Rapture of the Nerds

by Cory Doctorow

  Huw zones out during the endless subcommittee meetings that last into early evening, then suffers himself to be dragged to the hotel refectory by Doc Dagbjört and a dusky Romanian Lothario from the Cordon Bleu Catering Committee who casts pointed and ugly looks at him until he slouches away from his baklava and dispiritedly climbs the unfinished concrete utility stairway to sublevel 1, where his toil is to begin. He spends the next four hours trudging around the endless sublevels of the hotel—bare concrete corridors optimized for robotic, not human, access—hunting buggy transceivers. By the time he gets to his room, he’s exhausted, footsore, and sticky.

  Huw’s room is surprisingly posh for what is basically an overfurnished concrete shoe box, but he’s too tired to appreciate the facilities. He looks at the oversized sleepsurface and sees the maintenance regimen for its control and feedback mechanism. He spins around slowly in the spa-sized loo and all he can think about is the poxy little bots that patrol the plumbing and polish the tile. The media center is a dismal reminder of his responsibility to patrol the endless miles of empty corridor, rebooting little silver mushrooms and watching their blinkenlights for telltale reds. Back when it was a real hotel, the Marriott employed one member of staff per two guest rooms: these days, just staying here is a full-time job.

  He fills the pool-sized tub with steaming lavender- and eucalyptus-scented water, then climbs in, burka and all. The djinni’s lamp perches on the tub’s edge, periodically getting soaked in the oversloshes as he shifts his weight, watching the folds of cloth bulge and flutter as its osmotic layers convect gentle streams of water over his many nooks and crannies.

  “Esteemed sir,” the djinni says, its voice echoing off the painted tile.

  “Figured that one out, huh?” Hew says. “No more madam?”

  “My infinite pardons,” it says. “I have received your jury assignment. You are to report to Fifth People’s Technology Court at 800h tomorrow. You will be supplied with a delicious breakfast of fruits and semolina, and a cold lunch of local delicacies. You should be well rested and prepared for a deliberation of at least four days.”

  “Sure thing,” Huw says, dunking his head and letting the water rush into his ears. Normally the news of his assignment would fill him with joy—it’s what he’s come all this way for—but right now he just feels trapped, his will to live fading. He resurfaces and shakes his head, unintentionally spattering the walls with water that’s slightly gray. Dismal realization dawns: That’s another half hour’s cleaning. “How far is it to the courthouse?”

  “A mere two kilometers. The walk through the colorful and ancient Tripoli shopping mall and souk is both bracing and elevating. You will arrive in a most pleasant and serene state of mind.”

  Huw kicks at the drain control, and the tub gurgles itself empty, reminding him of the great water-reclamation facilities in the subbasement. He stands and the burka steams for a moment as every drop of moisture is instantly expelled by its self-wringing nanoweave. “Pleasant and serene. Yeah, right.” He climbs tiredly out of the tub and slouches toward the bedroom. “What time is it?”

  “It is two fifteen, esteemed sir,” says the djinni . “Would sir care for a sleeping draft?”

  “Sir would care for a real hotel,” Huw grunts, momentarily flashing back to the hotels of his childhood, during his parents’ peripatetic wandering from conference to symposium. He lies down on the wide white rectangle that occupies the center of the bedroom. He doesn’t hear the djinni’s reply: he’s asleep as soon as his head touches the pillow.

  A noise like cats fucking in a trash can drags Huw awake most promptly at zero-dark o’clock. “What’s that?” he yells.

  The djinni doesn’t answer: it’s prostrate on the bedside table as if hiding from an invisible overhead ax blade. The noise gets louder, if anything, then modulates into chickens drowning in their own blood, with a side order of Van Halen guitar riffs. “Make it stop!” shouts Huw, stuffing his fingers in his ears.

  The noise dies to a distant wail. A minute later it stops and the djinni flickers upright. “My apologies, esteemed sir,” it says dejectedly. “I did not with the room sound system mixer volume control interface correctly. That was the most blessed Imam Anwar Mohammed calling the faithful to prayer, or it would have been if not for the feedback. The blessed Imam is a devotee of the antique Deutsche industrial school of backing tracks and—”

  Huw rolls over and grabs the teapot. “Djinni.”

  “Yes, O Esteemed Sirrah?”

