People did still buy paper books, even though you could read a book on the orphidnet without owning it. Strictly speaking, you could publish a book by printing one copy and letting the orphids settle onto it. They’d crawl around and learn the text. For that matter, you could publish a book by thoroughly imagining it, and then recording your thoughts onto some orphids, as the metanovelists did. But the paper physicality of an old-style book remained perennially pleasing, and they still sold in small numbers. Not that Jayjay owned any.

“How’s the metanovel, Thuy?” asked Darlene, her long, jeans-clad legs sticking out over the sidewalk, her booted feet crossed like a cowboy’s. “Still wrasslin’ it?” Darlene made her living not so much by selling books as by brokering access to metanovels. Many metanovelists stored their works in secure form within the orphids on their own bodies, so as to be able to charge for access.

“Oh yeah,” said Thuy. “It’s called Wheenk. It’s gonna be about what’s happened to me this year. ‘Waking Up’ is the first chapter. I was thinking, though, what if I start using every single thing I find.” She gestured at the shelves in Darlene’s shop. “Like maybe collage in all your books to capture the full ambience. Every word, every page, all of it part of Wheenk, all visible in one synoptic glance.”

“Synoptic,” said Darlene, liking the word. “Yes, my shelves hold the synoptic gospels of our literary heritage; you read them side by side to see the face of the Holy Hive Mind in her presingular state. But you’ve got to be kidding about including all that data. Just do a link. If you put too much into a metanovel, it’s as dull as a nearly empty file. Everything and Nothing are the same, you feel me? Aim your frame.” Peering from beneath her dark bangs, Darlene held up her hands, flirtatiously regarding Jayjay through the rectangle of her thumbs and fingers. “What’s with the Stank ad following you mangy kiqs?”

“We’re extras on the Founders show,” said Jayjay, miming himself soaping an underarm. “I Stank purty.”

“How was Gerry Gurkin last night?” Thuy asked Darlene. Gurkin was a fellow metanovelist who was promoting his new work, Banality, by giving presentations at venues like Metotem Metabooks. For an evening’s performance, a metanovelist would typically hand out short-term access permissions and give the audience a guided tour of the metanovel’s world, the hope being that people would pay for longer-term access.