by Rudy Rucker
The weird events on the second floor of the Armory had indeed sparked a great Wheenk chapter, “Losing My Head”—which Thuy was in fact due to perform at Metotem in about an hour.
More and more, Thuy believed that her labyrinthine path through this postsingular world really was at some deep level tracing out the very design she’d seen Chu weave. So the reference to Azaroth on the storefront church’s window made perfect sense. With ample time to spare before her reading, Thuy cut inside to check if the rebelida ángel was gonna make a visita and pass her another clue.
Right away a silent, observant little girl toddled out from among the beat old metal chairs to stare at Thuy. The congregation consisted of working-class Latinos and Filipinos, many with families in tow. A glance into the orphidnet showed that only a few of them were kiqqies; Thuy could always pick out kiqqies by noticing who was using a lot of beezie agents—to Thuy, people’s beezies looked like colored mushrooms on their backs and heads.
“Have some popcorn,” said a comfortably ample woman, tugging the little girl out of Thuy’s way. The woman wore purple lipstick and a shiny yellow silk dress. She handed Thuy a white paper bag she’d just filled from a movie-theater-style popper in a glass case. Fresh puffed kernels were blooming and cascading out of the metal popper’s pan, fragrant with hot coconut oil, gritty with salt. A welcome treat. “Take a seat and enjoy the good words of Pastor Luis,” said the woman. “We’re glad to have you visit. I’m Kayla.”
“Thanks,” said Thuy, stepping further in and taking a seat in a lightly padded chair in the back row. Low-key gospel music was percolating from a three-person band: a languid shiny-haired dude with an electric guitar, a turbaned woman at a keyboard, and a classic mariachi guy strumming a bass.
Pastor Luis stood upon an inexpensive oriental carpet on the dais, a short man with thinning black-dyed hair, rough skin, and horizontal wrinkles across his forehead. He wore a shiny gray suit with the pants pulled up high and held in place by a lizard-patterned belt with a too-long tip flopping down.
Pastor Luis was talking and gesturing without letup, his voice a rhythmic flow. At first Thuy couldn’t make out what language he was speaking, but that didn’t matter, for despite the man’s unprepossessing appearance, there was an infectious energy to his motions, a hypnotic pulse to his expostulations. He was a kiqqie, with beezies bedecking him like shelf mushrooms on a forest-floor log.
Thuy relaxed and enjoyed for awhile, eating her popcorn, but then Luis paused and stared right at her, drawing info about her from the orphidnet.
“Welcome, sister Thuy,” he called in a sweet-accented tenor, speaking English now. “Azaroth be with you. Chant with us, ay, I’m calling out the rebel angel Azaroth, ay, bossed around by the rulers of the Hibrane, guiding us to revolt against Babylon, a sword against the Pharisees, ay, our counselor against the gobbling all-consuming nants. Show us your face, Azaroth, caress us with your love, ay, warm our hearts in this low, wounded world. Lead us in the invocation, Sister Kayla!”
Broadly smiling, Kayla curvetted up the aisle, dress flashing. She took the microphone from Luis and began a chant:
Innacun cunna gampamade nattoli.
Itannu si canayun udde ammem maita-ita.
Over and over, Kayla and the congregation repeated those same two lines, drawing out the sounds. Searching in the orphidnet, Thuy found the phrases to be couched not in Spanish, but in the Gaddang language of the Philippine island of Luzon, not all that far from good old Vietnam. Thuy’s grandparents had landed on Luzon when they’d fled Vietnam in a leaky boat.
One of Thuy’s beezies told her the lines were two folk riddles, meaning something like:
When he turns away he’s coming to you.
You stare at him but you never see him.
And, continued the beezie, the answer to the first riddle was “a cuttlefish,” and the answer to the second was “the sun,” although it could just as well have been “a Hibraner” or, for that matter, “Chu’s Knot.” Everything was so very deeply inter-twingled.
The chanted words overlapped, filling the air with vibrations like sacred Aums, calling another order of being into the room. Warm air eddied across Thuy; the hairs on the nape of her neck prickled up. Luis kicked aside the oriental rug to reveal a pattern inscribed on the floor, an octagon with a square drawn on the inner side of each edge—a beezie agent whispered that the pattern was a flattened hypercube—and here came Azaroth, visible in the orphidnet, or the upper part of him anyway, the lower half of his ethereal body beneath the floor. Azaroth, Thuy’s self-appointed life-coach and muse, wearing a big-collared yellow shirt printed with green daisies, his arms moving as slowly as kelp drifting in a wave.
