Would you like some juice?‖ said Jil, turning toward Jayjay with a pitcher in her hand. ―It‘s mango.‖
In person, Jil‘s face had more nuances and complexities than the orphidnet meshes revealed.
One orphid per square millimeter of skin wasn‘t nearly enough to capture the lively high-res play of a woman‘s eyes and mouth. Particularly Jil‘s.
―Wonderful,‖ said Jayjay, taking the plastic pitcher from her, or meaning to, but somehow he
and Jil bobbled the handoff, and the pitcher fell, bouncing out a floppy yellow-orange tongue that puddled sticky on the floor.
―Oops!‖ called Craigor from the kitchen table. Kittie, Thuy, and Sonic had already sat down
as well, Thuy holding a cantaloupe and Sonic bearing cups and Nektar‘s big pot of tea.
―The shoons will mop that,‖ Jil reassured Jayjay. Her dark eyebrows were arch-formed,
always giving her an optimistic, playful appearance despite any inner pain. ―The shoons can open up pores and make themselves into sponges. They clean up after my kids all the time. And my
husband.‖ She gave a sharp whistle; Happy Shoon and a doughboy trotted over to roll in the juice, chirruping as their bodies dampened and swelled. Jil gave Jayjay a really nice smile. She had faint freckles across the bridge of her perfect nose.
Usually Jayjay was tentative with women, but, faced with the alluring Jil, he found the
courage to go for it. ―When I first saw you on the orphidnet and heard your name, I thought you were this beautiful girl Jilena who was a year ahead of me in high school,‖ he said softly. ―I worshipped Jilena from afar.‖
―I was done with high school a looong time before you,‖ said Jil, looking Jayjay up and
down. ―Flatterer.‖ Jayjay felt the orphids on his body registering major hitcounts—he was live on Founders. And maybe Jil was checking out his physique too. He tingled at the thought.
―I‘d love to talk to you about the Hibrane,‖ said Jayjay, his pulse pounding in his ears. ―I hear you‘ve been there. I‘m a budding physicist. We should get together alone sometime.‖ He glanced over at the others, wondering if they were noticing him flirting with Jil. It would be good for Thuy to realize that Jayjay had other options.
But Thuy was busy cutting up the cantaloupe and offering Kittie a slice, and Kittie was
enthralled with Nektar, and Nektar was chattering at Craigor as if to keep him from looking at Jil.
For his part, Sonic was drinking tea as fast as he could. The guy could never get enough caffeine.
―You‘re a homeless kiqqie,‖ exclaimed Jil, sounding a little disappointed. Dammit, she‘d
already done an instant check via the orphidnet. ―And you‘re addicted to the Big Pig?‖
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―The Pig helps me get ideas,‖ said Jayjay. ―I wouldn‘t say that I have a problem. Anyway,
I‘m cutting down really soon.‖
―Oh, I know all about that, ‖ said Jil.
―I watch you on Founders, ‖ said Jayjay. ―You‘ve gotten a bad deal lately. I really admire that you‘ve hung onto your sobriety. You could show me the way. Mold me, Jil, train me to be like you.
Clear-eyed. Hi-res. A coiled spring. I want to please you.‖
He could hardly believe he was saying these things. His mouth
was way ahead of his brain.
“Boing,” said Jil. ―That‘s enough for now.‖
―Hey,‖ said Craigor, jumping to his feet. Jayjay was expecting to get bawled out for hitting
on the guy‘s wife, but, no, Craigor was into his own ego trip.
―Check this out,‖ said Craigor, producing four short metal rods with wads of piezoplastic on
their ends. He turned his chair over and stuck his rods to the ends of the chair legs—so that now the chair had piezoplastic knees and feet. When Craigor turned the chair upright, it waltzed around the kitchen, faster and faster, culminating with a tap dance and a bow. Craigor made as if to sit down and, with comical eagerness, the tall chair scuttled into position to catch him.
―That‘s a walking-chair,‖ said Jayjay, hoping to steal Craigor‘s thunder. ―You sold a double-
jointed version to the manager at the Natural Mind recovery center in the Armory.‖
―How‘d you happen to notice that?‖ asked Craigor, seeming genuinely curious about the
specific chain of logic Jayjay had followed. Everything was visible on the orphidnet, and many people had their beezie agents mining for things that were specifically relevant to their lives, the notion of ―relevant‖ being fairly inclusive, due to people‘s beezie-assisted abilities think a few steps further than before.
