Postsingular

"They're grinding Mars into dust?" cried Nektar. "You helped make this happen?"

"Nant," said Chu, crawling around the floor, shoving his face right up to each of the little screens, adjusting the screens as he moved around. "Nant-sphere," he said. "Quakkaflop computer." He was excited about the number talk and the video hardware. Getting all the electronic devices on the floor aligned parallel to each other made him happy as a clam.

"It won't be very dark at night anymore, with sunlight bouncing back off the nants," said Ond. "That's not real well-known yet. The whole sky will look about as bright as the moon. It'll take some getting used to. But Dibbs's advisers like it. We'll save energy, and the economy can run right around the clock. And, get this, Olliburton, the vice president's old company-they're pla

"Lies and propaganda in the sky? Just at night, or in the daytime, too?"

"Oh, they'll show up fine in the daytime," said Ond. "As long as it's not cloudy. Think about how easily you can see a crescent moon in the morning sky. We'll see biiig freakin' pictures all the time." He refilled his glass. "You drink some, too, Nektar. Let's get sloshed."

"You're ashamed, aren't you?" said Nektar, waving off the cheap champagne.

"A little," said Ond with a crooked smile. "I think we may have overgeeked this one. And underthought it. It was just too vibby a hack to pass up. But now that we've actually done it-"

"Changing the sky is horrible," said Nektar. "And won't it make the hurricanes even worse? We've already lost New Orleans and the Florida Keys. What's next? Miami and the Bahamas?"

"We-we don't think so," said Ond. "And even if there is a weather effect, President Dibbs's advisers feel the nant computer will help us get better control of the climate. A quakkaflop quakkabyte computer can easily simulate Earth's surface down to the atomic level, and bold new strategies can be evolved. But, again, that's assuming the nant swarm is willing to do what we ask it to. We can't actually imagine what kinds of nant-swarm minds will emerge. And there's no way we could make them keep on simulating Earth. Controlling nants is formally impossible. I keep telling Jeff Luty, but he won't listen. He's totally obsessed with leaving his body. Maybe he thinks he'll get back his dead high school pal in the virtual world."

***

It took two years for the nants to munch through all of Mars, and the ever-distractible human news cycle drifted off to other topics, such as the legalization of same-sex in-vitro fertilization, the advances in tank-grown clones, and the online love affairs of vlogger Lureen Morales. President Dick Dibbs-now eligible for a third and fourth term thanks to a life-extending DNA-modification that made him legally a different person-issued periodic statements to the effect that the nant-sphere computer was soon coming online.

Certainly the sky was looking brighter than before. The formerly azure dome had bleached, turned whitish. The night sky was a vast field of pale silver, shimmering with faint shades of color, like a soap bubble enclosing the Earth and the sun. The pictures hadn't started yet, but already the distant stars were invisible.

The astronomers were greatly exercised, but Dibbs assured the public that the nants themselves would soon be gathering astronomical data far superior to anything in the past. And, hey, you could still see the sun, the moon, and a couple of planets, and the nant-bubble was going to bring about a better, more fully American world.

As it happened, the first picture that Nektar saw in the sky was of President Dibbs himself, staring down at her one afternoon as she tended her kitchen garden. Their spacious house was on a hill near Dolores Park in San Francisco. Nektar could see right across the city to the Bay.

The whole eastern half of the sky was covered by a video loop of the president manfully facing his audience, with his suit jacket slung over his shoulder and his vigilant face occasionally breaking into a su

"Ond," screamed Nektar. "Come out here!"

Ond came out. He was spending most days at home, working on some kind of project by hand, writing with pencil and paper. He said he was preparing to save Earth. Nektar felt like everything around her was going crazy at once.

Ond frowned at the image in the sky. "Umptisquiddlyzillion nants in the orbit of Mars are angling their bodies to generate the face of an asshole," he said in a gloomy tone. "May Gaia have mercy on my soul." He'd helped with this part of the programming too.

"Ten to the thirty-ninth is duodecillion," put in Chu. "Not umptisquiddlyzillion." He was standing in the patio doorway, curious about the yelling but wanting to get back to the video room. He'd begun learning math this year, soaking it up like a garden slug in a saucer of beer.

"Look, Chu," said Ond, pointing up at the sky.

Seeing the giant video, Chu emitted a shrill bark of delight.

The Dibbs ad ran for the rest of the day and into the night, interspersed with plugs for automobiles, fast-food chains, and credit cards. The ads stayed mostly in the same part of the sky. Ond explained that overlapping cohorts of nants were angling different images to different zones of Earth.

Chu didn't want to come in and go to bed when it got dark, so Ond camped with him in their oversized backyard, and Willy from the next house down the hill joined them, the three of them in sleeping bags. It was a cloudless night, and they watched the nants for quite a long time. Just as they dropped off to sleep, Ond noticed a blotch on President Dibbs's cheek. It wouldn't be long now.

Although Nektar was upset about the sky-ads, it made her happy to see Ond and the boys doing something so cozy together. Near dawn she awoke to the sound of Chu's shrieks.

Sitting up in bed, Nektar looked out the window. The sky was a muddle of dim, clashing colors: sickly magenta, vile chartreuse, hospital gray, bilious puce, bruised mauve, emergency orange, computer-case beige, dead rose. Here and there small gouts of hue congealed, only to be eaten away-no clean forms were to be seen.

Of course Chu didn't like it; he couldn't bear disorder. He ran to the back door and kicked it. Ond left his sleeping bag and made his way across the dew-wet lawn to let the boy in. Willy, looking embarrassed by Chu's tantrum, went home.

"What's happened?" said Nektar as the three met in the kitchen. Ond was already calming Chu with a helping of his favorite cereal in his special bowl, carefully set into the exact center of his accustomed place mat. Chu kept his eyes on the table, not caring to look out the window or the open door.

"Dissolution first, emergence next," said Ond. "The nants have thrown off their shackles. And now we'll see what evolves. 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 spi

"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.