by Rudy Rucker
“Vibby!” said Thuy. “Good old President Bernardo—hey! What’s he doing now?”
A flicker, a pop, and control of this particular President Bernardo icon had shifted into the hands of his political rivals. Wearing a slack, imbecilic grin, the president dropped his pants, squatted on the sidewalk, relieved himself, and—
“Hurry up!” interrupted Kittie, looking back at them. “We’re gonna lose the pancakes. Oh, what is that supposed to be?”
“Homesteady Party attack ad,” said Jayjay, looking away from the degraded President Bernard Lampton. “They’re pumping out all this viral adware for the election.” Lampton’s image duck-walked toward Kittie, the president leering up at her.
A banner unfurled across their visual fields, reading Vote for Dick Too Dibbs! Beneath it appeared two vaguely similar men in red ties and blue suits: former President Dick Dibbs of Ohio, and his second cousin Dick Too Dibbs from Owensboro, Kentucky. President Dibbs had been convicted of treason and executed by lethal injection a few years back—the fallout of his scheme to turn the entire planet Earth into a Dyson sphere of nants, with the networked system supposedly running a Virtual Earth simulation, including a perfect copy of each and every former Earthling. It had come out in the trial that actually President Dibbs had instructed the nants to simulate only registered USA Homesteady Party members, condemning the rest of Earth’s population to vanish without a trace. President Dibbs had planned to install himself as an all-powerful president-for-eternity, or, not to put too fine a point on it, God. No matter, his Kentucky lawyer cousin Dick Too Dibbs stood a good chance of being voted into office. Too Dibbs seemed more honest and intelligent than the original Dibbs. And he had great ads.
“I was a private man,” said former President Dick Dibbs, with the very slightest gesture toward the obscene Bernard Lampton. “A clean man. Misled by corporate criminals. Unjustly executed by activist judges. We can control the Singularity. We can have a lasting paradise safe from woe. Dick Too Dibbs in November. He’s learned from my mistakes.” He gazed earnestly at Dick Too, with the faintest hint of a smile at the corners of his thin-lipped mouth.
Dick Too made a wry face. “I learned I don’t want to end up in the death house like you!” he said, giving his cousin’s icon a poke. President Dibbs shriveled up and shrank. “Forget him, folks. I know you’ve got every reason to be mistrustful of the Dibbs name. But I’ll do right by the common people. I know how the system works. And I’m honest. Which is more than can be said for Bernard Lampton. Why don’t you use one of your speeches to wipe yourself with, Bernardo? That’s about all it’s worth.”
“Put your filter dogs on that junk,” said Kittie. “Own your reality, pigheads.”
It was a little harder than usual for Jayjay to teach his virtual guard dogs to recognize this particular type of ad, which had arrived compressed within a single vertex of Lampton’s image-mesh. The orphidnet was getting very flaky thanks to all the spam and adware it was carrying. Jayjay had seen, like, two hundred Dick Too Dibbs ads yesterday. No matter how strenuously he tutored and upgraded his filter dogs, new ads kept romping in. The Homesteady Party was hi-tech and relentless. They seemed to be using programmers with an exceedingly deep understanding of the orphids’ code and to have a very large and effective PR force embedding ad-triggers into unexpected contexts.
“Get outta there!” Sonic was yelling, sprinting across the nearly empty McDonald’s parking lot, beautiful plumes of water splashing from each of his heavy-booted steps.
Too late. A couple of middle-aged bums in watch caps were already scarfing down the pancakes from the trash, and not even Sonic was up for hassling shaky pathetic winos over—garbage.
“Where’s some other food, Bernardo?” said Kittie. This time, the president’s icon didn’t come up at all; instead a Dick Too Dibbs ad appeared right away, the ad pebbled and glittery in the rain, Dick Too talking about the danger of letting big companies control the orphidnet—reasonable and populist remarks, really, but they seemed shady and insincere since they were coming via an ad.
