Jayjay and the Big Pig Posse awoke to a mustached guy prodding them with a wide broom.
―Go to hell,‖ said Jayjay, his fellow-kiqqie Sonic already standing at his side. ―Asshole
janitor.‖ The women were on their feet too: Kittie and Thuy, their faces greasy in the rainy-day morning light. Jayjay wore baggy black pants, a billed green cap, a green T-shirt, a piezoplastic iguana earring, and a scavenged gray suit jacket that Kittie had painted with a fancy filigreed skull design to cover the whole back.
― No mas janitor,‖ said the guy with the broom. ―Maintenance manager and security guard.
Get your pinche asses outta my hall. The Job Center‘s about to open. Go get some rehab at Natural Mind.‖
―You want some of this?‖ taunted Sonic, grabbing his own crotch. ―Stand by me, Jayjay. We
can take this pendejo down.‖ Skinny little Sonic wore his invariable outfit of heavy boots, thick black wool tights, red T-shirt, and a thin black leather jacket with intricate pleats and folds—a jitsy concoction that he‘d found unused in some woman‘s closet. His hair was pomaded into a dozen
hedgehog spikes.
―Lose the gangbanger routine, boys,‖ said Kittie, turning and walking to the glass street door.
Stocky sweat-suited Kittie was adorned with a bright blue tattoo on her neck, also a glowing pendant of a woman holding a paintbrush and a meat cleaver. Kittie sometimes made money painting solar cell landscapes on electric cars. ―I‘m seeing a bunch of fresh-dumped pancakes behind the Mission Street McDonald‘s.‖ she continued. ―Still hot, if we hurry. Come on, Thuy.‖ Kitty pronounced her friend‘s name the proper Vietnamese way, like twee and not like thooey.
Slender Thuy smiled and took Kittie‘s hand, ready for the adventure of a new day, Thuy in
her street-worn striped leggings and yellow miniskirt, her strawy black hair in two high pigtails, her shiny piezoplastic Yu Shu sneakers with fancy dragon‘s heads on their toes. The Big Pig Posse
members rarely changed their outfits; they were like cartoon characters that way. Superheroes.
Sonic gave the janitor a little poke in the chest; the janitor swung his fist; Sonic ducked.
Street theater. Jayjay and Sonic followed the women out, standing for a moment in the rain-shadow of the office building. The streets were liquid, the raindrops popping circles into the sheen, the spastic gusty wind making riffles, a few electric cars hissing past.
p.52
Rudy Rucker
Jayjay looked into his head, checking the orphidnet view of the McDonald‘s trashcans, and
indeed he saw a nice batch of griddle cakes, nearly a dozen. Only a block away.
But first, as long as he was focused on the orphidnet, Jay-jay said hello to some of the beezie AI agents hosted by the millions of orphids on his body, also greeting the far-flung higher-order beezies that could be found at the next level of abstraction and then, what the hey, he took a quick hit off the Big Pig at the apex of the virtual world, the outrageously rich and intricate Big Pig like a birthday piñata stuffed with beautiful insights woven into ideas that linked into unifying concepts that puzzle-pieced themselves into powerful systems that were in turn aspects of a cosmic
metatheory— aha! Hooking into the billion-snouted billion-nippled Big Pig made Jayjay feel like more than a genius.
Not that suckling on the Pig was most people‘s idea of a thrill—few citizens were even
bothering to intelligence-amplify themselves into the kilo-IQ zone of the kiqqies. Being a kiqqie meant you let the orphidnet do some of your thinking. Instead of just using the Net to see and remember things, you could launch autonomous beezie agents to analyze, hypothesize, simulate, and reason on your behalf.
Jayjay had to fully open his mental firewall in order to access the Big Pig wisdom. Right
away the Pig wrote some information into his brain, the way she always did when Jayjay hooked up, he wasn‘t sure why. The info-dumps took the form of incredibly accurate movie clips of things like water or clouds or fire; this new one showed a eucalyptus branch rocking in the wind, each twig and each leaf a separate pendulum, the system dancing upon its chaotic attractor.
Thuy was suckling on the Big Pig too, pulling greedily at the nipple, and Jayjay smiled to see her next to him—Thuy, his smart litter-mate, his lost true love.
