Postsingular by Rudy Rucker (detective books to read .TXT) đ
- Author: Rudy Rucker
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âAnd I saved her from you,â put in Kittie.
âLook, Iâm the one who really cares about her,â said Jayjay, his voice rising. âI wish we could talk about it, Thuy. Kittieâs just playing you for a game, youâre a trophy to her, a notch, and down the road youâllââ
âLetâs go back to my shoes,â interrupted Thuy. She didnât like to hear Kittie and Jayjay argue over her; it made her feel like an object. âThereâs 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.â
âYu Shuâs finest,â said Kittie, admiring Thuyâs feet. âYou were lucky to score those when that yuppie jogger had the heart attack, Thuy. Good eye.â
âI was the one who bagged the shoes for her,â said Jayjay. âThuy didnât want to touch a corpse.â
âCorpse-touching is the kind of thing men are good for,â said Kittie. âA social role for the lower caste.â
âOn the gasoline thing that you mentioned, Kittie,â said Sonic, off in his own head as usual. âThe techs couldnât have brought electric car technology along so fast if it werenât for the beezies. Itâs 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 Earthâs surface was ashes and tidal waves with everyone dead.â
âYea unto the breaking of the Seventh Seal,â intoned Thuy. She was taping this bit for her metanovel, and âSeventh Sealâ sounded good. Apocalyptic, dark, weird, damned. She overlaid the words with some gothic graphics.
âThe beezies give a squat because people are like flowers in Earthâs garden,â said Jayjay. âThe best art in the museum. After the beezies emerged in the orphidnet, they started watching usâand 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?â
âI think the beezies vampire off our emotions, is what it is,â said Thuy, handing him a fist-sized piece of chocolate sweetness. âEspecially our metabeezie pal the Big Pig. Beezies admire our juice, our hormones. Have you ever noticed that when youâre having sex, if you look into the orphidnet, the beezies are totally on your case?â
âI bet the beezies compete to settle onto a baby while itâs delivered,â said Kittie. âLike how the Hindus imagine souls being reborn. The beezies need us to do things for them. They can see everything, but they canât 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.â
âBut now beezies can use shoons instead of people to do stuff,â said Sonic. âLike remote-controlled hands. So what are people for? Iâm not art, not a sex-machine, not a robot to push a broom like a pendejo janitor.â
âHere boys,â said Thuy. âTake this last wad of cake before Kittie and I burst our Seventh Seals.â 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.
âUgh,â said Kittie.
âMaybe the beezies want us for our processing power,â speculated Jayjay, sharing the gooey chocolate with Sonic. âAnd weâre 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 beeziesâ exhaustive search procedures.â He paused, doubting what heâd just said. âOr maybe not. Naw, like I said before, I think the beezies help us just to see us thriveâthe same way youâd want the trees on your land to do well.â
âIf the beezies were big-biz landowners, theyâd be looking to harvest us,â said Kittie darkly. âLike the nants were gonna do. They were gonna pulp us.â
âIâd feel safer if there was some strong definite thing we were doing for the beezies,â said Sonic. âOther than being fun to watch. How about those movies the Big Pig always pushes on us? Maybe weâre processing them for her. Maybe weâre the Big Pigâs glasses.â
âUrim and Thummim,â repeated Thuy wiggling her shoes. She never tired of riffing on the Book of Mormon that a missionary had pressed upon her parents; heâd been the first white person she ever saw inside their house. âIâm just glad the beezies are here,â she continued, smiling at Jayjay. âEverythingâs so much more interesting now. And the worldâs getting cleaner. Speaking of clean, wipe the food off your faces, guys. You look nasty.â She handed Jayjay a Giants sweatshirt sheâd found in the back of the car.
âIâd like to play with a bunch of those little shoons,â mused Sonic. âLearn how to program them.â
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. âHey, beezies, where can we find some shoons to play with?â The other Posse members got into the orphidnet too.
âThere are some shoons at Nektar Lundquistâs house,â said a mushroom-shaped beezie with green eyes on its cap, without exactly speaking English. His compound glyphs bloomed as
ready-made thoughts. âYou four should go help Nektar. Sheâs under psychic attack by some malware that got into her orphids. She hasnât eaten for two days. Her shoons are having trouble taking care of her. Drive this car there; you can park in Nektarâs garage.â
âWow,â said Kittie. âReally?â
Everyone in the Posse knew all about Nektar Lundquist. Nektarâs husband Ond Lutter was famous not only because heâd released the orphids last year, but also because heâd turned back the nant invasion three years before that. People had loved Ond for killing the nants, but on Orphid Night theyâd 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, Nektarâs whole circle of acquaintances had become celebs: Nektar; Craigor Connor; Jil Zonder; Nektarâs boss, Xandro; Xandroâs wife, Beatriz; Nektarâs ex-boyfriend, Jose; and Joseâs 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, theyâd 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 nourishmentâsometimes 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 whoâd 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 artâwhat was that? Moving junk around on the deck of the boat where Craigor lived with Jil; and then laying down bogus raps about why heâd put, like, Christmas lights and a bowling ball next to a stack of tires. Big fucking deal. And Craigorâs other career, catching Pharaoh cuttlefish so that high-tech companies could coax display chemicals from the slain beastsâ skins? The man was nowhere. Jil would be better off with Jayjay, and if he could get in with the Founders crowd, heâd 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 Nektarâvirtual beings shaped like beetles.
The guiding beezie mapped out causal links, showing that the beetles were deviant AIs emerging from infected orphids on Nektarâs 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 orphidnetâs parallel quantum computation.
âFounders episode three hundred and ninety-five,â said Kit-tie, not understanding what she saw. â âNektar Gets the Sudocoke Horrors.â How great is that?â
âPoor Nektar,â said Thuy. âLook, Kittie, the shoons are helping her.â Indeed, a classic Happy Shoon was spooning water into Nektarâs cracked lips, a goob-doll shoon was offering a little cup of mush, and a doughboy shoon was sponging Nektarâs soiled sheets. ExaExa, Stank, and BigBox werenât posting any ads around Nektar Lundquist today. This episode was way too funky.
âI want to go, to physically go there, yeah,â said Sonic. âLook how many shoons.â
âWe still donât have the car keys,â said Jayjay doubtfully. He could almost smell the high, thin reek of Nektarâs dimly lit sickbed.
âYouâll want to figure out how to kill those beetles first,â glyphed the beezie. âYouâre in the right place for that. This carâs orphids happen to carry the beetle infection, too. We donât have a patch yet.â
âOh fuck!â exclaimed Kittie.
âOur orphids are infected too?â said Jayjay.
The beezie nodded.
âToo late to run away,â said Sonic. âOh well. This is where maybe humans really can outthink the beezies. Thanks to the Doodly Bug weapon shop.â He was talking about his fave online game.
The rain was really pouring down now. Rainwater dribbled in through the moon roofâs weather stripping to wet Jayjayâs 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,
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