The Pig extended a wobbly nipple toward Jayjay, and as he fastened on, the Pig passed him a time-lapse movie of a snowdrift being sculpted by the wind. The other Posse members found teats beside Jayjay, the four of them lined up like worshippers in a pew.

“Some Pig,” messaged Thuy with a giggle. The sick thing was, whenever she actually hooked into the Big Pig, she totally loved it.

“Radiant,” added Jayjay, picking up on Thuy’s Charlotte’s Web reference, not that he’d read the book, but right now, via the Pig, he was hooked into all the libraries in the world, with every volume an open book.

But, que lastima, the Big Pig hit was weak. The beetles were coming on, swarming into the space between Jayjay and the Big Pig, making the Pig’s images blocky, her animations jerky, her links slow—and there was no hope of an aha.

They dropped back into their mortal frames. In the peeling-paint Victorian, Dot and Red were reaching a climax, possibly goaded on by having the Posse nearby to watch them. Ugh.

Jayjay focused on the raindrops dripping through the moon roof and moved his leg. Now that he wasn’t doing anything interesting, the beetles were lying low.

“I want the real Big Pig,” said Kittie in a sullen tone. “Without all those freaking pests in the way. We really are infected.”

“I’m gonna get into Doodly Bug,” said Sonic, squinting his eyes and oddly wiggling his ten fingers. He touched the fingertips of his left hand to those of his right, pairing up his long, agile digits in a peculiar order. “I’ll invent some Calabi-Yau grenades to take down the beetles.”

Doodly Bug was based on quantum-loop string theory: in the game’s virtual worlds, players knotted hyperdimensional Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces so as to destabilize the particle symmetries of their online opponents. With orphidnet visualization engines and expert beezie agents helping the players along, the esoteric physics of Doodly Bug was within the reach of any kiqqie willing to waste a lot of time.

Sonic’s Doodly Bug ranking was approaching the highest possible level: Grandmaster of Space and Time. He’d already attained the only-slightly-less-exalted Multiversal Governator level. Jayjay was a Doodly Bug player too, with the quite respectable Kaluza Branesurfer rating. Last spring, Jayjay and Sonic had won some championships together. But then Jayjay had gotten obsessed with the ideas under the game—that is, with brane theory. And now, all praise the orphidnet, he’d begun using his intelligence-amplification to hang with the hard-core physicists who were investigating today’s number-one problem: understanding the Hibrane.

The explorations were long on theory and short on experiment, as a Hibraner named Gladax had somehow managed to erase all the orphidnet copies of Chu’s Hibrane jump-code the morning after Orphid Night.