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Craigor hustled Ond, Nektar, and Chu onto one of the
Merz Boat
's piezoplastic dinghies, which would ferry them to the dock and return on its own. The dinghy was like an oval jellyfish with a low rim around its edge. It twinkled with orphid lights.

“Watch me on the news!” called Ond from the dinghy.

“Are we right to just sit around?” Jil asked Craigor next. “Shouldn't we be calling for an emergency environmental cleanup? I feel itchy all over.”

“The feds would trash our boat and it wouldn't change anything,” said Craigor. “The genie's out of the bottle for good.” He glanced around, scanning their surroundings with his webeyes. “Those little guys are reproducing so
fast.
I see thousands of them—each of them marked by a dot of light. They're mellow, don't you think? Look, I might as well put those cuttlefish in the bay. I mean, Ond already paid me for them. And there's orphids all over the place anyway. What the hey, free the wizards.” He got busy with his scoop net.

Jil's webeye grid of orphid viewpoints had become a disk-like Escher tessellation which was thousands of cells wide, with the central cells big, the outer cells tiny, and ever more new cells growing along the rim. The massed sound of so many orphids was all but unbearable.

“I hate their voices,” said Jil, half to herself. Having the voices in her head made her feel a little high, and after all her work on recovery, she'd learned to dread that feeling. Being a little high was never enough for Jil; she always wanted to go all the way into the black hole of oblivion.

“Is this better?” came a smooth baritone voice from the orphids. The many had become one.

“You actually do understand us?” Jil asked the orphids. A few of the orphid's-eye images slewed around as Craigor carried his first dripping net of cuttles to the boat's low gunnel and lowered them to the bay waters.

“We understand you a little bit,” said the voice of the orphids. “And we'll get better. We wish the best for you and your family, Jil. We'll always be grateful to you. We'll remember your
Merz Boat
as our garden of Eden, our Alamogordo test site. Don't be scared of us.”

“I'll try,” said Jil. In the unadorned natural world, Momotaro and Bixie were cheering and laughing to see the freed cuttlefish jetting about in the shallow waters near the boat.

“We're not gonna be setting free the Pharaohs every day,” Craigor cautioned the kids. He smiled and dipped his net into the holding tank again. “Hey, Jil, I heard what the orphids said to you. Maybe they're gonna be okay.”

“Maybe,” said Jil, letting out a deep, shaky sigh. She poured herself a cup of hot tea. “Look at my cup,” she observed. “It's crawling with them. An orphid every millimeter. They're like some—some endlessly ramifying ideal language that wants to define a word for every single part of every worldly thing. A thicket of metalanguage setting the namers at an ever-greater remove from the named.” Her mind was teeming with words—it was like the orphids were making her smarter. Her hand twitched; some of her tea spilled onto the deck. “Now they're mapping the puddle splash, bringing it under control, normalizing it into their bullshit consensus reality. Our world's being nibbled to death by nanoducks, Craigor. We're nanofucked.”

“Profound,” said Craigor. “Maybe we can collaborate on a show. A Web page where users find new arrangements for the
Merz Boat
inventory, and if they transfer a payment, I physically lug the objects into the new positions. And the orphids figure out the shortest paths. Or, wait, we get some piezoplastic sluggies to do the heavy lifting, and the orphids can guide them. I'll just work on bringing in more great stuff; I'll be this lovable sage and the
Merz Boat
can be, like, my physical blog. And you can dance and be beautiful, at the same time intoning heavy philosophical raps to give our piece some heft.”

“Men are immediately going to begin using the orphids to look at the exact intimate details of women's bodies,” said Jil with a shudder. “Can you imagine? Ugh. No publicity for me, thanks.”

Craigor spoke no response to this. He lowered the rest of the Pharaohs into the bay. “A fisher of Merz, a fisher of men. Peace, dear cuttlefish.”

The empty dinghy swam back toward them, orphid-lit like a ferry, nosing up to its mooring on the side of the
Merz Boat
. Spooked by the dinghy, the skittish cuttlefish maneuvered and changed colors for safety. Their skins were thoroughly bespeckled with orphid dots outlining their bodies' voluptuous contours.

“Voluptuous?” said Jil.

“I didn't say that out loud, did I?” said Craigor. “Jeez, you're picking up my subvocal mutters. This orphidnet link is like telepathy almost. I better be a good boy. Or learn how to damp down your access to my activities. Whoops, did I say that out loud too? There's meshes all over you, Jil. In case you didn't know.”

“Already?” said Jil, holding out her hand. She'd been ignoring the changes to herself and her family, but now she let herself see the dots on her fingers, dots on her palms, dots all over her skin. The glowing vertices were connected by faint lines with the lines forming triangles. A fine mesh of small triangles covered her knuckles; a coarser mesh spanned the back of her hand. The computational orphidnet was going to have realtime articulated models of everything and everyone—including the kids.

Yes, the orphids had peppered Momotaro and Bixie like chickenpox. Oh, this was happening way too fast. God damn that Ond. Jil knelt beside Bixie, trying to wipe one of the dots off her daughter's smooth cheek. But it wouldn't come loose. By way of explanation, the orphids showed her a zoomed-in schematic image of a knot of long-chain molecules: an individual orphid. They were far too tiny to dislodge.

