by Rudy Rucker
For the first time, Ond accepted that he might have made a mistake in releasing the orphids.
In his house at last, Ond found little Chu convulsing on the living room floor, with a white-haired Hibrane angel woman probing at his brain. Ond cradled the boy in his arms.
“Stop it!” exclaimed Ond. “Please!” The angel’s face wasn’t cruel. Perhaps she’d listen to reason. “You’re hurting my son! What do you need?”
The Hibraner sighed, interrupted her slow stirring of Chu’s brain, and studied Ond. “Ond Lutter?” she messaged presently. “I’m Gladax. You’re the man who stopped the nants, yes?”
“Yes. Three years ago. Take your finger out of Chu’s head. Talk to me. We can work things out.”
“Your son stole our jump-code,” said Gladax. “I have to erase it. I don’t want to hurt him, but he’s so stubborn. What else can I do?” Though her voice was stern, her resolve was wavering. With a frown, she withdrew the energy ray from within Chu’s head.
“Are you okay, Chu?” asked Ond, hugging his son tighter than ever.
“I still have the link to the chimes and the blue spaghetti,” murmured the boy. “She didn’t erase them yet. Here.” In a flash, Ond absorbed Chu’s message containing the encrypted link.
“Got it,” said Ond, just to make sure Gladax knew.
“Jitsy little gnomes!” exclaimed the Hibraner, annoyed. “If I let you pollute our world with your horrible machines, there’s no reason for my dangerous journey to your brane.”
“Look, I’m the guy who stopped the nants,” said Ond. “You said it yourself. I can help you. And Chu can help too. You don’t want to scramble our brains. We’re a resource.”
Gladax frowned, not liking the situation. “Yes, Ond, you were the hero of Nant Day, but now you’ve made these orphid nanomachines. I don’t want seething beasties in my home brane.”
There was a hugger-mugger of voices outside. Someone was honking a car horn. Hector Rojas.
“My friend is here for me,” said Ond quickly. “Chu and I have to leave this instant. We’ll go back to Jil Zonder’s boat. I’ll do what I can to protect your world, Gladax, I promise. And remember, you need an expert on your side.”
“Oh, all right then,” messaged Gladax after a long pause. “But no broadcasting that link. Or I addle your brain for real, no gentle probing like with Chu. I’ll be watching you very closely, Ond Lutter.”
“Watch me all you like,” said Ond. “And leave poor Chu alone. How could you do that to him, anyway? Don’t you have children of your own?”
“A nephew,” messaged Gladax, showing a little smile. “He’s bright, but headstrong. Always does the opposite of what I tell him. He jumps branes every day—as if it were perfectly safe! As if Subdee was nothing to worry about! Yes, yes, I have to remember that you gnomes have emotions too. Run along before that mob gets hold of you.”
“Do you want to hear about the cuttlefish and how I found the angels’ jump-code?” Chu asked his father as Ond carried him to the door.
“I heard a little from the orphidnet AIs,” said Ond. How fragile the boy seemed, how precious. “I call them beezies.”
“The beezies are good,” said Chu in his toneless little voice. “But that angel woman was being mean to me. Gladax. I wouldn’t let her erase the jump-code. I almost have a way to learn that code by heart.”
“Strong Chu,” said Ond, touched by his son’s courage. “I want to hear all the details. We’re going to need them. But you rest for now. We don’t want to rile Gladax.”
“Okay,” said Chu.
People were yelling just down the hill. Almost here. Moving faster than he would have thought possible, Ond got himself and Chu into the backseat of Hector’s sporty car. Hector peeled out and slewed away from the crowd, following up with a high-speed doughnut move to shake a car trying to tail them.
On the way to the boat dock on Third Street, Chu couldn’t stop thinking about the Hibraners’ jump-code, no matter what Gladax and Ond had said. The more he thought about the code, the simpler it got. Pretty soon he could fit it all into his head. And then he had a really good idea. The core structure of the blue-spaghetti-and-chimes pattern was just a special kind of knot with a few hundred crossings. He rummaged in his pants pocket and found a piece of string, determined to make the pattern real.
“What are you doing?” Ond asked him.
Chu didn’t answer for now. His fingers were weaving his piece of string into an intricate Celtic-style knot. But before he finished, he began feeling dozy.
