“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.
Then the head turns, worrying at the nipple in a way that looks painful (though it appears to be doing wonders for the joe) and Huw sees that it isn’t Sandra Lal masticating that tit; it’s Doc Dagbjört. He feels a sear of jealousy jetting from his asshole to his shoulder blades, though whom he is jealous of he cannot exactly say. He clears his throat.
The lovebirds spring apart and stand. Doc Dagbjört’s shirt is hiked up around her armpits and before she gets it pulled back down, Huw is treated to a stunning display of her chestular appendages, which are rather spectacular in a showy, fantastically perfect way. The joe is more casual, stretches and yawns and pulls his own sweaty leather shirt down. Then he does a double take as he recognizes Huw.
“You!” he says. “The hell are you doing here?”
“You know him?” Dagbjört asks. She’s blushing a rather lovely and fierce Viking red.
Huw partially unrolls his burka from his arm and dangles it in front of his face. “So do you, Doc,” he says.
“The transvestite?” she says.
“I’m not a tranny,” Huw says. He rewraps the burka around his arm, which is throbbing with itch and needles of alternating ice and fire. “Just got a nasty little itch and took a while to figure out who to bribe.” He glares at the guy with the blue forelock, Bonnie the party animal. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about it, would you?”
“Who, me?” Bonnie frowns right back at him. “What did you think you were doing barging in here, anyway?”
Huw crosses his arms defensively. “In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a courtroom and the Vulture’s going to be back in about—”
The door bangs open behind him and he turns round. “Where is everybody?” croaks the black-clad judge. “Dammit, I expect punctuality in my courtroom!”
Judge Giuliani crosses to her box and stands behind it, tapping her toe on the floor and glowering furiously at the doorway as, one by one, the delinquent jurors filter in. Her stare is lost on Sandra, who sees Huw as she opens the door and nearly jumps out of her skin. Huw smiles at her sweetly and she edges around the far side of the room and sits down as far away from him as possible. So while the Vulture is busy tearing a strip off the Neanderthal, he gets up, walks over, and sits down next to her.
“Hello, Sandra,” he says warmly. “How’s it going?”
Sandra leans away from him, looking afraid. “Where did you get that?” she asks, eyeing his biohazard-wrapped wrist.
“I thought you and me, we could talk about it.” Huw smiles. It’s not a friendly expression. “I picked it up at your place a week or so back?”
“Listen, I have no idea what this is about, but I don’t like it! I don’t hang out with people who do that sort of thing, least not without warning. Are you sure you weren’t jarked by a stranger on your way over?”
“Silence in court!” says
Giuliani, waving her gavel at Sandra, who cowers, trying to get as far away as possible from both the judge and Huw. Huw crosses his arms, annoyed. Is she telling the truth?
“You pukes had better listen up right now! We are about to begin the most dangerous part of the proceedings! Are those of you who believe in physical resurrection all backed up to off-site storage? And are the rest of you all up to date on your life insurance policies? Because if not, you’re too fucking late, haa haa! It is time to open the box!”
“Oh shit.” Huw hastily beg
ins to untangle his burka, in the hope that its advanced biocontainment layers will help if the monster that hatched from the scatotrophic Klein bottle from outer space turns out to be unfriendly. His wrist itches hotly in sympathy, then mercifully stops.
Giuliani twirls her hammer round and presses a button; it turns into something like a cross between a pocket chain saw and a whittling knife. “Now, I am about to open the containment,” she says, standing over the ominous black cube with a raised knife. “With any luck, it’s just sleeping. If it isn’t, well, all I can say is it damn well better behave itself in my courtroom.”
She leans forward and slaps one hand on a side of the box. Something heavy goes clunk inside it. A hand goes up from the far side of the jury box. “What is it now?” says the Vulture.
“Please, Judge, can I go to the bathroom?” Bonnie is waving an anxious hand in the air.
“Oh fuck off, then,” snarls the judge. “Five minutes! Or you’ll be sorry!”
She yanks at the lid of the biohazard containment and Bonnie takes off, scampering behind the benches as if his arse is on fire—or maybe he’s just afraid that it will be, in a few seconds.
