“Chinese, French, Finnish, whatever,” said Rawna. “It’s a universally interfacing meta-interpreter. Last night the Goofer CEO managed to acquire the only one in existence. It’s from Triple Future Labs in Xi’an. Near Beijing.”
“Jeff can probably even talk to me now,” said Sid.
“Yes,” said Jeff, eerily calm. “Foreigners, animals, plants, stones, and rude turds.” He rose to his feet, looking powerful, poised, and very, very dangerous.
“So okay then,” said Rawna, rapidly heading for the door with Sid at her side. In her hoarse whisper, she issued more instructions to Diane. “Your job, my dear, will be to keep Jeff comfortable and relaxed today, and not get in the way. Take him out to the countryside, away from people and local cultural influences. Don’t talk to him. He’ll be doing the work in his head.” Rawna paused on the doorstep to rummage in her capacious rainbow-leopard bag and pulled out a bottle of wine. “This is a very nice Cucamonga viognier, the grape of the year, don’t you know. I meant to put it in your freezer, but — ”
With Jeff dominating the room like a Frankenstein’s monster, Rawna chose to set the bottle on the floor by the door. And then she and Sid were gone.
“I should have karate-kicked Sid as soon as he came in,” said Diane wretchedly. “I’m sorry I didn’t protect you better, Jeff.”
“It’s not a problem,” said Jeff. His eyes were glowing and warm. “I’ll solve Rawna’s piss-ant advertising issue, and then we’ll take care of some business on our own.”
For the moment, Jeff didn’t say anything more about the Kowloon slug, and Diane didn’t feel like pestering him with questions. Where to even begin? They were off the map of any experiences she’d ever imagined.
Quietly she ate some yogurt while Jeff stared at his Goofer display, which was strobing in a dizzying blur, in synch with his thoughts.
“The Chinese are fully onboard now,” announced Jeff, powering down his Goofer ring.
“What about the Kowloon slug?” Diane finally asked.
“I transmuted it,” said Jeff. “It’s not inside my head anymore. I’ve passed it on to my simmies. I’ve got a trillion universally-interfacing simmie-bots in the cloud now, and in an hour I’ll have a nonillion. This could be a very auspicious day. Let’s go out into Nature, yeah.”
Diane packed a nice lunch and included Rawna’s bottle of white wine. It seemed like a good thing to have wine on for this picnic, especially if the picnicker and the picknickee were supposed to stay comfortable and relaxed.
“I say we go up Mount Baldy,” suggested Diane, and Jeff was quick to agree. Diane loved that drive, mostly. Zipping down the Foothill to Mountain Ave., a few minutes over some emotionally tough terrain as she passed all the tract houses where the orange groves used to be, and then up along chaparral-lined San Antonio Creek, past Mt. Baldy Village, and then the switchbacks as they went higher.
Jeff was quiet on the drive up, not twitchy at all. Diane was hoping that the Kowloon slug was really gone from his head, and that the conotoxins had fully worn off. The air was invigorating up here, redolent of pines and campfire smoke. It made Diane wish she had a plaid shirt to put on: ordinarily, she hated plaid shirts.
“I’m going to just pull over to the picnic area near the creek,” she said. “That’ll be easy. We can park there, then walk into the woods a little and find a place without a bunch of people.”
But there weren’t any people at all — a surprise, given that it was a sunny Sunday in July. Diane pulled off the road into the deserted parking area, which was surrounded by tall trees.
“Did you know these are called Jeffrey pines?” said Diane brightly as they locked the car.
“Sure,” said Jeff. “I know everything.” He winked at her. “So do you, if you really listen.”
Diane wasn’t about to field that one. She popped the trunk, grabbed the picnic basket and a blanket to sit on, and they set off on a dusty trail that took them uphill and into the woods.
“Jeffrey pines smell like pineapple,” she continued, hell-bent on having a light conversation. “Or vanilla. Some people say pineapple, some people say vanilla. I say pineapple. I love Jeffrey pines.”
Jeff made a wry face, comfortably on her human wavelength for the moment. “So that’s why you like me? I remind you of a tree?”
Diane laughed lightly, careful not to break into frantic cackles. “Maybe you do. Sometimes I used to drive up here on my day off and hug a Jeffrey pine.”
“I can talk to the pines now,” said Jeff. “Thanks to what that Kowloon slug did for my simmies. I finally understand: we’re all the same. Specks of dirt, bacteria, flames, people, cats. But we can’t talk to each other. Not very clearly, anyway.”
“I haven’t been up here in weeks and weeks,” jabbered Diane nervously. “Not since I met you.” She looked around. It was quiet, except for birds. “I have to admit it’s funny that nobody else is here today. I was worried that maybe — maybe since you’re the hive mind man, then everyone in LA would be coming up here too.”
“I told them not to,” said Jeff. “I’m steering them away. We don’t need them here right now.” He put his arm around Diane’s waist and led her to a soft mossy spot beside a slow, deep creek. “I want us to be alone together. We can change the world.”
“So — you remember your dream?” said Diane, a little excited, a little scared. Jeff nodded. “Here?” she said uncertainly. Jeff nodded again. “I’ll spread out the blanket,” she said.
“The trees and the stream and the blanket will watch over us,” said Jeff, as they undressed each other solemnly. “This is going to be one cosmic fuck.”
“The earthly paradise?” said Diane, sitting down on the blanket and pulling Jeff down beside her.
“You can make it happen,” said Jeff, moving his hands slowly and lightly over her entire body. “You love this world so much. All the animals and the eggs and the bicycles. You can do this.” Diane had never felt so ready to love the world as she did right now.
He slid into her, and it was as if she and Jeff were one body and one mind, with their thoughts connected by the busy simmies. Diane understood now what her role was to be.
Glancing up at the pines, she encouraged the simmies to move beyond the web and beyond the human hive mind. The motes of computation hesitated. Diane flooded them with alluring, sensuous thoughts — rose petals, beach sand, dappled shadows…. Suddenly, faster than light in rippling water, the simmies responded, darting like tiny fish into fresh niches, leaving the humans’ machines and entering nature’s endlessly shuttling looms. And although they migrated, the simmies kept their connection to Jeff and Diane and to all the thirsty human minds that made up the hive and were ruled by it. Out went the bright specks of thought, out into the stones and the clouds and the seas, carrying with them their intimate links to humanity.
Jeff and Diane rocked and rolled their way to ecstasy, to sensations more ancient and more insistent than cannonades of fireworks.
In a barrage of physical and spiritual illumination, Diane felt the entire planet, every creature and feature, every detail, as familiar as her own flesh. She let it encompass her, crash over her in waves of joy.
And then, as the waves diminished, she brought herself back to the blanket in the woods. The Jeffrey pines smiled down at the lovers. Big Gaia hummed beneath Diane’s spine. Tiny benevolent minds rustled and buzzed in the fronds of moss, in the whirlpools of the stream, in the caressing breeze against her bare skin.