Rapture of the Nerds (10 page)

“Who
was
?” asks Huw, his knuckles whitening. “If I find them—”

“It was sort of one of those things,” Adrian says. “You know how it happens? Someone does some deep data mining on the proteome and spots a correlation. Posts their findings publicly. Someone else thinks,
Hey, I know that joe,
and invites them to a party along with a bunch of their friends. Someone else spikes the punch while they’re chatting up a Sheila, and then a prankster at the New Libyan embassy thinks,
Hey, we could maybe rope him into the hanging judge’s reality show, howzabout that?
Boy, you can snap your fingers and before you know what’s happening, there’s a flash conspiracy in action—not your real good, old-fashioned secret new world order, nobody can be arsed tracking those things these days, but the next best thing. A self-propagating teleology meme. Goal-seeking Neat Ideas are the most dangerous kind. You smoke?”

“Thanks,” says Huw, accepting the joint. “Is the tea ready?”

“Yeah.” And Adrian spends the next minute pouring a couple of mugs of extremely strong breakfast tea, while Huw does his best to calm his shattered nerves by getting blasted right out of his skull on hashishim dope.

“’Kay, lemme get this straight. I was never on tech jury call, right? Was a setup. All along.”

“Well, hurm. It was a real jury, all right, but that doesn’t mean your name was plucked out of the hat at random, follow?”

“All right. Nobody planned, not a conspiracy, just a set of
accidents
’cause the cloud wants to talk. Huh?” Huw leans back on the beanbag and bangs his head on a giant otolith, setting it vibrating with a deep gut-churning rumble. “’Sh cool stuff. Fucking cloud. Why can’t it send a letter if it wanna talk to
me
?”

“Yer the human condition in microcosm, mate. Here, pass the spliff.”

“’Kay. So
what
wants to talk?”

“Eh, well, you’ve met the ambassador already, right? S’okay, Bonnie’ll be along in a while with it.”

“And whothefuck are
you
? I mean, what’re you doing in this?”

“Hell.” Adrian looks resigned. “I’m just your ordinary joe, really. Forget the Nobel Prize, that doesn’t mean anything. ’S all a team effort these days, anyway, and I ain’t done any real work in cognitive neuroscience for thirty, forty years. Tell the truth, I was just bumming around, enjoying my second teenage Wanderjahr

when I heard ’bout you through the grapevine. Damn shame we couldn’t get a sane judge for the hearing. None of this shit would be necessary if it wasn’t for Rosa’s thing.”

“Rosa—”

“Rosa

Giuliani. Hanging judge and reality show host. She’s like, a bit conservative. Hadn’t you noticed?”

“A bit. Conservative.”

“Yeah, she’s an old-time environmentalist, really likes conserving things—preferably in formalin. Including anyone who’s been infected by a communications vector.”

“Oh.” Normally this description of

Giuliani’s politics would fill Huw with the warm fuzzies, but the thing in his throat is a reminder that he’s currently further outside his comfort zone than he’s ventured in decades. He’s still trying to digest the indigestible thought through a haze of amiability-inducing smoke, when the local unplugs herself from the omnifab’s console, stands up and stretches, then plugs in a language module.

“Your bicycle will be healed again in a few hours,” she says, nodding at Huw, just as the omni burps and then hawks up a passable replica of a Shimano dynamo hub. “Can you put it together with tools?”

“I, uh—” Huw gawks at her. “Do I know you?” he asks. “You look just like this hacker—”

She shrugs irritably. “I am not responsible for my idiot clone-aunts!”

“But you—” He stops. “There are lots of you?”

“Oh yes.” She smiles tightly. “Ade, my friend, I am taking a walk. Don’t get up to anything I wouldn’t.”

“I won’t, Becky. Promise.”

“Good. I’m Maisie, though.” She climbs onto a toadstool-shaped bone and rapidly rises toward the ceiling on a pillar of
something
that might be muscle, but probably isn’t.

“Lovely girls,” Adrian says when she’s gone. “Where was I? Ah, yes: the ambassador.”

“Ambassador?”

“Yeah, ambassador. It’s a special kind of communications node: needs enough brains to talk to that thing in your throat and translate what you send it into something the cloud can work with. You’re the interpreter, see. We’ve been expecting it for a while, but didn’t reckon with those idiot script kiddies ending up in court. It’ll be along—”

There’s a clattering noise behind Huw, and he looks round so abruptly that he nearly falls off his sack, and though he’s feeling mellow—far better disposed toward his fellow man than he was an hour ago—it’s all Huw can do to refrain from jumping up, shrieking.

