Thanks, Tom. It's always a pleasure to read at Booksmith. I've been here a number of times over the years. And so today I'm reading from Post Singular. I like the cover. It's green with a purple. Cuttlefish. I like cuttlefish a lot. So I'm going to start in on Chapter 3. Jill, and I'll read for about half an hour, 35 minutes, and then we can do a little Q&A if you have some questions. Jill in Crager's home was a long cabin atop a flat liveaboard scow called the Merzboot.
Propelled by cilia like a giant paramecium, the piezoplastic boat puttered around the shallow turbid bay waters near the industrial zone of San Francisco's Bay. Kreger had bought the one-of-a-kind Merz boat quite cheaply from an out-of-work exec during the chaos that followed the nanotech debacle. He'd renamed the boat in honor of one of his personal heroes, the Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters, who famously turned his house into an assemblage he called the Merzbau. Merz was Schwitters' made-up word meaning, according to Kreger, gnarly stuff that I can get for free. Jill Zonder 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 midway through college, she developed a problem with pseudocoke abuse and dropped out. She made it into recovery, blundered into an early marriage, and had kids with Kreger, a son and a daughter, Momotaro and Bixie, aged 11 and 10. The four of them made a close-knit, relatively happy family. However, Jill did sometimes feel a bit trapped, especially now that she was moving into her 30s.
Although Jill had finished up college and still dreamed of making it as a designer, she was currently working as a virtual booth buddy for ExaExa, doing demos at online trade fairs with her body motion captured, tarted up, and fed to software developers. All of 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 Jill 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 Yoo Shu, a Korean self-configuring athletic shoe manufacturer. She'd already sold them a slogan, Our goo grows on you. Craig O'Connor was a California board. Handsome, good-humored, not overly ambitious. Comfortable in his own skin. He called himself an assemblagist sculptor, which meant that he was a pack rat. The vast surface of the Meritz 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 the deck and marking colored link lines into the deck's computational plastic.
Kreger was a kind of fisherman as well. That is, he earned money by trapping iridescent pharaoh cuttlefish, an invasive species native to the Mergai archipelago of Burma, and now flourishing in the climate-heated waters of the San Francisco Bay. The chunky 3-kilogram cuttlefish brought in a good price apiece from Amphivision Inc., a San Francisco company that used organic rhodopsin from cuttlefish chromatophores to dope the special video display and contact lenses known as web eyes. All the digerati were wearing web eyes to overlay heads-up computer displays upon their visual fields. Web eyes also acted as cameras. You could transmit whatever you saw.
Along with earbud speakers, throat mics, and motion sensors, the web eyes were making cyberspace into an integral part of the natural world. There weren't many other cuddle fishermen in the 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 cuddles. To sweeten the take, Craig even got a small bounty from the Federal Aquatic Nuisance Species Task Force for each cuttlefish beak that he turned in. The task force's involvement was, however, a mixed blessing. Craig 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 non-digital kind of guy that he was, Craig's reports had fallen so far behind that the feds were threatening to lift his cuttlefishing license.
One Saturday afternoon, Ande Lutter, his wife Nectar Lundqvist, and their 12-year-old son Chu came over for a late afternoon cookout on the Merzboot. It was the 1st of September. Jill had met Ande at work. He'd been rehired and elevated to chief technical office of the reborn Exa Exa. The two little families had become friends. They got together nearly every weekend, hanging out, chatting, and flirting. It was clear to Nectar that Ande had something of a crush on Jill, but Jill felt the situation was manageable, as Jill didn't seem all that interested in Ande.
For her part, Nectar liked the looks of Kregor's muscular body, and it wasn't lost upon her often. Kregor glanced at her. Not that geeky, self-absorbed Ond ever noticed. He was blind to the emotions roiling beneath the surfaces of daily life. It's peaceful here, said Ond, taking a long pull of his beer. Even one bottle had a noticeable effect on the engineer. Like Eden. He leaned back in his white wicker-work rocker. No two chairs on the Merth's boat were the same. What are those cones, Nectar asked Jill and Kregor. She was talking about the waist-high, shiny, ridged shapes that loosely ringed the area Kregor had cleared out for today's little party.
The kids were off at the other end of the boat, Momotaro showing Chew the latest junk, and Bixie singing made-up songs that Chew tried to sing to. Ceramic jet engine baffled, said Jill, from the days before smart machines. Craig got them off the back lot at Lockheed. The ridges are for reducing turbulence, said Craig. Like your womanly curves, Nektar, we sit in an island of serenity. You're a poet, Craig, said Ond. The low sun illuminated his scalp through his thinner-than-ever 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 Ahn'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 Jill, smiling at her raffish husband, always off in his own world. The daughter of Bixie came trotting by. Planktonic sea creatures rarely swim, said Craigor. Like cuttlefish, they go with the flow. Until something nearby catches their attention, and then, dart. Another meal, another lover, another masterpiece.
