Rudy Rucker - Post-Singular.pdf

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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.
* * * *
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
 

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