"Provide you with a nutritious snack and fix some known bugs," Pangolin said. "Now you'll need to return to your alley to get your ma.n.u.script, then leave Vancouver as soon as you can before you get DJed."

"Where am I supposed to go?"

Pangolin shook his head like he was exasperated at having to spell it all out. "Where do you think? New York Alki. You need to find a publisher for your book. Here, take my card in case you have any tech-support issues."

Pangolin led Woo-jin down the hill, past another qputer monk who was bringing a trembling old blind woman to the tree. As they came to the door, Woo-jin asked, "What about my sister Patsy? Am I going to find her?"

Pangolin shrugged. "Beats me. I'm just a support tech rep."

Across town, inside her steel and gla.s.s coc.o.o.n, Abby sat on the couch in her underwear and a T-shirt with no bra, watching a show. She couldn't remember how long she'd been like this and couldn't think to try to remember. It was just her body and her show in a room that dimmed with the falling sun and glowed faintly in daylight. There was a refrigerator full of food; Rocco must have gone shopping before he went wherever it was he'd gone. The cabinets were stocked with instant noodles. She ate, defecated, urinated, and watched television. In the early days, television stations went dead at a certain hour and the screen would fill with an image of a fluttering flag. A recording of the national anthem would spizz out of the mono speaker. Abby envied those late-night TV watchers of yesteryear who'd gotten to witness the terminus of a transmission. Slouched in their living rooms with their Funyuns and lukewarm Pepsi in giveaway tumblers decorated with the Hamburglar. The idea that a signal could end. To stare into the linty fuzz allegedly representing a visual echo of the Big Bang. As soon as this show ended, Abby was going to get dressed and find Rocco. Yeah, right. This show was too good. She'd gotten sucked in. Here was Neethan Jordan, strutting up Hollywood Boulevard on the red carpet. A guitar riff looped over the footage, something sharp or flat and nasty that came from four guys in Sweden. It was the kind of music that made you think this Neethan Jordan guy was a menace to society. Better lock up your children 'cause he's out to corrupt them with his magnificently erogenous body parts. Neethan's feet strode across the field of red fabric running alongside the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Names scrolled beneath his strutting shoes: Anatole Litvak, Jetta Goudal, Sabu, Nita Naldi. Breaking the fourth wall, Neethan turned to the camera and said, "I don't know if I'm in my head, in a computer, or in a world that's actually real!" Cars pa.s.sed in what looked to Abby like an old-school video toaster montage-a sedan full of gaping, fanged clowns, a grainy Zapruder-film town car convertible with JFK waving from the back seat moments prior to his a.s.sa.s.sination, an ice-cream man dressed as a carrot leaning out of his window offering Fudgsicles, a gaggle of rambunctious exploitation flick h.e.l.l's Angels. This wasn't the physical world Hollywood Boulevard, if such a place had ever existed, but some kind of lazy, received idea of it. The red carpet led Neethan to the intersection of North Curson. A gas station, palm trees, abandoned cars. The red path veered to the right, north, into the hills. Here and there the husk of a house. Neethan's breathing was amplified now, signifying exertion and panic. The sun dropped. A white cat skittered up, considered him for a moment, then dashed into some bushes. Scattered tabloid news rags and hip-hop-branded forty-ouncers across the carpet's path. All these mansions, shuttered and dormant, gardens overgrown, vines snaking up gates and walls, curling around visionless security cameras mounted on poles. Individuals whose names used to appear in the credits of things that cost $100 million to make once lived here. A palm jutted up through the pavement in the middle of the street. Abby scratched her pubis: scritch scritch. The camera considered the sunset and the onset of utter darkness.

Intert.i.tle: TEN DAYS LATER.

New shot. Exterior. Morning. Neethan asleep on the red carpet. Pan back to reveal the carpet stretched through a semiarid Californian post-FUS landscape. Neethan's clothes, disheveled from over a week of travel by foot. His lips were flaky, chapped. "This is crazy," he said. "I can't keep going on like this. When is this carpet going to end?" And yet he pulled himself to his feet with a swell of music and continued. A shot of the punishing sun, time-lapse images of it rising and setting, the moon, stars pinwheeling across the fast-forwarded night. A commercial for hair-growth cream. A road sign read: DEATH VALLEY. The carpet continued forward, across the desert. The music was martial, percussive, as Neethan stumbled ever onward. Close-up of Neethan's peeled, delirious face. Finally, amid the sand and ripples of heat, he collapsed face-first on the acrylic carpet.

