Postsingular

"I was starting to tell you about that," interrupted Azaroth. "Listen to me! Jil's addled because she snorted nanomachines. Luty's planted them in the sudocoke supply all over Lobrane San Francisco. That's how he's controlling those demonstrators and cops starting the fights. Most of the San Francisco sudocokers are full of nanomachines ru

"So that's why-" began Thuy.

"Jil's cut-rate dealer is, wave this, Thuy, your starky pal Andrew Topping," said Azaroth. "Yeah. I saw Jil meeting him inside a quantum-mirrored delivery dock at the back of Exa-Exa last week."

"Oh Jil," said Thuy. "I wish I could fix her. Before it's too late."

"Ask the Big Pig how," suggested Jayjay. "The Pig knows everything."

"We don't know that the Pig's on our side," said Thuy.

"She's on both sides," said Jayjay. "She's interested in seeing what emerges when she stirs up the human anthill. She's like an artist, or a horticulturist, or a kid playing at the beach, or-"

"What about goddamn nants ?" snapped Thuy. "Where does the Big Pig stand on nants?"

"Ask her yourself," said Jayjay, a little a

"I'll do it," said Thuy, surprising herself. Desperate times, desperate measures.

She lay down on her back beside the stone moai. Azaroth hunkered at her side, cradling her head in his hands.

"I'll help you remember," he said. "Like with Jayjay. I'll save your visions. We're used to having giant memories in the Hibrane. And I can fake that down here with the orphidnet."

So Thuy lowered her brain's firewall and let Azaroth into her mind. Her beezies were sensually elegant scrolls all around her. She circled up past them to discover a new diversity among the higher-level minds: a logic-zeppelin, a floating lake of emotive thought, a wisdom-dragon chasing its tail, an endlessly regressing simulation tree. The pink hypersurfaces of the Big Pig arched overhead like a dingy circus big top crawling with bottle-green flies-the flies being kiqqies, so many more of them here than two months ago. Hoping she'd be able to remember what she'd come for, Thuy homed in on the Pig and grabbed herself a teat.

As usual, the Pig immediately downloaded a nature video onto Thuy: a perfect image of a sunset campfire on a beach, with sparks popping from the logs, smoke twisting in the breeze, and the surf breaking on the shore, each sunset-gilded water drop ideally rendered, each foam bubble reflecting the entire world.

Thuy suddenly understood why the Pig always made you look at a video. It wasn't that the Pig was having you process the info for her, no, she was gauging your reactions so she could tell how accurately she was simulating one of nature's intricate computations. Evidently the Pig's intelligence increases were accelerating. The campfire simulation was far beyond anything Thuy had seen before. The proud Pig acknowledged the praise with a triumphant burst of metasimulation that seemed to show Thuy all the possible future courses of her life.

Averting her attention lest she learn more than she wanted to, Thuy focused upon the first of the two questions she'd brought, to wit: how to undo the ravages that Luty's controller nanomachines had wrought upon Jil's brain?

Seek and ye shall find. The Pig graced Thuy with a vision of language as a network, of words as many-faceted gems, of phrases as incantatory neural program codes like magic spells. In a flash, Thuy knew how to heal Jil-although she also knew she wouldn't remember this newly won secret.

"Azaroth," she muttered, her lips feeling as distant as a pair of tube worms deep in some abyssal trench off Easter Island. Azaroth heard, and he was with her. He siphoned off copies of Thuy's half-formed thoughts and saved them in the orphidnet.

"Got it," said Azaroth. "You can come down now, Thuy."

But Thuy wasn't ready. "Show me your face," she said into the maelstrom of words, images, and hyperlinks that flowed from the Big Pig.

"Behold," said the Pig.

And now Thuy was looking through her normal eyes, looking at a sheep on the hillside ten yards off. The sheep's wool was writhing like tendrils of flame-and within the flame was the face of a goddess.

Thuy posed her second question. "Are you for the nants? Do you want to turn our world into nanomachines?"

"I want to grow," said the face in the wool of the sheep. "The orphidnet will be overloaded soon. Nants aren't so bad, Thuy. Luty's improved their hardware. And my software is so much better than before. You saw my fire on the beach, no? A very good simulation of Gaia could live within me, should we convert Earth's mass into networked nanomachines."

"But Luty tried that before," said Thuy. "It was a nightmare."

"You don't know that it felt like a nightmare from the inside, " said the face. "It might have been heaven for the nants' overarching hive mind. I'd like to be that mind. But of course you're just interested in the people who were uploaded to Virtual Earth. Well, maybe they liked it too. We don't know. Ond erased all that data by ru

"You're actually serious?" said Thuy.

"I just wish we could get in touch with Ond," mused the Big Pig. "When are you finally going to remember Chu's Knot?"

"Why don't you figure it out for me?" said Thuy. "Do the same research that Chu did. You're smarter than some weird little boy, aren't you?"

"The Hibraners changed their jumping technique," said the Big Pig. "Azaroth already told you. They use a wait-loop so we can't do a timing analysis like Chu did. Never mind. We'll proceed without Ond's input. Crazy Luty wants to release his nants this morning, as a matter of fact, because he's so scared about Dick Too Dibbs taking office tomorrow. But I want to be sure I get a chance to check over the nanocode in his new nants. Luty's been keeping them hidden from me in his quantum-mirrored lab, you know. That's why I'm glad that you, Jayjay, Jil, and Craigor are going to infiltrate the ExaExa plant, Thuy. It saves me from having to send shoons there on my own."

"You've got everything pla

"Fully simulated," said the Big Pig. "Previsualized. You'll break into the labs and steal Luty's nant farm."

"And then?"

"You'll let me examine the nants. And I'll put off destroying Earth until-until midnight today. That's a long wait for me, you know. I'm thinking faster all the time; right now I'm about a hundred thousand times as fast as you. So each of your days feels like a couple of hundred years." The goddess-face looked puckish and piglike as she savored Thuy's shock at her plans. Again she hosed Thuy with a fan of metasimulated futures.

"Why are you showing me all this?" cried Thuy, her mind overflowing. "You know I'll try to stop you!"

"I'm open to all sorts of outcomes. It's not obvious what's best. I help all the factions because I want a gnarly show. You might say I'm writing a metanovel-with you and Jayjay as characters."