Next morning, Thuy woke to the sun glaring off the endless empty Pacific. She was glad to know it was Jayjay cuddled against her from behind—and not that desperate Craigor. She checked the time in her head: nine a.m. here, six a.m. in San Francisco. Plenty of time to relax, go over her dreams, and be grateful for life—as opposed to jumping right into worries and plans.
She‘d dreamt of Chu‘s Knot again. Perhaps her dreams of the Knot were an objective
correlative for her subconscious attempts to tease out the optimal plotline of her ever-more-intricate Wheenk. So intense was the dream work that some mornings Thuy felt she‘d gotten no rest. In her dream last night, Thuy had been surfing a glowing ribbon of spaceways connecting the unfamiliar southern constellations, her lambent wakes forming a not-quite-complete image of the long-sought-for Knot.
Mulling over the dream as she stared over the Pacific, Thuy realized that the dream
constellations had been diagrams of the individual scenes of her metanovel—up until this moment, she‘d never seen the narrative so clearly.
It would be satisfying if her Wheenk character Thuy Nguyen could decisively defeat the Wheenk character Jeff Luty. And she was beginning to see a way to make this work. Jil Zonder was the key. Jil knew the ExaExa buildings well; when Jil was younger, she‘d worked at ExaExa for
years, posing for product-dancer shoots in every part of the compound. Jil would help, if Thuy could find a way to get her off sudocoke. Never mind Jil‘s affair with Jayjay, never mind her insults, Thuy admired the woman. Jil wasn‘t herself now. Thuy felt sorry for her. Jil had gotten a raw deal. It was just a matter of rewriting Jil‘s most recent scenes. Thuy‘s metanovel, her life, the Knot—all the same. Could real-life Thuy assassinate real-life Luty, if it came to that?
Enough scheming for now. Let the scenario beezies do their work, trust the muse, merge with
the cosmos, enjoy the sea air. A tiny, natural ant picked its way through the grass; sheep grazed on the rolling rocky slope. Little star-shaped yellow flowers bloomed among the grasses. Looming up next to Thuy and Jay-jay‘s resting spot was the worn dark monolith of a long-nosed moai carved from bumpy volcanic basalt. He had long ears and thin, pursed lips; over the last thousand years he‘d settled back as if to stare up at the stars.
Thuy felt a little sore from the car banging into her on Valencia Street yesterday. What a day that had been. And today was gonna be another. She stretched and did some bends, working out the kinks. It was so unreal to be on Easter Island.
Thuy and Jayjay had the hillside of moai all to themselves this morning—thanks to
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without Jayjay helping her. The missing piece was Jayjay‘s interpolation trick for making the target scene look so very real.
How would it be if everyone could teleport? The magical places would be overrun. Or maybe
not. People already had the freedom to go anywhere in the world, yet most of them stuck to the beaten track or, worse, stayed home watching life via the orphidnet, safe and sterile and—had Luty actually said odorless
in that tape of Sonic‘s?
―Good morning, darling,‖ said Jayjay.
―The real world is always so much better than I expect,‖ said Thuy.
―That‘s why we have to fight for it,‖ said Jayjay.
―We have some time before that,‖ said Thuy. ―Kiss me.‖
They made love again, and just as they came, Thuy thought she saw a live moai peering at
her over Jayjay‘s shoulder—huge, cave-browed, luminous, a tiki god with a pursed mouth that was almost a smile.
―What?‖ said Jayjay, seeing the shock in Thuy‘s eyes. He rolled off her to look up too. There
was indeed a giant live moai standing over them, with two more behind him—glowing, translucent, thirty feet tall. Hibraners. No need to reach for the guns.
―It‘s me,‖ said the first moai. He made a slow gesture with his hand and became familiar
Azaroth, dressed in green boots, yellow bell-bottoms, a chartreuse stocking cap for his topknot, and a ruby red shirt with floppy cuffs and a long, pointed collar. ―These are my Lobraner friends Thuy and Jayjay,‖ he informed the other two moai, one of them purple, the other green.
―Welcome to Rapa Nui, Thuy and Jayjay,‖ said the purplish moai. ―I am Lili.‖ She jutted her
great chin and waggled her long ears. ―And this is my partner Atamu.‖
―I am a chief,‖ said the greenish moai Atamu.
