Hylozoic (43 page)

Focusing even harder, Chu perceived that the infection was coming from beneath a certain spot on the living room floor—oozing up from the endlessly vast spaces of the subdimensions.

Suddenly a beak thrust up from the planks. An ostrichlike
figure grew to ceiling height, undulated her neck and cooed just once, very softly. A little ruff of fuzz adorned the top of her eyeless head.

“The Pekklet!” screamed Thuy. “Look out, Jayjay!”

But already the Pekklet had shot out tendrils to quantum entangle with Jayjay's flesh, once again snaring his will. He tottered across the room and crumpled to the floor.

“No!” shrieked Thuy. “No, no, no!”

Her mouth grew larger with each yell; her jaws pushed forward into a disturbing, inhuman shape. She was shape-shifting her head into a weapon of attack. The lower part of her pert face morphed into a toothy, elongated snout—the jaws of a dragon. Blood-red talons sprouted from her fingertips.

The Pekklet opened her blunt beak, hissing a warning. She puffed a fresh tangle of controller tendrils toward Thuy—who countered with an adroit burst of flame. Roaring defiance, Thuy lunged forward and sank her talons into the bully-bird's blackened chest. Widening her jaws, she bit off the Pekklet's head—and the struggle was over.

In the end, the Pekklet was mere flesh and blood. Eager to help, Chu teeked every last one of the dead creature's atoms asunder, wiping out her quantum connections, destroying her stash of viral runes.

Thuy leaned over Jayjay, murmuring to him. Seeing her dragon jaws, he lifted his hands as if in fear—but, no, he was weakly laughing, still stunned, but definitely himself again. With a musical growl, Thuy restored her head and hands to their usual form.

Victory? Not quite. For while the three humans had been focused on the Pekklet agent, a stray viralized atom had given the Yolla Bolly tulpas one last chance. Suller was standing in the cabin door, beak leveled, ready to drill them with femtorays.

Jayjay prepared to teek the reset rune across the ranch for
once and for all. But he was going to take another couple of seconds to fully get it together. Someone had to buy the humans a tiny bit more time.

Not letting himself think too deeply about what he was doing, Chu ran straight toward Suller, coming in under the deadly beak. He tackled the musty fowl and knocked him onto the porch floor. The two rolled down the steps onto the dirt, wrestling. With a quick twitch of his stubby wings, bony Suller flipped Chu onto his back. He cocked his deadly beak and—

Kakar pushed in between them, talking very fast. “Let me take care of him, Dad. I've got a thing going with this geek.”

But even as Kakar said this, the Peng were beginning to waver and droop. Taylor jets fanned from Suller, Gretta, Floofy, and Kakar. Jayjay had cast the reset rune one last time.

“I had a feeling you'd win, Chu,” said Kakar, on the point of melting away. “It wouldn't have helped us if Dad had killed you. I'm glad I saved you. But, please, can you do the same for Floofy and me? Ask your friends to make meat bodies for us. We'll be pals. And we'll share our flight lice with you.”

“Can we?” said Chu to the others. “I don't have so many friends, you know.”

“Make more Peng?” said Jayjay. “Get real, Chu.”

“Kakar's smart,” said Chu. “And Floofy is weird. Basically they're artists. Please?”

“Oh—why not,” said Thuy. “I can use them in Hive Mind. They're like a symbol for you and me, Jayjay.”

So Thuy used the last pulse of her fading infinitistic powers to create meat bodies for Kakar and Floofy—drawing on her all-too-clear memories of the rune that had repeatedly brought the Peng family back to the ranch.

The two birds were exultant and grateful. “We're here for real,” trilled Kakar, shaping the words with his larynx. “At last.”

“Let's make a post-digital magpie nest,” twittered Floofy. “We'll tangle old-tech scraps into a big hollow ball.”

“Not here, you won't,” said Jayjay. “It's our honeymoon time. We're gonna get it right. Go home, Chu, and take the birds with you.”

 

 

Chu settled back into his father Ond's and mother Nektar's adjoining homes in San Francisco. Kittie steered Floofy to a trove of piezoplastic, and the Peng built a marvelously garish nest on Nektar's roof.

Nature worldwide was gnarly and lively and free of tulpas. And Gaia stopped muttering about volcanoes. Jayjay, Thuy, and Chu had saved the world once again.

On the national scene, Dick Too Dibbs apologized and, when that wasn't enough, stepped down from the presidency. The same pattern happened worldwide. The dinosaur era of oligarchic rule had reached an end. The few rulers who didn't have the sense to abdicate were forcibly evicted, or worse.

Via a rapid series of teep referendums, nation after nation adopted new constitutions. No more presidents, no more senates, no more parliaments. From now on, countries would rule themselves via realtime public consensus.

Something subtler than the blunt instrument of majority rule came into sway. Laws became dynamically tuned compromises, continually adapting to social change. The post-digital body politic was as homeostatic and self-healing as the body of a living animal. It was odd to think that for so many millennia, people had lived in societies that were like crude, awkward machines.

The public's disapproval of Thuy was forgotten in the
excitement about her biting off the Pekklet's head. Sure she'd had sex with Chu, but it hadn't really been her fault. And now she was pregnant with her husband's daughter, which tapped a deep well of sympathy. She was a regular on
Founders
again.

In a bloom of self-confidence, Thuy published her topical metanovel,
Hive Mind
, via Metotem Metabooks. The number of access permissions sold was decent, if not overwhelming. With endless amounts of unmediated real-life action to teep, it was hard to push metanovels.

