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-tunnel back and forth between the worlds, thus seeming to disappear or, on the other hand, emerge from nothing. The paper called the worlds ―branes,‖ like in ―membranes.‖
―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-tunnel to the other brane,‖
agreed the mushroom. ―Or maybe someone from the other brane comes over here and takes them.‖
―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-tunnel to a parallel brane.‖
―What‘s the name of the other world?‖ asked Chu.
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Rudy Rucker
―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, cunningly managing
to catch hold of the rapid but bewildered cuttlefish. And in other scenes the gauzy, monumental figures displayed themselves to little groups of worshipful virtual humans. Chu glimpsed his mother in one of these worship groups, but then she disappeared.
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.
―Maybe,‖ said the smart mushroom. ―Traveling to the Hibrane would be an—encryption
problem. You‘d get your mind into a special state and encrypt yourself into a superposition capable of jumping you to the Hibrane.‖
―Encryption!‖ exclaimed Chu. ―I like breaking codes. Tell me more.‖
―To travel between the two worlds, a Hibraner turns off self-observation and spreads out into
an ambiguous superposed state, and then she observes herself in such a way so as to collapse down into the other brane.‖
―Which part of that is encryption?‖ asked Chu.
―The encryption lies in the way in which the Hibraner does the self-observation,‖ said the
mushroom. ―We can view it as being a quantum-mechanical operator based on a specific numerical pattern. And that would be the encryption code. Think of the code as the orientation of a higher-dimensional vector connecting the branes. It‘s a very short distance, but you have to travel in the right direction. I believe the direction code is over a million digits long.‖
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Postsingular
―Goody,‖ said Chu. He‘d studied an online tutorial on cryptography this summer. ―Let‘s
figure out that code right now. We‘ll use a timing-channel attack.‖
―It‘s fun working with you,‖ said the mushroom.
***
Ond took a circuitous route toward his house in the Dolores Heights district of San Francisco.
Whenever his enemies got too close, the orphids warned him.
Meanwhile the new world of the orphidnet was opening up around him. Every word, thought,
or feeling brought along a rich association of footnotes and commentary. He could see, after a fashion, with his eyes closed. Every single object was physically modeled in the orphidnet: not just the road around him but also the interiors of the houses, the people inside them, the contents of the people‘s pockets, and their bodies under their clothes.
Ond wasn‘t alone in the orphidnet. There were other people, quite a few of them, many
wanting to harangue, threaten, interview, or congratulate him. And, just as Ond had hoped, artificial intelligences were emerging in the orphidnet as spontaneously as von Karman vortex streets of
eddies in a brook, as naturally as three-dimensional Belousov-Zhabotinsky scrolls in an excitable chemical medium. Just like the BZ patterns in the Martian nant-sphere. Nobody had ever really
talked to those nant-based AIs, but these orphidnet guys seemed approachable and even friendly.
Ond decided to call them beezies.
The beezies were offering Ond their information services. They wanted to share whatever
intellectual adventures he could cook up. The scroll-shaped AIs looked like colored jellyfish, and they spoke in compound glyphs that Ond‘s brain turned into words.
It was a pleasant night, very warm, the first day of September, with a bright full moon. As
Ond rode the bicycle and dodged his pursuers, he began organizing a workspace for himself in the orphidnet. He visualized himself as a Christmas-tree trunk with his thoughts like branches. With the orphidnet agents helping him, he effortlessly added all his digital documents, e-mails, and blogs to the tree construct, which now took on a life of its own, automatically answering some of the
questions people were messaging him. Ond busied himself hanging links to favorite bits of info on his branches—trimming the mind-tree. He was having fun.
Passing the old, brick Mission Street Armory a mile from his house, it occurred to Ond to see
how things were going at home. It would be horrible if his enemies got there before him. Thank God the orphids had hidden his house‘s address.