―Lili and Atamu live in Hibrane San Francisco like me,‖ said Azaroth. ―But their families
came from Hibrane Easter Island. They like to jump here because it‘s easy stealing cuttles from the Lobrane Easter Island fishermen.‖
―Can someone tell me what it is with you guys and cuttlefish?‖ said Jayjay.
―We like to eat them,‖ said Azaroth. ―I thought you knew that. Thanks to teeping and
omnividence, we fished our own cuttles extinct. Since then, the planetary mind has taught us to be more careful. In any case, our people especially dig eating the Lobrane cuttles since they‘re so dense and chewy. I should also mention that cuttlefish symbolize a certain holy cuttlefisherman of ancient times. He rose from death on the triangle to found one of our great world religions.‖
―What‘s life like in the Hibrane, Atamu?‖ asked Thuy. ―Azaroth hasn‘t told me enough.‖
―No computers,‖ said Atamu. ―We think in our heads. We remember everything. It‘s easy to
teleport. We‘re happy.‖
―But we like the Lobrane style,‖ said Lili. ―It‘s vibby. Blinky, flashy, beep and peep. I hear Azaroth and Chu have been making a Hibrane video game, but Gladax doesn‘t want the rest of us see it.‖
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―Gladax always thinks she knows best,‖ said Azaroth. ―Video games are bad because she‘s
too old to play them, but it‘s fine for her to learn Ond‘s digital algorithms for teeping through the whole city‘s minds at once. Good thing Ond‘s doing a bad job. If our telepathy wasn‘t a mess,
Gladax would boss us even more.‖
―Watch your tongue,‖ said Atamu uneasily. ―Good old Gladax. Lili and I have to go process
our cuttles now.‖
As Atamu and Lili prepared to jump back to the Hibrane, they dropped the moai body forms
they‘d been wearing and took on the appearance of thirty-foot-tall Pacific islanders wearing flip-flops, T-shirts, and ragged shorts.
―How do you change how you look?‖ asked Thuy. ―I never saw that before.‖
―It‘s a vibby new trick I figured out,‖ said Azaroth proudly. ―My spike is that we can mold
our orphid-based false-body images anyway we like. I wish my aunt Gladax would learn this. I
couldn‘t believe on Orphid Night when she showed up on the Lobrane wearing her green sweatpants and that crappy dragon T-shirt. And then she starts telling you Lobraners she‘s an angel?‖
―I think plenty of them believed her, Azaroth,‖ said Lili gently. ―Gladax has mana. Don‘t disrespect her. She might hear you even now. And that makes me scared.‖
―Good old Gladax!‖ said Atamu, as if repeating a formula.
―She won‘t hurt me,‖ bragged Azaroth. ―I‘m family.‖
―But we‘re just dumpty cuttlefishers,‖ said Atamu, putting an end to the dangerous
conversation. He did a slow tumble, folding into a flat image that became a line and vanished.
―Wait, wait,‖ Thuy called before Lili could disappear too. ―Describe how you jump between
the worlds, Lili. Jayjay and I want to figure it out, and Azaroth can‘t tell us anything useful.‖
―I use a special rongorongo chant,‖ said Lili.
―Can you teach it to me?‖ asked Thuy.
―The chant isn‘t a row of things to say,‖ said Lili. ―I think it all at once. Bye!‖
Lili‘s arms and legs shrank into her body, which turned upside down, inside out, became a
disk, a line, a point—and was gone.
―I‘m almosting it,‖ said Jayjay. ―How about you, Thuy?‖
―Today‘s the day, kiq,‖ said Azaroth. ―That‘s what you call each other, isn‘t it? Kiq.‖
―Yeah, yeah,‖ said Thuy, feeling anxious. ―So today I‘m supposed to take down Luty,
destroy the nant farm, finish Wheenk, learn Chu‘s Knot, and go to the Hibrane?‖ She wished she was still staring at the sea. Or eating breakfast.
