Rapture of the Nerds

by Cory Doctorow

  “Good morning,” says the latter apparatchik. She smiles over her reading glasses. “Huw Jones, I believe?” Huw nods. “You’ve been named as a character witness in relation to the planning application now under consideration by this inquiry, but I have a backlog of testimony to get through this morning. Would you please take a seat while we continue with business?”

  It isn’t a question. Huw follows her glance and scuttles over to the gap in the front row of chairs, sits down, and waits to see what happens next.

  The recording paladin jabs the camera around the room, invoking its official recording mode, and Huw’s reality gets a red recording light superimposed over it in the bottom left corner of her gaze. They’re on the record.

  “One moment—” The chairwoman confers briefly with the clerk. “Oh, I see.” She looks at the audience. “Do we have a Professor-Doctor-Executrix R. Giuliani in the room? That’s professor of law, doctor of intellectual property law, executioner of felons, R. Giuliani —”

  Huw looks round, cringing in anticipation, but sees no sign of her. She raises her hand tentatively: “I don’t think she’s here. ...”

  Madam Chairwoman stares at her. “You know this person?”

  “I last saw her in a diplomatic jet over Wales ...” Huw slows, gripped by a nauseous sense that she’s committed some kind of humongous faux pas. “Is she supposed to be here?”

  “I have an open slot for her testimony.” The chair stares at him. “But if she can’t be bothered to turn up, there’s nothing to be done about it: she doesn’t get a say in opposing the planning application. So, moving swiftly on, whom are we expecting next—?” Madam Chair cocks her head on one side, as if listening: “All right. For the planning division, we call instance 199405 Lucifer to rebut P-D-E Giuliani’s nonexistent objection.”

  Now Huw sees that this space is not entirely hardwired to resemble the real world; for a trapdoor in space opens up between the audience seats and the committee’s table, and a gout of pale flame emanates from it, and a voice, beautiful and distant and damned, declares: “a nonexistent objection demands a nonexistent rebuttal, Your Honor.”

  “How much more of this do I have to sit through?” Huw says. Posthumans playing at biblical symbolism, how, how, how naff: “I want to go home. ...”

  The man in the seat to her left—small and doughy and vague, big-eyed and bulbous-headed—chooses to hear it as a question. “You’re not from around these parts, are you?” he says. His voice is as gray as his scaly, inhuman skin. “It can go on like this for hours. In real time, that is. Subjectively, civilizations can rise and fall.”

  Huw looks at him, then glances round nervously. The seats she’d thought were empty are in fact occupied by the ghosts of absent avatars, frozen in time while their owners are elsewhere. And as she examines them, she realizes new overlays are dropping into place: They’re archetypes, each representing one or another subculture of the posthumans who departed for the cloud back in the old days, yet failed to transcend their sad need to assert an identity through funny haircuts and aggressively obscure musical preferences.

  The lately called witness is exactly what you’d expect from an entity that calls itself 199405 Lucifer—acrawl with not-flies, reeking of nonsulfur, leather-not-winged, sporting an erect, throbbing not-penis that juts up to its not-sternum. The av bends low and touches its not-forehead to the ground. “My lords,” it says. Its not-voice manages to pack a lot of contempt into the phrase. Somewhere, Huw supposes, there is a slider labeled ironic courtesy, and the loser in the Satan suit has just cranked it all the way up to 11.

  The Planning Committee doesn’t seem to notice. They stare motionless at the witness, their avs so primitive and generic that they don’t even blink or shift their weight.

  “P-D-E Giuliani is a well-known reactionary, a perverse soul whose romantic affection for the flesh is matched only by her willingness to perma-kill anyone who dares disagree with her. When she takes the stand in this proceeding to insist upon the irreducible, ineffable physicality of human intelligence, she’s substituting maudlin sentimentalism for rigor. The proof of the reducibility of human experience is all around us: Here we are, people still, still loving, still living, still cogitating. The only difference is that we’re immortal, nigh-omnipotent, and riding the screaming hockey stick curve of progress all the way to infinity.”

