Postsingular

"What are you watching, Jayjay?" Thuy asked Jayjay from the backseat. "I'm getting bored waiting for Dot and Red." The rain was even stronger than before, filling the car with soporific drumming.

"Colloquium talk outta Berkeley," said Jayjay. "Professor Prav Plato describing the dark-energy Higgs field." It was more than a talk, really. The orphidnetted, beezie-amplified Prof Prav was spewing out images, simulations, and links as he spoke; and Prav's kiqqie listeners were continually popping up comments and diagrams as well. Jayjay made a point of catching all Prav's performances. The individual orphids kept a full record of everything they'd seen or heard for the past few months, so you always had the option of replaying a talk or slowing it down. But right now Jayjay was real-timing it, snowboarding his way down a whipped-cream mountain of symbols, loving how Prav was steering the flow past the Dick Too Dibbs ads that kept popping up like quirky machine monsters in a maze. It was awesome to kiq it with the Prav.

The only problem was that, now that Jayjay was doing something interesting again, the beetles were back. He set his virtual ke

"The profs don't realize you're a dropout guttersnipe?" Kit-tie taunted Jayjay from the backseat. Once, a few weeks back, in a friendly, unguarded moment, Kittie had told Jayjay she admired his ambition. But most of the time she tried to act all hard and street-tough-covering for the fact that she came from a comfortable middle-class family in Palo Alto, slumming yuppie larva that she was. "Forget that double-doming and check where I'm at, kiqs," continued Kittie. "Heath Himbo is doing Lureen Morales on the Caliente show. I love that hard, slutty thing Lureen does with her upper lip. But, dammit, they've got Dick Too Dibbs as a paid-up legit sponsor. How lame is that? Outta the way, Dick Too. And he's carrying a beetle under his arm. Those freaking beetles are ruining everything!"

"They've got a rainbow sheen," said Thuy. "They're the same malware that Nektar has. Oh, shit, they're chewing on my notes for my metanovel!"

"Yo!" cried Sonic just then. "I finally got the cure. Give me access, homes."

Jayjay and the others opened their mental shields. Virtual Sonic flicked his fingers, scattering glowing blue fleas every which way. A flea landed on one of Jayjay's filter dogs and exploded; the dog's teeth got twice as long, his hair turned into purple flames-and he began tearing through the beetles like a starving man eating Thanksgiving di

"Yay, Sonic!" said Kittie and Thuy, who'd gotten cleaned up too.

"Calabi-Yau flea-grenades," said Sonic. "I made them in the Doodly Bug weapon shop. I'm smarter than the beezies, see!" He wore a proud little smile on his face. "Squark-gaugino supersymmetry," added Sonic, getting back into his Doodly Bug wars. "Compactify dimension seven. Destroy starboard glueball pellet three o'clock high: ftoom! "

Fighting off malware was a continual activity, but usually the beezies would automatically give the patches to your filter dogs. Why had the beetles been so tough to kill? And why were Nek-tar's beetles in this particular car? Jayjay set some beezies to searching through possible causes for the unfolding scenario. Inside the house old Dot and Red were dressed again; the rain was letting up.

"Lureen Morales is an idiot," Thuy said to Kittie, dipping backward into the conversation the way she liked to do. "She's got a pushed-in Pomeranian face. I'm much more attractive than her. Don't be a brainwashed starfucker, Kittie. You sound like a frat boy. You should be listening to Tawny Krush instead."

Jayjay gri

"You're cha

"She's rehearsing a heavy-metal symphony with the Kazakhstan guitar corps," said Thuy loftily, her high pigtails swaying. "I'm going to sample it for my metanovel. That's what I'm all about. Postsingular literature." She stuck out her tongue at Kit-tie and waggled it. "Am I 'hot' yet?"

"Come here, ban gБi, " said Kittie, fumbling at Thuy's miniskirt. "Heath's going waay down on Lureen."

Jayjay returned his attention to Prav Plato's rap, not wanting to witness Kittie pawing his lost love. Sonic remained obsessively focused on his game. A moment of silence, and then old Red stumped out of the house and pulled open the car door. The two women drew apart.

"Wassup, Red," said Jayjay.

To switch from Prof Prav's fraught, exquisite communication to Red's rudimentary vocalizations was, for Jayjay, like dropping out of a beautiful sunset-clouded sky into a crude, flat cartoon. For the first second or two, the old man's words seemed like the yipping of a dog. Jayjay felt guilty about the involuntary comparison. Red wasn't all that different from Papa, dead three years now from a gang fight in the penitentiary.

"Log into the Department of Motor Vehicles with me and I'll give you the title," repeated the old man, holding out the car keys.

"I want to own the car," put in Kittie. "Me! I'll retrofit it and trick it out."

Red craned his neck, peering avidly at the women in the backseat.

"Your orphids are blushing, Thuy," said Kittie. "Red's peeping you. Dig it, realman, we're watching you right back, you and your breeder in the house. I'm seeing hella many coats in your hall closet. Can I have the leopard-patterned Burberry knockoff with the dog-fur collar?"

Jayjay laughed; he admired the way that Kittie always pushed things too far, even though that made her expensive to carry as a friend.

"Take the damn car and get out of here," said Red.

With quick mental gestures, Kittie and Red completed the registration steps. But then the car wouldn't start, of course, having sat there for about a year. Fortunately it had a manual transmission; Red told Jayjay he could start it by putting it in second gear and popping the clutch while Sonic and Kittie rolled it down the driveway into the street. So Jayjay tried that, with Thuy sitting in the backseat fixing her lipstick, Thuy watching her face in the orphidnet instead of in a mirror.

"I miss you, Thuy," said Jayjay into their moment alone. "When are you coming back to me?"

"When you get yourself straight," said Thuy. "Maybe. I'm changing, Jayjay. My Hibraner friend Azaroth is helping me write my metanovel. I'm really done with the Pig."

"But you love the Pig," protested Jayjay. "When we got high this morning, we were cha

"And uh," mimicked Thuy. "That's how everyone's Big Pig stories end. We might as well be sudocokers. It's sad, Jayjay. You know I still like you a lot; Kittie's like a cellmate helping me break out of jail, not like the love of my life. And yes, of course, I remember our wheenk moment this morning, it was fu