Rapture of the Nerds (20 page)

Bonnie nods, and makes a weird warbling singsong noise in the back of her throat. It soothes Huw, and she can feel an answering song rising from the ambassador. “No, don’t worry about me,” Huw murmurs. “I’ll be all right. We’ll get together sometime; I just have some loose ends to tie up first.”

And the funny thing is that even inside her dream, she believes it.

Herein begins the final adventure of Huw and his friends, the most recent addition to this story that Charlie and Cory labored over for seven long years. As you read the foregoeing, we expect that you found yourself utterly immersed in Huw's madcap adventures among the ants and their prey. As a service to you, the reader, we now offer this brief return to the cold, hard, default reality of the preposthuman world, a mundane place full of mundane concerns.

How mundane, you ask? Well, consider the fact that Charlie and Cory have to pause from their work imagining weird futuristic scenarios to pay mortgages, purchase real ale (Charlie) and espresso-roast coffee beans (Cory), exchange money for Internet access and electricity, and replace the keyboards we have worn out through the busy work of our aching, cramped fingers.

Hence this interlude, wherein we implore you, the reader, to return with us to the boring world of commerce. To reflect with us for a moment upon the so-called "real world" and all of its small, highly detailed frills and fillips. Such as bookstores, many of which still stand mute and lonely in nearby malls, high streets, and commercial centers. And online bookstores, which can be reached through a few clicks of the mouse. To imagine how how might make a difference to a cash-strapped school or library with a
donation
of a copy of this book. Try and visualize this with us, imagine the sigh of the store's door or the insectile click of the mouse, and then act as your conscience dictates.

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

History repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce.

Huw has been home for almost two weeks, going through the motions of a life that made sense to her earlier self but now seems terminally mired in arbitrary constraints. There is the pottery to tend, kilns to clean, extruders to manage, and a windmill with a squeaky bearing that wants periodic seeing to. There is a nineteenth-century terraced house to clean, for in the absence of electricity, there are no labor-saving robots. Newly reembodied, Huw is her own servant, and succeeds for a time in losing herself in manual labor. It’s better than confronting what s/he’s been through head-on.

Grief piles up like unread mail, dusty and suffocating.

The tech jury stint was brief—a few days aboard the airship to Tripoli, then a couple of days of acute terror; half a week unconscious or inebriated on a blimp bound for the neverglades, and then a mercifully short stay in the nightmarish land of the left-behind—but it has punctuated the steady flatline graph of Huw’s life with the infinitely steep spike of a personal singularity. Following her return home—ejected from the judge’s jet somewhere in the icy-cold stratosphere above Monmouth, falling terrified for fully thirty seconds before the parachute opened—she battled with the twin depressions of jet lag and mourning. The latter she has more experience of, her parents’ one true legacy: finding and so rapidly losing Bonnie hurts like hell, and acquiring a mild case of gender dysphoria is just the icing on top.

Jet lag, however, is something she has only read about in the yellowing pages of last-century travel romances. And so, after a couple of days of 3
a.m.
fry-ups and unaccountable sleepiness at noon, she attempts to slot herself back into her old life and bash her broken circadian rhythm onto British summer time. Nothing makes for a good night’s sleep like hard physical labor, and so it is that she comes to be putting in hard overtime in the kitchen garden one afternoon when she hears the distant brassy clang of the front door bell.

“Whutfuck
wheep
,” she says, the ambassador adding an unwelcome loop of metallic feedback by way of punctuation as she straightens up, plunges the rake point-down into the edge of the Romanesco broccoli patch, and shambles toward the back door. “I mean, who—” She scuffs the soles of her boots on the front step before crossing the kitchen floor and entering the hallway “—the fuck is visiting at—” and into the front porch. “—this time of—” She opens the door.

“Wotcher, babe!”

“
Aaargh!”
Huw nearly trips over as she takes a step back: “You, you vomitous streak of bat piss! What the fuck are
you
doing here?”