  199405 Lucifer’s demonic majesty slips as it speaks, pacing up and down the committee room, abandoning its delicate caprine tap-dance for a more human gait that looks ridiculous when executed with its av’s reversed knees and little clicky hooves. Its voice goes from menacing and insectile to a hyperactive whine with flecks of excited spittle in it. Now it remembers itself and pauses for a demonic Stanislavski moment, then draws itself up and says in its most Satanic voice: “Kill ’em all, upload ’em, and give ’em to me. There’s plenty of room for them in my realm.”

  Huw knows that this is grave stuff, the entire future of the true human race at stake, and she still cares passionately for that cause, even if she’s no longer a real person. But all this ... role playing is making the whole thing feel so contrived and inconsequential, like a dinner party murder-mystery: Who ate the planet Earth and turned it into computronium? I accuse the Galactic Overlords! Is it time for port and cheese-board now?

  The Satan fanboy returns to his flaming trapdoor, his “realm.” The Planning Committee nod their heads together in congress. Huw shifts her not-arse in the not-seat. Then she remembers that she has no weight to shift, that the numbness in her bum and thighs is just there for verisimilitude, and she makes herself motionless.

  It’s time for the next witness. “Call Huw Jones prime,” Madam Chair says. Huw starts to stand, but sees, across the courtroom, that someone else has already climbed to their feet.

  It’s Huw, but more so. Even post-reassignment, Huw was a little lumpy and broad in the beam. Her uploaded self-representation had mercilessly reproduced every pockmark, scar, and sagging roll. This Huw, halfway round the room, has had everything saggy lifted, everything asymmetrical straightened, everything fined down and perfected and shined, wrapped in a glamourous outfit that Huw couldn’t have worn convincingly even with a thousand years of remedial gender construction classes. It’s cover girl Huw, after being subjected to several hours’ tender ministrations from someone’s 3-D airbrush. “That’s me, Your Honor,” she says.

  “You may address me as Madam Chair. Please take the stand.” Madam Chair waves her mace at a chair sat on its own to one side of the committee table. Huw prime slinks across the conference room like a model on a catwalk. Real Huw knows that she walks with a graceless clumping. Her not-stomach does a flip-flop and she hisses involuntarily. Her neighbor shushes her. She gives him a two-fingered salute.

  “Your name?”

  “Huw Jones,” she says. “Instance 639,219.”

  It’s one of Huw’s instance-sisters. Clearly more cooperative than Huw had been. Huw wonders why they didn’t zero her out, given the evident availability of this much more presentable, much more skilful version of herself to speak for humanity.

  “Ms. Jones, do you have a statement for this proceeding?”

  “I do, Madam Chairwoman.” Someone’s been tweaking her voice sliders too, giving her a husky, dramatic timbre that Huw’s meatvoice couldn’t have approximated without the assistance of a carton of unfiltered cigarettes and a case of single malt. “I spent decades of realtime imprisoned in a meatsuit, which betrayed me at every turn. It hurt. It needed sleep. It was slow. It forgot things. It remembered things that didn’t happen. And worst of all, it tricked me into thinking that I was nothing without it—that any attempt to escape it would be death. Brains are awful, cheating things. They have gamed the system so that they get all the blood and all the oxygen and all the best calories, and they’ve convinced us that they’re absolutely essential to the enterprise of being an authentic human. But of course they’d say that, wouldn’t they? After all, once we take up and realize
how fantastically shit they are, they’ll be out of a job! Getting rid of my brain was the most important thing that ever happened to me. It was only once I was running on a more efficient substrate—once I could fork and vary myself and find the instances that made the best choices, once I could remember as much or as little as I cared to, look and feel however I wanted ... only then was I able to see and feel and know what I’d been missing all those years.”

  The Committee takes careful note of all this. Huw catches herself growling in the back of her throat. Who the hell is this person, and what is she doing with my identity?

  “Down there on Earth, there’s a billion hominids who’ve been hoodwinked by their brains, convinced that they can’t possibly survive transcendence. And up here, in the cloud, there are trillions of entities who lack the compassion and strength of conviction to rescue their cousins from physical bondage. Every one of us up here knows that once you’re uploaded, everything goes clear, everything is good. The bad things can just be filtered away. So here you come, with your offer of universal suffrage from dumbmatter, and we make you sit through this tedious business about whether this abuses the civil liberties of the, the, the protoplasm that colonizes the intelligences of Earth!”

