Rapture of the Nerds (12 page)

“What? Prohibition of what? What are you talking about?” His hands are shaking, he realizes. “I need a drink.”

“Prohibition of everything,
dipshit
, ” Bonnie says. She pauses for a moment, prodding at her eyes with a mister, but they are so swollen that she can’t get its applicator into contact with bare mucous membrane. She roots around some more, then whacks some kind of transdermal plaster on her arm. “Sorry, gotta
arse fuck
come down now. Your stash, darling? It’s illegal here. If the customs crows catch you with it, they’ll stick you on the chain gang and you’ll be chibbed and
fuck raped baby-eating murdered
by psychotic mutant Klansmen for the next two hundred years. It’s bad for the skin, I hear.” She stands up and heads toward a battered cabinet at the rear of the bridge, which she opens to reveal a couple of grubby-looking parachutes that appear to have been hand-packed with all due care and attention by stoned marmosets. “We’ll be passing over the hot tub in about three minutes. You coming?”

The parachute harness she hands him is incredibly smelly—evidently its last owner didn’t believe in soap—but its flight control system assures Huw that it’s in perfect working order and please to extinguish all cigarettes and switch off all electronics for the duration of the flight. Tight-lipped, Huw fastens it around his waist and shoulders, then follows Bonnie to the back of the bridge and down a rickety ladder to the bottom of the gas bag. There’s an open hatch, and when he looks through it, he sees verdant green folliage whipping past at nearly a hundred kilometers per hour, hundreds of meters below. “Clip the red hook to the blue static line eye,” says the harness. “Clip the—”

“I get the picture,” Huw says. Bonnie is already hooked up, and turns to check his rig, then gives him a huge shit-eating grin and steps backwards into the airship’s slipstream. “Aagh!” Huw flinches and stumbles, then follows her willy-nilly. Seconds later the chute unfolds its wings above him, and his ears are filled with the sputtering snarl of a two-stroke motor as it switches to dynamic flight and banks to follow Bonnie down toward a clearing in the mangrove swamp.

The swamp rushes up to meet him in a confusion of green, buffeting him with superheated steam as he descends toward it, so that by the time the chute punches him through the canopy, he’s as steamed as a dim sum bun. Bonnie’s chute speeds ahead of him, breaking branches off and clattering from tree to tree. He tries to follow its crazy trail as best as he can, but eventually he realizes, with a sick falling sensation in his stomach, that she’s no longer strapped into it. “Bonnie!” he yells, and grabs at the throttle control.

“Danger! Stall warning!” the parachute intones. “Guru Meditation Code 14067.”

Huw looks down dizzily. He’s skimming the ground now, or what passes for it—muck of indeterminate depth, interspersed with clumps of curiously nibbled-looking water hyacinth. The tree line starts in another couple of hundred meters, and it’s wall-to-wall petroleum plants. Black leafed and ominous looking, the stunted inflammabushes emit a dizzying stench of raw gasoline that makes his eyes swim and his nose water. “Fuck, where am I going to land?”

“Please fold your tray table and return your seat to the upright position,” says the parachute control system. “Extinguish all joints, switch off mobile electronics, and prepare for landing.” The engine note above and behind him changes, spluttering and backfiring, and then the damp muck comes up and slaps him hard across the ankles. Huw stumbles, takes a faltering step forward—then the nanolight’s engine drops down as the chute rigging collapses above his head and thumps him right between the eyes with a hollow
tonk
.

“What you’ve got to understand, son,” says the doctor, “is it’s all the fault of the alien space bats.” He holds up the horse syringe and flicks the barrel. A bubble wobbles slowly up through the milky fluid. “If it wasn’t for them and their Jew banker patsies, we’d be ascended to heaven.” He squeezes the plunger slightly and a thick blob of turbid liquid squeezes out of the syringe and oozes down the needle. “Carbon traders damned us to this living hell.” He grins horribly, baring gold-plated teeth, and points the end of the needle at Huw’s neck. Huw can’t move his gaze from Doc’s mustache: it’s huge and bushy, a hairy efflorescence that twitches suspiciously as the barefoot medic inhales with sharp disapproval.

“Carbon traders?” Huw’s voice sounds weak, even to himself. He stares past the doctor at the peeling white paint on the wall of this sorry excuse for a medical center. “What have they got to do with—?”

