“It won’t be very dark at night anymore, with sunlight bouncing back off the nants,” said Ond. “That’s not real well-known yet. The whole sky will look about as bright as the moon. It’ll take some getting used to. But Dibbs’s advisers like it. We’ll save energy, and the economy can run right around the clock. And, get this, Olliburton, the vice president’s old company—they’re planning to sell ads.”

“Lies and propaganda in the sky? Just at night, or in the daytime, too?”

“Oh, they’ll show up fine in the daytime,” said Ond. “As long as it’s not cloudy. Think about how easily you can see a crescent moon in the morning sky. We’ll see biiig freakin’ pictures all the time.” He refilled his glass. “You drink some, too, Nektar. Let’s get sloshed.”

“You’re ashamed, aren’t you?” said Nektar, waving off the cheap champagne.

“A little,” said Ond with a crooked smile. “I think we may have overgeeked this one. And underthought it. It was just too vibby a hack to pass up. But now that we’ve actually done it—”

“Changing the sky is horrible,” said Nektar. “And won’t it make the hurricanes even worse? We’ve already lost New Orleans and the Florida Keys. What’s next? Miami and the Bahamas?”

“We—we don’t think so,” said Ond. “And even if there is a weather effect, President Dibbs’s advisers feel the nant computer will help us get better control of the climate. A quakkaflop quakkabyte computer can easily simulate Earth’s surface down to the atomic level, and bold new strategies can be evolved. But, again, that’s assuming the nant swarm is willing to do what we ask it to. We can’t actually imagine what kinds of nant-swarm minds will emerge. And there’s no way we could make them keep on simulating Earth. Controlling nants is formally impossible. I keep telling Jeff Luty, but he won’t listen. He’s totally obsessed with leaving his body. Maybe he thinks he’ll get back his dead high school pal in the virtual world.”

It took two years for the nants to munch through all of Mars, and the ever-distractible human news cycle drifted off to other topics, such as the legalization of same-sex in-vitro fertilization, the advances in tank-grown clones, and the online love affairs of vlogger Lureen Morales. President Dick Dibbs—now eligible for a third and fourth term thanks to a life-extending DNA-modification that made him legally a different person—issued periodic statements to the effect that the nant-sphere computer was soon coming online.