Postsingular (9 page)

The air flickered and Bixie disappeared. The male angel with the topknot disappeared too; perhaps he'd guide Bixie. Big Gladax shook her fist in bleak frustration, and then made as if to poke an energy ray into Chu's head. But Ond was furiously waving his arms, beating the air around Chu, messing up Gladax's positioning. The dinghy docked against the
Merz Boat
.

“Bixie's in the Hibrane!” shouted Chu, scrambling aboard. “I have to go help her!”

“What. Are. You. Talking about!” said Jil, taking hold of the boy's shoulders. She half wanted to give him a brutal shake, but instead she crouched down to look in his eyes. “What did you do to my Bixie?”

Ond was talking into the air, addressing the Hibraner angel. “If you attack Chu again, Gladax, your jump-code goes out to every single person on Earth. And if you kill me, you're defenseless for good.”

“Talk to me, Chu,” insisted Jil, still holding the boy's shoulders.

“The angels live in the Hibrane,” said Chu in his usual flat tone. He looked frightened. “Angel Gladax is mad at me. The angels have always been coming here, but now we can see them better—thanks to the orphids. I found out how to jump a person to the Hibrane. Gladax doesn't like that. She told me not to share the jump-code. I didn't mean for Bixie to—”

“How?” interjected Craigor grimly. He was standing over Jil and Chu. “Tell us how! We have to go after Bixie.”

“The orphidnet AIs and I did a timing-channel attack on the disappearing cuttlefish,” began Chu. “And—”

“More jive about cuttlefish?” cried Craigor. “Where's my daughter, damn you!”

“Don't yell at him, Craigor, or I'll punch you in the mouth,” said Ond, his voice very tight. “Chu already gave me a link to the jump-code. It looks like blue spaghetti and it sounds like chimes. I'll message the link to you right now, Jil.” He twitched his head and hopped to one side, ducking the big angel, who still had that menacing ray sticking out of her forefinger. “Stop it, Gladax! We have to save Jil's daughter. I don't care about the subbies. See the jump-code, Jil? All right then. Now let Chu finish telling us how it works.”

Craigor got hold of an oar and took out his anger by violently waving it around, stirring eddies in the air. This had a good effect; Gladax drew back a couple of meters, unable to navigate her body's subtle matter through the roiled-up air currents.

“You don't have to use the blue spaghetti anymore,” said Chu, his voice maddeningly deliberate. “I have a new version almost done.” He produced a bird's-nest of string from his pocket and sat down on the deck. Delicately he tied two loose ends of his intricate tangle, which resembled a woven bracelet. “The jump-code's in this knot,” said Chu, staring at it with absorption. “Nice and tidy. I can remember this.”

“Get to the point, Chu,” puffed Craigor, still waving his oar. “Spaghetti, chimes, knot—how does someone use your freakin' code?”

“Well, I think when the angels do it, they stop thinking about themselves for a second,” said Chu, looking small and uncomfortable amidst the legs of the agitated grown-ups. His fingers were rubbing his knot. “And then they concentrate on the code and—”

Chu disappeared too.

“We're going after them, Ond,” yelled Jil. “Craigor, you watch Momotaro. Don't give me that moony hangdog look, Ond! Let's go!”

Ond's pursuers were yelling from the shore. An outboard motor sputtered and roared into life. Spotlights lit the water.

“Of course, Jil,” said Ond. “I
want
to hide in the Hibrane. Let's pace up and down the deck; Gladax has trouble keeping up. Block out her messages or she'll distract you. Please don't hate me. I'd do anything for you.”

“Okay then, Doctor Übergeek,” said Jil, stepping lively toward the bow at Ond's side, still extremely upset about Bixie of course, but also feeling just a little jazzed by Ond's flattery and by the prospect of a wild trip through another dimension. “You better make this good. We space out and we slam the code, huh? Like meditating before doing a line of sudocoke. Too bad we don't have Chu's Knot.”

“Just use the link I gave you,” said Ond.

In the orphidnet Jil studied the tangled blue spaghetti and the ringing chimes. But try as she might, she remained stubbornly aboard the
Merz Boat.

