Hylozoic Read online

  “I’ll buy you a burrito,” said Jayjay. “We’ve got the time.”

  “Okay,” said Sonic. “But first let me finish out this game.”

  “How many times have I heard that?”

  “I gotta bring the seal-sex safari to a climax for my customers,” explained Sonic. “But first I give ’em a big scare. That’s why I get return biz and good ratings. Sonic’s Animal Animats always kicks it up a notch. Last week in the middle of our ant war, I helped the red ants bring in an anteater. Devastating. And for today’s rush, I’ve got a great white shark offshore.” Sonic paused and mimed huge biting motions. His pet shoon robot, Edgar, imitated him, flexing his little body into a fishlike form.

  “Even as we speak, I’m helping the shark notice the abundant prey,” Sonic told Jayjay. “Beat your tail, whitey. Eat them blubbery mofos.”

  Jayjay teeped along, watching a ghostly, scarred shark come arrowing in toward the bloodied elephant seal bulls. The players riding the seals saw the shark from far away; it was the size of a rowboat. They sent their bulls wallowing up onto the beach—just in the nick of time. Some female elephant seals had gathered around, drawn by the roaring and the gore. They were keyed up and primed to mate. Weary of battle, the bulls elected to share the cows. A pinniped orgy began.

  “You’re all winners!” Sonic messaged to his charges. “I gotta bail. Giant squid versus sperm whales tomorrow!”

  And then he was focused on Jayjay, all there, his brown eyes warm. Good old Sonic.

  “Taquería now,” said Sonic.

  “Sure,” said Jayjay. “Hey, before we go—how about you splash off in the shower? That way you’ll make better company.”

  “Listen to my old running buddy,” said Sonic, shaking his head. “He’s turned priss. Like you don’t remember when you and me and Thuy and Kittie were the Big Pig Posse—sleeping in hallways and cars?”

  This said, Sonic went to clean himself up, picking his way among his dusty piles of mementos, little Edgar dogging his steps. And then the two guys teleported to the nearby Taquería Aztlán, one of the best. The inside of the restaurant was teleportblocked to prevent pilfering, but just outside the entrance, a steady flow of early dinner customers were popping in and out of visibility, the air crowded with the twinkling dots and spectral forms of people in the process of solidifying or melting away.

  These heavily trafficked spots were a little freaky; like a speeded-up ghost movie. Jayjay bumped heavily into a woman as they arrived—but fortunately the laws of physics blocked them from materializing in the exact same spot. You didn’t have to worry about ending up with, like, the head of a housefly or the legs of an old man.

  “You teep how eager this burrito is for me to eat it?” said Sonic after they’d gotten their food. Their dishes were exactly as they’d visualized them—telepathic ordering was more reliable than spoken words. “The cooks here, they’ve got a way with ingredients,” continued Sonic. “Inca and Aztec shamans, no doubt.” He glanced over at Jayjay. “Thanks for treating, by the way. Founders is paying you good?

  “You watch the show?”

  “Yeah,” said Sonic. He paused, chewing his food. “I teep into Gaia every night. It’s glowy to be talking to you face-to-face again. The star.”

  “People are curious about me and Thuy because we’re the ones who unrolled the lazy eight dimension this winter. But you could you could be in the show if you wanted to. My colorful friend.”

  “Stank Grooming Products,” read Sonic, staring into the space above Jayjay’s head. “BigBox Home Furnishings. Huffin Psi Secure. So bogus. What if our whole planet is an ad for the creatures of the subdimensions? What if the subbies are displaying us to attract intergalactic UFOs?”

  “Hate to say this, Sonic, but you sound spun.”

  “That’s because I’m so heavy into the all-new overmind. Gaia is much vaster than the Big Pig ever was. And trippier. Even my silps get high: my body and my organs and my cells. But I have to be careful. If your atomic silps get stoned enough, your molecules fall apart. The atoms are, like, ‘Screw this H-two-O hassle, we just wanna be two Hs and an O.’ Floop!” Sonic let out a dark, resonant chuckle. “Ace Weston, remember him? I fell by his room last week and there was a pile of soot in his bed. Carbon and trace elements. The oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen had drifted away.”

  “Did you really see that?” demanded Jayjay. “Or dream it? I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

  “Take a look. I’m an open book.”