―Jayjay‘s beezies were looking for the origins of Nektar‘s beetle infection,‖ said Thuy. ―They came from the Natural Mind building, and you caught them when you delivered the chair, Craigor, and then Nektar caught the beetles from you, that time when you squirted too quick. Lose-lose.‖
―Mouthy brat,‖ said Craigor, not especially embarrassed. He waggled his eyebrows at Thuy.
―You need a spanking.‖ He stuck his teaspoon to the side of his walking-chair with a spare bit of piezoplastic, and sent the chair trotting around the table to whack-whack-whack Thuy‘s thigh with the spoon.
―Craigor, you should load up on Jayjay‘s antibeetle flea-grenades,‖ said Nektar. ―For all we
know, the beetles are eating your brain right now.‖
Craigor responded in mime, fluttering his hands by his mouth like munching mandibles.
―Don‘t worry, Nektar,‖ said Jil with a sigh. ―We got the antibeetle fleas off the Founders show on our way over. And, yeah, the beetles really were lying dormant in us. That‘s weird they used Craigor for a disease vector.‖
Craigor‘s walking-chair flexed its knees, rhythmically hunching against Thuy, who laughed
at the urgent bumping. Kittie reached down to rip off one of the walking-chair‘s shins. Miming great pain, the chair limped three-legged back to Craigor, leaning against him with a decrescendo shudder.
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―You‘re funny,‖ said Thuy to Craigor, meaning it. ―I can put you in my metanovel. Are you
directly controlling the chair?‖
―I run the character animations though a beezie,‖ said Craigor. ―But the beezie draws on a
library of body-language routines that I stored. I act things out; that‘s how all the great animators do it. My body knows more than my head. I‘m a cuttle-fisherman, too.‖
―Mr. Disease Vector,‖ said Kittie, who‘d attached the loose rod to her crotch. ―Animate this.‖
―Oh that‘s witty,‖ said Craigor, looking annoyed. He grabbed the leg back.
Jayjay turned his attention to Jil, who was hunkered down by the sink checking up on her
shoons. Even in that awkward position, she looked lithe and graceful. He tossed her a tiny heart-shaped emoticon via the orphidnet; she answered by half-turning her head his way and miming a kiss in profile. He was living the dream—in a reality soap!
― Founders fans may want to scan the Big Pig Posse‘s back-story,‖ Nektar intoned, playing show host. ―Jayjay loses Thuy, Thuy takes up with Kittie and next—Thuy and Craigor? Kittie and Nektar? Jayjay and Jil? Sonic and the shoons? Stay tuned. Oh, look, the good ads are coming back.‖
The orphidnet icons of BigBox and Stank glowed in the corners of the room, also the ExaExa beetle logo.
―Do we get paid too?‖ asked Kittie.
―I think so,‖ said Nektar. ―The orphidnet figures all that out. I‘ll register you as extras. And right up front, I‘ll let you guys keep your SUV in my garage for a couple of weeks. And there‘s a room over the garage you can live in. It‘ll be fun having young people around.‖
―Bitchin‘,‖ said Sonic, draining the last of the tea. His eyes were bright and black. ―I‘m ready to settle in for a Doodly Bug death-run.‖
―I want to paint that SUV and retrofit it for solar power,‖ said Kittie.
―I‘ll be working on my metanovel,‖ said Thuy. ― Wheenk. ‖
―The title‘s growing on me,‖ said Jayjay, smiling at her. ―I‘m gonna be busy with Prav
Plato‘s physics seminars.‖ He put on a goody-goody tone, segueing into the plan they‘d privately made upstairs. By now he‘d privately messaged Kittie the details, too. ―We all have a lot to do—if we don‘t waste our energy by plugging into the Big Pig.‖
Jil gave Jayjay a quizzical look. She could tell he was acting, but she wasn‘t sure why. There were so many levels of unreality here. Jil turned to Nektar. ―We‘ll be on our way,‖ said Jil. ―I‘m gonna borrow your Happy Shoon so I can integrate his body-memories into my breeding stock.
