Postsingular | Page 9

sky.
"02A1B59F, 9812D007, 70FFDEF6," said Chu when Nektar went to
tuck him in that night. He had Ond's sheaf of pages with a flashlight
under his blanket.
"Give me that," said Nektar, trying to take the pages away from him.

"Daddy!" screamed Chu, a word he'd never used before. "Stop her! I'm
not done!"
Ond came in and made Nektar leave the boy alone. "It's good if he
learns the code," said Ond, smoothing Chu's chestnut cap of hair. "This
way there's a chance that--never mind."
When Nektar and Ond awoke next morning, the house next door was
gone.
"Maybe he set up the antenna wrong," said Ond.
"All their bushes and plants were eaten, too," said Nektar, standing by
the window. "All the neighbors are gone. And the trees. Look out there.
It's a wasteland. Oh God, Ond, we're going to die. Poor Gaia."
As far as the eye could see, the pastel chockablock city of San
Francisco had been reduced to bare dirt. It looked like the pictures of
the town after the 1906 earthquake. And instead of smoke, the air was
glittering with hordes of freshly made nants, a seething fog of
omnivorous, pullulating death-in-life. Right now the nants were staying
away from Ond and Nektar's house on the hill. But the gasoline
supplies for the generator wouldn't last forever. And in any case, before
long the nants would be undermining the house's foundation.
Chu was in the video room watching a screen showing his friend Willy.
Chu had thought to plug the video into an extension cord leading to the
generator. Ond's dog-eared pages of code lay discarded on the floor.
"It's radical in here, Chu," Willy was saying. "It feels almost real, but
you can tell Vearth is an awesome giant sim. It's like being a toon. I
didn't even notice when the nants ported me. I guess I was asleep. Jam
on up to Vearth as soon as you can."
"Turn that off!" cried Nektar, darting across the room to unplug the
video screen.
"I'm done with Ond's code blocks," said Chu in his flat little voice. "I

know them all. Now I want to be a nant toon."
"Don't say that!" said Nektar, her voice choked and hoarse.
"It might be for the best, Nektar," said Ond. "You'll see." He began
tearing his closely written sheets into tiny pieces.
"What is wrong with you?" yelled Nektar. "You'd sacrifice your son?"
All through Nant Day, Nektar kept a close eye on Chu. She didn't trust
Ond with him anymore. The constant roar of the generator motor was
nerve-racking. And then, late in the afternoon, Nektar's worst fear came
true. She stepped into the bathroom for just a minute, and when she
came out, Chu was running across what was left of their rolling
backyard and into the devastated zone where the nants swarmed thick
in the air. And Ond--Ond was watching Chu from the patio door.
The nants converged on Chu. He never cried out. His body puffed up,
the skin seeming to seethe. And then he--popped. There was a puff of
nant-fog where Chu had been, and that was all.
"Don't you ever talk to me again," Nektar told Ond. "I hate you, hate
you, hate you."
She lay down on her bed with her pillow over her head. Soon the nants
would come for her, and she'd be in their nasty fake heaven with
moronic Dick Dibbs installed as God. The generator roared on and on.
Nektar thought about Chu's death over and over and over until her mind
blanked out.
At some point she got back up. Ond was sitting just inside the patio
door, staring out at the sky. He looked unutterably sad.
"What are you doing?" Nektar asked him.
"Thinking about going to be with Chu," said Ond.
"You're the one who let the nants eat him. Heartless bastard."

"I thought--I thought he'd pass my code on to them. But it's been almost
an hour now and nothing is--wait! Did you see that?"
"What," said Nektar drearily. Her son was dead, her husband was crazy,
and soulless machines were eating her beloved Gaia.
"The Trojan fleas just hatched!" shouted Ond. "Yes. I saw a glitch. The
nants are running backwards. Reversible computation. Look up at the
sky. The scrolls are spiraling inward now instead of out. I knew it
would work." Ond was whooping and laughing as he talked. "Each of
the nants preserves a memory trace of every single thing it's done. And
my Trojan fleas are making them run it all backwards."
"Chu's coming back?"
"Yes. Trust me. Wait an hour."
It was the longest hour of Nektar's life. When it was nearly up, Ond's
generator ran out of gas, sputtering to a stop.
"So the nants get us now,"