Rapture of the Nerds (28 page)

“Not to worry.” The djinni tries to soothe her, but works out that the comb is a liability fairly rapidly. “Calm yourself down, there, there. It’s not all over: you have a certain residual value as a type specimen.”

“A, a what?”

“A type specimen: the definitive example of a wild, undomesticated Huw Jones. You could put yourself on a plinth and charge cloudies a fee for access.”

Huw sniffs suspiciously. “I could see if, if anyone could help.” An idea strikes her. “Maybe Ade has some credit? ...”

The djinni raises an eyebrow. “You’re trying to bum off your frenemies? Better pick them carefully.”

“But I—” Huw descends into the sniffles again. “—I’m useless! And if I can’t do something about 639,219, it’ll be the end of the world!”

An ominous jittering shudder runs through the walls of the kettle, derezzing them slightly. “Uh-oh,” says the djinni.

“What?” Huw says.

The djinni holds up a finger the size of a chipolata. It cocks its head this way and that, causing its topknot to flop from side to side, its expression blank. Huw remembers this gesture from “her” djinni, the meatspace cousin of this one, back in Tripoli—it’s hourglassing, timing out while it thinks.

“Collection protocol,” he says. “639,219 is trying to foreclose on you. She argues that your debts are so huge, they put my whole sim into negative equity, which means that unless I turn you over, she owns my sim too. It looks like she’s bought into a financial engineering clade and laid a whole whack of side-bets on your repayment schedule, hedging the crap out of herself so she’ll come out ahead no matter what happens. Wonder where she found the sucker who’d take the other side of that contract?” He was muttering to himself now, all the while zipping around the tiny volume inside the lamp, chalking magic sigils over the doorways and scattering herbs and yarrow stalks in complex patterns. “Course, it doesn’t matter, the whole thing wouldn’t pass muster with a full-bore audit, but by then she’ll have time-arbitraged her stake up to some crazy amount, probably got someone else to lay off the risk on, something uncollectable; meantime, she’ll have leveraged this sim up to the tits and I’ll just be an unsecured creditor in line behind the other bastards—”

Huw knows just enough finance-talk to realize how batshit insane the scenario the djinni is describing is, and she wishes she had a stomach so she could throw up. “I should go,” she says. “It was very nice of you to take me in, but I can look after myself.”

“You can’t, actually,” the djinni says. “Besides, I’m hardly helpless. Your evil sister has made the classic mistake of bringing a complex financial instrument to a djinni fight.” He grins hugely, showing far too many pointy teeth and a muscular, forked tongue, then he cracks his huge, walnutty knuckles. “This is going to be
fun
.”

And then he forks into four instances of himself, and all four begin barking buy/sell orders. At first, they use normal voices, but they quickly ramp up to high-pitched squeals, and then burst the nonsound barrier with a nonboom that rattles Huw’s teeth with impressive pseudophysics. The three new instances diff-and-merge back into the djinni with a trio of comic
pop
s and the djinni rubs his hands together. “Had to raid the pension fund to do it, but I think I’ve done for little what’s-her-number. An insult to one is an insult to all, so I just brought in the rest of my instance-sibs and margin-called that bitch so hard, she’ll be begging for spare cycles for the next hundred in realtime.” He shakes his head. “Noobs are all the same; think that once they’ve been around the block a few times, they can do whatever they want.”

“What happened to my debt?”

“Oh.” The djinni shrugs. “She flogged that as soon as I started my counterattack. I figure she had the countermeasure prepped in advance. Must have been automated, happened as soon as I started to call her markers. I tried to trace where it went, but it went too fast, off to some zurichoid anonymizer utility. But you’re out of the woods for now, and I’ve got some mad money to play with. Why don’t we go and celebrate, huh?”

“I thought I couldn’t set foot out of your sim? Feral debt collectors and all that?”

The djinni waves his pie-plate hands dismissively. “Not anymore,” he says. “Your debts have gone off-books to some black exchange. I’ve got a lien on them, so if they peep their heads over the parapets, I’ll
know
and we’ll have plenty of time to get to cover so I can get the debt audited. I’m pretty sure that after it’s been laundered by that ham-fisted amateur, it’ll be invalidatable.” The djinni puts an arm around Huw’s shoulders. “Stick with me, kid, and you’ll do just fine.”

