Postsingular

"Founders episode three hundred and ninety-five," said Kit-tie, not understanding what she saw. " 'Nektar Gets the Sudocoke Horrors.' How great is that?"

"Poor Nektar," said Thuy. "Look, Kittie, the shoons are helping her." Indeed, a classic Happy Shoon was spooning water into Nektar's cracked lips, a goob-doll shoon was offering a little cup of mush, and a doughboy shoon was sponging Nektar's soiled sheets. ExaExa, Stank, and BigBox weren't posting any ads around Nektar Lundquist today. This episode was way too funky.

"I want to go, to physically go there, yeah," said Sonic. "Look how many shoons."

"We still don't have the car keys," said Jayjay doubtfully. He could almost smell the high, thin reek of Nektar's dimly lit sickbed.

"You'll want to figure out how to kill those beetles first," glyphed the beezie. "You're in the right place for that. This car's orphids happen to carry the beetle infection, too. We don't have a patch yet."

"Oh fuck!" exclaimed Kittie.

"Our orphids are infected too?" said Jayjay.

The beezie nodded.

"Too late to run away," said Sonic. "Oh well. This is where maybe humans really can outthink the beezies. Thanks to the Doodly Bug weapon shop." He was talking about his fave online game.

The rain was really pouring down now. Rainwater dribbled in through the moon roof's weather stripping to wet Jayjay's left knee. But, at least for now, Jayjay had no sense of being infected by beetles. Maybe it was time to get high again.

In the apartment, Dot and Red were together on the couch with Dot's knitting thrown aside; Red was pulling down her elastic-waistband pants and-

"Ooo-la-la," said Thuy.

Sonic burst into shrill pulses of laughter.

"Oh, let's transcend," burst out Jayjay. "Let's hit the Pig."

"What the hey," said Kittie. "Rainy-day fun."

"Again?" said Thuy, meaning to refuse, but feeling her willpower weakening. It was so boring here in the car right now. "I swear, you guys, this is going to be my very, very last time ever. Wheenk. "

The virtual images of the Posse members spiraled upward through the orphidnet-not "up," exactly, the direction was more like "in." They all knew the way by now, and here were the billion snouts, tails, trotters, and flop-ears of the Big Pig metabeezie, the all-seeing eye atop the pyramid whose base held the ten sextillion networked orphids of Earth.

The Pig extended a wobbly nipple toward Jayjay, and as he fastened on, the Pig passed him a time-lapse movie of a snowdrift being sculpted by the wind. The other Posse members found teats beside Jayjay, the four of them lined up like worshippers in a pew.

"Some Pig," messaged Thuy with a giggle. The sick thing was, whenever she actually hooked into the Big Pig, she totally loved it.

"Radiant," added Jayjay, picking up on Thuy's Charlotte's Web reference, not that he'd read the book, but right now, via the Pig, he was hooked into all the libraries in the world, with every volume an open book.

But, que lastima, the Big Pig hit was weak. The beetles were coming on, swarming into the space between Jayjay and the Big Pig, making the Pig's images blocky, her animations jerky, her links slow-and there was no hope of an aha.

They dropped back into their mortal frames. In the peeling-paint Victorian, Dot and Red were reaching a climax, possibly goaded on by having the Posse nearby to watch them. Ugh.

Jayjay focused on the raindrops dripping through the moon roof and moved his leg. Now that he wasn't doing anything interesting, the beetles were lying low.

"I want the real Big Pig," said Kittie in a sullen tone. "Without all those freaking pests in the way. We really are infected."

"I'm go

Doodly Bug was based on quantum-loop string theory: in the game's virtual worlds, players knotted hyperdimensional Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces so as to destabilize the particle symmetries of their online opponents. With orphidnet visualization engines and expert beezie agents helping the players along, the esoteric physics of Doodly Bug was within the reach of any kiqqie willing to waste a lot of time.

Sonic's Doodly Bug ranking was approaching the highest possible level: Grandmaster of Space and Time. He'd already attained the only-slightly-less-exalted Multiversal Governator level. Jayjay was a Doodly Bug player too, with the quite respectable Kaluza Branesurfer rating. Last spring, Jayjay and Sonic had won some championships together. But then Jayjay had gotten obsessed with the ideas under the game-that is, with brane theory. And now, all praise the orphidnet, he'd begun using his intelligence-amplification to hang with the hard-core physicists who were investigating today's number-one problem: understanding the Hibrane.

The explorations were long on theory and short on experiment, as a Hibraner named Gladax had somehow managed to erase all the orphidnet copies of Chu's Hibrane jump-code the morning after Orphid Night.

To make the research even harder, the Hibraners had changed their jumping technique to include a wait-loop so that all their interbrane jumps took exactly half a second to initiate, leaving no hope of repeating the timing-cha

The kiqqie physicists were going bananas trying to think their way into the Hibrane, and Jayjay was cha

Yeah, Papa went to prison, just for selling a little dope, and Jayjay had dropped out of school to work fulltime at a taqueria with Mama so they could feed the five younger kids. When Mama had married the pendejo taqueria manager, Jayjay had quit working and left home. He figured he was too smart for work or for school. He hated his stepfather and he'd pretty much lost touch with his family. He'd lived in a squat, playing a lot of video games, making a little money in gamer tournaments-which was how he'd met Sonic. When the orphidnet hit, he embraced it.

For her part, Thuy had stuck it out at her parents' little stucco house in the Sunset district, straight through high school and college at San Francisco State and even a year of studying the violin at the Music Conservatory. But all that education had led to nothing substantial. Thuy wanted to be a writer, but her parents, timid Minh and bossy Khanh, had gotten her a job as an executive assistant at Golden Lucky, a Vietnamese restaurant-supply wholesaler in South San Francisco, with the possibility of a marriage to the boss. Thuy had been desperately bored there, so when the new global network unfurled on Orphid Night, she dove in and never looked back. She'd bailed on her family and shown up at Jayjay's squat in a condemned building off Valencia Street.

Thanks to the orphidnet, street-living was easy. In that first golden month, Thuy had crafted her big metastory, "Waking Up." But then she got more and more hung up on the Big Pig, and this summer a Hibraner had advised her to leave Jayjay for Kittie. Thuy's problems with the Pig were supposed to be from Jayjay's bad influence.