Текст книги "Postsingular"

Автор книги: Rudy Rucker

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"Of course I'm on your side, Jeff." Sonic's face is pale. "Look, if you thought you saw me doing something weird just now, that's only because I'm loading this last shoon with lies and disinformation. To trick Jayjay and Thuy into trusting me and rushing over here."

Luty's finger tightens on the trigger.

The video ends.

***

"Good info," Chief Brown told Thuy when the transmission was done. "This Sonic fellow, we're lucky he's on the inside. He can help us tomorrow. If he's alive. Nasty ending, huh? We'll find out the truth tomorrow. See you at 8 a.m. Oh, and Thuy, please keep this video material confidential. Don't post it for the public. We wouldn't want to spoil our surprise." The chief signed off again.

Again Thuy felt a flicker of uncertainty about Bim Brown. Was he for real? Maybe. Her beezies claimed the physical source coordinates of Bim's messages were matching the location of the San Francisco police station. But the guy seemed wrong.

In any case, there was no way in hell that Thuy was going to keep Sonic's crucial video confidential. Using the memory and network skills she'd developed as a metanovelist, she quickly reconstituted the video she'd just seen and posted the result to a secure site hosted by her personal orphids-all this took her less than a second.

"Good old Sonic," Jayjay was saying, a quaver in his voice. "I'm worried. I hope Luty was just scamming us. And what about that Dick Too Dibbs? The man has a brain! I'd been counting on him to be a total lackey for big biz. It's great knowing he's not gonna help Luty."

"Are you luring us into a trap?" Craigor asked the pelican sharply. The pelican didn't answer.

"Maybe the whole entire video was a fake," said Thuy, feeling more and more paranoid. There were too many levels to sort out. She squatted down to stare at the mildly glowing pelican. "Did Luty shoot Sonic or not?"

"I don't have time to talk," said the pelican in a matter of fact tone. "Because Jil is about to-"

"The kids are in bed," hollered Jil, popping out of the cabin door. She was totally wired, jerking around like a puppet on strings. Again Thuy noticed the spots of light inside Jil's head. "Don't get so close to that shoon, Thuy. We better kill it." Moving faster than seemed possible, Jil snatched up Jayjay's machete and ran at the hapless shoon. Before anyone could even think of stopping Jil, she'd lopped off the pelican's head. Jil whistled sharply and her Happy Shoons set to work eating the dead shoon's remains.

"Dammit, Jil," said Craigor in dismay. "Why did you have to-"

Jil whooped and flung the machete high into the air. It landed point first and stuck quivering in the deck. "Party time! Jil saved the ship!"

The others exchanged glances.

"Sleepy time," said Craigor with a weary sigh. "Thuy, do you want to bunk in the kitchen with Jayjay? That's where we've been keeping him. The floor bulges up to make beds when you ask."

"I totally don't want to sleep near those two," Thuy messaged Jayjay while favoring Craigor with a Mona Lisa smile. Her beezie agents were showing her all kinds of freaky scenarios that might unfold, should she and Jayjay sleep in the long cabin.

"Maybe we'll crash on the couch in your workshop, Craigor," said Jayjay aloud.

"I'll do better than that," said Jil, watching them with manic eyes. It was as if some external force were running her from the outside. "I'll make a special guesthouse for the lovebirds." She jerked her arms, messaging the ship's piezoplastic. The deck beside the long cabin bulged up to make an igloolike hut with portholes, a slanted door, and a sleeping platform inside.

"Thanks, Jil," said Thuy in a studiously neutral tone.

"Come on, baby," said Craigor, leading Jil back toward their bedroom. "Calm down."

Once Jayjay and Thuy were alone together in the crooked igloo, Jayjay tried to kiss Thuy, but she pushed him away. Not only were thousands of Founders fans watching them, Craigor and Jil might be tuned in too. And maybe their kids. Not to mention the fact that Thuy was hungry. All she'd had for supper was a bag of popcorn.

"Teleport us to San Francisco," she told Jayjay. "To my room in Nektar's garage. Kittie's not around. I guess you know that she and I aren't hooking up anymore."

