Rapture of the Nerds (13 page)

The ants have eaten through most of the nematode species beneath the soil, compromised all but the most plasticized root systems of the sickening flora. (The gasoline-refining forests are curiously symbiotic with the colony—anarchist supercolonies like living cheek-by-mouthpart with a lot of hydocarbons.) They’ve eaten the beehives and wasp nests, and they’ve laid waste to any comestible not tinned and sealed, leaving the limping Americans with naught but a few trillion tons of processed food to eat before their supply bottoms out.

The American continent is a very Grimm fairy tale that the cloud dwellers review whenever one faction or another doubts its decision to abandon Earth-bound humanity. The left-behinds there spend their lives waiting for an opportunity to pick up a megaphone and organize crews with long poles to go digging through the ruins of civilization for tinned goods. Presented with their opportunity in the aftermath of the Geek Rapture, they are happy as evangelical pigs in shit—plenty to rail against, plenty of fossil fuel, plenty of firearms.

What more could they possibly need?

Once it becomes clear that Huw is prepared to go to Glory City, the doc comes all-over country hospitality, and details Sam with the job of getting him properly lubricated. They watch the sunset through the tupperware walls of the doc’s homestead, gazing out at the thick carpet of ants swarming over the outer walls as they chase the last of the sun across the surface. When the sun finally sets, the sound of a billion tromping feet keeps them company.

“Well,” says Doc, nodding at Sam. “Looks like it’s time to hit the road.”

Huw sits up straight. Glory City is
not
on his agenda, but if he’s going to make a break for it, he wants to do it somewhere a bit more crowded and anonymous than here, right in the middle of Doc’s home turf. Plus, he’s still weak as a kitten from gasoline-tainted corn mash and the nanos knitting busily in his guts.

“We’ll take the bikes,” Doc says with an affable nod. “Go get ’em, Sam.”

Sam thuds off toward an outbuilding, the plasticized floors dimpling under his feet.

“He’s a good boy,” says Doc. “But I figure I used too many cognitive enhancers on him when he was a lad. Made him
way
too smart for his own good.”

Sam returns with a serious-looking anime-bike dangling from each hand. “alt.pave-the-earth,” he says, setting them down. His voice is bemused, professorial. “I’ll go get the sidecar.”

“He’ll need a space suit,” Doc calls after him. “What’re you, about a medium?”

Huw, staring wordlessly at the stretched and striated bikes with their angular moldings, opens his mouth. “I’m a 107-centimeter chest,” he says.

“Ah, we don’t go in for that metric eurofaggotry around here, son. Don’t really matter much. Space suits never fit too good. You’ll get used to it. It’s only six hours.”

Sam returns with a low-slung sidecar under one arm and a suit of Michelin Man armor over his shoulders.

“It’s very ergonomic,” he says tectonically as he sits the suit down next to Huw’s folding lawn chair, then goes to work attaching the car to one of the bikes.

Huw fumbles with the Michelin suit, eventually getting the legs pulled on.

“Binds a bit at the crotch,” he says, hoping for some sympathy.

“Yeah, it’ll do that,” says Doc.

Huw modestly turns his back and reaches down to adjust himself. As he does so, he fumbles with the familiar curve of the brass teapot. Peeking down, he sees a phosphorescent miniature holographic Ade staring back up at him.

“Quick! Hide me,” Adrian says.

Huw puts his hand where he’d expect to find a pocket, and a little hatch pops open, exposing a hollow cavity in the thigh. He sneaks the teapot into it and dogs the hatch shut. “I’m ready, I think,” he says, turning round again.

Doc and Sam have already suited up; they’re waiting impatiently for Huw to get ready. The bikes are bolted either side of the sidecar, and Doc waves Huw into the cramped seat in the middle. Waddling in the suit, clutching a portable aircon pack, Huw has a hard time climbing in. Everything sounds muffled except the whirr of the helmet fans. A pronounced smell of stale BVDs and elderly rubber assaults his nose periodically, as if the suit is farting in his face. “Let’s go,” Sam says, and they kick off toward the doorway, which irises open to admit a trickling rain of ants as the bikes roar and spurt gouts of flame against the darkness.

