Postsingular (11 page)

“There are some shoons at Nektar Lundquist's house,” said a mushroom-shaped beezie with green eyes on its cap, without exactly speaking English. His compound glyphs bloomed as ready-made thoughts. “You four should go help Nektar. She's under psychic attack by some malware that got into her orphids. She hasn't eaten for two days. Her shoons are having trouble taking care of her. Drive this car there; you can park in Nektar's garage.”

“Wow,” said Kittie. “Really?”

Everyone in the Posse knew all about Nektar Lundquist. Nektar's husband Ond Lutter was famous not only because he'd released the orphids last year, but also because he'd turned back the nant invasion three years before that. People had loved Ond for killing the nants, but on Orphid Night they'd wanted to lynch him. Ond and his autistic genius son, Chu, had jammed off to the mysterious parallel Hibrane world late on Orphid Night, and so far as anyone knew, they were still in the Hibrane. Not that anyone else had managed to go there since.

Cool, self-possessed Nektar Lundquist had taken advantage of the interest in her family to become the star of an orphidnet reality soap opera called
Founders,
complete with sponsors and ads. Thanks to the
Founders
show, Nektar's whole circle of acquaintances had become celebs: Nektar; Craigor Connor; Jil Zonder; Nektar's boss, Xandro; Xandro's wife, Beatriz; Nektar's ex-boyfriend, Jose; and Jose's sometime lover, Lureen Morales.

Each of them got a nice little income from the sponsors. The way the ads worked was that whenever anyone went through the orphidnet to peep at the
Founders
stars, they'd see a commercial for ExaExa computers, for Stank grooming products, or for BigBox home furnishings; and the
Founders
stars got paid per ad-view.

The
Founders
story thus far: On Orphid Night, Nektar left Ond for Jose, the head chef at Puff, an upscale hipster Valencia Street restaurant. A few weeks later, Nektar went to the Puff manager, got Jose fired, and took over as the Puff head chef herself, at which point Jose moved to the rival restaurant MouthPlusPlus across the street. The two restaurants competed to provide ever more bizarre kinds of nourishment—sometimes serving a course via feeding tube, enema, or intravenous drip.

Last month Nektar had started an affair with Craigor. Because of the affair, his wife, Jil, was brokenhearted and struggling to maintain her sobriety. Jil Zonder was a celeb in her own right, being the woman who'd designed the first piezoplastic beezie-controlled shoon.

Jayjay liked the looks of Jil Zonder.
And
Jil had been to the Hibrane with Ond and Chu for a few minutes before they sent her back.
And
Jil was a recovering sudocoker. The woman was experienced. It was a pleasure to watch her gestures, to savor her smiles. Neat, noble, naughty; vivacious, vibrant,
voom.
Kind of like Thuy had seemed, back when things were good.

Jayjay fantasized that, given the chance, he could make Jil Zonder happy. Jil was maybe ten years older than Jayjay, which could be a plus. Jayjay figured Jil could use a cute younger guy now that her windbag poseur husband Craigor Connor had been stupid enough to cheat with Nektar. Locative art—what was that? Moving junk around on the deck of the boat where Craigor lived with Jil; and then laying down bogus raps about why he'd put, like, Christmas lights and a bowling ball next to a stack of tires. Big fucking deal. And Craigor's other career, catching Pharaoh cuttlefish so that high-tech companies could coax display chemicals from the slain beasts' skins? The man was nowhere. Jil would be better off with Jayjay, and if he could get in with the
Founders
crowd, he'd tell her the first chance he got.

The mushroom-shaped beezie led the Big Pig Posse through the orphidnet to view Nektar Lundquist, lying alone in her big bed, window curtains drawn, her eyes clenched shut, her heavy blond hair spread across the pillow like golden snakes. Apparently she was far gone on sudocoke; there was a mirror with lines of powder next to her bed. There were perhaps a dozen shoons in the room, curvy little manikins bumbling about on the floor and the bed. But there were other presences in the orphidnet near Nektar—virtual beings shaped like beetles.

The guiding beezie mapped out causal links, showing that the beetles were deviant AIs emerging from infected orphids on Nektar's scalp. Creepy. Up till now, spam and malware had been in the form of high-level software, not in the form of low-level corruption of the individual orphids that supported the orphidnet's parallel quantum computation.

“
Founders
episode three hundred and ninety-five,” said Kittie, not understanding what she saw. “‘Nektar Gets the Sudocoke Horrors.' How great is that?”