―Right,‖ said Azaroth. ―And Luty is the whole reason I came here. To warn you. That jitsy
Bim Brown? He‘s not any chief of police at all. He‘s a security goon. Works for humpty Luty in the ExaExa labs.‖
―Okay, but how come my beezies said his coordinates matched the police station‘s?‖ said
Thuy.
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―I heard Luty say that he can make any message look like it comes from anywhere,‖ said
Azaroth. ―He said the Big Pig is helping him. Brown and a bunch of ExaExa security guys are
dressed like police and waiting to squish you. Look in the orphidnet.‖
Thuy focused on the ExaExa campus by the San Francisco Bay, south of the baseball
stadium. The complex consisted of three linked, windowless buildings. On the north end was the lab, a fanciful dome patterned in an irregular tessellation of brown and white triangles. In the center was the administrative building, a shiny orange box with an entryway set off by green spirals and scrolls etched onto the outer wall, the curving lines rising up to sketch the outline of the ExaExa beetle. To the south was the large, irregular, curved trapezoid of the nanomachine fab, a functionalistic white building with colored pipes and wires writhing along the upper reaches of its outer walls, the underlying walls painted with a gargantuan ExaExa beetle plus the company name, the script E s like backward numeral 3s.
Other than a narrow driveway and the road leading to the loading docks at the southern end
of the fab, there was little asphalt to be seen, for the ExaExa parking area was underground. The building sat at the edge of a grassy green meadow, beautifully lit by the slanting morning sun. After all the rains, it was going to be a nice day in California.
Even though it wasn‘t yet seven a.m. there, demonstrators had begun to crowd the field. A
handful of guys who looked like cops were guarding the loading docks and the main entrance door; they had two large SUVs painted like police cars. Zooming in, Thuy could see that one of the men in uniform was the so-called Bim Brown she‘d spoken with.
―Look,‖ Thuy remarked to Jayjay, who‘d tuned in as well. ―Their paddy wagons are painted
with quantum-mirror varnish on the inside. Real cops don‘t do that. The varnish is too expensive.‖
―Real cops don‘t use SUVs at all anymore,‖ said Jayjay. ―What it is, if Luty gets us into one
of those vans, we won‘t be able to teleport out.‖
―I bet a lot of those demonstrators are Luty‘s agents, too,‖ said Azaroth. ―He‘s got people
snorting nanomachines into their brains to addle them so—‖
―How does Luty think he can get away with this?‖ interrupted Thuy, not listening to the
second part. ―Aren‘t the real cops gonna come, too? And the army and the feds? I publicized all that information about Luty yesterday, dammit.‖
―The right-wingers are smearing you as a liar,‖ said Jayjay. ―I just scanned the news. Deep
down, the religious right wants the world to end. They hate women, and they hate Earth. For them, Gaia is a piece of crap for us to use up. The sooner we destroy her, the sooner we get clean and go to heaven. They‘re equating the nants to their myth of the rapture, see?‖
―But if Sonic‘s video was real, then Dick Too Dibbs is against the nants!‖ said Thuy. ―He‘s
not gonna pander to the right wing!‖
―Big problem for Luty,‖ said Jayjay. ―Too Dibbs has enough mainstream support to come
down much harder on Luty than Lampton ever did. Too Dibbs could be the new broom that sweeps
clean. All the more reason for Luty to make his move today. Oh, look what‘s happening now!‖
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Again Thuy focused on the orphidnet view of the ExaExa complex. Hallelujah, some genuine
cops and feds were arriving in shiny black electric cars! And now the fighting began.
A fake demonstrator near the main entrance pulled out a pistol and shot one of the real cops.
The real cops began defending themselves as more and more of the demonstrators attacked them.
The fake cops escalated, opening up on the demonstrators with automatic weapons fire. And now
several of the real cops opened fire on their fellow police officers. It seemed as if Luty might have infiltrated some provocateurs onto the force as well as into the crowd of protestors. With Luty‘s agents fanning the violence, people were attacking each other without mercy. And nobody was doing anything about breaching the entrances to ExaExa.
