POST- SINGULAR by Rudy Rucker
Rudy Rucker’s most recent nonfiction book was about the meaning of computation: The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How to Be Happy; the paperback is out from Thunder’s Mouth Press this fall. The author’s latest SF novel is Mathematicians in Love, which gives life to some of his ideas about computation, not to mention parallel worlds, and toppling an evil government. It will be out from Tor Books later in the year. Rudy is currently working on a novel, Postsingular, which uses the current tale, as well as “Chu and the Nants” (Asimov’s, June 2006), as back-story. He tells us he spends an inordinate amount of time writing and photographing for his blog: www.rudyrucker.com/blog.
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1.
The Singularity happened when, encouraged by his business backers, President Joe Doakes sent an eggcase of nants to Mars. Nants were self-reproducing nanomachines: solar-powered, networked, capable of gnatlike flight, and single-mindedly focused on transforming all available material into more nants. In a couple of years, the nants had eaten Mars, turning the red planet into a Dyson sphere of a duodecillion nanomachines, a three-millimeter-thick shell half a billion kilometers across, with Earth and the Sun trapped inside.
The stars were hidden by giant ads; in daytime the ads were a silvery background to the sky. Doakes’s backers were well-pleased. And behind the scenes the nant swarm was solving a number of intractable problems in computer science, mathematical physics, and process design; these results were privily beamed to the nants’ parent corporation, Nantel. But before Nantel could profit from the discoveries, the nants set to work chewing up Earth.
At the last possible moment, a disaffected Nantel engineer named Ond Lutter managed to throw the nants into reverse gear. The nants restored the sections of Earth they’d already eaten, reassembled Mars, and returned to their original eggcase—which was blessedly vaporized by a well-aimed Martian nuclear blast, courtesy of the Chinese Space Agency.
Public fury over Earth’s near-demolition was such that President Doakes and his Vice President were impeached, convicted of treason, and executed by lethal injection. But Nantel fared better. Although three high-ranking execs were put to sleep like the President, the company itself entered bankruptcy to duck the lawsuits—and re-emerged as ExaExa, with the corporate motto, “Putting People First—Building Gaia’s Mind.”
For a while there it seemed as if humanity had nipped the Singularity in the bud. But then came the orphids.
2.
Jil and Craigor’s home was a flat live-aboard scow called the Merz Boat. Propelled by cilia like a giant paramecium, the piezoplastic boat puttered around the shallow, turbid waters of the south San Francisco Bay. Craigor had bought the Merz Boat quite cheaply from an out-of-work exec during the chaos that followed the nant debacle. He’d renamed the boat in honor of one of his personal heroes, the Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters who’d famously turned his house into an assemblage called the Merz Bau. “Merz” was Schwitters’s made-up word meaning, according to Craigor, “gnarly stuff that I can get for free.”
Jil was eye-catching: more than pretty, she moved with perfect grace. She had dark blunt-cut hair, a straight nose and a ready laugh. She’d been a good student: an English major with a minor in graphics and design, planning a career in advertising. But then in her early twenties she’d had a problem with pseudocoke abuse. Fortunately she’d made it into recovery before having the kids with Craigor, a son and a daughter, seven-year-old Momotaro and five-year-old Bixie. The four of them made a close-knit, happy family.
Although Jil was still hoping to make it as an ad designer, for now she was working as a virtual booth bunny for ExaExa, doing demos at online trade fairs, with her body motion-captured, tarted up, and fed to software developers. All her body joints were tagged with subcutaneous sensors. She’d gotten into the product-dancer thing back when her judgment had been impaired by pseudocoke. Dancing was easy money, and Jil had a gift for expressing herself in movement. Too bad the product-dancer audience consisted of slobbering nerds. But now she was getting close to landing an account with Yoon Shoon, a Korean self-configuring-athletic-shoe manufacturer. She’d already sold them a slogan: “Our goo grows on you.”
Craigor was a California boy: handsome, good-humored, and not overly ambitious. Comfortable in his own skin. He called himself an assemblagist sculptor, which meant that he was a packrat, loath to throw out anything. The vast surface area of the Merz Boat suited him. Pleasantly idle of a summer evening, he’d amuse himself by arranging his junk in fresh patterns on the elliptical pancake of their boat, and marking colored link-lines into the deck’s computational plastic.
Craigor was also a kind of fisherman; he earned money by trapping iridescent Pharaoh cuttlefish, an invasive species native to the Mergui Archipelago of Burma, and now flourishing in the waters of the South Bay. The chunky three-kilogram cuttlefish brought in a good price apiece from AmphiVision, Inc., a San Jose company that used organic rhodopsin from cuttlefish chromatophores to dope the special video-displaying contact lenses known as webeyes. All the digirati were wearing webeyes to overlay heads-up computer displays upon their visual fields. Webeyes acted as cameras as well; you could transmit whatever you saw. Along with earbud speakers, throat mikes, and motion sensors, the webeyes were making cyberspace into an integral part of the natural world.
