Asimov's SF, September 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Orphids are quantum computers. They don't observe; they entangle. An orphid isn't like some bossy schoolmarm who keeps everyone in their seats until she looks away. It's perfectly possible for an orphid-tagged cuttlefish to quantum-tunnel to a world on a parallel hypersheet."

  “What's the name of the other world?” asked Chu.

  “What would you like to call it?” asked the mushroom. “You're the one discovering it."

  “Let's call it the Mirrorworld,” said Chu. “Can we see a Mirrorworld person grabbing a cuttlefish?"

  “Let's try,” said the mushroom. “Aha.” A moment later she was showing Chu some shiny figures like 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 around. Look, look, there's a Mirrorworlder taking a cuttlefish! They're having a fad for cuttlefish. It's lucky we looked at the cuttlefish data stream."

  “My good idea,” said Chu.

  The orphidnet was showing him a grid of scenes in which the glowing figures capered about, grabbed cuttlefish, flew through earth and water, or displayed themselves to little groups of worshipful virtual humans. Chu glimpsed his mother in one of these worship groups, but then she was gone.

  Chu watched the worship group a bit longer anyway. The Mirrorworlder in the center was like a woman of smooth light; she was preaching about how great she was; she said was an angel. Noticing Chu peeking at her, she pointed at him, which made him uneasy. He pulled away, although he would have liked to have seen where his mother had gone.

  “The Mirrorworlders have always been around,” said the smart mushroom, reporting more info from her data-mining. “People have never been sure if they're real; they called them elves or fairies or demons or spirits or other things. Mostly they called them angels. Mirrorworlders usually disappear if you watch them closely—or if you ask them a lot of questions. It decoheres them. But thanks to our quantum-computing orphids, the orphidnet can show the angels without melting them away."

  “Can I go to the Mirrorworld 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 Mirrorworld would be an—encryption problem. It's something you'd do with your own mind. Like what you call teleportation? You get your mind into a special state and encrypt yourself into a superposition capable of tunneling to the Mirrorworld."

  “Encryption!” exclaimed Chu. “I like breaking codes. Tell me more."

  “To travel between the two worlds, a Mirrorworlder 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 Mirrorworld or into our world."

  “What part of that is encryption?” asked Chu.

  “The encryption lies in the way in which the Mirrorworlder does the self-observation,” said the mushroom. “It's a quantum-mechanical operator based on a specific numerical pattern. The encryption code."

  “Goody,” said Chu. “Let's figure out the code right now. We'll use a timing channel attack."

  “It's fun working with you,” said the mushroom.

  9.

  Ond took a circuitous route towards his house in the leafy Rose Garden district of San Jose. Whenever his enemies got too close, the orphids would warn him and he'd make another detour.

  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 the insides 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 Belusouv-Zhabotinsky scrolls in an excitable chemical medium. Maybe he'd call them beezies.

  The beezies were talking to him, offering their information services. They wanted to share whatever intellectual adventures Ond could cook up. The scroll-shaped AIs looked like colored jellyfish and they spoke in compound glyphs that Ond's brain turned into words.

  As he rode the bicycle and dodged his pursuers, Ond began organizing a workspace for himself in the orphidnet. His self-image was like a tree trunk with his thoughts branching off it. With the orphidnet agents helping him, he effortlessly combined all his digital documents, emails, and blogs into a single lifebox file that could automatically answer the questions people were asking him. And as he encountered people and AIs, he put links to them on his lifebox—like hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree.

  Passing the Rosicrucian Egyptian museum 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 real address.

  In his mind's eye, Ond saw his family in the orphidnet. Nektar was lying on their bed—sulking? No, a little probing showed that she too was in the orphidnet, doing something with her friend Jose from work. Ond didn't like seeing his wife with the swarthy, virile Jose. Nektar and Jose were attending some kind of virtual gathering, an impromptu religious service with a choir of orphids surrounding a luminous woman-like 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, similar, bright forms lay in every direction, out on the fringes of his thoughts—

  Just then three virtual humans plowed into Ond's lifebox 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 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.

  10.

  Nektar didn't like the so-called angel at the center of the virtual temple where she'd found Jose. She'd never liked religion. Her mother had given the family's savings to a TV evangelist.

  The angel was saying that she and her race were like gods compared to humans, and that we should be grateful to them. Same old line you always heard in church. Nektar figured these angels were just some kind of aliens or AIs. The angel could hear Nektar thinking this, but the angel wasn't mad—she thought Nektar was funny.

  “Take your friend and do what you will, little doubter,” said the angel, sending a shower of sparks that settled down onto Nektar and Jose like pixie dust. “All is permitted in the new world."

  The sparks energized Jose; he stopped staring at the angel and tugged Nektar into a side room whose walls were covered by special marble slabs which were 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 actually there. He began freaking out. He couldn't remember things right. He said now that he'd seen an angel, maybe he should kill himself and go to heaven for good. Nektar told him to please wait, she was going to come there 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 go be with Jose in his apartment on Santa Clara Avenue. And she needed to leave Ond forev
er. She would never forgive him for ruining the cozy, womany 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, sweet 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 goodbye. 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 street a few blocks further on. Nektar went down some side streets to avoid the jam.

  11.

  While Ond and Mitch waited for the agents to return, 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 real-world dog was chasing his bike, barking and baring his teeth as if he meant to bite Ond's calf. Ond snapped fully into the material plane, hopped off the bike, and picked up some gravel to throw at the dog, 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? About what? 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 a single 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 named the Mirrorworld. 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 towards Ond's current location. By now, even the dimmest bulbs had figured out how to see Ond on the orphidnet.

