Hylozoic Read Online Free PDF Page A

night. I love it.”
    â€œWhat if
your
molecules come apart, too?”
    â€œGaia will remember me, dog. Dig this—the good thief on the cross said, ‘Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom,’ and Jesus went, ‘Verily I say unto you, today shalt thou be with me in paradise.’ Meaning that heaven is a memory bank. Those whom Gaia loves are immortal.” Sonic drained his bottle of beer. “So anyway, I’m ready to move your cabin. We’re grouping at Ond’s?”
    â€œYou sure you’re together enough?”
    â€œYea verily,” said Sonic. “Let’s hop.”
    Â 

    Â 
    They landed on the patio behind Ond’s new monster house, overlooking San Francisco from a hillside in Dolores Heights. The new mansion was squeezed in next to Ond’s old mansion, where his ex-wife Nektar still lived. The building crew had erected the second home in a month, making the most of their ability to talk to the materials.
    The hilltop was pleasantly gilded by the late afternoon sun. Jayjay could see the Golden Gate Bridge and a sliver of the fogshrouded Pacific. At the far end of the patio, graceful Jil Zonder was skipping from side to side with her arms outstretched, her lustrous dark hair bobbing. She was leading a dance class for a dozen of the soft plastic shoon robots. They were cute little guys, almost like living cartoons.
    Jil had built up a nice business marketing shoons: she bought slugs of piezoplastic, trained the lumps to act like helpful dwarves, and sold them. People used shoons as toys, pets, household servants, and specialized workers. The silps in the plastic cooperated without complaint. Not having undergone millennia of evolutionary struggle to survive, silps weren’t especially ambitious.
    â€œMoving day?” said Jil, pausing to smile at Jayjay. She seemed to be glowing with health and good humor, but with Jil you never quite knew. She had a lot of inner demons. Last winter she’d suffered a harrowing relapse into sudocoke addiction, and her marriage had broken up.
    Jayjay had played a part in that breakup; he and this desirable older woman had shared a brief, passionate affair—quite the hit on the
Founders
show. But now Jil seemed clean and calm again, comfortably settled in with Ond—a well-known nanotech engineer who’d admired her for years. Ond had been more or less responsible for setting the singularity and its aftershocks in motion. But the public had forgiven him for it. Things were going good.
    A knobby, raw-looking teenage boy appeared, moving in stroboscopic hops. Momotaro, Jil’s son. Close behind him were his younger sister Bixie and, taking up the rear, Ond’s fourteen-year-old son Chu, all three of them pulsing in and out of visibility. Their trajectories were like dashed lines with the end of each dash shading into invisibility.
    â€œTeleport. Stutter. Tag!” yelled Momotaro in his cracking voice, melting away and reappearing between each utterance.
    â€œWe. Aren’t. Allowed. To run,” called Bixie, who resembled a smaller, more delicate Jil.
    â€œOnly. Hop. One. Meter,” added Chu, as he strobed toward them, filling the air with the sparkle of materialization dots.
    â€œThey’ve been doing this all day,” said Jil with a sigh. “I keep telling them to save their energy for moving Jayjay and Thuy’s cabin, but—”
    â€œWe. Never. Listen!” whooped Bixie.
    Just then Chu managed to thump Momotaro in the middle of the back. “You’re it!”
    â€œShoon war!” cried Momotaro, diving onto Jil’s phalanx of robots, who began working him over like puppies worrying an older dog. Bixie cackled and joined him. Chu stood frowning to the side.
    â€œCatch,” said Bixie, tossing one of the shoons Chu’s way. “Don’t sulk.”
    Chu sidestepped the flying blob of struggling plastic, letting it plop onto the lawn and