Rapture of the Nerds (6 page)

Huw stumbles up to the door and leans on it. It opens easily, sucking him through with a gust of dusty air, and he staggers into a brightly lit green room with a row of benches stretching round three walls. The center of the room is dominated by two boxes; a strangely menacing black cube a meter on a side, and a lectern, behind which hunches a somewhat moth-eaten vulture in a black robe.

Faces and a brace of self-propelled cameras turn to watch Huw as he stumbles to a halt. “You’re late,” squawks the vulture—on second thoughts, Huw realizes she’s not an uplifted avian, but a human being, wizened and twisted by age, her face dominated by a great hatchet of a nose. She’s obviously one of the sad sacks on whom the anti-aging gene hacks worked only halfway: otherwise, she could be one of his contemporaries.

“Terribly sorry,” Huw says. “Won’t happen again.”

“Better not.” The judge harrumphs consumptively. “Dammit, I deserve some respect! Horrible children.”

As the judge rants on about punctuality and the behavior of the dutiful and obedient juror (which, Huw is led to believe, has always been deplorable but has been in terminal decline ever since the abolition of capital punishment for contempt of court back in the eighteenth century), he takes stock of his fellow inmates. For the first time he has reason to be glad of his biohazard burka—and its ability to completely obscure his snarl of anger—because he knows at least half of them. The bastard pseudo-random-number generators at the Magical Libyan Jamahiriya Renaissance’s embassy must be on the blink, because besides Doc Dagbjört—whom he half expected—the jury service has summoned none other than
Sandra Lal,
and an ominously familiar guy with a blue forelock,
and
the irritating perpetually drunk centenarian from next door but one. There are a couple of native Libyans, but it looks as if the perennially booming Tripolitanian economy has turned jury service evasion into a national sport. Hence the need to import guest jurors from Wales.

Fuck me, all I need is that turd Adrian to make it a clean sweep,
thinks Huw.
This must be some kind of setup
. An awful thought occurs to him:
Or a
reality show.
Jesus Buddha humping the corpse of Oliver Cromwell, say it’s not so?
He collapses on a bench in a rustle of static-charged fabric and with a sense of dread waits for proceedings to begin.

The Vulture stands up and hunches over the lectern. All the cameras abruptly pan to focus on her. “Listen up!” she says, in a forty-a-day voice that sounds like she’s overdue for another pair of lungs, “
I
am Dr. Rosa Giuliani—that’s doctor of law, not doctor of medicine—and I have volunteered my services for the next two weeks to chair this court, or focus group, or theater or whatever.
You
are the jury, or potential consumers, or performing animals. Procedurally, the MLJ have given me total autonomy as long as I conduct this hearing in strict accordance within the bounds of international law as laid down by the Hague Tribunal on Transhuman Manifestations and Magic. Some of you may not fully comprehend what this means. What it means is that you are here to decide whether a reasonable person would consider it safe to unleash Exhibit A on the world. If Exhibit A turns out to be a weapon of planetary destruction, you will probably die. If Exhibit A turns out to be a widget that brings everlasting happiness to the whole of humanity, you will probably get to benefit from it. But the price of getting it wrong is very high indeed. So I will enforce
extreme
measures against any fractional halfwit who tries to smuggle a sample out of this room. I will also nail to the wall the hide of anyone who talks about Exhibit A outside this room, because there are hardware superweapons and there are software superweapons, and we don’t know what Exhibit A is yet. For all we know, it’s a piece of hardware that looks like a portable shower cubicle but turns out to install borgware in the brain of anyone stupid enough to use it. So—”

Giuliani subsides in a fit of racking coughs. She gathers herself.

“We follow a set procedure. A statement is delivered by the damnfool script kiddies who downloaded the memeplex from the metasphere and who are applying for custodial rights to it. This will describe the prior background to their actions. Second, a preliminary activation of the device may be conducted in a closed environment. Thirdly, you rabble get to talk about it. Fourthly, you split into two teams: advocates and prosecution. Your task is to convince the members of the other team to join you. Finally, you deliver your majority verdict to me and I check it for procedural compliance. Then if I’m lucky, I get to hang someone. Are there any questions?”