  An urgent message popped up from Jeff Rojas, the guy who'd lent Ond the bicycle. Jeff was on his way in his car to offer Ond a fresh means of escape.

  Ond sped the last few blocks towards home.

  12.

  Just as Chu had hoped, the quantum-mechanical operator at the heart of the angels’ world-to-world teleportation method 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. The actual value of K was the secret code needed to break the encryption.

  Chu and the mushrooms were able to deduce digit after digit of K by delving into the ftp.exaexa.org/merzboat data stream. First of all they figured out how to represent each of the disappeared cephalopods as a number. And then they deduced 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 digits of K. This timing channel attack was a big problem, a heavy crunch, but the orphidnet made it feasible.

  Pretty soon Chu had the integer K tidily laid out as a pattern in the orphidnet. And with access to K, he now knew how to teleport back and forth between the two worlds.

  K turned out to be several millions of digits long, by the way. Chu relished the fact that the orphidnet allowed him to visualize a gigundo number like that, 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. Even this condensed pattern was too big to fit conveniently into even Chu's brain. When he “looked” at the pattern, he was really accessing a link to an orphidnet storage location. Chu gloated over the link, happy with the knowing. Although, hmm, given a little time, maybe he could find a deeper pattern that would allow him to memorize the entire code.

  A glowing shape approached him, bright and solemn, speaking in a woman's voice: a Mirrorworlder, the same one he'd seen in the temple before.

  “You shouldn't pry into our affairs,” she said. “We don't want you pushing into our land. We're gods compared to you. Worship me and forget your stolen wisdom."

  “No!” said Chu, holding tight to his hard-won code.

  The angel woman held up her index finger and glared at Chu. Poking him as if he were dough, she probed into the core of his brain, rooting around, trying to erase the link. Chu began twitching all over. He found his voice and screamed for Nektar. She didn't come.

  As Ond neared the house, he could see the lynch-mob only a block behind him. He felt for Nektar in the orphidnet and was surprised to discover that she'd left their house in her car and had driven right past him and, for that matter, past the mob. He hadn't noticed. And now when he contacted her mind, he learned 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 pushed his connection away.

  For the first time, Ond accepted that he might have made a mistake in releasing the orphids.

  In his house at last, he found little Chu convulsing on the living-room floor. Ond cradled the boy in his arms, reaching into his mind to stabilize him. To his dismay, he found one of those Mirrorworld angels poking around in his son's head.

  Sensing something quantum-mechanical about the alien being, Ond set to work decohering her. He knew that the best way to destroy a complicated quantum state is to closely observe it, that is, to ask a lot of questions about it. Ond subjected the alien to a barrage of questions and measurements, pinning down her sex, mass, energy, age, skin color, background, family size, voice timbre, food preferences, past ailments, education.... Finally, with a sound like a locust's abrupt chirp, the angel flipped from our world back to the Mirrorworld she'd come from.

  “Are you okay, Chu?"

  “I still have the link to the chimes and the blue spaghetti,” said the boy weakly. “Here.” Ond absorbed Chu's message containing the link. There was a hugger-mugger of voices approaching. Outside someone was honking a car horn.

  “That's my friend,” said Ond. “We've got to leave right away. We'll go back to Jil's boat."

  “I'd like that,” said Chu. “Do you want to hear about the cuttlefish and how I found the angels’ teleportation code?"

  “I heard a little from the orphidnet AIs,” said Ond, carrying his son to t
he door. “I call them beezies.” How fragile the boy seemed, how precious.

  “The beezies are good,” said Chu. “But that angel woman was being mean to me. I wouldn't let go of the link to her secret code. I almost have a way to learn the code by heart."

  “Strong Chu,” said Ond. “I want to hear all the details. We're going to need them. But you rest now. Tell me on the boat. Don't think about anything hard. I got really scared, seeing you shaking like that. If the angels come for you again, remember to drive them away by asking lots of nosy questions. You have to keep after them, is all."

  “Okay,” said Chu.

  Down the street, people were yelling and running toward them. Moving faster than he would have thought possible, Ond got himself and Chu into the back seat of Jeff's car, a fast and sporty model. Jeff peeled out just before the crowd reached them, following up with a high-speed doughnut move to shake a couple of cars trying to tail them.

  On the way to the boat, Chu felt dozy. He slouched against his father in the car's back seat. He wanted to sleep, but before he knew it, he was in the orphidnet yet again. He reached out to find Momotaro and Bixie. They were running around on the Merz Boat playing with a neat new toy called Happy Shoon. Jil had just now made it out of smart plastic. Chu joined in; Happy Shoon and the kids could see him. They played a kind of hide and seek game called Ghost In The Graveyard.

  The game felt a little creepy because there were a few angels following Chu around. They couldn't get at him right now because he'd learned from Ond to ask them lots of questions. But that was hard. Would life ever be easy again?

  13.

  After her initial half hour of panic, Jil relaxed and started using the orphidnet, dipping in and out. When she went in, it was like sleeping, as if the orphidnet users were dreamers pooling together in the collective unconscious of the hive mind. Jil began directing her dreamy visions for a purpose: she wanted to find out how to market Yoon Shoon.

  Yesterday Mr. Kim, the chief of marketing at Yoon Shoon, had emailed Jil about their need for a “beloved logoman,” and Jil hadn't even understood what the hell he wanted. But now the orphid AIs helped her; they searched the global namespace to figure out Mr. Kim's request. A “logoman” was meant to be a little animated figure to symbolize the Yoon Shoon company: a Michelin Man, a Reddy Kilowatt, a Ronald McDonald, a Mickey Mouse, like that.