In his mind‘s eye, Ond saw his family in the orphidnet. Nektar was lying on their bed—
sulking? No, she was in the orphidnet. Nektar didn‘t know about setting up a privacy barrier; Ond was able to follow her path. He found virtual Nektar doing something with her friend Jose. Ond didn‘t like seeing his wife with the swarthy, virile chef.
Nektar and Jose were attending some kind of virtual gathering, an impromptu religious
service with a choir of beezies surrounding a luminous womanlike form upon an altar. The glowing p.38
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being was definitely conscious, but she seemed neither like a human nor like an orphidnet AI. A third kind of mind? Other bright forms lay in every direction, drifting amid the fringes of his thoughts—
Just then three virtual humans plowed into Ond‘s mind-tree, distracting him. The first two
wanted to kill him, but the third was his scientist-friend Mitch from MIT, already in the orphidnet from the East Coast. Ond had an intense and rewarding chat with Mitch; bandwidth was so much
higher in the orphidnet than in normal human conversation. Mitch formulated a theory about how the emerging orphidnet minds would scale up. Quite effortlessly, Ond and Mitch set some obliging
orphidnet agents in motion to gather data to test Mitch‘s thesis— and awaited the results.
***
Although Nektar appreciated the theatrical setting of the virtual domed temple, she didn‘t like the so-called angel at its center. She‘d never liked religion. Just after she‘d left the family home in Arizona for UCLA, Nektar‘s mother, Karen Lundquist, had given the family‘s savings to a TV
evangelist. Nektar had to go up to her neck in debt to finish her degree. At least Ond had paid off the debt.
The old angel made molasses-slow gestures, all the while messaging pictures and words via
the orphidnet. Her name was Gladax. She said her people were as gods compared to Nektar‘s race—
which seemed a little dubious given that the angel was wearing dark green sweatpants and a cheap Tshirt with a dragon on it. She was dressed like a homeless person you‘d see in a laundromat, although somehow Nektar could tell that the giant old woman was really quite well off. She was stingy rather than poor.
She said that her people had been visiting Earth for centuries, although this happened to be
her first trip. She said she‘d come because now the two races could talk, thanks to the orphids, and she wanted to be in on the big night. Also she had a message to share. Nektar‘s people should learn to live with no digital technology at all. She said there was a higher path—she called it lazy eight. To Nektar, Gladax‘s admonitions sounded like the same line of crap she‘d always heard in church: give up something you like for something you can‘t imagine.
Nektar must have been unconsciously messaging her thoughts to the angel, for now the angel
turned her great slow head to stare at her. The angel messaged that although she did like to dress economically, she was in fact the mayor of San Francisco in her world. The angel added that she was seventy-two years old, and that she would give Nektar some good advice. Nektar seemed to amuse her.
―Take your boyfriend and enjoy your bodies, little doubter,‖ Gladax prescribed, moving her
hand in a languid trail that sent a shower of energy-sparks to settle down upon Nektar and Jose. Her words came across deep and slow, with a musical Asian accent. ―Wake up from the machines.‖
The sparks energized Jose; he stopped staring at the angel and tugged Nektar into a side room
whose walls were covered by marblelike slabs patterned in slowly flowing scrolls and swirls. Nektar and Jose laid down and made love. It was over too soon, like a wet dream.
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Postsingular
The marble room morphed into Jose‘s apartment. The real Jose was sitting up, eyes open,
trying to keep talking to Nektar. Jose was puzzled why Nektar wasn‘t physically there. He began freaking out. He couldn‘t remember things right. He said that if he‘d seen an angel, maybe that meant he should kill himself and go to heaven for good. Nektar messaged him to please wait, she was going to come to his apartment in the flesh, and that he hadn‘t felt anything like the real heaven yet.
And then she too was sitting up, eyes open, alone in her bedroom. She couldn‘t remember all
the details of what had just happened. But she knew two things. She needed to be with Jose in his apartment on Valencia Street. And she needed to leave Ond forever. She would never forgive him for ruining the cozy, womany real world and making life into a giant computer game. Quickly she
packed a suitcase with her essentials. She felt odd and remote, as if her head were inside a glass bubble. She didn‘t want to face what she was about to do. Better to think of Jose.