Just after the cleared area was Krager'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 at their captors. They looked so smart and so doomed, said Nectar, regarding the bubbling tank. Her face was still sensuous and beautiful, her blonde-tinted hair lustrous, but the set of her mouth had turned a bit hard and frown-wrinkled shadowed her brow. Jill gathered that Nectar didn't get along all that well. Nectar had never really forgiven her husband for the Nance.
That was an earlier round of nanomachines in chapter two. The color fish are like wizards on death row, continued Nectar. They make me feel guilty about my web eyes. Sometimes they disappear from the tank on their own, said Kreger. I had a dream that big, slow angels are poaching them. But it's hard to remember my dreams anymore. The kids always wake us up so early. He gave his daughter a kind pat. Bratz. Happy morning, it's the crackle of dong.
A crackle of dawn, sang exuberant Bixie, then headed back to the other kids. You finally got web eyes, too, said Jill to Nectar. I love mine. But if I forget to turn them off before falling asleep, uh, spammers are my dreams, not angels. I won't let my kids have web eyes yet. Of course, for Chu, she broke off not wanting to say the wrong thing. Web eyes are perfect for Chu, said Nectar. You know how he loves machines. He and Ander are like that way. Ander said he was a little autistic, too, when he was a boy. Asperger's syndrome. Sometimes, as they get older, their brains heal. She blinked and stared off into the distance. Mainly, I got my web eyes for my job.
Now that Chu was getting along pretty well in his school, Nectar had taken a job as a prep cook in Puff, a trendy Valencia Street restaurant. The main chef talked me into it. Jose, with web eyes, I can see all the orders and track the supplies while I'm shopping. And I showed her how to tap into the feed from Chu's web eyes, said Ond. You never quite know what Chu will do. He's not hanging over the rail like last time, is he, Nectar? You could watch him yourself, said Nectar, with a slight edge in her voice. If you must know, Chu's checking the coordinates of Craig's things with his global positioning locator. Momotaro's being the museum guide, 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-filtered cigarette from her purse. As long as the coast is clear, let's have a smoke. I got this from Jose. He said it's genomically tweaked for guiltless euphoria, high nicotine, and low carcinogens. Nectar gave a nodding smile. Jose is so much fun. She lit the illegal tobacco. None for me, said Jill. I quit everything when I got into recovery from pseudocoke a few years back. I thought I told you. Yes, said Nectar, exhaling. Good for you. Did you have a big, dramatic turning point?
Absolutely, said Jill. I was ready to kill myself, and I walked into a church and noticed it in the stained glass that said God is love. What a concept. I started going to a support group, started believing in love, and I got well. And then the reward, said Nectar, said Kregor, winking at Nectar. She met me, the answer to a maiden's prayer. It is written. Nectar smiled back at Kregor, letting the smoke ooze slowly from her film star lips. I'll have a puff, Nectar said Ond. This might be the biggest day for me since three years ago when we reversed the Nance.
You already said that this morning, said Nektar, irritated by her husband. Are you finally going to tell me what's going on, or does your own wife have to sign a non-disclosure agreement? Ahn's on a secret project for sure, said Jill, trying to smooth things over. I went to Exa Exa to dance for a product demo 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. Jill looked sexy, said Ahn in a quiet tone. What is a fab exactly, asked Gregor. I always forget.
It's where they fabricate those round little biochips that go in computers, said Jill. Most of the fab building is sealed off with anything bigger than a carbon dioxide molecule filtered out of the air. All these big hulking tanks of fluid in there growing tiny, precise biochips. The gene manipulation tools can reach all the way down to the molecular level. It's nanotech. She fixed Ond with her bright gaze. So what exactly are you working on, Ond? Ond opened his mouth but couldn't quite spit out his secret. I'm going to 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 going to be a very big deal.
Bixie came skipping back, her dark straight hair flopping around her face. Chu made a list of what Kreger moved since last time she reported, but I told Chu that my dad can leave his toys wherever he likes. She leaned against Jill, lively as a rubber ball. Jill often thought of Bixie as a small version of herself. We await Comptroller Chu's reports, said Kreger. He was busy with the colds and a fanciful grill constructed from an old-timey metal autofender. Chu and Momotaro came pounding into the cleared area together.