  Jayjay probed into Sonic’s memories—and promptly got lost. Packrat that Sonic was, he’d saved all of the details of his Gaian visions. The ubiquitous lazy eight memory upgrade had no size limits at all. Finding something in Sonic’s memory was hopeless; it was like combing the entire surface of the Earth.

  “Black dust,” repeated Sonic. “Didn’t even stink.” He finished his burrito, wiped his mouth, and pushed Jayjay out of his head. “I’ve got a memory stash like I’m ten thousand years old, huh? I’m on the nod every night. I love it.”

  “What if your molecules come apart, too?”

  “Gaia will remember me, dog. Dig this—the good thief on the cross said, ‘Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom,’ and Jesus went, ‘Verily I say unto you, today shalt thou be with me in paradise.’ Meaning that heaven is a memory bank. Those whom Gaia loves are immortal.” Sonic drained his bottle of beer. “So anyway, I’m ready to move your cabin. We’re grouping at Ond’s?”

  “You sure you’re together enough?”

  “Yea verily,” said Sonic. “Let’s hop.”

  They landed on the patio behind Ond’s new monster house, overlooking San Francisco from a hillside in Dolores Heights. The new mansion was squeezed in next to Ond’s old mansion, where his ex-wife Nektar still lived. The building crew had erected the second home in a month, making the most of their ability to talk to the materials.

  The hilltop was pleasantly gilded by the late afternoon sun. Jayjay could see the Golden Gate Bridge and a sliver of the fogshrouded Pacific. At the far end of the patio, graceful Jil Zonder was skipping from side to side with her arms outstretched, her lustrous dark hair bobbing. She was leading a dance class for a dozen of the soft plastic shoon robots. They were cute little guys, almost like living cartoons.

  Jil had built up a nice business marketing shoons: she bought slugs of piezoplastic, trained the lumps to act like helpful dwarves, and sold them. People used shoons as toys, pets, household servants, and specialized workers. The silps in the plastic cooperated without complaint. Not having undergone millennia of evolutionary struggle to survive, silps weren’t especially ambitious.

  “Moving day?” said Jil, pausing to smile at Jayjay. She seemed to be glowing with health and good humor, but with Jil you never quite knew. She had a lot of inner demons. Last winter she’d suffered a harrowing relapse into sudocoke addiction, and her marriage had broken up.

  Jayjay had played a part in that breakup; he and this desirable older woman had shared a brief, passionate affair—quite the hit on the Founders show. But now Jil seemed clean and calm again, comfortably settled in with Ond—a well-known nanotech engineer who’d admired her for years. Ond had been more or less responsible for setting the singularity and its aftershocks in motion. But the public had forgiven him for it. Things were going good.

  A knobby, raw-looking teenage boy appeared, moving in stroboscopic hops. Momotaro, Jil’s son. Close behind him were his younger sister Bixie and, taking up the rear, Ond’s fourteen-year-old son Chu, all three of them pulsing in and out of visibility. Their trajectories were like dashed lines with the end of each dash shading into invisibility.

  “Teleport. Stutter. Tag!” yelled Momotaro in his cracking voice, melting away and reappearing between each utterance.

  “We. Aren’t. Allowed. To run,” called Bixie, who resembled a smaller, more delicate Jil.

  “Only. Hop. One. Meter,” added Chu, as he strobed toward them, filling the air with the sparkle of mater
ialization dots.

  “They’ve been doing this all day,” said Jil with a sigh. “I keep telling them to save their energy for moving Jayjay and Thuy’s cabin, but—”

  “We. Never. Listen!” whooped Bixie.

  Just then Chu managed to thump Momotaro in the middle of the back. “You’re it!”

  “Shoon war!” cried Momotaro, diving onto Jil’s phalanx of robots, who began working him over like puppies worrying an older dog. Bixie cackled and joined him. Chu stood frowning to the side.

  “Catch,” said Bixie, tossing one of the shoons Chu’s way. “Don’t sulk.”

  Chu sidestepped the flying blob of struggling plastic, letting it plop onto the lawn and roll. “Momotaro is supposed to chase us now,” he complained.

  “Game over,” said Momotaro, making a downward beep, an old-school video game sound.

  “Cheer up, Chu,” said Jil. “We’re all going to Jayjay and Thuy’s party in the woods soon. Say hi to Jayjay and Sonic, kids.”