Jose wasn‘t a world-wrecker. She could save him; together they could make a new life. Why
had he wanted to kill himself just now? A strong, sexy man like that. Nektar shook her head, feeling that same mixture of tenderness and contempt that she always felt when confronted by men‘s wild, unrealistic ideas. She‘d give Jose something to live for. He‘d appreciate her. Ond wouldn‘t miss her one bit.
But, oh, oh, oh, what about Chu? Leaving her bedroom, Nektar regarded her son, lying on the
rug. He wasn‘t trembling anymore; he looked content, his eyes closed, his lips moving. The
orphidnet was catnip for him. If she interrupted him, he‘d probably have a tantrum. Was it really possible to leave him here?
She leaned close to kiss Chu good-bye. Little Chu, her own flesh, how could she abandon
him? He twisted away, muttering about numbers and cuttlefish. Oh, he‘d do fine with Ond; he was much more like Ond than like Nektar. Ond would be home any minute to watch over him.
The invisible bubble around Nektar‘s head felt very tight. If she didn‘t leave right now, she
was going to lose her mind. Tears wetting her face, she ran out to her car and headed for Jose. She passed Ond on his bike without even slowing down. Hurry home, Ond, and take care of our Chu. I can‘t do it anymore. I‘m bad. I‘m sorry. Good-bye.
A mob of some kind was blocking the road two blocks downhill. Nektar went down a side
street to avoid the jam.
***
While Ond and his scientist friend Mitch waited for the beezies to report back with
information about the upper levels of the orphidnet, Ond sent a virtual self to check on Nektar. She wasn‘t in that cultish group gathering anymore. She and Jose were in a marble room and—Ond was interrupted again. A real-world dog was chasing his bike, barking and baring his teeth as if he meant to bite Ond‘s calf. Ond screamed and snapped fully into the material plane. He had a phobia about dogs. He hopped off the bike, nearly falling on his face. Frantically he began throwing gravel at the brute, which was sufficient to send him skulking back into the shadows. Standing there, Ond had the p.40
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strange realization that he could hardly remember any of the things he‘d just been doing in the orphidnet. The memories weren‘t in his head; they were out—there. Just now Nektar had been
doing—what? And Ond had been talking to—who? When he was offline, Ond‘s memories of the
orphidnet were like Web links without a browser to open them.
On his bike, Ond let his mind expand again. Ah, yes, his investigations with Mitch. The
results were coming in. There was indeed an upward cascade of intelligences taking place in the orphidnet; each eddy was a part of a larger swirl, up through a few dozen levels, and ending with an inscrutable orphidnetspanning super-beezie at the top. Quite wonderful.
As for those luminous humanoid beings—the AIs now reported that these were so-called
angels from a parallel sheet of reality that had recently been dubbed the Hibrane. The best current models indicated the higher-space distance to the Hibrane must be about a thirtieth of a vatometer, that is, 0.03 decillionths of a meter. Due to the Randall–de Sitter interbrane warp factor, Hibraners at this remove would be scaled six times larger than regular humans and would move six times slower.
In addition, the Hibraners‘ quantum phases were almost totally orthogonal to ours; this meant
that Hibraners barely interacted with normal light or matter, which in turn explained why hardly anyone had noticed them before the orphids had begun sticking to them. Viewing alien angels in the orphidnet seemed both mind-boggling and natural. It made a kind of sense that the quantum-computing mental space of the orphidnet could serve as a meeting ground between two orders of
being.
But before Ond could begin considering this more deeply, he was distracted by a news feed
saying that the courts had dropped charges against him. The orphidnet beezies proudly told him they‘d hacked the system to get Ond out of trouble. But there was still the matter of the torch-bearing lynch mob pushing toward Ond‘s current location. By now, even the dimmest bulbs had figured out how to see Ond via the orphidnet.
An urgent message popped up from Hector Rojas, the guy who‘d lent Ond the bicycle.