“Lots of news,” he said to Thuy, talking right past the others. “I’ve been snooping around the ExaExa labs. First of all, humpty Luty’s sending an attack shoon to bust up your reading. He doesn’t want you spreading the word that he’s living in the labs. And he’d like to snatch you.” Image of a waist-high plastic golem shoon with slit eyes. “Second of all, Luty wants to launch his new nants tomorrow. He’s got sudocoked-up agents all over town. So be very starky. Make a plea to the mass mind. If you’re in on a big ExaExa riot, Thuy, you may finally see the light.” And then he switched to Spanish and Gaddang, giving the congregation a message of self-reliance and good will.
“By ‘see the light’ do you mean finish Wheenk, or remember Chu’s Knot, or both?” Thuy wanted to ask, but, oh shit, it was almost time for her reading! Was Luty really launching the nants tomorrow? Before Dick Too Dibbs even got into office?
Thuy tossed a couple of bucks in the collection plate and hurried out with a murmur of thanks. Down the street at Metotem Metabooks, Kittie was right inside the door, smilingly awaiting her.
“Hey, b. an gái,” said Kittie, dolled up and butch in a shiny black leather pantsuit, her hair in spikes, the cartoony blue tattoo on her neck looking good. Nektar had bought her the suit. Kittie raised a glass of red wine. “Here’s to Dick Too Dibbs’s inauguration. We’re freakin’ doomed.”
“I always look for the upside,” said Darlene, dressed in her usual boots, jeans, and cowboy shirt, but with a fancy necklace. “See this?” The necklace’s rhodopsin-doped image-beads were displaying silent talking heads of Bernard Lampton and Dick Too Dibbs, plus orphidnet graphics of Hibraners, beezie scrolls, and Pharaoh cuttlefish. “Isn’t it pretty?” said Darlene. “Scary times galvanize the art community.”
“Let’s hope the Homesteadies don’t zombify the kiqs and march us into death camps,” said Kittie. “Executive order, day one.”
“Dick Too won’t be that bad,” said Darlene. She was incorrigibly upbeat, with long front teeth and an upper lip that projected out. “I think he’s cute. And he’s sworn up and down that he’ll hunt down Luty and execute him. I believe him.”
“Believe a guy from the Homesteady Party?” put in Thuy.
“Life’s a long and winding river,” said Darlene. “The forces of evil never win for long. Come on, Thuy, let’s go in my office so you can personalize some access codes for your fans. And tell me what you want me to say when I introduce you. Have you been tracking the orphidnet rank of your teaser post? It’s super. We’re gonna have a good crowd. I hope Jayjay shows; he’s been out of circulation too long.”
Darlene had set out about twenty chairs. A dozen people were already seated, including Thuy’s fellow metanovelists Gerry Gurken, Carla Standard, Jack Sparks, and Linda Loca. Each of them had a very different take on how to make a metanovel.
Gerry’s metanovel Banality was a vast combine of images all drawn from one and the same instant on a certain day. No time elapsed in this work, only space, and the story was the user’s gradual apprehension of a vast conspiracy woven throughout not only our world but also throughout the worlds of dreams, thoughts, and the Hibrane. The images were juxtaposed in suggestive ways and were accompanied by a spoken voice-over delivered by a virtual Gerry Gurken, who wandered his memory palace at the us
er’s side.
Despite the dismissive remarks that Darlene sometimes made about Banality, Gerry Gurken was a craftsman to the core. Any ten-minute block of the work was fascinating, disorienting, and revelatory—leaving the user’s mind off-center and agog. Unfortunately, by the twenty-minute mark, most users found Banality to be too much.
Intense, lipsticked, nail-biting Carla Standard had used what she called a simworld approach in creating her Mission district metanovel You’re a Bum! Her virtual characters were artificially alive, always in action, and somewhat unpredictable, a bit like the nonplayer characters in an old-school video game. Rather than writing story lines, Carla endowed her characters with goals and drives, leaving them free to interact like seagulls in a wheeling flock. Each user’s You’re a Bum! experience was tailored with data drawn from the user’s personal meshes and social situations. In other words, when you accessed Carla’s metanovel, you saw something vaguely resembling your own life.
