“Let’s try,” said the mushroom. “Aha.” A moment later she was showing Chu some shiny figures like big, slow-moving people made of light. “They’re popping in and out of our world all the time!” exclaimed the mushroom. “And our good, smart, quantum-computing orphids are landing on them. No more sneaking. Look, look, there’s a Hibraner taking a cuttlefish! He’s slow, but he puts himself in just the right place. He’s a cuttlefisher! It’s lucky we looked at the cuttlefish data stream.”

“My good idea,” said Chu.

The orphidnet showed him scenes of glowing figures that oozed about, cunningly managing to catch hold of the rapid but bewildered cuttlefish. And in other scenes the gauzy, monumental figures displayed themselves to little groups of worshipful virtual humans. Chu glimpsed his mother in one of these worship groups, but then she disappeared.

Chu watched the little congregation a bit longer anyway. The Hibraner in the center was a giant old woman of light, silently moving in slow motion. Linking his virtual self into the site, Chu realized the woman was speaking via the orphidnet. She said she was from a better world where people didn’t use computers and didn’t endanger their homes with nants. Noticing Chu, she pointed at him, which made him uneasy. He pulled away, although he would have liked to find out where his mother had gone.

“The Hibraners have always been around,” said the smart mushroom who was guiding Chu. “I’m data-mining the info. People have never been sure if Hibraners are real; they called them fairies or spirits or angels. They’re out of quantum phase with your reality; people just see them as patches in their peripheral vision. The Hibraners may sometimes have caused people to hear voices or see visions. But now they’re easy to see via the orphidnet.”

“Can I go to the Hibrane and visit?” asked Chu. That would teach Nektar a lesson for yelling at him about wetting his pants while he was being a cuttlefish. He’d run away to another world.

“Maybe,” said the smart mushroom. “Traveling to the Hibrane would be an—encryption problem. You’d get your mind into a special state and encrypt yourself into a superposition capable of jumping you to the Hibrane.”

“Encryption!” exclaimed Chu. “I like breaking codes. Tell me more.”

“To travel between the two worlds, a Hibraner turns off self-observation and spreads out into an ambiguous superposed state, and then she observes herself in such a way so as to collapse down into the other brane.”

“Which part of that is encryption?” asked Chu.