Hector was on his way in his car to offer Ond a fresh means of escape.
Ond pumped his bike up the hill toward home.
***
Chu‘s working hypothesis was that the quantum-mechanical operator at the heart of the
angels‘ world-to-world jumping technique involved raising a numerical representation of a given object, such as a cuttlefish, to a certain exponential power K, producing an encrypted result of the K
form cuttlefish . Chu knew all about this style of encryption from the online cryptography tutorial he‘d studied. The actual value of K was the secret code needed to break the encryption.
In search of K, Chu and the mushrooms delved into the ftp.exaexa.org/merzboat data stream.
First of all, they figured out how to represent each of the disappeared cephalopods as a binary number. And then they studied exactly how long the encryption of each missing cuttlefish had taken.
A delicate web of number theory led back from the time intervals to the bits of K, for the 0 bits of K
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munged faster than the 1 bits did. This timing-channel attack was a big problem, a heavy crunch, but the orphidnet made it feasible.
And pretty soon Chu had the integer K tidily laid out as a pattern in the orphidnet. With access to K, he now had some hope of jumping back and forth between the two worlds.
Written as a decimal number, K turned out, by the way, to be over three million digits long, having 3,141,573 digits, to be precise. Chu relished the fact that the orphidnet allowed him to visualize a gigundo number like that, and to smoothly revolve it in his mind. He was starting to realize that, while he was online, a lot of his thinking was happening outside of his physical brain.
For the sake of elegance, Chu and the AIs transformed the giant code number K into a picture and a sound: blue spaghetti with chimes. And in the course of the transformation, they crushed the code from millions of digits down to just a few thousand bits. But even this condensed pattern was too big to fit conveniently into Chu‘s brain without his carrying out some time-consuming work of memorization. For now, when he ―looked‖ at the pattern, he was really accessing a link to a secure orphidnet storage location. Chu gloated over the link, happy with the knowing. Although, hmm, given a little time, maybe he could find a pattern of just a few hundred bits that would allow him to generate the thousands-of-bits‘ worth of chimes and blue spaghetti that in turn generated the original three-million-digit jump-code.
A gauzy shape crept into the room, bright and insistent, projecting an old woman‘s voice via
the orphidnet. She was a Hibraner, the same one Chu had seen in that temple where Nektar was.
―I‘m Gladax,‖ messaged the big angel, her voice singing in Chu‘s head. She was lying on her
stomach to fit her head and shoulders into the living room. She was still wearing that crummy T-shirt with the blurry dragon. ―The mayor of San Francisco in what you call Hibrane. One reason I‘m here is to warn little troublemakers like you. Don‘t go spreading around our jump-code, Chu. The last thing I want is a jitsy rat-plague of your peoples‘ nasty machines. Really, you Lobraners act like you want to be wind-up toys. Don‘t be a dummy. Give me access to your brain so I can erase that jump-code you stole.‖
―No!‖ exclaimed Chu, battening down his mind.
The angel held up her sallow, knobby index finger and glared at Chu. ―I don‘t want to hurt
you,‖ she said. ―I‘m sure you‘re a very nice little boy. But you have to give me the jump-code now.‖
Still Chu refused. Looking grim, Gladax extended a ray from her finger. Chu sat up, but
Gladax was all around him. She poked the ray into his skull; it slid in like a skewer into butter; Chu froze. Gladax began slowly feeling around the core of his brain, trying to reach the link to his orphidnet storage location. Chu began twitching all over. Messaging that she was sorry, Gladax kept on all the same. Chu found his voice and screamed for Nektar. But she wasn‘t home.
***
As Ond neared the house, he could see the lynch mob only a block behind him. Feeling for
Nektar in the orphidnet, he was surprised to discover that she‘d left home in her car and had driven p.42
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right past him and, for that matter, past the mob. He hadn‘t noticed. And now when he messaged her, she told him she was on her way to be in the physical presence of her friend Jose—and that she was leaving him for good. Before he could say anything, she‘d closed the connection.