Ade beams at her cheerfully: “You the new Huw, eh? Nice jubblies, mate: they suit you. I should do something about the hairdo though. And the mud. ’Ere, I thought you should have this.” He proffers a slightly grubby, dog-eared paper envelope.

“
You
...” Huw steams at Ade: in her old testosterone-enhanced body, she’d have taken a swing at him, but the old physical aggression is dialed down somewhat and anyway,
envelope
. “Fucking get off my land!”

“Sure thing, babe. Don’t forget to call!” Ade says, then legs it for his Hertz rental bicycle patiently balancing itself in the road outside. He pedals like mad, presumably not convinced that Huw doesn’t have a shotgun or arbalest or some similar anachronistic contraption.

Huw stares after him, heart thudding so hard, it makes her vision jitter. She clenches the envelope. It’s stiff:
must be a card
. She steps backwards jerkily, nearly goes arse-over-tit on her own front porch, closes and carefully dead bolts the door, then retreats to the kitchen for a bracing cup of tea.

While the kettle is heating, she is at a loose end for a few unwelcome moments. Huw has diligently avoided having time to think ever since she got home, because the slightest attempt at probing her memories gives her screaming hysterics: she—
no, he
—first volunteered for tech jury service to keep the godvomit nightmares
out,
to (she flinches from this thought) maybe find some sense of closure for thedesolation that’s been with her since her parents abandoned her for the cloud all those decades ago. (
Committed suicide,
part of her insists.
Transcended the meatpuppet show,
a traitor impulse adds. Either way, Huw wasn’t willing to follow them at the time.) Only now it’s hard to tell who was right and who was wrong. All she knows for sure is that Ade knowingly sent Bonnie into a situation that would kill her. And Huw has come to loathe Ade with a visceral hatred she hasn’t hitherto experienced.

For a couple of seconds she holds the sealed envelope beside the sewage-gas burner under the kettle and watches the envelope begin to singe and brown. But then ashe pulls it back: What if it’s not from Ade? Who else might want to write her a letter? Sandra? If there’s one person she hates more than Ade right now, it’s Sandra. But if she burns the letter, she’ll never know for sure—

The flap rips under the pressure of her sharpened thumbnail.

Your application for cosmological triage jury service has been provisionally accepted. To activate your application, present this card in person to
...

Huw screams and dumps the kettle, shoving the card straight into the blue-hot jet of flame. But the gesture is futile: it’s made not from murdered trees but some exotic and indestructible synthetic fiber, and all the heat does is make the print on the letter fluoresce—that, and burn Huw’s fingers.

Huw is holding her right hand under the cold-water tap and swearing when there’s another a knock at the door.

“Who is it?” she calls down the hall.

“It’s the Singularity,” a booming voice calls.

“What do you want?”

“Everything is different now!”

“I don’t want any.”

“If I could just have a moment of your time?” It takes a lot of skill to make a stentorian voicejob emit a credible wheedle, but the bell ringer at the door had clearly practiced it to an art.

Huw turns the faucet back up and puts her fingers back into the cold stream. They’re vicious little burns, red welts that her honest, baseline cells will take weeks to properly heal. Of course, she could just ride over to the McNanite’s and get some salve that’d make them vanish before her eyes, but Huw’s endured much worse and she’s still got enough stubborn stockpiled to last her a couple of eons.

There’s another thud at the door.
Thud. Thud. Thudthudthud.
Then a transhuman tattoo of thuds in rising frequency, individual thuds blurring into a composite buzz that gets the bones of the old house rattling in sympathy, shivering down little hisses of plaster dust from the joints in the ceiling.

Huw uses her good hand to wrench the faucet off, then wraps a tea towel around her throbbing, dripping hand and walks to the door, gritting her teeth with every step as she forces herself not to run. It feels like the house might rattle down around her ears any second, but she won’t give the infinity-botherer outside the satisfaction.

She opens the door with the same measured calm. Let one of these fundies know you’re on edge, and he’ll try to grab the psychological advantage and work it until you agree to hear his pitch.

“I said,” Huw says, “I don’t want any.”

