To make the research even harder, the Hibraners had changed their jumping technique to include a wait-loop so that all their interbrane jumps took exactly half a second to initiate, leaving no hope of repeating the timing-channel attack that clever Chu had used to figure out the Hibrane jump-code in the first place.

The kiqqie physicists were going bananas trying to think their way into the Hibrane, and Jayjay was channeling as many of their seminars as he could, working to reach the higher levels of this realworld metagame. Now and then he could actually contribute a seminar comment that made some of the others light up. He was disappointed that Thuy wasn’t more impressed. After all, he’d never even finished high school.

Yeah, Papa went to prison, just for selling a little dope, and Jayjay had dropped out of school to work fulltime at a taqueria with Mama so they could feed the five younger kids. When Mama had married the pendejo taqueria manager, Jayjay had quit working and left home. He figured he was too smart for work or for school. He hated his stepfather and he’d pretty much lost touch with his family. He’d lived in a squat, playing a lot of video games, making a little money in gamer tournaments—which was how he’d met Sonic. When the orphidnet hit, he embraced it.

For her part, Thuy had stuck it out at her parents’ little stucco house in the Sunset district, straight through high school and college at San Francisco State and even a year of studying the violin at the Music Conservatory. But all that education had led to nothing substantial. Thuy wanted to be a writer, but her parents, timid Minh and bossy Khanh, had gotten her a job as an executive assistant at Golden Lucky, a Vietnamese restaurant-supply wholesaler in South San Francisco, with the possibility of a marriage to the boss. Thuy had been desperately bored there, so when the new global network unfurled on Orphid Night, she dove in and never looked back. She’d bailed on her family and shown up at Jayjay’s squat in a condemned building off Valencia Street.

Thanks to the orphidnet, street-living was easy. In that first golden month, Thuy had crafted her big metastory, “Waking Up.” But then she got more and more hung up on the Big Pig, and this summer a Hibraner had advised her to leave Jayjay for Kittie. Thuy’s problems with the Pig were supposed to be from Jayjay’s bad influence.

“What are you watching, Jayjay?” Thuy asked Jayjay from the backseat. “I’m getting bored waiting for Dot and Red.” The rain was even stronger than before, filling the car with soporific drumming.