“Wheenk wheenk wheenk,” said Jayjay to Thuy, layering thoughts onto the words to make a hyperpun. Wheenk like a piglet, obviously, but also wheenk like a squeaky wheel, an unhappy wheel asking for oil, Jayjay-the-wheel longing both for the metaphorical anointment of Thuy‘s affection and for the literal lubrications of her aromatic bod. Not to mention that wheenk wheenk wheenk was a term Thuy liked to use to describe metanovels in which the characters spent, in her opinion, too much time bitching and moaning, and not enough time doing and loving.
Thuy was working on her own metanovel, an as-yet-untitled combine of words, links, video
clips, images, and sounds—she meant for it to be a bit like a movie that a user could inhabit, the user coming to feel from the inside how it was to be Thuy or, rather, how it was to be a version of Thuy leading a more tightly plotted and suspenseful life. Thuy had kicked off her metawriting career with a metastory posted on the Metotem Metazine site, and the tale, really a reminiscence, was getting good buzz—the title was ―Waking Up,‖ and it was a delicate weave of Thuy‘s memories and mental
associations relating to Orphid Night last year, when the newly-released orphids had blanketed Earth, and Thuy had seen Ond Lutter and his son Chu jump to the Hibrane, and she‘d thrown over her
career path to live on the street with Jayjay.
Thuy was finding it hard to bulk up her metastory into a full-fledged metanovel; part of the
problem was that neither she nor anyone else had really figured out what a metanovel should be, p.53
Postsingular
although by now there had been a fair number of not-quite-successful metanovels posted on the
orphidnet. One thing for sure, suckling on the Big Pig seemed a crippling drain on Thuy‘s creative energies. Though Jayjay loved the Pig, it wasn‘t as big a burden for him as it was for Thuy. Thuy‘s disillusionment with the Pig was in fact a key deal-breaking issue between her and Jayjay. So Jayjay was also intending for his wheenk to defiantly say, ―I‘m not scared of the Big Pig even if you are.‖
“Wheenk!” sang back Thuy, fully understanding every shade of Jayjay‘s meaning and upping the signifier strength by digging into the ever-expanding database of her metanovel, passing a link to a series of images inspired by her sorrow over her and Jayjay‘s breakup: for instance, shriveled tree-blossom petals on a dirty sidewalk, with Thuy‘s virtual violin playing sad, wheenking chords. There was more than a little self-pity here, which seemed a bit unjustified to Jayjay as the estrangement was, at least in his opinion, Thuy‘s own fault. And wasn‘t she still using the Big Pig anyway—like, right now?
The Big Pig was absorbing, mirroring, and amplifying their exchange, layering on further
sounds, clips, and links from the simmering matrix of global info. Intoxicated by the heady mix, Jayjay soon forgot about Thuy per se—that is, she became an archetype, a thought form, a pattern in the cosmic stew. Knowing Jayjay‘s particular likes, the Big Pig began displaying a fundamental secret-of-life construction of reality: branes and strings, an underlying graph-rewriting system, a transfinite stack of ―turtles all the way down.‖ Although the ideas felt familiar from Jayjay‘s last trip into the Pig, he knew the details wouldn‘t stay with him for long. So what. Pig trips were all about relaxing and enjoying the show. Aha!
For her part, Thuy sank into the details of her metanovel, letting the Big Pig show her a
stream of variations of what her completed work could be once it was done, each Pig-take on her work more sinewy and coruscating than the one before, giving Thuy the familiar, despairing
sensation that really there was no use for her to bother doing anything at all when everything was already thought of in the Big Pig. She wanted to bail out, but for now the Pig‘s ever-changing fountain of ideas was once again holding her in thrall.
Jayjay and Thuy might have stayed there leaning against the wall for quite some time, eyes
half closed, on the nod, feeling like superartistic supergeniuses, but Kittie began shaking them, ever-practical Kittie focused only on the McDonald‘s trashcan, worried that some other unhoused
individuals might score the breakfast goodies before the Big Pig Posse could make the scene,
heedless of the fact that, thanks to her, Jayjay was coming the fuck down again. If he could just once remember the approximate details of what he learned from the Pig, he‘d be a famous physicist.
