Postsingular

"I've been fired before," said Ond. "It doesn't matter. Exa-Exa's real problem with me was that I released the orphids before they could figure out a way to charge for orphidnet access. But it's go

"How soon do you expect to be freed from prison?"

"I'm leaving now," said Ond. "I wouldn't be safe in jail." Plugged into the orphidnet as he was, with a full awareness of the exact position of everyone's limbs, and with the emerging orphidnet AIs helping him, Ond was able to simply walk off through the crowd.

In the crowd were some very angry people who truly wished Ond harm. After all, he'd forced Earth away from her old state; single-handedly he'd made the decision to change everyone's lives-possibly forever. Ond was in a very real danger of being stabbed, beaten to death, or hung from a lamppost.

But whenever someone reached for him, he was just out of their grasp. For once in his life he was nimble and graceful. Perhaps if the others had been so keenly tuned into the orphidnet as Ond, they could have caught him. But probably not. The orphids were, after all, quite fond of Ond.

A gri

But there was no way to avoid the dragonfly cameras. Alone on the moonlit side streets of San Francisco, Ond asked the orphids to disable all the dragonfly cameras following him. The devices clattered to the street like dead sparrows. Next Ond had the orphids systematically change every existing database reference to his home's address. It was easy for the orphids to reach into all the world's computers.

But when he asked the orphids to make him invisible on the orphidnet, they balked. Yes, they would stop broadcasting his name, but the integrity of the world-spa

Before long, people would be figuring out how to track Ond in real time. And by dawn there'd be no safe place on Earth for him. CHAPTER 4

Chu's Knot

Meanwhile, Chu was lying on the rug, being careful not to touch the wet spots he'd made. He was mad at Nektar for yelling at him.

Eyes closed, he was studying the new living things in the orphidnet: shiny disks on short thick stalks, with the disk edges curled under. Virtual mushrooms! Each mushroom had six or seven eyes on top, and the fatter mushrooms had baby mushrooms growing out of their sides. Some were boys and some were girls. They were cute and friendly-and glad to talk to Chu. When he asked where they came from, they said they were emergent orphidnet AIs and that people's thoughts were their favorite thing to look at. They spoke really well, although often their thoughts came across in fatter chunks than just sentences and words.

Chu steered the conversation around to cuttlefish. One of the cartoony mushrooms said, "Look," and he showed Chu the cuttle-data flowing to ftp.exaexa.org/merzboat. Chu decided to analyze the data himself, with the orphidnet AIs helping him.

Pretty soon he noticed something interesting about the cuttlefish. Every so often, one of them would totally disappear.

Chu wondered how this could be. One of the mushroom AIs obligingly did a quick search of all the science papers in the world and found a theory that there's another world parallel to ours, less than a decillionth of a meter away, and that objects can quantum-tu

"When I set something down it always stays put," mused Chu.

"People collapse the quantum states of things they look at," said the mushroom AI, wobbling the cap of her head. "The watched pot never boils. Objects stay put in the presence of a classical observer."

"Sometimes I do lose things," allowed Chu. "I guess they could disappear when I look away."

"When things are on their own, they can sneak and quantum-tu

"People in the other world are taking our cuttlefish?" said Chu. "But we're using the orphids to watch the cuttlefish all the time. So they should stay put."

"Orphids are quantum computers. They don't observe; they entangle. An orphid isn't like some bossy schoolmarm who keeps everyone in their seats until she looks away. It's perfectly possible for an orphid-tagged cuttlefish to quantum-tu

"What's the name of the other world?" asked Chu.

"What would you like to call it?" asked the mushroom. "You're the one discovering it."

"Let's call it the Hibrane," said Chu. "And we can be the Lobrane. Can we see a Hibrane person catching a cuttlefish?"

"Let's try," said the mushroom. "Aha." A moment later she was showing Chu some shiny figures like big, slow-moving people made of light. "They're popping in and out of our world all the time!" exclaimed the mushroom. "And our good, smart, quantum-computing orphids are landing on them. No more sneaking. Look, look, there's a Hibraner taking a cuttlefish! He's slow, but he puts himself in just the right place. He's a cuttlefisher! It's lucky we looked at the cuttlefish data stream."

"My good idea," said Chu.

The orphidnet showed him scenes of glowing figures that oozed about, cu

Chu watched the little congregation a bit longer anyway. The Hibraner in the center was a giant old woman of light, silently moving in slow motion. Linking his virtual self into the site, Chu realized the woman was speaking via the orphidnet. She said she was from a better world where people didn't use computers and didn't endanger their homes with nants. Noticing Chu, she pointed at him, which made him uneasy. He pulled away, although he would have liked to find out where his mother had gone.

"The Hibraners have always been around," said the smart mushroom who was guiding Chu. "I'm data-mining the info. People have never been sure if Hibraners are real; they called them fairies or spirits or angels. They're out of quantum phase with your reality; people just see them as patches in their peripheral vision. The Hibraners may sometimes have caused people to hear voices or see visions. But now they're easy to see via the orphidnet."

"Can I go to the Hibrane and visit?" asked Chu. That would teach Nektar a lesson for yelling at him about wetting his pants while he was being a cuttlefish. He'd run away to another world.