Knead him in like sourdough starter.
You‘ve trained these shoons well, Nektar.‖
―Can I take a shoon too?‖ asked Sonic.
―Sure,‖ said Nektar. Sonic stuffed the Jayjay-faced doughboy shoon into the pleated pocket
of his leather jacket.
―Bye-bye,‖ said Jayjay, seizing the chance to touch Jil‘s hand. She upped the ante and kissed
his cheek. In the orphidnet, Jay-jay saw Jil staring over at her husband to make sure he noticed.
Craigor‘s smile had gone stiff. Thuy, however, was obliv, or was at least presenting herself that way.
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Why did she have to be so stubborn? Just because Jayjay liked the Big Pig? Well, hell, if Thuy was going to be such a priss, maybe he should take his golden opportunity for a romance with the divine Jil.
―Come stay on the Merz Boat if you need a place to live,‖ Jil told Jayjay in a warm tone.
―There‘s plenty of room. All four of you would fit, actually.‖
Jayjay knew from Founders that Jil and Craigor‘s cuttlefishing boat was entirely crafted from computationally rich piezoplastic, which had become a fairly expensive and sought-after material.
Although Craigor was still netting oversized Pharaoh cuttlefish from the Bay, much of the couple‘s income came from selling off bits of the boat‘s material in the form of Jil‘s shoons and Craigor‘s combines.
―Thanks, Jil,‖ said Jayjay, wondering how Craigor would take his incursion. ―I might be
there sooner than you think. But at least for today we‘ll be kiqqin‘ it in Nektar‘s garage.‖
Some stairs at the back of the garage led up to the room Nektar had mentioned, white-painted
with a peaked ceiling. The front and rear walls held generous windows, one showing a palm tree and Dolores Park, the other looking onto the San Francisco hills with their little stucco houses. The room was furnished with rugs, chairs, a double bed, a fold-out couch, a sink, and a fridge. The tile bathroom was stocked with Stank personal grooming products.
―Fuckin‘ A,‖ said Sonic, eyeing a framed Nantel award to Nektar‘s absent husband. ―Ond
Lutter himself.‖ The box was a couple of inches deep, holding a preserved blue-green beetle as well as a paper with the award inscription.
―Maybe we should do some Big Pig,‖ said Thuy, flopping into an armchair. She didn‘t
actually mean this; she was following their preplanned script.
Jayjay would in fact have liked very much to do some Pig, but he stuck to the script too. ―It‘s time we all got clean,‖ he said.
―Yeah, brother,‖ said Sonic. ―Getting down is coming old.‖
―You‘re slushed,‖ giggled Thuy, even though she knew Sonic had warped the phrase on
purpose. ―Yes, yes, it‘s time to mad the endness. But how? Whither and yon?‖
―Maybe Natural Mind could help us,‖ said Kittie, also playing along. ―I know we were
harshing on them before. But that was just our denial talking.‖
―Natural Mind it is,‖ said Jayjay earnestly. ―I‘m sick and tired of being sick and tired.‖
Badda- boom.
―Let‘s take showers before we go out,‖ said Sonic looking at the dirt shiny on his hands. ―Me
first.‖
―Me second,‖ said Kittie.
When Jayjay got his turn in the shower, he had fun freeze-framing the water in his orphidnet
view. Orphids were quick; they blanketed the water drops as fast as they formed. Further afield, Jayjay could see Craigor and Jil picking up their kids at school and heading back to their boat. School was still a reality—the orphidnet was no substitute for getting your butt smacked/stroked/sniffed by your fellow mammals in the human pack. With Jil still in her own little family, maybe it wasn‘t p.79
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realistic to think he could sleep with her. Maybe he‘d been fooling himself about those vibes he‘d picked up from her.
Thuy squeezed into the shower as Jayjay was getting out; the brief, sliding touch of her skin
made him unreasonably happy. Someday soon he‘d win her back. Thuy was the one he really
wanted.
