The images grew so vivid that Thuy quite forgot herself. She fell asleep and began dreaming. At first she was dreaming about Jayjay back in the cave, and then she was over here with Azaroth, Chu, and Ond. They were skulking around in Gladax's big-ass rococo mansion with its treelike pillars and curving halls, up on a hill above North Beach, the four of them trying to free a bungee-cord-bound prisoner from Gladax's exercise room and steal Gladax's magic harp. Ond and Chu kept disagreeing about the best way to tunnel into the exercise room from below. Waiting for them to break through, and hearing the same insistent harp chord in the background for the twentieth time, Thuy flashed that she wasn't dreaming anymore. She was playing a video game with the three guys.

She blinked, shook her head, and snapped out of it. Azaroth, Ond, and Chu were slumped beside her on the giant couch, twitching their fingers as if using invisible game controllers. How long had she been here? What was Jayjay doing right now?

Thuy reached over and joggled Ond's knee. Ond fluttered his eyelids, sat up, and offered an abashed grin. "We play this game all the time," he said. "We're practicing. That running water tap over there, that's our game computer. We're the first computer programmers in the Hibrane."

"How can you use water for a computer?" demanded Thuy.

"The flow is sufficiently gnarly to function as a universal emulator, yes. Back home that would be of merely theoretical interest, but in the Hibrane we can use those gnarly natural processes for useful computation. The crucial difference is that Hibrane systems remember all their previous states. It's like every single location here has an endless memory chip plugged in. I already told you about this while we were merged. Focus, Thuy. Take a mental inventory."

Come to think of it, Thuy could indeed remember every detail of the extensive telepathic exchange she'd had with the boys before the dreamlike video game session. But now she became distracted by her powerful memory for visual forms. Glancing at Ond, for instance, she could match the little vertical wrinkle between his eyes to a crack she'd seen in the sidewalk outside and to the edge of a shell fragment she'd thrown at Gladax. Everything she saw remained accessible to her mind; it was as if her memory had become unlimited.

Savoring the feel of this strange world, Thuy looked around the room, taking in the auras of the furnishings. Although the objects didn't exactly speak English, they too remembered everything. The auto parts carried the vibes of the farms and fields where they'd been raised, of the telepathic growers who'd cajoled them into their current shapes, and of the men and women who'd handled them. The jumbo lightbulb on the ceiling had a dark-and-light ribbon memory of all the times it had been off and on, with the bright stretches patterned by subtle shadings that mirrored the wavers of past electrical currents. And when Thuy studied the beat old couch, it wordlessly teeped her the touch sensations of all the butts that had sat upon its cushioned pads in the last twenty years. Noticing this, Chu had a rare fit of giggles.

"We've been thinking that if we could give Lobrane matter this kind of built-in memory, there'd be no reason to turn Earth into nants," said Ond. "Everything would already be like a computer."

"So come home with me and tell that to the Big Pig," said Thuy, still very worried about Jayjay. "Let's go right now!"

"Telling isn't enough," said Ond. "We have to be like Prometheus and steal fire from heaven. Put more formally, we need to seed the Lobrane with the Hibrane's paranormal branespace topology."

"Huh?" Although Ond had already sent Thuy these words during the hour they'd been merged, the meaning still hadn't sunk in.

"Use pictures, Ond," suggested Azaroth.

"I believe that a single ubiquitous Hibrane factor causes telepathy, omnividence, teleportation, and expanded memory," said Ond. Image of a space-filling glow. "I find it simplest to suppose that this factor has to do with the shapes of the unseen extra dimensions of Hibrane space." Image of ten axes crossing each other at strange angles; four of the axes are endless lines and the other six bend around into tight circles. "I call the Hibrane's configuration the paranormal branespace topology. " Image of one of the circles unrolling to make an endless line. A bundle of lines appears parallel to this new line and, oddly enough, they narrow in on each other to meet at a not-too-distant vanishing point. "We need to nudge the Lobrane over to the paranormal branespace topology." Image of a snowflake dropping into supercooled water that freezes into a block of ice. "Unfortunately I'm not enough of a physicist to give more details. But-"

"Chu and I think Gladax's harp is the key," teeped Azaroth. Image of the same gold harp they'd been seeking in the video game. Its strings were luminous and strange. Its sound box was decorated with a curiously detailed oil painting. Medieval?

"Remember that when Gladax strums her harp a certain way, people can't teep," said Chu. "She strummed it in the room where I was tied up. Our idea is that if someone carries Gladax's harp to the Lobrane and strums it there, the opposite might happen. The right chord could unroll one of the dimensions of our brane's space so that everything has telepathy and endless memory."

"And then there'd be no reason for nants," repeated Ond. "Once the harp unrolls that extra dimension in one spot, it'll spread."

"But why are you sneaking around?" said Thuy, recalling Gladax's remarks at ExaExa. "Gladax knows you want to steal her harp. She said, and I quote, 'Ond and Chu have a wild plan to steal my harp and unroll your lazy eight.' You heard that too, didn't you, Azaroth?"

"Maybe she knows," said Azaroth, looking embarrassed. "But that doesn't mean we can't outfox her."

"Gladax knows our plans?" said Ond angrily. "And you guys already have a word for the special dimension? You call it lazy eight? Why did you hide this from me, Azaroth? Are you setting us up?"

"It's complicated," said Azaroth with a sigh. "Gladax wants you to take the harp but she doesn't. If she thought you could really unroll your lazy eight, she'd probably lend you the harp, no problem. But, on the other hand, it's hers, and it's rare, and she's stingy, and she figures you'd probably just break it, so she doesn't want you to get your hands on it at all. She's conflicted. If you want the harp, you really do have to steal it."

"Lazy eight," put in Ond, off on his own line of thought. "Yes. I understand. We use the harp to unroll our eighth dimension, which means we make our eighth dimension into an endless line. And-here's the 'lazy' part-we give the line a special metric so that our minds can reach all the way to infinity. Like how the endless decimal 0.9999999 …describes a point that's only one meter away? That's how the Hibrane already is, if you think about it. Infinity is everywhere. Lazy eight."

"Infinity," said Chu, the math word sweet in his mouth. "It's like using a cosmic vanishing point for a universal Web server. People, animals, trees, rivers, air currents, dirt-everything's in touch with lazy eight. That's why telepathy works so well in the Hibrane. That's why it's so easy to teleport."

Thuy thought of chants and mantras, of divine names and the Buddhists' cosmic Aum. "All right!" she exclaimed. "Let's steal Gladax's harp!"