New shot. Exterior, night, everything lit blue in moonlight. Oops, somehow a boom mic poked into the shot. Neethan still lay pa.s.sed out on the carpet, which ran alongside a two-lane road. From the distance came the sound of an approaching vehicle. Pinp.r.i.c.k-like dots of light that grew larger with the steady increase in volume. Turns out it was an ambulance. After illuminating Neethan in the headlights, the vehicle slowed down and pulled to the side of the road. The back doors squeaked open and a pair of Sikh paramedics hustled to the fallen actor, loaded him onto a stretcher, and inserted him into the ambulance.

There was a montage of close-ups in which the paramedics' faces were not seen, only their gloved hands manipulating syringes, uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g caps off tubes of ointment. They slid an IV into Neethan's arm, pried his eyelids open and penlighted his pupils, glued electrodes to his forehead, and unb.u.t.toned his shirt to reveal a tanned and waxed six-pack.

Cut to shot of the ambulance, idling on the side of the road in the dark night.

More interior-montage footage, a syringe poked into an ampoule, then into Neethan's arm. The beeping of machines as the paramedics purposefully went about their business.

Cut to a shot of the ambulance, the doors opening, paramedics carrying Neethan back out on the stretcher, over to the place where he'd reposed. They lifted him from the stretcher and set him p.r.o.ne on the red carpet as the first featherings of dawn appeared on the horizon. Hustling back to the vehicle, the paramedics loaded the stretcher, hopped in after it, then closed the doors as the ambulance spat gravel and zoomed away.

Close-up on Neethan's face, eyes closed as the day's first sun rays foreshadowed the brutality of this valley of punishment. His eyes fluttered awake. Medium shot as he rose, stretched, surveyed the blasted landscape. The red carpet extended ahead and behind. Yawning, he stepped forward. Close-up of his shoes, scuffed leather, moving across the carpet.

Wide shot, putting the expansive Western desert on grand display. Up ahead, a figure stood motionless beside the red carpet. Close-up of Neethan squinting. As he drew closer he discerned two people standing side by side. Fifty more paces revealed them to be a man in a suit and a cameraman. Media. The reporter gripped a microphone and seemed to have been conducting hours of preparatory smiling. Neethan cleared his throat and extended his hand in greeting.

The reporter took Neethan's hand and shook it vigorously. "Hola. Soy Pefas Munoz de las noticias del ca.n.a.l siete."

"Hi, Pefas, nice to meet you. Glad to be here."

"Que puede usted decirme sobre su nueva pelicula?"

"En ingles o espanol?"

"Espanol, por favor."

"Stella Artaud: Asesino Newman, Temporada Cuatro, es la ultima temporada en la serie premiada de Stella Artaud: Asesino Newman. Yo interpreto al Doctor Uri Borden, un cientifico de clonicos quien se involucra en la insurreccion y tiene que decidir abortar el Mesias o no. Es una serie estimulante, exhibiendo efectos de los mas avanzados y accion en todas partes, con mas que un poco de ternura."

Abby paused the show, unkinked her neck, and shuffled into the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet she propped her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. It was night, she thought. She'd have to look out the window to be certain. After flushing she stood in front of the sink avoiding eye contact with herself. Just a quick peek, she thought, just to see how I'm holding up. She squeezed the porcelain sink lip and tried to raise her head. She found she could only do it if she closed her eyes. Breathing hard through her nostrils, she forced herself to look. Her face was broken out, that was the first problem. It was hard to mess up compliant Eurasian hair, but hers had turned greasy and knotty. Black bags under eyes jittery and blasted red.

"What's wrong with me?" Abby said, and though she knew well the answer still she refused to admit it. She'd been around people in this shape before. She'd seen Jadie like this. She knew what an embodiment looked like.

Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 4.

You made a lot of money in the tech boom.

That's an understatement.

Tell me how it got started.

I don't feel like talking about that today. Shut off the recorder.

Come on, now.

Shut off the f.u.c.king recorder.

Okay, it's off.

The red light's still on.

That's the battery light. The switch is to OFF, see?

This whole thing is bulls.h.i.t.

Why are you angry? Did I make you angry, Luke?

I've been nothing but patient with you. But nothing I say is going to move you to do anything besides file your stupid little report. You're humoring me. Nothing I say is going to matter to you.

Of course it matters to me.

Bulls.h.i.t.

Okay, have it that way. You can find someone else to help you tell your story. Be my guest.

Come on, Luke, be reasonable.

[crying]

Here. A tissue. I know this is hard for you.

