Thuy glanced up past the dead volcano at the scattered clouds. These, at least, looked the same as before. It struck her that the edge of one cloud was quite similar to the border of a lichen patch she’d noticed on a wall of the vent she’d just climbed. As she formed this thought, she realized she’d acquired an eidetic memory for visual form. Each shape she saw was being stored intact in her Hibrane-expanded mind.

Curiouser and curiouser. Thuy used telepathic omnividence to view herself as if from outside. She was still wearing striped yellow-and-black tights, a black miniskirt, and her yellow sweater. Fine. But her hair! Finding a comb in her coat pocket, she undid her pigtail fasteners, combed out her dark locks, made a tidy part down the middle and restored her high pigtails to pristine form. She applied a little pink lipstick too.

She was hungry. She wondered if Hibrane Easter Island had a town of Hanga Roa with a Tuna-Ahi Barbecue. Reaching into the telepathic glow of the Hibrane mindscape, she located the island’s town, which indeed had an unmarked restaurant very much like the place where she and Jayjay had breakfasted.

Given that she was the size of a gnome, Thuy didn’t feel like walking all the way to town. Maybe she could teleport. She fixed her mind upon the target location and the source location: the restaurant and the grassy patch by the moai.

Whenever Jayjay had teleported, he’d invoked his specially designed interpolation agents. The interpolators compensated for the fact that orphidnet images didn’t look quite as real as your immediate surroundings. But here in the Hibrane, you didn’t need interpolators. Thuy’s remote view of the village was utterly convincing.

Using her writerly sense of correspondences, Thuy let her attention dance back and forth between her images of source and target, pairing up features, crafting the sought-for transition as if writing a segue between two of a metanovel’s scenes. As she withdrew from reality’s insistent din, she seemed to collapse in on herself.

Where was she? Asking the question was enough. Pop—she was on the main street of the Hibrane version of Hanga Roa, carrying her coat under her arm. The locals had a few cars, even though they could teleport too. The cars were flimsy, as if cobbled together from organic parts: leaves, beetle wings, seashells. One car had dots like a ladybug, another bore yellow and white stripes. They all had solar cells and electric motors.