Postsingular by Rudy Rucker Read Free Book Online

whatever I’m working on. He’s still brilliant, no matter what.”
    â€œYou 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 gonna invent teleportation, though who knows, he might actually do it. It’d be a shame to kill him off. Like shattering the Venus de Milo. ”
    â€œOnd,” said Nektar. “Jeff Luty wants to shatter the whole world !”
    â€œHe’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.”
    â€œHa,” 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!”
    â€œMommy don’t yell!” shrieked Chu.
    â€œChill, 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.
    â€œHello, 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.
    â€œHello, Jil,” sang the orphids, their voices sounding in their listeners’ earbuds.
    â€œAfter 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.”
    â€œCan 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.
    â€œ 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?”
    â€œNo way,” said Craigor. “These Pharaohs took me four days to catch. Leave them alone, Ond.”
    â€œThey’re my daddy’s cuttlefish,” echoed Momotaro.
    â€œI’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