Postsingular - Rudy Rucker (classic novels TXT) 📗

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 metanovel-in-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 voiceover 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 the 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.

“Running won’t be enough,” he said. “I have a better way.”

Under the streetlight by Metotem Metabooks, the rubbery golem was molding himself into his original form, his shadow a black stain upon the puddled pavement. He moved his head in abrupt twitches, scanning for Thuy. An excited little dog began barking at the heavyset shoon; with a sharp kick, the golem sent the dog skidding into the gutter, limp and broken.

“Darlene said I should give you another chance,” Thuy told Jayjay, talking fast. “I want to be with you, yes. I hope it’s not too late.”

“Me too,” answered Jayjay. He smiled at her. “This is the same alley where we split up. Synchronicity.”

“But how deeply does Jil have her hooks into you? That woman—”

“Woman,” echoed Jayjay and embraced Thuy, sheltering her from the rain with the wings of his plastic poncho. “I only slept with Jil because I couldn’t have you. Jil’s no schemer; she wants to do right. She broke off with me because it was upsetting her kids. But Craigor keeps cheating on her; he’s got this midlife crisis thing. And now Jil’s using again. I feel sorry for her. But that’s nothing like the way I feel about you, Thuy. I’ve always dreamed of spending my life with you. Nobody else comes close.”

Thuy wanted to melt, to cling to her man like a vine, but over his shoulder she saw the golem splashing across Valencia.

“Jayjay—”

“It’s okay,” said Jayjay squeezing her tighter. “We’re outta here. We’ll teleport. Go in the orphidnet and look at the Merz Boat. And be looking at this alley with your eyes.”

Thuy followed Jayjay’s link to the gently rocking deck of the bargelike Merz Boat with its central cabin like an oversized loaf of bread. She had a moment of double vision: water waves flowed across the alley walls. And now Jayjay linked her to a striped, silk-spinning caterpillar that crawled all over the Merz Boat scene, smoothing over the all-but-imperceptible gaps in the remotely viewed image, interpolating among the orphidbased data points. No orphidnet image had ever looked this real.

Next Jayjay showed Thuy how to weave her thoughts from scene to scene, binding the alley and the seascape together.

Thuy’s mind spread out. She was neither here nor there. All of her particles were in synch with each other, temporarily free of the outside world. She felt very tiny, she was falling—where? With a thump, Thuy and Jayjay landed on the soft deck of—

“Welcome to the Merz Boat,” whispered Jayjay. “You and me, Thuy, forever.”