Hylozoic by Rudy Rucker Page B

“She’s knotted into me. I’m her puppet.” He groaned and sat up on his board, taking in the scene.
    The sea was like a sloshing bathtub—limp and listless, as ordinary and uninteresting as their woods had seemed this morning. The clouds in the sky were fatuous balloons. Even Thuy was starting to feel calm and neutral again.
    â€œThe atomic silps—they’re not computing the natural world in depth,” said Jayjay. “They’re wasting their cycles on this weird quantum computation that I programmed into them just now. No more gnarl.”
    â€œLet’s teleport back to Ond’s,” said Thuy. She signaled the four teenagers that they were leaving. And then they were on Ond’s patio.

 
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CHAPTER 5

ALIEN TULPAS
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    J il and Kittie were drinking tea and nibbling at a bowl of strawberries. Jil was training her shoons and Kittie was studying a blook—a rhodopsin-doped sheet of plastic capable of displaying images from every corner of earth.
    â€œBack so soon?” said Kittie, looking up. “Something’s wrong!”
    â€œJayjay had a kind of seizure,” said Thuy. “An alien mind took him over. He reprogrammed the ocean and—oh God, it’s reached here, too. Look how stupidly those branches move, all of them rocking in unison. San Francisco’s gone as dull as a drum machine. Can you feel it?”
    Jil and Kittie exchanged a puzzled look.
    â€œYou and Jayjay are high on Gaia?” suggested Kittie after a pause. “Pighead style? You shouldn’t let him drag you down,Thuy. Last fall you said that you’d quit being a pighead for good.”
    â€œThis is real,” said Jayjay in a low, gloomy voice. “Something strange happened to me last night.”
    â€œYou acted like a pighead,” said Jil in a mock-sweet tone. “What’s strange about that? Getting high is what you’re all about.”
    â€œI’m trying to change,” said Jayjay stiffly. “But that’s not the point. Last night I climbed up past lazy eight and I learned to think ten tridecillion thoughts in a second or two. And now this alien agent called a Pekklet is using me to steal the Earth’s gnarl. She’s making me cast malware programs into our atoms. They’re called runes.”
    Jil held up a lumpy strawberry, making a show of studying it. “This juicy little fella looks plenty gnarly to me.” She bit into it and grinned.
    â€œIt’s gnarly because it grew
before
the change,” said Jayjay. “But the next crop of strawberries will look like—like simple cones.”
    â€œAnd last night I thought I saw Hieronymous Bosch,” said Kittie, not taking her vision so seriously today. “What a party.” She guffawed. “Hey, Jayjay, did the aliens—
examine
you? Is the Pekklet beautiful? Does she give you a—”
    â€œIt’s not funny!” yelled Thuy, turning red. “It’s horrible. Look! This is what it’s about.” She turned on the hose and let the water play onto the stones of the patio. The water traveled in a perfect parabolic arc to spread across the ground in a smooth, even pool. No droplets, no bubbles, no spray, no fun.
    â€œI don’t get what—” began Jil.
    â€œThen look at
this
,” said Jayjay, seizing Jil’s empty teacup and throwing it down to smash. The cup broke into six equalsized pieces that settled symmetrically onto the ground like the petals of a magnolia flower.
    â€œThe world is acting like a cheap-ass video game,” said Thuy. “It’s almost as if we’ve been eaten by nanomachines and turned into sims.”
    â€œTell us again what happened to you, Jayjay,” said Kittie slowly.
    â€œWhile I was waiting for our wave, I heard squawking and chattering,” said Jayjay. “The sound was coming from inside my head. I remembered the sound from last