Текст книги "Postsingular"

Автор книги: Rudy Rucker

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

"Put your filter dogs on that junk," said Kittie. "Own your reality, pigheads."

It was a little harder than usual for Jayjay to teach his virtual guard dogs to recognize this particular type of ad, which had arrived compressed within a single vertex of Lampton's image-mesh. The orphidnet was getting very flaky thanks to all the spam and adware it was carrying. Jayjay had seen, like, two hundred Dick Too Dibbs ads yesterday. No matter how strenuously he tutored and upgraded his filter dogs, new ads kept romping in. The Homesteady Party was hi-tech and relentless. They seemed to be using programmers with an exceedingly deep understanding of the orphids' code and to have a very large and effective PR force embedding ad-triggers into unexpected contexts.

"Get outta there!" Sonic was yelling, sprinting across the nearly empty McDonald's parking lot, beautiful plumes of water splashing from each of his heavy-booted steps.

Too late. A couple of middle-aged bums in watch caps were already scarfing down the pancakes from the trash, and not even Sonic was up for hassling shaky pathetic winos over-garbage.

"Where's some other food, Bernardo?" said Kittie. This time, the president's icon didn't come up at all; instead a Dick Too Dibbs ad appeared right away, the ad pebbled and glittery in the rain, Dick Too talking about the danger of letting big companies control the orphidnet-reasonable and populist remarks, really, but they seemed shady and insincere since they were coming via an ad.

Seeking a filter to block this ad too, Jayjay searched the orphidnet and found a high-rated virtual defender resembling a chihuahua. He scanned the chihuahua's machine code to make sure the virtual dog didn't have Homesteady hookworms, then recruited him into his kennel. The chihuahua yapped at the other filter dogs, educating them. They set off in a baying pack, digging through Jayjay's recent inputs, competing to be the fastest and the most accurate filter dog of all, mating and spawning as they ran. All this took only seconds. And then Jayjay messaged his Best Dog in Hunt to the other Posse members, the mutated beast resembling a scaly dachshund by now.

Jayjay was wet and getting cold, although the rain-pocked wavy sheets of water undulating across the parking lot were still inconceivably beautiful-if he relaxed and actually looked at them. Seemed like he was pissing away too much time on low-level maintenance these days.

Thuy glanced over at Jayjay with a secret smile. She saw the water too. She liked it best when Jayjay was in the real world with her. She'd only left him for Kittie because he was spending too much time high on the Pig or plugging into his physics seminars. But she still thought he was the cutest, smartest guy she'd ever met.

"Let's walk to that car Bernardo showed us," said Kittie.

"I wonder if that was Bernardo at all," said Thuy. "Maybe he was a spoof from the start. Maybe the car is a trap."

"I'll take that chance," said Kittie, wiping the rain from her eyes.

On the way, Jayjay used the orphidnet to see into the garbage cans standing on the curb for pickup day. He was a bit gingerly in his scanning-lest a hidden Homesteady Party ad surprise him. He found a meaty roast chicken carcass, a third of a chocolate cake, a half-full box of Thai takeout, a couple of slices of pizza, and a bunch of brown bananas.

"Food links, Kittie," he said, messaging her the locations.

They scooped up the grub and hurried for the shelter of the puffy silver SUV, which was parked in a driveway by a beat old Victorian house on a side street between Mission and Guerrero, right where the Bernardo icon had said they'd find it. The Posse piled in, glad to be out of the rain, Jayjay in the driver's seat, Sonic shotgun, the women in back. Jayjay would have liked to be the one in back with Thuy.

Looking through the orphidnet, Jayjay could see and hear the old couple in the flat on the house's first floor. With nanocomputing orphids meshed upon every surface on Earth and linked together by quantum entanglement, you could peep anything you liked.

"Red! There's some kids in our car!" said the woman. She was soft-chinned, not unbeautiful, sitting on the couch knitting. "They're eating garbage! Why didn't you lock the car like I told you? Get out there and chase off those dirty kiqqies!"