  Huw pauses. “You keep calling me that,” he says slowly. “Do you realize just how rude that is?”

  “Eep! Rude? You appear to be squeezing—”

  “Listen.” Huw is breathing heavily. He sits up and looks out the window at the sleeping city. Somewhere, 150 gigameters beyond the horizon, the sun might be thinking about the faint possibility of rising. “I am a patient man. But. If you keep provoking me like this—”

  “— Like what?”

  “This hostel. The fucking alarm clock. Talking down to me. Repeatedly insulting my intelligence—”

  “— I’m not insulting!—”

  “Shut up.” Huw blows out a deep breath. “Unless you want me to give you a guided tour of the hotel waste compactor and heavy metal reclamation subsystem. From the inside.”

  “Ulp.” The djinni shuts up.

  “That’s better. Now. Breakfast. I have a heavy day ahead and I’m half starved from the sandwiches on that fucking airship. I want, let’s see ... fried eggs. Bacon rashers. Pork sausages. Toast with butter on it, piles of butter. Don’t argue, I’ve had a gray market LDL anti-cholesterol hack. Oh yeah. Black pudding, hash browns, baked beans, and deep-fried bread. Tell your little friends in the canteen to have it waiting for me. There is no ‘or else’ for you to grasp at, you horrible little robot. You’re going to do this my way or you’re not going to do very much at all, ever again.”

  Huw stands up and stretches. His bicycle notices: it unlocks and stretches too, folding itself into shopping mall mode. Memory metal frames and pedal-powered microgenerators are some of the few benefits of high technology, in Huw’s opinion—along with the ability to eat seven different flavors of grease for breakfast and not die of a heart attack before lunchtime.

  “Got that?”

  “I told them, but they say these Turkish food processors, they don’t like working with non-halal—”

  The djinni shuts up at Huw’s snarl. Huw picks up the teapot, hangs it from his bike’s handlebars, and pedals off down the hotel corridor with blood in his eye.

  I wonder what my chances are of getting a hanging judge?

  After breakfast, Huw rides to the end of the hotel’s drive and hangs a left, following the djinni’s directions, pedals two more blocks, turns right, and runs straight into a wall of humanity.

  It’s a good, old-fashioned throng. From his vantage point atop the saddle, it seems to writhe like an explosion in a wardrobe department: a mass of variegated robes, business attire, and exotic imported street fashions from all over, individuals lost in the teem. He studies it for a moment longer, and sees that for all its density it’s moving rather quickly, though with little regard for personal space. He dismounts the bike and it extrudes its kickstand. Planting his hands on his hips, he belches up a haram gust of bacon grease and ponders. He can always lock up the bike and proceed afoot, but nothing handy presents itself for locking. The djinni is manifesting a glowing countdown timer, ticking away the seconds before he will be late at court.

  Just then, the crowd shits out a person, who makes a beeline for him.

  “Hello, Adrian,” Huw says once the backpacker is within shouting distance—about sixty centimeters, given the din of footfalls and conversations. Huw is somehow unsurprised to see the backpacker again, clad in his travelwear and a rakish stubble, eyes red as a baboon’s ass from a night’s hashtaking.

  “Well, fancy meeting you here!” says Adrian. “Out for a bit of a ride?”

  “No, actually,” rep
lies Huw. “On my way somewhere, and running late. Are there any bike lanes here? I need to get past this mob. ...”

  The backpacker snorts. “Sure, if you ride to Tunisia. Yer bike’s not going to do you much good here. And don’t think about locking it up, mate, or it’ll be nationalized by the Popular Low-Impact Transit Committee before you’ve gone three steps.”

  “Shit,” grunts Huw. He gestures at the bike and it deflates and compacts itself into a carry-case. He hefts it—the fucking thing weighs a ton.

  “Yup,” Adrian agrees. “Nice to have if you want to go on a tour of the ruins or get somewhere at three a.m.—not much good in town, though. Want to sell it to me? I met a pair of sisters last night who’re going to take me off to the countryside for a couple days of indoctrination and heavy petting. I’d love to have some personal transport.”

  “Fuck,” says Huw. He’s had the bike for seven years; it’s an old friend, jealously guarded. “How about I rent it to you?”