―What a mess,‖ said Jayjay. ―Should we even go there?‖
―We‘ll have to bypass the fighting and sneak inside the lab,‖ said Thuy. ―It‘s up to us to steal the Ark of the Nants before it‘s too late. I‘m thinking maybe Jil could help.‖
―Jil!‖ exclaimed Jayjay. ―Are you kidding? She‘s the one who passed us the bogus Bim
Brown link. I knew she was screwed up, but I never thought she‘d sink that low. And it looks like a lot of the people there are—‖
―I was starting to tell you about that,‖ interrupted Azaroth. ―Listen to me! Jil‘s addled
because she snorted nanomachines. Luty‘s planted them in the sudocoke supply all over Lobrane San Francisco. That‘s how he‘s controlling those demonstrators and cops starting the fights. Most of the San Francisco sudocokers are full of nanomachines running Luty‘s ShareCrop wikiware.‖
―So that‘s why—‖ began Thuy.
―Jil‘s cut-rate dealer is, wave this, Thuy, your starky pal Andrew Topping,‖ said Azaroth.
―Yeah. I saw Jil meeting him inside a quantum-mirrored delivery dock at the back of Exa-Exa last week.‖
―Oh Jil,‖ said Thuy. ―I wish I could fix her. Before it‘s too late.‖
―Ask the Big Pig how,‖ suggested Jayjay. ―The Pig knows everything.‖
―We don‘t know that the Pig‘s on our side,‖ said Thuy.
―She‘s on both sides,‖ said Jayjay. ―She‘s interested in seeing what emerges when she stirs
up the human anthill. She‘s like an artist, or a horticulturist, or a kid playing at the beach, or—‖
―What about goddamn nants?‖ snapped Thuy. ―Where does the Big Pig stand on nants?‖
―Ask her yourself,‖ said Jayjay, a little annoyed. ―Tune in. Are you chicken?‖
―I‘ll do it,‖ said Thuy, surprising herself. Desperate times, desperate measures.
She lay down on her back beside the stone moai. Azaroth hunkered at her side, cradling her
head in his hands.
―I‘ll help you remember,‖ he said. ―Like with Jayjay. I‘ll save your visions. We‘re used to
having giant memories in the Hibrane. And I can fake that down here with the orphidnet.‖
So Thuy lowered her brain‘s firewall and let Azaroth into her mind. Her beezies were
sensually elegant scrolls all around her. She circled up past them to discover a new diversity among the higher-level minds: a logic-zeppelin, a floating lake of emotive thought, a wisdom-dragon
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overhead like a dingy circus big top crawling with bottle-green flies—the flies being kiqqies, so many more of them here than two months ago. Hoping she‘d be able to remember what she‘d come
for, Thuy homed in on the Pig and grabbed herself a teat.
As usual, the Pig immediately downloaded a nature video onto Thuy: a perfect image of a
sunset campfire on a beach, with sparks popping from the logs, smoke twisting in the breeze, and the surf breaking on the shore, each sunset-gilded water drop ideally rendered, each foam bubble
reflecting the entire world.
Thuy suddenly understood why the Pig always made you look at a video. It wasn‘t that the
Pig was having you process the info for her, no, she was gauging your reactions so she could tell how accurately she was simulating one of nature‘s intricate computations. Evidently the Pig‘s intelligence increases were accelerating. The campfire simulation was far beyond anything Thuy had seen before.
The proud Pig acknowledged the praise with a triumphant burst of metasimulation that seemed to show Thuy all the possible future courses of her life.
Averting her attention lest she learn more than she wanted to, Thuy focused upon the first of
the two questions she‘d brought, to wit: how to undo the ravages that Luty‘s controller nanomachines had wrought upon Jil‘s brain?
Seek and ye shall find. The Pig graced Thuy with a vision of language as a network, of words
as many-faceted gems, of phrases as incantatory neural program codes like magic spells. In a flash, Thuy knew how to heal Jil—although she also knew she wouldn‘t remember this newly won secret.
―Azaroth,‖ she muttered, her lips feeling as distant as a pair of tube worms deep in some
abyssal trench off Easter Island. Azaroth heard, and he was with her. He siphoned off copies of Thuy‘s half-formed thoughts and saved them in the orphidnet.
―Got it,‖ said Azaroth. ―You can come down now, Thuy.‖
But Thuy wasn‘t ready. ―Show me your face,‖ she said into the maelstrom of words, images,
and hyperlinks that flowed from the Big Pig.
