Postsingular - Rudy Rucker (classic novels TXT) 📗

Jayjay and the Big Pig Posse awoke to a mustached guy prodding them with a wide broom.

“Go to hell,” said Jayjay, his fellow-kiqqie Sonic already standing at his side. “Asshole janitor.” The women were on their feet too: Kittie and Thuy, their faces greasy in the rainy-day morning light. Jayjay wore baggy black pants, a billed green cap, a green T-shirt, a piezoplastic iguana earring, and a scavenged gray suit jacket that Kittie had painted with a fancy filigreed skull design to cover the whole back.

“No mas janitor,” said the guy with the broom. “Maintenance manager and security guard. Get your pinche asses outta my hall. The Job Center’s about to open. Go get some rehab at Natural Mind.”

“You want some of this?” taunted Sonic, grabbing his own crotch. “Stand by me, Jayjay. We can take this pendejo down.” Skinny little Sonic wore his invariable outfit of heavy boots, thick black wool tights, red T-shirt, and a thin black leather jacket with intricate pleats and folds—a jitsy concoction that he’d found unused in some woman’s closet. His hair was pomaded into a dozen hedgehog spikes.

“Lose the gangbanger routine, boys,” said Kittie, turning and walking to the glass street door. Stocky sweat-suited Kittie was adorned with a bright blue tattoo on her neck, also a glowing pendant of a woman holding a paintbrush and a meat cleaver. Kittie sometimes made money painting solar cell landscapes on electric cars. “I’m seeing a bunch of fresh-dumped pancakes behind the Mission Street McDonald’s.” she continued. “Still hot, if we hurry. Come on, Thuy.” Kitty pronounced her friend’s name the proper Vietnamese way, like twee and not like thooey.

Slender Thuy smiled and took Kittie’s hand, ready for the adventure of a new day, Thuy in her street-worn striped leggings and yellow miniskirt, her strawy black hair in two high pigtails, her shiny piezoplastic Yu Shu sneakers with fancy dragon’s heads on their toes. The Big Pig Posse members rarely changed their outfits; they were like cartoon characters that way. Superheroes.

Sonic gave the janitor a little poke in the chest; the janitor swung his fist; Sonic ducked. Street theater. Jayjay and Sonic followed the women out, standing for a moment in the rain-shadow of the office building. The streets were liquid, the raindrops popping circles into the sheen, the spastic gusty wind making riffles, a few electric cars hissing past.

Jayjay looked into his head, checking the orphidnet view of the McDonald’s trashcans, and indeed he saw a nice batch of griddle cakes, nearly a dozen. Only a block away.

But first, as long as he was focused on the orphidnet, Jay-jay said hello to some of the beezie AI agents hosted by the millions of orphids on his body, also greeting the far-flung higher-order beezies that could be found at the next level of abstraction and then, what the hey, he took a quick hit off the Big Pig at the apex of the virtual world, the outrageously rich and intricate Big Pig like a birthday piñata stuffed with beautiful insights woven into ideas that linked into unifying concepts that puzzle-pieced themselves into powerful systems that were in turn aspects of a cosmic metatheory—_aha_! Hooking into the billion-snouted billion-nippled Big Pig made Jayjay feel like more than a genius.

Not that suckling on the Pig was most people’s idea of a thrill—few citizens were even bothering to intelligence-amplify themselves into the kilo-IQ zone of the kiqqies. Being a kiqqie meant you let the orphidnet do some of your thinking. Instead of just using the Net to see and remember things, you could launch autonomous beezie agents to analyze, hypothesize, simulate, and reason on your behalf.

Jayjay had to fully open his mental firewall in order to access the Big Pig wisdom. Right away the Pig wrote some information into his brain, the way she always did when Jayjay hooked up, he wasn’t sure why. The info-dumps took the form of incredibly accurate movie clips of things like water or clouds or fire; this new one showed a eucalyptus branch rocking in the wind, each twig and each leaf a separate pendulum, the system dancing upon its chaotic attractor.

Thuy was suckling on the Big Pig too, pulling greedily at the nipple, and Jayjay smiled to see her next to him—Thuy, his smart litter-mate, his lost true love.

“Wheenk wheenk wheenk,” said Jayjay to Thuy, layering thoughts onto the words to make a hyperpun. Wheenk like a piglet, obviously, but also wheenk like a squeaky wheel, an unhappy wheel asking for oil, Jayjay-the-wheel longing both for the metaphorical anointment of Thuy’s affection and for the literal lubrications of her aromatic bod. Not to mention that wheenk wheenk wheenk was a term Thuy liked to use to describe metanovels in which the characters spent, in her opinion, too much time bitching and moaning, and not enough time doing and loving.

