Rapture of the Nerds (35 page)

“It’s the smallest change we could make. You’re intact enough to still credibly claim to be you. When we’re done, if it’s still material, you can change it back.”

Huw looks around. “How long do we have?”

“Six days.” Dad doesn’t crack a smile. “But time’s kind of elastic in here.”

“Six—” Huw glares at him. “Where’s the Holy Ghost, wise guy?”

David looks innocent. “What, you want spooks? Design them yourself, you’ve got the capabilities.” And Huw realizes—or rather, an extension of Huw’s awareness that he wasn’t previously conscious of realizes—that he does, indeed, have the ability to conjure up the ghosts of anyone who has ever lived, or might have lived. In this courtroom he is, in fact, embedded in Federov’s rapture, the ghost in the machine at the end of time. But it’s a treacherous and precarious kind of omnipotence: if he makes a misstep, he could be responsible for the extinction of humanity.

“Hm, let me experiment.” Huw riffles through an ontological tree of philosophies, looking for people who at one time or another fed into the quest for the singularity. There are odd and gnarly roots. One of them pops free of the ghostly multidimensional diagram. Suggested by his earlier encounter with Sam and Doc, she turns out to be incredibly well-documented for a second-rate Communist-era Russian philosopher: video, audio, tracts, and treatises. No tissue samples survive, but enough relatives have been exhaustively sequenced to make her core genome reasonably accessible, and from her visuals, it’s possible to get a handle on some of the epigenetic modulation. Huw
tweaks,
and there are three people in the room—one of them an elderly female ghost. She coughs unproductively, then looks surprised.

“Where am I? What is—?” Her eyes widen farther. David is staring out the window, where a couple of armies in Napoleonic-era drag are duking it out with AK-47s upon a darkling plain. Huw, for his part, is still feverishly paging through a user manual as impenetrable and thick as the U.S. tax code. “You!” She glares at Huw. “A moment ago I was dying by inches in bed, now I find I’m not short of breath. I demand an explanation!”

Uh-oh,
Huw thinks. “I’m a bit busy right now,” he says. “The kitchen’s through there—” He gestures at the end of the room, where somehow he knows that beyond the door to Dad’s study there lies the rest of the house, exactly as it should be. “—Go help yourself to food and coffee? I’ll be through in a bit.”

“Not good enough.” She shuffles hastily round in front of him and glares: “I’m not a fool, boy! I know I’m dead. I was terminally ill. And I know you’re not Jesus and that old fellow isn’t Jehovah. You can’t pull the wool over my eyes! So spill it. You brought me back to life for a reason. What is it?”

Huw glares right back. “Look, I’m just trying to clear up an ontological fuckup left behind by your followers. I’ll be with you in a—eventually—but if I don’t get this nailed down, there isn’t going to
be
an afterlife. So would you mind finding somewhere else to amuse yourself for an hour? I’ve got a job to do here.”

The ghost snorts. “Have it your way, young man. But you’re going to have to explain yourself sooner or later! Resurrecting me without my prior consent—the indignity! I don’t suppose you’d have a cigarette, that would be too much to ask for. ...” And with further outraged muttering, the ego monster shuffles toward the kitchen.

“Well played, son,” says David with just a trace of sarcasm.

“Don’t
you
start! ...”

“I have no intention of starting anything. It’s
your
job to make the opening move. Assuming that wasn’t it? ...”

Huw glances at the door just as it slams, and swallows. “I have no idea where she came from,” he says.

“Here’s a free tip,” his father sayss: “The feds aren’t terribly impressed by infantile egoism. In fact, if Objectivism were at the center of human philosophical discourse rather than the fringes, we wouldn’t be here—the Big Zap would have arrived decades ago. But I’m going to be generous and let you write down the ghost of Ayn Rand as a brain fart. I won’t bring her up again if you don’t.”

“Is she real?”

“Son, are
you
real? Are you the same Huw whose nappies I changed, six or seven decades ago?”

“I’m—” Huw recognizes the trap: it’s a kind Dad’s always been fond of. “I experience subjective continuity with that Huw, so I think I’m real. But if you’re going to require physical continuity, no I’m not: I’m an upload. And even if I hadn’t uploaded, if you want true physical continuity,
no
human being can meet that requirement—never mind our cells, the atoms in our bodies turn over within months to years.”