Doc Dagbjört is already waving a hand in the air, eager to please. The judge turns a black gaze on her that reminds Huw of historical documentaries about the Ayatollah Khomeini. Dagbjört refuses to wilt.

“What,” says Giuliani, “
is
it?”

“About this Exhibit? Is it the box, in? And if so, how secure the containment is? I would hate for your worries to depart the abstract and concretize themselves, as it were.”

“Huh.” The judge stalks out from behind her lectern and kicks the box, hard. Going by the resulting noise, she’s wearing steel toe-caps. Huw whimpers faintly, envisaging imminent post-singularity gray goop catalyzed nano-annihilation, beyond any hope of resurrection. But the only terrible consequence is that the judge smiles, horribly. “It’s safe,” she says. “This box is a waste containment vessel left over from the second French fast breeder program.”

This announcement brings an appreciative nod from a couple of members of the audience. (The
second
French fast breeder program was nothing to do with nuclear reactors and everything to do with breeding disaster-mitigation replicators to mop up the eight giga-Curies of plutonium that the first program scattered all over Normandy.) Even Huw is forced to admit that the alien memeplex is probably safe behind the Maginot line of nanotech containment widgets lining a hyperdiamond-reinforced tungsten carbide safe.

“So when do we get to see it?” asks Huw.

Judge Giuliani turns her vicious gaze on him. “Right
now
!” She snarls and thumps her fist on the lectern. The lights dim, and a multimedia presentation wobbles and firms up on top of her lectern. “Listen up! Let the following testimony entered under oath on placeholder-goes-here be entered in the court record under this-case-number. Go ahead, play, damn you.”

The scene is much as Huw would have imagined it: A couple of pudgy nocturnal hackers holed up in a messy bedroom floored in discarded ready meal packs, the air hazy with programmable utility foglets. They’re building a homebrew radio telescope array by reprogramming their smart wallpaper. They work quietly, exchanging occasional cryptic suggestions about how to improve their rig’s resolving power and gain. About the only thing that surprises Huw is that they’re both three years old—foreheads swollen before their time with premature brain bridges. A discarded pile of wooden alphabet blocks lies in one corner of the room. A forlorn teddy bear lies on the top bunk with its back to the camera viewpoint.

“Ooh, aren’t they
cute
?” says Sandra. “The one on the left is
just like
my younger brother before his ickle widdle accident!”

“Silence in court, damn your eyes! What do you think this is, an adoption hearing? Behold, Abdul and Karim Bey. Their father is a waiter and their mother is a member of the presidential guard.” (Brief clips of a waiter and a woman in green battle dress carrying an implausibly complicated gun drift to either side of the nursery scene.) “Their parents love them, which is why they paid for the very best prenatal brainbox upgrades. With entirely predictable results if you ask me, but as you can see, they didn’t. ...”

Abdul and Karim are pounding away at their tower of rather goopy-looking foglets—like all artifacts exposed to small children, they have begun to turn gray and crinkly at the corners—but now they are receiving a signal, loud and clear. They’re short on juice, but Karim has the bright idea of eviscerating Teddy and plugging his methanol-powered fuel cell into the tots’ telescope. It briefly extrudes a maser, blats a signal up through the thin roof of their inflatable commodity housing, and collapses in exhaustion.

The hackers have only five minutes or so to wait—in which time Abdul speed-reads through
War and Peace
in the original Russian while Karim rolls on his back, making googling noises as he tries to grab his feet—for they have apparently found the weakly godlike AIs of the metasphere in a receptive mood. As the bitstream comes in, Abdul whacks his twin brother upside the head with a purple velour giraffe. Karim responds by irritably uploading a correctly formatted patent application with the godvomit as an attachment.

“I hate smart-aleck kids,” mumbles the bald guy with the blue forelock, sitting across the room. The judge pretends to ignore him.

“These two miscreants are below the contractual age of consent,” Huw says, “so how come their application is being accepted?”

“Here in the MLJ, as you should well know, seeing you’re staying here and there was a copy of the Lonely Planet guide in your room,” the judge croaks, “ever since the People kicked out the last of the dictators, your civil rights are a function of your ability to demand them. Which is a bit annoying, because Karim demanded the vote six months ago, while Abdul is a second lieutenant in the People’s Cyberspace Defense Agency and a dab hand at creating new meme viruses. In fact, there’s some question over whether we shouldn’t be dragging him up in front of a court-martial instead.”

