Working on Postsingular again, trying to finish big Chapter Three. Here’s some of what I wrote the last couple of days.

“Wonda’s right,” chimed in Azaroth. “Remember, she and I been drifting into the ExaExa labs and checking out the scene. They don’t like it, but, hey, we’re big ghosts, what can they do? Jil’s connection is your pal Andrew Topping, Thuy. We’ve seen Jil meeting him inside a quantum-mirrored delivery dock at the back of ExaExa. The sudocoke he’s pushing is laced with these special controller nanomachines that Luty’s cooked up. They tell the users what to do. Like Nektar’s beetles, yeah.”

“Oh Jil,” said Thuy, overcome by sympathy for the other woman. Anyone who loved Jayjay couldn’t be all bad. “I wish I could fix her.”

“Ask the Big Pig how,” suggested Jayjay. “The Pig knows everything.”

The Pig graced Thuy with a vision of language as a network, of words as many-faceted gems, of phrases as incantatory program codes, which is not to say magic spells. In a flash, Thuy knew how to heal Jil — although she also knew she wouldn’t remember this newly won secret.

“Azaroth,” she muttered, her lips feeling as distant as a pair of tube worms deep in the abyssal trench off Easter Island. But Azaroth heard, and he was with her. He cast something insubstantial around Thuy’s head — a fine iridescent mesh, a dream net that refined Thuy’s current state of mind into a memory he could store in the dreamcatcher organ at the center of his head.

Thuy’s head ached. She probed her memories, trying to reconstruct her big insight about how to fix Jil. Incantatory programming. But the details weren’t happening. And Thuy’s vision of the Big Pig’s face was fading too. Off to one side, the sheep was cropping the grass as if nothing had happened.

“Ask Azaroth,” said Jayjay, guessing Thuy’s train of thought.

“I got it,” said Azaroth bringing his big, insubstantial head down near Thuy’s. “The mind state I caught for you. Feel me.” He opened his mouth and a bight of shimmering mesh bulged out like a tongue. The mesh did some odd, higher-dimensional jiggle, and then it was wrapped around Thuy’s head.

“Ready?” asked Azaroth.

“It’s okay,” murmured Jayjay. “Don’t be afraid.”

“Go ahead,” said Thuy.

All those thoughts about the language web came back to Thuy, percolating into her brain from the outside in. Decoupled from the Pig, she was able to assess and package the ideas, able to butcher the whale of inspiration into manageable packets. She knew how to deprogram Jil; now she knew how to undo the controller nanomachines her friend had snorted up with her sudocoke.

Even if the Pig was helping Luty, there was hope, as she was helping Thuy, too. And that was — why again? Azaroth hadn’t captured Thuy’s second vision; the only solid memory that remained was a single phrase: “I want a gnarly show.”

Even as she continued firming up her plans about how to heal Jil and steal the Ark, Thuy was thinking about how to finish Wheenk. Yes, yes, she could just about see what to do. She felt she had a richer control of language than ever before. All she needed to finish the Great Work was a little bit of pain, to make it profound.

The four of them teleported to the Merz Boat and found Jil sitting in the sun, looking sour, bedraggled and hung over. Now that Thuy knew the truth, she realized the sparkles that the orphidnet showed within Jil’s head were nanomachines, infecting Jil and filling her head with things like Nektar’s beetles.

“Love cycles useless rain in the tea,” said Thuy to Jil. “Stun rays squeeze the claws of Flippy-Flop the goose mouse. Caterwaul hello, dark drooping centaur dicks. Are you good to go-go, gooey goob? Able elbow boogie brew for two in anxious battered porches of thine ears, Jungle Jil. Comb out and pray. Pug sniff the cretin hop on lollipop pain of me and you, meow and moo.” Thuy rambled on like this for a minute or two, freestyling a seemingly random flow of Dada apothegms, but all the while she was guided by the precise and logical incantatory programming principles that Azaroth had helped her bring back from the Big Pig.

One by one, the evil bright sparks in Jil’s brain were winking out. And then Thuy was done, and Jil was joyful, tearful, her old self.

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