Ond wasn’t around as much as before—he was putting in long hours at the Nantel labs in the China Basin biotech district of San Francisco. The project remained secret until the day President Dick Dibbs announced that the US was going to rocket an eggcase of nants to Mars. The semiliving micron-sized dust specks had been programmed to turn Mars entirely into—more nants! Ten-to-the-thirty-ninth nants, to be precise, each of them with a billion bytes of memory and a computational engine cranking along at a billion updates a second. The nants would spread out across the celestial sphere of the Mars orbit, populating it with a swarm that would in effect become a quakkaflop quakkabyte solar-powered computer, the greatest intellectual resource ever under the control of man, a Dyson sphere with a radius of a quarter-billion kilometers.

“Quakka what?” Nektar asked Ond, not quite understanding what was going on.

They were watching an excited newscaster talking about the nant launch on TV. Ond and his coworkers were all at their homes sharing the launch with their families—the Nantel administrators had closed down their headquarters for a few days, fearing that mobs of demonstrators might converge on them as the story broke.

Ond was in touch with his coworkers via little screens scattered around the room. Most of them were drinking Mieux champagne; Jeff Luty had issued each employee a bottle of the inexpensive stuff in secret commemoration of his beloved Carlos.

“Quakka means ten to the forty-eighth,” said Ond. “That many bytes of storage and the ability to carry out that many primitive instructions per second. Quite a gain on the human brain, eh? We limp along with exaflop exabyte ware, exa meaning a mere ten to the eighteenth. How smart could the nant sphere be? Imagine replacing each of the ten octillion atoms in your body with a hundred copies of your brain, and imagine that all those brains could work together.”

“People aren’t stupid enough already?” said Nektar. “President Dibbs is supporting this—why?”

“He wanted to do it before the Chinese. And his advisers imagine the nants will be under American control. They’re viewing the nant-sphere as a strategic military planning tool. That’s why they were allowed to short-circuit all the environmental review processes.” Ond gave a wry chuckle and shook his head. “But it’s not going to work out like they expect. A transcendently intelligent nant-sphere is supposed to obey an imbecile like Dick Dibbs? Please.”

“They’re grinding Mars into dust?” cried Nektar. “You helped make this happen?”

“Nant,” said Chu, crawling around the floor, shoving his face right up to each of the little screens, adjusting the screens as he moved around. “Nant-sphere,” he said. “Quakkaflop computer.” He was excited about the number talk and the video hardware. Getting all the electronic devices on the floor aligned parallel to each other made him happy as a clam.