  Adrian grins and produces a smokesaver from one of the many snap-pockets on his chest. A nugget of hash smolders inside the plastic tube, a barely visible coal in the thick smoke. He puts his mouth over the end and slurps down the smoke, holds it for a thoughtful moment, then expels it over Adrian’s head. “Lovely. I’ll return it in two days, three tops. Where’re you staying?”

  “The fucking Marriott.”

  “Wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Here, will half a kilo chiseled off the side of this be enough?” He hands Huw a foil-wrapped brick of Assassin-brand hash the size of a paving stone. “The rest’ll be my deposit. The sisters’re into hashishim-revival. Quite versatile minds, they have.”

  Huw is already copping a light buzz from the sidestream Adrian’s blowing his way. This much hash would likely put him in a three-day incontinence coma. But someone might want it, he supposes. “I can work with that. Five hundred grams, and you can have the rest back in return for the bike. Four days’ time, at the Marriott, all right?”

  Adrian works his head from side to side. “Sure, mate. Works for me.”

  “Okay. Just bloody look after it. That bike has sentimental value, we’ve come a long way together.” Huw whispers into the bike’s handlebars and hands it to Adrian. It interfaces with his PAN, accepts him as its new erstwhile owner, and unfolds. Adrian saddles up, waves once, and pedals off for points rural and lecherous.

  Huw holds the djinni’s lamp up and hisses at it. “Right,” he says. “Get me to the court on time.”

  “With the utmost of pleasures, sirrah,” it begins. Huw gives it a sharp shake. “All right,” it says aggrievedly, “let me teach you to say, ‘Out of my bloody way,’ and we’ll be off.”

  Huw doesn’t know quite what to expect from the Fifth People’s Technology Court. A yurt? Sandstone? A horrible modernist-brutalist white-sheathed space-age pile?

  As it turns out, like much of the newer local architecture it’s an inflatable building, an outsized bounce-house made of metallic fabric and aerogel and compressed air. The whole thing could be deflated and carted elsewhere on a flatbed truck in a morning, or simply attached to a dirigible and lifted to a new spot. (A great safety-yellow gasket the size of a manhole cover sprouts from one side, hooked into power, bandwidth, sewage and water.) It’s shaped like a casino owner’s idea of the Parthenon, cartoonish columns and squishy frescoes depicting mankind’s dominance over technology. Huw bounds up the rubbery steps and through the six-meter doors. A fourteen-year-old boy with a glued-on mustache confronts him as he passes into the lobby.

  “Pizzpot,” grunts the kid, hefting a curare-blower in Huw’s direction. Huw skids to a stop on the yielding floor.

  “Pardon?”

  “Pizzpot,” repeats the boy. He’s wearing some kind of uniform, yellow semi-disposable coveralls tailored like a potato sack and all abristle with insignia. It looks like the kind of thing that Biohazard Containment Cops pass out when they quarantine a borough because it’s dissolving into brightly colored machine parts.

  “The People’s Second Revolutionary Technology Court Guardsman wishes to see your passport, sirrah,” his djinni explains. “Court will be in session in fifteen seconds.”

  Huw rolls up his sleeve and presses his forearm against the grimy passport reader the guardsman has pulled from his waistband. “Show me the way.” A faint glowing trail appears in front of Huw, snaking down the hall and up to a battered-looking door.

  Huw stumbles up to the door and leans on it. It opens easily, sucking him through with a gust of dusty air, and he staggers into a brightly lit green room with a row of benches stretching round three walls. The center of the room is dominated by two boxes; a strangely menacing black cube a meter on a side, and a lectern, behind which hunches a somewhat moth-eaten vulture in a black robe.

  Faces and a brace of self-propelled cameras turn to watch Huw as he stumbles to a halt. “You’re late,” squawks the vulture—on second thoughts, Huw realizes she’s not an uplifted avian, but a human being, wizened and twisted by age, her face dominated by a great hatchet of a nose. She’s obviously one of the sad sacks on whom the anti-aging gene hacks worked only halfway: otherwise, she could be one of his contemporaries.

  “Terribly sorry,” Huw says. “Won’t happen again.”

  “Better not.” The judge harrumphs consumptively. “Dammit, I deserve some respect! Horrible children.”

