Текст книги "Postsingular"

Автор книги: Rudy Rucker

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

But Thuy was busy cutting up the cantaloupe and offering Kittie a slice, and Kittie was enthralled with Nektar, and Nektar was chattering at Craigor as if to keep him from looking at Jil. For his part, Sonic was drinking tea as fast as he could. The guy could never get enough caffeine.

"You're a homeless kiqqie," exclaimed Jil, sounding a little disappointed. Dammit, she'd already done an instant check via the orphidnet. "And you're addicted to the Big Pig?"

"The Pig helps me get ideas," said Jayjay. "I wouldn't say that I have a problem. Anyway, I'm cutting down really soon."

"Oh, I know all about that, " said Jil.

"I watch you on Founders, " said Jayjay. "You've gotten a bad deal lately. I really admire that you've hung onto your sobriety. You could show me the way. Mold me, Jil, train me to be like you. Clear-eyed. Hi-res. A coiled spring. I want to please you."

He could hardly believe he was saying these things. His mouth

was way ahead of his brain.

"Boing," said Jil. "That's enough for now."

"Hey," said Craigor, jumping to his feet. Jayjay was expecting to get bawled out for hitting on the guy's wife, but, no, Craigor was into his own ego trip.

"Check this out," said Craigor, producing four short metal rods with wads of piezoplastic on their ends. He turned his chair over and stuck his rods to the ends of the chair legs-so that now the chair had piezoplastic knees and feet. When Craigor turned the chair upright, it waltzed around the kitchen, faster and faster, culminating with a tap dance and a bow. Craigor made as if to sit down and, with comical eagerness, the tall chair scuttled into position to catch him.

"That's a walking-chair," said Jayjay, hoping to steal Craigor's thunder. "You sold a double-jointed version to the manager at the Natural Mind recovery center in the Armory."

"How'd you happen to notice that?" asked Craigor, seeming genuinely curious about the specific chain of logic Jayjay had followed. Everything was visible on the orphidnet, and many people had their beezie agents mining for things that were specifically relevant to their lives, the notion of "relevant" being fairly inclusive, due to people's beezie-assisted abilities think a few steps further than before.

"Jayjay's beezies were looking for the origins of Nektar's beetle infection," said Thuy. "They came from the Natural Mind building, and you caught them when you delivered the chair, Craigor, and then Nektar caught the beetles from you, that time when you squirted too quick. Lose-lose."

"Mouthy brat," said Craigor, not especially embarrassed. He waggled his eyebrows at Thuy. "You need a spanking." He stuck his teaspoon to the side of his walking-chair with a spare bit of piezoplastic, and sent the chair trotting around the table to whack-whack-whack Thuy's thigh with the spoon.

"Craigor, you should load up on Jayjay's antibeetle flea-grenades," said Nektar. "For all we know, the beetles are eating your brain right now."

Craigor responded in mime, fluttering his hands by his mouth like munching mandibles.

"Don't worry, Nektar," said Jil with a sigh. "We got the antibeetle fleas off the Founders show on our way over. And, yeah, the beetles really were lying dormant in us. That's weird they used Craigor for a disease vector."

Craigor's walking-chair flexed its knees, rhythmically hunching against Thuy, who laughed at the urgent bumping. Kittie reached down to rip off one of the walking-chair's shins. Miming great pain, the chair limped three-legged back to Craigor, leaning against him with a decrescendo shudder.

"You're funny," said Thuy to Craigor, meaning it. "I can put you in my metanovel. Are you directly controlling the chair?"

"I run the character animations though a beezie," said Craigor. "But the beezie draws on a library of body-language routines that I stored. I act things out; that's how all the great animators do it. My body knows more than my head. I'm a cuttle-fisherman, too."

"Mr. Disease Vector," said Kittie, who'd attached the loose rod to her crotch. "Animate this."

"Oh that's witty," said Craigor, looking annoyed. He grabbed the leg back.

