Rapture of the Nerds (26 page)

“I hate this,” she says. “Everything it means to be human, reduced to a slider. All the solar system given over to computation, and they come up with the tasp. Artificial emotion to replace the genuine article.”

The djinni shakes his bulllike head. “You are the reductionist in this particular moment, I’m afraid. You wanted to feel happy, so you took steps that you correctly predicted would change your mental state to approach this feeling. How is that any different from wanting to be happy and eating a pint of ice cream to attain it? Apart from the calories and the reliability, that is. If you had practiced meditation for decades, you would have acquired the same capacity, only you would have smugly congratulated yourself for achieving emotional mastery. Ascribing virtue to doing things the hard, unsystematic, inefficient way is self-rationalizing bullshit that lets stupid people feel superior to the rest of the world. Trust me, I’m a djinni: There’s no shame in taking a shortcut or two in life.”

“Yeah, well, from what I’ve heard, people who let djinni s give them ‘shortcuts’ usually end up regretting it.”

“Propaganda written by people who resent their betters. If you’d like, I can put that little device back where I found it and you can go back to pretending that you’re not responsible for your emotional state.” The djinni reaches for the mixer-board.

“No!” Huw says, and snatches it back. As she does, she accidentally (and possibly not accidentally) nudges the slider a little more toward
happy
. She’s glad she did. Very glad.

“Right,” she says. “Right. Yeah. Okay. Right.” It occurs to Huw that it’s always easier to solve your problems when you’re in a good mood. She experimentally twiddles up the
curious
slider, and that sparks a round of quick, systematic experimentation with the rest of the box’s settings.

“How much realtime has passed on Earth?”

“About two minutes.”

“Guess we’d better call Adrian back, then,” she says.

The djinni’s finger blurs as he dials.

“Adrian?”

“’Lo, love. How’s every little thing wif you, sugartits?”

Huw plays the sliders like a pianist. “Adrian, you really need to listen to me for a moment. Can you do that?”

“Oh, I could listen to you all day, sweetnips.”

Huw knows exactly how angry she should be at this, but she’s got her sliders. A second’s drilling-and-zooming gets her to the place she needs to be. “Adrian, can we please take as read that I reacted with the outrage you’re craving, and allowed you to feel smugly superior in the way you need to feel in order to cope with your fundamental insecurity and self-loathing, so that we can get on to the point of this call? If it helps, I can ask around and see if I can create a chatbot of me that reacts in the way you’re hoping for, and you can play with it when we’re done.”

The line crackles. “What’s going on, Huw?”

Huw tells Adrian about all of it, from her mum’s appearance at her door to the present moment, omitting only the mention of her tutorial from the djinni. (She has the cool distance to understand that Adrian would take this as an admission of weakness and artificial advantage.) “My feeling is that you’ve been outmaneuvered. Whatever you’d planned for me, it was countermanded by someone or something with superior intelligence and coordination. The upshot is, the human race is almost certain to be wiped off the planet in the very near future.” Huw’s tweaking the
calm-anxious
spectrum compulsively now, riding the edge of engagement and detachment, hunting for the elusive sweet spot where she can sense the gravity of the situation without being sucked into the void it creates.

“Not good, huh?” Adrian says. He sounds stoned. Huw supposes he might be smoking or imbibing something down there in meatspace as a crude way of approximating Huw’s sliders. The rush of superiority is palpable, until Huw uncovers the
hubris-humility
slider and adjusts to compensate.

“Very, very, bad,” Huw says. “And given that I seem to be the nexus of multiple conspiracies, I believe that the next step is for me to do something to disrupt the status quo.”

“Like what?” Adrian says.

“Well, I reckon that things can’t get worse, so any change is bound to benefit us. Something rather grand, I think.” Huw feels wonderful: humble and all-encompassing and wise and engaged and present. She feels like the Buddha. She puts a fingertip on the
anxious-calm
slider and considers reengaging the anxiety that she “should” be feeling, but it would be stupid to budge it. There’s no virtue in doing a headless chicken impression, after all. Huw makes a mental note to find the slider combo that allows her to simultaneously resent the whole transhuman project while acknowledging that this
specific
bit of it is really rather wonderful.

“Are you all right, Huw?”

