Postsingular - Rudy Rucker (classic novels TXT) 📗

Little Chu was Nektar Lundquist’s joy, and her sorrow. The six-year-old boy was winsome, with a chestnut cap of shiny brown hair, long dark eyelashes, and a tidy mouth. Chu allowed Nektar and her husband to cuddle him, he’d smile now and then, and he understood what they said—if it suited his moods. But he wouldn’t talk.

The doctors had pinpointed the problem as an empathy deficit, a type of autism resulting from flawed connections among the so-called mirror neurons in Chu’s cingulate cortex. This wetware flaw prevented Chu from being able to see other people as having minds and emotions separate from his own.

“I wonder if Chu thinks we’re cartoons,” said Nektar’s husband, Ond Lutter, an angular man with thinning blond hair. “Just here to entertain him. Why talk to the screen?” Ond was an engineer working for Nantel, Inc., of San Francisco. Among strangers he could seem kind of autistic himself. But he was warm and friendly within the circle of his friends and immediate family. He and Nektar were walking to the car after another visit to the doctor, big Ond holding little Chu’s hand.

“Maybe Chu feels like we’re all one,” said Nektar. She was a self-possessed woman, tall and erect, glamorous with high cheekbones, full lips, and clear, thoughtful eyes. “Maybe Chu imagines that we automatically know what he’s thinking.” She reached back to adjust her heavy blond ponytail. She’d been dying her hair since she was twelve.

“How about it, Chu?” said Ond, lifting up the boy and giving him a kiss. “Is Mommy the same as you? Or is she a machine?”

“Ma chine ma chine ma chine,” said Chu, probably not meaning anything by it. He often parroted phrases he heard, sometimes chanting a single word for a whole day.

“What about the experimental treatment the doctor mentioned?” said Nektar, looking down at her son, a little frown in her smooth brow. “The nants,” she continued. “Why wouldn’t you let me tell the doctor that you work for Nantel, Ond? I think you bruised my shin.” The doctor had suggested that a swarm of properly programmed nants might eventually be injected into Chu to find their way to his brain and coax the neurons into growing the missing connections.

Ond’s oddball boss, Jeff Luty—annoyingly a bit younger than Ond—had built his company, Nantel, into a major player in just five years. Luty had done three years on scholarship at Stanford, two years as a nanotech engineer at an old-school chip company, and had then blossomed forth on his own, patenting a marvelously ingenious design for growing biochip microprocessors in vats. The fabulously profitable and effective biochips were Nantel’s flagship product, but Luty believed the future lay with nants: a line of bio-mimetic self-reproducing nanomachines that he’d patented. For several months now, Nantel had been spreading stories about nants having a big future in medical apps.

“I don’t like arguing tech with normals,” said Ond, still carrying Chu in his arms. “It’s like mud-wrestling a cripple. The stories about medical nant apps are hype and spin and PR, Nektar. Jeff Luty pitches that line of bullshit so the feds don’t outlaw our research. Also to attract investors. Personally, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to program nants in any purposeful, long-lasting, high-level way, even though Luty doesn’t want to admit it. All we can do is give the individual nants a few starting rules. The nant swarms develop their own Wolfram-irreducible emergent hive-mind behaviors. We’ll never really control the nants, and that’s why I wouldn’t want them to get at my son.”

“So why are you even making the stupid nants?” said Nektar, an edge in her voice. “Why are you always in the lab unless I throw a fit?”

“Jeff has this idea that if he had enough nants, he could create a perfect virtual world,” said Ond. “And why does he want that? Because his best friend died in his arms when he was a senior in high school. Jeff confides in me; I’m an older-brother figure. The death was an accident; Jeff and his friend were launching a model rocket. But deep down, Jeff thinks it was his fault. And ever since then, he’s been wanting to find a way to bring reality under control. That’s what the nants are really for. Making a virtual world. Not for medicine.”

“So there’s no cure?” said Nektar. “I babysit Chu for the rest of my life?” Though Chu could be sweet, he could also be difficult. Hardly an hour went by without a fierce tantrum—and half the time Nektar didn’t even know why. “I want my career back, Ond.”

Nektar had majored in media studies at UCLA, where she and Ond met. Before marrying Ond, she’d been in a relationship with a woman, but they fought about money a lot, and she’d mistakenly imagined life with a man would be easier. When Ond moved them to San Francisco for his Nantel job, Nektar had worked for the SF symphony, helping to organize benefit banquets and cocktail parties. In the process she became interested in the theatrics of food. She took some courses at cooking school, and switched to a career as a chef—which she loved. But then she’d had Chu. The baby trap.

“Don’t give up,” said Ond, reaching out to smooth the furrow between Nektar’s eyebrows. “He might get better on his own. Vitamins, special education—and later I bet I can teach him to write code.”

“I’m going to pray,” said Nektar. “And not let him watch so much video.”

“Video is good,” said Ond, who loved his games.

“Video is clinically autistic,” said Nektar. “You stare at the screen and you never talk. If it weren’t for me, you two would be hopeless.”

