“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 viongier, 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 sync 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 into 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.

  “I’m me again,” said Jeff, up on his elbow, looking at her with his face tired and relaxed.

  “We did it,” said Diane very slowly. “Everyone can talk to everything now.”

  “Let the party begin,” said Jeff, opening the bottle of wine.

  * * *

  Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician, and a computer scientist. He received Philip K. Dick awards for his cyberpunk novels Software and Wetware, and an Emperor Norton award for his autobiography Nested Scrolls. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area, and he paints in his spare time. His recent titles include a novel The Big Aha, an omnibus Transreal Trilogy, and his mammoth Journals: 1990-2014. His Complete Stories are available as well.

  Eileen Gunn is a short-story writer and editor. Her most recent collection, Questionable Practices, was published in March 2014 by Small Beer Press. Her fiction has received the Nebula Award in the U.S. and the Sense of Gender Award in Japan and has been nominated/shortlisted for the Hugo, Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree, Jr., and World Fantasy awards. Gunn was editor/publisher of the influential (and political) Infinite Matrix webzine and served for 22 years as a member of the board of directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop.

  “Hive Mind Man” was previous published in Asimov’s SF Magazine (February, 2012).

  Stompin’ at the Savoy

  by Lewis Shiner

  What I really need, Guy thought, is to duck into a Porta-Santa and blow off some of these bad vibes.

  WLCD, “the easy-watching channel,” blared at him from a video store across the street. He’d sweated clear through his collarless pink shirt, and burglar alarms were going off in his brain. One of the familiar red-and-green booths stood open and inviting at the next corner. Guy lurched inside and slammed the door.

  “Hello, Guy,” said Santa, scanning Guy’s ID bracelet. The white-bearded face smiled down from the CRT on the back wall and winked. “How are you?”

  “Pretty shitty, Santa. I’m really paranoid at the moment.”

  “I see. What are your feelings about being paranoid?”

  Guy wrestled with that for a few seconds. “I think that’s the stupidest question I ever heard.”

  “I see. Why do you feel it’s the stupidest question you ever heard?”

  “Look, Santa, there’s three guys back there been following me all afternoon. Business suits, mirror glasses, pointy shoes, the whole bit, you know?” He rubbed nervously at a scrape on his plasteel jacket. Guy loved that jacket and he really cared about the way he looked, not like those other assles at work who’d wear anything they saw on WLCD. “I think I lost them, but I don’t even understand what’s going down, you know? First the computer goes apeshit at work. Then—”

  “One moment please,” Santa said. The chubby face on the screen seemed to think something over, and then the voice came back. “Okay, you’re Guy Zendales, right?”

  “Right,” Guy said. Santa’s voice suddenly had a lot more personality than a moment before.

  “You said something about a computer?”

  “Yeah. I like, work at Modern Sounds, you know? And I was ringing up this sale when all of a sudden some wires must have got crossed. All this data just starts pouring out all over the screen, you know? Filled up a whole floppy that was supposed to have our daily sales records on it.”

  “You got it with you? Can I look at it?”

  “Sure,” Guy said. He stuck the diskette in the slot next to the screen.

  “Hmmm, " Santa said. “This is very interesting. Do you know what this is?”

  Suddenly Guy twigged bad vibes again. He trusted Santa, of course. Just like that deal with priests and confessionals, only Santa was for everybody. The ads on TV told you it was okay. “Get it off your chest ... tell Santa.”

  But Guy didn’t like the way Santa’s voice had changed. Why should Santa want to look at a bunch of receipts from a music store?

  “Uh, listen, Santa, man, I don’t know what the fuck this is about, okay? I really think I better split now.”

  “Oh, no, Guy, wait just a second. I’ve got something I want to...uh...show you...”

  Guy heard footsteps running toward the booth. “Just stay where you are,” Santa said.

  Guy snatched the diskette and stuck it back inside his jacket, just as the pounding started on the door of the booth.

  Guy’s vision blurred as the adrenaline hit him. “Holy shit!” he yelled. He lashed out instinctively with his reinforced shoes and the side of the booth split from floor to ceiling. Hunching his shoulders, he dove through the opening and knocked a man in a suit and sunglasses to the astroturf sidewalk.

  Still shouting, Guy ran into the middle of the street.

  ***

  Hondas zipped around him on either side, the drivers squeezing their brakes and shouting at him. Guy flinched and stood paralyzed for a second, then felt himself lifted by the elbows and carried across the street.

  “Shit!” cried a voice behind him that had to belong to a suit and sunglasses. “Muties! Hey you assles! Come back here with him!”

  Guy remained unnaturally rigid, afraid to even turn his head. He watched numbly as he was swept into a deserted building and down a flight of concrete stairs. Finally his terror began to subside and he risked a quick glance to his left.