The box deconstructs itself into a pile of bubbling pink slime, to reveal the space monster the brothers Bey downloaded. It squats, curled up, in a nest of shredded teddy bears; two of its six legs are wrapped over what ought to be its snout, and it is making a faint whistling noise that it takes Huw a few seconds to recognize as snoring.
“Behold, the stinking pile of godvomit!” says the Vulture. She stands over it, arms akimbo, Swiss Army chain saw at the ready, looking almost pleased with herself. “Exhibit A: asleep. It’s been this way for the past eighteen days, ever since the Bey twins created it. Any questions?”
A susurrus of conversation sweeps the jury benches. “That’s funny,” Huw says, “my arm doesn’t itch anymore.”
“Shut up about your arm already!” Sandra says. “Look!” She points at the box, just as the space monster emits a deep grunting sigh and rolls over on its side, snuffling sleepily.
“Six limbs, bilateral symmetry, exoskeleton. Has anyone tried deconstructing its proteome yet?” asks Doc Dagbjört, looking rather more cheerful than the situation warrants.
“From inside the containment? No.” The Vulture looks thoughtful. “But from traces of carapace scraped off the walls of the Bey residence nursery, we have obtained a partial genotype. Tell your guidebooks or familiars or whatever to download Exhibit B for you. As you can see, the genome of the said item is chimeric and shows signs of crude tampering, but it’s largely derived from Drosophila, Mus musculus, and a twenty-first-century situationist artist or politician called Sarah Palin. Large chunks of its genome appear to be wholly artificial, though, written entirely in Arabic, and there’s an aqueous-phase Turing machine partially derived from octopus ribosomes to interpret them. It looks as if something has been trying to use the sharia code as a platform for implementing a legal virtual machine. We’re not sure why, unless it’s an obscure joke.”
“Does the metasphere have a sense of humor?” Huw says. He clears his throat—the dust must be getting to him, because it feels as if he’s developing a ticklish cough.
“If it didn’t, my life would be a lot simpler,” the Vulture says. A door at the back of the courtroom bangs, Bonnie coming back from the toilet. Huw notes with a spike of erotic shock that Bonnie is female again, a forelocked vision of heroin-chic skin and bones. “As it is, it makes it hard to tell a piece of sculpture from a practical joke, a new type of washing machine, or an alien superweapon.”
“Urk.” Huw subsides into a fit of coughing; it doesn’t help his throat.
“Can we wake it up?” Doc Dagbjört asks. “If I play it some music, perhaps it can the dream awaken from?”
Oh shit, musical dream therapy, Huw realizes with a sinking feeling. So that’s why she’s on this panel.
“That is a possibility,” the Vulture concedes. She prods the sleeping space monster with a steel-toe-capped boot, but it just snores louder and burrows deeper into its nest of disemboweled toys. “I prefer electroshock, myself.”
“Shit.” Sandra says. Huw glances sideways at her, sees her cowering away from him. “Shit!”
“What is it?” he asks.
“Your—” She stops, and rummages in her fanny pack. After pulling out a mirror, she passes it to him. “Throat.”
At the other end of the bench, Doc Dagbjört is explaining the healing properties of ambient postindustrial music to an interested judge and a couple of less skeptical jurors. Huw holds up the hand mirror and points it at his throat.
Huw stares at the mirror nearly cross-eyed and focuses on his stubbly Adam’s apple. It has been completely covered with a familiar biohazard trefoil, surrounded by ranked miniature trefoils, each of them fractally ringed with smaller duplicates, and so on, into hairy infinitude that no doubt extends down to mitochondrial detail.
Huw clutches his hands to his throat and feels it buzzing, vibrating, just as Dagbjört lets fly with an eerie ululation. She sings the quasi-melody rather well, noodling around from a ghostly, bluesy I-IV-V progression to something pentatonic that sounds like the wind whistling over the blasted steppes of some distant Eastern land and then into something Celtic and complicated.
The buzzing under his sweating fingertips heightens. The godvomit is vibrating too, beginning a bobbing sinuous cobra dance, and it begins to sing too, a low droning ommmmmm that resonates in Huw’s bones, in Huw’s throat, in Huw’s mind.
His tongue stirs in his mouth and he feels a great, preverbal welling from his larynx. He feels a burst of Tourettic obscenities tickling at his lips like a sneeze, and he moves his hands from his throat and claps them over his mouth, but it’s too late: he’s singing too.
