It was a short, exciting drive to Dolores Heights. Street kids ran along the sidewalk, cheering the roaring silver dinosaur. With the gasoline supply closed down, all you saw on the roads anymore were electric retrofits. Empowered by orphidic intelligence amplification, the automotive engineers had come up with cheap gas-to-electric conversion kits, not to mention lightweight batteries and nanotech solar cells that you brushed onto your car’s roof like enamel paint.

The belching SUV wallowed across Dolores Street and up the steep little hill to Nektar’s gingerbread mansion, the highest on the ridge, save for one.

“I can’t believe we’re going to Nektar Lundquist’s,” exulted Kittie. “And do you realize that’s Lureen Morales’s place at the very top of the hill? We’re with the stars!”

The engine sputtered and missed; the gas was running out. Jayjay goosed the accelerator. With a peevish last roar, the behemoth waddled in through one of Nektar’s open garage doors.

Chapter 6

Nektar’s Beetles

Lying on her bed on the second floor, Nektar heard the unaccustomed sound of a car engine. Night before last, the beetles had come in her sleep like a fever dream, and ever since then she couldn’t fully wake up. The beetles kept wedging her orphidnet access open, kept getting into her head.

She was too weak to sit up, and there was no hope of using the orphidnet to examine her garage, what with the virtual beetles in the way, each of them a jagged oval core with faceted eyes, pinchy-feely mouths, and zigzag legs.

Although Nektar was a big celeb, nobody was here to help her—other than some little shoon robots she’d gotten from Jil Zonder.

Right now, so far as the public understood the situation, Nektar was on a weight-reducing sudocoke binge. But in reality she didn’t use sudocoke; and that was talcum powder on the mirror by her bed. The beetles had made her lay out the lines; whenever she balked at their requests, they’d feed her images she could barely stand to see. At least so far she’d refused to cut an ad for Dick Too Dibbs. That’s what they were after.

Nektar strained her ears to listen for more noises from the garage, but all she heard were the chirps and clicks from the beetle currently in her visual field.

“You say sorry about insulting Homesteadies,” repeated the beetle. “Make Too Dibbs testimonial now.”

Out of the question. The first Dick Dibbs had sent the nants to eat the Earth. Nektar would never ever forget that. Nor would she forget that her husband Ond had let the nants eat their son Chu in order to pass some viral code to the nants. Nektar had stopped loving Ond then and there—even though Ond’s crazy plan had worked. The nants had reassembled everything they’d destroyed, including Chu.