Always one for productizing things, Ond started a company with Chu, called Lutter-Lundquist Flight Lice, Inc. They were breeding and selling flight lice, and, as a value-added feature, Ond devised a method by which you could tune your flight lice not only to make you weightless, but also to propel you in whatever direction you chose.

As more and more people acquired the ability to zip through the air, flying became quite the new sport. In a way, there was no real reason to fly, given that everyone could teleport—but people enjoyed having the classic dream come true. Lutter-Lundquist Flight Lice was doing very well.

The popularity of flight lice was also good for Kakar and Floofy—it made them seem like valuable resources instead of like prisoners of war from a failed invasion.

The two became regular comic relief characters on
Founders
. Kakar had some small success marketing the bas-relief sculptures he pecked out from stone, while Floofy got involved in fashion design—in the coming season, there would be flocks of runway models gotten up like two-toed alien rhea birds.

Chu still wondered about the details of Thuy's and Jayjay's adventures at the bottom of the maelstrom, but, after all they'd been through together, he didn't like to pester them. So he enlisted Bixie to help.

Bixie proposed that she and Chu should take the expectant
parents for a pleasure flight along the Lost Coast of Northern California.

“Tell us everything that happened while you and Jayjay were aktualized,” said Bixie to Thuy once they were underway—with
Founders
sponsors' ads trailing in their wake like blimps.

“I'm kind of surprised nobody asked me about this before,” said Thuy in a noncommittal tone.

“They're all scared of you!” said Bixie with an elfin smile.

“But not you, huh?” The summer air fluttered the loose gown that Thuy wore over her growing belly.

“Not me. Come on and tell us the dramatic details.”

“I've been thinking I should save those for my third metanovel,” said Thuy. “If I don't give everything away in advance, I might finally get some good sales numbers.”

“Oh just go ahead, Thuy,” urged Jayjay. “You've been complaining about having to write a third metanovel in the same series. You'd do better to get this out of the way and write about something completely different for your next one.”

“Please?” put in Bixie. “Our viewers will love you.”

“Oh—all right,” said Thuy. “Why not. I'll teep it to you as I remember it.” And with that she began.

 

 

So, okay, the alien pitchfork flings Jayjay, Jeroen Bosch, and me into the core of this endless whirlpool. We're falling down through the subdimensions. I'm Dorothy in the twister, Alice in the rabbit hole, a drifting blossom petal.

Near the end, I start seeing this converging forest of bright lines ahead, and the perspective kind of flips. So it's like I'm staring up through a grove of redwoods, with the trunks all angling toward a glowing cloud. And the lines are Earth's lazy eight memory axes, you understand, with teep signals flickering
up and down like beads on wires—and all the lines meet at infinity, which is what's inside that cloud.

Ordinarily when we teep a signal off the router at infinity, it's a hairpin turn, a hiccup, a click of static—you zoom up, you zoom down, and you don't see squat. But now we're floating toward infinity like gnats on a summer breeze. I'm hearing this faint fractal hiss from the glowing haze, an intricate buzz as if every silp in the world is whispering to me at once.

We ooze out of the tip-ass pointy end of the endless vortex funnel and we're right in the middle of the bright cloud. I grab hold of the cloud stuff with both hands and rip a hole in it; it has a scrunchy texture like cotton candy. Jeroen is real excited, he's yelling that we're at God's throne, but that's not exactly what we find.

What's nestled inside the hole is infinity. It's not a point like some people say, and it's not a triangle like the way Jeroen likes to draw God. It looks like a smooth figure eight, a fancy crystal all full of reflections and bright-line curves. I can feel the heavy vibe of all the teep signals bouncing off it.

We three stare at the infinite eight for a little while, and its sound is percolating into our minds and bodies. It's like a magic amulet, it's teaching us how to think endless thoughts.

Jayjay laughs all of a sudden, and he counts through all the numbers from zero to the top. Every one of them. Out loud. And then turns around and counts all the way back down. It's impossible, but I hear it happen.

Jeroen isn't satisfied—he's still wanting to find a golden throne—so he starts clawing at the cloud, digging through to this open space on the other side. If I'd been the one to pop through first, we might have seen a Jack and the Beanstalk castle and a mountain range; and if it had been Jayjay, we probably would have seen a San Francisco–style sprawl.

But it's Jeroen who gets through the cloud first, and the scene crystallizes into showing us his particular way of looking at things—a sky-high Bosch-style triptych with a dog-pile of weird creatures on the clouds in front of the panels, freaky wrigglers jumping in and out of the paintings whenever they like. Jeroen is riding high, he's pointing his brush at the giant triptych—he's calling out commands and seeing things change.

While Jayjay and I are getting our bearings, a little beast comes writhing out after us through the hole we made in the cloud. She says she's Beth Gimel, the resident spirit of the maelstrom that funneled us here. We're seeing Beth as a striped badger with a corkscrew nose—like a Jabberwocky slithy tove.

She's all, “Welcome to Alefville!”

And I go, “This doesn't look like any kind of ville at all, it looks like worms crawling around a billboard.”

And then Beth explains that because Alefville is an infinite dimensional space, we lower-type beings are always going to see it in terms of things we expect to see.

It hits me that Jeroen's giant triptych is a variation on his
Garden of Earthly Delights
, with an Eden on the left, a creepy scene of frantic humpers in middle, and Hell on the right. That's Jeroen's natural way of organizing things—from Eden to Earth to Hell. History running downhill.