"Yeah, I know," said Jayjay. "I've been watching you. But what if that fifth attack shoon comes after us? Sonic mentioned a giant ant."

"We'll teleport again," said Thuy. "Even though you still haven't told me how teleportation works." "It's a nonlinear interpolation via the entanglement matrices

of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen field," said Jayjay. And then he laughed, proud of how he could shuck the physics jive.

In the long cabin, Jil and Craigor's voices were rising in argument.

"Come on, smart guy," Thuy told Jayjay. "Entangle our butts outta here."

"We'll do the hop like before," Jayjay messaged her. "You visualize both places: your source location and your target. Thanks to the orphidnet, you can get the realtime target images almost right. But it takes one of my special interpolators to make a target look so real that you can actually teleport there."

Thuy focused on her calm, dry room in Nektar's garage. She overlaid it with the dank, crooked hut Jil had lodged them in. Jayjay passed her an interpolator: a glowing larva which busied itself with Thuy's image of her garage room, heightening the scene's reality. And now Thuy began mentally sewing the two scenes together. Thuy's bedroom door was the igloo's window; her kitchen sink was a bump on one of the little hut's curving walls; the street sounds of San Francisco were nanomapped into the splashing of the sea. Thuy drew the links tighter. She folded in upon herself, becoming a single hypercomplex particle. Somewhere in the distance she seemed to glimpse an endless sea. Where was she? Her mind and body blossomed.

Thuy and Jayjay were in the room over Nektar's garage. The night had turned beautiful and moonlit; all the clouds were gone. Thuy scanned the orphidnet: no attack shoons nearby, and no Kittie. "I want you," Thuy told Jayjay, pulling him onto her bed. "It's high time."

Naked under the sheets, Thuy's skin tingled. Jayjay's caresses were beautiful balm; Thuy felt pliant and monumental. It was wonderful to have Jayjay kissing her. For a moment they paused, staring into each others' eyes. Thanks to the orphidnet, they were visible in realtime to thousands of outsiders. Oh, well. Jay-jay entered Thuy and rocked until her sweet ache unknotted into trembling release. And, yes, he was coming too.

"I love you," said Jayjay a moment later.

"And I love you," said Thuy. "It was sad being alone."

"The Big Pig-I'm not hooked on her like before," said Jay-jay. "She's just a tool now, an info source. I spend weeks working out what my Big Pig visions mean. Deciphering the visions is the part I was missing before. I'd get high, and the next day I'd get high again."

"I don't think Big Pig trips could help me write my metanovel," said Thuy. "Not even if I had Azaroth helping me remember my visions. Did I tell you that, according to Azaroth, when Wheenk is done, I'll remember Chu's Knot? He'd speed me up if he could, but I don't see there being a shortcut. A metanovelist is like a farmer cultivating a field every day for a year. Maybe an inventor is more like a rock hound finding a gem and polishing it the same afternoon."

"Wheenk ties into Chu's Knot?" said Jayjay equably. "Everything fits, huh? Wheenk will be a masterpiece. You're the only person I've met who really seems smarter than me. Oh, and be sure to write about what a good lover I am."

"The Founders audience knows the full anatomical details," said Thuy. "I kind of watched us in the orphidnet just now." She felt sheepish admitting this.

"Me too," said Jayjay. "Being a star makes me feel powerful."

"Do you think you could jump us to the Hibrane?"

"Not yet," said Jayjay. "The problem is, there's no orphids in the Hibrane to feed me a target image. And Jil's memories of the Hibrane are so vague. I don't know what's going to happen to her."

"What does it vaguely look like in the Hibrane?"

"It's San Francisco, but everything is big and moves really slow. They don't have computers, and life is mellow. They wear bright-colored clothes. It's as if the 1970s kept on going there."

"Peace and wow," said Thuy, giggling. "I've noticed that about Azaroth's outfits. I mean, his flyaway-collar shirts are so-" She was interrupted by scritching and scrabbling noises from the stairs.

"The fifth attack shoon!" exclaimed Jayjay.