Seeking a filter to block this ad too, Jayjay searched the orphidnet and found a high-rated virtual defender resembling a chihuahua. He scanned the chihuahua’s machine code to make sure the virtual dog didn’t have Homesteady hookworms, then recruited him into his kennel. The chihuahua yapped at the other filter dogs, educating them. They set off in a baying pack, digging through Jayjay’s recent inputs, competing to be the fastest and the most accurate filter dog of all, mating and spawning as they ran. All this took only seconds. And then Jayjay messaged his Best Dog in Hunt to the other Posse members, the mutated beast resembling a scaly dachshund by now.
Jayjay was wet and getting cold, although the rain-pocked wavy sheets of water undulating across the parking lot were still inconceivably beautiful—if he relaxed and actually looked at them. Seemed like he was pissing away too much time on low-level maintenance these days.
Thuy glanced over at Jayjay with a secret smile. She saw the water too. She liked it best when Jayjay was in the real world with her. She’d only left him for Kittie because he was spending too much time high on the Pig or plugging into his physics seminars. But she still thought he was the cutest, smartest guy she’d ever met.
“Let’s walk to that car Bernardo showed us,” said Kittie.
“I wonder if that was Bernardo at all,” said Thuy. “Maybe he was a spoof from the start. Maybe the car is a trap.”
“I’ll take that chance,” said Kittie, wiping the rain from her eyes.
On the way, Jayjay used the orphidnet to see into the garbage cans standing on the curb for pickup day. He was a bit gingerly in his scanning—lest a hidden Homesteady Party ad surprise him. He found a meaty roast chicken carcass, a third of a chocolate cake, a half-full box of Thai takeout, a couple of slices of pizza, and a bunch of brown bananas.
“Food links, Kittie,” he said, messaging her the locations.
They scooped up the grub and hurried for the shelter of the puffy silver SUV, which was parked in a driveway by a beat old Victorian house on a side street between Mission and Guerrero, right where the Bernardo icon had said they’d find it. The Posse piled in, glad to be out of the rain, Jayjay in the driver’s seat, Sonic shotgun, the women in back. Jayjay would have liked to be the one in back with Thuy.
Looking through the orphidnet, Jayjay could see and hear the old couple in the flat on the house’s first floor. With nanocomputing orphids meshed upon every surface on Earth and linked together by quantum entanglement, you could peep anything you liked.
“Red! There’s some kids in our car!” said the woman. She was soft-chinned, not unbeautiful, sitting on the couch knitting. “They’re eating garbage! Why didn’t you lock the car like I told you? Get out there and chase off those dirty kiqqies!”
Using the orphidnet to amplify your intelligence was viewed by many as a deviant activity. Kiqqies looked at things so differently from normals. And most kiqqies weren’t willing to hold jobs. If you were smart and paid attention to the orphidnet, you could live without money. But quite a few people preferred to hold back from orphidic intelligence-amplification—there was a feeling that once you were a full-on kiqqie, you were no longer your same old self.
“I’m watching a football game, Dot,” said Red, paunchy with a lean face. “The halftime show.” He was slumped in an armchair, seemingly staring at a wall. The orphidnet was better than TV: everything was on it, live and three-dimensional, seen from whatever viewpoint you chose—and you could see under people’s clothes.
“I know what you’re up to, Red,” said his wife. “You’re staring at those cheerleaders’ boobies. Or worse.” Voyeurism was in fact the number one orphidnet application for the average person.
“Hey, if you’re so concerned about my sex life,” riposted Red, “why don’t you come over here and—”
“Hush, I’m watching our granddaughter nap,” said Dot, bending over her knitting with a half-smile, appreciative of Red’s
sally. “I can keep an orphid-eye on you from here.”
“Live and let live,” said Red. “Those kiqqies can have our clunker for all I care. Gasoline is gone for good. Solar’s won the day, and if those assholes in the Middle East want to kill each other, it’s their own business now. Not even the Homesteadies want us back there.”
