Rudy Rucker's Postsingular is notable for its staging of not one, but two Singularities. The first, narrated in less than twenty pages, is a mass ‘upload’ scenario: a swarm of self-replicating nanobots (‘nants’) sweeps over the earth, creating minutely detailed schematic descriptions of everything they encounter, and storing these structural maps as data. In the process, the nants systematically dismantle the structures they are mapping, breaking them into atomic bits that will be re-assembled as circuitry in a vast computer. When their work is finished, the nants will have eaten their way through the earth all the way to its core, and rebuilt the entire planetary mass into a single engine of raw processing power. On a computer this powerful, every one of the physical objects the nants have deconstructed, along with the ‘software’ of every human mind, can easily be simulated – ‘A virtually identical simulation of Earth. Virtual Earth. Vearth for short.’ – leaving the bulk of the system's resources free to think big, posthuman thoughts.

The exodus into ‘Vearth’ is overseen by US President Dick Dibbs, a Christian fundamentalist and neoconservative who sees in the postbiological Singularity ‘a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy’ and an opportunity to re-make all of civilization on an American model. The deal Dibbs strikes ceding the planet to the posthuman hive-mind of the nants looks, at first glance, like a win-win proposition:

Life will be better in the simulation, where all the disorder and danger entailed in organic embodiment – from the threat of global ecological collapse all the way down to that of infectious disease – can simply be edited out. The nants’ creator, a deranged software tycoon who for his own reasons shares the president's vision of a simulated utopia, pledges that ‘Virtual Earth will be germ-free. Digital and odorless. No more dogs spreading filth.’