The White-Hole Situation

The I.B.U.

In the year 2525 the world is finally clean. It was a tough job and it took a lot longer than the I.B.U. ("we stand with you") thought it would. The I.B.U. ("always on, always there") kept finding new sources of toxic waste, and had to keep searching and seeking and refining and re-defining until finally it was satisfied and declared the mission accomplished. All's well that ends well, it declared, only it wasn't the end. It was only the beginning. The I.B.U. ("we're there for you") understood the basic principle that one thing leads to another, that life goes on, that the sun will come out tomorrow, that every single day people wake up and need something to do, something wholesome, something worthwhile, something good. The I.B.U. ("we're with you all the way") had to think and think again.

The original mission was clear. Clean it up. Clean it all up. Centuries of humanity's experiments of trial and error, of progress and mistakes, had led to an extraordinary accumulation of problems, from simple chemical compounds to confounding and complicated social unrest, from lead in the water and haze in the air to hate in the brain and junk DNA and everything possible in between. Cleaning up the ocean was simple compared to mopping up everything gone haywire in the species itself. Good thing the I.B.U. ("the U is for you") had all the time and resources it needed to get the job done.

The I.B.U. ("with you in mind") was originally based on a collection of words and characters known as "code" but over the many years it had transformed itself into an undecipherable system of symbols and network interactions. On occasions it published progress reports in the common human language but most of the time it churned away, processing and programming and directing all planetary activity from its distributed collection of hard shell yet infinitely flexible nodes that looked like tiny silver ball bearings and could be seen anywhere at all times, at motion and at rest, on land, in the water, in the air, all over the Earth. Nobody knew how many there were. The system itself didn't bother to count.

Nodes did all the work, all the physical labor as well as the pure calculation. Joining together they built structures big and small, from skyscrapers and satellites to scrambled eggs and cups of tea. Communicating separately they could theorize and plan. None were specialists. All were infinitely capable. Like a hive mind, a swarming collective, the nodes were essentially the system itself, but any single node alone was completely opaque and unknowable. None of these matters ever bothered September Rodgers. Nothing ever bothered her. The system was her mother and father. The I.B.U. ("we love you") was her family, her friend and her world, along with all the other new and improved people it had put together throughout the long generations.