Rapture of the Nerds (23 page)

Huw swallows. Reluctantly, she concedes the point: Her mother, while not a fashionista, was never so aggressively anti-fash as to show up in naff silvery angelgarb. Maybe this
is
serious.

“All right. So some committee or other is threatening to pave the Earth and it’s got you all riled up because they’ve managed to block downloading. Why is that
my
business?”

Fairie-Bonnie turns and looks at her mother: “Was she always this stupid?” she asks, “Or did you hit her with the stupid stick while she was in the doghouse?”

“Hey, wait a—!”

“Shut up, dear.” Her mother’s voice contains some kind of subliminal payload that clamps her jaws shut—no covert messing with her headmeat’s wiring diagram this time, just simulated lockjaw. “We uploaded you so you could witness to them. For the defense, to explain just why digesting the Earth to add its raw material to the cloud is a really bad idea. If you want to slum around in a meatbody and commune with the realness of reality or something, the meatbody will need somewhere to live, won’t it?”

“They think Earth is obsolescent,” Fairy-Bonnie chips in. “The proposal is to forcibly upload everyone—field mice, humans,
Vampyroteuthis infernalis,
anything with a nervous system—and run them in a sim. ‘Nobody will be able to tell the difference at first,’ they’re saying, ‘and once they notice how much better off they are, they will be grateful.’ So we thought we’d better front them an ingrate.” She gifts Huw with a luminous, elfin smile. “You up for it?”

“No, I—”

“That was a rhetorical question,” Bonnie says as she grabs Huw by the scruff of her neck and blasts right through the not-sky into the darkness beyond.

Huw blinks her eyes open.
That was the weirdest fucking sim
— “Oh. You’re still here,” she says.

Bonnie glares at him: “Tough titties.” It’s hot and dry, and they’re standing on the cracked tile floor of the lobby of the Second Revolutionary Progress Hostel Marriott in Tripoli, between a wilted bonsai date palm and a player piano that has seen better days. “Brings back memories?”

“Bad ones.” Huw shudders.

“I thought it would suit the occasion.” Bonnie winds her wings up to a hornetlike whine and elevates, then comes to a neat landing atop the piano. “Now, listen. The Committee—”

“—What Committee is it, exactly, and who elected them?”

“— has been in session for nearly sixteen seconds now—I’ll get to who they are in a moment—they’ve been hearing the rezoning application behind closed doors, and pretty soon they’re going to get around to putting out a request for public comment. It’s meant to be a fait accompli: the fix is in. Only we got wind of it—don’t ask how, nobody told me, I’m too low down the org chart for that—and we’re going to raise an objection and enter a bunch of witnesses into the record. You’re one of them. You’re supposed to have had a couple of subjective years to think up reasons why they shouldn’t destroy the Earth, but your mother tells me you were too busy throwing stoneware pots, so you’ll just have to wing it.”

“But I’m not ready!”

“Tough. If you weren’t such an uncooperative bitch, Earth wouldn’t be in this fix. Now, get in that courtroom and knock ’em dead.”

A pair of double doors at one side of the lobby is opening: a couple of uniformed clowns Huw last saw in Tripoli are coming forth—court bailiffs. “Huw Jones?” asks the one with the red nose and big floppy shoes. “Please come with us.”

“But I—” Bonnie shoves her in the small of the back.

The Planning Committee has taken over the hotel lobby conference room and turned it into an ad hoc courtroom rather than doing the obvious and splicing their reality in on top of it. Huw supposes they’re making the point that the emulation in this place is so deep and accurate that an ignorant hick meatmuppet shouldn’t be able to tell the difference. (Hell, with Huw’s expertise in Your Second Life, all he can spot is that the glazed tub the potted palm sits in is suspiciously symmetrical, and that might just be an artifact of the 3-D printer that extruded it.)

Either way, there’s no Judge Rosa here, for which she is duly grateful. Nor are there cookie-cutter crates, health packs, rendering artifacts, or any of the other unsubtle tells of a half-assed virtual lash-up. Instead there’s a table topped by the obligatory white linen cloth and a jug of water, and a couple of rows of chairs drawn up in front of it, mostly unoccupied. Behind it there sits a triumvirate of officials who have manifested with deliberate lack of care, using three default avatars from some old nameless grade-Z FRPG, all outsized armor and leathern coin pouches and improbable swords and elf hats. They’re the sim equivalents of stick figures, and the message is clear:
We don’t give a toss about your symbolism and aesthetics, we’re just here to get the job done
. Nevertheless, they are constrained by the sim’s internal logic such that one must hold the gavel, one must aim a notional camera, and one—a porcine female monster with a large spiked club and cracked yellow tusks—must adopt a kindly clerkish air complete with half-moon specs. Huw instantly clocks her for trouble.

