The guiding beezie mapped out causal links, showing that the beetles were deviant AIs emerging from infected orphids on Nektar’s scalp. Creepy. Up till now, spam and malware had been in the form of high-level software, not in the form of low-level corruption of the individual orphids that supported the orphidnet’s parallel quantum computation.

“Founders episode three hundred and ninety-five,” said Kittie, not understanding what she saw. “‘Nektar Gets the Sudocoke Horrors.’ How great is that?”

“Poor Nektar,” said Thuy. “Look, Kittie, the shoons are helping her.” Indeed, a classic Happy Shoon was spooning water into Nektar’s cracked lips, a goob-doll shoon was offering a little cup of mush, and a doughboy shoon was sponging Nektar’s soiled sheets. ExaExa, Stank, and BigBox weren’t posting any ads around Nektar Lundquist today. This episode was way too funky.

“I want to go, to physically go there, yeah,” said Sonic. “Look how many shoons.”

“We still don’t have the car keys,” said Jayjay doubtfully. He could almost smell the high, thin reek of Nektar’s dimly lit sickbed.

“You’ll want to figure out how to kill those beetles first,” glyphed the beezie. “You’re in the right place for that. This car’s orphids happen to carry the beetle infection, too. We don’t have a patch yet.”

“Oh fuck!” exclaimed Kittie.

“Our orphids are infected too?” said Jayjay.

The beezie nodded.

“Too late to run away,” said Sonic. “Oh well. This is where maybe humans really can outthink the beezies. Thanks to the Doodly Bug weapon shop.” He was talking about his fave online game.

The rain was really pouring down now. Rainwater dribbled in through the moon roof’s weather stripping to wet Jayjay’s left knee. But, at least for now, Jayjay had no sense of being infected by beetles. Maybe it was time to get high again.

In the apartment, Dot and Red were together on the couch with Dot’s knitting thrown aside; Red was pulling down her elastic-waistband pants and—

“Ooo-la-la,” said Thuy.

Sonic burst into shrill pulses of laughter.

“Oh, let’s transcend,” burst out Jayjay. “Let’s hit the Pig.”

“What the hey,” said Kittie. “Rainy-day fun.”

“Again?” said Thuy, meaning to refuse, but feeling her willpower weakening. It was so boring here in the car right now. “I swear, you guys, this is going to be my very, very last time ever. Wheenk.”

The virtual images of the Posse members spiraled upward through the orphidnet—not “up,” exactly, the direction was more like “in.” They all knew the way by now, and here were the billion snouts, tails, trotters, and flop-ears of the Big Pig metabeezie, the all-seeing eye atop the pyramid whose base held the ten sextillion networked orphids of Earth.