The Posse hit the street and hoofed toward the Mission Street Armory, keeping up a line of
recovery-hungry chatter as they went, the idea being to make the Natural Minders feel okay about admitting the Posse. Although it was of course possible or even likely that the Natural Minders weren‘t monitoring the Posse‘s activities at all. But it seemed wise to make up for having audibly confabbed with Nektar about launching an attack.
The rain had let up and the sun was out. People were shopping at the corner fruit stands,
some of them using the orphidnet to peer into the piles and find that perfect, unblemished lime, jalapeño, or mango. Others were channeling music or watching what was happening somewhere else.
With every-one‘s attention diluted, the street scene wasn‘t quite as vibrant as it used to be.
Passing Metotem Metabooks—which was a hangout for the Mission metanovelists—Jayjay
saw the owner, Darlene, slumped in an easy chair she‘d dragged outside to catch the afternoon sun, which had been a rarity of late. Darlene always had a big smile for Jayjay; sometimes he thought she had a crush on him. Darlene was quite influential on the literary scene; she edited the hip Metotem Metazine. Her store wasn‘t much, though. Just some comfortable chairs, a coffeepot, and shelves of beat-up paper books.
People did still buy paper books, even though you could read a book on the orphidnet without
owning it. Strictly speaking, you could publish a book by printing one copy and letting the orphids settle onto it. They‘d crawl around and learn the text. For that matter, you could publish a book by thoroughly imagining it, and then recording your thoughts onto some orphids, as the metanovelists did. But the paper physicality of an old-style book remained perennially pleasing, and they still sold in small numbers. Not that Jayjay owned any.
―How‘s the metanovel, Thuy?‖ asked Darlene, her long, jeans-clad legs sticking out over the
sidewalk, her booted feet crossed like a cowboy‘s. ―Still wrasslin‘ it?‖ Darlene made her living not so much by selling books as by brokering access to metanovels. Many metanovelists stored their works in secure form within the orphids on their own bodies, so as to be able to charge for access.
―Oh yeah,‖ said Thuy. ―It‘s called Wheenk. It‘s gonna be about what‘s happened to me this year. ‗Waking Up‘ is the first chapter. I was thinking, though, what if I start using every single thing I find.‖ She gestured at the shelves in Darlene‘s shop. ―Like maybe collage in all your books to capture the full ambience. Every word, every page, all of it part of Wheenk, all visible in one synoptic glance.‖
―Synoptic,‖ said Darlene, liking the word. ―Yes, my shelves hold the synoptic gospels of our
literary heritage; you read them side by side to see the face of the Holy Hive Mind in her presingular state. But you‘ve got to be kidding about including all that data. Just do a link. If you put too much into a metanovel, it‘s as dull as a nearly empty file. Everything and Nothing are the same, you feel p.80
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me? Aim your frame.‖ Peering from beneath her dark bangs, Darlene held up her hands, flirtatiously regarding Jayjay through the rectangle of her thumbs and fingers. ―What‘s with the Stank ad
following you mangy kiqs?‖
―We‘re extras on the Founders show,‖ said Jayjay, miming himself soaping an underarm. ―I Stank purty.‖
―How was Gerry Gurkin last night?‖ Thuy asked Darlene. Gurkin was a fellow metanovelist
who was promoting his new work, Banality, by giving presentations at venues like Metotem Metabooks. For an evening‘s performance, a metanovelist would typically hand out short-term
access permissions and give the audience a guided tour of the metanovel‘s world, the hope being that people would pay for longer-term access.
―Spotty,‖ said Darlene. ―All these hysterically funny Dick Too Dibbs ads kept popping up.
Poor Gerry. Not that his gig would have been much better without the interruptions. Banality is an exabyte of data, yes, but it‘s just images of San Francisco at noon on the day after Orphid Night, with Gerry‘s voiceovers. No story, and no characters besides our host, the virtual Gerry Gurken. Banality is about a lonely kiqqie who pokes around in alleys and has these sad, wry little insights. A
metanovel can be so much more.‖
―Oh, give the guy some credit,‖ said Thuy, who was good friends with Gerry. ―Some of his
juxtaposes are transcendent. But, yeah, I‘m aiming for my Wheenk to have a suspenseful action trajectory. If I can swing it, I‘d like to have several interlocking plots, the whole thing like clockwork or a program or a complex knot.‖
―But it has to be authentic,‖ said Darlene.