A cuttlefish disappeared, announced Momotaro. First they were 28, and then they were 27, 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. He gave each word equal weight, like a robot text reader. Maybe the cuddle flew away, said Momotaro. He put his fingers by his mouth and wiggled them, imitating a flying cuttlefish. 270 tentacles in the tank now, added Chu. Other news. Kreger's Chinese gong has moved 44 centimeters aft. Two bowling balls are in the horse trough, one purple and one pearly. The long orange line painted on the deck has 17 squiggles.
The windmill's wire goes to a string of 36 crab-shaped Christmas lights that don't work. The exercise bicycle next to Craig's workshop is, I'm going to put our meat on the grill now, Craig told Chu. You want to watch and make sure nothing touches your pork medallions? That goes without saying, said Chu. But I'm not done listing the, uh, Bixie, still slouching beside Jill's chair, had just stuck out her tongue at Chu, which made Chu stumble uncertainly to a halt. Just email me the list, said Craig with a wink at Bixie. But then seeing Chu's crust expression, he softened. Oh, go ahead, tell me now. And no more rude faces, Bixie.
Please don't cook any cuttlefish, said Chu. We aren't going to bother those bad boys at all, said Kreger soothingly. They're too valuable to eat. Hey, did you notice the fluorescent plastic car tires I got this week? He glanced over at Nectar to check that she was appreciating how kind he was to her son. Yes, said Chu, and then he recited the rest of his list while Kreger finished grilling. The four adults and three children ate their meal, enjoying the red and gold sunset. So how is the cuttlefish biz on desk as they worked through the pan of satsuma tiramisu that Nectar had brought for dessert?
The licensing is coming to a head, said Jill. Those electronic forms we were talking about. I've been trying to do them myself, but the feds' sites are all 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 Craig. 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 Ant. We label the cuttlefish with radio frequency tracking devices and let them report on themselves. Like barcodes, or ARFITs, but better.
It's not like I get my hands on the cuddles until I actually trap them, said Craig. 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 Ahnd. Pink and grinning, he glanced around the circle of faces and reached into his pocket. Introducing the orphans, he said, holding up a little transparent plastic vial. Etched into one side were the stylized beetle and flowing cursive letters of the Exa Exa logo. My big surprise. Whatever was in the vial was too small to see with the naked eye, but Jill's web eyes were displaying tiny balls of light, little halos around objects in rapid motion.
Orphids are to barcodes, as velociraptors were to trilobites, continued Ond. The Orphids will change the world. Not another nanomachine, exclaimed Nectar, jumping to her feet. You promise never again, Ond. They're not Nance never, said Ond, his tongue a little thick with the beer and tobacco. Orphids good, Nance bad. 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, gradually slowing down, and after a day, the population will plateau and stop growing. You'll see a few million of them on your skin, and maybe ten sextillion orphans on Earth's whole surface. From then on, they only reproduce enough to maintain that same density. You might see the orphans have a conscience, a desire to protect the environment. They'll actually hunt down and eradicate any rival nanomachine that anyone tries to unleash. Sell it, aunt, said Kroger, grinning at nectar.
Orphids use quantum computing. They propel themselves with electrostatic fields. They understand natural language, and they're networked via quantum entanglement, continued Ond. The Orphids will communicate with us much better than the Nance ever did, and as the OrphidNet emerges, we'll get intelligence amplification and superhuman AI. The secret ExaExa project, mused Jill, watching the darting dots of light in the vial. You've been designing these Orphids all along? Sly, Ond.
In a way, the Nance designed them, said Ond. Before I rolled back the Nance, the Nance sent Nantel some insanely great code. Coherent quantum states, human language comprehension, autocatalytic morphogenesis, a layered neural net architecture for evolvable AI. The Nance nailed all the hard problems. But Ond said Nectar in a pleading tone. We've been testing the orphans 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 formally pull the trigger. There's been a lot of company politics, a lot of infighting.
The truth is, Jeff Lutty is pulling strings from his hideout. Hideout hell, I might as well tell you that Lutty's holed up in the friggin' XXLabs hiding behind our super expensive quantum mirrored walls. Every time I see him, he balls me out for having stopped his Nance. He's losing it, but usually he gives me good advice about whatever I'm working on. He's still brilliant, no matter what. You should turn him in to the police, said Nectar. That man deserves to die.
Ahn looked uncomfortable. If you knew Jeff as well as I do, you'd have some sympathy for him. He's a lonely man. That boy, Carlos, who died in the model rocket accident, he was the only person Jeff ever loved. Yes, Jeff's obnoxious and weird, and he released the Nance that tried to chew up Earth and turn it into dust. But, like I say, and, like I say, he's getting nuttier all the time. Being cooped up isn't good for him. He thinks he's going to invent teleportation, though who knows, he might actually do it. It'd be a shame to kill him off. It'd be like shattering the Venus de Milo.
