Postsingular, Rudy Rucker [e book reading free txt] 📗

“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, jalapeño, or mango. Others were channeling music or watching what was happening somewhere else. With everyone’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 Grandmaster’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