Postsingular

Jeff Luty messaged and phoned for Ond several times that day, but Ond resolutely refused to go in to the lab or even to talk with Jeff. He stayed busy with his pencil and paper, keeping a weather eye on the developments in the sky.

By the next morning the heavenly scrolls had firmed up and linked together into a pattern resembling the convoluted surface of a cauliflower-or a brain. Its colors were mild and blended; shimmering rainbows filled the crevices between the scrolls. Slowly the pattern churned, with branching sparks creeping across it like lightning in a distant thunderhead.

And for another month nothing else happened. It was as if the nant-brain had lost interest in Earth and become absorbed in its own vasty mentation.

Ond only went into the Nantel labs one more time, and that day they fired him.

"Why?" asked Nektar as the little family had di

"Jeff Luty won't use the abort code I worked out," said Ond, tapping a fat sheaf of closely written sheets of paper that he kept tucked into his shirt pocket. Nektar had seen the pages-they were covered with blocks of letters and numbers, eight symbols per block. Pure gibberish, to her. For the last few weeks, Ond had spent every waking hour going over his pages, copying them out in ink, and even walking around reading them aloud. "Luty really and truly wants our world to end," continued Ond. "He actually believes virtual reality would be better. With his lost love Carlos waiting for him there. We got in a big fight. I called him names." He smiled at the memory of this part.

"You yelled at the boss about your symbols?" said Nektar, none too happy about the impending loss of income. "Like some crank? Like a crazy person?"

"Never mind about that," said Ond, glancing around the dining room as if someone might be listening. "The important thing is, I've found a way to undo the nants. It hinges on the fact that the nants are reversible computers. We made them that way to save energy. If necessary, we can run them backwards to fix any bad things they might have done. Of course, Jeff doesn't want to roll them back, and he wanted to claim my idea wouldn't work anyway because of random external inputs, and I said the nants see their pasts as networks, not as billiard table trajectories, so they can too undo things node-to-node even if their positions are off, and I had to talk louder and louder because he kept trying to change the subject-and that's when security came. I'm outta there for good. I'm glad." Ond continued eating. He seemed strangely calm.

"But why didn't you do a better presentation?" demanded Nektar. "Why not put your code on your laptop and make one of those geeky little slide shows? That's what engineers like to see."

"Nothing on computers will be safe much longer," said Ond. "The nant-brain will be nosing in. If I put my code onto a computer, the nants would find it and figure out how to protect themselves."

"And you're saying your strings of symbols can stop the nants?" asked Nektar doubtfully. "Like a magic spell?"

Silently Ond got up and examined the electric air cleaner he'd installed in the dining room, pulling out the collector plates and wiping them off. Seemingly satisfied, he sat down again.

"I've written a nant-virus. You might call it a Trojan flea." He chuckled grimly. "If I can just get this code into some of the nants, they'll spread it to all the others-it's written in such a way that they'll think it's a nant-designed security patch. They mustn't see this code on a human computer, or they'd be suspicious. I've been trying to memorize the program, so that maybe I can infect the nants directly. But I can't remember it all. It's too long. But I'll find a way. I'll infect the nants, and an hour later my virus will actuate-and everything'll roll back. You'll see. You'll like it. But those assholes at Nantel-"

"Assholes," chirped Chu. "Assholes at Nantel."

"Listen to the language you're teaching the boy!" said Nektar angrily. "I think you're having a mental breakdown, Ond. Is Nantel giving you severance pay?"

"A month," said Ond.

"That's not very long," said Nektar. "I think it's time I went back to being a chef. I've sat on the sidelines long enough. I can be a star, Ond, I just know it. It's your turn now; you shop and make the meals and clean the house and keep an eye on Chu after school. He's your child as much as mine."

"If I don't succeed, we'll all be gone pretty soon," said Ond flatly. "So it won't matter."

"Are you saying the nants are about to attack Earth?" said Nektar, her voice rising. "Is that it?"

"It's already started," said Ond. "The nant hive-mind made a deal with President Dibbs. The news is coming out tonight. Tomorrow's go

"Quindecillion," said Chu. "Not huppagoobawazillion. More pork-rice-spinach. Don't let anything touch." He shoved his empty plate across the table towards Nektar.

Nektar jumped up and ran outside sobbing.

"More?" said Chu to Ond.

Ond gave his son more food, then paused, thinking. He laid his sheaf of papers down beside Chu, thirty pages covered with line after line of hexadecimal code blocks: 02A1B59F, 9812D007, 70FFDEF6, like that.

"Read the code," he told Chu. "See if you can memorize it. These pages are yours now."

"Code," said Chu, his eyes fastening on the symbols.

Ond went out to Nektar. It was a clear day, with the now-familiar shimmering BZ convolutions glowing through the sky. The sun was setting, melting into red and gold; each leaf on each tree was like a tiny, green, stained-glass window. Nektar was lying face down on the grass, her body shaking.

"So horrible," she choked out. "So evil. So plastic. They're destroying Earth for a memory upgrade."

"Don't worry," said Ond. "I have my plan."

Nektar wasn't the only one who was upset. The next morning a huge mob stormed the White House, heedless of their casualties, and they would have gotten Dibbs, but just when they'd cornered him, he dissolved into a cloud of nants. The Virtual Earth port had begun.

By way of keeping people informed about the Nant Day progress, the celestial Martian nant-sphere put up a full map of Earth with the ported regions shaded in red. Although it might take months or years to chew the planet right down to the core, Earth's surface was going fast. Judging from the map, by evening most of it would be gone, Gaia's skin eaten away by micron-sized computer chips with wings.