Rapture of the Nerds (36 page)

“What do you care about them?” his father asks, cheek twitching. “You might as well accept that you’re just a holey ghost. But for what it’s worth, I turned loose the ones who weren’t nonplayer characters. The cloud can sort them out.”

“Dad—” Huw swallows. An ancient, cobwebby sense of déjà vu unfolds in the recesses of his mind: He’s been here before, with dad cracking infernally dreadful jokes in an attempt to distract him from doom-laden news. “What’s the outcome?”

“What?”

“Did I pass—?”

His father cups a hand around one ear: “I can’t hear you. What did you say?”

“Did I pass the exam?”

“Did you ...what? Pass the jam?”

“Dad ...”

“What do
you
think, son?”

“I don’t—” Huw stares at the being that contains a superset of his father and an entire galactic civiliation sitting in judgment over him and his kind, gathering his nerve. “You’re still here. But the Big Zap ... you wouldn’t still be here if it was coming, would you? So it’s not coming. The galactic federation decided to let us alone. We won!”

His father sniffs. “Don’t get your hopes up, son. Everyone dies eventually: individuals, nations, planetary civilizations, galactic federations, universal overminds.”

“But! But-but!”

“I appreciate you’re feeling kind of good right now because you’re right, you just about satisfied the Authority that post-humanity is not, in fact, a malignant blight upon the galaxy. Their satisfaction is conditional, by the way, on the human-origin cloud not changing its mind, pulling on its metaphorical jackboots, and going all SS
Death Star
supergalactic on the neighborhood: that would be a deal-breaker.” He gives Huw a stern glare. “Don’t get above yourself: ethical stocks can go down as well as up.” He takes a deep breath. “But I must admit that you surprised me back there. In a good way.”

“Bububub.” Huw manages to regain control of his larynx and shuts up momentarily. “What happens now?”

“Now?” David points at the door: “We leave this space. You get to go home again, at least as far as the cloud. Me, I’ve got a starship to catch after I dismantle this embassy: I’m needed three thousand light-years away.” Something approximating a weak smile wobbles onto his father’s face, takes bashful center stage: “We probably won’t meet again.”

“Dismantle the—?” Huw’s brain is still trying to catch up. “No, wait, Dad!” He stands. “You can’t go yet, it’s been fifty years!” His head is full of uncomfortable realization.

“Forty-seven years, four months, nine days, three hours, forty-four minutes, and eleven point six one four seconds, to be precise. And you didn’t write, son, not once. I checked with your mom.”

“But I was—” Huw swallows again. “—being a real dick.”
Also, setting the all-time record for the world’s longest adolescent snit,
he doesn’t add.

“That’s all right, son.” His dad holds his arms open.

A moment later, Huw is leaning on his shoulder, bawling like a little kid. “I’m too damn old for this.” He sniffs. “I missed you, you know.”

“I do.” His dad pats his back awkwardly. “I was a dick too, if it helps. I had what I thought were plenty good reasons but I didn’t work through the fact that they weren’t good enough for you. I didn’t mean to fuck you up.”

“I didn’t mean to—” Huw takes a deep breath, then wishes his congested sinuses to clear. “—huh. Leave me a forwarding address? This time I’ll write.”

“I’ll do that, but you might not hear back from me for a long time.” His dad’s mustache twitches as he disentangles Huw from his jacket. “Now get going. Do you want to keep them in suspense forever?” And with a gentle hand in the small of Huw’s back, he propels him toward the door.

Various instances of Huw have lived through roughly two and a half trillion years of trial by simulation since he stepped through the door, but on the other side, it’s as if barely any time at all has passed. (Someone is doing some serious fancy footwork with causality, and Huw absently makes a note to investigate later.) Back in chambers he finds Bonnie running round in circles, trying to catch an agitated parrot, who is flying around the ceiling shouting, “Where’s the plaintiff? Where’s the witness? Who’s a pretty counsel? Rawk!”