Thuy’s two sessions with You’re a Bum! had proved painful, even lacerating. First she’d relived the moment last spring when she and Jayjay stood under a flowering plum tree off Mission Street, Jayjay shaking the tree to make the petals shower down upon her like perfumed confetti, all the while Jayjay’s eyes were melting with love. And then she’d seen their breakup, but more objectively than before, with the simulated Thuy hungover from the Big Pig, her clothes in disarray, Thuy hysterically screaming at Jayjay in a mural-lined alley, and poor Jayjay’s trembling fingers nervously adjusting his coat and hat. Oh, why did she have to miss Jayjay so much?
Like Gerry Gurken, the excitable Jack Sparks was one of Thuy’s admirers, but he held little physical appeal for her. He was too thin and overwrought, too needy. As part of his doomed campaign to engage Thuy’s affection, Sparks had undertaken The Thuy Fan, an unwritable and unreadable metanovel wherein every possible action path of his young heroine Thuy would be traced. Waking up with a man, a woman, or nobody in bed beside her, Thuy hopped out of the right or left side of her bed, or perhaps she crawled over the foot end of the bed. She put on her slippers or threw them out the window, if she had a window. In some forkings she jumped out the window herself, but in most she went to take a shower. In the shower she sang or washed or had sex with her partner. And so on. And so on. In practice, no human author would have had the time and energy to contemplate so richly ramified a document as The Thuy Fan, but Jack Sparks had his beezies helping him by autonomously roughing in sketches of ever-more action paths.
Bouncy Linda Loca was working on a metanovel entitled George Washington, depicting the world as seen from the point of view of a dollar bill. What lent her work its piquancy was how literally she’d managed to execute the plan: perusing George Washington, you felt flat and crinkly; you spent most of your time in a wallet or folded in a pocket; and when you came out into the air the main things you saw were countertops and people’s hands. When Linda’s George Washington dollar changed hands, the bill moved the story along by buying drinks, influence, or sex, and thereby sketching the rise and fall of a young cop whom Linda had named George Washington as well.
Linda was having blowback issues with this George Washington character because, to round him out, she’d made him an aspiring writer. Problem was, George began pestering Linda with messages about her metanovel—dumb ideas, by and large. The character was, after all, only a beezie simulation of a human, without the deep complexity that made an artist.
For her part, Thuy was making Wheenk into what she termed a transreal lifebox, meaning that her metanovel was to capture the waking dream of her life as she experienced it—while sufficiently bending the truth to allow for a fortuitously emerging dramatic plot. Thuy wanted Wheenk to incorporate not only the interesting things she saw and heard but also the things that she thought and felt. Rather than coding her inner life into words and realworld images alone, Thuy was including beezie-built graphic constructs and—this was a special arrow in her quiver—music. The goal was that accessing Thuy’s work should feel like being Thuy herself.
In Darlene’s office—really a windowless storage room with a desk—Thuy took off her coat and personalized the dozen “Losing My Head” access codes that Darlene had sold in advance; for each of them she said the date and the user’s name and affixed an orphidnet link to the dedication event. Then she washed up and drank a glass of water.
“So what should I say about you?” asked Darlene. She and Thuy didn’t really know each other very well.
“Say I’m a genius, and that they should buy my work.” Thuy was feeling anxious and lonely. “Say I have a broken heart.”
“I noticed that in ‘Losing My Head,’” said Darlene. Now that Thuy had began publishing, she sometimes had the experience of people knowing her better than she realized. “How come you don’t get Jayjay back?” continued Darlene. “Even though he’s still on the Merz Boat, he broke up with Jil in November. Everyone knows that from Founders. If you don’t want Jayjay, I’m gonna go for him, girl.”
“He won’t clean up his act. He’s always getting high off the Big Pig.”
“I hear Jayjay’s been making some real progress with his physics,” said Darlene. “There’s rumors he’s nailed teleportation, if you can believe that. Him and Jil and Craigor keep disappearing from the Merz Boat and popping up in other places. Poor Jil is losing it; a couple of days ago she used teleportation to score sudocoke. Now that’s a drug problem. Maybe Jayjay’s Big Pig issues were never as severe as yours, Thuy. It seems like you love him anyway. What if you accepted him the way he is?”