He slouched against his father in the car’s backseat, and before he knew it, he was in the orphidnet yet again. He reached out to find Momotaro and Bixie. They were running around on the Merz Boat playing with a neat new toy that Jil called a shoon. Jil had just now made it out of smart plastic, a soft robot shaped like a little man. Smart, graceful Jil was good both with her hands and with high-level animation code. The shoon’s name was Happy. Chu’s virtual form joined the game. Happy and the kids could see him. They played a hide-and-seek game called Ghost in the Graveyard.
The game felt a little creepy because there was one of those oversized angels lagging along behind Chu, doing his best to keep up. He wasn’t bossy and old like Gladax; he wore colorful pants and a shirt with a big collar. He messaged that his name was Azaroth; he said he was working as an interbrane cuttlefisherman. He had a sketchy beard and a tight cap on his head with a ponytail wadded up on top. He told Chu that Chu should go ahead and pass his jump-code to everyone he knew, because it would be fun to have lots of Lobraners visiting their world no matter what Gladax said. Azaroth wasn’t scared of Gladax, because she was his aunt. He said he was a rebel angel.
After her initial half hour of panic, Jil had relaxed and started using the orphidnet, dipping in and out. When she went in, it was like sleeping, as if the orphidnet users were dreamers pooling together in the collective unconscious of the hive mind. It wasn’t actually like a sudocoke high; it didn’t have that somatic rush. This said, it wasn’t hard to imagine geeks getting seriously hooked on the orphidnet. But for Jil, the orphidnet was a manageable tool. She had begun directing her dreamy visions for a purpose: she wanted to find out how to market Yu Shu athletic shoes.
Yesterday Mr. Kim, the chief of marketing at Yu Shu, had e-mailed Jil about their need for a “beloved logoman,” and Jil hadn’t even understood what the hell he wanted. But the orphid AIs helped her; they searched the global namespace to figure out Mr. Kim’s request. A “logoman” was meant to be a little animated figure that would symbolize the Yu Shu company: a Michelin Man, a Reddy Kilowatt, a Ronald McDonald, a Mickey Mouse, like that.
The orphidnet was teeming with helpful AI agents. They resembled flexible umbrellas patterned with eyes. After telling Jil what Mr. Kim thought a logoman was, the smart umbrellas had helped her design one by twisting themselves into diverse shapes, modeling possible Yu Shu logoman designs. Jil had picked the versions she liked; the other agents contorted themselves into variations of the chosen shapes; Jil picked again; and so on. In a few minutes she’d evolved a lovable logoman that she decided to call Happy. Happy resembled a smiling athletic shoe, a dog with a floppy tongue, and a two-toothed Korean baby.
The orphidnet agents had instantiated Happy by loading his mesh onto a handy lump of Craigor’s piezoplastic—and right away Happy began hopping and rolling around on deck. It seemed Jil had invented a new style of robot; she decided to call such robots shoons. And then she’d snapped out of the orphidnet to be all there for this.
Bixie tossed a wooden block; Happy the shoon bounced over to retrieve it, his motions clownish enough to send the kids into gales of laughter.
Although it was getting late, nobody felt like going to sleep. With the clear sky and the full moon high overhead, it was nearly as bright as day. Momotaro and Bixie started playing hide-and-seek with the shoon, and a virtual version of Chu showed up to join them.
Moving around the deck rearranging things in the moonl
ight, Craigor was watching the kids play. “The orphidnet is a locative planetary brain,” he told Jil. “My possessions are embodied thoughts.” He paused, watching the orphidnet AIs. “The orphidnet doesn’t have to be alienating. You can use it as a way to pay very close attention to the world. Its whole strength is that it’s based on physical reality.”
While Craigor talked, Jil made two more plastic Happy figures. And she launched a bunch of virtual shoons onto the Net. Some of them stuck around to play hide-and-seek with Bixie, Momotaro, the plastic shoons, virtual Chu, and a curiously large humanoid form.
Craigor loved feeling the real and the unreal swirling around him. After a bit, virtual Chu went away, replaced by Ond in the orphidnet. Ond had a favor to ask.
“What?” said Craigor.
“Can I come back there with Chu?” asked Ond. “Physically? I’m not safe in town. Everyone knows where I am all the time. They want to lynch me.”
“What about Nektar?” asked Craigor.
