Rapture of the Nerds (33 page)

Satori.

An indeterminate time later, the hotel room door opens.

“Shit,” says a familiar voice.

“Didn’t I tell you she has a tendency toward self-abuse? Why, when he was six, he managed to lock himself in the living room when David had left the key in the drinks cupboard, and by the time we realized he was missing he’d—”

A familiar embarrassment flushes through her veins, dragging her back toward the distant land mass that is consensus reality: “Shut up, Mum! Why are you always bringing that up?”

“He never ate his greens, either,” his mother says. “Think you can get through to her?”

“I’ll try,” says the other voice. Male, a little deeper than last time he’d heard her,
her
—Huw drags her gaze back from the glass teat and looks round.

“You!” she says. It’s Bonnie, back as a boy again, same blue forelock and skinny amphetamine build as before. “You rooted my sib! Prepare to—”

“Uh?” Bonnie looks surprised. Huw’s mum—dressed up in hyperreal drag as her very own pre-upload middle-aged self—raises a hand.

“Huw, it’s all right. Bonnie here is thoroughly dewormed. You don’t have to take my word for it; the galactic feds have vermifuges you wouldn’t believe.”

“Guh.” Huw struggles to sit up, mind still fuzzed from endless reruns of a
This
Is Your Life
celebrity show starring one Huw Jones as seen from outside by an adoring throng of pot-worshippers. The narcotic effect of the television binge is fading rapidly, though. “Whassup?”

“Then there was the time he discovered David’s porn stash,” Huw’s mum confides in Bonnie, “when he was nine. David’s always had a bit of a clankie thing going, and for
ages
afterwards, Huw couldn’t look at a dalek without getting a—”

“Mum!” Huw throws a pillow. His mother deflects it effortlessly, exhibiting basketball-star reflexes that she’d never possessed in her lumpen nerd first life.

“Gotcha,” she says. “Turn the TV off, there’s a good girl, and pay attention. We have important things to discuss.” A note of steel enters her voice: “Compliance is—”

“Mandatory, I get it.” Huw zaps the screen, not merely muting it but also setting it into standby so that it’s not there in the corner as a distraction. “You want to talk.” She crosses her arms. “Talk, dammit.” She avoids looking at Bonnie. Some experiences are still too raw.

“Huw. My child.”

Uh-oh,
Huw thinks.
Here comes bad news.

“Yes, Mother dearest?” Huw says.

“We need to get you up to speed. In a very short subjective time, you are going to stand alone and naked before the galactic confederation, and you will speak on behalf of the human race, and if you are compelling in your defense of our species, we will join the confederation, with all the privileges accruing thereto. Or at least get a stay of execution.”

Huw pulled a face. “Yes, and if I cock it up, they annihilate us in an eyeblink. I’m way ahead of you, Mum. The only part I don’t understand is
why
?”

Huw’s mum inclined her head in Bonnie’s direction. He nodded smartly and declaimed, “Because they have divided the universe neatly into two kinds of civilizations: allies and potential threats. Anything that looks like the latter, well,
zap
. They’re playing a very, very long game, one that stretches so far out that they’re calculating the number of CPU cycles left before the Stelliferous Era ends, and deciding who gets what. You need to convince them that we, as a species, can be brought into their little social contract and behave ourselves and not run too many instances of ourselves and such.”

Huw reflects on her recent history. “I’m probably not the person best suited to this, you know.”

Bonnie and Huw’s mum nod their heads as one. “Oh, we know,” Bonnie says. “But they’ve asked for you. The ambassador, you know. Plus, well ...”

Huw’s mum gestures with one wrinkly hand, which bears a high-resolution mole with high-resolution hairs growing from it. There’s altogether too much reality in this sim, which is funny, because until pretty recently, Huw has been dedicated to the preservation of as much reality as is possible.

“Not now, Bonnie. Huw will get a chance soon enough.”

Now,
here’s
a familiar situation: conspirators who are privy to secrets that Huw is too delicate or strategically important or stupid to share. Huw knows how this one goes, and she isn’t prepared to sit through another round of this game.

