Текст книги "Postsingular"

Автор книги: Rudy Rucker

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"No use," said Azaroth, barely glancing at Thuy. "You've seen how she is."

"Feisty," muttered Gladax. "Too smart for her own good." She shook her head. "Let's do the easy thing first. Let's talk to the damned flowers." Moving like molasses, Azaroth and Gladax made their way outdoors.

Alone in the tai chi room, Thuy began stretching her bonds in earnest. Rather than struggling at random, she pulsed her kicks and shoves to match the rubber's resonant rate. With each pulse she extended her legs and arms a little further. And then she broke the rhythm with a double pulse, catching the material on its way in. This was enough. A band snapped.

Gladax was berating her gardener and her flowers, while Azaroth, watching Thuy from the corner of his eye, did his best to block Gladax's line of sight. Wriggling like an eel, Thuy got free of the broken net and thudded heavily to the straw mat. Fortunately she landed well. Sticking close to the floor, she wormed down the length of the room to the harp, a gilded triangle resting on one corner. This instrument was strung with thirty-four furiously vibrating strings that seemed somehow higher-dimensional.

The harp's front edge was a fluted wooden column with a scrolled capital, the rear edge was a tapering hollow-bodied wooden soundbox, and the crosspiece on top was an elegant S-curve. The flat inner side of the soundbox bore a masterful oil painting of a teeming garden of Eden. Two lovers were listening to the music of a winged, pale blue demon playing his own little harp. The lovers looked familiar. Like Jayjay and Thuy? Impossible. From what Gladax had said about inheriting the harp from her ancestors, the instrument must have been five or six hundred years old.

Thuy took the harp in both hands; although shoulder-high, it felt light. She tiptoed towards the door connecting the tai chi room to the rest of the house.

The harp's sound rose in pitch and-just like a fairy-tale harp-she cried out to Gladax in a woman's voice. "Mistress! Save me!"

Thuy laid her hand across the harp strings. The space-warping tubes tingled against her, but when she pushed forcefully enough they fell still. And now her telepathy was working again. For just a moment she could sense the strange otherworldly mind of the harp. The harp was an intelligent being from another order of reality. Gazing into her mind was like standing at the lip of a high, windy cliff. Thuy grew dizzy; she tottered on her feet. But then a veil dropped and the harp was once again a manageable triangle of wood.

Out in the garden Azaroth had clamped his aunt in a bear-hug. He was talking to her; he was pleading for her to let Thuy be. Good Azaroth.

According to Ond's overly elaborate plan, at this point he and Chu were supposed to appear through a tunnel they'd dug through the floor. But there hadn't been any dogs in the boys' video game simulation of the house. Teeping the street, Thuy saw them backed up against the house's front steps by two huge mastiffs.

Lugging the now silent harp, Thuy made her way through winding hallways to Gladax's front door. The heavy door was locked, so Thuy kicked a big hole in the stucco wall next to the door.

As she emerged, one of the dogs came up the steps. Thuy set down the harp, sprang at the beast and thumped him on the side of his head. The monster shook off the blow; he had a skull like a boulder. But Thuy kept up her attack, raining blows. Yes, the dogs were big, but they were slow. And when Thuy began punching their soft noses, the brutes turned tail, and ran up the street.

"Come on !" Thuy yelled to Ond and Chu, standing there at the bottom of the steps. "Help me carry the harp. We're heading home!"

The three of them trotted two blocks down the hill, Ond holding one end of the painted harp. The dogs were loudly barking-but they weren't going to attack again. At the bend of the street they found a vest-pocket park with a bench and a bed of chrysanthemums. Catching their breath on the bench, the three had a view west over the pastel buildings of the city toward the ocean, the bay, and the Hibrane version of the Golden Gate Bridge. The waters lay sullen and gray below the wintry afternoon sky. But the city looked peaceful and human-scale. It was nice to think there were no digital computers here.

"We have to focus on my Knot now," said Chu.

"Yes," said Thuy. She'd been here-how long? Only an hour by the slow Hibrane clocks-but six hours of her body's time, six hours of Lobrane time. Was Jayjay okay? Surely the Big Pig hadn't released the nants yet, had she?

"I'll be glad to get home," said Ond. He patted the hollow soundbox of the harp, which gave off a resonant echo. "Good work getting this, Thuy. I'm betting it'll make the nants obsolete. You'll strum it and universal extra memory will-unfurl."

"That's what you keep saying," said Thuy, feeling a bit doubtful. "What if Gladax hops down here and kills us? Or follows us back home."

"Azaroth's her only heir," said Ond. "When he really works on her, he can always get her to give in."

