Postsingular

People did still buy paper books, even though you could read a book on the orphidnet without owning it. Strictly speaking, you could publish a book by printing one copy and letting the orphids settle onto it. They'd crawl around and learn the text. For that matter, you could publish a book by thoroughly imagining it, and then recording your thoughts onto some orphids, as the metanovelists did. But the paper physicality of an old-style book remained pere

"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 go

"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 fu

"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 interlocking 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 Grand-master'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."