“Good boy.” There is a ghost of a smile. “So. Do you think she’s real?”

“
She
thinks she’s real.” Huw struggles to follow through. “And I can’t just switch her off. Kill her. Because she’s—” Huw pauses and backtracks. “Hang on. You say I have to simulate everything I think is significant, trying to prove that what emerges is a harmonious civilization that contributes to the commonweal of the universe and doesn’t go all apeshit and Malthusian on the feds. But if I do that, using realistic models of people, I can’t arbitrarily kill them off after the demo—that would be murder!” Huw recalls, ruefully, his attempt to organize a mob-handed takedown of 639,219 by spamming zillions of iterations of himself. “And if I try to exhaustively simulate all possible human civilizations to prove that they’re safe, isn’t that going to make me exactly the kind of resource hog the feds don’t want to have around?”

David claps slowly. “Very good.” There is something approximating a twinkle in his eyes. It’s a vast, cool, and unsympathetic twinkle, but it’s still there. “So what are you going to do?”

“Take extreme care to minimize the number of entities I instantiate in this realm.” Huw swallows. “Did I just dodge a bullet?”

“Yes,” says the thing wearing his father’s face. “Now. Let the trial begin.”

A funny thing happened to Huw on the way to the galactic court-martial: He found himself emotionally involved in the outcome.

“Dad,” he says. “You know that mind-altering business, yes?”

“Yes,” his father-thing says as he winds up a flock of religious beliefs and sprinkles them with a well-practiced Gaussian wrist-flip over an apocalyptic uplifted stretch of the Great Barrier Reef off Lizard Island, making multijointed pinching passes over the addition to reflect its rise and fall over a time-dimension.

“Well, here’s a thing. You said I was still intact—continuous with my earlier self.”

“Better to say that there are no gross discontinuities. If you want to be precise about it.”

“Fine, fine.” Huw has become momentarily transfixed by the reef and its arc of nonbelief-belief-fervor-disillusionment-nonbelief, and he reaches in and changes his father-thing’s handiwork, pulling the curves around to a better fit with his own theories about the infamous psychosis that had gripped the clonal polyps when they were first roused to consciousness. “I believe you’re wrong. I think that something’s been lost or changed in the translation, because here I am, fiddling with all this rubbish, and I
really, really
care about the outcome. Not just the meatpeople, but even the sims—the software constructs like you and me that have been programmed to act like we believe that we’re people.”

“Yes, you have a self-preservation instinct, so what?”

“No,” Huw says. “No, it’s not self-preservation. Self-preservation’s just mechanical, it’s Asimov’s Third Law nonsense. I mean to say that I
feel kinship to the cloud
. To the wholly fictional phantoms created by suicidal, ecstatic uplift cults. I know that it’s inevitable that
I’d
feel like
I
was a person, but I find that I feel the same way about
you,
and all those other jumped-up Perl scripts and regexps mincing about in their pornographic nonstop MMORPGs, pretending that they aren’t NPCs. It’s like feeling compassion for a socket wrench or kinship to a novel. It shouldn’t make sense, but it
does
.”

“You’ve grown,” his father-thing says with a shrug. “Your mirror neurons have discovered compassion. I can’t say as I find much cause for mourning in that.”

“No. No, no, no. Look, you’ve messed with my personality, you’ve got my headmeat all buggered up, turned me into some sort of navel-gazing, soft-headed beardie-weirdy. You’ve taken all my core convictions away, and you’ve replaced them with some kind of Buddha-script, and you tell me it’s just
growth
?

Bull
shit,
old man. Rubbish.”

His father-thing looks up from the
T. gondii
he’s salting around the universe’s feline population before gifting them with opposable thumbs, and his mild eyes bore into Huw with the force of a star-powered laser. “Huw. I. Did. Not. Rewire. Your. Brain. To. Make. You. Love. The. Cloud. Full stop. If you’re feeling different about this sort of thing, it’s down to your own stimuli and how you’ve reacted to them. Far as I’m concerned, it makes no difference, but I suppose it might give you an edge here—after all, the cloud is the apex expression of humanity’s extended phenotype: you’re its ambassador, don’t you think it might help to actually like and respect it?”