You have no idea.

Can we get you anything? Better food? More books?

[crying]

We can continue tomorrow if you prefer.

No. Let's keep going.

Why don't we take a half hour, get our bearings, and come back.

Okay.

All right, we're back. We were talking about your early days in the tech boom.

Yeah, so after I cleaned up my personal appearance I started talking to Wyatt and Erika about all these little companies that seemed to be sprouting up around the city. Netscape launched. AOL was rising. We started going to smart-drug parties and talking a lot about virtual reality. You could get swept up in these convergent zones of Bay Area freakishness and technology and money. Someone would get a weird idea that someone else made happen with technology and then capital started flowing. It struck me that those who understood the languages of technology were those who attracted the most money. So I bought a computer and set out to learn HTML and C++ and Perl at community colleges. I'd hang out at Wyatt and Erika's and we'd drink copious amounts of coffee and take ginkgo biloba and write code all night. Soon Wyatt and I quit the reprographics company and I started working for a company called Netversive while he joined something called Boing Dot.

You gave up trying to find the proof for the brochure?

We did. I was a little disappointed in myself at first but, at the same time, throwing in the towel liberated me. Not that it mattered one way or the other. A week after we quit our jobs at the reprographics place the whole building burned to the ground. The official reason was faulty wiring. Wyatt and I suspected that something malevolent was at our heels but we didn't have much time to ponder the situation. Our new jobs demanded our complete attention and all of our time.

What did Boing Dot and Netversive do?

Good question. I still couldn't tell you. Really it all boiled down to making Web pages and developing the back-end systems to support them. That's what everyone was actually doing. But everything was pitched as "internetworking solutions for revolutionary crossfunctional database management" blah blah blah. Boing Dot had something to do with those annoying pop-up ads. Netversive's product was more like a suite of a.n.a.lytics tools. I lasted there five months then accepted a job at a start-up called iPeanut. An online peanut-b.u.t.ter store. But more than just peanut b.u.t.ter. Other nut b.u.t.ters as well. While I was there I successfully oversaw the launch of our jams tab. My base salary was $150,000.

How long did you last at iPeanut?

Not long. Six months, maybe? Because the company was bought out by-okay, you're not going to believe this but I swear it happened-an online bread company. The vision of eBread was to be the market leader in online sandwich ordering. I hung around the merged company long enough to attend an all-hands meeting with the founder. Nice enough guy named Ray. Completely delusional, obviously, a real Kool-Aid drinker. His goal was to provide a way for people to order sandwiches on the Internet and have them delivered within the hour in major metropolitan areas. I remember a heated discussion breaking out in a conference room about whether we should offer free pickles. One time Ray put up a PowerPoint with all this market research about how many people in America routinely eat sandwiches. The numbers were astronomical, as you can imagine. He argued that if eBread were to snag just one-half of 1 percent of the national market in sandwiches, we'd be a $1 billion company within a year. The company went public, I cashed out my stock, and walked away with $500,000 more in my savings account. I was sick of eating sandwiches every day. Meanwhile, Wyatt tired of Boing Dot and went to work for Skinwiggle. They developed virtual mannequins for online clothing stores. I got a new job as director of customer solutions at Iceberg Software. The obsessiveness with which I had tried to track down Nick transferred easily to my new work ethic. I would get up at six, stop by my favorite cafe for a triple latte, be at my desk by quarter to seven, work until nine at night, and come home or sleep in a sleeping bag under my desk. I don't think I took a c.r.a.p in my apartment's toilet for a year.

What did Iceberg Software do?