Using the orphidnet to amplify your intelligence was viewed by many as a deviant activity. Kiqqies looked at things so differently from normals. And most kiqqies weren't willing to hold jobs. If you were smart and paid attention to the orphidnet, you could live without money. But quite a few people preferred to hold back from orphidic intelligence-amplification-there was a feeling that once you were a full-on kiqqie, you were no longer your same old self.

"I'm watching a football game, Dot," said Red, paunchy with a lean face. "The halftime show." He was slumped in an armchair, seemingly staring at a wall. The orphidnet was better than TV: everything was on it, live and three-dimensional, seen from whatever viewpoint you chose-and you could see under people's clothes.

"I know what you're up to, Red," said his wife. "You're staring at those cheerleaders' boobies. Or worse." Voyeurism was in fact the number one orphidnet application for the average person.

"Hey, if you're so concerned about my sex life," riposted Red, "why don't you come over here and-"

"Hush, I'm watching our granddaughter nap," said Dot, bending over her knitting with a half-smile, appreciative of Red's sally. "I can keep an orphid-eye on you from here."

"Live and let live," said Red. "Those kiqqies can have our clunker for all I care. Gasoline is gone for good. Solar's won the day, and if those assholes in the Middle East want to kill each other, it's their own business now. Not even the Homesteadies want us back there."

"Then tell the kids to drive the car away right now," said Dot. "Give them the keys and change the title. I'm sick of seeing that poor old car. It makes me sad. I told President Bernard a week ago, as a matter of fact. But I didn't mean for ragged freaks to make our car a crash pad. Three days ago we had some stumblebum in there just out of the Natural Mind rehab, remember? And now we've got these scuzzy kiqqies with their-"

Jayjay pinged Dot through the orphidnet while gnawing the chicken carcass. There was a lot of good meat on the flat underside.

"Hello?" said Dot.

"Hi," said Jayjay, the orphids on his throat registering the vibrations, reconstituting the sound waves, and sending the audio on its way. "This is the kiqqie in your car. Spelled M –A –N ."

"Red, one of them is talking to me! You listen too."

"We'll be glad to take the car off your hands," Jayjay told the old couple, still working on his chicken carcass. "Does it have enough gas to drive away?"

"Maybe a half gallon," said Red. "Whatever the homies haven't siphoned off. You in a hurry?"

"No," said Jayjay. "Not at all."

"So I'll give you the keys and transfer the title when the rain lets up," said Red. "Meanwhile I got a football game to watch."

"And be careful where you put that garbage you're eating," said Dot in a sharp tone. Sonic had just laid half a slice of glistening pizza on the dash so as to accept a lopsided piece of the cake from Thuy. "And no sex in our driveway. You happen to be sitting in a beloved and respectable family vehicle. When our children were small, we-"

Jayjay tuned her out. "Where's that Thai food?" he asked, cracking open his door to toss out the denuded chicken bones.

"All gone," said Kittie. "You got the whole chicken, so that's fair. There's still cake. And bananas. They're plantains, actually. They taste better than they look."

It's nice in this car, thought Jayjay, peeling a plantain. Big soft seats, the air faintly musty, the windows fogged up from their breath, the rain drumming on the roof. The women were cuddled together in back, with Thuy's musky fragrance perfuming the damp air. The car's resident beezies were like fuzzy, friendly ghosts.

"It'd be sweet to road-trip this silver marshmallow south," said Sonic. "San Ho, Cruz, the beach, and then past Los Angeles into Mexico, vato, hanging with la raza and the pyramids. You'd like Mexico, Jayjay; we could go underwater diving. Some kiqqies just invented snap-on gills. Hell, I'd like to see gasoline come back."

"Don't think that way, Sonic," said Kittie. "Gaia's better off without internal combustion. I mean, look at this weather. You've seen the climate simulations in the orphidnet. I'm glad the world's finally switched to electric cars."