Jayjay turned his attention to Jil, who was hunkered down by the sink checking up on her shoons. Even in that awkward position, she looked lithe and graceful. He tossed her a tiny heart-shaped emoticon via the orphidnet; she answered by half-turning her head his way and miming a kiss in profile. He was living the dream-in a reality soap!

"Founders fans may want to scan the Big Pig Posse's back-story," Nektar intoned, playing show host. "Jayjay loses Thuy, Thuy takes up with Kittie and next-Thuy and Craigor? Kittie and Nektar? Jayjay and Jil? Sonic and the shoons? Stay tuned. Oh, look, the good ads are coming back." The orphidnet icons of BigBox and Stank glowed in the corners of the room, also the ExaExa beetle logo.

"Do we get paid too?" asked Kittie.

"I think so," said Nektar. "The orphidnet figures all that out. I'll register you as extras. And right up front, I'll let you guys keep your SUV in my garage for a couple of weeks. And there's a room over the garage you can live in. It'll be fun having young people around."

"Bitchin'," said Sonic, draining the last of the tea. His eyes were bright and black. "I'm ready to settle in for a Doodly Bug death-run."

"I want to paint that SUV and retrofit it for solar power," said Kittie.

"I'll be working on my metanovel," said Thuy. "Wheenk. "

"The title's growing on me," said Jayjay, smiling at her. "I'm gonna be busy with Prav Plato's physics seminars." He put on a goody-goody tone, segueing into the plan they'd privately made upstairs. By now he'd privately messaged Kittie the details, too. "We all have a lot to do-if we don't waste our energy by plugging into the Big Pig."

Jil gave Jayjay a quizzical look. She could tell he was acting, but she wasn't sure why. There were so many levels of unreality here. Jil turned to Nektar. "We'll be on our way," said Jil. "I'm gonna borrow your Happy Shoon so I can integrate his body-memories into my breeding stock. Knead him in like sourdough starter.

You've trained these shoons well, Nektar."

"Can I take a shoon too?" asked Sonic.

"Sure," said Nektar. Sonic stuffed the Jayjay-faced doughboy shoon into the pleated pocket of his leather jacket.

"Bye-bye," said Jayjay, seizing the chance to touch Jil's hand. She upped the ante and kissed his cheek. In the orphidnet, Jay-jay saw Jil staring over at her husband to make sure he noticed. Craigor's smile had gone stiff. Thuy, however, was obliv, or was at least presenting herself that way. Why did she have to be so stubborn? Just because Jayjay liked the Big Pig? Well, hell, if Thuy was going to be such a priss, maybe he should take his golden opportunity for a romance with the divine Jil.

"Come stay on the Merz Boat if you need a place to live," Jil told Jayjay in a warm tone. "There's plenty of room. All four of you would fit, actually."

Jayjay knew from Founders that Jil and Craigor's cuttlefishing boat was entirely crafted from computationally rich piezoplastic, which had become a fairly expensive and sought-after material. Although Craigor was still netting oversized Pharaoh cuttlefish from the Bay, much of the couple's income came from selling off bits of the boat's material in the form of Jil's shoons and Craigor's combines.

"Thanks, Jil," said Jayjay, wondering how Craigor would take his incursion. "I might be there sooner than you think. But at least for today we'll be kiqqin' it in Nektar's garage."

Some stairs at the back of the garage led up to the room Nektar had mentioned, white-painted with a peaked ceiling. The front and rear walls held generous windows, one showing a palm tree and Dolores Park, the other looking onto the San Francisco hills with their little stucco houses. The room was furnished with rugs, chairs, a double bed, a fold-out couch, a sink, and a fridge. The tile bathroom was stocked with Stank personal grooming products.

"Fuckin' A," said Sonic, eyeing a framed Nantel award to Nektar's absent husband. "Ond Lutter himself." The box was a couple of inches deep, holding a preserved blue-green beetle as well as a paper with the award inscription.

"Maybe we should do some Big Pig," said Thuy, flopping into an armchair. She didn't actually mean this; she was following their preplanned script.

