Postsingular by Rudy Rucker (detective books to read .TXT) 📖

Westinghouse yam in alleyway,” said the improbable virtual spambot, formed like a waist-high two-legged sweet potato with multitudinous ruby eyes, wreathed in crackling blue sparks, peering at Thuy from a rain-wet alley off Valencia Street, the same spot where Grandmaster Green Flash had died. “Vote for Dick Too Dibbs,” added the yam, once he’d caught Thuy’s attention.

“Too Dibbs won the election two and a half months ago,” said Thuy. She didn’t bother to sic her filter dogs on the apparition. These days she enjoyed wandering the streets alone, open to the ether, playing the patterns, riding the flow. The heavier scenes went into her metanovel, which was growing at a rate of two or three minutes per day.

You could measure a metanovel’s length in terms of how much access time a typical user took to finish the work, assuming they didn’t set it aside. Thuy’s target-length for Wheenk was eight hours, about the time it would take to read a medium-fat book.

“I like Dick,” said the virtual yam, falling into step next to her, the misty rain drifting through him. “Does Dick like ye?”

“Give it a rest,” said Thuy. “Too Dibbs gets inaugurated the day after tomorrow, you slushed pighead.” The orphidnet was noisy with the thin cries and hoarse roars of marshmallow people already celebrating the advent of the new regime. To drown them out, Thu had her favorite Tawny Krush symphony playing, and she was enhancing the sound with violin squawks triggered by smooth gestures of her arms and legs, all but dancing down the street. She was protected from the rain by a hooded yellow slicker; under that she wore her good old yellow miniskirt, striped wool leggings, and piezoplastic Yu Shu sneakers, also a red T-shirt and red sweater she’d liberated from Nek-tar’s bulging closets.

“That’s you, Thuy, ain’t it?” said the sparkling yam. “Prescription John here. I wanna channel that story you posted this afternoon. What was it called again? Mary Moo done showed me the link, but I ain’t got the money for access. Mary says you wrote about us on the second floor at the Armory. Topping’s mad.”

“My metastory is called ‘Losing My Head,’ ” said Thuy. “I’m about to perform the whole thing live and for free at Metotem, so tune in and turn on, you skeevy old stoner. Still admining for Natural Mind, huh?”

“I cycled out too early, and had to re-up for spin-dry umpty-six. Mary never left. How you?”

“I’m off the Pig, yeah,” said Thuy. “Thinking clearer; feeling more; building my metanovel. The new metastory is an excerpt from it. I’m in the zone, John; it feels like dreaming while being awake. And the world’s helping me. This Hibraner Azaroth keeps showing up. You’re part of the pudding, too. It’s so perfect and synchronistic that you popped out of that particular alley. Everything’s entangled. God’s an artist.”

“The yam’s the man,” said Prescription John, puffing up his tuberous orange icon. “Whoops, here comes Topping. Gotta go.”

He sputtered, twinkled, and faded out—leaving Thuy with a sudden suspicion that maybe that hadn’t been the true flesh-and-blood Prescription John running the yam. Maybe she’d been talking to a virtual, artificially alive Prescription John from within her “Losing My Head” metastory. Hanging around Darlene’s Metotem store the other day, she’d heard some of the other metanovelists talking about times when their characters started messaging them—they referred to this not uncommon feedback phenomenon as “blowback.”

Gerry Gurkin, for instance, kept having visitations from the simulated Gerry Gurkin of his autobiographical Banality, the virtual Gerry clamoring that he wanted metanovelist Gerry to edit in a girlfriend character for him to fuck. Telling this story, portly Gerry darted hot intense looks at Thuy, as if he were planning to feed a model of her to virtual Gerry, which was perfectly fine with Thuy, and she said so.

Thuy was in a lonely-but-coned-off emotional state where she was ready to accept any admiration she was offered, as long as it was virtual and with no strings attached. Re: “coned off,” she’d heard a woman actually saying that about herself the other day, as if she were a wreck lane or a crime site. That phrase went straight into the metanovel. The yam’s “I like Dick; does Dick like ye?” seemed usable too. Oh, for sure that had been the real Prescription John. No beezie would ever talk that silly.

Light from the store windows made warm trapezoids on the shiny sidewalk, gilding the rain puddles, their surfaces wrinkled by the gusty wind. As always when she noticed gnarly natural patterns, Thuy thought of Jayjay. She missed his lean body, his voice, his smell, his physical presence. He was still living on the Merz Boat.