"They're still using some oil in Bangalore," said Sonic, flicking Jayjay's lizard earring. "To make piezoplastic for shoons. The beezies are all over that. Do beezies still get into your earring, Jayjay?"

"Sometimes," said Jayjay.

"Jayjay's always had an earring," said Thuy with a fond giggle. "He was wearing a gold hoop the first time he came home from school with me. Helping me with my math homework. My mother saw us kissing and she freaked out. 'He's not Vietnamese, he has an earring, he'll never get a job.' "

"After Orphid Night, I was there for you again," recalled Jayjay. "I saved you from the wikiware." Although most employees didn't have to go into offices anymore, many employers required you to install ShareCrop wikiware on your bodies' orphids-which became, in effect, a bossy virtual monkey on your back. Living free on the street as a kiqqie with Jayjay, Thuy had time to craft her metastory "Waking Up." But then the Big Pig addiction had started dragging her down.

"And I saved her from you," put in Kittie.

"Look, I'm the one who really cares about her," said Jayjay, his voice rising. "I wish we could talk about it, Thuy. Kittie's just playing you for a game, you're a trophy to her, a notch, and down the road you'll-"

"Let's go back to my shoes," interrupted Thuy. She didn't like to hear Kittie and Jayjay argue over her; it made her feel like an object. "There's two beezies living in the piezoplastic. I call them Urim and Thummim after the special stones of sight that Joseph Smith the Mormon used to decipher the writing on those golden plates he found. My feet can see. A couple of times when I almost tripped and fell, Urim and Thummim flexed the shoes to bounce me up."

"Yu Shu's finest," said Kittie, admiring Thuy's feet. "You were lucky to score those when that yuppie jogger had the heart attack, Thuy. Good eye."

"I was the one who bagged the shoes for her," said Jayjay. "Thuy didn't want to touch a corpse."

"Corpse-touching is the kind of thing men are good for," said Kittie. "A social role for the lower caste."

"On the gasoline thing that you mentioned, Kittie," said Sonic, off in his own head as usual. "The techs couldn't have brought electric car technology along so fast if it weren't for the beezies. It's like the beezies actually wanted to help us save our climate. But why should they care? The orphids would be here just the same, even if Earth's surface was ashes and tidal waves with everyone dead."

"Yea unto the breaking of the Seventh Seal," intoned Thuy. She was taping this bit for her metanovel, and "Seventh Seal" sounded good. Apocalyptic, dark, weird, damned. She overlaid the words with some gothic graphics.

"The beezies give a squat because people are like flowers in Earth's garden," said Jayjay. "The best art in the museum. After the beezies emerged in the orphidnet, they started watching us-and we got good to them. They admire our wetware, the wiring of our brains. Especially us kiqqies. Can I have some of that cake, Thuy?"

"I think the beezies vampire off our emotions, is what it is," said Thuy, handing him a fist-sized piece of chocolate sweetness. "Especially our metabeezie pal the Big Pig. Beezies admire our juice, our hormones. Have you ever noticed that when you're having sex, if you look into the orphidnet, the beezies are totally on your case?"

"I bet the beezies compete to settle onto a baby while it's delivered," said Kittie. "Like how the Hindus imagine souls being reborn. The beezies need us to do things for them. They can see everything, but they can't physically touch things. They need people in order to actualize their plans. Like it took people to bring solar-cell paint and piezoplastic shoons into production."

"But now beezies can use shoons instead of people to do stuff," said Sonic. "Like remote-controlled hands. So what are people for? I'm not art, not a sex-machine, not a robot to push a broom like a pendejo janitor."

"Here boys," said Thuy. "Take this last wad of cake before Kittie and I burst our Seventh Seals." She made a loud raspberry sound with her mouth. After all those years of being a good girl, she got a kick out of being bad.

"Ugh," said Kittie.