“You!” says Bonnie, clutching a large and ominously familiar black box in her arms as she slides to a halt at the foot of the spiral. “Hey, Ade, is this
your
party?”

The box twitches in her arms, as if something inside it is trying to escape. Huw can feel a scream welling up in his throat, and it isn’t his—it’s a scream of welcome, a paean of politics. He bites it back with a curse. “How the hell did you get that?” he says.

“Stole it while the judge was running after you,” Bonnie says. “There’s a README with it that says it needs a translator. That would be you, huh?” She looks at him with ill-concealed lust. “Prepare to plug into the ride of your life!”

“God, no,” he says.

Adrian pats his shoulder. “Pecker up. It’s all for the best.”

The box opens and the Kleinmonster bobs a curtsy at him, then warbles. His throat warbles in response. The hash has loosened his vocal cords so that there isn’t the same sense of forced labor, just a mellow, easy kind of song. His voices and the Kleinmonster’s intertwine in an aural handshake and gradually his sensoria fades away, until he’s no longer looking out of his eyes, no longer feeling through his skin, but rather he’s part of the Cloudmind, smeared across space and time and a billion identities all commingled and aswirl with unknowable convection currents of thought and deed.

Somewhere there is the Earth, the meatspace whence the Cloudmind has ascended. His point of view inverts and now the Earth is enveloped in him, a messy gobstopper dissolving in a probabilistic mindmouth. It’s like looking down at a hatched-out egg, knowing that once upon a time you fit inside that shell, but now you’re well shut of it. Meat, meat, meat. Imperfect and ephemeral and needlessly baroque and kludgy, but it calls to the cloud with a gravitic tug of racial memory.

And then the sensoria recedes and he’s eased back into his skin, singing to the Kleinmonster and its uplink to the cloud. He knows he’s x-mitting his own sensoria, the meat and the unreasoning demands of dopamine and endorphin.
Ah,
says the ambassador.
Ah. Yes. This is what it was like. Ah
.

Awful
.

Terrible
.

Ah
.

Well, that’s done
.

The Kleinmonster uncoils and stretches straight up to the ceiling, then gradually telescopes back into itself until it’s just a button of faintly buzzing nanocrud. The buzzing gains down and then vanishes, and it falls still.

Bonnie shakes his shoulders. “What happened?” she says, eyes shining.

“Got what it needed,” Huw says with a barely noticeable under-drone.

“What?”

“What? Oh, a bit of a reminder, I expect. A taste of the meat.”

“That’s it?” Bonnie says. “All that for—what? A trip down memory lane? All that fucking work and it doesn’t even want to stick around and chat?”

Huw shrugs. “That’s the cloud for you. In-fucking-effable. Nostalgia trip, fact-finding mission, what’s the difference?”

“Will it be back? I wanted to talk to it about ...” She trailed off, blushing. “I wanted to know what it was like.”

Huw thinks of what it was like to be part of the matryoshka-brain, tries to put it into words. “I can’t quite describe it,” he says. “Not in so many words. Not right now. Give me a while, maybe I’ll manage it.” He’s got a nasty case of the pasties and he guzzles a cup of lukewarm milky tea, swirling it around his starchy tongue. “Of course, if you’re really curious, you could always join up.”

Bonnie looks away and Adrian huffs a snort. “I’ll do it someday,” she says. “Just want to know what I’m getting into.”

“I understand,” he says. “Don’t worry, I still think you’re an anti-human race-traitor, girlie. You don’t need to prove anything to me.”

“Fucking right I don’t!” Bonnie says. She’s blushing rather fetchingly.

“Right,” Huw says.

“Right.”

Huw begins to hum a little, experimenting with his new transhuman peripheral. The drone is quite nice: it reminds him vaguely of a digeridoo. Or bagpipes. He sings a little of the song from the courthouse, in two-part discord. Bonnie’s flush deepens and she rubs her palms against her thighs, hissing like a teakettle.

Huw cocks his head at her and leans forward a bit, and she grabs his ears and drags him down on top of her.

Adrian taps him on the shoulder a moment later. “Sorry to interrupt,” he says, “but Judge Rosa’s bound to come looking for you eventually. We’d best get you out of Libya sharpish.”

