Rapture of the Nerds (19 page)

They’ve amputated the dalek suit’s gun and damped its public address system, so that Judge Judy is reduced to a neutered head on a peppermill with a black robe of office draped round it. Nevertheless, she is still capable of giving looks that could curdle milk and make sheep miscarry. Huw numbly watches her glare at the Bishop, and the Bishop’s watery answering stare.

“What
shall
We do with you?” the Bishop says. “Officially, you’re dead, which is convenient, since it wouldn’t do to have the great unwashed discover that God’s will was apparently to let you go.

“The entity who alerted Us to your presence was adamant that the sinner here should be spared. You’re host to some kind of godvomit that many entities are interested in, and apparently it needs you intact in order to work. It’s very annoying: we can’t kill you again.”

“I’m thrilled.” Huw’s voice is a flat monotone. “But I ’spect that means that Sam here’s
not
going to live. Nor the judge?” Sam is strapped to a board and immobilized by more restraints than a bondage convention, but it’s mostly a formality. He’s barely breathing, and the compress on his face blooms with a thousand blood-colored roses.

“Well, of course not,” the Bishop says. “Heretics. Enemies of the state. They’re to be shoved out the lock as soon as We’re sure that they’ve got nothing of interest to impart to Us. A day or two, tops. Got that, Your Honor? As long as you say useful things, you live.”

The judge sputters angrily in her peppermill.

“Now, let’s get you prepped for the operating theater,” the Bishop says.

Huw can barely muster the will to raise an eyebrow at this. “Operating theater?”

“Yes. We’ve found that quadruple amputees are much more pliable and less apt to take it on the lam than the able-bodied. You’ll get used to it, trust us.”

The servants of the Inquisition, ranged around them, titter at this.

“Take them back to their cells,” the Bishop says, waving a hand. “And notify the surgeons.”

Huw is having a dream. He’s a disembodied head whose vocal cords thrum in three-part harmony with a whistle lodged in his stump of a throat. The song is weird and familiar, something he once sang to a beautiful girl, a girl who gave her life for him. The song is all around him, sonorous and dense, a fast demodulation of information from the cloud, high above, his truncated sensorium being transmitted to the curious heavens. The song is the song he sang to the beautiful girl, and she’s singing
back
.

His eyes open, waking. He’s on the floor of his cell, parched dry and aching, still shrink-wrapped but with the full complement of limbs. The whistle warbles deep in his throat, and the floor vibrates in sympathy, with the tromping of a trillion tiny feet and the scissoring of a trillion sharpened mouthparts.

The ants razor through the floor, and Huw squirms away from them as best as he can—but the best he can do is hump himself inchworm style into a corner, pressed up against the wall of the dome that forms the outer wall of his cell. The song pours out of his throat, unabated by his terror. Some part of him is surprised that he’s capable of caring about anything anymore, but he does not want to be eaten by the ants, does not want to be reduced to a Huw-shaped lump of brick red crawling insects.

The whistle’s really going to town now. The ambassador is having words with the Hypercolony, and Huw can just barely make out the sense of the song he’s singing:
Ready for upload interface instructions
.

The ants have covered him, covered the walls and the floor and the ceiling, they’ve eaten through his coating of shrink-wrap, but the expected stings don’t come. Instead, Huw is filled with the sense of vast clumps of information passing through his skin, through the delicate mucous membranes of his eyes and nostrils, through his ears and the roots of his hair, all acrawl with ants whose every step conveys something.

Something: the totality of the Hypercolony—its weird, sprawling consciousness, an emergent phenomenon of its complexity, oozing through his pores and through the ambassador and up to the cloud. It’s not just the ants, either—it’s everything they’ve ever eaten: everything they’ve ever
disassembled
.

Somewhere in that stream is every building, every car, every tree and animal and—and every
person
the ants have eaten. Have disassembled.

Bonnie is passing through him, headed for the cloud. Well, she always did want to upload.

Huw doesn’t know how long the ambassador holds palaver with the Hypercolony, only knows that when the song is done, he is so hoarse, he can barely breathe. (During a duet, do the musicians pay any attention to the emotional needs of their instruments?) He leans against the wall, throat raw as the ambassador chatters to the ant colony—biological carriers for the engines of singularity, its own ancestral bootstrap code—and he can just barely grasp what’s going on. There are complex emotions here, regret and loss and irony and schadenfreude and things for which human languages hold no words, and he feels very stupid and very small as he eavesdrops on the discourse between the two hive minds. Which is, when the chips are down, a very
small
discourse, for the ambassador doesn’t have enough bandwidth to transmit everything the ants have ever stored: it’s just a synchronization node, the key that allows the Hypercolony to talk to the cloud in orbit high above it.