“I wasn’t raised to do acceptance,” said Thuy, laughing a little. “It’s un-Vietnamese. But yeah, maybe I could learn, Darlene. Thanks. Oh, I forgot to tell you, keep an eye on the door. I got a warning that Jeff Luty might send, like, a plastic robot to disrupt our event. An attack shoon?”
“I thought shoons were always cute and giggly,” said Darlene, seeming to take Thuy’s worries for mere stage fright.
“We’ll see,” said Thuy, peering out of the office. Most of the seats were taken, and more people were coming in the door. A glance into the orphidnet showed virtual faces hovering, a few hundred of them. Very respectable numbers for a Mission metanovelist.
“Thanks for coming,” Thuy told the crowd after Darlene’s introduction. “I’m Thuy Nguyen, and I’m going to be showing you a piece called ‘Losing My Head.’ It’s part of my metanovelin-progress, Wheenk.”
Thuy had learned a bit by watching others present their metanovels. The audience wanted to experience the thing itself. You had to give them a link into the metanovel database and drag them along in your wake.
As Thuy messaged out the access links, someone appeared in the middle of the front row, Jayjay, wearing his green cap and a black poncho with a stencil of a cuttlefish. He hadn’t been there a minute ago, and he hadn’t come through the door. Teleportation! Jayjay winked and gave Thuy the thumbs-up sign. She had to fight back a big grin. Excited and energized, she dove into the part where her head went through the grating in Topping’s wall, accompanying her voice-over with a fugue of images and music.
“We’re wrestling in this dough-faced top-man’s office and I fall into the wall. You know those dozens of voices jabbering in your brain: fears, scolds, lusts; masters, monsters, slaves? Right away the grating dices my head into bouillon cubes—dzeeent—one voice apiece. Zoom in on them and you can hear the little voices are choruses too—aum aum aum—the grills buzzsaw me more, my cells sing good-bye, I’m subatomic—fweee—as above so below, my fragments live in tide pools by an unknown sea—wheenk—I miss kissing Jayjay in the spring snow of falling flower petals—peck, peck, peck—I’m a lonely crowd of cryptozoa stalked by bird-man subbie sentinels—roar—time tide rolls in and I scuttle from a zillion hidey-holes, my pincers, feelers, eyestalks merge—click, click—I see a white plastic table under fluorescent fixture flicker, I’m a head sticking from a grill—mumble drone—a man leans over me with plastic ants on his face, he wants t
he Chu’s Knot I not got stocked, doc—eeeewf—dear Jayjay’s pulling me back through the grill, dragstripping me from speed of night to zero again—nteeezd—I’m chunking in the grill, slice-diced neck-first and, hey, the lab was ExaExa, and the mad scientist is—”
Thuy was interrupted by the store’s big window splintering. A golem shoon stood there: a small, rough-hewn humanoid waving big fists. He bent over and farted horribly, spewing pukeful billows of stink into the crowd. Coughing and retching, all but trampling one another, the crowd pushed out to the rainy street.
“Killer event,” said Gerry Gurken to Thuy. “Mind if I sample it for my blog?”
“Let’s go,” said Jayjay at Thuy’s side. “I’ll get you out of here.”
“I can take care of her,” said Kittie, wanting to freeze out Jayjay once again.
The golem shoon had his own ideas. Heedless of whom he knocked down, the stubby creature forced his way through the crowd, grimly intent on Thuy. Was the monster planning to drag her off to the ExaExa labs? Or to kill her on the spot? From the little Thuy had seen of Luty, he seemed far gone enough to do just about anything.
Seized by mortal fear, Thuy dashed into Valencia Street and was nearly run over by an electric car. It skidded past her, whacking her a glancing blow on the butt. Somehow she kept her balance. Thuy’s heart was hammering as if it would jump from her chest. By a stroke of good fortune, the out-of-control car plowed into the golem, squashing his head.
Thuy darted into a mural-lined alley across the street, leaning against a painted wall, gasping for breath, her face wet with rain, her sweater and T-shirt beginning to soak through. She’d left her slicker in Darlene’s office. Seen in the orphidnet, the murals were glowing windows that showed endless animated variations of themselves. Someone else came into the alley: Jayjay, fit and fleet of foot. He rested his hand lightly on her arm.
