Of course it would have destroyed Jayjay’s physical brain to run it at the hundred-thousand-fold speed-up rate required to live sixty years in six hours. So what the Big Pig did was to run a simulation of Jayjay in a virtual world. And once every realworld second, she used orphid signals to implant the latest interesting memories of the fake life into Jayjay’s credulous meat brain, using his reactions to further guide the sim.

Why was the Pig doing this? The simulation was both a thought experiment and an aid to reasoning. Not only was the Big Pig trying to see how a certain kind of future might play out, she was also studying how higher-dimensional cosmologies might relate to physical forms of memory. And Jayjay, like it or not, was helping her all the way.

His hallucinated life went as follows.

Turning 30.

Thuy never came back at all. Ignoring Jayjay’s pleas, at midnight the Big Pig released the nants. She was hell-bent on getting that extra memory.

Jayjay’s body was the first thing the nants ate. And soon after, the whole planet had been turned into a mass of nants—who justified their crime by carrying out a half-assed simulation of Virtual Earth.

Despite the Big Pig’s best programming efforts, the water, clouds, and fire never were quite right. In any case, the nants didn’t always try that hard; they often settled for shortcuts as crude as representing a tree by a cookie-cutter flat polygon.

Jayjay’s mental processes felt different; the mental and emotional life on Vearth was less drifty, more directed. Vearth’s denizens rarely dreamed. But long after Jayjay settled in, he kept on missing Thuy. He wished she’d made it back from the Hibrane.

Jayjay found work doing physics research in the Vearth version of San Francisco. The Big Pig pulled strings to get him the position despite his lack of academic credentials. The lab was looking for weird new principles of physics capable of super-charging brute matter’s computational capacities.

Although Jayjay enjoyed the job, he needed the salary, too. Vearth had an active cash economy, with the cash standing for computational resources. You needed money to buy or rent a simulated house, to view a show, or to get new clothes. And if you paid the Big Pig a certain monthly fee, your personal reality was rendered in higher resolution than was other people’s.

Jayjay ended up in a Vearth romance with none other than Darlene of Metotem Books. And on Jayjay’s thirtieth birthday, he and Darlene married.