Postsingular

"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 ante

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 Jay-jay, 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 i

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-ski

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."

"Sober?" protested Sonic, gazing down at the lifeless, limp shoon he'd drawn from his pocket, which was an especially creepy sight as the shoon's face still resembled Jayjay's. "How about dead ? Using the orphidnet isn't the same as being drunk or stoned."