“She—she left me for another man. She hates me because of the orphids.”
“Poor Ond,” said Jil, who was listening in.
Craigor’s mind was spinning rapid plans that he was careful not to broadcast. Of late he’d been feeling oppressed by the approach of middle age. He’d hardly slept with any other women before Jil, and he’d been faithful ever since their marriage. Life was passing him by. Would it be so terrible if he had a few affairs? There was nothing Craigor liked so much as having women admire at him. And now that Nektar was on the loose, wow. Her full lips, wiggly figure, heavy blond hair. But how could Craigor go after her with the orphids showing everyone everything all the time? If Jil found out about him being unfaithful, she’d probably lose it and go back on sudocoke. So he had to be a good boy. But was that fair? Did he have to spend his whole life as a captive to Jil’s stupid addiction problem? If he didn’t score some action, pretty soon he’d be dead in heaven with St. Peter asking, “Did you get any?” and Craigor would be all, “I slept with my wife.” What kind of way was that to meet your maker? With a sense of rattling past an irreversible switch point, Craigor made a snap decision to go for Nektar, no matter what the price. All these thoughts flew by in a fraction of a second. Craigor’s lips twitched in a sardonic, guilty grin.
“Poor Ond,” repeated Jil, taking in Craigor’s odd smile as if she knew what it was about.
“Can you please send the dinghy now?” messaged Ond. “We’re almost at the dock. I’m being followed, but don’t worry, I won’t stay long. We’ll be on our way before there’s any danger to you. Chu and I just need a minute to catch our breath. And then we’ll go—elsewhere.”
“I’m loving the orphidnet,” said Craigor, wanting to mellow Ond out, given that he’d just decided to sleep with the man’s wife. “I have this sense of resonance and enrichment. You did good, Ond. Here comes the dinghy.”
“You’re not seeing the big slow angels?” asked Ond. “From a parallel world?”
An odd, unsettling question, that. As Craigor waited for the dinghy to return with Ond and Chu, he studied the giant shiny man who’d been playing with the kids. Thirty feet tall, the ghostly form stepped over the boat’s cabin, then crouched down amid the cluttered boxes on the foredeck.
“See him? With a topknot?” said Craigor, pointing out the figure to Jil, who was still staring at him. “He’s like one of those beings I see out of the corner of my eye sometimes. And when I turn my head, nothing’s there. You must have had that experience when you were using. Something about the orphids is making our hallucinations real. Or they were real all along, and now the orphids are sticking to them.”
“I see another one,” said slender Bixie, peering across the water at the dinghy coming in. “A big angel in front of Chu’s little boat. She’s scolding him. She has white hair. Oh, and now the nice boy angel from our boat is dancing over there to argue with her. He’s her nephew. The angels move slow, but they hop fast.”
“The big angel’s name is Gladax,” said Craigor, the information jumping unbidden into his head. “She says we shouldn’t try to go to her world. She says the jump is dangerous, with ravenous beaky subbie creatures in between the worlds. She says their world’s much more important than ours.”
“Our world’s just as good,” replied Jil. She was getting images from the boy with the topknot. She saw two sheets of reality nestled together, the paired branes making each other glow. The viewpoint zoomed into the gap between the worlds, showing the angel boy twisting past beaky subbie-things like a kayaker avoiding rocks. “It’s not that dangerous to go.”
“Chu calls the angels’ world the Hibrane,” said Bixie. “Sweet! And he just now messaged me a link to a magic spell for going there.” Bixie stood on tiptoe and called out to Chu in the dinghy. “Try and catch me, Chu!”
The air flickered and Bixie disappeared. The male angel with the topknot disappeared too; perhaps he’d guide Bixie. Big Gladax shook her fist in bleak frustration, and then made as if to poke an energy ray into Chu’s head. But Ond was furiously waving his arms, beating the air around Chu, messing up Gladax’s positioning. The dinghy docked against the Merz Boat.
“Bixie’s in the Hibrane!” shouted Chu, scrambling aboard. “I have to go help her!”
“What. Are. You. Talking about!” said Jil, taking hold of the boy’s shoulders. She half wanted to give him a brutal shake, but instead she crouched down to look in his eyes. “What did you do to my Bixie?”
