Postsingular by Rudy Rucker (books for 7th graders .TXT) 📕

“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 realtiming 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!”

Fighting off malware was a continual activity, but usually the beezies would automatically give the patches to your filter dogs. Why had the beetles been so tough to kill? And why were Nek-tar’s beetles in this particular car? Jayjay set some beezies to searching through possible causes for the unfolding scenario. Inside the house old Dot and Red were dressed again; the rain was letting up.

“Lureen Morales is an idiot,” Thuy said to Kittie, dipping backward into the conversation the way she liked to do. “She’s got a pushed-in Pomeranian face. I’m much more attractive than her. Don’t be a brainwashed starfucker, Kittie. You sound like a frat boy. You should be listening to Tawny Krush instead.”

Jayjay grinned to hear Thuy harsh on Kittie.

“You’re channeling Tawny?” said Kittie, taken aback.

“She’s rehearsing a heavy-metal symphony with the Kazakhstan guitar corps,” said Thuy loftily, her high pigtails swaying. “I’m going to sample it for my metanovel. That’s what I’m all about. Postsingular literature.” She stuck out her tongue at Kit-tie and waggled it. “Am I ‘hot’ yet?”

“Come here, ban gái,” said Kittie, fumbling at Thuy’s miniskirt. “Heath’s going waay down on Lureen.”

Jayjay returned his attention to Prav Plato’s rap, not wanting to witness Kittie pawing his lost love. Sonic remained obsessively focused on his game. A moment of silence, and then old Red stumped out of the house and pulled open the car door. The two women drew apart.

“Wassup, Red,” said Jayjay.

To switch from Prof Prav’s fraught, exquisite communication to Red’s rudimentary vocalizations was, for Jayjay, like dropping out of a beautiful sunset-clouded sky into a crude, flat cartoon. For the first second or two, the old man’s words seemed like the yipping of a dog. Jayjay felt guilty about the involuntary comparison. Red wasn’t all that different from Papa, dead three years now from a gang fight in the penitentiary.

“Log into the Department of Motor Vehicles with me and I’ll give you the title,” repeated the old man, holding out the car keys.

“I want to own the car,” put in Kittie. “Me! I’ll retrofit it and trick it out.”

Red craned his neck, peering avidly at the women in the backseat.

“Your orphids are blushing, Thuy,” said Kittie. “Red’s peeping you. Dig it, realman, we’re watching you right back, you and your breeder in the house. I’m seeing hella many coats in your hall closet. Can I have the leopard-patterned Burberry knockoff with the dog-fur collar?”