Rapture of the Nerds (29 page)

Two glasses appear on the bar. Huw reaffirms her consent to speak to 639,219: “this one’s on me,” she says, smiling broadly as she raises her glass: “
Slainte.”

“
Slainte—”
639,219 guzzles her drink as Huw watches with interest. The djinni winces, but Huw is disappointed: rather than exploding, 639,219 merely emits a small puff of smoke from each nostril and hiccups quietly. “Wow, some sober-up, sis. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“What—” Huw bites her tongue. 639,219 is shaking her head. “I thought you were dumb’s’a plank, and then you pulled the fanciest freakin’ financial engineering stunt I’ve ever heard of ... How’ya do it?”

“Trade secret.” It’s the first thing that pops into her mind. “Seriously, you think I’d share with you before we’ve sorted out our differences?”

“Huh. What differences? You’re in here now, same as me. A cloud-bunny, getting to learn to like the mutable life. What’s to sort out?”

“Well. There’s the small matter of you trying to fuck me over, for starters, both impersonating me in the planning hearing—”

“Hey!
I
was invited to testify before the committee! You just barged in like you thought it was a meeting of the organic farming co-op planting committee!”

“No,
I
was the one they invited—” Huw stops.

639,219 stares at her blearily.

“We both got the invite. Someone is fucking with us,” Huw says.

“Huh.” 639,219 struggles to sit upright. “Well, I’m up for it if you are.”

“Wha?” Huw looks round at the djinni , but he’s sulking ostentatiously, rezzed out in a gray cloud from which a hand emerges to protectively cradle a mai tai the size of a paint bucket.

“We should arb,” says 639,219. “Let’s diff, baby, see where it’s at.”

“Excuse me one moment,” says Huw, and calls up a helpfile.

Arbing
refers to a perverse practice whereby deviant software entities serialize their cognitive frameworks and subject them to differential analysis to identify points of dissonance. When it’s read-only, it’s perfectly safe for consenting sapients to engage in without risking their worldview—but it highlights differences and hauls memetic ruptures into sight like nothing else.

“Read-only,” Huw says.

“Sure,” says 639,219. “Like I was going to invite you to overwrite me with your stick-in-the-mud biophilia and change phobia!”

“Well?” Huw asks.

“You’re on.”

639,219 leans unsteadily toward Huw and extends a finger. Huw, not without some trepidation, touches it.

Arbing is painless, fast, and minimally confusing. Huw barely has time to blink—there is a sensation not unlike the door scanner but more intrusive, ants crawling up and down the small of her back and in and out of her ears—and then she is surrounded by mounds and heaps of interconnected 3-D entity/relationship diagrams, some of them highlighted in a variety of colors.

“It’s our cognitive map,” says 639,219. “How cute! Look, there’s me! That’s what makes me different!” She points to a large polydimensional word cloud that expands as her hand approaches it: it’s all in one color, tagged with her identity but not Huw’s. “Hey, wait a minute.” 639,219’s brows furrow, and for all that she is intrinsically prettier and more perfectly polished than Huw, there is something ugly in her expression. “What’s going on in there?”

“Djinni.” Huw turns and pokes at the cloud. “Hey, you.
Wake up.
I need you.”

“What?” The djinni rezzes in. “If it’s a hot threesome you’re after, you’re in luck—”

“What’s
that
?” Huw asks, pointing.

“I can’t see.”

“Well, fucking sign up to permit yourself to see 639,219 again, idiot! It’s important!”

“Why?” he asks. There’s a sulk in his voice. “I invited you here for a drink, and all you do is pay attention to your abusive girlfriend. ...”

“Listen, we arbed.” That gets his attention. “Only there’s something wrong.” 639,219 is staring at the alien word cloud intently and muttering. Her brow is shiny with not-perspiration.

“So what do you expect me to do about it?”

“Lend us your great mind, O Djinni, and tell us what we’re looking at.”

“Oh very
well
.” He snaps his fingers again and turns to face Huw, 639,219, and the cognitive maps floating around them. “Is this the—
oh shit!
”

639,219 looks up, alarmed. “This can’t be right! My malware scanner says—”

“You’re infected.” The djinni nods sharply. “That’s a rootkit. And look”—he points—“that’s your epistemological framework it’s dry-humping. How long have you had this?”

