off. He was speaking clearly, selling the notion of the orphidnet.

  “What with the petabyte and petaflop capacity of each orphid, the full sextillion-strong orphidnet will boast an ubbabyte of memory being processed at an ubbaflop rate—ubba meaning ten to the thirty-sixth power,” said Ond to the crowd by the jailhouse steps, relishing the chance to inflict techie jargon on them. “The orphidnet's total power will thus be the square of an individual human's exabyte exaflop level. My former company's name was well-chosen: ExaExa. The orphidnet has the computational clout that you'd get from replacing each person by the entire population of Earth, and having all those people thinking together."

  “How will the orphidnet impact the average citizen?” asked a reporter.

  “Dive in and find out,” urged Ond. “The orphidnet is all around. Anyone can dip into it at any time. It'll be teeming with artificial intelligences soon, and I'm predicting they'll like helping people. Why wouldn't they? People are interesting and fun."

  “What about the less-privileged people who don't have specialized Web-access gear?"

  “The orphids are the interface,” said Ond. “Nobody needs hardware anymore. We're putting people first and building Gaia's mind."

  “That's the ExaExa slogan,” remarked another reporter. “But they fired you and disavowed responsibility for your actions."

  “I've been fired before,” said Ond. “It doesn't matter. ExaExa's real problem with me was that I released the orphids before they could figure out a way to charge for orphidnet access. But it's gonna be free. And, listen to me, listen. The orphids are our friends. They're the best nanotechnology we're going to get. I did a proactive release while there was still a chance of getting it right."

  “How soon do you expect to be freed from prison?"

  “Right now,” said Ond. “I wouldn't be safe in jail.” Plugged into the orphidnet as he was, with a full awareness of the exact position of everyone's limbs, and with the emerging orphidnet AI helping him, Ond was able to simply walk off through the crowd.

  In the crowd were some very angry people who truly wished Ond harm. After all, he'd forced Earth away from her old state; single-handedly he'd made the decision to change everyone's lives—possibly forever. Ond was in very real danger of being stabbed, beaten to death, or hung from a lamppost.

  But whenever someone reached for him, he was just out of their grasp. For once in his life he was nimble and graceful. Perhaps if the others had been so keenly tuned into the orphidnet as Ond, they could have caught him. But probably not. The orphids were, after all, quite fond of Ond.

  A grinning guy at the back of the crowd gave Ond a bicycle; Ond recognized him as a friend, a fellow nanotech enthusiast named Jeff Rojas. Ond mounted Jeff's bike and disappeared from the view of the still-coagulating lynch-mob, cutting through the exact right dark alleys to avoid the pursuing cars, though not quite able to elude the dragonfly cameras.

  Alone on the dark side-streets of San Jose, Ond asked the orphids to disable all the dragonfly cameras following him. The devices clattered to the street like dead sparrows. Next Ond had the orphids systematically change every existing reference to his home's address. Done.

  But when he asked the orphids to make him invisible on the orphidnet, they balked. Yes, they would stop broadcasting his name, but the integrity of the world-spanning mesh of orphids was absolutely inviolable. The orphids reminded Ond of a Nantel design meeting where he himself had altered the orphid operating system to include this very principle of Incorruptible Ubiquity.

  Before long, people would be figuring out how to track Ond in real time. And by dawn there'd be no safe place on Earth for him.

  8.

  Chu lay on the rug, careful not to touch the wet spots he'd made. He was mad at Nektar for yelling at him.

  Eyes closed, he was studying the new living things in the orphidnet: shiny disks whose edges bent under and curled up, with short thick stalks under their disks. Virtual mushrooms! Each mushroom had six or seven eyes on top, and the fatter mushrooms had baby mushrooms growing out of their sides. Some were boys and some were girls. They were cute and friendly—and glad to talk to Chu. When he asked where they came from, they said they were emergent orphidnet AIs, and that people's thoughts were their fa
vorite thing to look at. They spoke really well, like regular people, in a way—although their thoughts came across in fatter chunks than just sentences and words.

  Chu steered the conversation around to cuttlefish. One of the cartoony mushrooms said “Aha,” and he showed Chu the cuttle-data flowing to ftp.exaexa.org/merzboat. Chu decided to analyze the data himself, with the orphidnet AIs helping him.

  Pretty soon he noticed something interesting about the cuttlefish. Every so often, one of them would totally disappear. And occasionally one of the cuttlefish would pop back from the mysterious nowhere.

  Chu wondered how this could be. One of the mushroom AIs obligingly did a quick search of all the science papers in the world, and found a theory that there's another world parallel to ours, and that objects can quantum-tunnel back and forth, thus seeming to disappear and reappear.

  “But when I set something down it always stays put,” said Chu.

  “People collapse the quantum states of things they look at,” said the mushroom AI, wobbling the cap of her head. “The watched pot never boils. Objects stay put in the presence of a classical observer."

  “Sometimes I do lose things,” allowed Chu. “I guess they could disappear when I look away."

  “When things are on their own, they can sneak and quantum-tunnel to the other world,” agreed the mushroom. “Or maybe someone from the other world reaches over here to grab them."

  “People in the other world are taking our cuttlefish?” said Chu. “But we're using the orphids to watch the cuttlefish all the time. So they should stay put."