"The giant ant," confirmed Thuy, peering into the orphidnet. The four-foot-long plastic ant was halfway up the stairs, mandibles agape. Instantly Thuy was out of the bed, scampering around her room, pulling on her backup pair of striped yellow-and-black tights, her black miniskirt, her yellow sweater, her red plaid coat, and her beloved Yu Shu athletic shoes with the dragon heads.

"Teleport us," she messaged Jayjay as she readjusted her high pigtails in the mirror. "Happy Sun Pho Parlor on Valencia Street."

"You don't want to go somewhere fancier?" said Jayjay. "Like Puff? Or MouthPlusPlus?"

"Pho," said Thuy. "Hurry up!"

"We fuck and we pho," said Jayjay. "I'm for it."

The clack of plastic chopsticks overlaid Thuy's bedroom, the rich smell of spicy broth, the slurp and chatter of the diners. One of Jayjay's interpolators humped about the scene like a hyperkinetic inchworm, smoothing the tiny gaps among the orphid data points, enhancing the image toward the fully real. Once again, Thuy made mental connections between the source and target locations and she grew uncertain about which was which. Thuy's particles meshed together into a single subtle wave. Somewhere high above Thuy her bedroom door creaked open. Where was she now? She spread her arms and-pop.

The hostess didn't even blink when Thuy and Jayjay appeared inside the doorway of Happy Sun. It helped that Thuy was Vietnamese. "Two?" was all the woman said.

Minutes later, Thuy and Jayjay were leaning over huge steaming bowls, alternately spooning spiced beef broth and using chopsticks to pincer up skeins of rice noodles, shreds of meat, and the crisp bean sprouts and basil leaves that they'd shoveled into the soup from the condiment plate on the side. An electric beer sign hung on the wall above them.

"I don't know why I ever eat anything else," said Thuy, pausing for a sip of fresh-squeezed Vietnamese lemonade. "Pho is good for any time of day."

"I notice you pronounce it like fu'uh, " observed Jayjay.

"The name comes from the French for fire," said Thuy. "French stew is pot au feu. " She stared down at her noodles, stirring them into knots. A voice had just begun talking in her head. Her voice. She was getting blowback from the Thuy Nguyen character in Wheenk. The virtual Thuy was telling her not to sleep on the Merz Boat at all.

"Did your mother make pho at home?" Jayjay asked.

"Oh never," said Thuy distractedly. "It's too much trouble. Boiling the beef bones, skimming the stock, blackening the shallots and ginger roots with a blowtorch, putting them into a cloth bag with star anise and cinnamon to steep, filtering the stock– never mind. I'm hearing a voice. And I'm worried the ant shoon will catch us before we know it." Thuy laid some money on the table, just in case they had to leave in a rush.

Virtual Thuy kept on talking to her. Virtual Thuy wanted to show Thuy a little metastory she'd made. A scenario that might come true.

"Back to the boat now?" said Jayjay, glancing anxiously at the restaurant's glass door.

"I don't think so," mumbled Thuy. "Right now I have to-" The metastory in her head had begun to play. It was well crafted. Virtual Thuy was smarter than Linda Loca's George Washington character. Of course. Jayjay said something else, but Thuy wasn't listening to him. She was immersed in Virtual Thuy's metastory.

***

On the Merz Boat Craigor reads in bed, and Jil lies motionless and wide-eyed beside him-her image is overlaid with a vintage clip of the Bride of Dracula in her coffin.

Thuy and Jayjay settle into the crooked igloo and fall asleep. Thuy's dreams are animated images over her head. She sees seabirds stalking a stony shore. One of them plucks her up and carries her to a nest made of a single long loop of pho noodle, intricately woven over and under itself. Thuy in the nest is a baby bird with sparse yellow pinfeathers. She claws and pecks at the noodle, repeatedly breaking and retying the knot, each time changing its connectivity. A hairless pink rat pokes his head over the edge of the nest. Thuy is too busy with her knotting frenzy to notice him. The rat wriggles into the nest and presses up against Thuy from behind, his tiny red penis twitching against her.