Jayjay would in fact have liked very much to do some Pig, but he stuck to the script too. "It's time we all got clean," he said.

"Yeah, brother," said Sonic. "Getting down is coming old."

"You're slushed," giggled Thuy, even though she knew Sonic had warped the phrase on purpose. "Yes, yes, it's time to mad the endness. But how? Whither and yon?"

"Maybe Natural Mind could help us," said Kittie, also playing along. "I know we were harshing on them before. But that was just our denial talking."

"Natural Mind it is," said Jayjay earnestly. "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired." Badda-boom.

"Let's take showers before we go out," said Sonic looking at the dirt shiny on his hands. "Me first."

"Me second," said Kittie.

When Jayjay got his turn in the shower, he had fun freeze-framing the water in his orphidnet view. Orphids were quick; they blanketed the water drops as fast as they formed. Further afield, Jayjay could see Craigor and Jil picking up their kids at school and heading back to their boat. School was still a reality-the orphidnet was no substitute for getting your butt smacked/stroked/sniffed by your fellow mammals in the human pack. With Jil still in her own little family, maybe it wasn't realistic to think he could sleep with her. Maybe he'd been fooling himself about those vibes he'd picked up from her.

Thuy squeezed into the shower as Jayjay was getting out; the brief, sliding touch of her skin made him unreasonably happy. Someday soon he'd win her back. Thuy was the one he really wanted.

The Posse hit the street and hoofed toward the Mission Street Armory, keeping up a line of recovery-hungry chatter as they went, the idea being to make the Natural Minders feel okay about admitting the Posse. Although it was of course possible or even likely that the Natural Minders weren't monitoring the Posse's activities at all. But it seemed wise to make up for having audibly confabbed with Nektar about launching an attack.

The rain had let up and the sun was out. People were shopping at the corner fruit stands, some of them using the orphidnet to peer into the piles and find that perfect, unblemished lime, jalapeСo, or mango. Others were channeling music or watching what was happening somewhere else. With every-one's attention diluted, the street scene wasn't quite as vibrant as it used to be.

Passing Metotem Metabooks-which was a hangout for the Mission metanovelists-Jayjay saw the owner, Darlene, slumped in an easy chair she'd dragged outside to catch the afternoon sun, which had been a rarity of late. Darlene always had a big smile for Jayjay; sometimes he thought she had a crush on him. Darlene was quite influential on the literary scene; she edited the hip Metotem Metazine. Her store wasn't much, though. Just some comfortable chairs, a coffeepot, and shelves of beat-up paper books.

People did still buy paper books, even though you could read a book on the orphidnet without owning it. Strictly speaking, you could publish a book by printing one copy and letting the orphids settle onto it. They'd crawl around and learn the text. For that matter, you could publish a book by thoroughly imagining it, and then recording your thoughts onto some orphids, as the metanovelists did. But the paper physicality of an old-style book remained perennially pleasing, and they still sold in small numbers. Not that Jayjay owned any.

"How's the metanovel, Thuy?" asked Darlene, her long, jeans-clad legs sticking out over the sidewalk, her booted feet crossed like a cowboy's. "Still wrasslin' it?" Darlene made her living not so much by selling books as by brokering access to metanovels. Many metanovelists stored their works in secure form within the orphids on their own bodies, so as to be able to charge for access.

"Oh yeah," said Thuy. "It's called Wheenk. It's gonna be about what's happened to me this year. 'Waking Up' is the first chapter. I was thinking, though, what if I start using every single thing I find." She gestured at the shelves in Darlene's shop. "Like maybe collage in all your books to capture the full ambience. Every word, every page, all of it part of Wheenk, all visible in one synoptic glance."

"Synoptic," said Darlene, liking the word. "Yes, my shelves hold the synoptic gospels of our literary heritage; you read them side by side to see the face of the Holy Hive Mind in her presingular state. But you've got to be kidding about including all that data. Just do a link. If you put too much into a metanovel, it's as dull as a nearly empty file. Everything and Nothing are the same, you feel me? Aim your frame." Peering from beneath her dark bangs, Darlene held up her hands, flirtatiously regarding Jayjay through the rectangle of her thumbs and fingers. "What's with the Stank ad following you mangy kiqs?"