“Poor Nektar,” said Thuy. “Look, Kittie, the shoons are helping her.” Indeed, a classic Happy Shoon was spooning water into Nektar's cracked lips, a goob-doll shoon was offering a little cup of mush, and a doughboy shoon was sponging Nektar's soiled sheets. ExaExa, Stank, and BigBox weren't posting any ads around Nektar Lundquist today. This episode was way too funky.

“I want to go, to physically go there, yeah,” said Sonic. “Look how many shoons.”

“We still don't have the car keys,” said Jayjay doubtfully. He could almost smell the high, thin reek of Nektar's dimly lit sickbed.

“You'll want to figure out how to kill those beetles first,” glyphed the beezie. “You're in the right place for that. This car's orphids happen to carry the beetle infection, too. We don't have a patch yet.”

“Oh fuck!” exclaimed Kittie.

“Our orphids are infected too?” said Jayjay.

The beezie nodded.

“Too late to run away,” said Sonic. “Oh well. This is where maybe humans really can outthink the beezies. Thanks to the Doodly Bug weapon shop.” He was talking about his fave online game.

The rain was really pouring down now. Rainwater dribbled in through the moon roof's weather stripping to wet Jayjay's left knee. But, at least for now, Jayjay had no sense of being infected by beetles. Maybe it was time to get high again.

In the apartment, Dot and Red were together on the couch with Dot's knitting thrown aside; Red was pulling down her elastic-waistband pants and—

“Ooo-la-la,”
said Thuy.

Sonic burst into shrill pulses of laughter.

“Oh, let's transcend,” burst out Jayjay. “Let's hit the Pig.”

“What the hey,” said Kittie. “Rainy-day fun.”

“Again?” said Thuy, meaning to refuse, but feeling her willpower weakening. It was so boring here in the car right now. “I swear, you guys, this is going to be my very, very last time ever.
Wheenk.
”

The virtual images of the Posse members spiraled upward through the orphidnet—not “up,” exactly, the direction was more like “in.” They all knew the way by now, and here were the billion snouts, tails, trotters, and flop-ears of the Big Pig metabeezie, the all-seeing eye atop the pyramid whose base held the ten sextillion networked orphids of Earth.

The Pig extended a wobbly nipple toward Jayjay, and as he fastened on, the Pig passed him a time-lapse movie of a snowdrift being sculpted by the wind. The other Posse members found teats beside Jayjay, the four of them lined up like worshippers in a pew.

“Some Pig,” messaged Thuy with a giggle. The sick thing was, whenever she actually hooked into the Big Pig, she totally loved it.

“Radiant,” added Jayjay, picking up on Thuy's
Charlotte's Web
reference, not that he'd read the book, but right now, via the Pig, he was hooked into all the libraries in the world, with every volume an open book.

But,
que lastima,
the Big Pig hit was weak. The beetles were coming on, swarming into the space between Jayjay and the Big Pig, making the Pig's images blocky, her animations jerky, her links slow—and there was no hope of an
aha.

They dropped back into their mortal frames. In the peeling-paint Victorian, Dot and Red were reaching a climax, possibly goaded on by having the Posse nearby to watch them. Ugh.

Jayjay focused on the raindrops dripping through the moon roof and moved his leg. Now that he wasn't doing anything interesting, the beetles were lying low.

“I want the real Big Pig,” said Kittie in a sullen tone. “Without all those freaking pests in the way. We really are infected.”

“I'm gonna get into Doodly Bug,” said Sonic, squinting his eyes and oddly wiggling his ten fingers. He touched the fingertips of his left hand to those of his right, pairing up his long, agile digits in a peculiar order. “I'll invent some Calabi-Yau grenades to take down the beetles.”

Doodly Bug was based on quantum-loop string theory: in the game's virtual worlds, players knotted hyperdimensional Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces so as to destabilize the particle symmetries of their online opponents. With orphidnet visualization engines and expert beezie agents helping the players along, the esoteric physics of Doodly Bug was within the reach of any kiqqie willing to waste a lot of time.

Sonic's Doodly Bug ranking was approaching the highest possible level: Grandmaster of Space and Time. He'd already attained the only-slightly-less-exalted Multiversal Governator level. Jayjay was a Doodly Bug player too, with the quite respectable Kaluza Branesurfer rating. Last spring, Jayjay and Sonic had won some championships together. But then Jayjay had gotten obsessed with the ideas
under
the game—that is, with brane theory. And now, all praise the orphidnet, he'd begun using his intelligence-amplification to hang with the hard-core physicists who were investigating today's number-one problem: understanding the Hibrane.

