Thuy was finding it hard to bulk up her metastory into a full-fledged metanovel; part of the problem was that neither she nor anyone else had really figured out what a metanovel should be, although by now there had been a fair number of not-quite-successful metanovels posted on the orphidnet. One thing for sure, suckling on the Big Pig seemed a crippling drain on Thuy’s creative energies. Though Jayjay loved the Pig, it wasn’t as big a burden for him as it was for Thuy. Thuy’s disillusionment with the Pig was in fact a key deal-breaking issue between her and Jayjay. So Jayjay was also intending for his wheenk to defiantly say, “I’m not scared of the Big Pig even if you are.”

“Wheenk!” sang back Thuy, fully understanding every shade of Jayjay’s meaning and upping the signifier strength by digging into the ever-expanding database of her metanovel, passing a link to a series of images inspired by her sorrow over her and Jayjay’s breakup: for instance, shriveled tree-blossom petals on a dirty sidewalk, with Thuy’s virtual violin playing sad, wheenking chords. There was more than a little self-pity here, which seemed a bit unjustified to Jayjay as the estrangement was, at least in his opinion, Thuy’s own fault. And wasn’t she still using the Big Pig anyway—like, right now?

The Big Pig was absorbing, mirroring, and amplifying their exchange, layering on further sounds, clips, and links from the simmering matrix of global info. Intoxicated by the heady mix, Jayjay soon forgot about Thuy per se—that is, she became an archetype, a thought form, a pattern in the cosmic stew. Knowing Jayjay’s particular likes, the Big Pig began displaying a fundamental secret-of-life construction of reality: branes and strings, an underlying graph-rewriting system, a transfinite stack of “turtles all the way down.” Although the ideas felt familiar from Jayjay’s last trip into the Pig, he knew the details wouldn’t stay with him for long. So what. Pig trips were all about relaxing and enjoying the show. Aha!

For her part, Thuy sank into the details of her metanovel, letting the Big Pig show her a stream of variations of what her completed work could be once it was done, each Pig-take on her work more sinewy and coruscating than the one before, giving Thuy the familiar, despairing sensation that really there was no use for her to bother doing anything at all when everything was already thought of in the Big Pig. She wanted to bail out, but for now the Pig’s ever-changing fountain of ideas was once again holding her in thrall.