Rapture of the Nerds (32 page)

“Speaking for myself, that’s
exactly
what I’m cogitating,” Doc says. “Y’know, you weren’t the sharpest knife in the drawer as a boy, but I’ll swear you’re reading my mind. What—?”

“There’s this slider control.” Huw desperately searches for a plausible lie: “I’m thinking faster here, is all? So we can reach an uh, agreement?”

“I
like
the way you think,” says Doc: “After we build the Kingdom, you can be my handmaid!”

And Huw is abruptly ejected from whatever pocket nulliverse the Prophet’s fifth column have installed in the lobby of the virtual Tripoli Mariott, to a destination even more profoundly alienating than the cloud itself.

“Welcome to the embassy, Witness Jones,” says the gorilla.

He’s a very polite gorilla, thoroughly diplomatic: nattily turned out in a tuxedo and white spats (the effect overall only slightly spoiled by his failure to wear shoes). Huw would indeed be entirely charmed by him if not for a lingering bigoted prejudice against furries that she acquired at an early age. The gorilla looks naggingly familiar, and Huw has a forehead-slapping moment when she recognizes the beloved commercial mascot of a long-extinct brand of breakfast cereal—offered as a free, high-resolution avatar in many early game systems as part of a canny, much-copied marketing strategy. The Galactic Authority’s infinite power is apparently so vast that it needn’t bother itself about looking like an utterly naff simspace newbie who still thinks digital hair is cool.

“I’m very pleased to be here.”
But not for the reason you expect
. “Have you seen my djinni ?”

“Your—?” The gorilla’s expression sours. “He’s yours, is he? Yes, I’ve certainly seen him. I believe he’s camping in the rose garden around the back.” The gorilla gestures vaguely around the side of the building they’re standing in front of.

As befits an embassy to a galactic civilization, the cloud-dwellers have thrown together something rather posh. Unfortunately, they didn’t bother to vet the components for architectural coherency, which is why, within the gigantic outer ramparts of the Tokugawa-era Edo Castle (big enough to surround a medium-scale city, steep enough to repel tanks), they’ve installed Buckingham Palace as a reception suite; the Executive Office Building from Washington, D.C., as an administrative center; and an assortment of other tasteless excrescences—the Centre Pompidou to house an Arts and Culture Expo, the Burj Khalifa for hotel accommodation, and the Great Pyramid of Giza for no obvious reason at all.

To Huw’s not-terribly-trained nose, it all reeks of desperate insecurity. Even if they had been physically built, rather than merely rendered, these monumental buildings wouldn’t be remotely impressive compared to the cloud itself: but they were all designed to testify to the power and grandeur of their pre-singularity creators, in a manner that is deeply reassuring to a future-shocked primate trying to face up to overwhelming neighbors. And the neighbors
are
overwhelming. The embassy is embedded within the fragment of the pan-galactic inter-cloud hosted by the repurposed remains of Io, and the aliens aren’t going to let anyone forget it: beyond the embassy compound lies a remarkably realistic-looking re-creation of the moon’s icy, sulfurous surface. Above it hangs the marmalade-and-cottage-cheese-streaked gibbous ball of Jupiter. Illumination, such as it is, comes from the distant reddish disk of the cloud, occulting and scattering much of the sunlight trapped within its Dyson sphere layers. And spanning fully 180 degrees of the sky beyond Jupiter and cloud lies ...

The Milky Way. But not as Huw knows it.

Her
Milky Way is a timid smear of dimness, wheeling in the sky high above the nighttime hills of Wales.
This
Milky Way is a map of communications density, a dream of thought slashed livid across a billion inhabited star systems, pulsing with intellect, bubbling with fallow voids between the various conjoined empires. It reminds Huw of maps and visualizations Dad printed out in her—his—childhood, showing the early days of the Internet, mere trickling exabytes and petabytes of data zinging through the wires between population centers. But the points of light in this dazzling mist of data aren’t web browsers, they’re entire uploaded civilizations. If it’s meant to impress, it’s succeeding. If it’s meant to intimidate, it’s doing that too.

“Thanks, I’ll find him later. Uh, where am I staying? And what do I need to know for the process I’m supposed to be part of?”