“We have to let go of our internal monologues,” suggested Ond. “Focus on the spaces between our thoughts.”

On a good, serene day, that wouldn't have been hard for Jil, but just now it was tough. Urgently casting about for mental leverage, she thought of the Zen koan where the teacher holds up a stick and says, “If you call this a mere stick, you deny its Buddha nature. If you don't call it a stick, you're lying. What do you call it? Quick!”

Jil broke the stick. She was neither here nor there, neither now nor then, not inside, not out. The chiming blue spaghetti buried her. She felt a twisting sensation and saw a series of ocean images, as if she were flying very low across an endless sea. Some creatures like birds stuck their heads above the surface, snapping at her. Subbies? Jil dodged them readily enough, energized by a pleasure/paranoia rush straight out of her sudocoke days. It was hard to say how long the jump lasted. But then something changed, she felt a nudge, and—hello!

She was in the Hibrane, with Chu and, yes, Ond beside her, standing in a grassy moon-silvered meadow with great trees at the edge. Her skin tingled and, just like that, her orphids were gone. No matter, her mind was blooming in some new way. The air filled with a vibrating soundless hum. A sealed window in Jil's head swung open.

Beyond the trees were the lamp-lit windows of a city like San Francisco. Nearby was a field and a hill. They'd landed in the Hibrane version of Golden Gate Park.

Everything here was big and slow; everything was alive. The grass rose to Jil's waist; the pines and eucalyptus trees towered like skyscrapers. The meadow itself was impossibly broad. On this world, Jil, Chu, and Ond were only a foot high.

Giant people and immense dogs cavorted ponderously beneath lampposts in the meadow, moving as if in slow motion. The brightly dressed Hibraners were playfully skimming a wooden triangle back and forth.

Jil could sense the inner essences of the rocks, the trees, the people. This was paradise, better than anything she'd ever felt before. Although none of the Hibraners were talking, Jil was picking up their thoughts. Hibrane telepathy was different from orphidnet messaging. This telepathy was smooth and all but wordless, a flow of image and emotion.

Jil noticed a dark spot in the meadow, a dog the size of a buffalo, ruminatively chewing something on the ground. Oh, dear God, where was Bixie?

Without stopping to look into the dog's mind, Jil charged toward the great brute, calling her eleven-year-old daughter's name. Jil's footsteps were surprisingly loud and heavy on the soft ground. And she seemed to be moving as fast as a car might drive. The long-haired giants stopped playing and assumed attitudes of fear, as if Jil were a fierce demon from a nether world.

Spooked by little Jil's charge, the huge dog wallowed to his feet and began a deep, startled bark. On the ground between his legs was—only a stick.

“Mom!” came a sweet voice from the shadows of a park bench nearby. “I'm over here.” Yes, it was Bixie, sitting upon a collapsed leather wineskin. Thanks to the telepathy, Jil could see Bixie in the dark—and she could sense her daughter's whole mind, sweet as a summer day. A moan of relief escaped Jil; she sped to embrace the girl.

“I'm scared of that dog,” said Bixie, disentangling herself. “I'm glad you came, Mom.”

“I want to take you home now,” said Jil, hoping this was possible. With all their orphids gone, there was no chance of linking back into the Lobrane Earth's orphidnet. So how would they access the magic blue spaghetti code?

Ond and Chu came pounding across the moon-silvered grass, scared of the dog. They joined Jil and Bixie beneath the bench. Some of the lamp-lit Hibraner giants on the lawn were turning to flee; a couple of the others were ever so slowly hunkering down to stare at the Lobraners. The enormous dog continued his slow, thunderous barking, but showed no sign of wanting to attack.

The Hibraners' clothes were curiously dyed and homespun in appearance. Another giant had arrived; he had big dark eyes, a straight nose, and a slight beard. He wore a stocking cap with a bun of hair balled up in a sphere atop his head. Jil recognized him from the
Merz Boat.

The young Hibraner's mind reached out to Jil, playing across her psyche. His name was Azaroth. He said he'd helped guide their jumps toward Golden Gate Park. He warned that the Hibraners might regard the Lobraners as dangerous gnomes—at least until they got used to them.

