Postsingular (7 page)

And then she too was sitting up, eyes open, alone in her bedroom. She couldn't remember all the details of what had just happened. But she knew two things. She needed to be with Jose in his apartment on Valencia Street. And she needed to leave Ond forever. She would never forgive him for ruining the cozy, womany real world and making life into a giant computer game. Quickly she packed a suitcase with her essentials. She felt odd and remote, as if her head were inside a glass bubble. She didn't want to face what she was about to do. Better to think of Jose.

Jose wasn't a world-wrecker. She could save him; together they could make a new life.
Why
had he wanted to kill himself just now? A strong, sexy man like that. Nektar shook her head, feeling that same mixture of tenderness and contempt that she always felt when confronted by men's wild, unrealistic ideas. She'd give Jose something to live for. He'd appreciate her. Ond wouldn't miss her one bit.

But, oh, oh, oh, what about Chu? Leaving her bedroom, Nektar regarded her son, lying on the rug. He wasn't trembling anymore; he looked content, his eyes closed, his lips moving. The orphidnet was catnip for him. If she interrupted him, he'd probably have a tantrum. Was it really possible to leave him here?

She leaned close to kiss Chu good-bye. Little Chu, her own flesh, how could she abandon him? He twisted away, muttering about numbers and cuttlefish. Oh, he'd do fine with Ond; he was much more like Ond than like Nektar. Ond would be home any minute to watch over him.

The invisible bubble around Nektar's head felt very tight. If she didn't leave right now, she was going to lose her mind. Tears wetting her face, she ran out to her car and headed for Jose. She passed Ond on his bike without even slowing down. Hurry home, Ond, and take care of our Chu. I can't do it anymore. I'm bad. I'm sorry. Good-bye.

A mob of some kind was blocking the road two blocks downhill. Nektar went down a side street to avoid the jam.

While Ond and his scientist friend Mitch waited for the beezies to report back with information about the upper levels of the orphidnet, Ond sent a virtual self to check on Nektar. She wasn't in that cultish group gathering anymore. She and Jose were in a marble room and—Ond was interrupted again. A realworld dog was chasing his bike, barking and baring his teeth as if he meant to bite Ond's calf. Ond screamed and snapped fully into the material plane. He had a phobia about dogs. He hopped off the bike, nearly falling on his face. Frantically he began throwing gravel at the brute, which was sufficient to send him skulking back into the shadows. Standing there, Ond had the strange realization that he could hardly remember any of the things he'd just been doing in the orphidnet. The memories weren't in his head; they were out—there. Just now Nektar had been doing—what? And Ond had been talking to—who? When he was offline, Ond's memories of the orphidnet were like Web links without a browser to open them.

On his bike, Ond let his mind expand again. Ah, yes, his investigations with Mitch. The results were coming in. There was indeed an upward cascade of intelligences taking place in the orphidnet; each eddy was a part of a larger swirl, up through a few dozen levels, and ending with an inscrutable orphidnet-spanning super-beezie at the top. Quite wonderful.

As for those luminous humanoid beings—the AIs now reported that these were so-called angels from a parallel sheet of reality that had recently been dubbed the Hibrane. The best current models indicated the higher-space distance to the Hibrane must be about a thirtieth of a vatometer, that is, 0.03 decillionths of a meter. Due to the Randall–de Sitter interbrane warp factor, Hibraners at this remove would be scaled six times larger than regular humans and would move six times slower.

In addition, the Hibraners' quantum phases were almost totally orthogonal to ours; this meant that Hibraners barely interacted with normal light or matter, which in turn explained why hardly anyone had noticed them before the orphids had begun sticking to them. Viewing alien angels in the orphidnet seemed both mind-boggling and natural. It made a kind of sense that the quantum-computing mental space of the orphidnet could serve as a meeting ground between two orders of being.

But before Ond could begin considering this more deeply, he was distracted by a news feed saying that the courts had dropped charges against him. The orphidnet beezies proudly told him they'd hacked the system to get Ond out of trouble. But there was still the matter of the torch-bearing lynch mob pushing toward Ond's current location. By now, even the dimmest bulbs had figured out how to see Ond via the orphidnet.

An urgent message popped up from Hector Rojas, the guy who'd lent Ond the bicycle. Hector was on his way in his car to offer Ond a fresh means of escape.

Ond pumped his bike up the hill toward home.

Chu's working hypothesis was that the quantum-mechanical operator at the heart of the angels' world-to-world jumping technique involved raising a numerical representation of a given object, such as a cuttlefish, to a certain exponential power
K
, producing an encrypted result of the form
cuttlefish
^K
. Chu knew all about this style of encryption from the online cryptography tutorial he'd studied. The actual value of
K
was the secret code needed to break the encryption.

