Postsingular

"That's where my new tech comes in," said Ond. "We label the cuttlefish with radio-frequency tracking devices and let them report on themselves. Like bar codes or RFIDs, but better."

"It's not like I get my hands on the cuttles until I actually trap them," said Craigor. "So how would I label them? They're smart enough that it'd actually be hard to trap the same one twice."

"What if the tags could find the cuttlefish?" said Ond. Pink and gri

"Not another nanomachine release!" exclaimed Nektar, jumping to her feet. "You promised never again, Ond!"

"They're not nants, never," said Ond, his tongue a bit thick with the beer and tobacco. "Orphids good, nants bad. Orphids self-reproduce using nothing but dust floating in the air. They're not destructive. Orphids are territorial; they keep a certain distance from each other. They'll cover Earth's surface, yes, but only down to one or two orphids per square millimeter. They're like little surveyors; they make meshes on things. They'll double their numbers every few minutes at first, gradually slowing down, and after a day, the population will plateau and stop growing. You'll see a few million of them on your skin, and maybe ten sextillion orphids on Earth's whole surface. From then on, they only reproduce enough to maintain that same density. You might say the orphids have a conscience, a desire to protect the environment. They'll actually hunt down and eradicate any rival nanomachines that anyone tries to unleash."

"Sell it, Ond," said Craigor, gri

"Orphids use quantum computing; they propel themselves with electrostatic fields; they understand natural language; and they're networked via quantum entanglement," continued Ond. "The orphids will communicate with us much better than the nants ever did. And as the orphidnet emerges, we'll get intelligence amplification and superhuman AI."

"The secret ExaExa project," mused Jil, watching the darting dots of light in the vial. "You've been designing these orphids all along? Sly Ond."

"In a way, the nants designed them," said Ond. "Before I rolled back the nants, the nants sent Nantel some insanely great code. Coherent quantum states, human language comprehension, autocatalytic morphogenesis, a layered neural net architecture for evolvable AI-the nants nailed all the hard problems."

"But Ond-" said Nektar in a pleading tone.

"We've been testing the orphids for the last year to make sure there won't be another disaster when we release them," said Ond, raising his voice to drown out his wife. "And now even though we're satisfied that it's all good, the execs won't formally pull the trigger. There's been a lot of company politics; a lot of infighting. Truth is, Jeff Luty's pulling strings from his hideout. Hideout, hell, I might as well tell you that Luty's holed up in the friggin' ExaExa labs, hiding behind our super-expensive quantum-mirrored walls. Every time I see him he bawls me out for having stopped his nants. He's kind of losing it. But usually he gives me good advice about whatever I'm working on. He's still brilliant, no matter what."

"You should turn him in to the police!" said Nektar. "That man deserves to die."

Ond looked uncomfortable. "If you knew Jeff as well as I do, you'd have some sympathy for him. He's a lonely man. That boy Carlos who died in the model rocket accident-he was the only person Jeff ever loved. Yes, Jeff 's obnoxious and weird, and, like I say, he's getting nuttier all the time. Being cooped up isn't good for him. He thinks he's go

"Ond," said Nektar. "Jeff Luty wants to shatter the whole world !"

"He's suffering enough as it is," said Ond. "For all practical purposes, he's living in solitary confinement. And most of the ExaExa board understands that we don't have to listen to him. They recognize that if we do things my way, the orphids will be autonomous, incorruptible, cost free. And, in the long run, profits will emerge. I'll tell you something else. A big downside of keeping Jeff around is that he wants to create an improved breed of nants. And, as it happens, my orphids are the best possible defense. It's like Jeff and I are in a chess match. And right now I'm a rook and a bishop ahead. So that's why I've gotten informal approval to go ahead and release the orphids."

"Ha," said Nektar. "Approval from yourself. You want to start the same nightmare all over again!" She tried to snatch the vial from Ond's hands, but he kept it out of her reach. Nektar's symmetric features were distorted by unhappiness and anger. Her voice grew louder. "Mindless machines eating everything!"

"Mommy don't yell!" shrieked Chu.

"Chill, Nektar," said Ond, fending her off with a lowered shoulder. "Where's your nicotine euphoria? Believe me, these little fellows aren't mindless. An individual orphid is roughly as smart as a talking dog. He has a petabyte of memory and he crunches at a petaflop rate. One can converse with him quite well. Watch and listen." He said a string of numbers-a machine-coded Web address-and an orphid interface appeared within the webeyes of Chu and the four adults.

The orphids in the vial were presenting themselves as cute little cartoon faces, maybe a hundred of them, stylized yellow smileys with pink dots on their cheeks and gossamer wings coming out the sides of their heads.

"Hello, orphids," said Jil. Bixie looked up at her curiously. To Jil, her daughter's face looked ineffably sweet and vulnerable behind the dancing images of nanomachines.

"Hello, Jil," sang the orphids, their voices sounding in their listeners' earbuds.

"After I release you fellows, I want you to find all the cuttlefish in the San Francisco Bay," Ond told the orphids. "Ride them and send a steady stream of telemetry data to, uh, ftp-dot-exaexa-dot-org-slash-merzboat."

"Can you show us a real cuttlefish?" the orphids asked. Their massed voices were like an insect choir, the individual voices slightly off pitch from one another.

"Those are cuttlefish," said Ond, pointing to Craigor's holding tank. "Settle on them, and we'll release them into the bay. Okay by you, Craigor?"

"No way," said Craigor. "These Pharaohs took me four days to catch. Leave them alone, Ond."

"They're my daddy's cuttlefish," echoed Momotaro.

"I'll buy them from you," said Ond, his eyes glowing. "Market rate. The orphids will blanket your boat, too. They can map out your stuff, network it, make it interactive. That's where the publicity for your sculpture comes in. Your assemblages will be little societies. The AI hook makes them hot."