Cut to Thuy waking up with the sun coming through a porthole. She thinks it's Jayjay spooned against her back. But the man's smell is wrong. And then she hears Jayjay's voice outside. The hut's door flies open, showing pearly sky and the silhouettes of Jayjay and Jil. Thuy looks over her shoulder at the man whose sticky private parts nestle against her thigh. Craigor. She's naked with Craigor on the couch in Craigor's workshop at the back of the boat.

"Musical beds," says Craigor with a sardonic grin. "Teaching Thuy the facts of life."

"Little Thuy does whoever she likes," says Jil in a flat, bitter tone. "Women, men, husbands, wives-she's playing you for a fool, Jayjay."

"Oh, that ends it," says Jayjay dejectedly. "Forget everything I said last night, Thuy." He turns away.

"But Craigor snuck!" cries Thuy. "This isn't what it looks like! Craigor carried me here while I was-"

Jayjay closes his eyes and disappears for good.

***

"Listless bastard," Thuy spat at Jayjay as the vision wore off. "Always so quick to give up and walk away. Why won't you fight for me? Don't you care at all?" The waiter was picking up the money. An old man. He was embarrassed to be overhearing a lovers' quarrel.

"What's with you?" said Jayjay, his voice going up an octave. "What'd I do?"

The sounds of the pho parlor filtered back in. Jayjay was staring at Thuy, his brown eyes worried. "I just had a vision," Thuy said. "One of my characters talking to me. We are definitely not going back to the Merz Boat tonight."

"Fine," said Jayjay. "But I'm seeing the attack ant coming down the sidewalk half a block away."

"I am so sick of being jerked around by that life-hating geek Luty," said Thuy, the anger still in her veins. On a sudden inspiration, she darted into the restaurant kitchen and asked the prep cook if she could borrow the heavy-duty blowtorch he was using to charbroil some peeled shallots and ginger roots for more stock. "I won't hurt anyone," Thuy assured him. "I need to fix something." The cook was a boy her age, a recent immigrant. She gave him her sweetest smile. Smiling back, he handed her the torch and a lighter.

"Come on, Thuy," said Jayjay, standing by their table. "The ant's almost here. We gotta hop. What are you doing with that thing?"

"Teaching the ant a lesson," said Thuy. She sat down, resting the blowtorch's gas cylinder between her legs, one hand on the valve, the other hand holding the lighter.

The ant entered on the heels of a pair of hipsters coming in for a late evening meal. They were loudly surprised to have a four-foot-long plastic ant push past their legs like a hungry dog. The diners looked up, some of them jumping to their feet and heading through the kitchen for the back door.

"Here I am," Thuy shrieked at the ant. "Come and get me, bit-head!"

Jayjay understood Thuy's plan; he stood behind her, watching with an expectant grin, ready to jump in if things went badly.

But things went well, at least for Thuy, although, yes, rather badly for Luty's ant. When the ant reared up to attack, Thuy lit the torch's narrow, seven-inch-long flame. With one quick gesture she burnt through the ligaments connecting the ant's head to its thorax, and then she severed the thorax from the bulging gaster in the rear. The head spun on the floor clacking its mandibles, the six-legged thorax scuttled out the restaurant door, and the smoldering gaster leaked a foul puddle.

"You watching me, Luty?" shouted Thuy into the air, holding the flaming torch high. "You're going down tomorrow!" She remembered something Azaroth had said to her at that church; he'd told her to make a plea to the mass mind. "Any Founders fans listening in?" cried Thuy. "Jeff Luty is alive and in hiding in the ExaExa labs. Here's the proof!" She sent out compressed copies of her "Losing My Head" metastory and of Sonic's video. "Come at 8 a.m. tomorrow, hundreds of you, thousands. We'll crush Luty before he can feed our Gaia to a new round of nants!"

"You rock, Thuy," said Jayjay, stepping forward to kick the ant's head out the door. "Good move."

Meanwhile the hostess and the boy from the kitchen dragged the fuming gaster outside. The old waiter was already cleaning the floor with a bucket and string mop. The chef-owner was holding a long knife and yelling at Thuy in Vietnamese, calling her a troublemaker. She apologized and gave him a little extra money.