―We‘re alchemists,‖ said Thuy. ―Transmuting our lives into myth and fable.‖
Metanovelists‘ bull sessions could go on for hours. Jayjay privately wondered how much
work Thuy had actually done. She kept all her notes and drafts under secure protection and had never shared any of her metanovel with him, other than that one metastory.
―What‘s that?‖ interrupted Kittie, peering down the block. A group of people were gathered
around an inert, stick-thin figure who‘d just been pulled out of an alley.
―It‘s Grandmaster Green Flash!‖ exclaimed Sonic, as they ran to see.
Hip, sparkling Grandmaster Green Flash had been the reigning San Francisco Doodly Bug
champion at one time, a kiqqie whom Jayjay and Sonic looked up to. The Grandmaster had gotten
heavily into the Big Pig, hitting the sacred sow for days at a time. Jayjay had gone on a few runs with Flash, but he hadn‘t been able to muster that same stare-into-the-sun intensity that the Grandmaster had. For Grandmaster Green Flash, any activity other than total ecstasy was a meaningless uptight social game.
And now Grandmaster Green Flash was dead on the sidewalk, his skin splotched with
diamond-glitter paisley run amok. He‘d let himself get too far out of the loop; he‘d stopped eating and drinking, and then he‘d even let go of breathing. His face was frozen in a triumphant, terrifying grin.
―I really am going to get clean,‖ murmured Thuy to herself. ―I‘m ready for the turning point.‖
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A cop pulled up in an electric car, alerted by the onlookers.
―This guy was the best,‖ said Sonic, kneeling beside Grandmaster Green Flash, squinting
against the mephitic stench.
The Grandmaster‘s skin glistened like an oil slick, the sunlight shattering off it in rainbow
shades. Peering into the Net, Jayjay saw way too many orphids on the guy. Normal surfaces had one or two orphids per square millimeter, but the Grand-master‘s skin looked to be carrying a density a billion times that high. That‘s why he looked like a diffraction grating. He was covered with rows of quantum-computing molecules. Diseased orphids.
―Stay back,‖ warned Jayjay.
The iridescent colors on the Grandmaster‘s skin were forming double scrolls like beans or
curled-up fetuses, the rotating spirals nestling within each other.
―Nanomachines all over him,‖ exclaimed Kittie. ―Like nants! Run!‖ She took off further
down the block, stopping at the end to stare back at them.
―Come on, ‖ said Thuy, tugging at Jayjay. She rubbed her hands together as if shedding invisible nanomachines.
―It‘s okay,‖ said Jayjay. A dense, twinkling haze had gathered around the Grandmaster‘s
corpse. ―The orphidnet has an immune system. That shiny fog is a trillion healthy orphids attacking the sick ones on his skin. Orphids are designed to attack runaway nanomachines, remember? One of the main reasons Ond Lutter released the orphids was because he wanted to block another wave of nants.‖
Thuy took off anyway.
Jayjay and Sonic stayed and watched the rainbow sheen fade from the Grandmaster‘s body as
the massed cloud of orphids consumed the rogue nanomachines. ―Poor Flash,‖ said Sonic.
A warm breeze struck their faces; in the orphidnet a thirty-foot-high figure was standing over them. A Hibraner! He was a youngish-looking guy, dressed in red jeans and a yellow shirt with red cubes printed on it. His long hair was gathered into a topknot. Moving incredibly slowly, the glowing humanoid form reached down and cupped his flickering hands about the corpse, as if taking the
measure of the situation. By degrees he turned his head to stare down the block after Thuy. And then, in a single twinkling jump, he hopped a hundred feet to stand by Thuy, bending down as if to talk with her.
―An angel!‖ screamed a fat woman on the sidewalk. ―An angel come to carry the dead man‘s
soul away!‖
―Damn,‖ said one of the cops, a mustached guy not much older than Jayjay. ―That‘s the third
time this week.‖
―Third time for which part?‖ asked Jayjay. ―Cancerous nanomachines and a Hibraner
showing up?‖
―Like that, yeah.‖
―What does it mean?‖ asked Sonic.