Thuy teeped cautiously toward Gladax's garden. The old woman and her nephew were sitting on a bench laughing. Perhaps everything was going to be all right after all. Or-a sudden paranoid thought-maybe this was a triple cross, and the Hibraners were in fact glad to get rid of the magic harp. Maybe the harp wanted Thuy to take it to the Lobrane.

"There's more to this harp than you realize," Thuy told Ond. "She's alive. She's an alien."

"Maybe so," said Ond in a soothing tone, not really believing her. "We have to go forward anyway, Thuy. Our plan is Earth's only hope."

"Your plan, " snorted Thuy. "A fat lot of help you two have been with it so far."

"We're scared of dogs, okay?" said Chu. "Ond's right, it's time to go."

The three of them focused on Chu's Knot, trying to relax enough to enter the interbrane gap. But with all the worries, it was hard to get underway. Hard to get their heads in the right place. They took a break and talked a little more.

"Did you guys see a weird ocean when you came across?" Thuy asked Ond.

"That's the Planck frontier," said Ond. "Physics below the Planck length is a scale-inverted image of the physics above the Planck length. If someone were to shrink down below that foamy frontier, they'd feel like they were expanding into another cosmos. The world of the subdimensions."

"The Hibraners call it Subdee," said Chu. "And those bird-headed men are the subbies. Subbies from Subdee. Thanks to them it's dangerous to jump branes."

"They poke up their heads to eat our information," said Ond.

"More than information," said Chu. "They want to eat our bodies too."

"I hate the subbies," said Thuy.

A single ray of sun broke through the clouds to illuminate the little park.

"I want to jump back right now," said Chu. "I want my orphidnet. Let's ride the sunbeam. That's how to do it. And remember to use my Knot to point you the right way. The subbies aren't the only thing to worry about. You can get lost between the two branes. There's a lot of different directions in hyperspace."

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.

Meanwhile, in the hi-res district of San Francisco, Jayjay's professional life was going well; he'd begun making some discoveries about the higher dimensions of space. In line with orthodox brane theory, the Lobrane dimensions beyond ordinary space and time were curled into Planck-length circles comprising a knotty Calabi-Yau manifold. But by studying the records of people's conversations with Hibraners on Orphid Night, Jayjay deduced that one of the Hibrane's higher dimensions was stretched to infinite length. The Hibraners spoke of this special dimension as being their eighth dimension.

Jayjay received a fat bonus from his lab, and soon after his fortieth birthday, he and Darlene moved into a full-size high-resolution cloud-house that floated above Vearth's Golden Gate Bridge. By and large, Darlene was happy, although after Jayjay talked to her once too often about how much he missed Thuy, she erased all the copies of Thuy's autobiographical metanovel Wheenk that she could find. But Jayjay forgave her.

In the heat of their make-up sex, Jayjay and Darlene decided to have a child. Having purchased enough computational resources for an additional simulated human, they programmed the child as best they could with a mixture of their memories, skills and behaviors. The baby was a boy; they named him Dirk.

Turning 50.

Life in Gustav's camp was on a downward spiral. To handle his overambitious land grants, Gustav's simulations grew ever coarser: mountains were cones, lawns were smooth green surfaces, and people's subconscious minds weren't simulated at all. Gustav's followers began defecting to the Big Pig, but then Gustav developed blockade software to fence them in. Jayjay was friends with some physicists in the Gustav-run zones, and, in an effort to help them, he cobbled together some breakout software that made it possible to flee Gustav's regime. The breakout ware spread like wildfire, and Gustav's reign was over.

But now, having observed that Gustav's simulated humans had gotten along quite well without subconscious minds, the Big Pig began skimping on her own personality-modeling routines.

Soon after his fiftieth birthday, Jayjay became obsessed with the notion that Darlene's behavior had become inhumanly rigid and stereotyped. The Big Pig's shortcuts had made Darlene uncanny to him. Right around then Jayjay stumbled on a surviving copy of Wheenk.

He cajoled the Big Pig into creating a simulated version of Thuy, based upon her metanovel. Jayjay and the young sim began a torrid affair. But then Darlene caught them in bed together. Darlene left Jayjay, taking their son Dirk along. Quite soon the shallowness of the simulated Thuy wore thin. Jayjay extinguished the sim by removing her computational resources. He felt guilty and depressed.

