Rapture of the Nerds (22 page)

Huw is adding a shelf to the pottery’s storehouse (the existing ones have filled up with pots of all sizes and description) when words of fire scorch themselves over the brick wall that she is painstakingly drilling.

2
²⁶
SECONDS. COMMUNICATIONS CONSTRAINTS LIFTED
".

“Pissflaps,” she says. They’ve turned the bloody phone on. Just when she was getting used to the blessed silence. She has had years of subjective time to think about whom she could call and what she might say to them, and has concluded that there’s no one she wants to talk to. She returns to her spirit level and snap line and measuring tape.

*She could just reconfigure the wall to add a shelf, or reconfigure the pottery store to be bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, or dereference several of the pot objects and make them go away. But instantiating screws and gravity and snap lines and chalk dust and plumb-bobs and measuring tapes and MDF shelving is much, much more bloody-minded.

“Huw, this is unbecoming.” The voice is everywhere, vibrating through every membrane in her body. She’s not hearing it with her ears, because she doesn’t have ears, and the thing that claims to be her mother—the thing with as good a claim to be her mother as Huw has on being herself, if she’s honest about it—has privs on Huw’s simulated existence that allow her to speak to Huw by affecting her kinesthetic representation down to the cellular level. Listening to Mum is bad enough, but listening to her with the soles of her feet, with the hairs in her armpits, with her eyelashes and sinus cavities, is intolerable.

Huw begins to methodically smash pots. She doesn’t feel angry enough to be smashing pots. She
can’t
feel angry enough to smash pots. But she knows she
should
feel angry enough, and so she does. She is a method actor in the role of Huw as Huw was before having her brain removed and modeled, and she’s way into character.

“Huw, stop it. Listen, if there’d been any choice in the matter, I certainly would have respected your decision to stay in the meat. But this is bigger than you and bigger than me and bigger than both of us.”

There’s a rusty old ax in the garden shed. Beset by an impulse to smash pots faster and harder, she leaves the storehouse and goes around the side of the vegetable garden. It’s a gorgeous summer day outside, with a thin haze dusting the upturned blue bowl of the sky:
A glorious day to die,
Huw finds herself thinking, without any clear certainty of where the idea is coming from. “Huw, this is important. We need you to make a case for—”

The ax handle is worn smooth from decades of use chopping bamboo for firewood to warm Huw’s bones on cold and lonely winter mornings. The blunt back of the head is flecked with rust, just like the real template on which this model is based, but the sides of the blade are flat and polished. Huw picks it up, holding it just below the head, and turns to trot back toward the pottery, mayhem in mind.
Crack pots,
she thinks.
Show her what I’m made of now. Damaged goods. All her fault.
She’s not entirely coherent at this point, a myriad ghosts yammering their conflicting urges inside the back of her head. She charges back into the potting shed and lays about her with the ax.

It
should
horrify her, this destruction of over a year’s work, but all emotion is oddly muffled: it’s like watching furry snuffporn while knowing that the cute little critters being trampled into a bloody pulp underfoot are just CGI renderings, that no life-forms of any kind were involved (let alone harmed) in the taping of the animal cruelty apocalypse. And the lack of horror in turn gives Huw a sense of the monstrous vacuum hidden behind her lack of anger, of the throbbing un-space where her emotional reaction has been excised.

“Huw, stop—”

“
Not unless you give me back my mind!” Crash
goes a shelf on which sits the fruit of an entire working week, an entire lovingly crafted dinner service that would have sold for enough to feed her for a month back in a world where food wasn’t a figment of the imagination.

“Why are you doing this to yourself? It’s pointless! And besides, you’re evading your responsibilities.”

I should be angry,
Huw thinks dispassionately. “I’m destroying what I ought to be capable of loving,” she says while she smashes a crate of bone china teacups. “Just following your example, Mum. Nothing to see here.”

“There’s no
time
for this!” The everywhere-voice sounds upset:
Good,
Huw thinks. “Will you stop if I make you angry?”

Huw pauses. “Try me,” she suggests.

A foaming wave of visceral loathing and hatred descends on her like a tsunami. It’s all muddled together: self-loathing, regret, and sheer bloody-minded hatred for her mother. Huw shrieks and drops the ax. “
Now
look what you’ve made me do!”

