Postsingular by Rudy Rucker (books for 7th graders .TXT) 📕

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

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

Humans were in the virtual temple, too, adoring the new beings they were seeing in their minds. Upon a round altar in the middle of the room stood a thirty-foot shape of light, a glowing giant woman, messily dressed, Eurasian-looking, old, with narrow eyes and short greasy white hair, her head nearly scraping the high dome. She was studying the crowd, her expression a mixture of curiosity and disdain. Rather than speaking out loud, the glowing woman was projecting thoughts and words via the orphidnet. She said she was an angel.

***

“I see colored dots on everything,” Momotaro told his sister. Darkness had fallen; they were well into Orphid Night. A full moon edged over the horizon, silvering the bay waters. “Those are the orphids the grown-ups were arguing about.”

“Orphid,” said Bixie, repeatedly touching her knee with her finger. “Orphid, orphid, orphid. I’m glad they don’t bite.”

“They’re talking to us,” said Momotaro. “Can you hear?”

“They sound like teachers,” said Bixie. “Shut up, orphids. Blah blah blah.”

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

“I want to see the Spice Dolls show,” said Bixie. “Ooo, there’s Kimmie Kool and Fancy Feather. Hi, girls. Are you having a party?”

***

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

“Check it out, Jil, no more Web hardware,” said Craigor. “Nice work, orphids. And how are you getting video into my head? Magnetic vortices in the occipital lobes, you say? You’re like smart lice. Wavy. And I can turn it off, I hope? Oh, I see, like that. And I have read-write access control. Awesome. Leave the pictures on for now, I’m loving them. Behold the new orphidnet interface, Jil.”

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

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

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

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

“This is gonna hurt the market for my cuttlefish,” said Craigor.

“But AmphiVision will still be making screen displays. I’ll still be putting the Pharaohs on death row.”

“Don’t think that way,” said Jil. “You have fun making the cuttle traps. It’s a skill. Of course now—everything’s going to be so different. Will anyone do anything anymore? Everyone will be terminally distracted.”

“It’ll be easy to catch fish and cuttlefish,” said Craigor. “I’ll always know where they are. I can see their meshes under the boat right now. One cuttle, some rockfish, and a salmon.”

“Yeah, but what if the fish are watching you?”

“I can always outsmart a fish,” said Craigor. “Give me some credit, Jil. And as far as work goes, people will still do things anyway. Humans are busybodies.”

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

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

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

Jil and Craigor glanced up to see buzzing dragonfly cameras against the night sky, their lenses like glowing eyes. Shit.

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

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

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

***

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

“What with the petabyte and petaflop capacity of each orphid, the full ten-sextillion-strong orphidnet will boast ten ubbabytes of memory being processed at a ten ubbaflop rate—_ubba _meaning ten to the thirty-sixth power,” said Ond to the crowd by the jailhouse steps, relishing the chance to inflict techie jargon upon them. “Yes, the orphidnet is less powerful than was the Martian nant-sphere, but even so, the orphidnet’s total power exceeds the square of an individual human’s exabyte exaflop level. My former company’s name was well chosen: ExaExa. Put more directly, the orphidnet has the computational clout that you’d get by covering the surface of the Earth with a dogpile of humans mounded a hundred deep.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve been fired before,” said Ond. “It doesn’t matter. Exa-Exa’s real problem with me was that I released the orphids before they could figure out a way to charge for orphidnet access. But it’s gonna be free. And, listen to me, listen. The orphids are our friends. They’re the best nanotechnology we’re going to get. I’m counting on them to protect us from a possible return of the nants. Remember: Jeff Luty is still at large.”

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

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

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

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

A grinning guy at the back of the crowd gave Ond a bicycle; Ond recognized him as a friend, a fellow nanotech enthusiast named Hector Rojas. Ond mounted Hector’s bike and disappeared from the view of the still-coagulating lynch mob. Guided by the all-seeing orphids, Ond cut through the exact right alleys to avoid the people and the cars.

But there was no way to avoid the dragonfly cameras. Alone on the moonlit side streets of San Francisco, Ond asked the orphids to disable all the dragonfly cameras following him. The devices clattered to the street like dead sparrows. Next Ond had the orphids systematically change every existing database reference to his home’s address. It was easy for the orphids to reach into all the world’s computers.

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

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