There weren’t many other cuttlefishermen in the South Bay—the fishery was under a strict licensing program that Craigor had been grandfathered into when the rhodopsin market took off. Craigor had lucked into a good thing, and he was blessed with a knack for assembling fanciful traps that brought in steady catches of the wily Pharaoh cuttles.
To sweeten the take, Craigor even got a small bounty from the federal Aquatic Nuisance Species Task Force for each cuttlefish beak that he turned in. The Task Force involvement was, however, a mixed blessing. Craigor was supposed to file two separate electronic forms about each and every cuttlefish that he caught: one to the Department of the Interior and one to the Department of Commerce. The feds were hoping to gain control over the cuttles by figuring out the fine points of their life cycle. Being the laid-back kind of guy that he was, Craigor’s reports had fallen so far behind that the feds were threatening to lift his cuttlefishing license.
3.
One Sunday afternoon, Ond Lutter, his wife Nektar and their high-functioning-autistic ten-year-old son Chu came over for a late afternoon cook-out on the Merz Boat. They were a less happy family than Jil’s.
Jil had met Ond at work; he was the fired engineer who’d put a stop to the Nantel nants, now elevated to Chief Technical Officer of the reborn ExaExa. The awkward Ond thought Jil was cute—in a nice way—and the two little families had become friends. They got together nearly every weekend.
“It’s peaceful here,” said Ond, taking a long pull of his beer. He rarely drank, and even one bottle had a noticeable effect on him. “Like Eden.” He leaned back in his white wickerwork rocker. No two chairs on the Merz Boat were the same.
“What are those cones?” asked Nektar. She was talking about the waist-high shiny ridged shapes that loosely ringed the area Craigor had cleared out for today’s little party. The kids were off at the other end of the boat, Momotaro showing Chu the latest junk and Bixie singing made-up songs that Chu tried to sing too.
“Ceramic jet-engine baffles,” said Jil. “From the days before piezoplastic. Craigor got them off the back lot at Lockheed.”
“The ridges were for reducing turbulence,” said Craigor. “We sit in an island of serenity.”
“You’re a poet, Craigor,” said Ond. The low sun illuminated his scalp through his thinning blonde hair. “It’s good to have a friend like you. I have to confess that I brought along a big surprise. And I was just thinking—my new tech will solve your problems with generating those cuttlefish reports. It’ll get your sculpture some publicity as well.”
“Far be it from me to pry into Chief Engineer Ond’s geeksome plans,” said Craigor easily. “As for my diffuse but rewarding oeuvre—” He made an expansive gesture that encompassed the whole deck. “An open book. Unfortunately I’m too planktonic for fame. I transcend encapsulation.”
“Planktonic?” said Jil, smiling at her raffish husband, always off in his own world.
“Planktonic sea creatures rarely swim,” said Craigor. “Like cuttlefish, they go with the flow. Until something nearby catches their attention. And then—dart! Another masterpiece.”
Just aft of the cleared area was Craigor’s holding tank, an aquarium hand-caulked from car windshields, bubbling with air and containing a few dozen Pharaoh cuttlefish, their body-encircling fins undulating in an endless hula dance, their facial squid-bunches of tentacles gathered into demure sheaves, their yellow W-shaped pupils gazing out at their captors.
“They look so smart and so—doomed,” said Nektar, regarding the bubbling tank. She had full lips and she wore her curly brown hair in a fat ponytail. “Like wizards on death row. They make me feel guilty about my webeyes.”
“I had a dream about angels coming to set the cuttlefish free,” said Craigor. “But it’s hard to remember my dreams anymore. Bixie wakes us up so early.” He gave his daughter a little pat. “Brat.”
“Crackle of dawn,” said Bixie.
“You finally got webeyes too?” said Jil to Nektar. “I love mine. But if I forget to turn them off before falling asleep—ugh. Spammers in my dreams, not angels. I won’t let my kids have webeyes yet. Of course for Chu—” She broke off, not wanting to say the wrong thing.
“Webeyes are perfect for Chu,” said Nektar. “You know how he loves machines. He and Ond are alike that way. Ond says he was autistic too when he was a boy. I’m the token normal in our family. As if.” She blinked and stared off into the distance. “Mainly I got my webeyes for my job.” Now that Chu was getting along pretty well in his school, beautiful Nektar had reentered the workforce as a cook in an upscale San Jose restaurant. “The main chef at Ririche talked me into it. Jose. He’s been showing me the ropes. I can see all the orders, and track our supplies while I cook.”
“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.”
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