“Come down here, you feathered bandit!” Bonnie is shaking his fists at the bird, and Huw works out the context from the white streaks on the back of Bonnie’s shirt.

“Trial’s over,” Huw says. His voice comes out with his usual male timbre. “We need to be going, the embassy’s packing up.”

“Trial’s
what
—?” Bonnie turns on him. “It’s
over
?”

His mum
bamf
s in from some corner of the embassy hyperspace, flashy teleportation spangles dissolving like hologram fireworks around her. “Huw! Am I in—? Oh.”

“Dad says hi,” he says. “The Big Zap is canceled, conditionally: As long as we keep our nose clean, eat our greens, and don’t terrorize the neighborhood, they’ll let us alone.”

“Rawk! Court is adjourned?” The parrot swoops down on his mum’s shoulder with a rattle of wing feathers.

“That’s nice, dear.” His mother smiles.

“You did it?” Bonnie stares at him. “Hey, you switched again.”

“Dad-thing is packing up the embassy; they’re leaving the solar system to us. I, uh, left a lot of myself behind back there. No, no, I’m all right—” He waves off an anxious Bonnie. “—but we need to get out of here before the embassy dismantles.” Right back to the reconstituted and re-created bedrock of Io—the Authority is nothing if not environmentally sensitive, and believes in recycling moons and small planets wherever possible. “Dad says they’re going to begin teardown immediately, so—” As he says it, a red warning sign appears in midair, hovering over the entrance to the chambers:
evacuate now
. It flashes, the archaic blink-tag irritant clearly contrived to get their attention. As if that isn’t enough, a fire siren spools up to an earsplitting shriek, and an unspeakable stench tickles his nostrils. “—I think he wants us out of here right now.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake.” Mom rolls her eyes, then shoulder-barges the door. “David, you passive-aggressive asshole!” she shouts, waving her fist at the hyperrealistic sky above the embassy complex (where, one by one, the stars are going out), “How many times have I told you, it is
not
acceptable to use the kid as a back channel? You get your incarnated ass down here
right now
so I can have words with you: Compliance is mandatory—”

“Was she always like this?” Bonnie asks Huw sotto voce

as they follow the blinking evacuation arrows toward a rainbow archway capped by a sign reading
cloud gateway
.

“Uh-huh. Pretty much. Why do you think I got into casting pots?” He walks swiftly away from his mother, who is railing at the universe.

“You poor bastard.”

Huw pauses, contemplating the throng of diplomats, lawyers, tourists, xenophiliacs, instantiated fictional characters and various other subtypes of humanity that clutter the vestibule in front of the gate. “I don’t know about you, but I’m going home. I mean,
really
home. Planning on reincarnating back on Earth and holing up in the workship for at least a couple of years and not traveling
anywhere
.” He glances sidelong at Bonnie. “I realize that might not appeal to you as a lifestyle choice.”

Bonnie shrugs, hands in pockets. “I can visit from time to time. Or I could stick around, go walkabout if it gets too boring. If you want.”

“I want.” Huw takes his arm and leads him to the back of the queue. And in a subjective eye-blink, they’re back on Earth.

The story is about to draw to a close. Perhaps you are one of the estimated* 98.533% of readers who have already purchased a hardcopy or ebook, or
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There’s something not right about Huw’s new body. Or perhaps there’s something that’s changed in his mind. One way or another, he’s just not able to throw a pot the way he could.

Oh, the body
looks
right enough, and there’s enough actual biological material in it that he qualifies, at least marginally, as a primate. But there’s plenty of other gubbins in there, especially round about the headmeat where they decanted the version of him that stepped out of the embassy as it was being folded up to the size of a pinprick and made to vanish.

That version had demanded a very stiff drink. In person. In his pottery. On Earth. Right. Away.

He’d saved the entire fucking universe. Surely this was not too much to ask for.

