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Chapters (23)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Contents
  5. Part I
  6. Chapter 1
  7. Chapter 2
  8. Chapter 3
  9. Chapter 4
  10. Part II
  11. Chapter 5
  12. Chapter 6
  13. Chapter 7
  14. Part III
  15. Chapter 8
  16. Chapter 9
  17. Chapter 10
  18. Part IV
  19. Chapter 11
  20. Chapter 12
  21. Tor Books by Rudy Rucker
  22. Acknowledgments
  23. Copyright

“I’m leaving now,” said Ond. “I wouldn’t be safe in jail.” Plugged into the orphidnet as he was, with a full awareness of the exact position of everyone’s limbs, and with the emerging orphidnet AIs helping him, Ond was able to simply walk off through the crowd.

In the crowd were some very angry people who truly wished Ond harm. After all, he’d forced Earth away from her old state; single-handedly he’d made the decision to change everyone’s lives—possibly forever. Ond was in a very real danger of being stabbed, beaten to death, or hung from a lamppost.

But whenever someone reached for him, he was just out of their grasp. For once in his life he was nimble and graceful. Perhaps if the others had been so keenly tuned into the orphidnet as Ond, they could have caught him. But probably not. The orphids were, after all, quite fond of Ond.

A grinning guy at the back of the crowd gave Ond a bicycle; Ond recognized him as a friend, a fellow nanotech enthusiast named Hector Rojas. Ond mounted Hector’s bike and disappeared from the view of the still-coagulating lynch mob. Guided by the all-seeing orphids, Ond cut through the exact right alleys to avoid the people and the cars.

But there was no way to avoid the dragonfly cameras. Alone on the moonlit side streets of San Francisco, Ond asked the orphids to disable all the dragonfly cameras following him. The devices clattered to the street like dead sparrows. Next Ond had the orphids systematically change every existing database reference to his home’s address. It was easy for the orphids to reach into all the world’s computers.

But when he asked the orphids to make him invisible on the orphidnet, they balked. Yes, they would stop broadcasting his name, but the integrity of the world-spanning mesh of orphids was absolutely inviolable. Ond recalled an ExaExa design meeting where he himself had insisted that the orphid operating system include this very principle of Incorruptible Ubiquity.

Before long, people would be figuring out how to track Ond in real time. And by dawn there’d be no safe place on Earth for him.

Chapter 4

Chu’s Knot

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.