“Mum,” Huw says very quietly. “That’s enough. I am through being a pawn. I’m the official delegate. If you’ve got something I should know, I require that you impart it.”
Require
—there was a nice verb. Huw is proud of it. “Or you can leave and Bonnie will tell me. This is not optional. Compliance is mandatory, as you keep saying.”

Her mum goes nearly cross-eyed with bad temper, but bottles it up just short of an explosion. After all, she’s been an ascended master for years, albeit in a sim where transcendence involves a heavenly realm with all the style and subtlety of a third-rate casino. Still, she’s learned a thing or two.

“It’s your father,” she says.

“What about him?” He’d been conspicuously absent from the noosphere, and Huw had noticed. But she’d assumed that the old man had diffused his consciousness or merged with one of the cluster organisms or something else equally maddening and self-indulgent.

“Well, he seti’ed himself.”

“He what now?”

“It’s not something one discusses, normally. Very distasteful. He concluded that the noosphere was too pedestrian for his tastes, so he transmitted several billion copies of himself by phased array antennas to distant points in the local group galaxies, and erased all local copies.”

Huw parses this out for a moment. “Dad defected to an alien civilization?”

“At least one. Possibly several.”

“You two have been dead to me ever since I left. Why should it matter what imaginary playworld he’s been inhabiting? Even if it’s in some other solar system?”

“Galaxy,” his mum says. “Don’t get me started on the causality problems. But apparently, he arrives
there
millions of years in the future and then they come
here-now
to follow up on it.”

“You’ve lost me,” Huw says, and makes to turn herself up.

Bonnie meekly raises a hand. “Huw, I know it’s difficult. Can I explain?”

“Yeah, whatever,” Huw says. Then he remembers his moral high ground. “Proceed.”

“Your father traveled a very great distance to join with the galactic federation. They instantiated him, got to know him, and decided that his species represented a potential threat.”

“On the basis of a sample size of one,” Huw’s mother says. “Knowing David, I can’t honestly say they were wrong. If we were all like him ...”

“Also, they concluded that, notwithstanding the dubiousness of his species, they rather liked and trusted him,” Bonnie says.

“He always
was
a lovable rogue,” says Mum.

“He’s the federation’s negotiator, isn’t he?” Huw says with a sinking sense of dread tickling at her stomach lining.

“What can I say? He’s a flake,” Huw’s mother says with a faintly apologetic tone, as if she’s passing judgment on her younger self’s juvenile indiscretions. “But a
charismatic
flake. Charming too, if you were as young and silly as I was in those days.”

She means between her first and second Ph.D.s, if Huw remembers her family history correctly. Mum and Dad had both been appallingly bright, gifted with a pedantic laser-sharp focus that only another borderline-aspie nerd could love. All things considered, it was a minor miracle that their sole offspring could walk and chew gum without counting the cracks in the pavement and the number of mastications. But general intelligence isn’t a strongly inherited trait, and humans breed back toward the mean: and so Huw’s childhood had been blighted by the presence of not one but two mad geniuses in the household, intermittently angsting over how they could possibly have given birth to a mind so mundane that their attempts to instill an understanding of the lambda calculus in him before he could walk had produced infant tantrums rather than enlightenment. (He had been twelve before he truly grokked Gödel’s theorem, by which time Dad had given up on him completely as a hopeless retard.)

“Are you sure it’s him?” Huw says. “I mean, he didn’t just upload: he beamed himself at the galactic empire. They could have done anything with the transmission! It might be some kind of seven-headed tentacle monster using Dad’s personality as a sock puppet, for all you know? ...” She tries to keep the hopeful note out of her voice.

“Good question.” Bonnie looks thoughtful. “You’re right: We can’t rule that out. But—”

“He
thinks
like David!” Mum says. “We were together for nearly thirty years before we uploaded, and a couple of subjective centuries afterwards—linear experiential centuries, if you unroll the parallelisms and the breakups and back-togethers—there are even a couple of instances of us who couldn’t untangle enough to resume autonomous existence, so they permanently merged at the edges, the idiots. They’re out in the cloud somewhere or other.” She draws herself up. “The one who seti’d out was the real one, though. And we kept in touch, despite the divorce. I’d know him anywhere, the devious little shitweasel—”

“Okay, enough.” Huw stands. “What’s at stake?”