Ann, said Nectar, Jeff Lutie wants to shatter the whole world. He's suffering enough as it is, said Ann. For all practical purposes, he's living in solitary confinement. And most of the ex-exit board understands that we don't have to listen to him. They recognize that if we do things my way, the orphans will be autonomous, incorruptible, cost-free, and in the long run, profits will emerge.
I'll tell you something else. A big downside of keeping Jeff around is that he wants to create an improved breed of Nance. And as it happens, my orphans are the best possible defense. It's like Jeff and I are in a chess match. And right now, I'm a rook and a bishop ahead. So that's why I've gotten informal approval to go ahead and release the orphans. Ha, said Nectar. Approval from yourself. You want to start the same nightmare all over again. She tried to snatch the vial from Ann's hands, but he kept it out of her reach. Nectar's symmetric features were distorted by unhappiness and anger. Her voice grew louder. Mindless machines eating everything.
Mommy, don't yell, shrieked Chu. Chill, Nectar said Ann, fending her off to the lowered shoulder. Where's your nicotine euphoria? Believe me, these little fellows aren't mindless. An individual orphan 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 set a string of numbers, a machine-coded web address, and an orphan net interface appeared within the web eyes of Chu and the four adults. The orphans in the vial 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 of the sides of their heads. Hello, orphans, said Jill. Bixie looked up at her curiously. To Jill, her daughter's face looked ineffably sweet and vulnerable behind the dancing images of the nanomachines. Hello, Jill, sang the orphans, their voices sounding in their listeners' earbuds. After I release you fellas, I want you to find all the cuttlefish in the San Francisco Bay, I'm told the orphans. Ride them and send a steady stream of telemetry data to ftp.exexa.org.
Can you show us a real cuttlefish? The orphans asked. Their massed voices were like an insect choir, the individual voices slightly off pitch from one another. Those are cuttlefish, said Ond, pointing to Kreger's holding tank. Settle on them and we'll release them into the bay. Okay by you, Kreger? No way, said Kreger. Those pharaohs took me four days to catch. Leave them alone, Ond.
They're my daddy's, coddlefish, echoed Momotaro. I'll buy them from you, said Ond, his eyes glowing. Market rate. The orphans will blanket 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 Krager. Okay, sure. He named a figure and Ond instantly transferred the amount. All right, said Krager. Wiretap those pharaohs and spring them from what Nectar said. Death row.
Weren't you listening to what An said about the orphans doubling their numbers, cried Nectar? We're doomed if he opens the vial. She lunged at her husband. An danced away from his wife, keeping the orphans out of her reach, his grin, a tense rictus. Chu was screaming again.
Stop it, Ande exclaimed Jill. Things are spinning out of control. I don't want your orphans on my boat. I don't want them on my kids. They're harmless, said Ande. I guarantee it. And I'm telling you, this is going to happen anyway. I just thought it would be fun to kick off Orphanite in front of you guys. Be a sport, Jill. Hey, listen up, Orphans. We're your friends, aren't you? Yes, Ande, yes, chorused the orphans. The discordant voices overlapped, making tiny, wavering beats. That was very nice of you to think of us, Ande, said Jill 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 orphans away.
I think tracking the cuddles is a great idea, putting Kreger, half a step behind Jill, as usual. And tagging my stuff is good, too. My sample just can wake up and think. Thank you, Kreger, said Aunt. He turned clumsily towards the cuttlefish tank. This time he didn't see nectar 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 Jill and Bixie, past Kreger and Momotaro. Chu caught up with the vial and, screaming like a banshee, wrenched it open and threw it high into the air on the trajectory toward the tank.
Stop the yelling, yelled Chu. Perhaps he was addressing the orphans. Make everything tidy! Through her web eyes, Jill saw illuminated orphans spiraling out of the vial in midair, the pants forking and splitting in two, and now her web eyes overlaid the scene with a tessellated grid showing each orphans' location. Some were zooming towards the cuddles, but others were homing in on the junk crowding the boat's aft. Additional view windows kept popping up as the nanomachines multiplied. Jill hugged Bixie to her side, covering the slender girl's dark hair with her hands, as if to keep the orphans' offer. And bent forward, rubbing his wrist.
Prager gave Nectar a quick embrace, calming her down, and then he stared into the tank, using his web eyes to watch the Orphids settle in. Momotaro stood at his father's side. Chu lay on the deck beside the boat's long cabin, tensely staring into the sky, soaking up Orphid info from his web eyes. Nectar removed the special contact lenses from her eyes. Do you at least have an undue signal for the Orphids? Nectar asked Ann presently, like you did for the Nance. Only a minute elapsed, but the world felt different. Human history had changed for good.