And oh, how they’d fussed, begging and commanding him to at least leave an instance in the cloud for debriefing and the lecture circuit, but he’d been firm. Oh, how they’d fiddled, pestering him with questions about what he wanted his new body to be like, which upgrades and mods it should have, trying to tempt him with talented penises and none-too-subtle surrogates, such as retractable unobtanium claws and bones infused with miracle fiber and carbon nanotubes.

He’d waved them off, refusing even to take in all the wonders on offer: no, no, no, just give me back my actual, physical body, the body I would have had if none of this had taken place, if I had been a man who was born to a woman, grown to maturity in the gravity well of my ancestors.

Once he’d gotten through to them, they’d complied with a vengeance, and now Huw heaved himself out of bed every morning with the aches and pains of baseline humanity on throbbing, glorious display. He showered himself, noting the soap’s slither over every ingrowing hair, every wrinkle, every flabby nonessential extruding from his person. He squinted at the small writing on cereal packaging and held it up to the watery Welsh light that oozed through the kitchen window, moving it closer and farther in the hopes of finding the right focus-length for his corneas, which had been carefully antiqued with decades’ worth of waste products, applied with all the care of a forger re-creating a pair of exquisitely aged Levi’s.

The cloud had its little jokes, oh ho ho, yes it did, and Huw would have let it all pass but for the pots. He’d been at his wheel for three days now, and no matter how carefully he kneaded the air pockets out of his clay, wet his hands, and threw the clay down onto the spinning wheel, no matter how carefully he wet his fingers and guided the spinning clay upward and outward into a graceful, curvilinear spliney form, it always went awry. His clumsy fingers tore the clay, his clumsy hands moved too fast and collapsed the pot’s walls, his clumsy arms lost their bracing against his thighs and slipped and spattered the walls and his face with wet clay.

Huw threw his first pot at age fifteen, part of the mandatory art requirement that his parents had to stump up for as part of his homeschooling program. The minute the clay hit the wheel and his fingers touched the wet, sensual, spinning earth, he’d felt a jolt of recognition:
Where have you been all my life?
Something in his peripheral nervous system, something in his muscles
recognized
the clay, understood it right down to the finest grain, integrated it into his proprioception, so that it felt like a part of him. Huw has had days in his life when he had a hard time thinking clearly, days when he didn’t feel like getting out of bed.

But he’s never, ever had a day when he couldn’t throw a bloody pot.

“It’s not
fair,
” he tells the motes of dust and the dribbles of wet clay that fill his pottery. It really isn’t, either. This is meant to be his retirement, his recuperation, his
occupational therapy
. He’s a veteran, after all. A veteran with a scorching case of posttraumatic stress disorder (self-diagnosed). It’s not fair.

He picks up another lump of clay, kneads it, dipping his fingers into the water with a practiced, unconscious gesture, working the water into the clay. He’s complained to the cloud, of course, but they assured him that he checksummed correctly—that is, the body they’ve built for him is the body he left with, functionally speaking. The inarguable and obvious fact that this body is different in a very significant way is of no moment to the cloud. Checksums don’t lie.

Huw pats and squeezes the clay into shape and thunks it dead bull’s-eye center into the middle of his wheel. He wets his hands again, rocks back so his tailbone is well behind him and his sitz bones are well beneath him, braces his elbows on his thighs, and makes ready to ruin another pot.

“Give it a rest already, will you?” Bonnie says from behind him. He doesn’t startle, because he’s sensed her presence for some minutes, every since she slipped into his pottery. Technically it isn’t off-limits to her, but no one apart from Huw can really feel comfortable in the narrow space with its high shelves. There’s nowhere to sit or stand apart from his wheel, and everything is covered with dried clay-dust that is hungry for hair, clothes, and skin on which to stick. So Bonnie usually hangs out in the house or walks around the valleys while Huw’s wasting clay and cursing the fates.