“I can see you have a lot of questions, there. You’re staying in a suite on the two hundred eighty-sixth floor of the tower, there—” The gorilla points at the Burj Khalifa. “—and as for the rest, you are scheduled for an orientation meeting later. Perhaps you’d like to move in, freshen up, and collect your djinni ? The Cultural Secretary will talk you through the diplomatic process later, but for the time being, she’s rather busy seeing to the other witnesses.”

“Other— Rosa Giuliani, by any chance?” She asks, “Is there a person here called Bonnie? Or a—?”

“I’m sure you’ll have time to catch up with your friends later.” The gorilla nudges. “But right now, Secretary Chakrabarti has asked me to see that you’re comfortably settled in and all your needs attended to first. To minimize culture shock, you understand.”

Huw certainly understands, all right. The embassy is not just a very high fidelity sim, mimicking Earth-bound reality right down to the limits of direct sensory perception (despite the jumble of items from the architectural heritage dime store and the mad skyscape overhead); it’s also a capabilities-enforced PvP environment, the enlightened modern substitute for diplomatic immunity. And so she allows the gorilla to lead her to a teleport booth, and then to the gigantic jungle-infested lobby of the largest skyscraper in the Middle East, and up a roaring maglev express elevator (her ears pop, painfully and hyperrealistically, on the way) to a penthouse suite about the size of her entire street back home.

“I hope you enjoy the facilities here,” says the gorilla with a wink. “Nothing but the best for our expert witnesses—we have hot and cold running
everything
.”

It’s a far cry from jury duty accommodation in a crappy backpacker’s hostel in dusty Tripoli. Huw dials her time right up (sinfully extravagant: it’s the same kind of costly acceleration that got her into trouble when 639,219 called her on it) and orders the whirlpool-equipped hot tub with champagne to appear in the bathroom. Then she climbs in to marinate for subjective hours (a handful of seconds in everyone else’s reference frame) and to unkink for the first time in ages. After all, it’s not as if she’s consuming real resources here. And she needs to relax, recenter her emotions the natural way, and do some serious plotting.

Of course, the sim is far too realistic. A virtual champagne bath should somehow manage to keep the champagne drinking-temp cold while still feeling warm to the touch. And it shouldn’t be sticky and hot and flat; it should feel like champagne does when it hits your tongue—icy and bubbly and fizzy. And when Huw’s nonbladder feels uncomfortably full and relaxed in the hot liquid and she lets a surreptitious stream loose, it should be magicked away, not instantly blended in with the vintage Veuve to make an instant tubworth of piss-mimosa.

This is what comes of having too much compute-time at one’s disposal, Huw seethes. In constraint, there is discipline, the need to choose how much reality you’re going to import and model. Sitting on an Io’s worth of computronium has freed the Galactic Authority—and isn’t
that
an unimaginative corker of a name?—from having to choose. And with her own self simulated as hot and wide as she can be bothered with, she can feel every unpleasant sensation, each individual sticky bubble, each droplet clinging to her body as she hops out of the tub and into the six-jet steam-shower for a top-to-bottom rinse, and then grabs a towel—every fiber slightly stiff and plasticky, as if fresh out of the wrapper and never properly laundered to relax the fibers—and dries off. She discovers that she is hyperaware, hyperalert, feeling every grain of not-dust in the not-air individually as it collides with her not-skin.

Oh, oh, oh,
enough,
she wants to shout.
What is the
point
of all this rubbish?

This is the thing that Huw has never wanted to admit: Her primary beef against the singularity has never been existential—it’s
aesthetic
. The power to be a being of pure thought, the unlimited, unconstrained world of imagination, and we build a world of animated gifs, stupid sight gags, lame van-art avatars, brain-dead “playful” environments, and brain-dead flame wars augmented by animated emoticons that allowed participants to express their hackneyed ad hominems, concern-trollery, and Godwin’s law violations through the media of cartoon animals and oversized animated genitals.

Whether or not sim-Huw is
really
Huw, whether or not uploading is a kind of death, whether or not posthumanity is immortal or just kidding itself, the single, inviolable fact remains: Human simspace is no more tasteful than the architectural train wreck that the Galactic Authority has erected. The people who live in it have all the aesthetic sense of a senile jackdaw. Huw is prepared to accept—for the sake of argument, mind—that uploading leaves your soul intact, but she is never going give one nanometer on the question of whether uploading leaves your
taste
intact. If the Turing test measured an AI’s capacity to conduct itself with a sense of real style, all of simspace would be revealed for a machine-sham. Give humanity a truly unlimited field, and it would fill it with Happy Meal toys and holographic, sport-star, collectible trading card game art.