"Maybe the beezies want us for our processing power," speculated Jayjay, sharing the gooey chocolate with Sonic. "And we're additional computing nodes. After millions of years of evolution, our brainware is optimized. Our pattern-recognizing wetware provides shortcuts that can work faster than the beezies' exhaustive search procedures." He paused, doubting what he'd just said. "Or maybe not. Naw, like I said before, I think the beezies help us just to see us thrive-the same way you'd want the trees on your land to do well."

"If the beezies were big-biz landowners, they'd be looking to harvest us," said Kittie darkly. "Like the nants were gonna do. They were gonna pulp us."

"I'd feel safer if there was some strong definite thing we were doing for the beezies," said Sonic. "Other than being fun to watch. How about those movies the Big Pig always pushes on us? Maybe we're processing them for her. Maybe we're the Big Pig's glasses."

"Urim and Thummim," repeated Thuy wiggling her shoes. She never tired of riffing on the Book of Mormon that a missionary had pressed upon her parents; he'd been the first white person she ever saw inside their house. "I'm just glad the beezies are here," she continued, smiling at Jayjay. "Everything's so much more interesting now. And the world's getting cleaner. Speaking of clean, wipe the food off your faces, guys. You look nasty." She handed Jayjay a Giants sweatshirt she'd found in the back of the car.

"I'd like to play with a bunch of those little shoons," mused Sonic. "Learn how to program them."

Jayjay was getting bored waiting for the rain to stop and for Red to come out with the keys. Maybe it was time for a hit of the Big Pig. By way of edging in that direction, he projected himself into the orphidnet. "Hey, beezies, where can we find some shoons to play with?" The other Posse members got into the orphidnet too.

"There are some shoons at Nektar Lundquist's house," said a mushroom-shaped beezie with green eyes on its cap, without exactly speaking English. His compound glyphs bloomed as

ready-made thoughts. "You four should go help Nektar. She's under psychic attack by some malware that got into her orphids. She hasn't eaten for two days. Her shoons are having trouble taking care of her. Drive this car there; you can park in Nektar's garage."

"Wow," said Kittie. "Really?"

Everyone in the Posse knew all about Nektar Lundquist. Nektar's husband Ond Lutter was famous not only because he'd released the orphids last year, but also because he'd turned back the nant invasion three years before that. People had loved Ond for killing the nants, but on Orphid Night they'd wanted to lynch him. Ond and his autistic genius son, Chu, had jammed off to the mysterious parallel Hibrane world late on Orphid Night, and so far as anyone knew, they were still in the Hibrane. Not that anyone else had managed to go there since.

Cool, self-possessed Nektar Lundquist had taken advantage of the interest in her family to become the star of an orphidnet reality soap opera called Founders, complete with sponsors and ads. Thanks to the Founders show, Nektar's whole circle of acquaintances had become celebs: Nektar; Craigor Connor; Jil Zonder; Nektar's boss, Xandro; Xandro's wife, Beatriz; Nektar's ex-boyfriend, Jose; and Jose's sometime lover, Lureen Morales.

Each of them got a nice little income from the sponsors. The way the ads worked was that whenever anyone went through the orphidnet to peep at the Founders stars, they'd see a commercial for ExaExa computers, for Stank grooming products, or for BigBox home furnishings; and the Founders stars got paid per ad-view.

The Founders story thus far: On Orphid Night, Nektar left Ond for Jose, the head chef at Puff, an upscale hipster Valencia Street restaurant. A few weeks later, Nektar went to the Puff manager, got Jose fired, and took over as the Puff head chef herself, at which point Jose moved to the rival restaurant MouthPlusPlus across the street. The two restaurants competed to provide ever more bizarre kinds of nourishment-sometimes serving a course via feeding tube, enema, or intravenous drip.

Last month Nektar had started an affair with Craigor. Because of the affair, his wife, Jil, was brokenhearted and struggling to maintain her sobriety. Jil Zonder was a celeb in her own right, being the woman who'd designed the first piezoplastic beezie-controlled shoon.