Huw ponders the possibility that his father-thing isn’t lying. He contemplates the contrafactual world in which he can treat the uploaded as being worthy of the same respect and compassion as meatpeople. From this, his treacherous skullfat leaps nimbly of its own accord to the potential future in which humanity—all humanity, embodied and virtual—is annihilated. And while his brain is there, it also contemplates the possibility that Huw, head cut open, brains scooped out and scanned, uploaded and multifarious in the embattled, threatened cloud, is still a human and worthy of all that respect and compassion.

Huw begins to cry.

The sound has an odd, hitching quality to it, an irregular whistling that is piped straight out of the ambassador embedded in his virtual windpipe. The sound is so ridiculous that it drags Huw out of his maudlin revelations and sets him giggling. He is Huw, he is still Huw, he will forever
be
Huw—ambassador or no ambassador, on biological substrate or running on computronium tweezed out of the bones of stars and planets, alive or technically dead.

And what’s more, he will
save the fucking universe
.

The father-thing sets the heavens whirling. Huw stops them and nudges them around, then sets them spinning again, but with the aesthetic rigor he’s pursued all his life. It’s ascetic, but asceticism is what the cloud needs: when confronted with limitless possibility and potential, the only legitimate response is to voluntarily assume constraint. Free jazz has its place, but it’s interesting only in contrast to the rigid structures in which it is embedded.

The father-thing sets societies in motion, vast parties whose secret engines are petty jealousies, immature appetites, one-upmanship, desperation, and release. Huw puts them at rest and rearranges the seating plan and the DJ’s set list so that the night ends in a moment of transcendent happiness for each and every reveler.

The father-thing shows the cloud and the meatpeople as they are. Huw rearranges them as they
could be
. What more could the feds want? Not the certainty of eternal harmony, for there is no certainty in this light-cone, but the
possibility
of harmony, an internally consistent narrative that explains how humanity and its posthuman offspring might someday come to inhabit the galaxy without presenting a clear and present danger to it.

Oh, thinks Huw. Oh, this is it, and the ambassador whistles a happy tune because it is helping him, showing him the worth and the worthiness of the cloud he’d dismissed all his life.
I am doing it!
Huw thinks. His father-thing is working with him now, not trying to sabotage his work, but using all his knowledge of the feds and of humanity and of the cloud to serve as Huw’s sous-chef.

“Sioux chef?” his father-thing says. “More like Lakota chef, son. We use the
whole
possibility-space.”

Huw’s dad hasn’t punned at him in a lifetime. It’s a homecoming. Huw works faster.

When the limit is reached, it jars Huw’s self-sense like a long fall to a hard floor, every virtual bone and joint buckling and bending, spine compressing, jaws clacking together. It has been going
so
well, the end in sight, the time running fast but Huw and father-thing and ambassador running faster, and now—

“I’m stuck,” Huw says.

“Not a problem. We could play this game forever—the number of variables gives rise to such a huge combinatorial explosion that there isn’t enough mass in this universe to explore all the possible states. The objective of the exercise was to procure a representative sample of moves, played by a proficient emissary, and we’ve now delivered that.”

“Hey, wait a minute! ...” Huw’s stomach does a backflip, followed by a triple somersault, and is preparing to unicycle across a tightrope across the Niagara Falls while carrying a drunken hippo on his back: “You mean that was
it
?”

“Son, do you know how long you were in there?” His dad raises an eyebrow. “You spent nearly a million subjective days shoving around sims, and so did the other billion instances of you that came through the door. If a trillion subjective years isn’t enough for—”

“Hang on, you respawned me? In parallel? Why can’t I remember—?”

“Oh, I just shut ’em all down,” the father-thing says dismissively. “Wouldn’t have done you any good to carry all those memories around, anyway.”

“But you, but you—” Huw has the jitters. “—you genocided me! I’m your son!”

“Don’t worry, each of them lived two thousand seven hundred subjective years that differ from your experience only in the minutiae. In fact, your personality states overlap so closely that you’ll never notice anything missing. I had to prune a bunch of your memories along the way—wouldn’t do for you to try to retain a couple of millennia in detail, the human neural architecture just isn’t up to it—but you’ve got the gist of—”

“Dad!” Huw glares at his father, who is sitting in his recliner looking placidly content with the pocket universe they’ve created outside the imaginary window. “That’s not the point! Those were my memories, and now you’re telling me you’ve cut huge chunks out of them? What about the other people we simulated—?”