“This could be you,” said Dick Too Dibbs, appearing in an ad above the body bag. “If you vote for Bernard Lampton. Dick Too Dibbs is the man to crack down on nanomachines. I know the bad guys; I can game their heads. It takes an honest insider to halt the attacks. Not a fake do-gooder who takes bribes. Dick Too Dibbs in November.”

Jayjay and Sonic headed down the sidewalk to catch up with Kittie and Thuy. The Hibraner was gone now. “That’s the third time I’ve seen that particular angel,” said Thuy, looking shaky. “You’ve heard me talk about him: Azaroth. Remember, I met him a couple of days after Orphid Night and he wanted to know if I’d seen the details of how Ond and Chu jumped to the Hibrane? And this summer he told me to cut back on the Big Pig. And just now he told me that if the Natural Mind guys offer me a job, I should say no and start a fight. He says if my life gets weird enough, I’ll remember Chu’s Knot.”

“Maybe you’re going crazy,” said Sonic, needling her. “Maybe he didn’t say anything to you at all.”

“I am so ready to visit Natural Mind,” said Thuy.

The Armory was a century-old brick building with every sixteenth brick turned sideways, making a grid of studs upon the dark-red walls. An anachronistic dish antenna projected from the gently vaulted roof. In the visible world, the looming Armory filled the better part of a city block; within the orphidnet it was a square, featureless hole. The Armory’s floor, ceiling, windows, and inner walls were quantum-mirrored to block the quantum entanglement signals used by the orphids. In other words, from the outside you couldn’t see in. Jayjay imagined Andrew Topping as a loathsome fat grub worm in there, a greedy parasite befouling the orphidnet. Would he grow violent when the Posse confronted him?

As if Jayjay weren’t anxious enough, one of his scenario-searching beezies now sprung a paranoid theory on him: Some unknown “Faction X” was deliberately luring the Posse into the Armory. The elegantly glyphed argument came down to this:

• Faction X contaminated Nektar with beetle malware.
• Faction X directed the Posse to a beetle-infested SUV.
• Faction X expected that someone in the Posse would design an antidote.
• Faction X expected that once the Posse invented a beetle antidote, the beezies would ask the Posse to heal Nektar.
• Faction X knew Nektar would urge the Posse to confront the Natural Minders in their lair.
• Faction X was maneuvering the Posse into the Armory.

And the beezies had an exponential number of possible theories about the identity and motivations of Faction X. Given that everyone was using beezies, overelaborate action scenarios were quite common now. Beezies were bringing human social intrigue to new heights.