Huw ignores him, concentrating on the marimba sensation of Bonnie’s rib cage grinding over his chest.

Adrian rolls his eyes. “I’ll just go steal a blimp or something, then, shall I?”

Bonnie breaks off worrying Huw’s ear with her tongue and teeth and says, “Fuck off awhile, will you, Adrian?”

Adrian contemplates the two of them for a moment, trying to decide whether they need a good kick round the kidneys, then turns on his heel and goes off to find Maisie, or perhaps Becky, and sort out an escape.

The entity Huw has mistaken for the whole of the cloud whirls in its orbit, tasting the meat with its mutifarious sensory apparat, thinking its in-fucking-effable thoughts, muttering in RF and gravity and eigenstate. The ambassador hibernates on the safe house’s floor, prized loose from under Huw’s tailbone, where it had been digging rather uncomfortably, quite spoiling Huw’s concentration, and tossed idly into a corner. The cloud thing’s done with it for now, but its duty-cycle is hardly exhausted, and it wonders what its next use will be.

Huw moans an eerie buzz that sets Bonnie’s gut aquiver in sympathy, which is not nearly so unpleasant as it sounds.

In fact, Bonnie thinks she could rather get used to it.

Woah! How about that for an opener? Sex, aliens, dream therapists, and vat-grown goatmeat—we think you'll agree that Huw is off to a smashing start. If you do, this just might be the perfect time to stand up, stretch your legs, unlock your mobile device, and ask it for directions to the nearest book merchant's premises, where you can purchase the meatspace embodiment of the bits that are presently caressing your eyeballs.

Or maybe not. Maybe you'd like to buy a commercial ebook, or maybe your local bookseller has become a casualty of the trying economic times we live in. Below is a list of online bookselling options should you wish to have our modest little book come to you, rather than the other way around. Or
maybe you'd like to donate a copy
to a school or library.

USA:
Amazon Kindle
(DRM-free)
Barnes and Noble Nook
(DRM-free)
Google Books
(DRM-free)
Kobo
(DRM-free)
Apple iBooks
(DRM-free)
Amazon
Booksense
(will locate a store near you!)
Barnes and Noble
Powells
Booksamillion

Canada:
Amazon Kindle
(DRM-free)
Kobo
(DRM-free)
Chapters/Indigo
Amazon.ca

What finally wakes Huw is the pain in his bladder. His head is throbbing, but his bladder has gone weak on him lately—he’s been shirking having a replacement fitted—and if he doesn’t get up and find the john soon, he’s going to piss himself. So he struggles up from a sump hole of somnolence.

He opens his eyes and realizes disappointedly that he’s not back home in his own bed: he’s lying facedown in a hammock.
Damn, it’s not just a bad dream.
The hammock sways gently from side to side in the hot stuffy air. Light streams across him in a warm flood from one side of the room; the floor below the string mesh is gray and scuffed, and something tells him he isn’t on land anymore.
Shit,
he thinks, pushing stiffly against the edge and trying not to fall as the hammock slides treacherously out from under him.
Why
am
I
so
tired?

His bare feet touch the ground before he realizes he’s bare-ass naked. He rubs his scalp and yawns. His veins feel as if all the blood has been replaced by something warm and syrupy and full of sleep.
Drugs?
he thinks, blinking. The walls—

Three of them are bland, gray sheets of structural plastic with doors in them. The fourth is an outward-leaning pane of plexiglas or diamond or something. A very, very long way below him he can see wave crests.

Huw gulps, his pulse speeding. Something strange is lodged in the back of his throat. He stifles a panicky whistle. There in a corner lie his battered kit bag and a heap of travel-worn clothing. He leans against the wall.
There’s got to be a crapper somewhere nearby, hasn’t there?
The floor, now he’s awake enough to pay attention, is thrumming with a low bass chord from the engines, and the waves are sloshing by endlessly below. As he picks at a dirty shirt, a battered copper teapot rolls away from beneath it. He swears, memories flooding back. Then he picks up the teapot and gives it a resentful rub.

“Wotcher, mate!” The djinni that materializes above the teapot is a hologram, so horribly realistic that for a moment Huw forgets his desperate need for a piss.

“Fuck you too, Ade,” he says.

“What kind of way to welcome yer old mate is that, sunshine?” Hologram-Adrian’s wearing bush jacket and shorts, a shotgun slung over one shoulder. “How yer feeling, anyway?”