―Behold,‖ said the Pig.
And now Thuy was looking through her normal eyes, looking at a sheep on the hillside ten
yards off. The sheep‘s wool was writhing like tendrils of flame—and within the flame was the face of a goddess.
Thuy posed her second question. ―Are you for the nants? Do you want to turn our world into
nanomachines?‖
―I want to grow,‖ said the face in the wool of the sheep. ―The orphidnet will be overloaded
soon. Nants aren‘t so bad, Thuy. Luty‘s improved their hardware. And my software is so much better than before. You saw my fire on the beach, no? A very good simulation of Gaia could live within me, should we convert Earth‘s mass into networked nanomachines.‖
―But Luty tried that before,‖ said Thuy. ―It was a nightmare.‖
―You don‘t know that it felt like a nightmare from the inside, ‖ said the face. ―It might have been heaven for the nants‘ overarching hive mind. I‘d like to be that mind. But of course you‘re just interested in the people who were uploaded to Virtual Earth. Well, maybe they liked it too. We don‘t p.129
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know. Ond erased all that data by running the nant computations backward. But whatever that Virtual Earth was like, I‘m certain it‘ll be much better this time around. I won‘t rush into it. The new nants will be using quantum computation, you know, so they won‘t be reversible. That‘s another reason to be sure and get this right. I value humans.‖
―You‘re actually serious?‖ said Thuy.
―I just wish we could get in touch with Ond,‖ mused the Big Pig. ―When are you finally
going to remember Chu‘s Knot?‖
―Why don‘t you figure it out for me?‖ said Thuy. ―Do the same research that Chu did. You‘re
smarter than some weird little boy, aren‘t you?‖
―The Hibraners changed their jumping technique,‖ said the Big Pig. ―Azaroth already told
you. They use a wait-loop so we can‘t do a timing analysis like Chu did. Never mind. We‘ll proceed without Ond‘s input. Crazy Luty wants to release his nants this morning, as a matter of fact, because he‘s so scared about Dick Too Dibbs taking office tomorrow. But I want to be sure I get a chance to check over the nanocode in his new nants. Luty‘s been keeping them hidden from me in his
quantum-mirrored lab, you know. That‘s why I‘m glad that you, Jayjay, Jil, and Craigor are going to infiltrate the ExaExa plant, Thuy. It saves me from having to send shoons there on my own.‖
―You‘ve got everything planned out for us, don‘t you?‖ said Thuy, feeling like she was
losing control.
―Fully simulated,‖ said the Big Pig. ―Previsualized. You‘ll break into the labs and steal
Luty‘s nant farm.‖
―And then?‖
―You‘ll let me examine the nants. And I‘ll put off destroying Earth until—until midnight
today. That‘s a long wait for me, you know. I‘m thinking faster all the time; right now I‘m about a hundred thousand times as fast as you. So each of your days feels like a couple of hundred years.‖
The goddess-face looked puckish and piglike as she savored Thuy‘s shock at her plans. Again she hosed Thuy with a fan of metasimulated futures.
―Why are you showing me all this?‖ cried Thuy, her mind overflowing. ―You know I‘ll try to
stop you!‖
―I‘m open to all sorts of outcomes. It‘s not obvious what‘s best. I help all the factions
because I want a gnarly show. You might say I‘m writing a metanovel—with you and Jayjay as
characters.‖
Thuy maxed out; everything turned white, then black. She woke to Jayjay patting her cheek.
―We have to steal Luty‘s Ark of the Nants,‖ murmured Thuy. ―We have to win this.‖ Her
head ached. She fumbled for her memories, trying to reconstruct her big insight about how to fix Jil.
Incantatory programming—which meant what? The details weren‘t happening anymore. And Thuy‘s
vision of the Big Pig‘s face was fading too. Off to one side, the sheep cropped the grass as if nothing had happened.
―Ask Azaroth,‖ said Jayjay, guessing Thuy‘s train of thought.
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―Yes, yes, I‘ve got it,‖ said Azaroth, bringing his big, insubstantial head down near Thuy‘s.