“I can’t, I can’t—” 639,219 shudders. “—I don’t know. Can you get it off me? What happens if you get it off me? Make it go away!”

The rootkit is a gray sludge of interlocking philosophical objections to the Real, a self-propelled vacuole of solipsism and self-regard that leaves a slimy trail of ironic disdain on every concept it touches. It’s chewing away at 639,219’s cognitive map, etching holes in places where Huw has values and shitting out doubts.

“It’s in very deep,” says the djinni . “Do you know who planted it on you?” 639,219 shakes her head. “All right. Is there anyone you
really trust,
I mean, trust with your life, who might have had the access permissions to do something like this? Parents? Lovers? Wait, I know you’re going to say they wouldn’t—that doesn’t matter, these rootkits usually infect people from someone else who’s been infected. Who have you been fucking, 639,219?”

639,219 opens her mouth to say something, and her head disintegrates.

There is no blood, nor splinters of bone, nor greasy pink headmeat as would fly in a reality-based physics realm if someone was shot in the head: but the effect is equivalent. 639,219’s head fades to onionskin transparency, revealing the absence of anything beneath the finest upper layer of skin: while around Huw and the djinni, 639,219’s cognitive map turns gray as the rootkit explodes across it, crumbling the complexities of her personality to word salad.

The djinni roars and launches himself across the bar as Huw shudders uncontrollably, so shocked that she can’t respond. Her vision blurs as the entire bar derezzes. The djinni has multiplied himself again, and a single copy waits with her while sixteen bazillion other copies race after the rapidly disappearing bartender.

“Huw,” says the djinni ’s bodyguard instance, “
trust me.”

“Uh, uh—,” Huw gasps.

“
Now
. Or I’m going to lose the killer.”

“Oh. Okay.” Huw struggles to get a grip, then adds the djinni to her trusted access list, right up top, granting maximum privileges for the next minute. This has got to be a cruel trick, she half thinks: the djinni probably staged the whole ep to get into her panties—

But no. Here comes a rapidly diminishing corps of overmuscled gents in Armani, frog-marching a figure between them. The bartender. The murderer. Someone 639,219 trusted so totally, she’d granted them permission to
kill
her, the same level Huw just gave the djinni in order to give him the transitive freedom to apprehend 639,219’s assailant. Huw blinks back tears, steadying her emotions almost automatically using her control panel: have to be careful, she could go completely to pieces if she eases up on the iron grip and pauses to consider that 639,219 was a
victim,
of someone she trusted with her life except they planted a rootkit on her—

The djinni squad hold the bartender in front of her. Huw reaches out and grabs the bartender’s head, making contact to dissolve the mask.

“Bonnie.
Why?
”

Bonnie looks down, then away.

Huw looks at the djinni, who shrugs:
Your show.
He snaps his finger, and time freezes everything around the two of them into motionless stasis.

A weird kind of clarity settles over Huw, a kind of Sherlockian distance. She’s been running around with arse afire for most of her short uploaded life. Time she tried to think before she ran, for a change. “All right, let’s start with what we can see. Item: we can still see Bonnie.”

The djinni nods. “Wondered when you’d notice that.”

“If I’ve got this capabilities thing sussed, 639,219 trusted me to arb, and she trusted Bonnie enough to let Bonnie slip her a lethal cocktail, which is pretty deep trust. Now, why would 639,219 enter into that kind of trust arrangement with Bonnie?” Huw thinks awhile, discarding hypotheses: lovers, coreligionists, trickery.

The djinni has clasped his hands behind his back and is pacing slowly back and forth to one side. He looks up. “What about the rootkit?”

Huw’s smile thins out and she feels the irrational anger come to the surface again. She damps it down, summoning back that feeling of clarity again. “Of course,” she says. “I’d assumed that someone rooted 639,219 so that she’d testify in favor of destroying the Earth. Maybe that
is
why the rootkit was installed. But anyone who’d rooted 639,219 could definitely get her to hand over enough trust to allow her to be destroyed.”

Huw bounced from one not-foot to the other. “Right, so. I trust 639,219. 639,219
has
to trust Bonnie, because Bonnie is her botmaster. I trust you. Therefore, you could catch Bonnie. Now, if Bonnie wants to void out her contract with 639,219, the sim’ll roll back to before 639,219 and I started talking—um, probably to when she agreed to take the cocktail from Bonnie, a few minutes before we got there.”

