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 dinner. As she often did, she’d made brown rice, fried pork medallions, and spinach—one of the few meals that didn’t send Chu into a tantrum. The gastronomic monotony was dreary for Nektar, another thorn in the baby trap.

“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.”