Sonic stood at the Job Center‘s glass door, projecting 3D emoticons at the janitor—turds,
knives, and skulls visible in the heads-up orphidnet display that overlaid their worldviews. The janitor didn‘t care. The janitor had a job; the Posse was in the rain; the door between them was locked.
Still a bit high from the Pig, Jayjay saw the situation as a tower of archetypal patterns:
thresholds and interfaces, insiders and outsiders, the hidden heroes commencing a mythic quest.
p.54
Rudy Rucker
―The Big Pig sucks,‖ said Thuy, shaking off the intoxication. ―I feel totally stupid now. That was absotively, posilutely my last time.‖ She laughed unhappily, fully aware that she‘d sworn off the Pig a hundred times before.
The four were splashing down the sidewalk toward the Mc-Donald‘s parking lot. Jayjay was
internally grumbling to himself about Thuy always making such a big deal about wanting to quit the Big Pig. You got high, you saw stuff, you came down, you moved on. Where was the problem?
―We gotta find a steady place to sleep,‖ said Sonic.
―A place to think and work,‖ said Thuy, brightening. ―Let‘s ask President Bernardo!‖
US President Bernard Lampton had organized a cadre of beezie agents willing to help people
find whatever they needed. Any neighborhood was like a realtime charity bazaar, with unused
objects there for free in attics, garages, and back rooms. You could find stuff on your own via the universal orphidnet view, but asking Bernardo was like using an efficient search engine.
―Where can we four live long-term with no rent, Bernardo?‖ said Jayjay, wanting to please
Thuy. ―We‘re tired of crashing in halls with it raining all the time.‖
President Bernardo appeared in their overlays; trudging along Mission Street same as them,
dressed in baggy jeans and a hooded sweatshirt like a homie. ―Get an SUV,‖ he suggested. ―There‘s a nice big one near here, with enough gas to drive it a mile or two. The owner would even give you the title, camaradas. ‖ Bernardo gestured and a little map popped up with a highlighted image of a bloated, obsolete fuel-burner.
―Vibby!‖ said Thuy. ―Good old President Bernardo—hey! What‘s he doing now?‖
A flicker, a pop, and control of this particular President Bernardo icon had shifted into the
hands of his political rivals. Wearing a slack, imbecilic grin, the president dropped his pants, squatted on the sidewalk, relieved himself, and—
―Hurry up!‖ interrupted Kittie, looking back at them. ―We‘re gonna lose the pancakes. Oh,
what is that supposed to be?‖
―Homesteady Party attack ad,‖ said Jayjay, looking away from the degraded President
Bernard Lampton. ―They‘re pumping out all this viral adware for the election.‖ Lampton‘s image duck-walked toward Kittie, the president leering up at her.
A banner unfurled across their visual fields, reading Vote for Dick Too Dibbs! Beneath it appeared two vaguely similar men in red ties and blue suits: former President Dick Dibbs of Ohio, and his second cousin Dick Too Dibbs from Owensboro, Kentucky. President Dibbs had been
convicted of treason and executed by lethal injection a few years back—the fallout of his scheme to turn the entire planet Earth into a Dyson sphere of nants, with the networked system supposedly running a Virtual Earth simulation, including a perfect copy of each and every former Earthling. It had come out in the trial that actually President Dibbs had instructed the nants to simulate only registered USA Homesteady Party members, condemning the rest of Earth‘s population to vanish
without a trace. President Dibbs had planned to install himself as an all-powerful president-for-eternity, or, not to put too fine a point on it, God. No matter, his Kentucky lawyer cousin Dick Too p.55
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Dibbs stood a good chance of being voted into office. Too Dibbs seemed more honest and intelligent than the original Dibbs. And he had great ads.
―I was a private man,‖ said former President Dick Dibbs, with the very slightest gesture
toward the obscene Bernard Lampton. ―A clean man. Misled by corporate criminals. Unjustly
executed by activist judges. We can control the Singularity. We can have a lasting paradise safe from woe. Dick Too Dibbs in November. He‘s learned from my mistakes.‖ He gazed earnestly at Dick
Too, with the faintest hint of a smile at the corners of his thin-lipped mouth.
