Postsingular

"I'm tender," said Jayjay. "And I'm not like a sudocoker at all. I'm much smarter than I used to be. Hold tight." He popped the clutch; the car lurched; the motor caught and died.

"Pump the gas pedal!" shouted Red, watching from his front steps.

"One more try, loser," Kittie hollered to Jayjay. "Then I drive and you push." The car begin rolling forward again.

"Warn me earlier," said Thuy, wiping a lipstick smear off her nose. "Using the beezies to help you think is one thing, Jayjay, but getting high on the Pig is something else. Those physicists you admire, they're spending their spare time buffing up their theories. They're not getting wasted and sleeping on the floor. Kittie and I are go

"Oh, come on, stick around," said Jayjay, not taking the threat all that seriously. "I'm good story material, no? Hold tight again." This time the engine caught. Jayjay paused, gu

It was a short, exciting drive to Dolores Heights. Street kids ran along the sidewalk, cheering the roaring silver dinosaur. With the gasoline supply closed down, all you saw on the roads anymore were electric retrofits. Empowered by orphidic intelligence amplification, the automotive engineers had come up with cheap gas-to-electric conversion kits, not to mention lightweight batteries and nanotech solar cells that you brushed onto your car's roof like enamel paint.

The belching SUV wallowed across Dolores Street and up the steep little hill to Nektar's gingerbread mansion, the highest on the ridge, save for one.

"I can't believe we're going to Nektar Lundquist's," exulted Kittie. "And do you realize that's Lureen Morales's place at the very top of the hill? We're with the stars!"

The engine sputtered and missed; the gas was ru

Nektar's Beetles

Lying on her bed on the second floor, Nektar heard the unaccustomed sound of a car engine. Night before last, the beetles had come in her sleep like a fever dream, and ever since then she couldn't fully wake up. The beetles kept wedging her orphidnet access open, kept getting into her head.

She was too weak to sit up, and there was no hope of using the orphidnet to examine her garage, what with the virtual beetles in the way, each of them a jagged oval core with faceted eyes, pinchy-feely mouths, and zigzag legs.

Although Nektar was a big celeb, nobody was here to help her-other than some little shoon robots she'd gotten from Jil Zonder.

Right now, so far as the public understood the situation, Nektar was on a weight-reducing sudocoke binge. But in reality she didn't use sudocoke; and that was talcum powder on the mirror by her bed. The beetles had made her lay out the lines; whenever she balked at their requests, they'd feed her images she could barely stand to see. At least so far she'd refused to cut an ad for Dick Too Dibbs. That's what they were after.

Nektar strained her ears to listen for more noises from the garage, but all she heard were the chirps and clicks from the beetle currently in her visual field.

"You say sorry about insulting Homesteadies," repeated the beetle. "Make Too Dibbs testimonial now."

Out of the question. The first Dick Dibbs had sent the nants to eat the Earth. Nektar would never ever forget that. Nor would she forget that her husband Ond had let the nants eat their son Chu in order to pass some viral code to the nants. Nektar had stopped loving Ond then and there-even though Ond's crazy plan had worked. The nants had reassembled everything they'd destroyed, including Chu.

President Dick Dibbs and his vice president had been impeached, convicted, and executed like the rabid dogs they were, but Jeff Luty had escaped. And Nantel had regrouped as ExaExa. According to Ond, Luty was safely hidden from the orphidnet within the quantum-mirror-shielded walls of the ExaExa labs. They'd had the mirroring in place even before they released the orphids. Taking care of the boss.

Nektar drifted back from her reverie. Probably the malware beetles were a Jeff Luty product. Ond said Jeff liked insects better than humans because they were closer to being machines. Not only ants, but beetles as well, especially the sacred scarab dung beetle of ancient Egypt. Back at Nantel, Jeff had given Ond a mounted giant beetle as an award; it was still kicking around the house somewhere.

If Luty had made these software beetles, then no wonder they'd come to attack Nektar. Jeff had always had it in for her. Back in the Nantel days, Luty had tried to take over Ond's life, keeping him at the lab till late, seven days a week. Maybe he had some sick crush on Ond. It had taken some severe tantrums on Nektar's part to get Ond a more reasonable schedule, and Luty had never forgiven Nektar.

Ond always said Luty was like a child, forgetful of the niceties, a genius in the rough, but Nektar had never liked the guy, not his chewed-down fingernails, not his weird vocabulary of made-up words, not his lip balm, not his greasy ponytail. Why couldn't Luty take ten minutes off and cut his hair? Of course, the worst was that he'd enlisted Ond into his nant project of destroying the natural world. Yes, Ond had backed off in the end, but by then it had been too late for Nektar. If Luty hadn't warped Ond, then Nektar and Ond might still have been together.

Gathering her strength, Nektar executed a savage mental lunge that closed down the image of the beetle currently threatening her. She glanced over at her bedside clock. Ten fifteen in the morning. And now the minute hand bent up and out toward her, articulating itself like a beetle leg. Nektar willed the leg back into a minute hand. The clock face dropped off, and a fresh beetle crawled out.

"You must record ad," it insisted. "We exhaust time and patience. More punish." Day before yesterday, Nektar had ranted against Too Dibbs and the Homesteadies, putting the truth out there for her Founders audience. That's what had set this off.

"You know I won't help you," said Nektar flatly. "I'd rather die. I meant what I said and I'll say it again." She threw her remembered words in the beetle's face. "The Homesteady Party wants people to be like sheep, easy to fleece. That's why they're against personal freedom, against quirky culture, against self-expression, against education, against art. They want a mass mind they can mass-process like synthoid tomatoes. Is anyone in the orphidnet cha

In response, the beetle's chirping grew guttural, sinister. Nektar braced herself. An image of her son Chu appeared. A long, solemn knife hovered beside him like the bow of a violin.

Trying to draw back from the coming torment, Nektar groped for a memory, any memory, and came up with a clip of her and rival chef Jose having their final fight in the Puff kitchen: Jose holding that same kind of long knife to his own throat, making the tiniest of cuts and lifting a drop of his blood to Nektar's lips, all the while glaring into her eyes. "Taste that, " he'd hissed. "You bitch." A pair of beetle legs unfurled from Jose's belly, taking hold of the knife. Jose's face became Chu's. The knife sawed into Chu's neck; the boy's head flopped back and all the blood of his body gushed out.

Nektar moaned and rocked, drawing deeper into herself. As if from somewhere very far away, she felt water on her lips. Those good little shoons were taking care of her. Maybe the beezies would find a way to save her soon. Maybe there were people in the garage. Hang on, Nektar. A beetle leg rummaged down through her veils of thought, its spiny foot trying to snag her attention. Nektar burrowed deeper, replaying triumphal memories of her rise to the head chef 's post at Puff.