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

“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, oldtimey, 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 admining 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,