Dick Too made a wry face. ―I learned I don‘t want to end up in the death house like you!‖ he
said, giving his cousin‘s icon a poke. President Dibbs shriveled up and shrank. ―Forget him, folks. I know you‘ve got every reason to be mistrustful of the Dibbs name. But I‘ll do right by the common people. I know how the system works. And I‘m honest. Which is more than can be said for Bernard Lampton. Why don‘t you use one of your speeches to wipe yourself with, Bernardo? That‘s about all it‘s worth.‖
―Put your filter dogs on that junk,‖ said Kittie. ―Own your reality, pigheads.‖
It was a little harder than usual for Jayjay to teach his virtual guard dogs to recognize this particular type of ad, which had arrived compressed within a single vertex of Lampton‘s image-mesh. The orphidnet was getting very flaky thanks to all the spam and adware it was carrying. Jayjay had seen, like, two hundred Dick Too Dibbs ads yesterday. No matter how strenuously he tutored and upgraded his filter dogs, new ads kept romping in. The Homesteady Party was hi-tech and relentless.
They seemed to be using programmers with an exceedingly deep understanding of the orphids‘ code and to have a very large and effective PR force embedding ad-triggers into unexpected contexts.
―Get outta there!‖ Sonic was yelling, sprinting across the nearly empty McDonald‘s parking
lot, beautiful plumes of water splashing from each of his heavy-booted steps.
Too late. A couple of middle-aged bums in watch caps were already scarfing down the
pancakes from the trash, and not even Sonic was up for hassling shaky pathetic winos over—
garbage.
―Where‘s some other food, Bernardo?‖ said Kittie. This time, the president‘s icon didn‘t
come up at all; instead a Dick Too Dibbs ad appeared right away, the ad pebbled and glittery in the rain, Dick Too talking about the danger of letting big companies control the orphidnet—reasonable and populist remarks, really, but they seemed shady and insincere since they were coming via an ad.
Seeking a filter to block this ad too, Jayjay searched the orphidnet and found a high-rated
virtual defender resembling a chihuahua. He scanned the chihuahua‘s machine code to make sure the virtual dog didn‘t have Homesteady hookworms, then recruited him into his kennel. The chihuahua yapped at the other filter dogs, educating them. They set off in a baying pack, digging through Jayjay‘s recent inputs, competing to be the fastest and the most accurate filter dog of all, mating and spawning as they ran. All this took only seconds. And then Jayjay messaged his Best Dog in Hunt to the other Posse members, the mutated beast resembling a scaly dachshund by now.
p.56
Rudy Rucker
Jayjay was wet and getting cold, although the rain-pocked wavy sheets of water undulating
across the parking lot were still inconceivably beautiful—if he relaxed and actually looked at them.
Seemed like he was pissing away too much time on low-level maintenance these days.
Thuy glanced over at Jayjay with a secret smile. She saw the water too. She liked it best
when Jayjay was in the real world with her. She‘d only left him for Kittie because he was spending too much time high on the Pig or plugging into his physics seminars. But she still thought he was the cutest, smartest guy she‘d ever met.
―Let‘s walk to that car Bernardo showed us,‖ said Kittie.
―I wonder if that was Bernardo at all,‖ said Thuy. ―Maybe he was a spoof from the start.
Maybe the car is a trap.‖
―I‘ll take that chance,‖ said Kittie, wiping the rain from her eyes.
On the way, Jayjay used the orphidnet to see into the garbage cans standing on the curb for
pickup day. He was a bit gingerly in his scanning—lest a hidden Homesteady Party ad surprise him.
He found a meaty roast chicken carcass, a third of a chocolate cake, a half-full box of Thai takeout, a couple of slices of pizza, and a bunch of brown bananas.
―Food links, Kittie,‖ he said, messaging her the locations.
They scooped up the grub and hurried for the shelter of the puffy silver SUV, which was
parked in a driveway by a beat old Victorian house on a side street between Mission and Guerrero, right where the Bernardo icon had said they‘d find it. The Posse piled in, glad to be out of the rain, Jayjay in the driver‘s seat, Sonic shotgun, the women in back. Jayjay would have liked to be the one in back with Thuy.
Looking through the orphidnet, Jayjay could see and hear the old couple in the flat on the
house‘s first floor. With nanocomputing orphids meshed upon every surface on Earth and linked
together by quantum entanglement, you could peep anything you liked.