The blast of the jet engines doesn’t die down, nor does the laser-show strobing off the pixelboards on the outsized fuel tanks, but somehow Huw manages to snooze through the next couple of hours: it’s probably the moonshine. Doc is rambling at length about some recondite point of randite ideology, illuminating his own rugged self-reliance with the merciless glare of A-is-A objectivist clarity, but after a few minutes Huw discovers two controls on his chest plate that raise his opinion of the suit designers: a drinking straw primed with white lightning, and the volume control on the radio. As his sort-of jailers drive him along a potholed track lined with the filigree skeletons of ant-nibbled trees, he kicks back and tries to get his head together. If it wasn’t for the eventual destination, he could almost begin to enjoy himself, but there’s a nagging sense of weirdness in his stomach (where the godvomit still nestles, awaiting a communicative impulse) and he can’t help worrying about what he’ll do once they get to Glory City.

An indeterminate time passes, and Huw is awakened by a sharp prodding pain near his bladder. “Uh.” He lolls in the suit, annoyed.

“Psst, keep it quiet. They think you’re sleeping.” The prodding sensation goes away, replaced by a buzzing voice from just north of his bladder.

“Ade?” Huw whispers.

“No, it’s the tooth fairy. Listen, have you seen Bonnie?”

“Not lately. She went for—” Huw pauses. “You know I landed bad?”

“Shit. So that’s why you’re with Doc. Have they got her?”

“No.” Huw desperately wants to scratch his head in puzzlement, but his arms are folded down inside the sidecar and he doesn’t dare let Sam or Doc figure he’s awake. “Look, I woke up and the doctor—
is
he a real doc?—was trying to fix my neck. A motor fell on my head. Bonnie got him to help, but then she left and I haven’t seen her.”

“Cholera and crummy buttons.” Ade’s tinny voice sounds upset. “They’re not trustworthy, mate. Sell you as soon as look at you, those two. She
said
you were hurt, but—”

“You don’t know where she is, either,” Huw says.

“Nope.” They ride along in near silence for a while.

“What’s the big idea?” Huw asks, trying to sustain a sense of detachment. “Packing me off to bongo-bongo land to convert the cannibals is all very fucking well, but I thought you said this would be safe as houses?”

“Um, well, there’s been a kinda technical hitch in that direction,” Adrian says. “But we’ll get that sorted out, don’t you worry yer little head over it. Main thing is, you don’t wanna stay with the randroids any longer than you have to, got that? Show ’em a clean pair of heels, mate. When you get to Glory City, head for the John the Baptist Museum of Godless Evolution and find the Steven Jay Gould Lies and Blasphemy exhibit. There’s a trapdoor under the
Hallucigenia
mock-up leading to an atheist’s hole, and if you get there, I’ll send someone to pick you up. ’Kay?”

“Wait—,” Huw says, but he’s too late. The buzzing stops, just as Doc reaches over and cuffs Huw around the helmet. “What?” Huw cranks the volume on his suit radio.

“—said, you paying attention, boy?” Doc demands. There’s a suspicious gleam in his eye, although Huw isn’t certain it isn’t just the effect of looking at him through a thin layer of toughened glass across which wander a handful of very lost ants.

“I was asleep,” Huw says.

“Bah.” Doc rubs off the ants, then grabs the brakes. “Well, son, I was just saying: only a couple of hours now until we get there. ...”

The road is unlit and there’s little traffic. What there is seems to consist mostly of high-tech bicycle rickshaws retrofitted for unapologetic hydrocarbon combustion, and ancient rusting behemoth pickups that belch thick blue petroleum smoke—catalytic converters and fuel cells being sins against man’s deity-designated dominance over nature. The occasional wilted and ant-nibbled wreaths plaintively underscore the messages on the tarnished and bullet-speckled road signs:
keep right
and
slow trucks
.

The landscape is dotted with buildings that have the consistency of halvah. These are the remains of man’s folly and his pride, now bored out of 90 percent of their volume to fill the relentless bellies of the Hypercolony. Individually, the ants crawling across his faceplate—also along his gauntlets, over the sexy sizzle of the LEDs, and crisped up in a crust around the flame-nozzles—appear to be disjointed and uncoordinated. But now, here, confronted with the evidence of the Hypercolony’s ability to coordinate collective action from its atomic units, Huw is struck with a deep, atavistic terror. There is an Other here, loose on the continent, capable of bringing low all that his kind has built. Suddenly, Huw’s familiar corporeality, the source of so much personal pride, starts to feel like a liability.