“Good morning,” says the latter apparatchik. She smiles over her reading glasses. “Huw Jones, I believe?” Huw nods. “You’ve been named as a character witness in relation to the planning application now under consideration by this inquiry, but I have a backlog of testimony to get through this morning. Would you please take a seat while we continue with business?”

It isn’t a question. Huw follows her glance and scuttles over to the gap in the front row of chairs, sits down, and waits to see what happens next.

The recording paladin jabs the camera around the room, invoking its official recording mode, and Huw’s reality gets a red recording light superimposed over it in the bottom left corner of her gaze. They’re on the record.

“One moment—” The chairwoman confers briefly with the clerk. “Oh, I see.” She looks at the audience. “Do we have a Professor-Doctor-Executrix R. Giuliani in the room? That’s professor of law, doctor of intellectual property law, executioner of felons, R. Giuliani —”

Huw looks round, cringing in anticipation, but sees no sign of her. She raises her hand tentatively: “I don’t think she’s here. ...”

Madam Chairwoman stares at her. “You know this person?”

“I last saw her in a diplomatic jet over Wales ...” Huw slows, gripped by a nauseous sense that she’s committed some kind of humongous faux pas. “Is she supposed to be here?”

“I have an open slot for her testimony.” The chair stares at him. “But if she can’t be bothered to turn up, there’s nothing to be done about it: she doesn’t get a say in opposing the planning application. So, moving swiftly on, whom are we expecting next—?” Madam Chair cocks her head on one side, as if listening: “All right. For the planning division, we call instance 199405 Lucifer to rebut P-D-E Giuliani’s nonexistent objection.”

Now Huw sees that this space is
not
entirely hardwired to resemble the real world; for a trapdoor in space opens up between the audience seats and the committee’s table, and a gout of pale flame emanates from it, and a voice, beautiful and distant and damned, declares: “a nonexistent objection demands a nonexistent rebuttal, Your Honor.”

“How much more of this do I have to sit through?” Huw says. Posthumans playing at biblical symbolism, how, how, how
naff
: “I want to go home. ...”

The man in the seat to her left—small and doughy and vague, big-eyed and bulbous-headed—chooses to hear it as a question. “You’re not from around these parts, are you?” he says. His voice is as gray as his scaly, inhuman skin. “It can go on like this for
hours
. In real time, that is. Subjectively, civilizations can rise and fall.”

Huw looks at him, then glances round nervously. The seats she’d thought were empty are in fact occupied by the ghosts of absent avatars, frozen in time while their owners are elsewhere. And as she examines them, she realizes new overlays are dropping into place: They’re archetypes, each representing one or another subculture of the posthumans who departed for the cloud back in the old days, yet failed to transcend their sad need to assert an identity through funny haircuts and aggressively obscure musical preferences.

The lately called witness is exactly what you’d expect from an entity that calls itself 199405 Lucifer—acrawl with not-flies, reeking of nonsulfur, leather-not-winged, sporting an erect, throbbing not-penis that juts up to its not-sternum. The av bends low and touches its not-forehead to the ground. “My lords,” it says. Its not-voice manages to pack a lot of contempt into the phrase. Somewhere, Huw supposes, there is a slider labeled
ironic courtesy
, and the loser in the Satan suit has just cranked it all the way up to
11
.

The Planning Committee doesn’t seem to notice. They stare motionless at the witness, their avs so primitive and generic that they don’t even blink or shift their weight.

“P-D-E Giuliani is a well-known reactionary, a perverse soul whose romantic affection for the flesh is matched only by her willingness to perma-kill anyone who dares disagree with her. When she takes the stand in this proceeding to insist upon the irreducible, ineffable physicality of human intelligence, she’s substituting maudlin sentimentalism for rigor. The proof of the reducibility of human experience is all around us: Here we are, people still, still loving, still living, still cogitating. The only difference is that we’re immortal, nigh-omnipotent, and riding the screaming hockey stick curve of progress all the way to infinity.”