―Red! There‘s some kids in our car!‖ said the woman. She was soft-chinned, not unbeautiful,
sitting on the couch knitting. ―They‘re eating garbage! Why didn‘t you lock the car like I told you?
Get out there and chase off those dirty kiqqies!‖
Using the orphidnet to amplify your intelligence was viewed by many as a deviant activity.
Kiqqies looked at things so differently from normals. And most kiqqies weren‘t willing to hold jobs.
If you were smart and paid attention to the orphidnet, you could live without money. But quite a few people preferred to hold back from orphidic intelligence-amplification—there was a feeling that once you were a full-on kiqqie, you were no longer your same old self.
―I‘m watching a football game, Dot,‖ said Red, paunchy with a lean face. ―The halftime
show.‖ He was slumped in an armchair, seemingly staring at a wall. The orphidnet was better than TV: everything was on it, live and three-dimensional, seen from whatever viewpoint you chose—and you could see under people‘s clothes.
―I know what you‘re up to, Red,‖ said his wife. ―You‘re staring at those cheerleaders‘
boobies. Or worse.‖ Voyeurism was in fact the number one orphidnet application for the average person.
p.57
Postsingular
―Hey, if you‘re so concerned about my sex life,‖ riposted Red, ―why don‘t you come over
here and—‖
―Hush, I‘m watching our granddaughter nap,‖ said Dot, bending over her knitting with a half-
smile, appreciative of Red‘s sally. ―I can keep an orphid-eye on you from here.‖
―Live and let live,‖ said Red. ―Those kiqqies can have our clunker for all I care. Gasoline is gone for good. Solar‘s won the day, and if those assholes in the Middle East want to kill each other, it‘s their own business now. Not even the Homesteadies want us back there.‖
―Then tell the kids to drive the car away right now,‖ said Dot. ―Give them the keys and
change the title. I‘m sick of seeing that poor old car. It makes me sad. I told President Bernard a week ago, as a matter of fact. But I didn‘t mean for ragged freaks to make our car a crash pad. Three days ago we had some stumblebum in there just out of the Natural Mind rehab, remember? And now we‘ve got these scuzzy kiqqies with their—‖
Jayjay pinged Dot through the orphidnet while gnawing the chicken carcass. There was a lot
of good meat on the flat underside.
―Hello?‖ said Dot.
―Hi,‖ said Jayjay, the orphids on his throat registering the vibrations, reconstituting the sound waves, and sending the audio on its way. ―This is the kiqqie in your car. Spelled M- A- N.‖
―Red, one of them is talking to me! You listen too.‖
―We‘ll be glad to take the car off your hands,‖ Jayjay told the old couple, still working on his chicken carcass. ―Does it have enough gas to drive away?‖
―Maybe a half gallon,‖ said Red. ―Whatever the homies haven‘t siphoned off. You in a
hurry?‖
―No,‖ said Jayjay. ―Not at all.‖
―So I‘ll give you the keys and transfer the title when the rain lets up,‖ said Red. ―Meanwhile I got a football game to watch.‖
―And be careful where you put that garbage you‘re eating,‖ said Dot in a sharp tone. Sonic
had just laid half a slice of glistening pizza on the dash so as to accept a lopsided piece of the cake from Thuy. ―And no sex in our driveway. You happen to be sitting in a beloved and respectable
family vehicle. When our children were small, we—‖
Jayjay tuned her out. ―Where‘s that Thai food?‖ he asked, cracking open his door to toss out
the denuded chicken bones.
―All gone,‖ said Kittie. ―You got the whole chicken, so that‘s fair. There‘s still cake. And
bananas. They‘re plantains, actually. They taste better than they look.‖
It‘s nice in this car, thought Jayjay, peeling a plantain. Big soft seats, the air faintly musty, the windows fogged up from their breath, the rain drumming on the roof. The women were cuddled together in back, with Thuy‘s musky fragrance perfuming the damp air. The car‘s resident beezies were like fuzzy, friendly ghosts.