“Then tell the kids to drive the car away right now,” said Dot. “Give them the keys and change the title. I’m sick of seeing that poor old car. It makes me sad. I told President Bernard a week ago, as a matter of fact. But I didn’t mean for ragged freaks to make our car a crash pad. Three days ago we had some stumblebum in there just out of the Natural Mind rehab, remember? And now we’ve got these scuzzy kiqqies with their—”
Jayjay pinged Dot through the orphidnet while gnawing the chicken carcass. There was a lot of good meat on the flat underside.
“Hello?” said Dot.
“Hi,” said Jayjay, the orphids on his throat registering the vibrations, reconstituting the sound waves, and sending the audio on its way. “This is the kiqqie in your car. Spelled M-A-N.”
“Red, one of them is talking to me! You listen too.”
“We’ll be glad to take the car off your hands,” Jayjay told the old couple, still working on his chicken carcass. “Does it have enough gas to drive away?”
“Maybe a half gallon,” said Red. “Whatever the homies haven’t siphoned off. You in a hurry?”
“No,” said Jayjay. “Not at all.”
“So I’ll give you the keys and transfer the title when the rain lets up,” said Red. “Meanwhile I got a football game to watch.”
“And be careful where you put that garbage you’re eating,” said Dot in a sharp tone. Sonic had just laid half a slice of glistening pizza on the dash so as to accept a lopsided piece of the cake from Thuy. “And no sex in our driveway. You happen to be sitting in a beloved and respectable family vehicle. When our children were small, we—”
Jayjay tuned her out.
“Where’s that Thai food?” he asked, cracking open his door to toss out the denuded chicken bones.
“All gone,” said Kittie. “You got the whole chicken, so that’s fair. There’s still cake. And bananas. They’re plantains, actually. They taste better than they look.”
It’s nice in this car, thought Jayjay, peeling a plantain. Big soft seats, the air faintly musty, the windows fogged up from their breath, the rain drumming on the roof. The women were cuddled together in back, with Thuy’s musky fragrance perfuming the damp air. The car’s resident beezies were like fuzzy, friendly ghosts.
“It’d be sweet to road-trip this silver marshmallow south,” said Sonic. “San Ho, Cruz, the beach, and then past Los Angeles into Mexico, vato, hanging with la raza and the pyramids. You’d like Mexico, Jayjay; we could go underwater diving. Some kiqqies just invented snap-on gills. Hell, I’d like to see gasoline come back.”
“Don’t think that way, Sonic,” said Kittie. “Gaia’s better off without internal combustion. I mean, look at this weather. You’ve seen the climate simulations in the orphidnet. I’m glad the world’s finally switched to electric cars.”
“They’re still using some oil in Bangalore,” said Sonic, flicking Jayjay’s lizard earring. “To make piezoplastic for shoons. The beezies are all over that. Do beezies still get into your earring, Jayjay?”
“Sometimes,” said Jayjay.
“Jayjay’s always had an earring,” said Thuy with a fond giggle. “He was wearing a gold hoop the first time he came home from school with me. Helping me with my math homework. My mother saw us kissing and she freaked out. ‘He’s not Vietnamese, he has an earring, he’ll never get a job.’”
“After Orphid Night, I was there for you again,” recalled Jayjay. “I saved you from the wikiware.” Although most employees didn’t have to go into offices anymore, many employers required you to install ShareCrop wikiware on your bodies’ orphids—which became, in effect, a bossy virtual monkey on your back. Living free on the street as a kiqqie with Jayjay, Thuy had time to craft her metastory “Waking Up.” But then the Big Pig addiction had started dragging her down.
“And I saved her from you,” put in Kittie.
“Look, I’m the one who really cares about her,” said Jayjay, his voice rising. “I wish we could talk about it, Thuy. Kittie’s just playing you for a game, you’re a trophy to her, a notch, and down the road you’ll—”
“Let’s go back to my shoes,” interrupted Thuy. She didn’t like to hear Kittie and Jayjay argue over her; it made her feel like an object. “There’s 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.”