And Bonnie is
still
dead, for all that something that remembers being her is waking up upstairs, and he’s still lying here in a cell waiting to be chopped up by barbarians, and there’s something really weirdly wrong with the way he feels in his body, as if the ants have been making impromptu modifications, and as the ambassador says good-bye to the ants, a sense of despair fills him—

The door opens.

“Hello, my child.” It’s the other Bishop, the pansexual pervert in the polygenital suit. It winks at him: “Expecting someone else?”

Huw tries to reply. His throat hurts too much for speech just yet, so he squirms up against the wall, trying to get away, for all the time an extra millimeter will buy him.

“Oh, stop worrying,” the Bishop says. “I—ah, ah!—I just dropped by to say everything’s sorted out. Mission accomplished, I gather. The, ah, puritans are holed up upstairs watching a fake snuff video of your disassembly for spare organs—operating theaters make for great cinema and provide a good reason for not inviting them to the auto-da-fé in person. Isn’t CGI great? Which means you’re mostly off the hook now, and we can sort out repatriating you.”

“Huh?” Huw blinks, unsure what’s going on.
Is this a setup?
But there’s no reason
why
the lunatics would run him through something like this, is there? It’s so weird, it’s got to be true, Rosa’s Tyburn Tales reality livecast notwithstanding. “Wh-whaargh, what do you mean?” He coughs horribly. His throat is full of something unpleasant and thick, and his chest feels sore and bloated.

“We’re sending you home,” the Bishop says. It holds up a dainty hand and snaps its fingers; a pair of hermaphrodites in motley suits with bells on the tips of their pointy shoes steer in a wheelchair and go to work on what remains of Huw’s bonds with electric shears and a gentle touch. “You have our thanks for a job well done. I’d beatify you, except it’s considered bad form while the recipient is still alive, but you can rest assured that your lover is well on her way to being canonized as a full saint in the First Church of the Teledildonic. Giving up her life so that you might survive to bring the Hypercolony into the full Grace of the cloud certainly would qualify her for beatification, even if her other actions weren’t sufficient, which they were, as it happens.” The acolytes’ slim hands lift Huw into the wheelchair and wheel him through the door.

“I feel weird,” Huw says, voice odd in his ears.
My ears?
For one thing, he’s got two of them and he could have
sworn
the Inquisitors took a hot wire to one. And for another ... He manages to look down and whimpers slightly.

“Yes, that’s often one of the symptoms of beatification,” the Bishop says placidly. “The transgendered occupy a special place of honor in our rites, and to have it imposed on you by the Hypercolony is a special sign of grace.” And Huw sees that it’s true, but he doesn’t feel as upset about it as he knows he ought to. The ants have given him a whole goddamn new body while the ambassador was singing a duet with them, and he—she—is about five developmental-years younger, five centimeters shorter, and if her pubes are anything to go by, her hair’s going to come in two shades lighter than it was back when she was a man.

It’s one realization too many, so Huw zones out as the Bishop’s minions wheel her up the corridor and into an elevator while the Bishop prattles on. The explanation that the Bishop is the leader of both the Church Temporal—the Fallen Baptists—and the Church Transcendental—the polyamorous perverts—passes her by. There’s some arcane theological justification for it all, references to Zoroastrian dualism, but in her depression and disorientation the main thing that’s bugging Huw is the fact that she survived—and Bonnie didn’t. That, and worrying about how to pay for a really good gender reassignment doc when she gets home.

Huw tries to imagine what the old Huw, the Huw who went down to his pottery every day, would have felt about being turned into a woman by a bunch of quasi-sentient ants en route to immortal transcendence. A lot angrier, she thinks. But after all she’s been through, well, her moral outrage gland appears to have forgotten how to fire. (Or perhaps it wasn’t installed in this new body, which is an outrage, but she can’t get worked up about it, because, well, no moral outrage, right? The fact is, she can just have it all put back the way it was, and all the niggling differences between the original equipment and the new parts they’ll grow her just don’t seem that important anymore. Huw doesn’t really like personal growth, but some is inevitable.