Cheesy sound effects are all part of the service: in this case, staticky ancient TV game show applause, rattling from wall to wall and around the back of Huw’s head like a surround-sound mixing desk run by a maniac. “That’s good, let it all hang out!” calls her mother. “I can give you another sixty seconds, wall clock time.”

“Bitch.” Huw picks up the ax and leans on it, breathless as the toll of the exertion comes home in the shape of aching muscles. (The biology model in here is
very
good, she has to admit.) “Murderer.”

“That’s right, make it about you, baby. Just the same as always.” Is that a note of bitterness in Mum’s voice? She’s more than earned it, in Huw’s opinion. She feels a brief spark of joy in the existential twilight. For what she’s inflicted on Huw—

“This is
mandatory
not
optional,
darling, so drop the tantrum. You’re not convincing anyone, and if you don’t get over yourself, you’re not going to have a home to go back to and it’ll be all your own fucking fault the Earth was destroyed.”

“The—”

Headcrash.

“—Earth—”

Huw trips over her tongue, pauses on the cusp of a pure and brilliant
oh shit
moment—

“
Destroyed?”

“Yes,” says her mother. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.
They
want to destroy the Earth, and everyone’s relying on
you
to stop them. Personally, I think that’s a forlorn hope, but under the circumstances, extreme measures seemed justifiable in order to get your fucking attention.
Now
will you listen to me?”

Hyperspace bypasses, Vogon poetry, the heat death of the universe: none of these things feature in the extraordinary situation now pertaining to the end of the world as Huw knows it.

“I’m going to take you to meet somebody,” her mum tells her, bossily overreaching as ever. “They’ll set you straight.”

“Who?” Huw stubbornly clutches her ax.

“The defense—the people who asked me to fetch you. You see, you’re the missing link: or you were. The embassy speaker. Their High Weirdnesses know you and recognize you from your time as ... it gets complicated. Easier to show than tell!”

“Hey, wait—”

The walls of the world slam down around Huw, exposing her to the insane glory and fractal chaos of the mindcloud.

The cloud—the diffuse swarm of solar-powered nanocomputers that the singularity built from the bones of the inner solar system (Earth aside)—consists of quadrillions of chunks of raw quantum computing power, each of them powerful enough to run a shard in which thousands of human-scale minds can thrive (or a handful of superhuman ones). Entire small moons and planets were consumed back in the day, as the first generation of artilects and exultants and uploads jumped in with both metaphorical feet to join the gold rush. Now they’ve tapped most of the sun’s output of energy, they’re using their surplus power to boil Jupiter; in another few centuries the swarm will increase in size a thousandfold as they add the biggest of the outer planets to its thinking mass.

From the outside, from a terrestrial embodied point of view, the cloud looks like a single entity, a monolithic slab of smartmatter thinking the mysterious and esoteric thoughts of an uploaded syncitium of futurist minds, disembodied think-states floating in an abstract neurological void.

But on the inside, the cloud consists of a myriad of shards separated by light-speed communication links, the homes of hordes of bickering beings who cling to their own individuality as tightly as any mud-grubbing neophobe. And within any given shard, reality feels curiously
cramped
.

Part of it is backup junk, of course. Like pre-singularity porn monkeys, the cloud’s inhabitants are implausibly reluctant to hit the Delete key. Earlier versions of personalities, long-abandoned playpen realities like Huw’s crack-potted simulation, experimental religions and randomly evolved entertainments pile up in the quantum dust at the edge of the cloud. Physical reality is intrinsically self-deduplicating, but the cloud is not—distributed across shards that are light-minutes apart, it’s almost impossible to ensure that there’s only one copy of any particular object. And so it is that all but a fraction of a thousandth of the near infinite capacity of the cloud is given over to storing rubbish. It’s beautiful, fractally self-similar rubbish, but junk is junk.

“Mind your head.” Huw stumbles (incarnate in a body modeled on her recently departed flesh) close to a gnarly purple archway of cauliflower-textured
something
that projects through the floor they’re standing on. The voice comes from a point source this time, rather than etched into the structure of the universe all around. She glances round and sees her mother, incarnate in the same offensively impervious golem body: “Some of the stacks hereabouts will archive anything they come into contact with that isn’t locked down.”