Once Thuy and Jayjay were outside, they did a hop from Valencia Street to-Easter Island. As a girl, Thuy had read a picture book about the stone tiki idols known as moai. Ever since, she'd wanted to see them in person.

Jayjay and Thuy spent the night curled up next to an ancient statue on the slope of the extinct volcano Rano Raraku, where many of the famous moai had been quarried and carved. It was summer in Easter Island, with the clock three hours later than in California. A good spot, a warm night. Just in case, after arriving, Jayjay made a quick teleport hop to the inside of a Chilean military warehouse, fetching two automatic rifles, a box of ammo, and a box of hand grenades. He and Thuy slept in peace. CHAPTER 10

The Ark of the Nants

Next morning, Thuy woke to the sun glaring off the endless empty Pacific. She was glad to know it was Jayjay cuddled against her from behind-and not that desperate Craigor. She checked the time in her head: nine a.m. here, six a.m. in San Francisco. Plenty of time to relax, go over her dreams, and be grateful for life-as opposed to jumping right into worries and plans.

She'd dreamt of Chu's Knot again. Perhaps her dreams of the Knot were an objective correlative for her subconscious attempts to tease out the optimal plotline of her ever-more-intricate Wheenk. So intense was the dream work that some mornings Thuy felt she'd gotten no rest. In her dream last night, Thuy had been surfing a glowing ribbon of spaceways connecting the unfamiliar southern constellations, her lambent wakes forming a not-quite-complete image of the long-sought-for Knot.

Mulling over the dream as she stared over the Pacific, Thuy realized that the dream constellations had been diagrams of the individual scenes of her metanovel-up until this moment, she'd never seen the narrative so clearly.

It would be satisfying if her Wheenk character Thuy Nguyen could decisively defeat the Wheenk character Jeff Luty. And she was beginning to see a way to make this work. Jil Zonder was the key. Jil knew the ExaExa buildings well; when Jil was younger, she'd worked at ExaExa for years, posing for product-dancer shoots in every part of the compound. Jil would help, if Thuy could find a way to get her off sudocoke. Never mind Jil's affair with Jayjay, never mind her insults, Thuy admired the woman. Jil wasn't herself now. Thuy felt sorry for her. Jil had gotten a raw deal. It was just a matter of rewriting Jil's most recent scenes. Thuy's metanovel, her life, the Knot-all the same. Could real-life Thuy assassinate real-life Luty, if it came to that?

Enough scheming for now. Let the scenario beezies do their work, trust the muse, merge with the cosmos, enjoy the sea air. A tiny, natural ant picked its way through the grass; sheep grazed on the rolling rocky slope. Little star-shaped yellow flowers bloomed among the grasses. Looming up next to Thuy and Jay-jay's resting spot was the worn dark monolith of a long-nosed moai carved from bumpy volcanic basalt. He had long ears and thin, pursed lips; over the last thousand years he'd settled back as if to stare up at the stars.

Thuy felt a little sore from the car banging into her on Valencia Street yesterday. What a day that had been. And today was gonna be another. She stretched and did some bends, working out the kinks. It was so unreal to be on Easter Island.

Thuy and Jayjay had the hillside of moai all to themselves this morning-thanks to teleportation. Thuy was beginning to get the feeling that soon she'd be able to teleport on her own without Jayjay helping her. The missing piece was Jayjay's interpolation trick for making the target scene look so very real.

How would it be if everyone could teleport? The magical places would be overrun. Or maybe not. People already had the freedom to go anywhere in the world, yet most of them stuck to the beaten track or, worse, stayed home watching life via the orphidnet, safe and sterile and-had Luty actually said odorless

in that tape of Sonic's?

"Good morning, darling," said Jayjay.

"The real world is always so much better than I expect," said Thuy.

"That's why we have to fight for it," said Jayjay.

"We have some time before that," said Thuy. "Kiss me."

They made love again, and just as they came, Thuy thought she saw a live moai peering at her over Jayjay's shoulder-huge, cave-browed, luminous, a tiki god with a pursed mouth that was almost a smile.