"We're extras on the Founders show," said Jayjay, miming himself soaping an underarm. "I Stank purty."

"How was Gerry Gurkin last night?" Thuy asked Darlene. Gurkin was a fellow metanovelist who was promoting his new work, Banality, by giving presentations at venues like Metotem Metabooks. For an evening's performance, a metanovelist would typically hand out short-term access permissions and give the audience a guided tour of the metanovel's world, the hope being that people would pay for longer-term access.

"Spotty," said Darlene. "All these hysterically funny Dick Too Dibbs ads kept popping up. Poor Gerry. Not that his gig would have been much better without the interruptions. Banality is an exabyte of data, yes, but it's just images of San Francisco at noon on the day after Orphid Night, with Gerry's voiceovers. No story, and no characters besides our host, the virtual Gerry Gurken. Banality is about a lonely kiqqie who pokes around in alleys and has these sad, wry little insights. A metanovel can be so much more."

"Oh, give the guy some credit," said Thuy, who was good friends with Gerry. "Some of his juxtaposes are transcendent. But, yeah, I'm aiming for my Wheenk to have a suspenseful action trajectory. If I can swing it, I'd like to have several interlocking plots, the whole thing like clockwork or a program or a complex knot."

"But it has to be authentic," said Darlene.

"We're alchemists," said Thuy. "Transmuting our lives into myth and fable."

Metanovelists' bull sessions could go on for hours. Jayjay privately wondered how much work Thuy had actually done. She kept all her notes and drafts under secure protection and had never shared any of her metanovel with him, other than that one metastory.

"What's that?" interrupted Kittie, peering down the block. A group of people were gathered around an inert, stick-thin figure who'd just been pulled out of an alley.

"It's Grandmaster Green Flash!" exclaimed Sonic, as they ran to see.

Hip, sparkling Grandmaster Green Flash had been the reigning San Francisco Doodly Bug champion at one time, a kiqqie whom Jayjay and Sonic looked up to. The Grandmaster had gotten heavily into the Big Pig, hitting the sacred sow for days at a time. Jayjay had gone on a few runs with Flash, but he hadn't been able to muster that same stare-into-the-sun intensity that the Grandmaster had. For Grandmaster Green Flash, any activity other than total ecstasy was a meaningless uptight social game.

And now Grandmaster Green Flash was dead on the sidewalk, his skin splotched with diamond-glitter paisley run amok. He'd let himself get too far out of the loop; he'd stopped eating and drinking, and then he'd even let go of breathing. His face was frozen in a triumphant, terrifying grin.

"I really am going to get clean," murmured Thuy to herself. "I'm ready for the turning point."

A cop pulled up in an electric car, alerted by the onlookers.

"This guy was the best," said Sonic, kneeling beside Grandmaster Green Flash, squinting against the mephitic stench.

The Grandmaster's skin glistened like an oil slick, the sunlight shattering off it in rainbow shades. Peering into the Net, Jayjay saw way too many orphids on the guy. Normal surfaces had one or two orphids per square millimeter, but the Grand-master's skin looked to be carrying a density a billion times that high. That's why he looked like a diffraction grating. He was covered with rows of quantum-computing molecules. Diseased orphids.

"Stay back," warned Jayjay.

The iridescent colors on the Grandmaster's skin were forming double scrolls like beans or curled-up fetuses, the rotating spirals nestling within each other.

"Nanomachines all over him," exclaimed Kittie. "Like nants! Run!" She took off further down the block, stopping at the end to stare back at them.

"Come on, " said Thuy, tugging at Jayjay. She rubbed her hands together as if shedding invisible nanomachines.

"It's okay," said Jayjay. A dense, twinkling haze had gathered around the Grandmaster's corpse. "The orphidnet has an immune system. That shiny fog is a trillion healthy orphids attacking the sick ones on his skin. Orphids are designed to attack runaway nanomachines, remember? One of the main reasons Ond Lutter released the orphids was because he wanted to block another wave of nants."

