Postsingular | Page 5

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 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."