Ond was talking into the air, addressing the Hibraner angel. “If you attack Chu again, Gladax, your jump-code goes out to every single person on Earth. And if you kill me, you’re defenseless for good.”
“Talk to me, Chu,” insisted Jil, still holding the boy’s shoulders.
“The angels live in the Hibrane,” said Chu in his usual flat tone. He looked frightened. “Angel Gladax is mad at me. The angels have always been coming here, but now we can see them better—thanks to the orphids. I found out how to jump a person to the Hibrane. Gladax doesn’t like that. She told me not to share the jump-code. I didn’t mean for Bixie to—”
“How?” interjected Craigor grimly. He was standing over Jil and Chu. “Tell us how! We have to go after Bixie.”
“The orphidnet AIs and I did a timing-channel attack on the disappearing cuttlefish,” began Chu. “And—”
“More jive about cuttlefish?” cried Craigor. “Where’s my daughter, damn you!”
“Don’t yell at him, Craigor, or I’ll punch you in the mouth,” said Ond, his voice very tight. “Chu already gave me a link to the jump-code. It looks like blue spaghetti and it sounds like chimes. I’ll message the link to you right now, Jil.” He twitched his head and hopped to one side, ducking the big angel, who still had that menacing ray sticking out of her forefinger. “Stop it, Gladax! We have to save Jil’s daughter. I don’t care about the subbies. See the jump-code, Jil? All right then. Now let Chu finish telling us how it works.”
Craigor got hold of an oar and took out his anger by violently waving it around, stirring eddies in the air. This had a good effect; Gladax drew back a couple of meters, unable to navigate her body’s subtle matter through the roiled-up air currents.
“You don’t have to use the blue spaghetti anymore,” said Chu, his voice maddeningly deliberate. “I have a new version almost done.” He produced a bird’s-nest of string from his pocket and sat down on the deck. Delicately he tied two loose ends of his intricate tangle, which resembled a woven bracelet. “The jump-code’s in this knot,” said Chu, staring at it with absorption. “Nice and tidy. I can remember this.”
“Get to the point, Chu,” puffed Craigor, still waving his oar. “Spaghetti, chimes, knot—how does someone use your freakin’ code?”
“Well, I think when the angels do it, they stop thinking about themselves for a second,” said Chu, looking small and uncomfortable amidst the legs of the agitated grown-ups. His fingers were rubbing his knot. “And then they concentrate on the code and—”
Chu disappeared too.
“We’re going after them, Ond,” yelled Jil. “Craigor, you watch Momotaro. Don’t give me that moony hangdog look, Ond! Let’s go!”
Ond’s pursuers were yelling from the shore. An outboard motor sputtered and roared into life. Spotlights lit the water.
“Of course, Jil,” said Ond. “I want to hide in the Hibrane. Let’s pace up and down the deck; Gladax has trouble keeping up. Block out her messages or she’ll distract you. Please don’t hate me. I’d do anything for you.”
“Okay then, Doctor Übergeek,” said Jil, stepping lively toward the bow at Ond’s side, still extremely upset about Bixie of course, but also feeling just a little jazzed by Ond’s flattery and by the prospect of a wild trip through another dimension. “You better make this good. We space out and we slam the code, huh? Like meditating before doing a line of sudocoke. Too bad we don’t have Chu’s Knot.”
“Just use the link I gave you,” said Ond.
In the orphidnet Jil studied the tangled blue spaghetti and the ringing chimes. But try as she might, she remained stubbornly aboard the Merz Boat.
“We have to let go of our internal monologues,” suggested Ond. “Focus on the spaces between our thoughts.”
On a good, serene day, that wouldn’t have been hard for Jil, but just now it was tough. Urgently casting about for mental leverage, she thought of the Zen koan where the teacher holds up a stick and says, “If you call this a mere stick, you deny its Buddha nature. If you don’t call it a stick, you’re lying. What do you call it? Quick!”
Jil broke the stick. She was neither here nor there, neither now nor then, not inside, not out. The chiming blue spaghetti buried her. She felt a twisting sensation and saw a series of ocean images, as if she were flying very low across an endless sea. Some creatures like birds stuck their heads above the surface, snapping at her. Subbies? Jil dodged them readily enough, energized by a pleasure/paranoia rush straight out of her sudocoke days. It was hard to say how long the jump lasted. But then something changed, she felt a nudge, and—hello!