Thuy took off anyway.

Jayjay and Sonic stayed and watched the rainbow sheen fade from the Grandmaster's body as the massed cloud of orphids consumed the rogue nanomachines. "Poor Flash," said Sonic.

A warm breeze struck their faces; in the orphidnet a thirty-foot-high figure was standing over them. A Hibraner! He was a youngish-looking guy, dressed in red jeans and a yellow shirt with red cubes printed on it. His long hair was gathered into a topknot. Moving incredibly slowly, the glowing humanoid form reached down and cupped his flickering hands about the corpse, as if taking the measure of the situation. By degrees he turned his head to stare down the block after Thuy. And then, in a single twinkling jump, he hopped a hundred feet to stand by Thuy, bending down as if to talk with her.

"An angel!" screamed a fat woman on the sidewalk. "An angel come to carry the dead man's soul away!"

"Damn," said one of the cops, a mustached guy not much older than Jayjay. "That's the third time this week."

"Third time for which part?" asked Jayjay. "Cancerous nanomachines and a Hibraner showing up?"

"Like that, yeah."

"What does it mean?" asked Sonic.

"You're the kiqqies," said the cop. "You tell me. I'm just a mule who goes to work instead of lying around stoned all day."

"We're getting into recovery," said Jayjay.

"Sure you are." The cop tossed a body bag onto Grandmaster Green Flash. Moving on its own, the black piezoplastic enveloped the corpse.

"This could be you," said Dick Too Dibbs, appearing in an ad above the body bag. "If you vote for Bernard Lampton. Dick Too Dibbs is the man to crack down on nanomachines. I know the bad guys; I can game their heads. It takes an honest insider to halt the attacks. Not a fake do-gooder who takes bribes. Dick Too Dibbs in November."

Jayjay and Sonic headed down the sidewalk to catch up with Kittie and Thuy. The Hibraner was gone now. "That's the third time I've seen that particular angel," said Thuy, looking shaky. "You've heard me talk about him: Azaroth. Remember, I met him a couple of days after Orphid Night and he wanted to know if I'd seen the details of how Ond and Chu jumped to the Hibrane? And this summer he told me to cut back on the Big Pig. And just now he told me that if the Natural Mind guys offer me a job, I should say no and start a fight. He says if my life gets weird enough, I'll remember Chu's Knot."

"Maybe you're going crazy," said Sonic, needling her. "Maybe he didn't say anything to you at all."

"I am so ready to visit Natural Mind," said Thuy.

The Armory was a century-old brick building with every sixteenth brick turned sideways, making a grid of studs upon the dark-red walls. An anachronistic dish antenna projected from the gently vaulted roof. In the visible world, the looming Armory filled the better part of a city block; within the orphidnet it was a square, featureless hole. The Armory's floor, ceiling, windows, and inner walls were quantum-mirrored to block the quantum entanglement signals used by the orphids. In other words, from the outside you couldn't see in. Jayjay imagined Andrew Topping as a loathsome fat grub worm in there, a greedy parasite befouling the orphidnet. Would he grow violent when the Posse confronted him?

As if Jayjay weren't anxious enough, one of his scenario-searching beezies now sprung a paranoid theory on him: Some unknown "Faction X" was deliberately luring the Posse into the Armory. The elegantly glyphed argument came down to this:

• Faction X contaminated Nektar with beetle malware.

• Faction X directed the Posse to a beetle-infested SUV.

• Faction X expected that someone in the Posse would design an antidote.

• Faction X expected that once the Posse invented a beetle antidote, the beezies would ask the Posse to heal Nektar.

• Faction X knew Nektar would urge the Posse to confront the Natural Minders in their lair.

• Faction X was maneuvering the Posse into the Armory.

And the beezies had an exponential number of possible theories about the identity and motivations of Faction X. Given that everyone was using beezies, overelaborate action scenarios were quite common now. Beezies were bringing human social intrigue to new heights.

