Postsingular

Overpopulation led to a series of dirty little wars, with terrorism a growing problem. An incurable virus began to spread. Program after program crashed, and nant after nant was reduced to doing nothing but eternally repeating the single binary bit "0."

Jayjay had entered his life's bleak winter. Wistfully he proved one last result about what might have happened had the Lobraners been able to unroll the eighth dimension: The ubiquitous and accessible point at infinity would have provided an entanglement cha

He continued wondering about what kind of vibration might actually unfurl the eighth dimension. He'd managed to deduce that one could use wound-up hyperdimensional tubes as specially tuned strings. The order in which the strings were struck would be of key importance. But Jayjay was unable to reason his way to any conclusions about what the ideal order would be.

Increasingly discouraged and paranoid, Jayjay, aged eighty-four, went into the dirtiest, most crowded streets of the all but unrecognizable maze that had once been San Francisco. Soon he was infected with the so-called Baal virus.

Death came to him as he lay in thick silk sheets in a velvet-curtained room with a conventionally beautiful view. There was no way of knowing exactly where the room was. Nothing was real. Jayjay was glad to be leaving this dream within a dream.

His dying thoughts were of the bright, quirky girl he'd loved in his youth, sixty years before. Thuy Nguyen. Where had the time gone?

As Jayjay's soul left his dying body, his simulated world burst open like a balloon. The light of infinity shone upon him; he bathed in the music of a living harp. This, surely, was the sound he'd been searching for; this harp's magical vibrations could unfurl the eighth dimension. With the chord filling his being, Jayjay sped from the remains of his rubbishy virtual world, singing Thuy's name, hoping against hope for the return of his lost true love.

***

Meanwhile, Thuy was hanging like a captured lioness from a stick on the shoulders of two jackal-headed women-Thuy peering upside-down at nerdy Jeff Luty holding an alien beetle. Was this how her life was supposed to end? She felt terrified, incredulous, and deeply pissed off.

The sloping temple walls bore indistinct hieroglyphs that changed every time Thuy looked at them. The flute and drum sounds were coming from thin air. And there was no actual fire to produce the firelight. The Egyptian trappings were fully bogus. But the seven subbies were real; the four bird-men, the two jackal-women, and the sacred scarab beetle were giving off clear telepathic vibes via all-but-invisible tendrils co

"Do the gloating villain thing like at your lab," Thuy urged Luty, wanting to get something going. "That way I get another chance to kick your ass."

"Open my nant farm," mumbled Luty, his murky eyes blank. "Apply antinantanium." His lined gray face rippled like a puddle in the wind. His ponytail twitched; he licked his lips; he moved the beetle closer to Thuy's face.

Thuy now saw that Luty's forearm blended seamlessly into the beetle's abdomen. The beetle was part of Luty's body-or no, ick, it was the other way around. The Luty-thing was an appendage, a speaking-tube. The beetle had already devoured Luty some time back. The tormented man had met his end in Subdee.

"Gthx," said the scarab on his own. Sensing Thuy's attention, he swelled larger, with the Luty-thing's mass decreasing by an equivalent amount. "Glkt grx. " The beetle brushed his ante

"Yes, we're subbies from Subdee," intoned the scarab's Lutytube. "Yes, we ate Jeff Luty. It's a rare feed indeed when a multikilogram object plops through the Planck frontier. And now we've got a second course! Untie her, girls, and gather round."

The jackal-headed women crouched to lay Thuy on the ground, their butts big in the phantom firelight. They untied the thongs around Thuy's ankles and wrists, then stood dancing in place, their hands swaying, their feet mincing a steady little box step, their blank eyes blinking in unison. Thuy recalled her initial impression that the bird-men were fat plants. The dancer subbies were plants, too, veiling themselves in images gleaned from their feast on Luty's brain. Looking at the sexy jackal-women forms, Thuy felt a flicker of pity for the dead man and his lonely dreams.

The subbies cackled and chirped, drawing themselves into a tight circle around Thuy. The beetle had swelled to human size; he was standing on his spindly rear legs, wearing Luty as a penis-like appendage projecting from his belly. Jeff wouldn't have liked that.

One of the bird-men poked at Thuy's thigh with his curved beak; one of the jackal-women snuffled her armpit. Thuy thought of the old Norman Rockwell painting of a white family saying grace around Thanksgiving di

"Don't eat me!" cried Thuy. "I have to stop the nants."

"We like the nant plan," said the beetle bucking his abdomen to make the Luty-penis talk. "We subbies grow vatoscale roots to draw info from the quantum level of your cosmos, you see. We poke through the Planck frontier's foam. Once the nants eat Earth, your planet's high-level structures will be folded into the tasty quantum states of the nanomachines. We want to help the nants, yes. I've tweaked my metabolism to synthesize antinantanium, so I can send a root hair to exude a timely drop."

"Kkrt," croaked one of the bird-headed men. "Kth krrb."

The beetle chirped a response; the dangling Luty-shape explained. "My friends want to eat you right away, Thuy. But first I want you to tell me what that harp is for. I don't understand what my root hairs are drawing from your brain."

"I need to hold the harp to explain it," said Thuy, her mind racing.

The big sacred scarab dropped onto his six legs and ambled over to the harp. Impatiently a jackal-women bit off one of Thuy's pigtails and wolfed it down.

A bird-man gave the jackal-woman a sharp peck, then snipped Thuy's other pigtail and swallowed it, holding his head high to work the bolus down his crane's neck. The other subbies closed in on Thuy, tearing off bits of her clothes: her sleeves, part of her miniskirt, and then-oh no!-both of Thuy's beloved golden piezoplastic shoes. The beetle interrupted with a peremptory chirp. He backed into the circle of subbies, dragging the harp with his mandibles. The crowded painting gleamed.

This was Thuy's last chance to escape. Hoping for the best, she plucked a few strings. They tingled against her fingers in a highly unpleasant way, but she bore down and began strumming steadily. Thuy felt a flicker of sympathy from the harp, and then the sound took on a life of its own, rising to a whining drone like a leaf-blower's buzz.