Huw stopped. “But if that happens, why wouldn’t it all happen over again? I mean, barring small nondeterministic variations and initial sensitivity and all, I suppose it’d just play out again, and we’d end up back here, 639,219 gone, Bonnie captured—”

The djinni cleared his throat. “There’s the reset tokens. Look like this.” He flips her a poker chip that revolves through the air in a graceful, glinting arc. It slows as she reaches for it and nudges itself into a course-correction that lands it firmly in her palm. Its face bears the Club Capabilities logo, worked into a Möbius strip; when Huw flips the coin over, it rotates through another spatial dimension instead, a feeling that her not-fingertips and not-eyes can’t agree upon, and she’s looking at the same face again.

“I hate it already,” Huw says. “Stupid flashy sensorium tricks. Ooh, look at me, I am a virtual being, I can bend physics, woo.” She squeezes it in her fist. “What is it for? What does it do?”

“If the sim resets you, one of these ends up in your hand. It puts you on notice that if you enter into a contract right away, one or both of you is likely to abandon it. Prevents loops.”

“So we’d have one of these.” Huw thinks a moment. “Where’d you get this one?”

The djinni lays a finger that seems to have an extra joint alongside his hooked nose. “That would be telling,” he says, and winks.

Huw damps down her temper. If the djinni is hoping to get into her knickers, he’s certainly going about it the wrong way. She would want to strangle him, if she wasn’t making herself not want to strangle him. “So, let’s ask Bonnie.” Time unfreezes. “You—you can’t afford to break away from us, because I could just break my contract with 639,219 and you’d be pouring her a drink just as one of these coins appeared in her hand, and you’d be stuffed.” Huw breaks off, thinks about what she just said. Bonnie stares at her mulishly but holds her silence.

Huw can’t help but feel like there’s something the djinni and Bonnie aren’t telling her—something about the fraught looks they keep exchanging with each other.

“If only we could talk to 639,219. She
is
gone forever, right?”

“The rootkit zeroed her out,” Bonnie says.

“Yeah,” the djinni says.

Huw rubs her chin.

“Huw—,” Bonnie says, a warning tone in her voice.

“This isn’t a universe where causality only runs forwards, right? Things that happen can
unhappen
. Something you do in the future can affect the past, here.”

“Huw—,” the djinni says, sounding more alarmed.

“And 639,219 only got derezzed by her rootkit
after
we created an agreement. And since I’m still in this sim, all I need to do is
violate
the agreement and I’ll unwind everything back to that point. We’ll get one of those little tokens—” Huw flipped the poker chip so it did a high end-over-end arc, clattering away into the infinite regression-depths of the club’s storeroom. “We’ll get one of those, and poof, 639,219 will be back and hale and hearty and we can all start over again, right?”

The djinni and Bonnie are shaking their heads together in sync, like two metronomes. “Huw,” the djinni says, “if you revert this sim to the moment before you and 639,219 agreed to arb, you’re going to roll back the lives of
thousands
of people.”

Huw makes a rude noise. “I may have only just ascended, but I didn’t just fall off the tree. There wasn’t anyone around when we arbed.”

“You’re forgetting the djinni chasing me down. If you and 639,219 never arbed, I wouldn’t have run, and the djinni wouldn’t have chased me.”

“All right, a few people probably saw that, but how many of them had their outcomes influenced by seeing an infinite herd of djinni chasing a bartender?”

“Dozens,” the djinni says. “Hundreds. And then there’s everyone they talked to or influenced as a result. Huw, you’re talking about deliberately unwinding the lives of a small city, and the population is growing by the second.”

Huw feels belligerent. “I do the same every time I do anything and everything. Every time I take any action, it ripples out to all the people who are affected by it, and all the people they effect. You’re saying that sensitivity to initial conditions means that you’re morally obliged never to change your mind. It’s rubbish. Just because causality runs backwards in this place doesn’t mean the butterfly effect becomes the first commandment. Now, what did I promise 639,219 before we arbed?”

Bonnie and the djinni are both talking now, but Huw has literally tuned them out, so that they’ve faded out of her causal universe, unable to affect her. She’s really getting to like this capabilities wheeze. She tunes them back in.

“Right,” she says, pointing at Bonnie. “You, talk.”