Firewalls, mostly. Security for high schools, filtering software. I cashed out my stock there for three-quarters of a million. Then I went to join Wyatt at Skinwiggle. I developed a customer relationship management system there from scratch. Insane the stuff we cranked out by hand when there were dozens of companies churning out products that did the same thing only better. The good thing about working at Skinwiggle was I got to spend more time with Wyatt. He wasn't in the best of shape. The Internet aged him. He was chronically sleep-deprived and overworked. He started complaining about his chakras and the troubling condition of his stool. He b.i.t.c.hed constantly about the company, responding to every perceived slight with biting sarcasm. The thing about Web companies is there's always something severely f.u.c.ked-up. There is always an outage, always lost data, always compromised customer information, always a server going off-line. You work with these clugey internal tools and patch together work-arounds to compensate for the half-a.s.sed, rushed development, and after a while the f.u.c.ked-upness of the whole enterprise becomes the status quo. VPs insecure that they're not as in touch as they need to be with conditions on the ground insert themselves into projects midstream and you get serious scope creep. You present to the world this image that you're a b.u.t.toned-down tech company with everything in its right place but once you're on the other side of the firewall it looks like triage time in an emergency room, 24/7. Systems break down, laptops go into the blue screen of death, developers miskey a line of code, error messages appear that mean absolutely nothing. The instantaneousness with which you can fix stuff creates a culture that works by the seat of its pants. I swear the whole Web was built by virtue of developers fixing one mistake after another, constantly forced to compensate for the bugginess of their code. Then, on top of the technical f.u.c.ked-upness, you add the human emotions of an office environment. People feel undervalued, hold grudges, get snagged into little vendettas, fantasize about shoving their bosses off the roof. At Skinwiggle, where I was making $250 grand, there were constant turf wars. The CEO was this colossal p.r.i.c.k named Vikram Ramakrishnan. He'd come up through the brutal Indian university system, and was unanimously reviled by his employees. Every morning he'd tell his a.s.sistant, "I'm ready for my breakfast," and she'd go prepare him a bowl of oatmeal, cubed mangoes, orange juice, and coffee and bring it to him on a tray. Vikram believed the best way to motivate his employees was to either quote from the Upanishads or ask them, "How's it feel to be a f.u.c.king failure?" in front of everybody at department meetings. He hired a bunch of his misogynist cousins to run the development team. Big-time nepotism. I recognized right away that I needed to get the f.u.c.k out of there as soon as I could. This was the spring of 2000. Then one day I woke up and all the start-ups were dying. One by one they started to wither. Ma.s.sive layoffs all over the Bay Area. I quickly sold what Skinwiggle stock had vested and braced myself. A few weeks later the ax fell and Wyatt and I lost our jobs. I had been prescient and purchased a town house near Coit Tower, which was where we found ourselves the day after the layoffs. We got really, really f.u.c.king high and ate nachos and talked about what the h.e.l.l had just happened to us. Not just in terms of the layoffs but in a more metaphysical sense. We'd veered off the path in our search for Nick, Squid, Bickle, and Kirkpatrick. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and discovered that I could live my modest lifestyle for thirty or so years without having to work again. Now, I felt, I had to wait for something. It was like my life had entered a lobby, somewhere I was supposed to sit and read old magazines. Which is just what I proceeded to do, more or less. My days were simple. I'd exercise, read, watch a movie, read some more, eat in restaurants, go on walks. It was a life so exotically different from the cubicle-bound existence I'd led for years, and in many ways it felt charmed and fantastic. I started dating, had a string of amusing relationships that didn't last longer than a couple months each. I had no idea at the time the kind of bomb Erika was going to drop on us.

She and Wyatt were still together?

Yeah. I had plenty of room, so I invited them to live with me, rent-free. Erika's career was starting to pick up steam. In her line of work, fantasy and science fiction writing, it was all about building brand awareness around the name and ensuring repeat readers through a series or trilogies. She could crank out a trilogy in a year. And not thin, wimpy little books. Big-a.s.s doorstoppers. Often I could hear her writing upstairs, bashing the h.e.l.l out of her keyboard. She typed like a prizefighter. Extraordinarily disciplined about her work. Wrote solid from nine to four every day.

Anyway, when she wasn't writing books, Erika went to this support group for UFO abductees. You can imagine the place. Some community center room with an air pot of coffee, chairs arranged in a circle kind of deal. At least that's how I pictured it. According to Wyatt the sessions could get pretty emotional and often Erika came home utterly drained. Through the group she met this therapist named Wendell Hoffman who looked exactly how you'd expect someone named Wendell Hoffman to look. He specialized in recovering buried memories of alien visitations through hypnotherapy. Wendell suggested that Erika attend a private session in which she would be put under hypnosis and he'd record her impressions on paper during the experience. Nothing s.e.xual or untoward happened at these sessions, if that's what you're thinking.

So one night Wyatt and I were stoned as per usual, eating takeout Thai and watching 2001: A s.p.a.ce Odyssey. Erika came home and just stood in the middle of the room for a minute. At first I thought she was entranced by the movie but she was standing in such a way that she was just staring into the kitchen. People standing immobile for long periods of time isn't really an uncommon event among cannabis fans, so she must have been standing there a really long time, maybe even into the star-child sequence, before I noticed it was weird that she was just standing there. So finally I asked her what was wrong. She just shook her head. I noticed she hadn't set her purse down, and in her other hand she held a sheaf of papers. The astronaut turned into an embryo after some rad special effects and Wyatt turned off the DVD. "What's wrong?" one of us said again. Erika handed us the papers.

