Rapture of the Nerds (7 page)

Doc Dagbjört sits back hastily. “Just asking!”

“Are you all seated comfortably?” Giuliani asks. “Then I shall continue.” She whacks her gavel on the lectern and the presentation rolls boringly on. “Here’s what happened next.” It’s a dizzying fast-forward montage: The space monster digests the twins’ nappy hamper then chows down on their bedding while Abdul—or maybe it’s Karim—hastily jury-rigs an EMP gun out of animatronic toys and an air force surplus radar set. The twins back into a corner and wait, wide-eyed, as the
thing
sprouts a pink exoskeleton lined with throbbing veins, rabbit ears, and a set of six baby elephant legs with blue toenails. It squats in the middle of their room, hooting and pinging as it digests the pile of alphabet blocks. Karim—or maybe it’s Abdul—improvises a blue goo attack using the roomful of utility fog, but the ad hoc nanoweaponry just slimes off the space monster like so much detergent.

“At this point, the manifestation estivated,” announces the judge.

“Duh, wassatmean?” asks one of the other jurors, one whom Huw doesn’t know—possibly a nationalist from the Neander valley.

“It went to sleep,” explains Doc Dagbjört. “Isn’t that right, Judge?”

“Damn straight.” The judge whacks her gavel again. “But if I get any more lip out of you, sunshine, I’ll have you flogged till the ivory shows. This is
my
trial. Clear?”

Dagbjört opens her mouth, closes it, then nods.

“Well,” says Judge

Giuliani, “that’s that, then. The thing seems to have fallen deeply asleep. Just in case it wakes up, the MLJ Neighborhood Sanitation Committee have packed it into a Class Four nanohazard containment vessel—which I’m standing on right now—and shipped it over here. We’re going to try a directed revival after lunch,
with
full precautions. Then I’ll have a think about it, you damned meddling baboons can rubber-stamp my verdict, and we’ll wrap up in time for tea. Do it my way and you can all go home three days early: rock the boat and I’ll have you broken on the wheel. Court will now adjourn. Make sure you’re all back here in three hours’ time—or else.
And
... cut!”

In case the message is insufficiently clear, the bench Huw is perched on humps up into an uncomfortable ridge, forcing him to stand. The Vulture storms out of the courtroom in a flurry of black robes, leaving a pool of affronted jurors milling around a lectern containing a sleeping puddle of reified godvomit.

“All right, everyone,” announces Doc Dagbjört, clapping her hands together. “How about we go and find the refectory in this place? I could murder some meze!”

Huw slouches off toward the entrance in a black mood, the teapot clanking at his hip. This isn’t going quite the way he’d imagined, and he’ll be damned before he’ll share a refectory table with that sanctimonious Swedish Girl Scout, much less Sandra and her gender-bending (and disturbingly attractive) friend. Someone is quite clearly doing this in order to get under his skin, and he is deeply pissed off. On the other hand, it’s a long time since breakfast—and there must be somewhere that serves a decent goat curry in Tripoli.

Mustn’t there?

It is insanely hot on the sidewalk outside the court, hot and crowded and dusty, and even with his biohazard burka pumping away heat as fast as it can, Huw is sweating. His skin itches everywhere, but especially on the shoulder, where he can feel his skin crawling every time he thinks about the glowing trefoil tattoo.

The court is located in a district full of bleached white shells, buildings thrown up by massively overengineered mollusks. Unable to breathe without oxygen supplies, having erected a habitable structure, they die in order to provide a delicious moving-in feast for the residents. It’s cheap favela architecture, but durable and far better than the tent cities of a previous century; snail cities have power, recycling services, bandwidth, and a weird kind of hobbit-ish charm. Some of the bigger shells have been turned into storefronts by various cottage professionals, and Huw is drawn toward one of them by the mouthwatering smell of roasting meat.

There are elaborate cast-iron tables outside the shell-front, and cast-iron chairs, and—luxury of luxuries—a parasol over each. There are people inside the shell, but the outside tables are deserted. Huw wilts into the nearest space and puts his teapot down on the table. “You,” he grunts. “Universal translator for anyone who comes my way. I expect service with a smile.
Capisce?
”

“Your wish is my command ,” pipes his djinni.

A teenaged girl in a black
salwar kameez
, white face paint, and far too much eye shadow and silver spider-jewelry saunters over, looking for all the world like a refugee from a goth club in Bradford. “Yeah? Whatcher want, granny?”

“It’s mister,” Huw says. “You the waitress?”

“Yeah,” she answers in English, staring at him idly. Her earrings stare too—synthetic eyeballs dangling from desiccated optic nerves. “You a tranny?”