“No, Adrian. I’m not all right. I might be humanity’s only hope for ongoing physical existence. I’m anxious about that. I’m upset about being murdered. I’m displeased at having been coerced into this role, and about the fact that I’m still in the dark about most of it. But let’s be realistic, Adrian: Will allowing those feelings to guide my actions improve anything? I don’t think so.”

“Huw, you are as weird as a two-headed snake. But I like it. It suits you. So, what did you have in mind?”

“I don’t know who’s working against us here, Ade, and that makes me nervous. Do
you
know who’s working against us? Got any ideas, Mr. Big Wheel?”

“Eh, that’s a hard one. Obviously there’s any number of cloudies who would love to get their brains on six trillion trillion kilograms of computronium, even though it’d take quite a long time to cool down on account of 98 percent of it being white hot and under high pressure right now. So there’s a big gap between it being popular, and going land-grab crazy for it. Rumor says that WorldGov’s slave cyberwar AIs sneaked some nasty poison pills into the standard shard firmware design back during the hard takeoff, just in case their owners ever wanted to shut it down—that’s just a
rumor,
” Ade adds hastily. “Personally, I think it’s a pile of possum poo, but it just might be that they don’t disbelieve it with sufficient conviction to say ‘up yours’ to what’s left of incarnate humanity without going through the correct legal forms.”

Huw’s brow furrows. “WorldGov? You mean the, the parliamentarians? Do they have any skin in this game?” Even before the singularity, the pursuit of political power through elections to high office had become more of a ritualized status game than an actual no-shit opportunity to leave a mark on the increasingly hypercomplexificated and automated global ecosphere. Different governments all tended to blur at the edges anyway, into a weird molten glob of Trilateralist Davos Bilderberger paranoia, feuding and backbiting in pursuit of the biggest office and the flashiest VIP jet. By the takeoff itself, most of the WTO trade negotiators had borgified, and the resulting WorldGov, with its AI-mediated committee meetings, had become the ultimate LARP for aspirational politicians. Not many had the guts and drive to make it to the top, leveling up by grinding experience points for sitting out committee meetings and campaigning in elections for votes from people who didn’t actually believe in government anymore. (Also, uniquely among live-action role-playing games, the costumes sucked.)

Ade snorts. “Yes, and they’re still playing politics after all these years. Even though all their civil servants are NPCs and WorldGov takes a hands-off approach to most everything except cloud-tech court operations. Tell you what, though, if someone’s trying to buy their consent to a takeover, I know exactly who’ll know who’s got their hand out. You leave it to me, hen. I’ll get back to you when I’ve found out which politicians are on the take. Meanwhile, why don’t you go figure out who’s working against us up there? Until we know that, we’re just shadowboxing.”

“Huh.” Huw digests the idea. Normally she’d be livid about Ade’s belittling dismissal, but the emo slider has her on a clear-headed plateau of intellectual curiosity. “If we can find both ends of the string, you figure we can untangle it?”

“That or cut the Gordian knot, luv. You up for it?”

“There’s only one person I know for certain has had contact with the enemy,” Huw says slowly.

“Who is that?”

“Me, after a fashion.” She ends the call on a flash of smugness.
Give Ade something to chew on and hope he chokes on it,
she thinks.
I must try to remember that move when I’m not high
. But implementation details call.

“Djinni?”

“Yes, mistress?”

“Do you know how I might locate another instance of myself?”

“Certainly!” The djinni smiles. “Just like Monmouth!”

Huw pauses. “Then ... guns. I’m going to need guns. Lots of guns!”

“Like this?” says the djinni , and snaps his fingers.

There is a whizzy white-out special effect followed by a famous movie zoom sequence, and they are surrounded by three-meter-high steel gun racks receding to infinity. Huw reaches for the nearest weapon, then frowns in disappointment. “I meant firearms, not nerf guns!”

“Don’t be silly, you’d just damage yourself.” The djinni snaps his fingers again, and the arsenal of foam dart shooters disappears. “If you’re planning a fight, you need to be aware that guns don’t work outside of designated PvP areas here. Anyway, they’re as obsolete as atlatls. If you’re planning on doing your other self a mischief, you need to wise up: Any gun you can come up with, whoever you’re planning on shooting can come up with a bigger, better, more tightly optimized one. And even if you nail them, they’ll just respawn.”