According to Kittie, who’d taken to watching every freaking second of Founders, Jayjay had had a little affair with Jil Zonder in November, although Jil had broken it off pretty quickly for the sake of her kids. Kittie said Jil wouldn’t have gotten into the affair at all if it hadn’t been that, right after his affair with Nektar, Craigor had started humping that slutty Lureen Morales up the hill. And now it looked like poor, heartbroken Jil might be drifting back into sudocoke.

Back when Jil and Jayjay’s affair had actually been going on, Kittie had kept wanting to tell Thuy about the couple’s intimate doings: who put what where how often, like that. For sure Thuy didn’t care to process that type of info. No more than she cared to peep at Kittie and Nektar making the two-backed beast. Or, for that matter, Craigor and Lureen. Grunt, grunt, moan, moan. Thuy had given up on sex, at least for now, although she and Kittie were still roommates and fairly good friends. Oh, Jayjay, where are you?

Thuy drew even with El Santo de Israel, an evangelical storefront church that had preaching and a crowd most evenings. It was next to an auto repair shop. The church name was in the serif-heavy Old English font that some Latinos liked, and the windows were decorated with poster paints: a man wrestling an angel, a six-pointed star with Hebrew letters around it, the Christian fish symbol with an eye in the middle, and numerous chapter-and-verse scripture references. Fresh red writing on the window read: “Visita Del Rebelde Ángel Azaroth Hoy.” Rebel Angel Azaroth Visiting Today.

Azaroth again. Thuy’s ears began ringing as if she had a fever. The busy street scene became remote, “in quotes,” a grimy surreal diorama behind shatterproof glass. Was Thuy writing her metanovel, or was the metanovel writing her?

Until now, Thuy had held back from mentioning Azaroth in Wheenk, but it was time to write him in. She mentally replayed her memories of her very first meeting with him, going over the events slowly and precisely, blending them into the material she already had.

It had happened shortly after Orphid Night, when the ethereal Hibraners had become visible, thanks to the airborne orphids adhering to the aliens’ insubstantial forms and bedecking them with meshes of graphical vertices.…

***

As part of her then job at Golden Lucky, the Vietnamese restaurant-supply wholesaler, Thuy was researching the possibility of starting to deal in the meat of the locally caught Pharaoh cuttlefish being processed by AmphiVision, the San Francisco company that made display devices using organic rhodopsin from cuttlefish chromatophores. AmphiVision was discarding the cuttles’ really quite tasty flesh, and Thuy’s boss, Vinh Phat, sensed a business opportunity. There was a good demand for grilled cuttlefish in the local Asian communities. Vinh had set Thuy to tracking data on the cuttlefishers, giving her access to a dragonfly spy camera.

So as it happened, Thuy was watching Craigor, Jil, Ond, Nektar, and Chu on the Merz Boat the night that Ond released the orphids. She dipped into Chu’s cuttlefish datastream; she accessed the blue spaghetti link; and she paid close attention when Chu wove his Celtic-style jump-code knot from a piece of string. The knot intrigued, even fascinated, Thuy. Looking through the dragonfly, she examined it quite closely during the penultimate instant after Chu tied together the string’s two loose ends, right before he disappeared into the Hibrane.

Thuy was investigating all these things with a sense of doing a job for Golden Lucky, alone with the family cat Naoko in her frilly bedroom at her parents’ house, working online after hours, not immediately understanding the transformative impact of what was going down. But then she looked out her window past her parents’ neighbors’ identical houses; she saw the orphidoutlined hills of San Francisco; and suddenly she got the picture. Game over. Everything was changed forever, and Thuy no longer needed to play the good girl. Not quite letting herself think about what she was doing, she packed a bag and headed for her high-school boyfriend, Jayjay. Thanks to the orphidnet, it was easy to find him. He was living with Sonic in a shell of a house in the Mission—some developer had gutted it for a retrofit and had then run out of funds.

Azaroth manifested himself to Thuy three days after Orphid Night. By then the Big Pig had emerged, and Thuy, Jayjay, and Sonic had learned about suckling on the pig, which meant that Thuy woke up woozy. She sat up in bed, looking around Jayjay’s ugly, junked squat, and then, in the orphidnet, she saw a glowing eye the size of a melon peering in the window. It was a Hibraner, a thirty-foot-tall man of light. He wore flashy clothes: purple bell-bottoms and a green shirt with yellow stripes. He reached through the wall to caress Thuy; she felt his ethereal body as a warm air-current.

“It’s glow to talk with you,” Azaroth messaged, his voice coming through the orphidnet connection in Thuy’s head. The voice sounded boyish, eager, perhaps a bit nerdy. He accompanied his speech with a rich stream of images. “I’m Azaroth from the Hibrane. And you’re …?”

“Thuy,” she said aloud, causing Jayjay to stir in his sleep. Sonic wasn’t around; he’d already gone out to