The aircon unit makes a sputtery noise that Huw feels rather than hears through the cavities of the michelin-suit. He’s tried wiggling the aircon umblicus in its suit-seal, but now the air coming out of it is hot and wet and smells of burning insulation. He’s panting and streaming with sweat by the time the dim white dome of Glory City swims out of the darkness ahead to straddle the road like a monstrous concrete carbuncle. Sam guns the throttle like a tireless robot, while Doc snors in the saddle, his mouth gaping open beneath his mustache, blurred behind the ant-crawling Lexan of his faceplate. “How much longer?” Huw says, the first words he’s spoken in an hour.

“Three miles. Then we park up and take a room for the night in Saint Pat’s Godly Irish Motel. No smoking, mind,” Sam adds.

Huw stares in grim, panting silence as they take the uphill slope toward the base of the massive, kilometers-high Fuller dome that caps the former city. Impregnated with neurotoxins, the dome is the ultimate defense against the Hypercolony. They ride into the city past a row of gibbeted criminals, their caged bones picked clean by ants, then into the deserted and gaping air lock, large enough to accommodate an armored batallion. What Huw initially takes for an old-fashioned air-shower turns out to be a gas chamber, venting something that makes his throat close when he gets a hint of a whiff of it through the suit’s broken aircon. After ten minutes of gale-force nerve gas, most of the ants are washed away, and those that remain appear to have died. Sam produces a stiff whisk broom and, with curious gentleness, brushes him free of the few thousand corpses that have become anchored by their mouthparts to his suit. They he hands Huw the whisk so that he may return the favor. Only after they are all thoroughly decontaminated do the inner doors to Glory City open wide, sucking them into the stronghold of the left-behind.

Once within the dome, Huw finds that Glory City bears little resemblance to any media representations of pre-singularity NorAm cities he’s ever seen. For one thing, the roads are narrow and the buildings tall, leaning together like a sinister crowd of drunkards, the olde-world, olde-town feel revived to make maximum use of the cubic volume enclosed by the dome. For another thing, about half the tallest buildings seem to be spiky towers, like the old medieval things back home that he associates with seamy nightclubs. It takes him a moment to realize:
Those
are
churches!
He’s never imagined so many temples existing before, let alone in a single city.

The next thing he notices are the adverts. They’re everywhere. On billboards and paving stones and the sides of parked monster trucks. (And, probably, tattooed on the hides of the condemned prisoners outside before the ants ate them.) Half the ads are public service announcements, and the other half are religious slogans. It’s hard to know which category some go in:
enjoy christ on a shingle: all the zest half the calories lower glycemic index
! Whichever they are, they set his teeth on edge—so that he’s almost happy when Sam steers him into a cramped parking lot behind a tall gray slab of concrete and grunts, “This is the motel.”

It’s about two in the morning, and Huw catches himself yawning as Sam shakes Doc awake and extracts him from the sidecar. “C’mon in,” says Doc. “Let’s get some sleep. Got a long day tomorrow, son.”

The lobby of the motel is guarded by a fearsome-looking cast-iron gate. Huw unlatches his faceplate and heaves a breath: the air is humid and warm, cloying and laden with decay as sweet as a rotting tooth. Doc approaches the concierge’s desk while Sam hangs back, one meaty hand gripping Huw’s arm proprietorially. “Don’t you go getting no clever ideas,” Sam says like a quiet earthquake. “Doc tagged you with a geotracker chip. You go running away, you’ll just get him riled.”

“Uh. Okay.” Huw dry-swallows the muck lining his teeth.

Doc is at the desk, talking to a woman in long black dress. She wears a bonnet that looks like it’s nailed to her head, and she’s
old,
showing all the distressing signs of physical senescence. “Twenty cents for the suite,” she says, “and fifteen for the pen.” (Post-imperial deflation has taken its toll on the once-mighty dollar.) She wags a wrinkled finger under Doc’s nose: “And none of your filth!”

Doc draws himself up to his full height. “I assure you, I am here to do the Lord’s work,” he says. “Along with this misguided creep. And my assistant.”

Sam pushes Huw forward. “Doc gets the presidential suite whenever he stays here,” he says. “You get to sleep in the pen.”

“The—?”

“’Cause we don’t rightly trust you,” Sam says, pushing Huw toward a side door behind the reception area. “So a little extra security is called for.”

“Oh—,” Huw says, and stops.
Oh, really now,
Huw would say, except that the doc is holding at arm’s-length a squeeze bottle of something liquid and so cold that it is fogged with a rime of condensation. Huw’s throat is dry: suddenly he’s unable to ignore it.