Chu was listening in. Showily he kicked at the ground, making a deep dent in it. “I bet I could make that dog go
ki-yi-yi
and run away, Bixie. The giants can't hurt us. We're like iron. And we're fast.” Not that Chu was actually moving toward the dog.

“Can we go back?” Jil asked Chu.

“Yes,” said Chu in his matter-of-fact tone. “I still have my special knot.” He showed her his intricate tangle of string. Good. Shifting her attention to Ond's mind, Jil was a little surprised to see just how intensely the man worshipped her.

Ond smiled at her, knowing that she knew. “The vibrating soundless hum,” he said, picking the phrase from Jil's mind. “This telepathy is so powerful. And there's more. I feel like I can remember every shape I see.”

“I miss the orphidnet,” said Chu, admiring his knot. “I was good at it. Maybe we should go home with Jil and Bixie.”

“Not yet,” protested Ond. “I want to lie low until things calm down back home. Maybe wait a year or two of Lobrane time. I think that'll only be a few months by this world's clocks. We're six times as small and six times as fast. Stay and keep me company, son.”

“But I liked being so smart. I liked the beezies. The air ate all our orphids when we got here.”

“We don't need orphids here, Chu. We've got telepathy, omnividence, and—an endless spike of extra memory space.” Ond gazed at Jil. “I'm storing images of your face,” he murmured. “Dear Jil.”

“I miss the orphids,” insisted stubborn Chu.

“Not me,” said Jil. “I was liking my life the way it was.” But was that really true? Of late, Craigor had been seeming restless. And this made staying sober a little harder than before.

“Maybe I was wrong to unleash the orphids,” Ond was saying. “For what it's worth, I'm sorry, Jil. I thought it was the best defense against the nants. But maybe—”

“Oh, don't beat yourself up,” said Jil, feeling a deep empathy for the awkward man and his odd son. “Life will settle down.”

“I love you,” messaged Ond.

Jil could almost have melted into him. Dear sweet Ond. But no. He wasn't supposed to be her type at all. She'd been a cheerleader in high school, and she'd always gone for the jocks. Also, Craigor and Momotaro were waiting at home. It wouldn't do to leave Craigor alone for too long. Not that Jil enjoyed the role of jealous jailer. With Nektar out on her own, Craigor seemed primed for a reckless move. What if Jil just let Craigor screw all the women he liked? Impossible thought. Jil had the superstitious feeling that her stable marriage was all that stood between her and sudocoke. It was very nice to know that Ond really and truly loved her. But Ond wasn't as physically attractive as Craigor. What would happen if Jil found herself a much hotter man, maybe someone younger? Did she have to be a puritan in every respect for the rest of her life? Oh, god, where was her head? And Ond and Chu were probably seeing all these thoughts. Stop it, Jil!

“Let us use your magic knot now, Chu,” said Jil in a brisk tone.

“Go ahead,” said Chu, holding the knot steady with his fingers. “Stare at it as if it were the blue spaghetti. And feel it with your fingers. The touching takes the place of the chimes.”

“Me first,” said Bixie.

Chu flashed a rare smile at Bixie as he held out his magic knot. “See you later.”

“Hurry, Bixie,” urged Jil. “Look over there across the lawn. It's that bossy angel Gladax. And, see, she's carrying some kind of net! Go
on,
Bixie, get out of here. Thanks, Chu. Bye, Ond. Take care, you two.” She hesitated, then gave Ond a quick kiss on the cheek.

Bixie disappeared and then Jil. Gladax was still twenty yards away, her legs and arms moving at a snail's pace. Her net was made of—rubber?

“We don't have to be scared of her, right, Ond?” said Chu, his voice even flatter than usual.

“No way,” sang Ond, elated from Jil's kiss. “We move six times as fast as the Hibraners. Let's run a few hundred yards. And then I'll show you how to camouflage yourself. Like a mental firewall.”

Ond didn't yet realize how fast Gladax could hop.

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.

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, Jayjay 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, 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.

“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 McDonald'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 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.