Postsingular

"Market rate," mused Craigor. "Okay, sure." He named a figure and Ond instantly transferred the amount. "All right!" said Craigor. "Wiretap those Pharaohs and spring them from– what Nektar said. Death row."

"Weren't you listening to what Ond said about the orphids doubling their numbers?" cried Nektar. "We're doomed if he opens the vial." She lunged at her husband. Ond danced away from his wife, keeping the orphids out of her reach, his grin a tense rictus. Chu was screaming again.

"Stop it, Ond!" exclaimed Jil. Things were spi

"They're harmless," said Ond. "I guarantee it. And, I'm telling you, this is go

"Yes, Ond, yes," chorused the orphids. The discordant voices overlapped, making tiny, wavering beats.

"That was very nice of you to think of us, Ond," said Jil carefully. "But I think you better take your family home now. They're upset and you're not yourself. Maybe you had a little too much beer. Put the orphids away."

"I think tracking the cuttles is a great idea," put in Craigor, half a step behind Jil. "And tagging my stuff is good, too. My assemblages can wake up and think!"

"Thank you, Craigor," said Ond. He turned clumsily toward the cuttlefish tank. This time he didn't see Nektar coming. She rushed him from behind, a beer bottle clutched in her hand, and she struck his wrist so hard that the vial of orphids flew free. The chaotically glowing jar rolled across the deck, past Jil and Bixie, past Craigor and Momotaro. Chu caught up with the vial and, screaming like a banshee, wrenched it open and threw it high into the air on a trajectory toward the tank.

"Stop the yelling!" yelled Chu. Perhaps he was addressing the orphids. "Make everything tidy!"

Through her webeyes, Jil saw illuminated orphid-dots spiraling out of the vial in midair, the paths forking and splitting in two. And now her webeyes overlaid the scene with a tessellated grid showing each orphid's location. Some were zooming toward the cuttles, but others were homing in on the junk crowding the boat's aft. Additional view-windows kept popping up as the nanomachines multiplied.

Jil hugged Bixie to her side, covering the slender girl's dark hair with her hands, as if to keep the orphids off her. Ond bent forward, rubbing his wrist. Craigor gave Nektar a quick embrace, calming her down. And then he stared into the tank, using his webeyes to watch the orphids settle in. Momotaro stood at his father's side. Chu lay on the deck beside the boat's long cabin, tensely staring into the sky, soaking up orphid info from his webeyes. Nektar removed the special contact lenses from her eyes.

"Do you at least you have an 'undo' signal for the orphids?" Nektar asked Ond presently. "Like you did for the nants?" Only a minute had elapsed, but the world felt different. Human history had changed for good.

"Orphid computations aren't reversible," said Ond. "Because the physical world keeps collapsing their quantum states. Decoherence. I can't believe you attacked me like that, Nektar."

"I can't believe you're ruining the world," snapped Nektar.

"I want you off our boat," Jil told Ond again. "You've done what you came to do. And for God's sake, don't spread the word that you did your release right here. I don't want cops and reporters trampling us."

"Sorry, Jil," replied Ond, wiggling his fingers. His wrist was okay. "This is so historic that I'm vlogging it live. It's already on the Web. Webeyes and wireless, you know."

Craigor hustled Ond, Nektar, and Chu onto one of the Merz Boat 's piezoplastic dinghies, which would ferry them to the dock and return on its own. The dinghy was like an oval jellyfish with a low rim around its edge. It twinkled with orphid lights.

"Watch me on the news!" called Ond from the dinghy.

***

"Are we right to just sit around?" Jil asked Craigor next. "Shouldn't we be calling for an emergency environmental cleanup? I feel itchy all over."

"The feds would trash our boat and it wouldn't change anything," said Craigor. "The genie's out of the bottle for good." He glanced around, sca

Jil's webeye grid of orphid viewpoints had become a disk-like Escher tessellation which was thousands of cells wide, with the central cells big, the outer cells tiny, and ever more new cells growing along the rim. The massed sound of so many orphids was all but unbearable.

"I hate their voices," said Jil, half to herself. Having the voices in her head made her feel a little high, and after all her work on recovery, she'd learned to dread that feeling. Being a little high was never enough for Jil; she always wanted to go all the way into the black hole of oblivion.

"Is this better?" came a smooth baritone voice from the orphids. The many had become one.

"You actually do understand us?" Jil asked the orphids. A few of the orphid's-eye images slewed around as Craigor carried his first dripping net of cuttles to the boat's low gu

"We understand you a little bit," said the voice of the orphids. "And we'll get better. We wish the best for you and your family, Jil. We'll always be grateful to you. We'll remember your Merz Boat as our garden of Eden, our Alamogordo test site. Don't be scared of us."

"I'll try," said Jil. In the unadorned natural world, Momotaro and Bixie were cheering and laughing to see the freed cuttlefish jetting about in the shallow waters near the boat.

"We're not go

"Maybe," said Jil, letting out a deep, shaky sigh. She poured herself a cup of hot tea. "Look at my cup," she observed. "It's crawling with them. An orphid every millimeter. They're like some-some endlessly ramifying ideal language that wants to define a word for every single part of every worldly thing. A thicket of metalanguage setting the namers at an ever-greater remove from the named." Her mind was teeming with words-it was like the orphids were making her smarter. Her hand twitched; some of her tea spilled onto the deck. "Now they're mapping the puddle splash, bringing it under control, normalizing it into their bullshit consensus reality. Our world's being nibbled to death by nanoducks, Craigor. We're nanofucked."

"Profound," said Craigor. "Maybe we can collaborate on a show. A Web page where users find new arrangements for the Merz Boat inventory, and if they transfer a payment, I physically lug the objects into the new positions. And the orphids figure out the shortest paths. Or, wait, we get some piezoplastic sluggies to do the heavy lifting, and the orphids can guide them. I'll just work on bringing in more great stuff; I'll be this lovable sage and the Merz Boat can be, like, my physical blog. And you can dance and be beautiful, at the same time intoning heavy philosophical raps to give our piece some heft."