  Shit, he though, snapping his eyes away. Muties, all right. Guy had heard stories about the so-called Law of Genetic Conservation, that for every genetically engineered “improvement” something else would go hideously wrong. The mutie on Guy’s left could have been Exhibit A in the trial that had outlawed the whole field of genetic research.

  The near side of its head was as swollen and lumpy as an organlegger’s sack of cut-rate eyeballs. The muties’ own eyes were about two inches out of line, the right one protruding a good half inch or so. The rest of its body was fairly normal, except for the hunched back and the enormous hands and feet.

  At the bottom of the steps they began running through a tiled hallway, then down a wooden ramp and into a rough-cut tunnel that was black from years of soot. Guy listened almost hopefully for footsteps following them.

  There weren’t any.

  Guy had never smelled rat urine before, but he was sure he was smelling it now. It’s the Subway, Guy thought. As if it wasn’t bad enough to be chased by assles in mirror sunglasses and kidnapped by muties, they had to bring him here.

  He began to really get frightened.

  The muties slowed and turned into a side tunnel. Guy could see the nose of the mutie on his right in his peripheral vision. It was the size and color of an unripe cucumber. What next? he wondered.

  One more turn and they were in a long, narrow room, done in white tile on all the surfaces. Greasy daylight filtered in through a reticulated plastic skylight. From the rusted pipes that still protruded at waist height Guy could tell that the place had been a rest room once, long enough ago to have accumulated a thick layer of dust and cobwebs, but not long enough to have lost the acrid odor.

  Finally he had to stop looking at the walls and face the other inhabitants of the room.

  At least ten muties lounged against the walls in a range of shapes and sizes, but in the center of them was the Bull Goose Mutie, the ugliest thing Guy had ever seen. Empty breasts dangled from its enormous, Buddha-like chest. Faceted, insectile eyes stared out of a skull shaped like a rotting pumpkin. Its matchstick arms ended in waxy, serrated fingers, and its legs folded too many times under its huge weight. The final, ghastly touch was provided by a smoldering Dr. Graybow pipe in the raw wound of its mouth.

  “Guy Zendales,” the Big Mutie said in a squeaky cartoon voice. “We have decided to render you our assistance.”

  “Terrific,” Guy said. “Thanks a lot. Why don’t you, like, give me a phone number and I’ll get back to you.”

  “Give him Slack,” the Big Mutie said, and Guy was set on the floor to brush ineffectually at the wrinkles in his jacket. “The govt agents,” the squeaking voice went on, “were going to kill you, you know.”

  “Kill?” Guy said. “Me?” One of the muties correctly diagnosed his expression and brought him a folding chair. Guy sat in it and massaged the muscle spasms in the back of his legs.

  “They must destroy the information on that diskette of yours. Because you’ve seen that information, they must destroy you as well.”

  “But...but...I’ve never done anything to the govt...”

  The Big Mutie, Guy realized, was attempting a bitter smile. “Neither have we. Yet they have systematically attempted to exterminate us for years, despite the fact that it was their experiments which produced us.”

  “Why me? What did I do?”

  “There was a glitch in the govt computer and it accidentally dumped 297 sectors of classified information into your store’s system. I believe the file was called BLOOPERS.”

  “Bloopers,” Guy echoed. None of this seemed to fit together. He remembered a video he’d seen once, about a patient in a mental hospital. It showed a woman sitting at a gray metal table, setting out lines and patterns with paper clips and pencils and scraps of paper. Tears ran slowly out of the woman’s eyes. At the time he’d wanted to cry himself, without really knowing why. Now he thought he was beginning to understand.

  “Perhaps we should explain,” the Big Mutie said. “The govt agents would have destroyed all of us long ago if it weren’t for our special genetic programming. Bob005, for example—” it pointed to the one with the gigantic nose, “is especially strong and fast. Bob667—” here it pointed to the one with the lopsided head, “was adapted for increased intuitive and precognitive powers. He anticipated your problem and enabled us to rescue you.”

  “It’s not that I’m not grateful or anything,” Guy said, “but what’s in it for you?”

  “We will never be free until the govt falls. We are always on the lookout for a weapon to use against them, and that diskette may be the one we need.” When it moved its head, dozens of identical reflections darted across its faceted eyes, making Guy’s stomach turn precariously.

  “Look, I’d love to help, but I have to have the other data that’s on here. I need to get this thing unfucked and sent in to the main office or I’ll lose my job.”

  The Big Mutie sighed. “All right. Suppose we get you safely to a computer. Will you at least let us look at the BLOOPERS file?”

  “Sure,” Guy said. “Anything you want. Just get me out of here, okay?”

  The Big Mutie seemed hurt. “Are we that ugly? Can you not stand to be around us even long enough for us to help you?”

  Guy started to lift his hands in denial, then let them drop. “Well, yeah,” he said. “I guess that about sums it up.”