In search of
K,
Chu and the mushrooms delved into the
ftp.exaexa.org/merzboat
data stream. First of all, they figured out how to represent each of the disappeared cephalopods as a binary number. And then they studied exactly how long the encryption of each missing cuttlefish had taken. A delicate web of number theory led back from the time intervals to the bits of
K
, for the 0 bits of
K
munged faster than the 1 bits did. This timing-channel attack was a big problem, a heavy crunch, but the orphidnet made it feasible.

And pretty soon Chu had the integer
K
tidily laid out as a pattern in the orphidnet. With access to
K,
he now had some hope of jumping back and forth between the two worlds.

Written as a decimal number,
K
turned out, by the way, to be over three million digits long, having 3,141,573 digits, to be precise. Chu relished the fact that the orphidnet allowed him to visualize a gigundo number like that, and to smoothly revolve it in his mind. He was starting to realize that, while he was online, a lot of his thinking was happening outside of his physical brain.

For the sake of elegance, Chu and the AIs transformed the giant code number
K
into a picture and a sound: blue spaghetti with chimes. And in the course of the transformation, they crushed the code from millions of digits down to just a few thousand bits. But even this condensed pattern was too big to fit conveniently into Chu's brain without his carrying out some time-consuming work of memorization. For now, when he “looked” at the pattern, he was really accessing a link to a secure orphidnet storage location. Chu gloated over the link, happy with the knowing. Although,
hmm,
given a little time, maybe he could find a pattern of just a few hundred bits that would allow him to generate the thousands-of-bits' worth of chimes and blue spaghetti that in turn generated the original three-million-digit jump-code.

A gauzy shape crept into the room, bright and insistent, projecting an old woman's voice via the orphidnet. She was a Hibraner, the same one Chu had seen in that temple where Nektar was.

“I'm Gladax,” messaged the big angel, her voice singing in Chu's head. She was lying on her stomach to fit her head and shoulders into the living room. She was still wearing that crummy T-shirt with the blurry dragon. “The mayor of San Francisco in what you call Hibrane. One reason I'm here is to warn little troublemakers like you. Don't go spreading around our jump-code, Chu. The last thing I want is a jitsy rat-plague of your peoples' nasty machines. Really, you Lobraners act like you want to be wind-up toys. Don't be a dummy. Give me access to your brain so I can erase that jump-code you stole.”

“No!” exclaimed Chu, battening down his mind.

The angel held up her sallow, knobby index finger and glared at Chu. “I don't want to hurt you,” she said. “I'm sure you're a very nice little boy. But you have to give me the jump-code now.”

Still Chu refused. Looking grim, Gladax extended a ray from her finger. Chu sat up, but Gladax was all around him. She poked the ray into his skull; it slid in like a skewer into butter; Chu froze. Gladax began slowly feeling around the core of his brain, trying to reach the link to his orphidnet storage location. Chu began twitching all over. Messaging that she was sorry, Gladax kept on all the same. Chu found his voice and screamed for Nektar. But she wasn't home.

As Ond neared the house, he could see the lynch mob only a block behind him. Feeling for Nektar in the orphidnet, he was surprised to discover that she'd left home in her car and had driven right past him and, for that matter, past the mob. He hadn't noticed. And now when he messaged her, she told him she was on her way to be in the physical presence of her friend Jose—and that she was leaving him for good. Before he could say anything, she'd closed the connection.

For the first time, Ond accepted that he might have made a mistake in releasing the orphids.

In his house at last, Ond found little Chu convulsing on the living room floor, with a white-haired Hibrane angel woman probing at his brain. Ond cradled the boy in his arms.

“Stop it!” exclaimed Ond. “Please!” The angel's face wasn't cruel. Perhaps she'd listen to reason. “You're hurting my son! What do you need?”

The Hibraner sighed, interrupted her slow stirring of Chu's brain, and studied Ond. “Ond Lutter?” she messaged presently. “I'm Gladax. You're the man who stopped the nants, yes?”

“Yes. Three years ago. Take your finger out of Chu's head. Talk to me. We can work things out.”

“Your son stole our jump-code,” said Gladax. “I have to erase it. I don't want to hurt him, but he's so stubborn. What else can I do?” Though her voice was stern, her resolve was wavering. With a frown, she withdrew the energy ray from within Chu's head.

“Are you okay, Chu?” asked Ond, hugging his son tighter than ever.

“I still have the link to the chimes and the blue spaghetti,” murmured the boy. “She didn't erase them yet. Here.” In a flash, Ond absorbed Chu's message containing the encrypted link.

“Got it,” said Ond, just to make sure Gladax knew.

“Jitsy little gnomes!” exclaimed the Hibraner, annoyed. “If I let you pollute our world with your horrible machines, there's no reason for my dangerous journey to your brane.”

“Look, I'm the guy who stopped the nants,” said Ond. “You said it yourself. I can help you. And Chu can help too. You don't want to scramble our brains. We're a resource.”

Gladax frowned, not liking the situation. “Yes, Ond, you were the hero of Nant Day, but now you've made these orphid nanomachines. I don't want seething beasties in my home brane.”