Postsingular

"Hey, ban gБi, " said Kittie, dolled up and butch in a shiny black leather pantsuit, her hair in spikes, the cartoony blue tattoo on her neck looking good. Nektar had bought her the suit. Kittie raised a glass of red wine. "Here's to Dick Too Dibbs's inauguration. We're freakin' doomed."

"I always look for the upside," said Darlene, dressed in her usual boots, jeans, and cowboy shirt, but with a fancy necklace. "See this?" The necklace's rhodopsin-doped image-beads were displaying silent talking heads of Bernard Lampton and Dick Too Dibbs, plus orphidnet graphics of Hibraners, beezie scrolls, and Pharaoh cuttlefish. "Isn't it pretty?" said Darlene. "Scary times galvanize the art community."

"Let's hope the Homesteadies don't zombify the kiqs and march us into death camps," said Kittie. "Executive order, day one."

"Dick Too won't be that bad," said Darlene. She was incorrigibly upbeat, with long front teeth and an upper lip that projected out. "I think he's cute. And he's sworn up and down that he'll hunt down Luty and execute him. I believe him."

"Believe a guy from the Homesteady Party?" put in Thuy.

"Life's a long and winding river," said Darlene. "The forces of evil never win for long. Come on, Thuy, let's go in my office so you can personalize some access codes for your fans. And tell me what you want me to say when I introduce you. Have you been tracking the orphidnet rank of your teaser post? It's super. We're go

Darlene had set out about twenty chairs. A dozen people were already seated, including Thuy's fellow metanovelists Gerry Gurken, Carla Standard, Jack Sparks, and Linda Loca. Each of them had a very different take on how to make a metanovel.

Gerry's metanovel Banality was a vast combine of images all drawn from one and the same instant on a certain day. No time elapsed in this work, only space, and the story was the user's gradual apprehension of a vast conspiracy woven throughout not only our world but also throughout the worlds of dreams, thoughts, and the Hibrane. The images were juxtaposed in suggestive ways and were accompanied by a spoken voice-over delivered by a virtual Gerry Gurken, who wandered his memory palace at the user's side.

Despite the dismissive remarks that Darlene sometimes made about Banality, Gerry Gurken was a craftsman to the core. Any ten-minute block of the work was fascinating, disorienting, and revelatory-leaving the user's mind off-center and agog. Unfortunately, by the twenty-minute mark, most users found Banality to be too much.

Intense, lipsticked, nail-biting Carla Standard had used what she called a simworld approach in creating her Mission district metanovel You're a Bum! Her virtual characters were artificially alive, always in action, and somewhat unpredictable, a bit like the nonplayer characters in an old-school video game. Rather than writing story lines, Carla endowed her characters with goals and drives, leaving them free to interact like seagulls in a wheeling flock. Each user's You're a Bum! experience was tailored with data drawn from the user's personal meshes and social situations. In other words, when you accessed Carla's metanovel, you saw something vaguely resembling your own life.

Thuy's two sessions with You're a Bum! had proved painful, even lacerating. First she'd relived the moment last spring when she and Jayjay stood under a flowering plum tree off Mission Street, Jayjay shaking the tree to make the petals shower down upon her like perfumed confetti, all the while Jayjay's eyes were melting with love. And then she'd seen their breakup, but more objectively than before, with the simulated Thuy hungover from the Big Pig, her clothes in disarray, Thuy hysterically screaming at Jayjay in a mural-lined alley, and poor Jayjay's trembling fingers nervously adjusting his coat and hat. Oh, why did she have to miss Jayjay so much?

Like Gerry Gurken, the excitable Jack Sparks was one of Thuy's admirers, but he held little physical appeal for her. He was too thin and overwrought, too needy. As part of his doomed campaign to engage Thuy's affection, Sparks had undertaken The Thuy Fan, an unwritable and unreadable metanovel wherein every possible action path of his young heroine Thuy would be traced. Waking up with a man, a woman, or nobody in bed beside her, Thuy hopped out of the right or left side of her bed, or perhaps she crawled over the foot end of the bed. She put on her slippers or threw them out the window, if she had a window. In some forkings she jumped out the window herself, but in most she went to take a shower. In the shower she sang or washed or had sex with her partner. And so on. And so on. In practice, no human author would have had the time and energy to contemplate so richly ramified a document as The Thuy Fan, but Jack Sparks had his beezies helping him by autonomously roughing in sketches of ever-more action paths.

Bouncy Linda Loca was working on a metanovel entitled George Washington, depicting the world as seen from the point of view of a dollar bill. What lent her work its piquancy was how literally she'd managed to execute the plan: perusing George Washington, you felt flat and crinkly; you spent most of your time in a wallet or folded in a pocket; and when you came out into the air the main things you saw were countertops and people's hands. When Linda's George Washington dollar changed hands, the bill moved the story along by buying drinks, influence, or sex, and thereby sketching the rise and fall of a young cop whom Linda had named George Washington as well.

Linda was having blowback issues with this George Washington character because, to round him out, she'd made him an aspiring writer. Problem was, George began pestering Linda with messages about her metanovel-dumb ideas, by and large. The character was, after all, only a beezie simulation of a human, without the deep complexity that made an artist.

For her part, Thuy was making Wheenk into what she termed a transreal lifebox, meaning that her metanovel was to capture the waking dream of her life as she experienced it– while sufficiently bending the truth to allow for a fortuitously emerging dramatic plot. Thuy wanted Wheenk to incorporate not only the interesting things she saw and heard but also the things that she thought and felt. Rather than coding her i

In Darlene's office-really a windowless storage room with a desk-Thuy took off her coat and personalized the dozen "Losing My Head" access codes that Darlene had sold in advance; for each of them she said the date and the user's name and affixed an orphidnet link to the dedication event. Then she washed up and drank a glass of water.

"So what should I say about you?" asked Darlene. She and Thuy didn't really know each other very well. "Say I'm a genius, and that they should buy my work." Thuy was feeling anxious and lonely. "Say I have a broken heart."

"I noticed that in 'Losing My Head,' " said Darlene. Now that Thuy had began publishing, she sometimes had the experience of people knowing her better than she realized. "How come you don't get Jayjay back?" continued Darlene. "Even though he's still on the Merz Boat, he broke up with Jil in November. Everyone knows that from Founders. If you don't want Jayjay, I'm go