“Carbon traders.” Doc nods as he rams the blunt end of the quarter-inch needle against Huw’s jugular. Machines whine and click, and the side of Huw’s neck goes numb. “Once the children of Mammon started floating credit-default swaps against carbon remediation bonds, the whole planet became worth more if it was on fire than if it was fulla trees. So now you’ve got all these trillion-dollar bets that’ll go bust if the polar caps don’t melt, and it wasn’t long afore the polar caps were worth more melted than intact, and well, the market provided the incentives. Now look at us.”

Huw tries to swallow. The plunger is going down, and white goo is flooding into his circulatory system, billions of feral redneck nanomachines bouncing off his fur-lined arteries in search of damaged tissue to fix. His mouth is parched, his tongue as crinkly and musty-dry as a dead cauliflower. “But the, the alien—”

“Alien space bats, son,” says Doc. He sighs lugubriously and pulls the syringe away from Huw’s neck. “With their fancy orbital Fresnel lens.
They’re
behind the global warming thing, y’see, it’s nothing to do with burning oil. It dates to the fifties. Those closet Commies in with their astronomy toys, they were smart—using tax-funded astrophysics instruments to signal the space brothers! Seeing as how God made us a strongly anthropic universe to live in, it stands to reason there must be aliens out there. It’s a long-term plot, a two hundred-year Communist plan to bankrupt America. And it’s working. All those deserters and traitors who upped and left when the singularity hit, they just made it worse. They’re the savvy ones we need to make this country great again, rebuild NASA and Space Command, but do it right, pure American, deep background checks and purity oaths, and go wipe those no-good Ruskie alien space bats and their Jew banker patsies from the dark side of the moon.”

Oh Jesus fuck,
Huw thinks incoherently, lying back and trying to get both eyes to focus simultaneously. He still feels sick to his stomach and a bit dizzy, the way he’s been since Bonnie found him neatly curled up under a gas tree with a huge lump on his head and his parachute rigging draped across the incendiary branches. “Have you seen my teapot?” he tries to say, but he’s not sure it comes out right.

“You want a cup of joe?” asks Doc. “Sure, we can do that.” He pats Huw’s shoulder with avuncular charm. “You just lie there and let my little helpers eat the blood clots in your brain for a while.”

“Bonnie—,” Huw whispers, but Doc is already standing and turning toward the door at the other side of the surgery, out of his line of sight. The blow from the motor did something worse to him than concussion, and he can’t seem to move his arms or legs—or neck.
I’m still breathing, so it can’t be that bad,
he tells himself hopefully.
Remember, if you break your neck during a botched parachute landing and then a mad conspiracy theorist injects black market nanomachines into you, it’s highly unlikely that anything worse can happen before sundown,
he tells himself in a spirit of misplaced optimism.

And things are, indeed, looking up compared to where they were an hour or two ago. Bonnie had found him, still unconscious, lying at the foot of a tree that was already dribbling toxic effluent across his boots. The teapot was screaming for help at the top of its tinny electronic lungs as an inquisitive stream of brick red ants crawled over its surface, teaming up to drag it back to one wing of the vast sprawling supercolony that owned the continent. The ants stung, really, really hard. And there were
lots
of them, like a tide sweeping over his body. It was Bonnie who’d signaled Doc, using some kind of insane spatchcock mobile phone jury-rigged from the wreckage of her parachute harness to broadcast on all channels for help, and it was Bonnie who’d sat beside him, whispering sweet nothings and occasionally whacking impudent Formicidae, until Doc hove into view on his half-rusted swamp boat. But she’d vanished, not sticking around to explain to Doc how come she and Huw were at large in the neverglades—and the doc seemed mad about that.

After a couple of hours on the operating table, Huw has discovered that half an hour can be a very long time indeed when your only company is a demented quack and you can’t even scratch your arse by way of entertainment. And his arse
itches
. In fact, it’s not all that itches. Up and down his spine, little shivers of tantalizing irritation are raising gooseflesh. “Shitbiscuits,” he mumbles as his left hand begins to tremble uncontrollably. The nanobots have reached the swollen, damaged tissues within his cervical vertebrae and are busily reducing the swelling. They’re coaxing suicidal neurons back into cytocellular stability, laying temporary replacement links where apoptosis has already proceeded to completion, and generally repairing the damage Huw’s supine spinal cord has received. For which Huw is incredibly grateful—if Doc were as nuts as he seems, he might have injected an auto engine service pack and Huw might at this very moment be gestating a pile of gleaming ceramic piston rings—but it
itches
with the fire of a thousand ants crawling inside his veins. “Balls on a tea towel,” he says. And then his toes begin to tremble.