Huw feels a flutter way down in the pit of her not-stomach, something between not-nausea and not-arousal, and she swallows some not-spit. “Are we going anywhere fancy? Should I dress for it?”

“Oh,” the djinni says with a wag of his head and a flip of his topknot, “not to worry. The protocols’ll dude us up when we arrive—got to love these capabilities bars; they’re literally impossible to enter if you don’t belong, they won’t even execute.”

Getting from one sim to another involves a moment of hiatus, during which Huw’s consciousness flutters in and out of existence, without any subjective sense of time passing. Some internal clock tells her that for a moment, she hadn’t been
anywhere
. But then she is. It must have happened before—it
has
happened before—but Huw was so distracted that she didn’t notice the nonzero time it took for her processes to suspend, replicate, and restart. It leaves her reeling and filled with self-loathing:
I am such a dupe,
she thinks,
so willing to believe that I’m
me
even though I’m clearly dead and this shambling thing is just a thin shade.
The thought makes her want to lie down and wait for 639,219 to catch up with her and decompile her. But there is the whole Earth at stake, and all the meatpeople—the
real
people—crawling over its surface, and even if she is just a ghost, she has a duty to stop them from being slaughtered wholesale and turned into computational ghosts.

The existential crisis distracts Huw from the sim in which she has been instantiated, but now she takes stock of it.
club capabilities
is what the sign over the door declares, and this portal is flanked by a pair of scanner devices that crackle with intense energy. The djinni’s got one of her hands caught in his celestial one, and he tugs her toward the scanners.

“Come on,” he says, “let’s get a drink.” He releases her hand in order to pass through the scanner, and he shivers as he emerges from it. “Come on,” he says again, “you’ll love this.”

“What is it?” Huw says, hovering around the scanner’s entrance.

“Interpreter,” the djinni says. “Middleware layer. Turns you into an agent in the capabilities sim. Means that you can transact only noncoercively with other agents.”

“Gibberish,” Huw says.

“Once you’re in a capabilities environment, everything you do with someone else involves forming contractual protocols. If either party violates the contract, they cease to see one another. It’s a cheat-proof sim. Means that no one can harm you unless you agree to let them. It’s the kind of place you can really relax in. But first you need to get refactored to participate as a capabilities agent, which means going through the scanner. Let me assure you, it’s an entirely pleasant experience.”

Huw likes the sound of being in a safe-conduct zone, though she can’t escape the feeling that allowing a scanner to remodel her consciousness—or whatever she has that passes for a consciousness—is a frightening idea. Trepidatiously, she inches into the scanner.

It
does
feel good. Huw remembers when she was a man (or rather, she remembers when meat-Huw had been a man, and suffers from the delusion that those memories are hers), remembers the pee-gasms that would shiver up her spine after a particularly fine micturation. Either by design or by accident, the scanner replicates that feeling as it remaps her.
Oh-ah,
she thinks as she passes through, then takes stock of herself.

Club Capabilities is, typically, bigger on the inside than the outside. Architectural hubris is cheap as air in the cloud. Where a terrestrial establishment would have a central bar area and booths around the periphery, this establishment has a kilometers-wide expanse of glassy floor and a central bar that features such nifty magnification features that stools spring up like self-similar leather mushrooms as you approach any given spot: in the distance, near the walls, gales howl among the hyperspace gates leading to the private areas (which feature planetary themes, so that the subsurface oceanic caverns of Enceladus adjoin the fiery sands of long-dismantled Venus).

The dress code is similarly over the top, as Huw realizes when she notices the djinni is wearing an antique Armani suit. She’s no expert on haute couture: she realizes she probably ought to recognize the designer of the cocktail dress the scanner selected for her, but she’s too busy fighting with the insane footwear to care about such minor details. Mid-1980s:
Greed is good
. It seems a fitting context in which to discuss the identity of a person or persons who might be trying to steal a planet’s worth of computronium.

The whole thing is so massively, monstrously over the top—like a nuclear aircraft carrier tricked out as a private yacht—that it takes Huw a moment to realize that she and the djinni are alone.

“Where is everyone?” she asks, grabbing his arm for balance.

