"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 pulp 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.
Cool, self-possessed Nektar Lundquist had taken advantage of the interest in her family to become the star of an orphidnet reality soap opera called Founders, complete with sponsors and ads. Thanks to the Founders show, Nektar's whole circle of acquaintances had become celebs: Nektar; Craigor Connor; Jil Zonder; Nektar's boss, Xandro; Xandro's wife, Beatriz; Nektar's ex-boyfriend, Jose; and Jose's sometime lover, Lureen Morales.
Each of them got a nice little income from the sponsors. The way the ads worked was that whenever anyone went through the orphidnet to peep at the Founders stars, they'd see a commercial for ExaExa computers, for Stank grooming products, or for BigBox home furnishings; and the Founders stars got paid per ad-view.
The Founders story thus far: On Orphid Night, Nektar left Ond for Jose, the head chef at Puff, an upscale hipster Valencia Street restaurant. A few weeks later, Nektar went to the Puff manager, got Jose fired, and took over as the Puff head chef herself, at which point Jose moved to the rival restaurant MouthPlusPlus across the street. The two restaurants competed to provide ever more bizarre kinds of nourishment-sometimes serving a course via feeding tube, enema, or intravenous drip.
Last month Nektar had started an affair with Craigor. Because of the affair, his wife, Jil, was brokenhearted and struggling to maintain her sobriety. Jil Zonder was a celeb in her own right, being the woman who'd designed the first piezoplastic beezie-controlled shoon.
Jayjay liked the looks of Jil Zonder. And Jil had been to the Hibrane with Ond and Chu for a few minutes before they sent her back. And Jil was a recovering sudocoker. The woman was experienced. It was a pleasure to watch her gestures, to savor her smiles. Neat, noble, naughty; vivacious, vibrant, voom. Kind of like Thuy had seemed, back when things were good.
Jayjay fantasized that, given the chance, he could make Jil Zonder happy. Jil was maybe ten years older than Jayjay, which could be a plus. Jayjay figured Jil could use a cute younger guy now that her windbag poseur husband Craigor Connor had been stupid enough to cheat with Nektar. Locative art-what was that? Moving junk around on the deck of the boat where Craigor lived with Jil; and then laying down bogus raps about why he'd put, like, Christmas lights and a bowling ball next to a stack of tires. Big fucking deal. And Craigor's other career, catching Pharaoh cuttlefish so that high-tech companies could coax display chemicals from the slain beasts' skins? The man was nowhere. Jil would be better off with Jayjay, and if he could get in with the Founders crowd, he'd tell her the first chance he got.
The mushroom-shaped beezie led the Big Pig Posse through the orphidnet to view Nektar Lundquist, lying alone in her big bed, window curtains drawn, her eyes clenched shut, her heavy blond hair spread across the pillow like golden snakes. Apparently she was far gone on sudocoke; there was a mirror with lines of powder next to her bed. There were perhaps a dozen shoons in the room, curvy little manikins bumbling about on the floor and the bed. But there were other presences in the orphidnet near Nektar-virtual beings shaped like beetles.
The guiding beezie mapped out causal links, showing that the beetles were deviant AIs emerging from infected orphids on Nektar's scalp. Creepy. Up till now, spam and malware had been in the form of high-level software, not in the form of low-level corruption of the individual orphids that supported the orphidnet's parallel quantum computation.