The explorations were long on theory and short on experiment, as a Hibraner named Gladax had somehow managed to erase all the orphidnet copies of Chu's Hibrane jump-code the morning after Orphid Night.

To make the research even harder, the Hibraners had changed their jumping technique to include a wait-loop so that all their interbrane jumps took exactly half a second to initiate, leaving no hope of repeating the timing-channel attack that clever Chu had used to figure out the Hibrane jump-code in the first place.

The kiqqie physicists were going bananas trying to think their way into the Hibrane, and Jayjay was channeling as many of their seminars as he could, working to reach the higher levels of this realworld metagame. Now and then he could actually contribute a seminar comment that made some of the others light up. He was disappointed that Thuy wasn't more impressed. After all, he'd never even finished high school.

Yeah, Papa went to prison, just for selling a little dope, and Jayjay had dropped out of school to work fulltime at a taqueria with Mama so they could feed the five younger kids. When Mama had married the
pendejo
taqueria manager, Jayjay had quit working and left home. He figured he was too smart for work
or
for school. He hated his stepfather and he'd pretty much lost touch with his family. He'd lived in a squat, playing a lot of video games, making a little money in gamer tournaments—which was how he'd met Sonic. When the orphidnet hit, he embraced it.

For her part, Thuy had stuck it out at her parents' little stucco house in the Sunset district, straight through high school and college at San Francisco State and even a year of studying the violin at the Music Conservatory. But all that education had led to nothing substantial. Thuy wanted to be a writer, but her parents, timid Minh and bossy Khanh, had gotten her a job as an executive assistant at Golden Lucky, a Vietnamese restaurant-supply wholesaler in South San Francisco, with the possibility of a marriage to the boss. Thuy had been desperately bored there, so when the new global network unfurled on Orphid Night, she dove in and never looked back. She'd bailed on her family and shown up at Jayjay's squat in a condemned building off Valencia Street.

Thanks to the orphidnet, street-living was easy. In that first golden month, Thuy had crafted her big metastory, “Waking Up.” But then she got more and more hung up on the Big Pig, and this summer a Hibraner had advised her to leave Jayjay for Kittie. Thuy's problems with the Pig were supposed to be from Jayjay's bad influence.

“What are you watching, Jayjay?” Thuy asked Jayjay from the backseat. “I'm getting bored waiting for Dot and Red.” The rain was even stronger than before, filling the car with soporific drumming.

“Colloquium talk outta Berkeley,” said Jayjay. “Professor Prav Plato describing the dark-energy Higgs field.” It was more than a talk, really. The orphidnetted, beezie-amplified Prof Prav was spewing out images, simulations, and links as he spoke; and Prav's kiqqie listeners were continually popping up comments and diagrams as well. Jayjay made a point of catching all Prav's performances. The individual orphids kept a full record of everything they'd seen or heard for the past few months, so you always had the option of replaying a talk or slowing it down. But right now Jayjay was real-timing it, snowboarding his way down a whipped-cream mountain of symbols, loving how Prav was steering the flow past the Dick Too Dibbs ads that kept popping up like quirky machine monsters in a maze. It was awesome to kiq it with the Prav.

The only problem was that, now that Jayjay was doing something interesting again, the beetles were back. He set his virtual kennel of filter dogs on the trail of the beetles, hoping the dogs might evolve a way to bring down the intruders. Catching up for lost time, he jammed through a snowdrift of tensors to rejoin Prav.

“The profs don't realize you're a dropout guttersnipe?” Kittie taunted Jayjay from the backseat. Once, a few weeks back, in a friendly, unguarded moment, Kittie had told Jayjay she admired his ambition. But most of the time she tried to act all hard and street-tough—covering for the fact that she came from a comfortable middle-class family in Palo Alto, slumming yuppie larva that she was. “Forget that double-doming and check where
I'm
at, kiqs,” continued Kittie. “Heath Himbo is doing Lureen Morales on the
Caliente
show. I love that hard, slutty thing Lureen does with her upper lip. But, dammit, they've got Dick Too Dibbs as a paid-up legit sponsor. How lame is that? Outta the way, Dick Too. And he's carrying a beetle under his arm. Those freaking beetles are ruining everything!”