All but paralyzed by this input, Jayjay used private messaging to share the Faction X scenario with the others, the four of them standing on the sidewalk outside the Armory's big green door.

"Should we go in anyway?" Jayjay messaged the others.

"I will," answered Thuy. "I need this experience for my metanovel. And they might help me kick the Pig. I'm really serious after seeing Grandmaster Green Flash."

"I want to get in there to cut the freakin' spam levels," messaged Sonic. "What we came for. Don't wimp out now."

"I want to see the quantum-mirrors," put in Kittie. "It'll be weird. A new trip. Something to paint."

These were all good reasons. "Okay," said Jayjay.

The big front door swung open at his touch, revealing a small hall or antechamber. A shiny finish coated the floor, ceiling and walls of the antechamber, also the back of the door. Jayjay saw himself dimly mirrored on every side. The colors in the reflections were odd, sour pastels.

"Watch it!" exclaimed Kittie, heavily catching her balance as she stepped inside. "It's like oil, or ice."

"Quantum-mirror varnish," said Sonic. "The whole inside of the ExaExa plant is covered with it too. It costs a fortune."

"Polyurethane doped with carbon nanotubes knotted and palladium-doped to make square-root-of-NOT gates," said Jay-jay, showing off his physics chops. "The gates slice right through the orphid entanglement threads."

"We're losing the orphidnet right now," said Thuy as the outer door swung closed behind them. They pushed through an inner door and entered the Armory proper. The great open space was fully quantum-mirrored. Floors, walls, windows, ceilings, and doors, all were glazed with square-root-of-NOT varnish. The acid-tinged reflections gave the Armory the misleading air of a psychedelic fun house, although in fact it was an oasis of calm. Relaxed, smiling people were hanging out talking with each other.

But Jayjay wasn't paying much attention to them yet. He was busy freaking out. For the first time in over a year, he had no all-seeing orphidnet view. The outer world was gone. And his body's beezies had reacted to the Armory by dropping offline; they were accustomed to distributing their computations far across the worldwide orphidnet. Jayjay's unaided natural mind felt stupid, befogged. He had so much less input than before, so much less computational strength.

Sonic stared down at his twitching fingers, as if unable to assimilate his loss.

"Ugh!" exclaimed Thuy, half turning back. "I feel like a piece of mud pottery. A raw-wood birdhouse. A bland bologna in a deli case."

"Keep it together," said Kittie, taking Thuy's hand. "We can use this in our work, honey. Grist for the mill. Remember, nonkiqqies like to feel this way."

"Hell they do," said Thuy. "Even Dot and Red were plugged in."

"Welcome to Natural Mind," said a dark-skinned woman sitting at a reception desk on the other side of the inner door. She looked compact and powerful. "I'm Millie Stubbs. Do you want to change? Not sure? It's enough to want to want to change, if that makes sense to you."

The big open room echoed with the low hubbub of voices, a comfortable, old-timey, human sound. People were sitting in groups on yoga mats and beanbag chairs. In a far corner of the hundred-foot-high room, an openwork metal staircase rose to an atticlike second floor squeezed against the roof.

"Stay with it, Thuy," said Jayjay. "We can do this." Slowly, laboriously, some of his beezie agents were coming back to life, limping along at a fraction of their usual clock-rate.

"Relax and feel," counseled Millie Stubbs. "You'll get used to it. You can meet our chief in a minute. And our clients and our graduates. They'll tell you how it is to be sober."

"Sober?" protested Sonic, gazing down at the lifeless, limp shoon he'd drawn from his pocket, which was an especially creepy sight as the shoon's face still resembled Jayjay's. "How about dead ? Using the orphidnet isn't the same as being drunk or stoned."

"It is for some of us," said Millie, sizing up Sonic's jerky motions. "Not all that many people walk into Natural Mind by accident. Maybe this is where you need to be. A sober living environment. We've got a few bunks open."

"People live here?" asked Sonic, incredulous. "What do they do?"