Orphid computations aren't reversible, said Ond, because the physical world keeps collapsing their quantum states. Decoherence. I can't believe you attacked me like that, Nectar. I can't believe you're ruining the world, snapped Nectar. I want you off our boat, Jill told Ond again. 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, Jill, replied Ond, wriggling his fingers. His wrist was okay. This is so historic that I'm vlogging it live. It's already on the web. Web eyes and wireless, you know.
Kreger hustled Ant, Nectar, and Shu onto one of the Mertzbo's piece of plastic dinghies, which would ferry them to the 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 Ant from the dinghy. Are we right to just sit around? Jill asked Kreger next. Shouldn't we be calling for an emergency environmental cleanup? I feel itchy all over.
The feds would trash our boat, and it wouldn't change anything, said Kregor. The genie's out of the bottle for good. He glanced around, scanning their surroundings with his web eyes. 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 orphans all over the place anyway. What the hay, free the wizards. He got busy with his scoop net. Jill's web eye grid of orphan viewpoints had become a disc-like Escher tessellation, which were thousands of cells wide, with the central cells big, the outer cells tiny, and ever more new cells growing along the rim.
The masked sound of so many orphans was all but unbearable. I hate their voices, said Jill, half to herself. Having the voices in her head made her feel a little high. And after all her work on recovery, she learned to dread that feeling. Being a little high was never enough for Jill. She always wanted to go all the way into the black hole of oblivion.
Is this better? Came a smooth, baritone voice from the orphans. The many had become one. You actually do understand us, Jill asked the orphans. A few of the orphans' eye images slewed around as Kreger carried his first dripping net of cuddles to the boat's low gunnel and lowered them to the bay waters. We understand you a little bit, said the voice of the orphans, and we'll get better. We wish the best for you and your family, Jill. We'll always be grateful to you. We'll remember your merits boat as our Garden of Eden, our Alamo Gordo test site, but don't be scared of us. I'll try, said Jill.
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 going to be set and free the pharaohs every day, Craig accosted the kids. He smiled and dipped his net into the holding tank again. Hey, Jill, I heard what the Orphids said to you. Maybe they're going to be okay. Maybe, said Jill, 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 endlessly ramifying ideal language that wants to define a word for every single part of every worldly thing.
A thicket of meta-language setting the namers at an ever-greater remove from the named. Her mind was teeming with words. It was like the orphans were making her smarter. Her 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 webpage where users find new arrangements for the Merzboot inventory, and if they transfer a payment, I physically lug the objects into the new positions.
Oh, that's a money-making business. And the orphans figure out the shortest pants. Oh, wait till we get some piezoplastic sluggies to do the heavy listing, and the orphans can guide them. I'll just work on bringing in more great stuff. I'll be this lovable sage, and the merits 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. Men are immediately going to begin using the orphans to look at the exact intimate details of women's bodies, said Jill, with a shudder. Can you imagine? Ugh. No publicity for me, thanks.
Kreger 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 toward them, orphaned lit like a fairy, 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 orphaned dots outlining their bodies' voluptuous contours. Voluptuous, said Jill.
I didn't say that out loud, did I, said Crager? Geez, you're picking up my sub-vocal mutters. This orphanette link is like telepathy almost. I better be a good boy, or learn how to damp down your access to my activities. Whoops, did I say that out loud too? There's matches all over you, Jill, in case you didn't know.
Already, said Jill, holding out her hand. She'd been ignoring 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 her knuckles. A coarser mesh spanned the back of her hand. The computational orphanette was going to have real-time, articulated models of everything and everyone, including the kids. Yes, the orphans had peppered Momotaro and Bixie like chicken pox. Oh, this was happening way too fast. Goddamn that aunt.
Jill knelt beside Bixie, trying to wipe one of the dots off her daughter's smooth cheek, but it wouldn't come loose. By way of explanation, the Orphids showed her a zoomed-in schematic view of a knot of long-chain molecules, an individual Orphid. They were far too tiny to dislodge. We're like cuttlefish in a virtual net, said Craig, shaking his head. He sat down next to Jill on the deck, each parent holding one of the kids. Look out there, said Jill, pointing. The Orphids were twinkling in the bay waters, on the bridges and buildings of San Francisco, and even on the foothills and mountains surrounding the bay.
Jill and Kreger hadn't really believed it when Onda 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 snow blind, said Kreger, forcing a hick chuckle. Where does that expression come from? Like why are those two particular options? I'm so scared, said Jill in a tight voice. I don't know if I can do this. All these head trips, they make me want to use again. I want to turn myself off. Just relax, Jill, said Kreger. How about the way Onda and Nectar were fighting? What a pair of lovebirds, hey?