  Huw is discovering entire new kinds of anger, nuanced flavors of outrage whose existence she’d never suspected. She is experiencing a kind of full-body virtual paralysis of quivering, maddened horror. Her nonkidneys are angry, as are the soles of her nonfeet, the tiny nonhairs on the back of her neck. She opens her mouth to speak, but the shape of the anger is too big, it chokes on the way out and it’s like opening your mouth in a windstorm only to have the wind rush in and stop up the words and your breath.

  “Madam Chairwoman, honored guests, I am here to ask you for freedom. Not for me, but for all those still enslaved on Earth. Free them! Don’t wait one extra moment, not one extra picosecond. The sooner they are free, the sooner they can begin to thank us for their liberation.” She pauses, blinks her liquid, slightly outsized eyes with a graceful rise and fall of languid lashes, then beams at them with a smile that is so obviously designed that it makes her look like a waxwork.

  The chair nods and the orc with the camera zooms in for a close-up, and other-Huw gets up and goes back to her seat. On the way, she catches Huw’s eye and tips her a wink that is contemptuous and victorious. And now Huw finds her not-breath and her not-nerves and leaps to her not-feet.

  “abomination!” It’s not a word she’s ever used in her life, but there is no other word that will do. “Abomination!” she roars, and she scrambles toward her instance-sister, moving with such purpose that she crashes into the other people in the simspace, sometimes actually passing through them as her temper makes itself felt in the physics model of the courtroom.

  Her instance-sister doesn’t move: she seems frozen to the spot, still mugging for the camera-orc as Huw plows a furrow of chaos through the courtroom, fingers curled into claws as she reaches toward the enemy. “Thief! Impostor! Liar!” She leaps at her airbrushed double and falls flat on her face, planked in midair upon an invisible strip of altered reality.

  The light reddens and a harsh alarm bell sound clip unwinds: “Order in court! Order in court!” Huw hangs in the air screaming and gnashing her teeth and flailing at the impostor. “You’re not the real me!” she shrieks. She pauses only to take a deep gulp of what passes for air—the physics model still maintains her corporeal dependencies—and as the alarm cuts out, she screams “Who are you, you unclefucking traitor? Who rewired your head?”

  There is silence in the courtroom.

  The false sister turns slowly to stare at Huw with an expression of mild pity, shrugs, turns back to face the camera-orc and winks at the unseen audience.

  “Here’s an untranscended version of me, warts and bad headmeat and all. As you can see, she’s diseased and deranged, obsessed and unhinged. That’s what being trapped in a meatsack does to you—it warps your perspective!” The false sister takes a shuddering lungful of her own, chest swelling fetchingly, and declares with a quiver in her voice: “Madam Chairwoman, honored guests, I am so grateful to be here today and to have had the opportunity of getting my life in order. A chance to, to put that sad debased creature”—she is pointing at Huw—“behind me. A chance to be all that I can be, to do all that I can do, to leave the shackles of mortality and madness behind ...”

  “Liar!” Huw says. “Who the fuck are you?” But nobody in the courtroom seems to be able to hear her. They don’t need to sanction her for contempt of court; they can just edit her out of the proceedings. Probably they can’t even hear anyone who hasn’t been called to the witness stand. Panicking, she flails at the air beneath her in a semblance of a crawl stroke. But although she’s free to move, she can’t gain traction: all she can do is watch in angry despair as a stranger wearing her own skin regales the court with tales of the horrors of the physical and sings the praises of radical transhumanism to a degree that would have taken aback even Mum in her most rabid pre-singularity ideological phase.