“I’m afraid I rather must insist,” says the infinity-botherer through his augmented, celestial voice box. The force of that voice makes Huw take an involuntary wincing step backwards, like a blast from an air horn. “Huw, this is mandatory, not optional.”

This is mandatory, not optional.
The words send Huw whirling back through time, back to her boyhood, and a million repetitions and variations on this phrase from his—

“Mum?” she asks, jaw dropped as she stares up at the giant

borg

on the doorstep. It’s at least three meters high, silvery and fluid, thin as a schwa, all ashimmer with otherworldly transcendant wossname. It’s neither beautiful nor handsome, though it’s intensely aesthetically pleasing in a way that demands some sort of genderless superlative that no human language has ever managed. Huw hates it instantly—especially since she suspects that the loa riding it might be descended from one of his awful parents.

“Yes, dear,” the Singularity booms. “I like the regendering, it really suits you. Your father would send his best, by the way, if he were still hanging around the solar system.”

Huw last saw her parents at their disembodiment; they’d already had avatars running around in the cloud for years, dipping into meatspace every now and again for a resynch with their slowcode bioinstances dirtside. When they were finally deconstituted into a fine powder of component molecules, it’d been a technicality, really, a final flourish in their transhumanifaction. But the finality of it, zeroing out of their bodies, had marked a break for Huw. Mum and Dad were now, technically, dead. They were technically alive too, but that was beside the point.

Until Mum donned a golem and came over for a chat.

“Mum, I don’t talk to dead people,” she says. “Go away.” She deliberately does not slam the door, but closes it, and turns the latch, and heads back to the sink, deliberately ignoring the fragment of cloud wearing her mum’s memories. She’s gone three steps before the door splinters and tears loose of its hinges, thudding to the painstakingly restored tile floor in the front hall with a merry tinkle of shattering antique glass.

“Love, I know you’re not best pleased to see me, but you’ve been summoned, and that’s that.”

The spirit of adolescence descends on Huw in a red mist. Her mum has always been able to reduce her to a screeching teakettle of resentment.
“get out of my house, mum! i hate you!
”

Her mum’s avatar grabs Huw in a vicious hug that feels like foam rubber padding wrapped around titanium armatures. “Poor thing,” it says. “I know it’s been hard for you. We did our best, you know, but well, we were only human. Now, come along, sweetie.”

It’s Tripoli all over again, but this time the golem whose grasp she can’t escape emits a steady stream of basso profundo validations about Huw’s many gifts and talents and how proud her parents are of all she’s achieved and suchlike. Huw tries to signal a beedlemote, but her mum’s got some kind of diplomatic semaphore that makes all the enforcementware give it free passage. Mum’s bot stops at every traffic signal, and several times Huw tries to get passersby to help her, with lines like, “I’m being kidnapped by the bloody Singularity!” but no one seems interested in lending a hand. Even if they did, well, Mum goes about 200 kmh between traffic lights, gait so fast that every time Huw opens her mouth to scream, it fills with wind, and her cheeks wibble and wobble while she tries to breathe past the air battering at her windpipe.

Then they’ve arrived. The consulate is midfab, and its hairy fractal edges radiate heat as nanites grab matter out of the sky to add to it. The actual walls are only waist high, though the spindly plumbing, mains, and network infrastructure are already in place and teeter skyward, like a disembodied nervous system filled with dye for an anatomical illustration.

The consul is an infinitely hot and dense dot of eyeball-warping fuzz in the exact center of what will be the ground floor. Well, not
exactly
infinite, but it does seem to bend the light around it, and it certainly radiates too much heat to approach very closely. “Thank you for coming,” it says. “You brought your invitation, I hope?”

“Fuck you!
No!
” Huw screams.

She’s gathering breath for another outburst, but Mum shakes her—gently by golem standards, but hard enough to rattle the teeth in her jaws. “
Bad
idea, darling.” A palpable cone of silence descends around Huw’s ears as Mum confides, “When I said it was mandatory, I was serious: if you don’t comply, it’ll delete everyone.”