I guess Chew puts them under a lot of stress, said Jill weakly. Yeah, said Craig, patting Jill's cheek. I enjoy And, 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 Nectar was talking about her new friend Jose? I see an affair taking shape. I hope And doesn't try and seduce you, Jill. I can tell he's got a crush on you. Adultery is going to be an open book, with orphans tracking every inch of everyone's body. Maybe people will just start accepting it more. The world as they'd known it was over, but Craig was gossiping as if nothing about human nature would really change. You okay, he said, wrapping his arm around Jill.
Oh, Kreger, said Jill, leaning her head on her husband's familiar shoulder, always be here for me. I'd be lost without you. Drained by shock and fear, the two of them dozed off there, sitting on the soft deck with the kids. So that's the beginning of the singularity, and then more stuff happens. Anybody have any questions? Well, I've learned one trick of the trade is never put a date in your novel. Like in my novel software that I wrote in 1980, I thought of as far into the future as I could imagine, and I put 2020.
And then if you have a date like that, and then once it rolls around, you look bad. So this, personally, I do tend to actually have a calendar, because I like to get the days of the week right and the phases of the moon. So I privately know when this is, and I guess I might as well share it with you. It's 2038. This might be 2036, actually. I'm writing the sequel now, and I think the sequel's set in 2038, and I believe this is 2036. Though, in a way, of course, science fiction is always also about the present. So in a way, what I'm doing here is...
If you take the present things and exaggerate them a little bit, it enables you to sort of notice. Like the whole idea of GPS mapping, where you can go to Google Maps and there's like little locations everywhere pinned down. And the idea is the orphanage is just, you know, turning that up, you know, a little bit higher. Instead of having GPS coordinates on every building, you have, you know, every millimeter on your skin. So then you can see every object in the world. You just need to get enough beacons out there. And the orphans are self-reproducing, so that's how they get out there.
So what you read is, was the singularity taking place? That was it. And there had been a pseudo-singularity before they got into the mud. Yeah, before, in Chapter 2, they took a different approach. And that was the more traditional approach. And you'll see, I was sort of set down this path by Charles Strauss' book, Accelerando, which I really enjoyed. Because before that, people had been saying, well, what if there's this singularity when all the machines get as smart as we are and everything totally changes and then some...
Some wimps were even saying, well, we can't write about it, we can't see past it. But, I mean, why are you a science fiction writer if you're not going to see past things that people can't see past? That's what it's all about. And then Strauss went ahead and did it. And I really, really admire that book, Accelerando. But there's one thing in it that was happening, and the characters didn't seem to think it was a big deal. And that was in some solar systems, they would basically smash a planet into dust. Basically turn a planet into a bunch of, well, loosely speaking, into a bunch of computer chips with wings.
and then have this big cloud of these chips and let them fan out in a big so-called Dyson sphere around the sun so they can soak up all the solar radiation. And then you say, well, what happened to the people that lived on the planet? Oh, well, those chips are riding this beautiful virtual reality, and everybody's living in the virtual reality, and it's even better than before. And I don't buy that. I don't think it would work. And I just think it sort of represents a way of thinking about the world that is...
I think, evil. I think it's a wrong way to think about the world. That the world is some piece of shit we can just break up and reuse. I mean, the world is a living organism. Gaia is alive. We're part of it. And the other thing, it's already a computer. I think...
What's not widely realized yet is digital computers are going to go away. In 100 years, we'll be using something different. We don't use watches with gears anymore. In 100 years, we're not going to be using chips full of zeros and ones. We're going to be using a different kind of thing to do these tasks for us. And what it's going to be, it's going to be natural objects or living organisms. If you look at a glass of water in the right way, that in itself is an incredibly powerful quantum computer. And what's actually going on in our world...
I mean, this piece of cloth is this incredibly powerful quantum computer that's simulating a piece of cloth. So it would be folly to chop it up and then try to make a less good kind of computer, like the state-of-the-art right now, like Intel chips, and try to port it over to it. It would be like trying to take a beautiful Windows software and put it onto a Macintosh. Whoops. I mean, onto a cell phone. Or take a beautiful Macintosh software and put it onto a Windows machine, whatever your prejudice is. So, yeah.
the previous things of the story that you read a couple years ago? Yeah, that's right. I read it. In fact, this is Jacob and Rina here, the hosts of SFNSF. And, yeah, a couple years ago I did a reading there with Terry Bisson, and I read this story called Chew and the Nance. Oh, yeah, and I didn't finish. I went off on a tangent. I'm sorry. And in that story, Chew and the Nance, this guy invents, crushes Earth into nanomachines, so he basically turns Earth into a cloud of dust, and it's supposed to be an emulation, and everybody's going to get poured into it. But later it comes out, it's only the rich people who have donated a lot of money to the Republican Party are the only ones that are going to be kept.