Jayjay liked the looks of Jil Zonder. And Jil had been to the Hibrane with Ond and Chu for a few minutes before they sent her back. And Jil was a recovering sudocoker. The woman was experienced. It was a pleasure to watch her gestures, to savor her smiles. Neat, noble, naughty; vivacious, vibrant, voom. Kind of like Thuy had seemed, back when things were good.

Jayjay fantasized that, given the chance, he could make Jil Zonder happy. Jil was maybe ten years older than Jayjay, which could be a plus. Jayjay figured Jil could use a cute younger guy now that her windbag poseur husband Craigor Connor had been stupid enough to cheat with Nektar. Locative art-what was that? Moving junk around on the deck of the boat where Craigor lived with Jil; and then laying down bogus raps about why he'd put, like, Christmas lights and a bowling ball next to a stack of tires. Big fucking deal. And Craigor's other career, catching Pharaoh cuttlefish so that high-tech companies could coax display chemicals from the slain beasts' skins? The man was nowhere. Jil would be better off with Jayjay, and if he could get in with the Founders crowd, he'd tell her the first chance he got.

The mushroom-shaped beezie led the Big Pig Posse through the orphidnet to view Nektar Lundquist, lying alone in her big bed, window curtains drawn, her eyes clenched shut, her heavy blond hair spread across the pillow like golden snakes. Apparently she was far gone on sudocoke; there was a mirror with lines of powder next to her bed. There were perhaps a dozen shoons in the room, curvy little manikins bumbling about on the floor and the bed. But there were other presences in the orphidnet near Nektar-virtual beings shaped like beetles.

The guiding beezie mapped out causal links, showing that the beetles were deviant AIs emerging from infected orphids on Nektar's scalp. Creepy. Up till now, spam and malware had been in the form of high-level software, not in the form of low-level corruption of the individual orphids that supported the orphidnet's parallel quantum computation.

"Founders episode three hundred and ninety-five," said Kit-tie, not understanding what she saw. " 'Nektar Gets the Sudocoke Horrors.' How great is that?"

"Poor Nektar," said Thuy. "Look, Kittie, the shoons are helping her." Indeed, a classic Happy Shoon was spooning water into Nektar's cracked lips, a goob-doll shoon was offering a little cup of mush, and a doughboy shoon was sponging Nektar's soiled sheets. ExaExa, Stank, and BigBox weren't posting any ads around Nektar Lundquist today. This episode was way too funky.

"I want to go, to physically go there, yeah," said Sonic. "Look how many shoons."

"We still don't have the car keys," said Jayjay doubtfully. He could almost smell the high, thin reek of Nektar's dimly lit sickbed.

"You'll want to figure out how to kill those beetles first," glyphed the beezie. "You're in the right place for that. This car's orphids happen to carry the beetle infection, too. We don't have a patch yet."

"Oh fuck!" exclaimed Kittie.

"Our orphids are infected too?" said Jayjay.

The beezie nodded.

"Too late to run away," said Sonic. "Oh well. This is where maybe humans really can outthink the beezies. Thanks to the Doodly Bug weapon shop." He was talking about his fave online game.

The rain was really pouring down now. Rainwater dribbled in through the moon roof's weather stripping to wet Jayjay's left knee. But, at least for now, Jayjay had no sense of being infected by beetles. Maybe it was time to get high again.

In the apartment, Dot and Red were together on the couch with Dot's knitting thrown aside; Red was pulling down her elastic-waistband pants and-

"Ooo-la-la," said Thuy.

Sonic burst into shrill pulses of laughter.

"Oh, let's transcend," burst out Jayjay. "Let's hit the Pig."

"What the hey," said Kittie. "Rainy-day fun."

"Again?" said Thuy, meaning to refuse, but feeling her willpower weakening. It was so boring here in the car right now. "I swear, you guys, this is going to be my very, very last time ever. Wheenk. "

The virtual images of the Posse members spiraled upward through the orphidnet-not "up," exactly, the direction was more like "in." They all knew the way by now, and here were the billion snouts, tails, trotters, and flop-ears of the Big Pig metabeezie, the all-seeing eye atop the pyramid whose base held the ten sextillion networked orphids of Earth.

