Postsingular (14 page)

“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 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 inter-locking 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.”

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 Grandmaster'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.

“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.
  

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 inside of the ExaExa plant is covered with it too. It costs a fortune.”

“Polyurethane doped with carbon nanotubes knotted and palladium-doped to make square-root-of-NOT gates,” said Jayjay, showing off his physics chops. “The gates slice right through the orphid entanglement threads.”

“We're losing the orphidnet right now,” said Thuy as the outer door swung closed behind them. They pushed through an inner door and entered the Armory proper. The great open space was fully quantum-mirrored. Floors, walls, windows, ceilings, and doors, all were glazed with square-root-of-NOT varnish. The acid-tinged reflections gave the Armory the misleading air of a psychedelic fun house, although in fact it was an oasis of calm. Relaxed, smiling people were hanging out talking with each other.

But Jayjay wasn't paying much attention to them yet. He was busy freaking out. For the first time in over a year, he had no all-seeing orphidnet view. The outer world was gone. And his body's beezies had reacted to the Armory by dropping offline; they were accustomed to distributing their computations far across the worldwide orphidnet. Jayjay's unaided natural mind felt stupid, befogged. He had so much less input than before, so much less computational strength.

Sonic stared down at his twitching fingers, as if unable to assimilate his loss.

“Ugh!” exclaimed Thuy, half turning back. “I feel like a piece of mud pottery. A raw-wood birdhouse. A bland bologna in a deli case.”

“Keep it together,” said Kittie, taking Thuy's hand. “We can use this in our work, honey. Grist for the mill. Remember, nonkiqqies
like
to feel this way.”

“Hell they do,” said Thuy. “Even Dot and Red were plugged in.”

“Welcome to Natural Mind,” said a dark-skinned woman sitting at a reception desk on the other side of the inner door. She looked compact and powerful. “I'm Millie Stubbs. Do you want to change? Not sure? It's enough to
want to want to
change, if that makes sense to you.”

The big open room echoed with the low hubbub of voices, a comfortable, old-timey, human sound. People were sitting in groups on yoga mats and beanbag chairs. In a far corner of the hundred-foot-high room, an openwork metal staircase rose to an atticlike second floor squeezed against the roof.

“Stay with it, Thuy,” said Jayjay. “We can do this.” Slowly, laboriously, some of his beezie agents were coming back to life, limping along at a fraction of their usual clock-rate.

“Relax and feel,” counseled Millie Stubbs. “You'll get used to it. You can meet our chief in a minute. And our clients and our graduates. They'll tell you how it is to be sober.”