Postsingular | Page 7

It should happen
pretty fast."
By mid-morning, swirls had emerged in the sky patterns, double scrolls
like Ionic column capitals, like mushroom cross-sections, rams' horns,
or paired whirlpools--with each of the linked spirals endlessly turning.

The scrolls were of all sizes; they nested inside each other, and new
ones were continually spinning off the old ones.
"Those are called Belousov-Zhabotinsky scrolls," Ond told Chu. "BZ
for short." He showed the boy a Web site about cellular automata,
which were a type of parallel computation that could readily generate
double-spiral forms. Seeing BZ scrolls emerge in the rigorously orderly
context of his pocket computer made Chu feel better about seeing them
in the wild.
Jeff Luty messaged and phoned for Ond several times that day, but Ond
resolutely refused to go in to the lab or even to talk with Jeff. He stayed
busy with his pencil and paper, keeping a weather eye on the
developments in the sky.
By the next morning the heavenly scrolls had firmed up and linked
together into a pattern resembling the convoluted surface of a
cauliflower--or a brain. Its colors were mild and blended; shimmering
rainbows filled the crevices between the scrolls. Slowly the pattern
churned, with branching sparks creeping across it like lightning in a
distant thunderhead.
And for another month nothing else happened. It was as if the
nant-brain had lost interest in Earth and become absorbed in its own
vasty mentation.
Ond only went into the Nantel labs one more time, and that day they
fired him.
"Why?" asked Nektar as the little family had dinner. As she often did,
she'd made brown rice, fried pork medallions, and spinach--one of the
few meals that didn't send Chu into a tantrum. The gastronomic
monotony was dreary for Nektar, another thorn in the baby trap.
"Jeff Luty won't use the abort code I worked out," said Ond, tapping a
fat sheaf of closely written sheets of paper that he kept tucked into his
shirt pocket. Nektar had seen the pages--they were covered with blocks
of letters and numbers, eight symbols per block. Pure gibberish, to her.

For the last few weeks, Ond had spent every waking hour going over
his pages, copying them out in ink, and even walking around reading
them aloud. "Luty really and truly wants our world to end," continued
Ond. "He actually believes virtual reality would be better. With his lost
love Carlos waiting for him there. We got in a big fight. I called him
names." He smiled at the memory of this part.
"You yelled at the boss about your symbols?" said Nektar, none too
happy about the impending loss of income. "Like some crank? Like a
crazy person?"
"Never mind about that," said Ond, glancing around the dining room as
if someone might be listening. "The important thing is, I've found a
way to undo the nants. It hinges on the fact that the nants are reversible
computers. We made them that way to save energy. If necessary, we
can run them backwards to fix any bad things they might have done. Of
course, Jeff doesn't want to roll them back, and he wanted to claim my
idea wouldn't work anyway because of random external inputs, and I
said the nants see their pasts as networks, not as billiard table
trajectories, so they can too undo things node-to-node even if their
positions are off, and I had to talk louder and louder because he kept
trying to change the subject--and that's when security came. I'm outta
there for good. I'm glad." Ond continued eating. He seemed strangely
calm.
"But why didn't you do a better presentation?" demanded Nektar. "Why
not put your code on your laptop and make one of those geeky little
slide shows? That's what engineers like to see."
"Nothing on computers will be safe much longer," said Ond. "The
nant-brain will be nosing in. If I put my code onto a computer, the
nants would find it and figure out how to protect themselves."
"And you're saying your strings of symbols can stop the nants?" asked
Nektar doubtfully. "Like a magic spell?"
Silently Ond got up and examined the electric air cleaner he'd installed
in the dining room, pulling out the collector plates and wiping them off.

Seemingly satisfied, he sat down again.
"I've written a nant-virus. You might call it a Trojan flea." He chuckled
grimly. "If I can just get this code into some of the nants, they'll spread
it to all the others--it's written in such a way that they'll think it's a
nant-designed security patch. They mustn't see this code on a human
computer, or they'd be suspicious. I've been trying to memorize the
program, so that maybe I can infect the nants directly. But I can't
remember it all. It's too long.