They're the elect. They don't call it the Republicans. I'm always having to make up new words for the Republicans in my books. I think they're called the homesteady party in this book. And in Mathematicians in Love, they are called the...
I'm writing a series of novels where there's incredibly evil presidents. I can't imagine why. And so the incredibly evil president is grinding Earth into Nance and then supporting us, but supporting us badly. But then Xu manages to reverse it. It turns out it's a reversible computation. So all the dust particles reassemble themselves and everybody's back where they started. And so then An says, okay, now I'm going to make a better kind of nanomachine. I'm going to make the orphans. But meanwhile, in the background, this is the mad scientist, Jeff Lutie, who originally designed the Nance. He's still alive.
The president and the vice president have been convicted of treason and executed by lethal injection, which is a scene I really enjoyed writing. But Ludi has managed to escape justice, and he's hiding out. And so in this book, it's sort of like Onsen's, it's a little bit of a chess game between Ludi and On. Ludi, he wants to bring back the Nance 2.0, like his bad nanomachines. And so it's sort of back and forth right up to the last page about who's going to win. And then at the end, something even stranger happens, and that leads into the novel I'm writing now, which is called Hilozoic.
I have souvenirs for you if you'd like. You can have some marked-up manuscript pages from Ilazoic. You can pass this around. You can each take one or two. These are incredibly valuable archival. That would be sort of fun. Yeah, do a sort of surrealist cut-up thing.
And I don't worry about you stealing my ideas because my ideas are so bizarre. You won't be able to do anything with them. It's like trying to use Darth Vader's sword, you know. The Orphids. Well, they're interesting. Each of them is about as smart as a dog, which is cool. A talking dog. Yeah. And so there's a lot of them. So it's sort of...
A lot of AI, you have things like emergent behaviors. You'll have a flock of creatures, like an ant colony. The ants have a certain amount of intelligence, but the colony itself, it's sort of like a higher level organism made up of it. That's the word? That's what ants leave pheromones around. Yeah. I've never heard that word. Stigmergy? Stigmergy. S-T-I-G-E. Stigmergy. S-T-I-G-M-E-R-G-Y. Oh, that's a word I need to know. Journalist got an article. Okay. That's clearly a word I should start using. But anyway, so there'll be things sort of like the ant colonies in this sort of cyberspace. And those things, I'm going to call them beesies. And then there'll be groups of them that make still higher organ-level minds. It's sort of like a pyramid. And at the very top, the sort of supreme mind that's made up of all these little minds is called the big pig.
And I have, in the next chapter, there's a bunch of characters, and they're sort of the main characters in the book. It sort of really isn't until fourth chapter, like five, that I really get into the sort of main story, because even this event here is sort of setting the stage still. And these people, they're basically like San Francisco, you know, slackers, younger people. And they're addicted to the big pig, because they'll just do a mind merge with this incredibly smart universal mind. It's sort of like surfing the web or using Google, but more so, you know.
Because you kind of plug into it. It's the old cyber. And in a way, I'm doing something sort of, it's like bringing back cyberpunk in a way, the old idea of jacking into the web and getting mind amplification. And they get kind of high by doing it. And then when they unlink themselves, then they can't remember any of the great ideas that they had, which is kind of a familiar sensation. Yeah. Yeah, right. And you find the scrapbook paper, you've written some notes, you know, that aren't that useful. And so, yeah, so that's, there's all these different layers of minds that are emerging from the orphans.
So does the guy who created these try to control this mind? No, it's one of these things, it's sort of like the artificial life paradigm, where fast cheap and out of control. Like, you release these things, you have no hope of controlling them. He's implanted an instinct in them. Basically, they don't like other kinds of nanomachines. So whenever the nants try to get released, they pounce on them and tear them up. So it's like having red ants, and you're keeping the black ants out, or the red ants. But you can talk to them, but you can't really tell them what to do. But they're not, I mean, they don't want to destroy us. They already have taken over the world. They've covered the world, and they're satisfied. They've won every millimeter. They don't need to be any denser than that. So they're fairly satisfied. But there is sort of a problem. The big mind at the top, the big pig, starts thinking, well, it would be nice to have twice as much memory.