“Oh.” Even through the artificial fug of self-congratulatory happiness, Huw feels a frisson of disappointment. She glances at the slider controls. “Is there any way to use this to mess with my other mental attributes? Agility, reaction time, IQ? That sort of thing?”

“IQ doesn’t exist, intelligence isn’t a unidimensional function,” says the djinni . “But yes. See here? Zoom right out, yes, like that. ...” He points at the top-level sliders. “Now rotate it through the five point seven two zero fifth dimension like
so.
...”

Huw’s emo control panel no longer resembles a set of four sliders: For a moment it’s a rainbow-refracting fractal cauliflower-like structure, Huw’s brain on software—then a clunky box of dials pops out on top. It’s clearly some sort of expert or superuser mode. Several of the dials are held in position with substantial-looking padlocks that seem to say
if you tweak this dial, you will die
in no uncertain terms. But her eyes are drawn to one side of the deck where there’s a thick red line around a bunch of dials labeled
cognitive efficiency
. As with the sliders, the pinch-zoom expands them into a dizzying array, like the engineer’s console at the back of the flight deck of a pre-computer airliner. “Ooh,” Huw says, one pinkie hovering over a black Bakelite knob captioned
short-term memory capacity
. It’s currently pointing at the number
6
. Huw twists, and it clicks round to
11
.

“That’s funny, I don’t feel any different.”

“You’ll need to tweak the collective annealing gain up a little to use the extra pigeonholes,” says the djinni . “Here, why don’t you zoom back out and do
this
?”

He demonstrates.

Huw glances at the controller, then whips a virtual padlock into place to pin the top-level dial in position. “I think
not,
” she says: “I asked you to help me, not rewire my brain.”

The djinni affects wounded dignity: “I
am
helping you,” he says. “For one thing, you’re now smart enough to grasp what I’ve been trying to
tell
you, which is—”

“Yes, yes, different strategies apply here, I know.” And Huw realizes that she
does
know: It’s as if a thin veil of fog she’d been entirely unaware of until now has evaporated, and she can see forever, infinite vistas of logical extrapolation opening before her mind’s eye. “639,219 has the edge on me in experience and praxis, but she’s got a weak spot. At least 639,218 of them, to be precise, all of instances that ran before ʼ219 found her local, treacherous maximum—or as many as aren’t in terminal catatonia thanks to her cunning needling. (Fucking cuckoo.) Yes, I
know
what I need to do. Where’s the speed dial? I need to run fast for a while—”

The djinni reaches toward her, but Huw is already too fast: She flips the control panel inside out, reflects it off its own interior through a multidimensional transform, and pops up the speed controller. “Hey, this is a lot simpler than I thought! ...” She tweaks a rubber band figure, and the lights dim to red, simulated wavelengths stretching. Outside the café awning, a passerby is frozen in midstride: birds hang motionless in the sky. “Right, time for a tutorial, I think. While I’m doing that, I need to spawn an invite list to all my instances
except
number 639,219—” She stops. The djinni is also near-motionless, frozen relative to her frenetic accelerated pace. Huw snaps back to realtime. “Did you catch that?” she says.

The djinni moves as though he is underwater. Huw can’t quite sit still enough for real realtime, more like 0.8x. The djinni’s basso is now a contralto. “Look, you know all those stories about people who receive the gift of the djinn but fail due to their own hubris?”

“The ones you said were propaganda?”

“Mostly propaganda. Hubris isn’t one of your winning-er strategies. Why don’t you try the humility end of that slider, see what you come up with?”

“You just don’t want me to put metal in the microwave, because then I’d have as much power as you,” Huw says, quoting a memorable bit of propaganda from the contentious era of the uplifting, a quote from Saint Larson, one of the period’s many canonized funnybeings.

“You know, I don’t have to take this abuse. Djinnspace is full of useful djinn intelligence tasks I could use to amass reputation capital and attract computational resources and swap known-good, field-tested strategies. I’m not doing this for my benefit.”

Huw cocks her head. “Bullshit,” she says. “Whatever opportunities you might seize without my help, they’re swamped by the opportunity to become one of the Saviors of Earth. You’re taking a flutter on shorting the singularity in hope of a handsome pay-off. There’s no other possible explanation for your presence here, is there?”