Thuy was working on her own metanovel, an as-yet-untitled combine of words, links, video clips, images, and sounds—she meant for it to be a bit like a movie that a user could inhabit, the user coming to feel from the inside how it was to be Thuy or, rather, how it was to be a version of Thuy leading a more tightly plotted and suspenseful life. Thuy had kicked off her metawriting career with a metastory posted on the Metotem Metazine site, and the tale, really a reminiscence, was getting good buzz—the title was “Waking Up,” and it was a delicate weave of Thuy’s memories and mental associations relating to Orphid Night last year, when the newly-released orphids had blanketed Earth, and Thuy had seen Ond Lutter and his son Chu jump to the Hibrane, and she’d thrown over her career path to live on the street with Jayjay.

Thuy was finding it hard to bulk up her metastory into a full-fledged metanovel; part of the problem was that neither she nor anyone else had really figured out what a metanovel should be, although by now there had been a fair number of not-quite-successful metanovels posted on the orphidnet. One thing for sure, suckling on the Big Pig seemed a crippling drain on Thuy’s creative energies. Though Jayjay loved the Pig, it wasn’t as big a burden for him as it was for Thuy. Thuy’s disillusionment with the Pig was in fact a key deal-breaking issue between her and Jayjay. So Jayjay was also intending for his wheenk to defiantly say, “I’m not scared of the Big Pig even if you are.”

“Wheenk!” sang back Thuy, fully understanding every shade of Jayjay’s meaning and upping the signifier strength by digging into the ever-expanding database of her metanovel, passing a link to a series of images inspired by her sorrow over her and Jayjay’s breakup: for instance, shriveled tree-blossom petals on a dirty sidewalk, with Thuy’s virtual violin playing sad, wheenking chords. There was more than a little self-pity here, which seemed a bit unjustified to Jayjay as the estrangement was, at least in his opinion, Thuy’s own fault. And wasn’t she still using the Big Pig anyway—like, right now?

The Big Pig was absorbing, mirroring, and amplifying their exchange, layering on further sounds, clips, and links from the simmering matrix of global info. Intoxicated by the heady mix, Jayjay soon forgot about Thuy per se—that is, she became an archetype, a thought form, a pattern in the cosmic stew. Knowing Jayjay’s particular likes, the Big Pig began displaying a fundamental secret-of-life construction of reality: branes and strings, an underlying graph-rewriting system, a transfinite stack of “turtles all the way down.” Although the ideas felt familiar from Jayjay’s last trip into the Pig, he knew the details wouldn’t stay with him for long. So what. Pig trips were all about relaxing and enjoying the show. Aha!

For her part, Thuy sank into the details of her metanovel, letting the Big Pig show her a stream of variations of what her completed work could be once it was done, each Pig-take on her work more sinewy and coruscating than the one before, giving Thuy the familiar, despairing sensation that really there was no use for her to bother doing anything at all when everything was already thought of in the Big Pig. She wanted to bail out, but for now the Pig’s ever-changing fountain of ideas was once again holding her in thrall.

Jayjay and Thuy might have stayed there leaning against the wall for quite some time, eyes half closed, on the nod, feeling like superartistic supergeniuses, but Kittie began shaking them, ever-practical Kittie focused only on the McDonald’s trashcan, worried that some other unhoused individuals might score the breakfast goodies before the Big Pig Posse could make the scene, heedless of the fact that, thanks to her, Jayjay was coming the fuck down again. If he could just once remember the approximate details of what he learned from the Pig, he’d be a famous physicist.

Sonic stood at the Job Center’s glass door, projecting 3D emoticons at the janitor—turds, knives, and skulls visible in the heads-up orphidnet display that overlaid their worldviews. The janitor didn’t care. The janitor had a job; the Posse was in the rain; the door between them was locked.

Still a bit high from the Pig, Jayjay saw the situation as a tower of archetypal patterns: thresholds and interfaces, insiders and outsiders, the hidden heroes commencing a mythic quest.

“The Big Pig sucks,” said Thuy, shaking off the intoxication. “I feel totally stupid now. That was absotively, posilutely my last time.” She laughed unhappily, fully aware that she’d sworn off the Pig a hundred times before.

The four were splashing down the sidewalk toward the McDonald’s parking lot. Jayjay was internally grumbling to himself about Thuy always making such a big deal about wanting to quit the Big Pig. You got high, you saw stuff, you came down, you moved on. Where was the problem?

“We gotta find a steady place to sleep,” said Sonic.

“A place to think and work,” said Thuy, brightening. “Let’s ask President Bernardo!”

US President Bernard Lampton had organized a cadre of beezie agents willing to help people find whatever they needed. Any neighborhood was like a realtime charity bazaar, with unused objects there for free in attics, garages, and back rooms. You could find stuff on your own via the universal orphidnet view, but asking Bernardo was like using an efficient search engine.

“Where can we four live long-term with no rent, Bernardo?” said Jayjay, wanting to please Thuy. “We’re tired of crashing in halls with it raining all the time.”

President Bernardo appeared in their overlays; trudging along Mission Street same as them, dressed in baggy jeans and a hooded sweatshirt like a homie. “Get an SUV,” he suggested. “There’s a nice big one near here, with enough gas to drive it a mile or two. The owner would even give you the title, camaradas.” Bernardo gestured and a little map popped up with a highlighted image of a bloated, obsolete fuel-burner.

“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