There’s a whole gang of dirtside refuseniks who make this their primary objection to transcendence. They’re severe Bauhaus cosplayers, so immaculately and plainly turned out that they look more like illustrations than humans. Huw’s never felt any affinity for them—too cringeworthy, too like a Southern belle who comes down with the vapors at the sight of a fish knife laid where the dessert fork is meant to go. It always felt unserious to object to a major debate over human evolution with an argument about style.

But Huw appreciates their point, and has spent his and then her entire life complaining instead about the ineffable and undefinable
humanness
that is lost when someone departs for the cloud. She’s turned her back on her parents, refused to take their calls from beyond the grave, she’s shut herself up in her pottery with only the barest vestige of a social life, remade herself as someone who is both a defender of humanity
and
a misanthrope. All the while, she’s insisted—mostly to herself, because, as she now sees with glittering clarity, no one else gave a shit—that the source of her concerns all along has been metaphysical.

The reality that stares her in the face now, as she reclines on the impeccably rendered 20-million-count non-Egyptian noncotton nonsheets, is that it’s always been a perfectly normal, absolutely subjective, totally meaningless dispute over color schemes.

Now
she’s got existential angst.

The Burj Khalifa’s in-room TV gets an infinity of channels, evidently cross-wired from the cable feed for Hilbert’s hotel. It uses some evolutionary computing system to generate new programs on the fly, every time you press the channel-up button. This isn’t nearly as banal as Huw imagined it might be when she read about it on the triangular-folded cardboard standup that materialized in her hand as she reached for the remote. That’s because—as the card explained—the Burj has enough computation to model captive versions of Huw at extremely high speed, and to tailor the programming by sharpening its teeth against these instances-in-a-bottle so that every press of the button brings up eye-catching, attention-snaring material: soft-core pornography that involves pottery, mostly.

Huw would like nothing better than to relax with the goggle-box and let her mind be lovingly swaddled in intellectual flannel, but her mind isn’t having any of it. The more broadly parallel she runs, the more meta-cognition she finds herself indulging in, so that even as she lies abed, propped up by a hill of pillows the size of a Celtic burial mound, her thoughts are doing something like this:

• Oh, that’s interesting, never thought of doing that sort of thing with glaze.
  
• Too interesting, if you ask me, it’s not natural, that kind of interesting, they’ve got to be simulating gigaHuws to come up with that sort of realtime optimization.
  
• There’ll be hordes of Huw-instances being subjected to much-less-interesting versions of this program and winking out of existence as soon as they get bored.
  
• Hell,
  I
  could be one of those instances, my life dangling on a frayed thread of attention.
  
• Every time I press the channel-up button, I execute thousands—millions? billions?—of copies of myself.
  
• Why don’t I
  care
  more about them? It’s insane and profligate cruelty but here’s me blithely pressing channel-up.
  
• Whoa, that’s interesting—she looks awfully like Bonnie, but with a bum that’s a little bit more like that girl I fancied in college.
  
• I could
  die
  at any instant, just by losing attention and pressing channel up.• That’s wild, never noticed how those muscles—quadrati lumborum?—spring out when someone’s at the wheel, that bloke’s got QLs for
  days
  .
  
• If I were
  really
  ethically opposed to this sort of thing, I’d be vomming in my mouth with rage at the thought of all those virtual people springing into existence and being snuffed out.
  
• But I’m
  not
  , am I? Hypocrite, liar, poseur, mincing aesthete, that’s me, yeah?
  
• So long as it’s
  interesting
  and
  stylish,
  I’ll forgive anything.
  
• I’ve got as much existential introspection as a Mario sprite.
  

Enough, already,
she tells herself, and cools herself down to a single thread, then slows that down, hunting for the sweet spot at the junction of stupidity and calm. Then finding it, she settles down and watches TV for a hundred subjective years, slaughtering invisible hordes of herself without a moment’s thought.