  “I need a drink of water,” said Chu in his flat voice. He turned and walked across the lawn to Nektar’s house. Although he’d been working to heal his brain’s defective empathy circuits, Chu still wasn’t all that sociable, even compared to other fourteen-year-olds.

  In the moment of silence they heard Nektar’s voice rising in the front yard. Something about a tree.

  “Live entertainment,” said Sonic. “Let’s go watch.”

  “It won’t be interesting,” said Jil in a disgusted tone. “Nektar picks dumb fights to get attention. The diva. I guess it’s good for our show.” Like the others, Jil got her cut of the Founders royalties. “Sooner or later Nektar will boss Ond right back into her bed.”

  “No way,” said Jayjay, wanting to reassure Jil. “Ond’s crazy about you.”

  “Enough about me,” said Jil. “Let’s pick on—Sonic! How come you never have a girlfriend or a boyfriend, Sonic?”

  “Mostly I’m not really in my body,” said Sonic. “And—”

  “Sonic’s a peeper!” yelled Momotaro. “Sonic watches Thuy and Jayjay doing it!”

  Sonic smiled crookedly, unhappily. With so much telepathy, there were few real secrets anymore, but it was impolite to ferret out—and to publicly air—other people’s intimate doings. “Little jerk,” he said. “Would you like me to talk about who you peep?”

  “Maaaabel?” crooned Bixie ever so softly before breaking into giggles.

  “Shut up!” yelled Momotaro. “I’m sorry, Sonic! Never mind. Let’s all go watch Ond and Nektar argue!”

  Chu reemerged from Nektar’s house, carrying a wool overshirt. “I’m ready for the woods.”

  The six of them walked through the narrow space between Nektar’s and Ond’s garages. Resting on blocks in front of the monster homes was the two-room cottage that Jayjay and Thuy had recently cobbled together. Seeing it, Jayjay felt a little rush of pride. The insulated, solar-celled roof had a generous overhang to shelter the projecting front porch; the wall’s planks fit together as neatly as puzzle parts; the floors gleamed with parquet; the drains led to a nanoseptic tank beneath the floor; and they’d even built some custom furniture: a big bed and a wardrobe, a table and benches, two desks and a kitchen nook. The house’s resident silp was pleasant and smart; Thuy called her Vrilla.

  “Hi, Vrilla,” teeped Jayjay. “It’s almost time.”

  Beside the street, Ond and Nektar were standing toe-to-toe beneath a great spreading oak tree. Ond—a tall, tentative man with thinning blond hair—held a portable power saw and some kind of electrical outlet box. Nektar was wearing party clothes: a red silk skirt and jacket with black blouse, black tights and—as a concession to the fact they were heading for the wilderness—sensible black shoes.

  “I’m telling you to give this tree some respect!” Nektar was telling Ond. “She’s a hundred years old.”

  “I want to teach her to make electricity,” said Ond quietly. Ond always sounded calm and reasonable—even when his actions seemed utterly bonkers. “Let me implant this special socket into the oak’s side,” he continued. “She’ll heal.”

  “Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle,” snapped Nektar, tossing her head so that her nanotinted blond ponytail flipped across her cheek, nicely framing a diamond in her ear. She had a flair for drama. “Enough is enough. The answer is no.”

  “Be reasonable, Nektar. This is my new business plan. Electric trees will be a boon to the human race.”

  “You and your boons,” said Nektar. “First the nants, then the orphids, and now the silps. Has it occurred to you that people might be tired of everything changing every year?” Nektar turned to face the others. “Praise Gaia, it’s time to go. I’m ready for a drink. Put your damned tools in the garage, Ond.”

  “Would you mind if I tested out my idea on one of your trees?” said Ond to Jayjay.

  “Why bother?” said Jayjay. “I’m not even using electricity anymore. Communication is telepathic, computation is silpbased, we can ask our walls to heat or cool our rooms, and the ceiling glows when we need light. When I need to go somewhere I walk or I teleport, I don’t even need an electric car.”

  “But teeking is hard work,” said Ond. “Lots of people still use cars.”

  “With practice teeking gets easier,” said Jayjay. “The power industry is on the way out.”

  “Things are changing too fast,” muttered Ond.

  “Now you see how it feels,” said Nektar. “Put your toys away and let’s go to the party, Ond.”