  As the judge rants on about punctuality and the behavior of the dutiful and obedient juror (which, Huw is led to believe, has always been deplorable but has been in terminal decline ever since the abolition of capital punishment for contempt of court back in the eighteenth century), he takes stock of his fellow inmates. For the first time he has reason to be glad of his biohazard burka—and its ability to completely obscure his snarl of anger—because he knows at least half of them. The bastard pseudo-random-number generators at the Magical Libyan Jamahiriya Renaissance’s embassy must be on the blink, because besides Doc Dagbjört—whom he half expected—the jury service has summoned none other than Sandra Lal, and an ominously familiar guy with a blue forelock, and the irritating perpetually drunk centenarian from next door but one. There are a couple of native Libyans, but it looks as if the perennially booming Tripolitanian economy has turned jury service evasion into a national sport. Hence the need to import guest jurors from Wales.

  Fuck me, all I need is that turd Adrian to make it a clean sweep, thinks Huw. This must be some kind of setup. An awful thought occurs to him: Or a reality show. Jesus Buddha humping the corpse of Oliver Cromwell, say it’s not so? He collapses on a bench in a rustle of static-charged fabric and with a sense of dread waits for proceedings to begin.

  The Vulture stands up and hunches over the lectern. All the cameras abruptly pan to focus on her. “Listen up!” she says, in a forty-a-day voice that sounds like she’s overdue for another pair of lungs, “I am Dr. Rosa Giuliani—that’s doctor of law, not doctor of medicine—and I have volunteered my services for the next two weeks to chair this court, or focus group, or theater or whatever. You are the jury, or potential consumers, or performing animals. Procedurally, the MLJ have given me total autonomy as long as I conduct this hearing in strict accordance within the bounds of international law as laid down by the Hague Tribunal on Transhuman Manifestations and Magic. Some of you may not fully comprehend what this means. What it means is that you are here to decide whether a reasonable person would consider it safe to unleash Exhibit A on the world. If Exhibit A turns out to be a weapon of planetary destruction, you will probably die. If Exhibit A turns out to be a widget that brings everlasting happiness to the whole of humanity, you will probably get to benefit from it. But the price of getting it wrong is very high indeed. So I will enforce extreme measures against any fractional halfwit who tries to smuggle a sample out of this room. I will also nail to the wall the hide of anyone who talks about Exhibit A outside this room, because there are hardware superweapons and there are software superweapons, and we don’t know what Exhibit A is yet. For al
l we know, it’s a piece of hardware that looks like a portable shower cubicle but turns out to install borgware in the brain of anyone stupid enough to use it. So—”

  Giuliani subsides in a fit of racking coughs. She gathers herself.

  “We follow a set procedure. A statement is delivered by the damnfool script kiddies who downloaded the memeplex from the metasphere and who are applying for custodial rights to it. This will describe the prior background to their actions. Second, a preliminary activation of the device may be conducted in a closed environment. Thirdly, you rabble get to talk about it. Fourthly, you split into two teams: advocates and prosecution. Your task is to convince the members of the other team to join you. Finally, you deliver your majority verdict to me and I check it for procedural compliance. Then if I’m lucky, I get to hang someone. Are there any questions?”

  Doc Dagbjört is already waving a hand in the air, eager to please. The judge turns a black gaze on her that reminds Huw of historical documentaries about the Ayatollah Khomeini. Dagbjört refuses to wilt.

  “What,” says Giuliani, “is it?”

  “About this Exhibit? Is it the box, in? And if so, how secure the containment is? I would hate for your worries to depart the abstract and concretize themselves, as it were.”

  “Huh.” The judge stalks out from behind her lectern and kicks the box, hard. Going by the resulting noise, she’s wearing steel toe-caps. Huw whimpers faintly, envisaging imminent post-singularity gray goop catalyzed nano-annihilation, beyond any hope of resurrection. But the only terrible consequence is that the judge smiles, horribly. “It’s safe,” she says. “This box is a waste containment vessel left over from the second French fast breeder program.”

  This announcement brings an appreciative nod from a couple of members of the audience. (The second French fast breeder program was nothing to do with nuclear reactors and everything to do with breeding disaster-mitigation replicators to mop up the eight giga-Curies of plutonium that the first program scattered all over Normandy.) Even Huw is forced to admit that the alien memeplex is probably safe behind the Maginot line of nanotech containment widgets lining a hyperdiamond-reinforced tungsten carbide safe.