Postsingular

For a while there it seemed as if humanity had nipped the Singularity in the bud. But then came the orphids.

***

Jil and Craigor's home was a long cabin atop a flat live-aboard scow called the Merz Boat. Propelled by cilia like a giant paramecium, the piezoplastic boat puttered around the shallow, turbid bay waters near the industrial zone of San Francisco. Craigor had bought the one-of-a-kind Merz Boat quite cheaply from an out-of-work exec during the chaos that followed the nant debacle. He'd renamed the boat in honor of one of his personal heroes, the Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters, who'd famously turned his house into an assemblage called the Merzbau. Merz was Schwitters's made-up word meaning, according to Craigor, "gnarly stuff that I can get for free."

Jil Zonder was eye-catching: more than pretty, she moved with perfect grace. She had dark, blunt-cut hair, a straight nose, and a ready laugh. She'd been a good student: an English major with a minor in graphics and design, pla

She made it into recovery, blundered into an early marriage, and had kids with Craigor: a son and a daughter, Momotaro and Bixie, aged eleven and ten. The four of them made a close-knit, relatively happy family, however, Jil did sometimes feel a bit trapped, especially now that she was moving into her thirties.

Although Jil had finished up college and still dreamed of making it as a designer, she was currently working as a virtual booth bu

Craigor Co

Craigor was a kind of fisherman as well; that is, he earned money by trapping iridescent Pharaoh cuttlefish, an invasive species native to the Mergui Archipelago of Burma and now flourishing in the climate-heated waters of the San Francisco Bay. The chunky three-kilogram cuttlefish brought in a good price apiece from AmphiVision, Inc., a San Francisco company that used organic rhodopsin from cuttlefish chromatophores to dope the special video-displaying contact lenses known as web-eyes. All the digirati were wearing webeyes to overlay heads-up computer displays upon their visual fields. Webeyes also acted as cameras; you could transmit whatever you saw. Along with earbud speakers, throat mikes, and motion sensors, the webeyes were making cyberspace into an integral part of the natural world.

There weren't many other cuttlefishermen in the bay-the fishery was under a strict licensing program that Craigor had been grandfathered into when the rhodopsin market took off. Craigor had lucked into a good thing, and he was blessed with a knack for assembling fanciful traps that brought in steady catches of the wily Pharaoh cuttles.

To sweeten the take, Craigor even got a small bounty from the federal Aquatic Nuisance Species Task Force for each cuttlefish beak that he turned in. The task force involvement was, however, a mixed blessing. Craigor was supposed to file two separate electronic forms about each and every cuttlefish that he caught: one to the Department of the Interior and one to the Department of Commerce. The feds were hoping to gain control over the cuttles by figuring out the fine points of their life-cycle. Being the nondigital kind of guy that he was, Craigor's reports had fallen so far behind that the feds were threatening to lift his cuttlefishing license.

One Saturday afternoon, Ond Lutter, his wife, Nektar Lundquist, and their twelve-year-old son Chu came over for a late afternoon cookout on the Merz Boat. It was the first of September.

Jil had met Ond at work; he'd been rehired and elevated to chief technical officer of the reborn ExaExa. The two little families had become friends; they got together nearly every weekend, hanging out, chatting and flirting.

It was clear to Nektar that Ond had something of a crush on Jil. But Nektar felt the situation was manageable, as Jil didn't seem all that interested in Ond. For her part, Nektar liked the looks of Craigor's muscular body, and it wasn't lost upon her how often Craigor glanced at her-not that geeky, self-absorbed Ond ever noticed. He was blind to the emotions roiling beneath the surfaces of daily life.

"It's peaceful here," said Ond, taking a long pull of his beer. Even one bottle had a noticeable effect on the engineer. "Like Eden." He leaned back in his white wickerwork rocker. No two chairs on the Merz Boat were the same.

"What are those cones?" Nektar asked Jil and Craigor. She was talking about the waist-high shiny ridged shapes that loosely ringed the area Craigor had cleared out for today's little party. The kids were off at the other end of the boat, Momotaro showing Chu the latest junk and Bixie singing made-up songs that Chu tried to sing too.

"Ceramic jet-engine baffles," said Jil. "From the days before smart machines. Craigor got them off the back lot at Lockheed."

"The ridges are for reducing turbulence," said Craigor. "Like your womanly curves, Nektar. We sit in an island of serenity."

"You're a poet, Craigor," said Ond. The low sun illuminated his scalp through his thi

"Far be it from me to pry into Chief Engineer Ond's geek-some plans," said Craigor easily. "As for my diffuse but rewarding oeuvre-" He made an expansive gesture that encompassed the whole deck. "An open book. Unfortunately I'm too planktonic for fame. I transcend encapsulation."

"Planktonic?" said Jil, smiling at her raffish husband, always off in his own world. Their daughter Bixie came trotting by.

"Planktonic sea creatures rarely swim," said Craigor. "Like cuttlefish, they go with the flow. Until something nearby catches their attention. And then-dart! Another meal, another lover, another masterpiece."

Just aft of the cleared area was Craigor's holding tank, an aquarium hand-caulked from car windshields, bubbling with air and containing a few dozen Pharaoh cuttlefish, their body-encircling fins undulating in an endless hula dance, their facial squid-bunches of tentacles gathered into demure sheaves, their yellow W-shaped pupils gazing at their captors.

"They look so smart and so-doomed," said Nektar, regarding the bubbling tank. Her face was still sensuous and beautiful, her blond-tinted hair lustrous. But the set of her mouth had turned a bit hard and frown-wrinkles shadowed her brow. Jil gathered that Ond and Nektar didn't get along all that well. Nektar had never really forgiven her husband for the nants. "The cuttlefish are like wizards on death row," continued Nektar. "They make me feel guilty about my webeyes."