Postsingular | Page 5

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 the nant swarm is willing to do what we ask it to. We can't actually imagine what kinds of nant-swarm minds will emerge. And there's no way we could make them keep on simulating Earth. Controlling nants is formally impossible. I keep telling Jeff Luty, but he won't listen. He's totally obsessed with leaving his body. Maybe he thinks he'll get back his dead high school pal in the virtual world."
***
It took two years for the nants to munch through all of Mars, and the ever-distractible human news cycle drifted off to other topics, such as the legalization of same-sex in-vitro fertilization, the advances in tank-grown clones, and the online love affairs of vlogger Lureen Morales. President Dick Dibbs--now eligible for a third and fourth term thanks to a life-extending DNA-modification that made him legally a different person--issued periodic statements to the effect that the nant-sphere computer was soon coming online.
Certainly the sky was looking brighter than before. The formerly azure dome had bleached, turned whitish. The night sky was a vast field of pale silver, shimmering with faint shades of color, like a soap bubble enclosing the Earth and the sun. The pictures hadn't started yet, but already the distant stars were invisible.
The astronomers were greatly exercised, but Dibbs assured the public that the nants themselves would soon be gathering astronomical data far superior to anything in the past. And, hey, you could still see the sun, the moon, and a couple of planets, and the nant-bubble was going to bring about a better, more fully American world.
As it happened,