For the first time, Ond accepted that he might have made a mistake in releasing the orphids.
In his house at last, Ond found little Chu convulsing on the living room floor, with a white-
haired Hibrane angel woman probing at his brain. Ond cradled the boy in his arms.
―Stop it!‖ exclaimed Ond. ―Please!‖ The angel‘s face wasn‘t cruel. Perhaps she‘d listen to
reason. ―You‘re hurting my son! What do you need?‖
The Hibraner sighed, interrupted her slow stirring of Chu‘s brain, and studied Ond. ―Ond
Lutter?‖ she messaged presently. ―I‘m Gladax. You‘re the man who stopped the nants, yes?‖
―Yes. Three years ago. Take your finger out of Chu‘s head. Talk to me. We can work things
out.‖
―Your son stole our jump-code,‖ said Gladax. ―I have to erase it. I don‘t want to hurt him, but he‘s so stubborn. What else can I do?‖ Though her voice was stern, her resolve was wavering. With a frown, she withdrew the energy ray from within Chu‘s head.
―Are you okay, Chu?‖ asked Ond, hugging his son tighter than ever.
―I still have the link to the chimes and the blue spaghetti,‖ murmured the boy. ―She didn‘t
erase them yet. Here.‖ In a flash, Ond absorbed Chu‘s message containing the encrypted link.
―Got it,‖ said Ond, just to make sure Gladax knew.
―Jitsy little gnomes!‖ exclaimed the Hibraner, annoyed. ―If I let you pollute our world with
your horrible machines, there‘s no reason for my dangerous journey to your brane.‖
―Look, I‘m the guy who stopped the nants,‖ said Ond. ―You said it yourself. I can help you.
And Chu can help too. You don‘t want to scramble our brains. We‘re a resource.‖
Gladax frowned, not liking the situation. ―Yes, Ond, you were the hero of Nant Day, but now
you‘ve made these orphid nanomachines. I don‘t want seething beasties in my home brane.‖
There was a hugger-mugger of voices outside. Someone was honking a car horn. Hector
Rojas.
―My friend is here for me,‖ said Ond quickly. ―Chu and I have to leave this instant. We‘ll go
back to Jil Zonder‘s boat. I‘ll do what I can to protect your world, Gladax, I promise. And remember, you need an expert on your side.‖
―Oh, all right then,‖ messaged Gladax after a long pause. ―But no broadcasting that link. Or I addle your brain for real, no gentle probing like with Chu. I‘ll be watching you very closely, Ond Lutter.‖
―Watch me all you like,‖ said Ond. ―And leave poor Chu alone. How could you do that to
him, anyway? Don‘t you have children of your own?‖
―A nephew,‖ messaged Gladax, showing a little smile. ―He‘s bright, but headstrong. Always
does the opposite of what I tell him. He jumps branes every day—as if it were perfectly safe! As if Subdee was nothing to worry about! Yes, yes, I have to remember that you gnomes have emotions
too. Run along before that mob gets hold of you.‖
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―Do you want to hear about the cuttlefish and how I found the angels‘ jump-code?‖ Chu
asked his father as Ond carried him to the door.
―I heard a little from the orphidnet AIs,‖ said Ond. How fragile the boy seemed, how
precious. ―I call them beezies.‖
―The beezies are good,‖ said Chu in his toneless little voice. ―But that angel woman was
being mean to me. Gladax. I wouldn‘t let her erase the jump-code. I almost have a way to learn that code by heart.‖
―Strong Chu,‖ said Ond, touched by his son‘s courage. ―I want to hear all the details. We‘re
going to need them. But you rest for now. We don‘t want to rile Gladax.‖
―Okay,‖ said Chu.
People were yelling just down the hill. Almost here. Moving faster than he would have
thought possible, Ond got himself and Chu into the backseat of Hector‘s sporty car. Hector peeled out and slewed away from the crowd, following up with a high-speed doughnut move to shake a car trying to tail them.
***
O