"What?" said Jayjay, seeing the shock in Thuy's eyes. He rolled off her to look up too. There was indeed a giant live moai standing over them, with two more behind him-glowing, translucent, thirty feet tall. Hibraners. No need to reach for the guns.

"It's me," said the first moai. He made a slow gesture with his hand and became familiar Azaroth, dressed in green boots, yellow bell-bottoms, a chartreuse stocking cap for his topknot, and a ruby red shirt with floppy cuffs and a long, pointed collar. "These are my Lobraner friends Thuy and Jayjay," he informed the other two moai, one of them purple, the other green.

"Welcome to Rapa Nui, Thuy and Jayjay," said the purplish moai. "I am Lili." She jutted her great chin and waggled her long ears. "And this is my partner Atamu."

"I am a chief," said the greenish moai Atamu.

"Lili and Atamu live in Hibrane San Francisco like me," said Azaroth. "But their families came from Hibrane Easter Island. They like to jump here because it's easy stealing cuttles from the Lobrane Easter Island fishermen."

"Can someone tell me what it is with you guys and cuttlefish?" said Jayjay.

"We like to eat them," said Azaroth. "I thought you knew that. Thanks to teeping and omnividence, we fished our own cuttles extinct. Since then, the planetary mind has taught us to be more careful. In any case, our people especially dig eating the Lobrane cuttles since they're so dense and chewy. I should also mention that cuttlefish symbolize a certain holy cuttlefisherman of ancient times. He rose from death on the triangle to found one of our great world religions."

"What's life like in the Hibrane, Atamu?" asked Thuy. "Azaroth hasn't told me enough."

"No computers," said Atamu. "We think in our heads. We remember everything. It's easy to teleport. We're happy."

"But we like the Lobrane style," said Lili. "It's vibby. Blinky, flashy, beep and peep. I hear Azaroth and Chu have been making a Hibrane video game, but Gladax doesn't want the rest of us see it."

"Gladax always thinks she knows best," said Azaroth. "Video games are bad because she's too old to play them, but it's fine for her to learn Ond's digital algorithms for teeping through the whole city's minds at once. Good thing Ond's doing a bad job. If our telepathy wasn't a mess, Gladax would boss us even more."

"Watch your tongue," said Atamu uneasily. "Good old Gladax. Lili and I have to go process our cuttles now."

As Atamu and Lili prepared to jump back to the Hibrane, they dropped the moai body forms they'd been wearing and took on the appearance of thirty-foot-tall Pacific islanders wearing flip-flops, T-shirts, and ragged shorts.

"How do you change how you look?" asked Thuy. "I never saw that before."

"It's a vibby new trick I figured out," said Azaroth proudly. "My spike is that we can mold our orphid-based false-body images anyway we like. I wish my aunt Gladax would learn this. I couldn't believe on Orphid Night when she showed up on the Lobrane wearing her green sweatpants and that crappy dragon T-shirt. And then she starts telling you Lobraners she's an angel?"

"I think plenty of them believed her, Azaroth," said Lili gently. "Gladax has mana. Don't disrespect her. She might hear you even now. And that makes me scared."

"Good old Gladax!" said Atamu, as if repeating a formula.

"She won't hurt me," bragged Azaroth. "I'm family."

"But we're just dumpty cuttlefishers," said Atamu, putting an end to the dangerous conversation. He did a slow tumble, folding into a flat image that became a line and vanished.

"Wait, wait," Thuy called before Lili could disappear too. "Describe how you jump between the worlds, Lili. Jayjay and I want to figure it out, and Azaroth can't tell us anything useful."

"I use a special rongorongo chant," said Lili.

"Can you teach it to me?" asked Thuy.

"The chant isn't a row of things to say," said Lili. "I think it all at once. Bye!"

Lili's arms and legs shrank into her body, which turned upside down, inside out, became a disk, a line, a point-and was gone.

"I'm almosting it," said Jayjay. "How about you, Thuy?"

"Today's the day, kiq," said Azaroth. "That's what you call each other, isn't it? Kiq."

