User:Toussaint/Postsingular

Postsingular is a 2007 American science-fiction novel written by Rudy Rucker. It was published by Tor Books, and was the first novel by Rucker to be released as a Creative Commons-licensed work (cc-by-nc-nd). It was succeeded by a sequel, Hylozoic, in May 2009.

Synopsis
Postsingular 's prologue covers a New Year's Eve celebration by Jeff Luty and Carlos Tucaywho, at age 17, were best friends, bottle rocket enthusiasts and programmers of nanorobotic machines. However, even though they envisioned starting a space nanotechnology company when they were older, Tucay's life was cut short when the lug of the bottle rocket which they had attempted to launch speared itself through Carlos' right eye, killing him.

Years later, Luty had finished college at Stanford University, and had started his own company, Nantel, in San Francisco; Nantel became a leading designer of nanorobots, and managed to grow an immense number of such robots, or nants, in vats. One of Nantel's leading employees, Ond Lutter, worked on the company's government-commissioned project to launch nanorobots, or nants, to colonize, assimilate and turn the entirety of Mars into a nanorobotic planet that formed an immense core of quakkabyte-size information processing; however, Lutter is suspicious of Luty's - and the government's - ambitions, and he became increasingly alarmed over both parties' attempts to also convert the Earth into a nant sphere in which all living beings are assimilated into virtual reality. Lutter writes a trojan to counter the nants, and attaches the trojan to his eight-year-old autistic son Chu, who volunteers, much to his mother Nektar Lundquist's dismay, to be assimilated by the nants. Within two hours, Chu manages to reverse the advance of the nants (and return from virtual reality to full reality), which then reverse their process of assimilation of Earth and Mars before being totally destroyed by the Chinese Space Agency. Luty goes into hiding, the president and vice-president are forced from office and executed by lethal injection, and Nantel shuts down and revives itself in the form of "ExaExa", where Lutter is rehired.

Three years later, Lutter reveals to family friends Craigor (a government-licensed fisher of an invasive species that is valuable to augmented reality contact lens, or webeyes, hardware companies in San Francisco) and Jil Connor that he is working on a nanorobotics project that will result in the creation of ophids, or quantum nanorobots that are far less assimilatory than the nants, only consume matter that is smaller than themselves and are able to intelligibly communicate with humans. Angry with Ond due to their all-too-familiar experience with the nants, Nektar tries to wrest the jar of ophids from Ond's hands, but accidentally sends the jar falling to the ground with a loose, barely open cap; as a result of the opening (and Chu's command to advance), ophids have spread beyond the San Francisco area within minutes of the accidental release. Frightened by the potential public fury, Jil sends Ond and his family from Craigor's houseboat to the mainland, but both families manage to see the digital overlay provided by the ophids to the webeyes, and are even able to carry telepathic relays through the ophids' two-way brain-computer interface without the need for webeyes. Ond is soon arrested for the ophids' release, and when he is released from jail, he is the subject of anti-ophid vigiliantes who also are plugged into the Web of ophids and know Ond's every location.