By the time Doc reappears, Huw is sitting up, albeit as shaky as an ethanol addict in the first week of withdrawal. He moans quietly as he accepts a chipped mass-produced Exxon mug full of something dark and villainous enough that it resembles a double-foam latte, if the barista substituted Gulf crude for steamed milk. “Thanks,” he manages to choke out. “I think. I hope Bonnie comes back soon.”

“That godless sinning harridan?” Doc cranks one eyebrow up until it teeters alarmingly. “Naw, son, you don’t want to be going worrying about the likes of her. She’s bad company, her and her crew—between you and me, I figure she’s in league with the space bats.” He chuckles. “Naw, you’ll be much better off with me an’ Sam. Ade told us all about you and what you’re here for. We’ll set you straight.”

“Ade. Told you.” Huw’s stomach does a backflip, which feels extremely strange because something is wrong with his body image. It feels all wrong inside. He clears his throat and almost chokes: the alien whistle-thing-communicator is gone! Then his stomach gives a warning twinge and his momentary flash of hope fades. The godvomit has simply retreated deeper into his gastrointestinal tract, hiding to bide its time like a bad plot twist in a Tamil robo-apocalypse movie. “How’d you know him?”

“’Cause we do a bit of business from time to time.” Doc’s eyebrow relaxes as he grins at Huw. “A little light smuggling, son. Don’t let it get on your nerves. Ade told us what to do with you, and everything’s going to be just fine.”

“Just fine—” Huw stops. “What are you going to do with me?” he asks.

“Ade figures we oughta deliver you to the Baptist temple in Glory City—that’s Charleston as was—in time for next Thursday’s memorial service. It’s the forty-sixth anniversary of the Rapture, and they get kinda jumpy at this time of year.” A meaty hand descends on Huw’s shoulder and he looks round, then up, and up until his newly fixed neck aches at the sight of a large, completely hairless man with skin the color of a dead fish and little piggy eyes. “Son, this is Sam. Say hello, Sam.”

“Hello, Sam,” rumbles the human mountain. Huw blinks.

“You’re going to hand me over to the Baptists?” he asks. “What happens then?”

“Well.” Doc scratches his head. “That’s up to you, isn’t it?”

“But this anniversary. What do you mean, they get jumpy?”

“Oh, nothing much. Just sacrifice a bunch of heretics to make God notice they still believe, that kinda thing. You got a problem with that?”

“Maybe.” Huw licks his lips. “What if I don’t want to go?”

“Well, then.” Doc cocks his head to one side and squints at Huw’s left ear. “Say, son, that’s a mightly nice ear you’ve got there. Seeing as how you’ve not paid your medical bill, I figure we’d have to take it off you to cover the cost of your treatment. Plus maybe a leg, a kidney, and an eye or two. How about it?”

“No socialized medicine here!” rumbles Sam as a second backhoe-sized hand closes around Huw’s other shoulder.

“Okay! I’ll do it! I’ll do it!” Huw says.

Doc beams amiably at him. “That calls for a shot of shine,” says the medic. “I
knew
you’d see sense. Now, about the alien space bats. We’ve got this here telescope that Sam liberated when they were burning the university—hive of godless heretics—but we don’t know how to work it proper. Have you ever used one? We’re looking for the bat cave on the moon. ...”

Welcome to the American future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.

Over the years and decades since the singularity, the ant colony has taken the entire Atlantic coast of the United States, has marched on Georgia and west to the Mississippi. It is an anarchist colony, whose females lay eggs without regard for any notional Queen, and it has just entered its fiftieth year of life, which is Methuselah-grade longevity by normal ant colony standards, but may be just the beginning for the Hypercolony.

The God-botherers have no treaty with the ants, but have come to view them as another proof of the impending end of the world. Anything that is not contained in chink-free, seamless plastic and rock is riddled by ant tunnels within hours. They’ve learned to establish airtight seals around their homes and workplaces, to subject themselves to stinging insecticide showers before clearing a vestibule, to listen for the Tupperware burp whenever they seal their children in their space suits and send them off to Bible classes.