Postsingular

Holding tight to the harp, Thuy wrapped the image of Chu's Knot around the sunbeam-and then she was back in the interbrane teleportation zone, winging across that same endless sea, tracing its foam-flecked, wavy curves. Ond was next to her, helping her lug the harp, and beyond him was Chu, the three of them gliding along like superheroes.

Thuy was uneasy about the harp. The rushing wind kept setting its strings to vibrating. Repeatedly she reached out to damp them, but the magical instrument's body was resonating with a low, persistent thrum-just the thing to attract unwanted attention.

And now, oh no, here came the subbies. At first they looked like fat, stubby plants, but Thuy felt a tingle, and once again she was seeing bird-headed beings with human bodies flying along beneath the surface. The beaked heads poked up and swiveled to stare at the harp. Four of them.

"Shoo!" screamed Chu, losing his cool. He veered into his father, nearly breaking Ond's hold on the harp. A corner of the instrument dipped into the sea. The rushing surface set the transparent strings to singing a fresh chord, mellower than the ones before. Rainbows of quantum foam kicked up.

Squawking and gabbling, the subbies tugged at the harp with their cartoony white-gloved hands.

"Fly home to Nektar, Chu!" cried Ond, releasing his hold on the harp. Thuy too lost her grip on the golden prize. It sank beneath the surface, just as Gladax had feared.

Thuy screeched to a stop without exactly knowing how she did it. Ond and Chu rocketed heedlessly ahead. To hell with them. Thuy wasn't coming back to the Lobrane without that freaking magic harp.

Just now there were no subbies to be seen; they were all beneath the foamy, swirling skin of the Planck frontier. Gathering her courage, Thuy took a deep breath and dove through the surface into-more air. There wasn't water underneath the skin after all. There was air, and a grassy plain, and to make things the stranger, the direction of gravity flipped as Thuy passed through the wavy skin.

She was standing on the underside of the undulating membrane that she'd initially taken for the surface of a sea. From this side, the Planck frontier resembled a rolling landscape of steadily shifting hills and valleys, a lush estuarial parkland studded with Egyptian-style pyramids and monuments.

Animal-headed men and women milled about the river's marshy edge, some on foot and some hovering above the reeds. And there, climbing the steps of a lotus-columned temple, were the four bird-headed men with the magic harp! Flutes and drums sounded from within the great stone hall; firelight illuminated a blood-stained altar.

Not stopping to ponder, Thuy ran at the subbies, screaming her defiance.

Moments later she was bound hand and foot. Two jackal-headed women slung her from a stick and carried her up the steps behind the bird-men with the harp.

A familiar figure was standing before the firelit altar: Jeff Luty with his ponytail. He seemed to be holding a twitching giant scarab in one hand. The drumming rose to a crescendo, punctuated by shrieks from the flutes. Luty grimaced wetly and extended the scarab toward Thuy. The beetle opened his ragged jaws. CHAPTER 12

Lazy Eight

When the nanoslime attacked Jayjay, at first it hurt, but after a few minutes it started feeling good, and then he went into a dream and didn't even notice when the orphids cleared the slime off him. In the dream he thought he lived a whole lifetime without Thuy, and that at the end of his life his soul flew off to look for her.

What actually happened was that the Big Pig, for reasons of her own, threw Jayjay into a profoundly convincing hallucination that seemed, to him, to last a full sixty years. During the six or seven hours that Thuy was gone, Jayjay lived out an entire simulated life, full of incident and emotion, the sim life ending with death by virus at the deeply hallucinated age of eighty-four.

Of course it would have destroyed Jayjay's physical brain to run it at the hundred-thousand-fold speed-up rate required to live sixty years in six hours. So what the Big Pig did was to run a simulation of Jayjay in a virtual world. And once every real-world second, she used orphid signals to implant the latest interesting memories of the fake life into Jayjay's credulous meat brain, using his reactions to further guide the sim.

Why was the Pig doing this? The simulation was both a thought experiment and an aid to reasoning. Not only was the Big Pig trying to see how a certain kind of future might play out, she was also studying how higher-dimensional cosmologies might relate to physical forms of memory. And Jayjay, like it or not, was helping her all the way.

His hallucinated life went as follows.

Turning 30.

Thuy never came back at all. Ignoring Jayjay's pleas, at midnight the Big Pig released the nants. She was hell-bent on getting that extra memory.

Jayjay's body was the first thing the nants ate. And soon after, the whole planet had been turned into a mass of nants-who justified their crime by carrying out a half-assed simulation of Virtual Earth.

Despite the Big Pig's best programming efforts, the water, clouds, and fire never were quite right. In any case, the nants didn't always try that hard; they often settled for shortcuts as crude as representing a tree by a cookie-cutter flat polygon.

Jayjay's mental processes felt different; the mental and emotional life on Vearth was less drifty, more directed. Vearth's denizens rarely dreamed. But long after Jayjay settled in, he kept on missing Thuy. He wished she'd made it back from the Hibrane.

Jayjay found work doing physics research in the Vearth version of San Francisco. The Big Pig pulled strings to get him the position despite his lack of academic credentials. The lab was looking for weird new principles of physics capable of supercharging brute matter's computational capacities.

Although Jayjay enjoyed the job, he needed the salary, too. Vearth had an active cash economy, with the cash standing for computational resources. You needed money to buy or rent a simulated house, to view a show, or to get new clothes. And if you paid the Big Pig a certain monthly fee, your personal reality was rendered in higher resolution than was other people's.

Jayjay ended up in a Vearth romance with none other than Darlene of Metotem Books. And on Jayjay's thirtieth birthday, he and Darlene married.

The couple wanted to buy a house in the Mission District of San Francisco, but there was only so much room in Vearth's highest-resolution and best-simulated zones. So for their starter home, Jayjay and Darlene shoehorned themselves into a "thumbnail" development constructed within a basement storage room off Valencia Street. Two hundred and fifty-six families lived down there; upon entering the basement, the residents would shrink in size and drop to a low-resolution format so as to fit into thumbnail Victorian homes with jaggy coarse meshes.

Turning 40.

More and more of Vearth's simulated citizens gave up pantomiming a traditional lifestyle and became homeless pigheads. Although merging into the Big Pig had been unusual or even transgressive in the old world, it was a constant temptation on Vearth. With no physical bodies to pull them back, many pig-heads lost their identities for good. In effect the Big Pig ate them.

An opportunistic hive mind by the name of Gustav arose from a cabal of dissatisfied mid-level beezies. Gustav attracted a large following by promising equal computational resources for all. So as to reward his adherents with more room in which to live, Gustav arbitrarily scaled up the areas of the districts he controlled. Unfortunately, Gustav didn't own enough computational resources to properly simulate his supersized neighborhoods, which became as granular and jerky as old-school video arcade games.