"Participate in meetings-and work," said Millie. "Our clients earn their keep."

"Tiny me," said Thuy, running her hands over her face. "I feel like I'm waking up from a dream. But I loved the dream. It's only the Big Pig I want to quit, Millie. Not the whole freakin' orphidnet. All my work's in the orphidnet."

"The idea is to cut way down before ramping back up," said Millie. "Honor your natural mind. It's not slow, it's not dull, it's just subtle. Notice your details, remember to feel. Most of our graduates come back for a meeting once or twice a week. It's an island of serenity here. Check it out." She pulled out a paperback as if to start reading.

"That's all?" said Kittie. "No questionnaires?"

"Like I said, Mr. Topping will interview you in a minute," said Millie Stubbs.

"Aha," said Jayjay.

"You pigheads like that word, don't you?" said Millie, baring her strong teeth in a grin.

"Of course you know who we are, right?" said Thuy.

"I see that Mr. Topping is nearly ready for you." Millie pointed across the room to where a yellow light was blinking beside the open metal stairwell.

They started up the stairs, Kittie and Thuy in the lead. Seen in the murky pastels of the quantum-mirrored walls, the four of them looked like ascending divers.

Jayjay noticed that Sonic was flexing his powerful hands. Was he planning to attack Topping? Jayjay wanted to send Sonic a quantum-encrypted instant message warning him to stay cool, but here inside the Armory, the orphidnet-based quantum-encryption routine didn't seem to be available. So Jayjay settled for messaging Sonic an unencrypted emoticon, a peace sign carved from ice.

"Yeah, yeah," muttered Sonic. "Be chill, but don't forget to watch your ass."

The upper floor held a large, low-ceilinged office: fluorescent lights, rows of old-school computers, the hum of ventilation. Hundreds of street-worn Natural Mind clients were sitting before monitors, wearing headphones and navigating with hand gestures. The machines were linked to a hub with a cable going through the ceiling beside a ladder and a trapdoor-all leading to the antenna on the Armory roof.

"How retro," said Kittie.

In this confined well-lit space, the quantum-mirror glazes were bright and clear. With the floor and ceiling reflecting each other, it felt as if they were suspended in an endless 3-D grid of worker drones.

"I'm thinking of Franz Kafka at his desk at the Workmen's Accident Insurance Company of Prague," said Thuy. "Is this, like, aversion therapy to make kiqqies hate the orphidnet?"

"We plantin' mines," said a rabbity-looking thin man sitting at a computer near the stairs. "I calls 'em mines, anyhow. They's links what blow up into ads. Catchin' folks by surprise, you understand. The trick is to stick your ad-mine onto a spot where the filter dogs ain't pissed yet. Who you gals? Maybe we done met on the orphidnet, but . . ."

"I never remember what I was doing online when I come down either," said Kittie. "I'm Kittie, and this is my girlfriend, Thuy, and we've got our sidekicks Jayjay and Sonic here too."

"Prescription John's the name," said the guy in his country accent. He reached out to shake their hands. "My problem is I'm lovin' that Hawg even more than hillbilly heroin. Been here umpty-five times."

"You're into the Big Pig too?" said Jayjay.

"Plentifully," said Prescription John. He nodded toward the wasted-away Asian woman next to him. "This here's Mary Moo. Some of our running buddies carried me and Mary here last week. We was malnourished."

"This is my fourth time through the Natural Mind spin-dry," said the skeletal Mary Moo. She had a soft, cultured, California voice. "We're going to keep it together this time, aren't we, John? When we hit the street?"

"I'm in no rush to step out," said Prescription John. "We sleeping between sheets, eating off a table, and ad-mining the orphidnet for the Man. Copacetic. It's like living with my mamma and playing video games."

All around, the spectral Natural Mind clients were peering and gesturing at their screens. A windowless office with a closed door ran along the room's rear. Jayjay couldn't peep into the office, what with its walls being covered with quantum-mirror varnish. A light over the office door glowed yellow, same as at