Rapture of the Nerds (34 page)

“It’s a lot more informal than you might expect,” says faceless suit #2 with just a smidgen of disapproval.

“You say, ‘build a world.’” Huw thinkst. “Are we talking about trial by combat? Not fighting, exactly, but constructive engagement?”

“Something like that,” says #1 suit. “But we’re not sure. Nobody human has ever been through this process before.”

After Policy, Huw is finally whisked into chambers to be fitted with Counsel. The legal office is smaller and more spartan than the Policy committee, or even the wardrobe and makeup departments; it’s just Bonnie, looking slightly embarrassed and clutching a stuffed parrot plushie. “It’s the best we could manage at short notice,” he says, holding it out to her.

“A parrot.” Huw turns it over in her hands. It’s a handsome gray blue bird, seamlessly fabbed out of cheap velour fabric by a simulated couture robot. “No, don’t tell me, it’s—”

“Hello! I am your counsel! Put me on your shoulder! Rawwwk!” The parrot comes to animatronic life, blinks at Huw, and preens.

“What does it do, say ‘pieces of eight’ and crap down my back?” asks Huw.

“Witness deponeth not! Rawwwk!”

“It’s a prop, babe. Actually, it’s an emulation environment containing an entire university law school’s graduate research faculty, ready and waiting to brief you, but Psychology figured a plush toy would be a useful disarming gesture in the context of a parent-child confrontation: clutch it defensively and act like a kid and you’ll be able to guide ... your father ...” Bonnie trails off.

“You—” Huw raises the animatronic parrot: it sidles aboard and sinks its claws into one suit shoulder pad. “—have. No. Idea. Who. You’re. Talking. About.” She says it with quiet disgust, staring into Bonnie’s eyes at close range. “This is my
dad
. He’s immune to head-ology. He’s a really smart high-functioning Asperger’s case who deals with social interaction by emulating it in his head, running a set of social heuristics, and looking for positive-sum outcomes. If you try to game him, he’ll notice.” She extends a finger and pokes him in the abs experimentally. “You’ve met my mother. Do you think this chickenshit little-kid brain hack would fool
her
?”

Bonnie doesn’t back off. “Your mum approved it.
She
thinks it’s worth a try. Don’t you think you should maybe listen to her once in a while? She’s known him longer than you have!” He’s breathing hard, and looks like he’s biting back anger. “If you insist on going it alone and you get it wrong, we’ll
all
suffer.”

“Not for long.” Huw meets Bonnie’s gaze. He’s the same scrawny cute tattoo-boy with blue forelock that she first ran into in Sandra Lal’s kitchen the morning after, but somehow he looks smaller to her: wrapped up in and tied down by sad old ideological quarrels and Ade’s stupid political games. She feels a momentary stab of resurgent lust, tempered by self-contempt: Bonnie is flawed, she knows that—played like a fish by 639,219, the Igor to Ade’s Young Dr. Frankenstein. But she needs Bonnie on her side, at least for a short while. And there’s nothing like a good screaming match for cleaning the air. “Spill it, Bonnie. Whatever you’ve been bottling.”

“What
I’m
bottling? You’re the one who’s been having a crazy snit and trying to ignore reality for the past couple of weeks! The one who kept running away from jury service in Tripoli; then you were happy enough getting your ashes hauled on the way to Glory City until the shit hit the fan, and
then
you were all over your own feet trying to bug out, and
then
your mum comes to fetch you to deal with the biggest threat humanity has ever faced, and you’re all,
No, I can’t deal with this, my grand aesthetic objection to the cloud is so important that I think I shall throw pots until we all die rather than face up to it,
so I try to talk sense into you, and instead all you can do is blame
me
for—”

Huw freezes Bonnie in midrant.

Actually, it’s not so much that she freezes Bonnie as that she tweaks her own speed up by several orders of magnitude. Bonnie’s lips slow to a crawl, then stop: a stray droplet of spittle hangs glistening in the air in front of them. The light dims to red and the air becomes viscous and very chilly as Huw struggles to control her instinctive threatened-mammal response—an adrenaline reflex triggered by verbal attack—and rewinds her memories of the past few weeks (or years, or centuries) to compare them with Bonnie’s tirade.