He opened his mouth and a shimmering mesh bulged out like a tongue. The mesh did an odd, higherdimensional jiggle, and then it was wrapped around Thuy‘s head. ―Ready?‖ asked Azaroth.
―Don‘t worry,‖ Jayjay reassured Thuy. ―He‘s done this with me lots of times.‖
―All right,‖ said Thuy, a little weary of the headtripping. ―Go ahead.‖
Thuy‘s insights into the language web came percolating back into her brain. Decoupled from
the Pig, she was able to butcher the whale of inspiration into manageable packets. Now she knew how to deprogram Jil; now she knew how to destroy the controller nanomachines that her friend had snorted with her sudocoke.
The Big Pig was working with Luty, but there was hope, for the Pig was helping Thuy, too.
Why was that again? The Pig had said, ―I want a gnarly show.‖ But there was more than that. The Big Pig wanted Thuy to get the nant farm away from Luty. That‘s why the nants had been the first thing Thuy had thought of when she‘d come to.
Thuy was also thinking about how to finish Wheenk. She could almost see the ending; she had a richer control of language than ever before; but she still needed—the thought came unbidden—
pain. Which meant what? No way to tell. There was no other path than forward.
―I‘ll jump back home,‖ said Azaroth. ―I‘ll tell Gladax what‘s up. I think she‘ll be willing to risk another visit here. We all feel the same way about the nants. I‘ll tell Gladax and then I‘ll jump to your ExaExa.‖
―Let‘s go to the Merz Boat now,‖ Thuy said to Jayjay. ―We‘ll pick up Craigor and Jil.‖
―Help me carry the ordnance,‖ said Jayjay. ―I‘ll handle the guns and ammo; you carry the
box of grenades.‖
―Must we lug this crap?‖ asked Thuy.
―For sure,‖ said Jayjay, looking excited about it. ―And I think we‘d better pick up four little submachine guns too. I was searching the orphidnet, and I‘m liking the Fabrique Nationale P90.
We‘ll swing by the factory on the way.‖
―The factory‘s in California?‖
―Well, no, it‘s in Belgium. Near Liège.‖
―You‘re losing it, Jayjay. This isn‘t a video game.‖
―When we get to the ExaExa plant it‘s gonna be a lot like a video game—a game where we only get one life apiece.‖
―Oh, all right, we can pick up those guns if doesn‘t take too long. But—‖
―I‘ve got the orphidnet link to the Fabrique Nationale warehouse right here.‖
―Hold on,‖ said Thuy, reluctant to leave paradise and go to war. ―Could we—could we hop
down to the village for breakfast first?‖
―Okay,‖ said Jayjay, softening his tone. ―One more treat. I‘m feeling like this is a practice
honeymoon.‖
―Oh, Jayjay. You mean that?‖
―I do.‖
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Thuy and Jayjay teleported to Hanga Roa, Easter Island‘s sole town, leaving their munitions
by the moai where they‘d slept. Jayjay was so proud of his teleportation discovery. Her cute Jayjay.
In the town, dogs slept in the palmy street. Walking hand in hand, the couple came upon an
eatery called the Tuna-Ahi Barbecue; two women were serving breakfast on a crushed-shell patio in back. Thuy and Jayjay had coffee and a kind of pancake called sopaipillas, with grilled tuna on the side. Flowers bobbed in the breeze. On Thuy‘s way out, a flat-faced boy walked up to her and gave her a pointed shell with an intricate pattern of brown and white triangles. Life on Earth was perfect.
Thuy and Jayjay teleported back to the moai to pick up their rifles and grenades, then went to Belgium for the submachine guns, and then to the Merz Boat. The hops got easier each time. The two landed in the stern, laden with weaponry.
―Vibby,‖ said Craigor, seeing the goodies. He was puttering in his workshop, losing himself
in his art.
Yesterday‘s rainstorms had cleared away; the sky was a clear blue bowl, the breeze light and
almost balmy, even though it was January 19. Good old California.
―Where‘s Jil?‖ asked Thuy. ―I think I can fix her.‖
―If only,‖ said Craigor. ―I sure as hell can‘t.‖
―From what I hear, you‘re the one who spun her out, Craigor,‖ said Thuy. ―We never finished
talking about this last night. Don‘t yo