Huw forces a deep breath, self-monitoring to see if the drop in her existential rage is natural. “Where
are
we?”

“What, physically? We’re on board a cluster of half a dozen thinkplates about the size of dustbin lids, a hundred thousand klicks out past where Lunar orbit used to be. Or did you mean—?”

“Metaphorically, Ma.” Huw glares at her. “You brought me here. Say your piece and get out of my life again, why don’t you?”

“Oh all right, then.” The faceless golem squats on the pavement—a tessellated mat of marble tiles inset with fossils, some of which are disturbingly anthropomorphic. (The sky overhead is a kaleidoscope of 3-D movie screens replaying famous last-century entertainments. It’s all tiresomely theatrical.) “I thought you’d want to be involved in saving the Earth, but obviously you’re not going to listen to anything your old mother says and you’re our best hope, so—” The golem raises its head. “—over to you, Bonnie?”

“Nice to see you, Huw.”

The last time Huw saw Bonnie, she was evanescencing into a cloud of loose, dusty molecules and a large mass of information, writhing as a trillion razor-sharp mandibles reduced her to powder. When Huw thought about Bonnie’s uploaded self and its continuing existence in the cloud, he imagined her clothed in shimmering virtual metal or sailing gracefully through the virtual sky as a virtual angel. Huw is self-conscious enough to know that Bonnie wasn’t an angelic presence on Earth, but rather a perfectly normal, flawed human being. Flawed? Bonnie had both yearned for transhuman ascension and had lacked the guts to do anything about it. By Huw’s lights, the former was inexcusable, the latter despicable. But love is blind, and love that mourns for loss is blinder still, and Huw loved Bonnie, and nothing would change that.

Though, her present manifestation certainly tests the limits of love’s infinite capacity for forgiveness.

Huw had pictured her with wings, but they’d been long-feathered snowy white things. Not gaudy, fluttering, ornamental butterfly wings that iridesced in the nonlight of nonspace. She’d overlaid Bonnie’s familiar features with erotic perfection, elevating her blobby nose and weak chin to high exemplars of some refined esoteric aesthetic—but hadn’t redrawn her face with saucer-sized anime eyes; a deeply dimpled, sharp and foxy chin; beestung lips; and a dainty upturned nose. Huw may have made her over to be an angel, but Bonnie had made herself over to be a fluttering little fairy.

“You’re kidding, right?”

Bonnie flutters her wings, let her ballet-slippered toe kick the nonground. “I like it,” she says. “And it’s none of your business in any event. You want me to look like something else, then filter me—but don’t tell me I’m doing self-representation wrong.” Huw has to admit she has a point; in theory, Huw can make Bonnie’s appearance into anything she wants it to be. But, of course, Huw hasn’t figured out how to do that sort of thing in the sim, because she stubbornly refuses to learn to do anything that isn’t part and parcel of her two-year pottery-sulk.

“But why? Since when were you a Tinker Bell sort of person?”

“How dare you presume to tell me what sort of person I’m legitimately allowed to be?”

This isn’t going well. There had been many occasions on which Huw had fantasized about a reunion with Bonnie, and those fantasies never involved the fairy of the apocalypse accusing her of appropriating someone else’s body image.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s nice to see you, Bonnie.”

“Shut up, Huw. Earth is about to be destroyed, and all you can do is arse around throwing temper tantrums? I didn’t take you for a hypocrite!”

“Why do you care what happens to the Earth?” Huw says, finding reserves of belligerence she hadn’t know about. “You’ve given up on the meatsack! You seceded from the human race. If you weren’t a traitor to reality, you’d have reincarnated—”

Fairy-Bonnie flaps her wings so hard, they buzz. “I’m not here willingly, Huw. The Committee—they’ve put a ban on downloading. I
can’t
go home! Your mother got through to you only by misappropriating a heavy construction golem and taking it for a joy ride.”

Huw digests this for a minute. “Is that true, Mum? Sounds like epistemic hairsplitting to me—”

“You’d better believe it, dear. Do you think I’d have shown up at your door TWOCing a JCB if there’d been something more stylish on offer? A hippo leech, perhaps?”