So, Bonnie harbored uploading fantasies while back in the flesh, but was too weak to go through with it? And Bonnie got rooted by the scheming God-botherers back in Glory City. And Bonnie is righteously pissed off at Huw for, well, multitudinous failings too elaborate and embarrassing to enumerate (because, Huw is forced to admit, they’re mostly genuine).

Huw
could
just unfreeze him and rant straight back—and good luck with that, right before the court appearance of her life. That’d be the sort of thing the old Huw would do in a split second, because that Huw has made a profession, a career, a life out of grabbing opportunities by both hands and throwing them away as hard as he or she can. But the new Huw, emergent and self-aware after an iterative optimization course delivered via self-TV, is more mature, more forgiving of human weakness, and more than somehow reluctant to faceplank for the hell of it.

So she decides on her move, unfreezes time, and executes.

Unfortunately, iterative optimization delivered via self-TV tends to deliver a bunch of subconscious freight, including a payload of TV tropes that don’t necessarily work in reality quite the way they do on the glass teat, so when she grabs Bonnie and attempts to snog, Bonnie startles and pulls away, and the animatronic plush law academy unbalances and starts flapping and rawking. “Hey!” says Bonnie, “if you think you can shut me up with such a transparent manipulative gambit, you’ve got no fucking—”

“But I’m not, I—”

“I’ve had enough! That’s it! I’m outta—”

“I’m sorry?”

That
shuts Bonnie up. He stares at her goggle-eyed. “Would you mind repeating what you just said?” he asks after a few seconds.

“I said,” Huw says, “I’m sorry. I take your point, and you’re entirely justified, and I’ve been a pain in the ass, and I’m sorry.”

“Uh.” Bonnie looks at the parrot. “Are you recording this? Because I’d like a copy.”

“Rawk! Witness deponeth not! Rawwwk!”

“When this is over,” Huw says, “I’d like to get away from here for a bit, hole up with you somewhere nice, and work out whether we maybe have a future, or just a fling, or something in between. How does that sound?”

Bonnie rubs his chin. There is a sparkle in his eyes. “After all this tsunami of shit, you’re asking me on a date?”

Huw shrugs, trying to get the parrot to sit still on her shoulder. “Why not? There’s always a first time.”

Bonnie takes a deep breath. “You’ve got a galactic federation to convince first. If you don’t succeed, date’s off. How about that?”

“I can live with that.” Huw manages to smile, despite a tremulous feeling that she nearly fucked her whole life up by accident. “Well, technically not, but you know what I mean. Where’s the courtroom?”

“Over there.” Bonnie points at a blank wall. “You ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.” She squares her shoulder. “I don’t see a—”

A door emerges from the surface of the wall: classically proportioned, paneled, pillars to either side. “Go break a leg,” says Bonnie as Huw steps toward it.

“Hello, Dad,” Huw says, stepping into the sim. “You’re looking well.”

The old man—David, her dad—has manifested in a personsuit that approximates his earthly appearance with a few years tacked on. He wears modestly simulated clothes of modest cut and modest style. His mustache is a little unkempt and has little shoots of gray mixed in with the gingery brown.

“Huw,” he says, “what have they got you wearing?”

Huw looks self-consciously at his party outfit, which is computed in such obsessive detail that it practically strobes. He shrugs. Then he notices—he’s a he again. Why not? Gender’s just a slider, just like everything else. Someone or something’s slid it malewards, at that razor-sharp moment when Huw crossed over from
there
to
here
. The tailored suit has sized to fit, but it’s tailored for a slim, young womanly shape, and Huw is back to his gently spread-out, unkempt male shape. This strikes him as a dirty trick, a bit of cheap back-footery, but no one ever said the feds were fair. They don’t need to be fair. They have time-traveling, star-powered lasers. And of the legal-minded parrot there is no sign: he’s on his own.

“Nothing to do with me,” Huw says. “Psyops from the naked apes, to be honest. How’s life among the superbeings, then?”

“Better than you can imagine. Literally. You haven’t the sensory apparatus or the context for it.”

“Well, that’s pretty convenient,” Huw says. “It’s the 3.0 version of ‘You’ll understand when you grow up.’”

“What’s the 2.0?”

“‘If you have to ask, you can’t understand.’ Or maybe, ‘Ask your mother’. All of which is as convenient as anything. Whatever happened to, ‘If you can’t explain it, you don’t understand it yourself?”

“A good general principle, but it’s not dispositive. Not here. Some things are genuinely transcendent. Some things inhabit a physics that you can’t access. Sorry if that’s not very satisfying. Sometimes the truth is a pain in the arse.”