“No, I’m a biohazard. What’s on the lunch menu?”

“We’ve got a choice of any cloned meat shawarma you fancy: goat, mutton, ox tongue, or Rumsfeld. With salad, olives, cheese, falafels, coffee or Coke. Pretty much anything. Say, are you
really
a biohazard?”

“Listen,” Huw says, “I’m not wearing this fucking sack because I
enjoy
it. Your Ministry of Barbarian Affairs insisted—”

“Why don’t you take it off then?” she asks. “If they call you on it, just pay.”

“Pay—”

“What’s wrong with you? You one of those dumb Westerners who doesn’t get baksheesh?” She looks unimpressed.

Huw stifles a facepalm.
I should have known. ...
“Thanks. Just get me the goat shawarma and falafels. They’re cloned, you say?”

She looks evasive. “Cloned-ish.”

“Vatmeat?” Huw’s stomach turns.

“You’re not a racist, are you? Nothing wrong with being vatted.”

Huw pictures a pulsating lump of flesh and hoses, recalls that the top-selling album of all time was recorded by such a being, and resigns himself to eating vatmeat rather than getting into a religious argument. “I’ll take the goat. And, uh, a Diet Coke.”

“Okay.” She turns and beams his order to the kitchen, then wanders over to the bar and begins to pour a tall drink.

Huw takes a deep breath. Then he pinches the seal node on his burka and gives it a hard yank. As gestures of defiance go, it’s small but profound; he feels suddenly claustrophobic, and can’t stop until he’s tugged the whole thing off, up and over his head, and yanked down the overalls that make up its bottom half, and stomped them all into the gray dust under his boots.

The air is dry, and smells
real
. Huw finally begins to relax. The waitress strolls over bearing a large glass, loaded with Coke and ice cubes. As she gets close, her nose wrinkles. “You need a bath, Mr. Biohazard Man.”

“Yeah. Well. You tell the Ministry.” Huw takes the drink, relishes a long swallow, unencumbered by multiple layers of smart antiviral polymer defenses. He can feel the air on his face, the sunlight on his skin. He puts the glass down.
Wonder how long I’ll take to work up a suntan?
he thinks, and glances at his wrist. He freezes.

There’s a biohazard trefoil on the back of his hand.

Huw stands up, feeling dizzy. “There a toilet here?” he asks.

“Sure.” The waitress points him round the back. “Take your time.”

The bathroom is a small nautiloid annex, but inside it’s as chilly and modern as Sandra Lal’s. Huw locks the door and yanks his tee and sweatpants off. He turns anxiously to check his back in the mirror over the sink—but the trefoil on his shoulder has gone.

It’s on the back of his hand. And it itches.

“Shit,” he says quietly and with feeling.

Back at the table, Huw bolts his food down then rises, leaving an uncharacteristic tip. He picks up the bundle of dusty black biohazard fabric and strolls past the shops. One of them is bound to be a black market nanohacker. His hands are shaking. He isn’t sure which prospect is worse: finding he’s got a big medical bill ahead, or trying to live in ignorance.

“Teapot,” he whispers.

“Yes, sir ?”

“Where’s the nearest body shop? Doesn’t have to be fully legal under WIPO-compliant treaty terms, just legal enough.”

“
Bzzt
. It is regrettably not possible for this humble unit to guide you in the commission of felonies, O Noble Sirrah—”

Shake
. “There is legal and there is
legal,
” Huw says. “I don’t give a shit about complying with all the brain-dead treaties the Moral Majority rammed through WIPO in the wake of the Hard Rapture. I just want somewhere that the local police won’t arrest me for frequenting if I pay the usual. Whatever the usual happens to be around here. Can you do that? Or would you like to tell me where the nearest heavy metal reclamation plant is?”

“Eeek! Turn left! Left, I say! Yes, ahead of you! Please, do me no injury, sirrah!”

Huw walks up to a featureless roc’s egg and taps on it. “Anyone at home?” he asks.

A door dilates in the shell, emitting a purple-tinged light. “Enter,” says a distinctly robotic voice.

Inside the shell, Huw finds himself in a room dominated by something that looks like a dentist’s chair as reinvented on behalf of the Spanish Inquisition by H. R. Giger. Standing beside it—

“Does your sister work at the diner along the road?” he asks.

“No, she’s my daughter.” The woman—who looks young enough to be the waitress’s twin, but wears medical white and doesn’t have any body piercings that blink at him—looks distinctly unimpressed. “And she’s got an attitude problem. She’s a goth, you know. Thinks it’s so rebellious.” She sniffs. “Did she send you here?”