And so the big pig is thinking, maybe the Nance wouldn't be such a bad move for me. So the big pig's allegiances are sort of torn, which is a problem. The basic concept of the singularity is how are we going to deal with it? Is it going to be nice to us or mean to us, right? Whatever manifests itself out of the singularity. Well, it's what we make of it. I mean, the singularity, it's doing its thing. I mean, it's not really interested in being nice to us or mean to us. I mean, the orphans are there. What I'm interested in, a lot of times, one way I think about science fiction...
Science fiction is all sorts of things to me, but one way to look at it is a sort of dry way to think of it. It's as a thought experiment. It's like when futurologists do scenarios. And you can say, all right, the world's blanketed with machines, sextillion machines as smart as talking dogs, and we can talk to them. And there's a group mind on top. But you say that, and then that's sort of dry. And then you say, well, what would it be like to live in the world? And that's the whole work of the novel, is to make it interesting. And, of course, everybody who wrote a book like this, they would have their own set of things that they think are interesting. I mean, you know, I'm not...
I'm not fascinated by the workings of high finance, so you won't find much about that in there. But I'm interested in literature, and I'm interested in sex, and I'm interested in eating and drugs and romantic complications and things of that nature. And so there's lots of that stuff in there. One thing they get into here, because these young kids are the main characters, they call themselves kickies, and that's short for kilo IQ, because their IQs are effectively at the level of a thousand, because they're so amplified by being plugged into the web all the time. The orphan now.
They have this huge amount of offline memory. Because you can take some metal... A lot of times you're processing things in your mind, but if you're with the orphaned map, you can spin those things out. You can tell some orphans or maybe a little group of orphans to work on this thing for you. And, you know, they don't have to do it, but they might do it just because they think it's interesting. They have nothing better to do. So, sure, they'll work on it. Like you want to analyze all the possible routes that you might take to get home or analyze all the possible scenarios that might unfold when you take your new friend to meet your parents.
And we tend to do these things when we're lying awake at 3 in the morning, but you could farm it out to, you know, thousands of agents, like, generating lots of scenarios. So social interactions get more complicated because people have thought of many more possibilities. And also you can farm out memory. Like anything, the orphans basically have pretty good memories. So you can just kind of scroll back. It's like there used to be some people, and I imagine they're still around, who would sort of photograph the web every day. They have these huge servers. They would save the state of the Internet once a day. And they've been doing it for like 20 years. And, you know, there's this huge server farm somewhere.
I don't know, it's in Salt Lake City or something, with the Mormon genealogy project. But the orphans would do that for you. So if you wanted to know what was going on at the corner of whatever, Turk and Eddy Street, at 2 a.m. on August 14th last year, you could just kind of scroll back and they could show you what was there. So all the paths would become visible. This has a big effect on crime, obviously. Privacy, forget it. Privacy, so what? It's gone. Nobody has it. Not even the president.
In this situation, what would it be like to write a novel? Because then I was thinking, well, there's a thing that's always interested me. I found out. I went to the Pacific Northwest. You know the big totem poles that you see? Well, the Native Americans only started making those after they got axes and steel saws. Before that, they made things like that, but they were like the size of your hand. They were made of this very hard black stone, and they'd ship these little godheads and things and animals. But they're tiny, like you could hold in your hand. And it wasn't until they got the technology of the steel axe and the saw that they could start wailing away and make these great big things. And that period of the totem pole building only lasted about 20 years, between the time that they got the axes, between the time that their culture was destroyed by smallpox and expropriation and things of that nature.
And so I'm thinking, by getting the Orphanet, it's like us suddenly getting axes and saws. I mean, you could write a novel that was a million pages long. And it could have graphics in it, live graphics in movies, and links, and just 3D things, and you could record your emotions. And so I use the word metanovel for these things. And so I'm trying to... One of my characters, she's Vietnamese, she's called Tween Nguyen, and she's a metanovelist. And she's writing a metanovel called Wink.
which in the meta-meta sense, the meta-novel she's writing is post-singular, because it's sort of my take on trying to use these enhanced powers. In the second volume, she's writing a second meta-novel, which is the second volume. It's called Vib. Viby is a word they use to mean cool. I always like to make up a few new slang words. So yeah, that's one type of thing that interests me, what you would do with this increased intelligence. I'm not so much interested in new forms of commerce, I'm interested in new forms of artistic creation. Well, the reminder is not right now.
Would the big pig write a novel? I don't think... I don't think... I don't think so. I think it's something about us that we like making works of art. Maybe because we want to be understood. Maybe once we had telepathy, we wouldn't make works of art anymore. I don't know. I mean, perhaps the group might could write novels, but not in my book. There's only so many... You know, it's a garden of forking paths. It's a path I didn't have at the time. So maybe I've nattered on long enough. So if any of you want me to sign a book for you, I'll go up front and sign a few for you.