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―You‘re the kiqqies,‖ said the cop. ―You tell me. I‘m just a mule who goes to work instead of
lying around stoned all day.‖
―We‘re getting into recovery,‖ said Jayjay.
―Sure you are.‖ The cop tossed a body bag onto Grandmaster Green Flash. Moving on its
own, the black piezoplastic enveloped the corpse.
―This could be you,‖ said Dick Too Dibbs, appearing in an ad above the body bag. ―If you
vote for Bernard Lampton. Dick Too Dibbs is the man to crack down on nanomachines. I know the
bad guys; I can game their heads. It takes an honest insider to halt the attacks. Not a fake do-gooder who takes bribes. Dick Too Dibbs in November.‖
Jayjay and Sonic headed down the sidewalk to catch up with Kittie and Thuy. The Hibraner
was gone now. ―That‘s the third time I‘ve seen that particular angel,‖ said Thuy, looking shaky.
―You‘ve heard me talk about him: Azaroth. Remember, I met him a couple of days after Orphid
Night and he wanted to know if I‘d seen the details of how Ond and Chu jumped to the Hibrane?
And this summer he told me to cut back on the Big Pig. And just now he told me that if the Natural Mind guys offer me a job, I should say no and start a fight. He says if my life gets weird enough, I‘ll remember Chu‘s Knot.‖
―Maybe you‘re going crazy,‖ said Sonic, needling her. ―Maybe he didn‘t say anything to you
at all.‖
―I am so ready to visit Natural Mind,‖ said Thuy.
The Armory was a century-old brick building with every sixteenth brick turned sideways,
making a grid of studs upon the dark-red walls. An anachronistic dish antenna projected from the gently vaulted roof. In the visible world, the looming Armory filled the better part of a city block; within the orphidnet it was a square, featureless hole. The Armory‘s floor, ceiling, windows, and inner walls were quantum-mirrored to block the quantum entanglement signals used by the orphids.
In other words, from the outside you couldn‘t see in. Jayjay imagined Andrew Topping as a
loathsome fat grub worm in there, a greedy parasite befouling the orphidnet. Would he grow violent when the Posse confronted him?
As if Jayjay weren‘t anxious enough, one of his scenario-searching beezies now sprung a
paranoid theory on him: Some unknown ―Faction X‖ was deliberately luring the Posse into the
Armory. The elegantly glyphed argument came down to this:
• Faction X contaminated Nektar with beetle malware.
• Faction X directed the Posse to a beetle-infested SUV.
• Faction X expected that someone in the Posse would design an antidote.
• Faction X expected that once the Posse invented a beetle antidote, the beezies would ask the Posse to heal Nektar.
• Faction X knew Nektar would urge the Posse to confront the Natural Minders in their lair.
• Faction X was maneuvering the Posse into the Armory.
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And the beezies had an exponential number of possible theories about the identity and
motivations of Faction X. Given that everyone was using beezies, overelaborate action scenarios were quite common now. Beezies were bringing human social intrigue to new heights.
All but paralyzed by this input, Jayjay used private messaging to share the Faction X scenario with the others, the four of them standing on the sidewalk outside the Armory‘s big green door.
―Should we go in anyway?‖ Jayjay messaged the others.
―I will,‖ answered Thuy. ―I need this experience for my metanovel. And they might help me
kick the Pig. I‘m really serious after seeing Grandmaster Green Flash.‖
―I want to get in there to cut the freakin‘ spam levels,‖ messaged Sonic. ―What we came for.
Don‘t wimp out now.‖
―I want to see the quantum-mirrors,‖ put in Kittie. ―It‘ll be weird. A new trip. Something to
paint.‖
These were all good reasons. ―Okay,‖ said Jayjay.
The big front door swung open at his touch, revealing a small hall or antechamber. A shiny
finish coated the floor, ceiling and walls of the antechamber, also the back of the door. Jayjay saw himself dimly mirrored on every side. The colors in the reflections were odd, sour pastels.
―Watch it!‖ exclaimed Kittie, heavily catching her balance as she stepped inside. ―It‘s like
oil, or ice.‖
―Quantum-mirror varnish,‖ said Sonic. ―The whole insi