“Right, so you can’t explain how you are. Can you explain what comes next? The prep team were a little fuzzy on this one. Are we meant to build a world now or something?”

Huw’s father looks uncomfortable. “Something like that. You and I are about to play God. We’ve got a little worldbuilding kit—” He points out the window of the small study they’re sat in. Huw realizes that they’re in another modest, slightly blocky sim of his father’s old study, where Huw had been forbidden to tread as a boy, and into which he had sneaked at every opportunity. Out the window, where there should be iron gray Welsh sky and the crashing sea, there is, instead, a horizon-spanning skybox hung with ornament-sized pieces of reality, hung in serried ranks: trees, houses, buildings, people, livestock, CO2, rare earths, bad ideas, literary criticism, children’s books, food additives, tumbleweeds, blips, microorganisms, lamentable fashion, copy editors’ marks, pulsars, flint axes, cave drawings, mind-numbingly complex mathematical proofs, van art, mountains, molehills, uplifted ant colonies.

Huw sees now that it had been a mistake to think of this as a low-powered sim. This sim—and his identity in it—consumes more compute-time than anything he’s ever seen, than
everything
he’s ever seen
combined,
but it doesn’t waste any of it on fancy graphics and fanciful landscapes. The feds’ court system uses its might to be as
comprehensive
as possible, to encompass every conceivable significant variable. Huw’s consciousness has expanded, somehow, to take all of it in. Not by running in parallel, or by running at higher speed, but by running
differently,
in a way that he can’t explain or understand. But it’s there, and he can’t deny it.

“So those are the game tokens, and we’re the players, and what, we set up a model train diorama and see how it runs?”

“It’s not the worst analogy,” his father says. “But I can tell you think that this is a trivial way of settling important issues. The federation isn’t callous. It recognizes the gravity of wiping out entire civilizations, entire species. It does so only when it has a high degree of certainty that the species in question is apt to reject any social contract that involves managed resource consumption.”

“So if they think we’re likely to pig out at the galactic buffet, they’ll wipe us out? They’re interstellar eco-cops?”

“Yes, but again, without the gloss of triviality you put on the explanation. There’s one reality, and we all inhabit it. You know there are physical limits to how much computation you can do with a universe? To date, it’s managed only 10
¹²²
quantum operations on roughly 10
⁹⁰
bits registered in quantum fields; the entire future of the Stelliferous Era will raise that by, at most, only six to nine orders of magnitude—and a lot of the universe will be off-limits to us due to cosmological expansion. So every civilization must learn how to manage its resources peacefully, without pursuing infinite growth—or we face a Malthusian catastrophe in the deep future. The universe must either come under a peace agreement or dissolve into war. If they let one rogue planet-bound species through in this era, they risk a conflict that destroys galaxies. We are playing the very longest, deepest game, and the federation will do everything they can for peace.”

“Including genocide.” Huw feels the slight spiritual lift he used to get whenever he rhetorically outmaneuvered his father.

“Yes,” his father says. “Including that.” The old bastard robs Huw of his satisfaction with the simple acknowledgment. “But as little as possible, and not without due deliberation beforehand. Look at it this way: If I handed you the keys to a time machine, wouldn’t you feel duty-bound to assassinate Hitler in his crib? If not, why not? How could you justify
not
preventing tens of millions of deaths by taking preemptive action? They don’t
want
to exterminate us; that’s why we’re holding this hearing. But you need to demonstrate at least some minimal redeeming features. The ability to get into art school instead of growing up to be a tyrant, say.”

“So we lay out our model train set.”

“We do, laying out the pieces as optimally as either of us can imagine. You get a veto over every placement. We set out every element that either of us believes to be of moment—every idea, every personality, every thought, every celestial body—and, having built that best of all possible worlds, we examine the interaction of all these elements, and decide, together, whether the outcome that emerges from all those parts rubbing up against one another is a net benefit to the universe and law-abiding, resource-sharing inhabitants.”

“That sounds perfectly ridiculous,” Huw says, but there’s something in his newly expanded consciousness that whispers,
What a reasonable way to sort all this out.
“And you’ve messed my head up too. How can that be—?” What?
Fair? Reasonable? Right?
All concepts that slide off the galactic scale of the thing like sweat dribbling down an ass-crack.