Are these the papers right here?

Well, look at that. My G.o.d.

And she transcribed these, or wrote them, during a hypnotherapy session with Dr. Hoffman?

I don't think he was an actual doctor, but yeah.

I was wondering if you might read this doc.u.ment aloud.

Do I have to?

Yes.

We'd really like you to read it aloud.

All right then. Here's was what Erika wrote during that session with Wendell Hoffman.

1. The following is TRUE PROPHECY for humanity. Heed it and receive enlightenment and love. Disregard it and incur punishment and suffering.

2. The ultimate holy purpose of the human race is to actively spread organic life throughout the universe.

3. Haeckel's Theory: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: "Ontogeny is the growth (size change) and development (shape change) of an individual organism; phylogeny is the evolutionary history of a species. Haeckel's recapitulation theory claims that the development of advanced species was seen to pa.s.s through stages represented by adult organisms of more primitive species. Otherwise put, each successive stage in the development of an individual represents one of the adult forms that appeared in its evolutionary history. The embryo becomes a fish, a lizard, a mammal. Haeckel formulated his theory as such: 'Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.' This notion later became simply known as recapitulation." So says Wikipedia.

4. So it is with the life cycles of individuals and the species h.o.m.o sapiens. As the individual experiences childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, and death, these stages are recapitulated by the human race as a whole.

5. Childhood: Breaking away from our primate ancestors with the acquisition of tools, fire, language, pantheism.

6. Adolescence: The majority of what we refer to as history, the rise of monotheism, nation-states, philosophy, empire, democracy, and the rapid migration of humans to every corner of the earth. The industrial revolution represents the end of adolescence and the onset of adulthood.

7. Adulthood: The information technology revolution. A growing awareness of the mortality of the planet. Secularism and global market capitalism as the foundations of societies.

8. Middle age: An era of stewardship, of securing our legacy, and also of regret.

9. Old age: A great slowing as the inst.i.tutions built during adulthood begin the process of disintegration. Yet with this slowing and suffering, the blossoming of wisdom.

10. WE ASK: Can it be that our responsibility as humans during this age of adulthood is to reproduce?

11. If we CAN reproduce, we MUST reproduce. This is the law of living things.

12. Should we reproduce s.e.xually or as.e.xually?

13. If our species is to reproduce s.e.xually, we must first find our lover. Perhaps this lover is already among us, waiting for us to begin our courtship.

14. If we decide to reproduce as.e.xually, we must seek our children within. These children won't live in the physical dimension we inhabit but will exist as cognitive constructs in a qputer operating system.

15. Our holy task is not as simple as reproducing to create a new species, i.e. Nietzsche's ubermensch. Our holy task calls us higher. We seek to reproduce life itself.

16. Our holy task is to guide into being life that will thrive long after our planet has died.

17. We find no conflict with the world's great religions. We honor them for lighting our way. We honor the memory of the Christian G.o.d who claimed to create humanity in its own image. We honor the memory of the Eastern G.o.ds who promised eternal return. We seek PEACE with all believers and nonbelievers.

18. Our first law: Inflict no violence on our creations.

19. Our highest principle: Love is the metaphysical framework upon which the physical substance of life depends.

20. We create life cognitively (as.e.xually) and physically (s.e.xually). The life we create cognitively we create with information. The life we create physically we create with matter.

21. We pa.s.s life to the NEXT BEINGS as life was pa.s.sed to us by the previous beings, our G.o.ds.

22. The messiahs appeared in order to prepare our societies for greater control over the transformation of matter. Societies guided by religion created the steam engine, the factory, the computer. We unburdened ourselves from physical labor with machines, then from thinking with computers.

23. Marshall McLuhan wrote that technologies were extensions of man. As we extend, we delegate tasks to our creations. We delegated the digging of our hands to shovels. We delegated long division to the pocket calculator. By delegating our tasks to our technologies, we become more fully aware of who we are, and are terrified by the alienation this awareness engenders. Our final extension is into NEW LIFE.

24. With computers we delegated more complex functions of our brains. With the Internet we delegated our nervous systems. With the Bionet we delegated our immune systems. With qputers we have begun delegating our spirits.

25. As our spirits become extended through qputers a great, terrifying void opens before us. Do not fear this void. GO DEEPER.

26. Confronted with this void we have but one choice: Channel the spirit into NEW LIFE.