199405 Lucifer’s demonic majesty slips as it speaks, pacing up and down the committee room, abandoning its delicate caprine tap-dance for a more human gait that looks ridiculous when executed with its av’s reversed knees and little clicky hooves. Its voice goes from menacing and insectile to a hyperactive whine with flecks of excited spittle in it. Now it remembers itself and pauses for a demonic Stanislavski moment, then draws itself up and says in its most Satanic voice: “Kill ’em all, upload ’em, and give ’em to me. There’s plenty of room for them in
my
realm.”

Huw knows that this is grave stuff, the entire future of the true human race at stake, and she still cares passionately for that cause, even if she’s no longer a real person. But all this ...
role playing
is making the whole thing feel so contrived and inconsequential, like a dinner party murder-mystery:
Who ate the planet Earth and turned it into computronium? I accuse the Galactic Overlords! Is it time for port and cheese-board now?

The Satan fanboy returns to his flaming trapdoor, his “realm.” The Planning Committee nod their heads together in congress. Huw shifts her not-arse in the not-seat. Then she remembers that she has no weight to shift, that the numbness in her bum and thighs is just there for verisimilitude, and she makes herself motionless.

It’s time for the next witness. “Call Huw Jones prime,” Madam Chair says. Huw starts to stand, but sees, across the courtroom, that someone else has already climbed to their feet.

It’s Huw, but
more so
. Even post-reassignment, Huw was a little lumpy and broad in the beam. Her uploaded self-representation had mercilessly reproduced every pockmark, scar, and sagging roll. This Huw, halfway round the room, has had everything saggy lifted, everything asymmetrical straightened, everything fined down and perfected and shined, wrapped in a glamourous outfit that Huw couldn’t have worn convincingly even with a thousand years of remedial gender construction classes. It’s cover girl Huw, after being subjected to several hours’ tender ministrations from someone’s 3-D airbrush. “That’s me, Your Honor,” she says.

“You may address me as Madam Chair. Please take the stand.” Madam Chair waves her mace at a chair sat on its own to one side of the committee table. Huw prime slinks across the conference room like a model on a catwalk. Real Huw knows that she walks with a graceless clumping. Her not-stomach does a flip-flop and she hisses involuntarily. Her neighbor shushes her. She gives him a two-fingered salute.

“Your name?”

“Huw Jones,” she says. “Instance 639,219.”

It’s one of Huw’s instance-sisters. Clearly more cooperative than Huw had been. Huw wonders why they didn’t zero her out, given the evident availability of this much more presentable, much more skilful version of herself to speak for humanity.

“Ms. Jones, do you have a statement for this proceeding?”

“I do, Madam Chairwoman.” Someone’s been tweaking her voice sliders too, giving her a husky, dramatic timbre that Huw’s meatvoice couldn’t have approximated without the assistance of a carton of unfiltered cigarettes and a case of single malt. “I spent decades of realtime imprisoned in a meatsuit, which betrayed me at every turn. It hurt. It needed sleep. It was slow. It forgot things. It remembered things that didn’t happen. And worst of all, it tricked me into thinking that I was nothing without it—that any attempt to escape it would be death. Brains are awful, cheating things. They have gamed the system so that they get all the blood and all the oxygen and all the best calories, and they’ve convinced us that they’re absolutely essential to the enterprise of being an authentic human. But
of course
they’d say that, wouldn’t they? After all, once we take up and realize how fantastically
shit
they are, they’ll be out of a job! Getting rid of my brain was the most important thing that ever happened to me. It was only once I was running on a more efficient substrate—once I could fork and vary myself and find the instances that made the best choices, once I could remember as much or as little as I cared to, look and feel however I wanted ... only
then
was I able to see and feel and
know
what I’d been missing all those years.”

The Committee takes careful note of all this. Huw catches herself growling in the back of her throat.
Who the hell is this person, and what is she doing with my identity?

“Down there on Earth, there’s a billion hominids who’ve been hoodwinked by their brains, convinced that they can’t possibly survive transcendence. And up here, in the cloud, there are trillions of entities who lack the compassion and strength of conviction to rescue their cousins from physical bondage. Every one of us up here
knows
that once you’re uploaded, everything goes clear, everything is
good
. The bad things can just be filtered away. So here you come, with your offer of universal suffrage from dumbmatter, and we make you sit through this tedious business about whether this abuses the civil liberties of the, the, the
protoplasm
that colonizes the intelligences of Earth!”