“We're like cuttlefish in a virtual net,” said Craigor, shaking his head. He sat down next to Jil on the deck, each parent holding one of the kids.

“Look out there,” said Jil, pointing.

The orphids were twinkling in the bay waters, on the bridges and buildings of San Francisco, and even on the foothills and mountains surrounding the bay. Jil and Craigor hadn't really believed it when Ond had said it would only take a day for the orphids to cover Earth. But everything as far as the eye could see was already wrapped in meshes of orphid dots.

“I don't know whether to shit or go snowblind,” said Craigor, forcing a hick chuckle. “Where does that expression come from? Like, why those two particular options?”

“I'm so scared,” said Jil in a tight voice. “I don't know if I can do this. All these head trips. They make me want to use again. I want to turn myself off.”

“Just relax, Jil,” said Craigor. “How about the way Ond and Nektar were fighting? What a pair of lovebirds, hey?”

“I guess Chu puts them under a lot of stress,” said Jil weakly.

“Yeah,” said Craigor, patting Jil's cheek. “I enjoy Ond, but, please, don't be a geek
and
a drunken maniac. And this is the same guy who saved Earth three years ago. Weird. Did you notice the way Nektar was talking about her new friend Jose? I see an affair taking shape. I hope Ond doesn't try and seduce you, Jil. I can tell he's got a crush on you. Adultery is gonna be an open book, with orphids tracking every inch of everyone's body. Maybe people will just start accepting it more.”

The world as they'd known it was over, but Craigor was gossiping as if nothing about human nature would really change. “You okay?” he said, wrapping his arm around Jil.

“Oh, Craigor,” said Jil, leaning her head on her husband's familiar shoulder. “Always be here for me. I'd be lost without you.” Drained by shock and fear, the two of them dozed off there, sitting on the soft deck with the kids.

Riding ashore in the
Merz Boat
's dinghy, Chu wished they could have asked Bixie to come with them. She fascinated him.

The orphidnet hookup got better and better all the way home. Chu realized that, with his eyes closed, he could still see Bixie there on her parents' scow, laughing and playing with her brother. With orphids blanketing the world, it was like your eyes were everywhere. Chu liked seeing with his eyes closed. He could hear everything, too. The orphidnet converted the minute air-pressure vibrations of the orphid-mesh into audible sounds.

Before they got home, Chu saw police waiting at their house. He told Ond, but Ond said he wasn't scared. When they got out of the car, one of the policemen touched Chu, and Chu screamed and acted crazy so they'd leave him alone. Chu and Nektar went in the house and Ond got in the police car. Nektar was mad; she said the cops might as well keep Ond for all she cared. She said Chu could watch video, and then she went and lay down on her bed with her pillow over her head like she always did when she was upset.

Chu didn't bother with the video; he just lay on his back and explored the orphidnet. He saw Ond in the police car. He saw Bixie and Momotaro playing on the
Merz Boat
. And he swam around inside one of the cuttlefish Craigor had thrown back into the bay.

It was both dreadful and fascinating to be a cuttlefish, especially when Chu's host began rubbing up against another cuttlefish, tangling his tentacles with hers. The cuttlefish were doing reproduction. Chu's cuttlefish girlfriend squirted out eggs—and Chu's cuttlefish fertilized them. His heart beat fast. After the sex, he and his cuttlefish girlfriend began eating algae off the rocks, scraping it up with their beaks. And then, all of a sudden, Chu's cuttlefish girlfriend was gone. He jetted about looking for her, to no avail.

In the real world, Chu's arms were hurting. Nektar was shaking him and asking him if he were having a fit. She was angry. Chu realized he'd not only been beating his arms on the floor to imitate the cuttlefish's tentacles, he'd also been chewing on the rug with his teeth. And he'd wet his pants. He felt silly. Nektar helped him into some dry clothes. Chu promised he wouldn't be a cuttlefish anymore, and Nektar went back to her room.

Nektar felt guilty about yelling at Chu for wetting his pants again. Her family life was an endless round of lose-lose. She lay back down on her bed, closed her eyes, and watched Ond arriving at the jail. But then she got distracted.

Thanks to the orphidnet, she could see the insides of all the neighbors' houses. She'd always wondered about that Lureen Morales in the mansion at the very top of the hill. Lureen was famous for her coarse sex-vlog,
Caliente.
Lureen never talked to Nektar. Even though their paths crossed a few times a week, Lureen always acted like she'd never seen Nektar before in her life. Was Lureen on meds? With the slightest touch of will, Nektar was able to examine Lureen's orphid-outlined medicine cabinet, and yes, it was loaded with prescription sudocoke. While Nektar was at it, she examined Lureen's jewelry, her shoes, and her impressively large array of sex toys.

The thought of sex turned Nektar's thoughts to her cute new friend Jose. Without quite knowing how, she managed to send a virtual copy of herself to Jose's apartment on the second floor of a retrofitted yellow Victorian on Valencia Street, right across the street from Puff, the restaurant where they worked together. It was like she could fly up out of her body into the sky and then fly back down.