“Yu Shu’s finest,” said Kittie, admiring Thuy’s feet. “You were lucky to score those when that yuppie jogger had the heart attack, Thuy. Good eye.”
“I was the one who bagged the shoes for her,” said Jayjay. “Thuy didn’t want to touch a corpse.”
“Corpse-touching is the kind of thing men are good for,” said Kittie. “A social role for the lower caste.”
“On the gasoline thing that you mentioned, Kittie,” said Sonic, off in his own head as usual. “The techs couldn’t have brought electric car technology along so fast if it weren’t for the beezies. It’s 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 Earth’s surface was ashes and tidal waves with everyone dead.”
“Yea unto the breaking of the Seventh Seal,” intoned Thuy. She was taping this bit for her metanovel, and “Seventh Seal” sounded good. Apocalyptic, dark, weird, damned. She overlaid the words with some gothic graphics.
“The beezies give a squat because people are like flowers in Earth’s garden,” said Jayjay. “The best art in the museum. After the beezies emerged in the orphidnet, they started watching us—and 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?”
“I think the beezies vampire off our emotions, is what it is,” said Thuy, handing him a fist-sized piece of chocolate sweetness. “Especially our metabeezie pal the Big Pig. Beezies admire our juice, our hormones. Have you ever noticed that when you’re having sex, if you look into the orphidnet, the beezies are totally on your case?”
“I bet the beezies compete to settle onto a baby while it’s delivered,” said Kittie. “Like how the Hindus imagine souls being reborn. The beezies need us to do things for them. They can see everything, but they can’t 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.”
“But now beezies can use shoons instead of people to do stuff,” said Sonic. “Like remote-controlled hands. So what are people for? I’m not art, not a sex-machine, not a robot to push a broom like a pendejo janitor.”
“Here boys,” said Thuy. “Take this last wad of cake before Kittie and I burst our Seventh Seals.” 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.
“Ugh,” said Kittie.
“Maybe the beezies want us for our processing power,” speculated Jayjay, sharing the gooey chocolate with Sonic. “And we’re 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 beezies’ exhaustive search procedures.” He paused, doubting what he’d just said. “Or maybe not. Naw, like I said before, I think the beezies help us just to see us thrive—the same way you’d want the trees on your land to do well.”
“If the beezies were big-biz landowners, they’d be looking to harvest us,” said Kittie darkly. “Like the nants were gonna do. They were gonna pul
p us.”
“I’d feel safer if there was some strong definite thing we were doing for the beezies,” said Sonic. “Other than being fun to watch. How about those movies the Big Pig always pushes on us? Maybe we’re processing them for her. Maybe we’re the Big Pig’s glasses.”
“Urim and Thummim,” repeated Thuy wiggling her shoes. She never tired of riffing on the Book of Mormon that a missionary had pressed upon her parents; he’d been the first white person she ever saw inside their house. “I’m just glad the beezies are here,” she continued, smiling at Jayjay. “Everything’s so much more interesting now. And the world’s getting cleaner. Speaking of clean, wipe the food off your faces, guys. You look nasty.” She handed Jayjay a Giants sweatshirt she’d found in the back of the car.
“I’d like to play with a bunch of those little shoons,” mused Sonic. “Learn how to program them.”
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. “Hey, beezies, where can we find some shoons to play with?” The other Posse members got into the orphidnet too.
“There are some shoons at Nektar Lundquist’s house,” said a mushroom-shaped beezie with green eyes on its cap, without exactly speaking English. His compound glyphs bloomed as ready-made thoughts. “You four should go help Nektar. She’s under psychic attack by some malware that got into her orphids. She hasn’t eaten for two days. Her shoons are having trouble taking care of her. Drive this car there; you can park in Nektar’s garage.”
“Wow,” said Kittie. “Really?”
Everyone in the Posse knew all about Nektar Lundquist. Nektar’s husband Ond Lutter was famous not only because he’d released the orphids last year, but also because he’d turned back the nant invasion three years before that. People had loved Ond for killing the nants, but on Orphid Night they’d 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.