Huw holds up his arm. “I’m here because of this,” he says, dodging the question.

“Aha.” She peers at his trefoil. “Do you know what it is?”

“No, that’s why I’m here.”

“Very well. If you take a seat and give me your debit token, I’ll try to find out for you.”

“Will there be any trouble?” Huw asks, lying back on the couch and trying not to focus on the mandibles descending toward him.

“I don’t know—yet.” She fusses and potters and mumbles to herself. “All right, then,” she says at length. “It’s in beta, whatever it is.”

“Oh yes?” Huw says, in a way that he hopes sounds intelligent.

“Certainly. That’s the watermark—it’s compliant with the INEE’s RFC 4253.11 on debug-mode self-replicating organisms. Whatever host medium it finds itself in, it advertises its presence by means of the trefoil.”

“And—?” Huw says.

“And that means that either the person who made it is conscientious, or is working with an RFC-compliant SDK.”

“I see,” Huw says. He supposes that this is probably interesting to people in the biz, but he has no idea what it means. It’s an alien culture. He prefers concrete stuff he can get his hands on. None of these suspicious self-modifying abstractions that suddenly make you sprout antlers.

The hacker mutters to herself some more. “Well,” she says, and “Hmmm,” and “Oh,” until Huw feels like bursting. “Right, then.”

Huw waits. And waits. His whole fucking life seems to consist of conversations like this. He’s read some hilariously naïve accounts of life in the soi-disant “Information Age” about “Future Shock,” all those dim ancestors trying to make sense of their rapidly changing world. They fretted about the “singularity”—the point at which human history goes nonlinear and unpredictable and the world ceases to have any rhyme or reason. Future shock indeed—try living in the fucking singularity, and having your world inverted six times before breakfast.

“Well, that’s it. I can do it
in vitro
or
in situ
, up to you.”

“Do it?”

“Accelerate it. What, you think I’m going to
decompile
this thing? That code is so obfuscated, it may as well be cuneiform for all the sense I can make of it. No, there’s only one way to find out what it does: accelerate its life cycle and see what happens. I can do it in your body—that’s best, it’s already halfway there—or I can do it in glass. Your choice.”

“Glass!” Huw says, his heart racing at the vision of an unlicensed tech colony cutting out of his guts, like the thing in the courtroom.

The hacker sighs a put-upon exhalation. “Fine,” she says. Let’s get you cloned, then.” Before he can jerk free, the instrument bush hovering over him has scraped a layer of skin from his forearm and drawn a few cmililiters of blood from the back of his hand, leaving behind an anesthetized patch of numb skin that spreads over his knuckles and down to his fingertips. Across the room, a tabletop diamond-walled chamber fogs and hums. The mandibles recede and Huw sits up. A ventilation system kicks in, clearing the fog from the chamber, and there Huw sees his cloned hand taking shape, starting as a fetal fin, sundering into fingers, bones lengthening, proto-fingernails forming. “That’ll take a couple hours to ripen,” the hacker says. “Then I’ll implant it and we’ll see what happens. Come back this time tomorrow, I’ll show you what turns up.” She rubs her thumbs against her forefingers.

Huw sticks his hand out to touch hers and interface their PANs so he can transfer a payment to her, but she shies back. “I don’t think so,” she says. “You’re infectious, remember?”

“Well, how shall I pay you, then?” he says.

“Over there,” she says, gesturing at a meatpuppet in the corner, a wrinkled naked neuter body with no head, just a welter of ramified tubules joined to a bare medulla that flops out of the neck stump like an alien nosegay. Huw shakes the currency zombie’s clammy hand and interfaces with its PAN, transfers a wad of baksheesh to it, and steps back, wiping his hand on the seat of his track pants afterwards.

“This time tomorrow, right?” the hacker says.

“See you then,” Huw says.

Back at the courthouse, the People’s Second Revolutionary Technology Court Guardsman doesn’t even blink as Huw unrolls the multiple thicknesses of burka he’d wrapped around his telltale hand—which is starting to itch like it’s acrawl with subcutaneous fire ants—and forearm.

As he steps into the gloomy courtroom, he thinks that he’s alone: but after that moment he detects movement and slurping sounds from the shadows behind one of the benches. A familiar head with a blue forelock rears back, face a rictus of agonized enjoyment. Huw makes out a female head suctioned to the joe’s chest, teeth fastened to his nipple.
Christ,
Huw thinks,
he and Sandra are having a snog in the fucking courtroom. The Vulture’s going to string them up by their pubes and skull-fuck them with her gavel
.