The Pig extended a wobbly nipple toward Jayjay, and as he fastened on, the Pig passed him a time-lapse movie of a snowdrift being sculpted by the wind. The other Posse members found teats beside Jayjay, the four of them lined up like worshippers in a pew.

"Some Pig," messaged Thuy with a giggle. The sick thing was, whenever she actually hooked into the Big Pig, she totally loved it.

"Radiant," added Jayjay, picking up on Thuy's Charlotte's Web reference, not that he'd read the book, but right now, via the Pig, he was hooked into all the libraries in the world, with every volume an open book.

But, que lastima, the Big Pig hit was weak. The beetles were coming on, swarming into the space between Jayjay and the Big Pig, making the Pig's images blocky, her animations jerky, her links slow-and there was no hope of an aha.

They dropped back into their mortal frames. In the peeling-paint Victorian, Dot and Red were reaching a climax, possibly goaded on by having the Posse nearby to watch them. Ugh.

Jayjay focused on the raindrops dripping through the moon roof and moved his leg. Now that he wasn't doing anything interesting, the beetles were lying low.

"I want the real Big Pig," said Kittie in a sullen tone. "Without all those freaking pests in the way. We really are infected."

"I'm gonna get into Doodly Bug," said Sonic, squinting his eyes and oddly wiggling his ten fingers. He touched the fingertips of his left hand to those of his right, pairing up his long, agile digits in a peculiar order. "I'll invent some Calabi-Yau grenades to take down the beetles."

Doodly Bug was based on quantum-loop string theory: in the game's virtual worlds, players knotted hyperdimensional Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces so as to destabilize the particle symmetries of their online opponents. With orphidnet visualization engines and expert beezie agents helping the players along, the esoteric physics of Doodly Bug was within the reach of any kiqqie willing to waste a lot of time.

Sonic's Doodly Bug ranking was approaching the highest possible level: Grandmaster of Space and Time. He'd already attained the only-slightly-less-exalted Multiversal Governator level. Jayjay was a Doodly Bug player too, with the quite respectable Kaluza Branesurfer rating. Last spring, Jayjay and Sonic had won some championships together. But then Jayjay had gotten obsessed with the ideas under the game-that is, with brane theory. And now, all praise the orphidnet, he'd begun using his intelligence-amplification to hang with the hard-core physicists who were investigating today's number-one problem: understanding the Hibrane.

The explorations were long on theory and short on experiment, as a Hibraner named Gladax had somehow managed to erase all the orphidnet copies of Chu's Hibrane jump-code the morning after Orphid Night.

To make the research even harder, the Hibraners had changed their jumping technique to include a wait-loop so that all their interbrane jumps took exactly half a second to initiate, leaving no hope of repeating the timing-channel attack that clever Chu had used to figure out the Hibrane jump-code in the first place.

The kiqqie physicists were going bananas trying to think their way into the Hibrane, and Jayjay was channeling as many of their seminars as he could, working to reach the higher levels of this realworld metagame. Now and then he could actually contribute a seminar comment that made some of the others light up. He was disappointed that Thuy wasn't more impressed. After all, he'd never even finished high school.

Yeah, Papa went to prison, just for selling a little dope, and Jayjay had dropped out of school to work fulltime at a taqueria with Mama so they could feed the five younger kids. When Mama had married the pendejo taqueria manager, Jayjay had quit working and left home. He figured he was too smart for work or for school. He hated his stepfather and he'd pretty much lost touch with his family. He'd lived in a squat, playing a lot of video games, making a little money in gamer tournaments-which was how he'd met Sonic. When the orphidnet hit, he embraced it.