Upstairs in whatever dwelling they’re in, there’s a penthouse suite furnished in sybaritic luxury. Carpets of silky natural growing hair, wall-hanging screens showing views from the landscapes of imaginary planets, the obligatory devotional orgy beds and sex crucifixes of the Church of Teledildonics. The Bishop leads the procession in through the door, and a familiar voice squawks: “You’ll regret this!”

“Perhaps.” The Bishop is calm, and Huw sees why fairly rapidly.

Judge Giuliani spins her chair round and glares at them; then her eyes fasten on the wheelchair. “What happened here?” she says.

“The
alien artifact
you so urgently seek,” the Bishop says with heavy irony. “It has accomplished its task, and we are blessed by the fallout. Its humble human vessel whom you see before you—” A hand caresses Huw’s shoulder. “—is permanently affected by the performance, and
We
are deeply relieved.”

“Its. Task.”

Giuliani is aghast. “Are you insane? You let it
out
?”

“Certainly.” The Bishop smirks. “And we are all the ah, ah,
better
for it.” He pauses for a moment, sneezes convulsively, and shudders orgasmically. “Oh! Oh! That was good. Oh my. Yes, ah, the cloud has reestablished its communion with the North American continent, and I feel sure that the Hypercolony is deeply relieved to have offloaded almost two decades’ worth of uploads—everything that has happened since the Rapture of the Nerds, in fact.”

“Ah.”

Giulani glares at the Bishop, then gives it up as a bad job—the Bishop doesn’t intimidate easily. “Who’s this?” she says, staring at Huw.

“This? Don’t you recognize her?” The Bishop simpers. “She’s your creation, after all. And you’re going to take very good care of her, aren’t you?”

“Gack,” says Huw, blanching. She tries to lever herself out of the wheelchair, but she’s still weak as a baby.

“If you think I’m—” A puzzled expression crawls over the judge’s face. “Why?” she says. She peers closer at Huw and hisses to herself: “You, you little rat-bastard! Court is in session—”

“—

Because the ambassador she carries is the main pacemaker for all uploads from the North American continent, and if you don’t look after her, the cloud will be
very
pissed off with you. And so will the Hypercolony. Oh, and if you don’t promise to look after her, you aren’t going home. Is that good enough for you?”

“Ahem,” says

Giuliani. She squints at Huw, eyebrows beetling evilly. “Main pacemaker for a whole continent? Is that true?”

Huw nods, unable to trust her throat.

“Hmm.”

Giuliani clears her throat. “Then, goddamnit, I hereby find you not guilty of everything in general and nothing in particular. All charges are dismissed.” She glares at the Bishop. “I’ll even get her enrolled in the witness protection program. Will that do for now?”

Huw shudders, but the Bishop nods agreeably. “Yes, that will be sufficient,” he says. “New skin, new identity, clean sheet. Just remember, you wouldn’t want the Hypercolony to come calling, er, crawling, would you?”

The judge nods, meek submission winning out over bubbling rage.

“Very well. There appears to be a jet with diplomatic clearance on final approach into Charleston right now. Shall we go and put you it?”

Halfway across the Atlantic, Huw falls into a troubled sleep, cuddled restlessly in her first-class berth. Sitting up front in ambassador class, the judge mutters darkly to herself, occasionally glancing nervously over her shoulder in the direction of Huw and her passenger. Far above them, the cloud whirls in its orbit, tasting the meat with its mutifarious sensory apparati, holding its ineffable internal squabbles, thinking its ineffable thoughts, muttering in RF and gravity and eigenstate. Now there’s someone to talk to downstairs, signals synchronized by the beat of Huw’s passenger, it grows positively voluble: catching up with the neighborhood gossip, chuckling and chattering in many voices about the antics of those lovable but dim dreaming apes who remain below.

Huw dreams she’s back at Sandra Lal’s house, in the aftermath of that memorable party that started this whole thing off. Only she’s definitely
she
—wearing her new body, aware of it but comfortable in it at the same time. She’s in the kitchen, chewing over epistemology with Bonnie. A sense of sadness spills over her, but Bonnie laughs at something, waving—Bonnie is male, this time—at the window. Then he holds out his hand to Huw. Huw walks into his embrace and they hold each other for a long time. Bonnie doesn’t say anything, but his question is clear in Huw’s head as she leans her chin on his shoulder. “Not yet,” Huw says. “I’m not ready for that. Not till I’ve kicked Ade’s butt halfway into orbit and cleared it with the judge. They’re making you a saint, did you know that?”