Judge Giuliani seems to have forgotten to snarl; her delivery is becoming almost civilized as the presentation from the subpoenaed crib-cam fast-forwards to the terrible two’s attempt to instantiate the bitstream in atoms, using a ripped teddy bear as a containment vessel.

“Ah, here it is. Observe: The artifact is extremely flexible, but not so flexible that it can gestate in a psuedo-living toy. Abdul’s own notes speculate that gestation may be supported in medium-sized dogs, goats, and camels.” Over the lectern, the display zooms in on the teddy bear’s swollen gut. The bear is jerking spasmodically and twitching like a Tourettic children’s TV host, giggling and stuttering nonsensical self-worth affirmations. The gut distends farther and the affirmations become more disjointed, and then a long, sharp blade pokes through the pseudoflesh and flame-retardant fur-analogue. “There are indications that the artifact floods its host organism with endorphins at metamorphosis-time,” says the judge. The rent in the bear’s belly widens, and out climbs a shimmering
thing
.

It takes Huw a moment to understand what he’s seeing. The artifact is a tall, metallic stalk, at first coiled like a cobra, but gradually roused to full erectness. Its glistening tip dips down toward the bear. “See how it sutures the exit wound?” the judge says, a breath of admiration in her rough voice. “So tidy. Jurors, take note, this is a
considerate
artifact.” Indeed, the bear’s fur has been closed with such cunning that it’s almost impossible to see the exit wound. However, something has gone horribly awry inside it, as it is now shaking harder than ever, shivering off its limbs and then its fur. Finally its flesh starts breaking away like the sections of a tangerine.

The artifact stands erect again, bounces experimentally a couple times, then
collapses
in a way that Huw can’t make any sense of. He’s not alone, either. The jurors let out a collective uncomprehending bleat. “Look closely, Jurors!” the judge says, and the scene loops back on itself a couple times in slomo, from multiple angles, then again in wireframe. It makes Huw’s mind hurt. The artifact’s stalk bulges in some places, contracts in others, all the whole slipping through and around itself. His potmaker’s eye tries to no avail to understand what’s happening to the topology and volume.

“Fucking lovely,” Sanda Lal says. She’s always had a thing about trompe l’oeil

solids: “Nicest Klein bottle I’ve ever seen.”

A Klein bottle. Of course.
Take a Möbius strip and extrude it one more dimension out and you get a vessel with only two sides, the inside and outside a single continuous plane. Glassblower shit.
Fucking show-offs
.

The young brothers are on hands and knees before the artifact now, staring in slack-jawed concentration, drool slipping between their patchworks of baby teeth and down their chins. The cam zooms in on the artifact, and it begins to fluoresce and pulse, as through digesting a radioactive hamster. The peristaltic throbbing gives it motion, and it begins to work its way toward the hamper in the corner of the room. It inches across the floor, trailed by the crawling brothers, then knocks over the hamper and begins to burrow through the spilled, reeking linens.

“It’s scat-tropic,” Doc Dagbjört says.

“Yes,” the judge says. “And scat-powered. Karim notes that its waste products are a kind of silt, similar to diatomaceous earth and equally effective as a roach and beetle powder. It also excretes water and trace elements.”

“A fractional-dimensional parasitic turd-gobbler from outer space?” Huw says. “Have I got that right?”

“That’s right, ma’am,” says the blue-forelocked joe. “And it’s pretty too. I’d gestate one, if only to eliminate the need for a bloody toilet. Quite a boon to your average WHO-standard pit latrine too, I imagine.”

“Of course
you’d
gestate one,” Huw says. “Nothing to you if your body is dissolved into toxic tapioca. I imagine you’re just about ready to join the cloud anyroad.”

Sandra casts him a poisonous glare. “Fuck you, and the goat you rode into town on,” she said. “Who the hell
are
you, anyway?”

“Judge?” Doc Dagbjört says, desperately trying to avoid a mass execution, “my co-juror raises an interesting point. What evidence do we have to support Adbul’s assertion that the artifact can safely gestate in mammals or, more specifically, primates?”

The judge grunts irritably. “Only simulations, of course,” she says. “Are you volunteering?”