“Ma chine ma chine ma chine,” said Chu.

“Pray to who?” said Ond.

“The goddess,” said Nektar. “Gaia. Mother Earth. I think she’s mad at humanity. We’re making way too many machines. Here’s our car.”

***

Chu did get a little better. By the time he was seven, he could ask for things by name instead of pointing and mewling. Thanks to Ond’s Nantel stock options, they had a big house on a double-sized lot. There was a boy next door, Willy, who liked to play with Chu, which was nice to see. The two boys played video games together, mostly. Despite Nektar’s attempts, there was no cutting down on Chu’s video sessions. He watched movies and cartoons, cruised the Web, and logged endless hours with online games. Chu acted as if ordinary life were just another Web site, a rather dull one.

Indeed, whenever Nektar dragged Chu outside for some fresh air, he’d stand beside the house next to the wall separating him from the video room and scream until the neighbors complained. Now and then Nektar found herself wishing Chu would disappear—and she hated herself for it.

Ond wasn’t around as much as before—he was putting in long hours at the Nantel labs in the China Basin biotech district of San Francisco. The project remained secret until the day President Dick Dibbs announced that the US was going to rocket an eggcase of nants to Mars. The semiliving micron-sized dust specks had been programmed to turn Mars entirely into—more nants! Ten-to-the-thirty-ninth nants, to be precise, each of them with a billion bytes of memory and a computational engine cranking along at a billion updates a second. The nants would spread out across the celestial sphere of the Mars orbit, populating it with a swarm that would in effect become a quakkaflop quakkabyte solar-powered computer, the greatest intellectual resource ever under the control of man, a Dyson sphere with a radius of a quarter-billion kilometers.

“Quakka what?” Nektar asked Ond, not quite understanding what was going on.

They were watching an excited newscaster talking about the nant launch on TV. Ond and his coworkers were all at their homes sharing the launch with their families—the Nantel administrators had closed down their headquarters for a few days, fearing that mobs of demonstrators might converge on them as the story broke.

Ond was in touch with his coworkers via little screens scattered around the room. Most of them were drinking Mieux champagne; Jeff Luty had issued each employee a bottle of the inexpensive stuff in secret commemoration of his beloved Carlos.

“Quakka means ten to the forty-eighth,” said Ond. “That many bytes of storage and the ability to carry out that many primitive instructions per second. Quite a gain on the human brain, eh? We limp along with exaflop exabyte ware, exa meaning a mere ten to the eighteenth. How smart could the nant sphere be? Imagine replacing each of the ten octillion atoms in your body with a hundred copies of your brain, and imagine that all those brains could work together.”

“People aren’t stupid enough already?” said Nektar. “President Dibbs is supporting this—why?”

“He wanted to do it before the Chinese. And his advisers imagine the nants will be under American control. They’re viewing the nant-sphere as a strategic military planning tool. That’s why they were allowed to short-circuit all the environmental review processes.” Ond gave a wry chuckle and shook his head. “But it’s not going to work out like they expect. A transcendently intelligent nant-sphere is supposed to obey an imbecile like Dick Dibbs? Please.”

“They’re grinding Mars into dust?” cried Nektar. “You helped make this happen?”

“Nant,” said Chu, crawling around the floor, shoving his face right up to each of the little screens, adjusting the screens as he moved around. “Nant-sphere,” he said. “Quakkaflop computer.” He was excited about the number talk and the video hardware. Getting all the electronic devices on the floor aligned parallel to each other made him happy as a clam.

“It won’t be very dark at night anymore, with sunlight bouncing back off the nants,” said Ond. “That’s not real well-known yet. The whole sky will look about as bright as the moon. It’ll take some getting used to. But Dibbs’s advisers like it. We’ll save energy, and the economy can run right around the clock. And, get this, Olliburton, the vice president’s old company—they’re planning to sell ads.”

“Lies and propaganda in the sky? Just at night, or in the daytime, too?”

“Oh, they’ll show up fine in the daytime,” said Ond. “As long as it’s not cloudy. Think about how easily you can see a crescent moon in the morning sky. We’ll see biiig freakin’ pictures all the time.” He refilled his glass. “You drink some, too, Nektar. Let’s get sloshed.”

“You’re ashamed, aren’t you?” said Nektar, waving off the cheap champagne.

“A little,” said Ond with a crooked smile. “I think we may have overgeeked this one. And underthought it. It was just too vibby a hack to pass up. But now that we’ve actually done it—”

“Changing the sky is horrible,” said Nektar. “And won’t it make the hurricanes even worse? We’ve already lost New Orleans and the Florida Keys. What’s next? Miami and the Bahamas?”

“We—we don’t think so,” said Ond. “And even if there is a weather effect, President Dibbs’s advisers feel the nant computer will help us get better control of the climate. A quakkaflop quakkabyte computer can easily simulate Earth’s surface down to the atomic level, and bold new strategies can be evolved. But, again, that’s assuming