For her part, Thuy had stuck it out at her parents' little stucco house in the Sunset district, straight through high school and college at San Francisco State and even a year of studying the violin at the Music Conservatory. But all that education had led to nothing substantial. Thuy wanted to be a writer, but her parents, timid Minh and bossy Khanh, had gotten her a job as an executive assistant at Golden Lucky, a Vietnamese restaurant-supply wholesaler in South San Francisco, with the possibility of a marriage to the boss. Thuy had been desperately bored there, so when the new global network unfurled on Orphid Night, she dove in and never looked back. She'd bailed on her family and shown up at Jayjay's squat in a condemned building off Valencia Street.

Thanks to the orphidnet, street-living was easy. In that first golden month, Thuy had crafted her big metastory, "Waking Up." But then she got more and more hung up on the Big Pig, and this summer a Hibraner had advised her to leave Jayjay for Kittie. Thuy's problems with the Pig were supposed to be from Jayjay's bad influence.

"What are you watching, Jayjay?" Thuy asked Jayjay from the backseat. "I'm getting bored waiting for Dot and Red." The rain was even stronger than before, filling the car with soporific drumming.

"Colloquium talk outta Berkeley," said Jayjay. "Professor Prav Plato describing the dark-energy Higgs field." It was more than a talk, really. The orphidnetted, beezie-amplified Prof Prav was spewing out images, simulations, and links as he spoke; and Prav's kiqqie listeners were continually popping up comments and diagrams as well. Jayjay made a point of catching all Prav's performances. The individual orphids kept a full record of everything they'd seen or heard for the past few months, so you always had the option of replaying a talk or slowing it down. But right now Jayjay was real-timing it, snowboarding his way down a whipped-cream mountain of symbols, loving how Prav was steering the flow past the Dick Too Dibbs ads that kept popping up like quirky machine monsters in a maze. It was awesome to kiq it with the Prav.

The only problem was that, now that Jayjay was doing something interesting again, the beetles were back. He set his virtual kennel of filter dogs on the trail of the beetles, hoping the dogs might evolve a way to bring down the intruders. Catching up for lost time, he jammed through a snowdrift of tensors to rejoin Prav.

"The profs don't realize you're a dropout guttersnipe?" Kit-tie taunted Jayjay from the backseat. Once, a few weeks back, in a friendly, unguarded moment, Kittie had told Jayjay she admired his ambition. But most of the time she tried to act all hard and street-tough-covering for the fact that she came from a comfortable middle-class family in Palo Alto, slumming yuppie larva that she was. "Forget that double-doming and check where I'm at, kiqs," continued Kittie. "Heath Himbo is doing Lureen Morales on the Caliente show. I love that hard, slutty thing Lureen does with her upper lip. But, dammit, they've got Dick Too Dibbs as a paid-up legit sponsor. How lame is that? Outta the way, Dick Too. And he's carrying a beetle under his arm. Those freaking beetles are ruining everything!"

"They've got a rainbow sheen," said Thuy. "They're the same malware that Nektar has. Oh, shit, they're chewing on my notes for my metanovel!"

"Yo!" cried Sonic just then. "I finally got the cure. Give me access, homes."

Jayjay and the others opened their mental shields. Virtual Sonic flicked his fingers, scattering glowing blue fleas every which way. A flea landed on one of Jayjay's filter dogs and exploded; the dog's teeth got twice as long, his hair turned into purple flames-and he began tearing through the beetles like a starving man eating Thanksgiving dinner. The dog briefly paused to shake himself, showering the exploding fleas onto the other dogs. In another second the slavering pack had devoured all of Jayjay's beetles.

"Yay, Sonic!" said Kittie and Thuy, who'd gotten cleaned up too.

"Calabi-Yau flea-grenades," said Sonic. "I made them in the Doodly Bug weapon shop. I'm smarter than the beezies, see!" He wore a proud little smile on his face. "Squark-gaugino supersymmetry," added Sonic, getting back into his Doodly Bug wars. "Compactify dimension seven. Destroy starboard glueball pellet three o'clock high: ftoom! "