“You need to convince them that we’re not a threat. Even though they know your dad inside out and—”

“No. What are they going to
do
?” Huw paces over toward the living room door, then turns and stares at Bonnie and his mother. “The cloud isn’t a pushover, surely? I mean, if you threaten its existence, surely it can do something to defend itself? How does the court propose to enforce its ruling?”

“Trust me, they can do it,” says Mum. Her earlier anger has dimmed, moderated by— Is that fear? “The cloud is an immature matryoshka. It’s going to grow up to be a Dyson sphere; masses of free-flying processor nodes trapping the entire solar output and using it to power their thinking, communicating via high-bandwidth laser. But it’s not there yet, and the Galactics
are
. There’s a thing you can do with a matryoshka cloud if you’re sufficiently annoyed with the neighbors: You just point all those communications lasers in the same direction and
shout
. It’s called a Nicoll-Dyson beam—a laser weapon powered by a star—and just
one
of them is capable of evaporating an Earth-sized planet a thousand light-years away in half an hour flat. The feds have
millions
of star systems, and that stupid time travel widget with which to set up the Big Zap. It could already be on its way—the combined, converging, coherent radiation beams of an entire galaxy, focused on us.”

Huw dry-swallows. “So defense isn’t an option?”

“Not unless you can figure out a way to move the entire solar system. Because they won’t be shooting at Earth, or at individual cloud shards: they’ll nuke the sun—make the photosphere implode, generate an artificial supernova. Snail, meet tank-track.
Now
do you see why we need you? It’s not about integrating Earth into the cloud, or about some stupid squabble over aesthetics: if the galactic federation finds us Guilty of Being a Potential Nuisance, we don’t get a second chance.”

“Heard enough.” Huw walks through into the living room of the suite. Bonnie and Mum trail her at a discreet distance, anxiety audible in their muted footsteps. “Okay, you’ve made your point. We’re up against Dad, or something that uses Dad as an avatar for interacting with naked apes.” She pauses. “I need an outfit, and an approach.” A flick of one hand and Huw conjures her emotional controller into being: it seems somehow to have become second nature while she was watching TV. She suppresses a moue of distaste as she recognizes the subtle environmental manipulation. “You’ve been planning this for ages, haven’t you? So you must have some strategies in mind, ideas about how to get under Dad’s skin. Let’s see them. ...”

There is indeed a Plan, and Mum and her little helpers must have been working on it for subjective centuries, bankrolled by the cloud’s collective sense of self-preservation.

“We’re working from old cognitive maps of your father,” says the lead stylist, “so this may be a little out of date, but we think it’d help if you wear this.”
This
is a rather old-fashioned cocktail suit and heels that Huw can’t help thinking would have suited her mother better. “It’s styled after what your mother wore to the registry office. You don’t look identical to her, but there is a pronounced resemblance. We’ve run 65,536 distinct simulations against a variety of control models and assuming the judge
is
a fork of your father from after his primary uploading, wearing this outfit should deliver a marked fifteen percent empathy gain toward you: fond memories.”

“Really.” Huw looks at it dubiously. “And if it isn’t? A fork of David Jones?”

“Then you’re at no particular loss. Let’s get you into it, Makeup is waiting. ...”

After Costume and Makeup, there’s a Policy committee waiting for Huw in the boardroom: faceless suits—literally faceless, their features deliberately anonymized—to walk her through their analysis of the history and culture and philosophy of the Authority. It’s a sprawling area of scholarship, far too big for a single person to assimilate in less than subjective decades. Even with a gushing fire hydrant of simulation processing power at her disposal, Huw can’t hope to assimilate it all and still be the person who’s supposed to appear before the star chamber in a few hours’ time. But she can get a handle on the field—and, more important, a whistle-stop tour of what the cloud has inferred about galactic jurisprudential etiquette so that she won’t accidentally put herself in contempt.

“The federation has been around long enough that their judicial process isn’t based on a physical model anymore,” says the #1 faceless suit, from the head of the table: “They set up a simulation space, throw in all the available evidence—including the judge-inquisitor and the accused—and leave them to build a world. By consensus. They iterate a whole bunch of times, and whatever falls out is taken to be the truth of the claimed case. Then the judge decides what to do about it.”