“Where—? Oh.” The djinni snaps his fingers. “Let me post a good-conduct deposit for you ... there.” And suddenly they are no longer alone: for Huw can see a couple of dozen figures scattered across the premises, from barstool to dance floor to snogging in a booth beneath the racing moons of Mars. He looks at her: “How about a cocktail, little lady?”

“I’d love one,” Huw says as the djinni leads her toward the bar. It zooms ever-larger, and a pair of red leather stools sprout from the floor, welcoming. Huw almost collapses onto hers, her legs screaming from the unaccustomed demands of balancing on stilettos. “Agh. I’ll have a—” A bland-featured bartender proffers a laminated menu above which visions of liquid excess hover like offers of chaos. “—bloody hell it’s
you,
you bitch!”

Huw’s eyes focus on another figure slumped across the bar to starboard, some football pitches distant: as she focuses, the distance between them collapses until she can almost smell the alcohol on 639,219’s breath. The djinni’s hand descends heavily on her arm, restraining her as she winds up to thump her mortal enemy. “You can’t do that in here!” he says. “You’d just render yourself unable to see her anymore. Besides, I think she’s the worse for wear.”

“Don’t care. Let me at her.” Huw says through bloodily rouged lips. 639,219 is vulnerable, clearly drunk: her head lolls across her arms as she drools on the bar, her hair a mess and her dress-code-mandated cocktail number askew.

“Turn the aggro
down,
” says the djinni , and to her great surprise, Huw finds herself manipulating her emo-box sliders until the red haze of rage fades to gray. “Remember who’s fronting your security deposit? She can’t hurt you in here, remember?”

639,219 chooses this moment to open one eye and raise her head a few degrees, then focus on Huw. “Bleargh,” she says, then bends over and vomits, copiously and noisily. Small, brightly colored machine parts cascade down her chin and across her skirt, tumbling across the floor before they fade from view. “Aaagh. Urgh.
You.
”

“You’re drunk, sister.” The djinni is on his feet and between them, a warning hand upraised, before Huw can respond. “Get it out of your system and go, or forfeit your deposit. We don’t
have
to talk to you.”

“’F it wasn’t for you meddling kids,” says 639,219, staring woozily at the djinni , “I’d ha’ gotten awa’ wi’it!” A stray purple wing nut dribbles from the side of her mouth. “Bastid!”

Huw feels uncomfortable. Watching her rival come apart at the seams as the result of the djinni’s financial machinations is disturbing: a certain sense of
there but for random luck go I
springs to mind. Looking at their argument, it suddenly occurs to her that the real winner is the guy in the Armani suit: she’s more or less bankrupt, her debts parceled out to a shady out-shard investment entity, and as for 639,219, she’s been smacked down
hard,
despite spending years working to achieve a proficiency with cloud systems that Huw can barely comprehend.

639,219 might be a vindictive bitch and a body-denying Apollonian Traitor to the Real, but seeing her brought this low is a sharp reminder that
no
instance of Huw is actually up to paddling safely in this virtual shark pool.

“What exactly were you trying to get away with?” Huw asks, trying to keep her smile from melting into a smirk of uneasy satisfaction. “Would you mind satisfying my curiosity?”

“Pish off, you unctuous’n’self-righteous prig.”

Huw is about to speak, when the djinni catches her eye. He shakes his head, very slowly: 639,219 shows no sign of seeing. Then the djinni speaks. “I strongly advise you not to engage with your alienated instance,” he says. “Remember, you can engage only in consensual transactions in this bar. I’m withholding my consent for discourse from her, and I think you should do the same.”

“Why?” says Huw, nipped by an imp of the perverse. “Don’t you think I could benefit from finding out why this bad sister went off on her little side trip?”

“No, you—” The djinni pauses. “Wait. Yes, I change my mind. You probably
could
learn something useful. But don’t you think it’s just possible that her viewpoint might be contagious? Engage too deeply, and you could pick up her bad memes by accident, and then where would you be?”

“Huh.” Huw sniffs. She turns her attention to the hovering bartender. “I’ll have a Bloody Mary.”

“And your companion?” asks the bartender.

Huw fiddles with her settings until she’s pretty sure 639,219 can’t hear them: “She’ll have what I’m having, only with Bhut Jalokia sauce instead of Tabasco.”