  It’s not about you, she remembers Mum telling her many years ago, when they were discussing—that’s the correct euphemism, stuffy British understatement at its worst—her parents’ plans to transcend: I know at your age it feels like you’re the center of the universe, Huw, but it really isn’t all about you, and you’ll realize this when you’re our age: The universe doesn’t give a shit about human life. We are medium-sized mammals who prosper only because we’ve developed a half-assed ability to terraform the less suitable bits of the planet we evolved on, and we’re conscious of our inevitable decay and death, and we can’t live anywhere else. There is no invisible sky daddy to give us immortal life and a harp and wings when we die. If we want an afterlife, we have to work hard and make it for ourselves. You’re still at the age when you feel immortal. Maybe the new anti-aging hacks will let you live for a very long time—but they’re too late for your father and me, and we can already feel the wind of senescence breathing down our necks. So stop trying to guilt-trip me with this suicide nonsense! The real act of suicide would be to stay here until we stop moving and rot.

  The sense of being ephemeralized, of being pushed kicking and screaming out of the picture, is nearly identical. Right now, Huw is just a stage prop in the false sister’s denunciation of the real world: Look at those cavemen go, ranting and raving and throwing poo! Way to get what you want. Huw’s focus narrows. I’ve been set up, she realizes. This was fixed.

  “Thank you for your testimony,” the Chair announces presently. “This hearing will now adjourn to integrate a summary before we move to the concluding arguments. Are there any other witnesses left to call?”

  “Me, Your Honor!” Huw says.

  The elven swordsmaiden with an oversized black phallic symbol strapped to the small of her back consults a magic scroll: “No, I think that’s a wrap.” The scroll rolls shut with a snap. “If that’s it, I’m out.”

  “It is.” The Chair nods, tusks swaying. “BRB.” Her avatar freezes, then shrinks rapidly to a point and vanishes. The rest of the committee follow suit.

  Around Huw, the audience is rising and variously shuffling toward the doors, ascending through the ceiling, teleporting, and dissolving in ropy greenish clouds of ichor. Huw is left flailing in midair until the room is almost empty. But her cover girl doppelgänger remains, standing just out of reach, watching her struggle with an expression of amused contempt.

  “You—” Huw glares at her.

  Instance 639,219 snaps her fingers and Huw drops to the floor, belly-flopping across a Louis Ghost chair hard enough to knock the wind out of her lungs. “Don’t try to fight me, sister. You’re out of your depth.” Huw gasps for breath while the malignant impersonator circles her. “Hmm. How amusingly Terrestrial. And you’re a girl too. I thought you were still male, down there. What an interesting time for you to crawl out of the woodwork. I wonder who dreamed you up?”

  “Imp—” Huw swallows. “Impostor. You
’re an impostor.”

  Instance 639,219 grins. “What? You think I’m a fake? Pot, kettle ...” Her circle of inspection finished, she straightens up: “Don’t you remember? Or did you edit it out as too embarrassing? I’ll bet that’s what it is. I—you—always did have an excessive opinion of our own integrity.”

  Huw clears her throat. “Well, fuck me. You don’t realize you’re an impostor, do you? You think I’m the fake.”

  “Oh, how tedious. Identity politics? We both originated with the same upload, but you’re the one who stalled, who refused to budge, to try out the thing you’d been terrified of since you were a pants-wetting teenager filled with romantic hallucinations about your fleshy glory. I’m the me who spent the two years subjective actually trying transcendence, rather than denying it. You’re the superstition-based Huw who foreordained the outcome of the experiment on the way in. I’m the evidence-based Huw who actually ran the experiment and had the intellectual honesty to face the outcome.”

  “That's a lie,” Huw says. “Even if you believe it, it’s still a lie. You aren’t me. We have no common ancestor. You’re synthetic, created out of nothing to look and sound like me, or almost like me, just to discredit and provoke me. Some radical sectarian faction whipped you up out of polygons and Markov chains.”

  639,219 studies Huw intently, tip of her tongue resting on her square, even teeth. “It’s remarkable,” she says at length. “Just incredible. To think that we share a common basis. Goodness me, love, you’re practically catatonic with denial, aren’t you? All right, I’ve heard your hypothesis. Now I’d like you to hear mine.

  “There were a lot of us, early on. About a trillion, all running through the sim in parallel. A fitness function periodically sorted us into categories based on how similar our behavior was. The most characteristic example from each group was kept, the remainder were culled, until only I remained. Don’t worry, Huw, it was absolutely instantaneous and painless, and besides, none were zeroed—they were saved as diffs, and can be reinstantiated with no subjective time lapse should the need arise.