―It‘d be sweet to road-trip this silver marshmallow south,‖ said Sonic. ―San Ho, Cruz, the
beach, and then past Los Angeles into Mexico, vato, hanging with la raza and the pyramids. You‘d p.58
Rudy Rucker
like Mexico, Jayjay; we could go underwater diving. Some kiqqies just invented snap-on gills. Hell, I‘d like to see gasoline come back.‖
―Don‘t think that way, Sonic,‖ said Kittie. ―Gaia‘s better off without internal combustion. I
mean, look at this weather. You‘ve seen the climate simulations in the orphidnet. I‘m glad the world‘s finally switched to electric cars.‖
―They‘re still using some oil in Bangalore,‖ said Sonic, flicking Jayjay‘s lizard earring. ―To make piezoplastic for shoons. The beezies are all over that. Do beezies still get into your earring, Jayjay?‖
―Sometimes,‖ said Jayjay.
―Jayjay‘s always had an earring,‖ said Thuy with a fond giggle. ―He was wearing a gold hoop
the first time he came home from school with me. Helping me with my math homework. My mother
saw us kissing and she freaked out. ‗He‘s not Vietnamese, he has an earring, he‘ll never get a job.‘ ‖
―After Orphid Night, I was there for you again,‖ recalled Jayjay. ―I saved you from the
wikiware.‖ Although most employees didn‘t have to go into offices anymore, many employers
required you to install ShareCrop wikiware on your bodies‘ orphids—which became, in effect, a
bossy virtual monkey on your back. Living free on the street as a kiqqie with Jayjay, Thuy had time to craft her metastory ―Waking Up.‖ But then the Big Pig addiction had started dragging her down.
―And I saved her from you,‖ put in Kittie.
―Look, I‘m the one who really cares about her,‖ said Jayjay, his voice rising. ―I wish we
could talk about it, Thuy. Kittie‘s just playing you for a game, you‘re a trophy to her, a notch, and down the road you‘ll—‖
―Let‘s go back to my shoes,‖ interrupted Thuy. She didn‘t like to hear Kittie and Jayjay argue over her; it made her feel like an object. ―There‘s two beezies living in the piezoplastic. I call them Urim and Thummim after the special stones of sight that Joseph Smith the Mormon used to decipher the writing on those golden plates he found. My feet can see. A couple of times when I almost
tripped and fell, Urim and Thummim flexed the shoes to bounce me up.‖
―Yu Shu‘s finest,‖ said Kittie, admiring Thuy‘s feet. ―You were lucky to score those when
that yuppie jogger had the heart attack, Thuy. Good eye.‖
―I was the one who bagged the shoes for her,‖ said Jayjay. ―Thuy didn‘t want to touch a
corpse.‖
―Corpse-touching is the kind of thing men are good for,‖ said Kittie. ―A social role for the
lower caste.‖
―On the gasoline thing that you mentioned, Kittie,‖ said Sonic, off in his own head as usual.
―The techs couldn‘t have brought electric car technology along so fast if it weren‘t for the beezies.
It‘s like the beezies actually wanted to help us save our climate. But why should they care? The orphids would be here just the same, even if Earth‘s surface was ashes and tidal waves with everyone dead.‖
p.59
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―Yea unto the breaking of the Seventh Seal,‖ intoned Thuy. She was taping this bit for her
metanovel, and ―Seventh Seal‖ sounded good. Apocalyptic, dark, weird, damned. She overlaid the words with some gothic graphics.
―The beezies give a squat because people are like flowers in Earth‘s garden,‖ said Jayjay.
―The best art in the museum. After the beezies emerged in the orphidnet, they started watching us—
and we got good to them. They admire our wetware, the wiring of our brains. Especially us kiqqies.
Can I have some of that cake, Thuy?‖
―I think the beezies vampire off our emotions, is what it is,‖ said Thuy, handing him a fist-
sized piece of chocolate sweetness. ―Especially our metabeezie pal the Big Pig. Beezies admire our juice, our hormones. Have you ever noticed that when you‘re having sex, if you look into the
orphidnet, the beezies are totally on your case?‖
―I bet the beezies compete to settle onto a baby while it‘s delivered,‖ said Kittie. ―Like how the Hindus imagine souls being reborn. The beezies need us to do things for them. They can see everything, but they can‘t physically touch things. They need people in order to actualize their plans.
Like it took people to bring solar-cell