"Yeah, yeah," said Thuy, feeling anxious. "So today I'm supposed to take down Luty, destroy the nant farm, finish Wheenk, learn Chu's Knot, and go to the Hibrane?" She wished she was still staring at the sea. Or eating breakfast.

"Right," said Azaroth. "And Luty is the whole reason I came here. To warn you. That jitsy Bim Brown? He's not any chief of police at all. He's a security goon. Works for humpty Luty in the ExaExa labs."

"Okay, but how come my beezies said his coordinates matched the police station's?" said Thuy.

"I heard Luty say that he can make any message look like it comes from anywhere," said Azaroth. "He said the Big Pig is helping him. Brown and a bunch of ExaExa security guys are dressed like police and waiting to squish you. Look in the orphidnet."

Thuy focused on the ExaExa campus by the San Francisco Bay, south of the baseball stadium. The complex consisted of three linked, windowless buildings. On the north end was the lab, a fanciful dome patterned in an irregular tessellation of brown and white triangles. In the center was the administrative building, a shiny orange box with an entryway set off by green spirals and scrolls etched onto the outer wall, the curving lines rising up to sketch the outline of the ExaExa beetle. To the south was the large, irregular, curved trapezoid of the nanomachine fab, a functionalistic white building with colored pipes and wires writhing along the upper reaches of its outer walls, the underlying walls painted with a gargantuan ExaExa beetle plus the company name, the script E s like backward numeral 3s.

Other than a narrow driveway and the road leading to the loading docks at the southern end of the fab, there was little asphalt to be seen, for the ExaExa parking area was underground. The building sat at the edge of a grassy green meadow, beautifully lit by the slanting morning sun. After all the rains, it was going to be a nice day in California.

Even though it wasn't yet seven a.m. there, demonstrators had begun to crowd the field. A handful of guys who looked like cops were guarding the loading docks and the main entrance door; they had two large SUVs painted like police cars. Zooming in, Thuy could see that one of the men in uniform was the so-called Bim Brown she'd spoken with.

"Look," Thuy remarked to Jayjay, who'd tuned in as well. "Their paddy wagons are painted with quantum-mirror varnish on the inside. Real cops don't do that. The varnish is too expensive."

"Real cops don't use SUVs at all anymore," said Jayjay. "What it is, if Luty gets us into one of those vans, we won't be able to teleport out."

"I bet a lot of those demonstrators are Luty's agents, too," said Azaroth. "He's got people snorting nanomachines into their brains to addle them so-"

"How does Luty think he can get away with this?" interrupted Thuy, not listening to the second part. "Aren't the real cops gonna come, too? And the army and the feds? I publicized all that information about Luty yesterday, dammit."

"The right-wingers are smearing you as a liar," said Jayjay. "I just scanned the news. Deep down, the religious right wants the world to end. They hate women, and they hate Earth. For them, Gaia is a piece of crap for us to use up. The sooner we destroy her, the sooner we get clean and go to heaven. They're equating the nants to their myth of the rapture, see?"

"But if Sonic's video was real, then Dick Too Dibbs is against the nants!" said Thuy. "He's not gonna pander to the right wing!"

"Big problem for Luty," said Jayjay. "Too Dibbs has enough mainstream support to come down much harder on Luty than Lampton ever did. Too Dibbs could be the new broom that sweeps clean. All the more reason for Luty to make his move today. Oh, look what's happening now!"

Again Thuy focused on the orphidnet view of the ExaExa complex. Hallelujah, some genuine cops and feds were arriving in shiny black electric cars! And now the fighting began.

A fake demonstrator near the main entrance pulled out a pistol and shot one of the real cops. The real cops began defending themselves as more and more of the demonstrators attacked them. The fake cops escalated, opening up on the demonstrators with automatic weapons fire. And now several of the real cops opened fire on their fellow police officers. It seemed as if Luty might have infiltrated some provocateurs onto the force as well as into the crowd of protestors. With Luty's agents fanning the violence, people were attacking each other without mercy. And nobody was doing anything about breaching the entrances to ExaExa.