But his professional life kept chugging along. Regarding the possibility of unrolling the eighth dimension, Jayjay proved that, although the unrolled extra dimension would be infinite in extent, it could be in practice possible to access any location along this infinite line in a fixed and bounded amount of time. This "Zeno metric," as a mathematician friend termed it, guaranteed that an unrolled eighth dimension could act as a ubiquitous and infinitely capacious memory storage device. A human mind could scan over the first meter of the unrolled dimension in 0.9 seconds, the second meter in 0.09 seconds, the third meter in 0.009 seconds, the fourth in 0.0009 seconds …and so on through an infinite series that could be traversed in one second because, after all, 1.0 lies beyond the endless decimal number 0.999999.. . .

This result had the profound implication that, had the real Earthlings learned how to unroll the eighth dimension, then there would have been no need to grind the planet into nants. With the eighth dimension unrolled, the Big Pig could have found all the memory she could ever need, right in the crevices of ordinary matter.

Turning 60.

A reality-hacking movement arose. People learned to edit their environments on the fly, and the legacy of the shattered Earth's former geography fell by the wayside. Vearth mountains moved, chasms opened, seas grew. It became increasingly difficult to decide where you were.

Some simpler souls quailed at the new freedoms. Large numbers of them enlisted in faiths offering brutally simple answers. As well as the new sects, hundreds of narrowly ethnic clans arose.

Meanwhile Jayjay was consolidating his researches on "lazy eight," as the Hibraners reportedly termed their unrolled eighth dimension. Jayjay was sixty years old, and he had a sense that he was running out of time. Despite Luty's erstwhile promises of immortality for everyone, Vearth could only support so many virtual agents. With the birth rate going up, the older and weaker sims were being culled out.

Jayjay was comforted by the fact that his son Dirk had come to live with him. Rather than making fresh discoveries, Jayjay was polishing and clarifying his old results, in part by teaching them to his beloved Vearth-born boy.

He liked to explain, for instance, that unrolling the eighth dimension would be effectively the same as taking the vanishing point of a painting and having it be next to every location of space. Each pathway to this universally accessible point at infinity would provide an unlimited amount of memory.

Jayjay was well off enough to attract a new wife: Keppy. Keppy was a second-generation virtual human like Dirk. Born in Vearth, she'd never been a real person at all. Keppy spent a lot of her time on low-level nant hunts with a flock of beezies. Dirk often joined her.

Turning 70.

As part of their endless jockeying for more influence, the sect and clan leaders began exhorting their followers to reproduce without limit. The population levels exploded, with the result that even the wealthiest people's realities had clunky performance and low resolution. The Big Pig stepped up her use of cleansing squads to erase those humans who were contributing the least to the group mind. Among the increasingly desperate lower classes, the beezie nant hunts took on the intense quality of mass wars.

Strange to say, Jayjay's nearly fifty years of life in Vearth had lasted but five of the real world's hours. He was plagued by a persistent sense of living in a dream. Would he never awake?

His work in physics continued to give him some pleasure. He was closing in on discovering actual methods for unrolling the eighth dimension. It was a matter of creating certain types of vibrations with a hyperdimensionally tweaked musical instrument. Perhaps a zither or a guitar. But what would you use for the strings?

Jayjay had some ideas along these lines but, sadly enough, the lack of temporal synch between his mind and the natural world made it impossible for him to carry out any honest-to-god real world physics experiments. He was marooned in the nants' dream.

On the morning of his seventieth birthday, Jayjay awoke with much of his virtual body gone. He was little more than a head, a shoulder and an arm. The rest had been sold. He would need to purchase fresh computational resources to reconstitute his flesh. But all his money was gone too. Keppy had left Jayjay with Dirk, taking Jayjay's entire savings.

Once again, as several times before, the Big Pig bailed out Jayjay. But, crushed by his son Dirk's betrayal, Jayjay found it increasingly difficult to carry on.

Turning 80.

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 channel connecting every point with every other point in synchronicity. Not only would an unfurled eighth dimension have provided endless memory for all, it would have brought about telepathy for every object in the world.

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 connected to Thuy's head. Luty, however, seemed strangely absent. Thuy sensed zero psychic energies coming off the weathered old programmer. Somehow this emptiness was the creepiest thing of all.

"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 antennae slowly and intimately across Thuy's face and head, as if palpating her brain's emanations. She felt a series of tingles in her skull.

"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 dinner. When she'd been a kid, she'd gone through a Norman Rockwell phase, trying to decipher what it meant to be white. And now she was a subdimensional roast turkey. But still non-white. Her thoughts were jumping all around. The jackal woman gave her neck a little nip.

"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.

The rhythmic noise got deep into Thuy's head; for some reason she recalled her mother's fear that an electric fan in her bedroom at night might chop up her dreams.