  Thuy and her father arrived, looking tense. They were carrying two large trays of Vietnamese appetizers made by Thuy’s aunt under her mother’s direction: damp rice-paper spring rolls, fried pork dumplings, fish balls, and a yellow-and-green gelatin mold with tiny shrimp and shreds of cabbage. Jayjay could hear old Minh’s mumbled parting words echoing in Thuy’s head. “It’s impossible to teleport a house!” You could always count on Minh to be a bitch. Becoming disabled had only made her worse.

  “Everyone here?” asked Thuy in a bright, brittle tone. She glanced around, counting heads. “Jayjay, Sonic, Jil, Momotaro, Bixie, Chu, Nektar, Ond, Thuy, and Khan. That’s only ten.”

  “Craigor and Darlene said they’ll be late,” put in Jil. “Craigor said they’ll make it to your housewarming, though.”

  “Craigor and Darlene won’t help us move, but they’re coming to the party?” exclaimed Thuy. “That’s a big help. Look, we need twelve people right now. What about Kittie? Where’s she?”

  Nektar sighed. “Lureen Morales hired Kittie to paint a bedroom mural for her. That’s Lureen’s way of getting in her hooks. And Kittie’s all starstruck, she’s watched Lureen for years. It’s disgusting. I’d like to teach that fat whore Lureen a lesson. Oops, here they come.”

  Ambling down the hill were Lureen Morales and Kittie Calhoun. Blowsy, busty Lureen was known for her long-running erotic reality show Caliente; in the pretelepathy days it had been a video blog. Over the years, Lureen had surgically changed her sex two or maybe three times.

  “Hello, Nektar,” sang out Lureen, sweetening her voice. She was wearing unbelievably tight jeans and a frilly white top. “When should we schedule that lesson you want to teach me? Tonight? Maybe Kittie can help. I’m such a slow learner.”

  Kittie guffawed. She was a good-humored, sturdy woman with paint on her sweat clothes and a brilliant blue tattoo on her neck. She’d been Nektar’s girlfriend for the past few months, running a little business out of Nektar’s garage, painting solar cells onto electric cars.

  “All right now,” interrupted Jayjay, eager for the move. “Let’s all get inside our cabin and teleport it!” Jayjay and Thuy had already stowed their few possessions within Vrilla’s rooms. Once they’d moved it to the clearing, they’d be all set.

  Meanwhile, Momotaro, Bixie, and Chu ran inside and began bouncing on the newly made bed. Sonic joined them, big kid that he was. Jayjay, Thuy, Khan, Jil, and Ond squeezed onto the benches built into the corner by the dining table. The two trays of Vietna
mese appetizers sat ready upon the table. Nektar, Kittie, and Lureen perched on stools around Thuy’s desk on the other side of the main room.

  Teeping together, the twelve became a temporary group mind, a twenty-four-legged organism. Jayjay made sure everyone was clearly focused on the foundation that he and Thuy had built in the woods. And then, on the count of three, they launched themselves thither, bearing the house and her contents along.

  Teleporting involved cohering your wave function so intensely that you became, in effect, an exotic elementary particle. In terms of the quantum-mechanical approximation, you became a camel-humped wave function, simultaneously here and there.

  But it was a little more complicated than that. Quantum mechanics was known to be only an approximation to the world’s deeper rules. There were three new realms to take into account: the parallel spacetime of the Hibrane, the unexplored zone beyond the infinity of the lazy eight axis, and the subdimensional levels beneath the Planck length. While remaining quantum-mechanically orthodox, teleportation teased its practitioners with glimpses of the subdimensions.

  As the shape of Jayjay’s wave function shifted, he felt himself skimming across the surface of a hidden sea: the Planck frontier that separated ordinary reality from Subdee. Voracious, meddlesome subbies lived in the subdimensional sea. They’d once attacked Thuy by sending up harpoon-tipped tendrils. It was good practice to finish one’s teleportation hops as quickly as possible.

  But the mind force of the twelve teekers was barely adequate for the task of moving the house, and the passage was proceeding slower than Jayjay would have liked. And then, just when it seemed like they were ready to bloom up into the redwood glen—old Khan lost his focus.

  Thuy’s mother, Minh, was teeping him, she was having a hissy fit because they’d forgotten to bring along her special homemade ginger-plum dipping sauce. As the distracted Khan’s mental grip weakened, the cabin teeped a yip of fear. They were sinking too close to the subbies’ sea. Jayjay heard a noise like a wood chipper.