If you can call it singing. He’s giving voice to two wordless melodies simultaneously, meshing in artful discord with each other and the joint song of the Kleinmonster and Dagbjört. One voice is basso profundo, the other a Tiny Tim falsetto, and the Kleinmonster is turning its attention on him—he can hear it thinking joyful thoughts to itself. His skin crawls with creeping horror as his voice box secedes from his autonomic nervous system, and he flees the courtroom, pursued by the mystified stares of his co-jurors and the glare of the Vulture.
He stumbles for the loo, struggling to keep the alien song inside his chest, lips clamped tightly shut. He has a titanic, painful, rock-hard erection, and he thinks wildly of autoerotic asphyxiators who blow their loads in ecstatic writhing as their oxygen-starved brains stage endorphin-fueled fireworks displays on the backs of their eyelids. He is certain he is dying. He falls to his knees on the rubber tiles of the lav’s floor and begins to retch and weep.
He feels a tentative hand caressing his shoulder and he turns his head. Through a haze of tears, he recognizes Bonnie, her eyes smoldering with barely controlled lust. “You’re so fucking transhuman,” s/he says, and clamps her mouth to his, ramming her tongue in almost to his gag reflex. She pins him to the yielding tiles and straddles him, grinding her/his crotch against his.
It’s enough to shock him out of despair and into anger. He pushes hard against her bony xylophone chest and spits. “You are sick,” he says, rolling away. The song is dying now, just a buzz of harmonics that pick at his pulse. “God!”
Bonnie smirks at him and does a cat stretch on the tile before climbing to her feet. She shakes herself and tosses her fringe and gives him another smirk. “Really? I could have sworn you wanted it,” she says, and leaves him alone.
Huw pulls himself to his feet and staggers for the door, his throat no longer itching, but wriggling. He pushes weakly against the door and steps out into the corridor, where he confronts the entire court, which has apparently adjourned to follow him. The Vulture’s fists are fiercely planted on her hips.
“You’re infected,” the Vulture says. Her voice is ominously calm. “That’s unfortunate. We’ve got a nanocontainment box for you until we sort it out. We’ll
pull an alternate juror from the pool.” Sandra, Bonnie, Dagbjört, the caveman, and the centenarian are all staring at him like he’s a sideshow curiosity. “Come along now, the guardsmen will take you to your box.” The guardsmen are a pair of hulking golems, stony-faced and brutal-looking. They advance on him with a thunderous tread, brandishing manacles like B-movie Inquisitors.
Huw’s mind blanks with fear and rage. Bastards! he tries to scream, and what comes out is an eerie howl that makes the jurors wince and probably terrifies every dog within a ten-kilometer radius. He feints toward them, then spins on his heel and dashes for the front doors. Curare darts spang off the rubber walls and rebound around him, but none hit him. He leaps off the courtroom steps and runs headlong into the humanswarm, plowing into its midst.
He runs without any particular direction, but his feet take him back to the hacker’s egg-shaped clinic of their own accord. He turns his head and scans the crowd for jurors or officers of the court. Seeing none, he thumps the egg until the door irises open, then dives through it.
The hacker is laid out on her table, encased in the instrument bush. Her fingers and toes work its tendrils in response to unknowable feedback from its goggles and earphones. Huw coughs in three-part harmony, and she gives her fingers a decisive waggle that causes the bush to contract into a fist near the ceiling.
She looks at him, takes in Huw’s watermarked throat and two-part snoring drone. “Right,” she says. “Looks like you’re about done, then.” The teapot at his belt translates efficiently, giving her a thick Brummie accent for no reason Huw understands.
“What the fuck is this shit?” Huw says, over his drone.
“No need for that sort of language,” she says primly. She gets up off her table and gestures toward it. “Up you go.”
Reluctantly, Huw climbs up, then watches the bush descend on him and encase him in a quintillion smart gossamer fingers.
“I uploaded your opportunistic code to a mailing list,” explains the hacker. “It was a big hit with the Euros—lucky for you it’s their waking hours, or it could have been another twelve hours before we heard back. You’ve solved quite a little mystery, you know.
Rapture of the Nerds Page 6
