Rapture of the Nerds

by Cory Doctorow

  Huw can’t help but feel like there’s something the djinni and Bonnie aren’t telling her—something about the fraught looks they keep exchanging with each other.

  “If only we could talk to 639,219. She is gone forever, right?”

  “The rootkit zeroed her out,” Bonnie says.

  “Yeah,” the djinni says.

  Huw rubs her chin.

  “Huw—,” Bonnie says, a warning tone in her voice.

  “This isn’t a universe where causality only runs forwards, right? Things that happen can unhappen. Something you do in the future can affect the past, here.”

  “Huw—,” the djinni says, sounding more alarmed.

  “And 639,219 only got derezzed by her rootkit after we created an agreement. And since I’m still in this sim, all I need to do is violate the agreement and I’ll unwind everything back to that point. We’ll get one of those little tokens—” Huw flipped the poker chip so it did a high end-over-end arc, clattering away into the infinite regression-depths of the club’s storeroom. “We’ll get one of those, and poof, 639,219 will be back and hale and hearty and we can all start over again, right?”

  The djinni and Bonnie are shaking their heads together in sync, like two metronomes. “Huw,” the djinni says, “if you revert this sim to the moment before you and 639,219 agreed to arb, you’re going to roll back the lives of thousands of people.”

  Huw makes a rude noise. “I may have only just ascended, but I didn’t just fall off the tree. There wasn’t anyone around when we arbed.”

  “You’re forgetting the djinni chasing me down. If you and 639,219 never arbed, I wouldn’t have run, and the djinni wouldn’t have chased me.”

  “All right, a few people probably saw that, but how many of them had their outcomes influenced by seeing an infinite herd of djinni chasing a bartender?”

  “Dozens,” the djinni says. “Hundreds. And then there’s everyone they talked to or influenced as a result. Huw, you’re talking about deliberately unwinding the lives of a small city, and the population is growing by the second.”

  Huw feels belligerent. “I do the same every time I do anything and everything. Every time I take any action, it ripples out to all the people who are affected by it, and all the people they effect. You’re saying that sensitivity to initial conditions means that you’re morally obliged never to change your mind. It’s rubbish. Just because causality runs backwards in this place doesn’t mean the butterfly effect becomes the first commandment. Now, what did I promise 639,219 before we arbed?”

  Bonnie and the djinni are both talking now, but Huw has literally tuned them out, so that they’ve faded out of her causal universe, unable to affect her. She’s really getting to like this capabilities wheeze. She tunes them back in.

  “Right,” she says, pointing at Bonnie. “You, talk.”

  “Look,” Bonnie says, “you’ve got this all wrong.”

  The djinni frowns. “You need to audit her,” he says. “You’ll never get anything useful out of her volitionally. Just arb her.”

  “No,” Bonnie and Huw say at the same moment. Huw is struck with a whole-not-body revulsion at the thought of being exposed and exposing with this Bonnie, this weird shade of the man and woman she’s loved and lost and loved and hated.

  “Why is it always me?” Huw says. “Why don’t you do the transhuman mind-meld for a change?”

  The djinni shakes his topknot. “Wrong cognitive model. I’m an expression of a hivemind, wholly synthetic. You two are uploaded—built incrementally by modeling a physical structure. Means that we’re impedence mismatched. Can’t ever have a meeting of the minds, alas.” He doesn’t sound very sorry. “So, look, Huw, let me tell you, whatever leverage you’ve got with Bonnie is going to evaporate pretty quick. Soon as someone leaves the club, the contract is fixed, because now there’s causal links that are external to this sim—Club Capabilities can’t reverse effects that take place outside of here. That’s why there’s no comms links in or out—we’re causally isolated. So if you’re going to blackmail her into arbing, better do it quick before someone decides to go outside and check his email.”

  Huw opens his mouth: “Well, fuck. Bonnie—”

  “You’re not going to make me—” Bonnie makes her move, begins to derez, trying to untrust Huw. But the djinni is faster. Bonnie and everyone in the bar—except the djinni —freeze in place and fade to red again.

  “Bullet time,” the djinni tells Huw. “You have about ten subjective seconds—two milliseconds as far as everyone else is concerned. Use them wisely.”

  Feeling pressured and desperate and sick to her stomach, Huw tweaks her emo control into bland-faced robotitude. A comforting blanket of gray descends, and of course it’s obvious what she ought to do. It’s for Bonnie’s own good, and 639,219’s insofar as 639,219 was a fragment of Huw’s own mind. Huw doesn’t owe her flawed instance-sister anything except the honest truth before the planning tribunal, and proof of Bonnie’s malfeasance will provide that. Besides, I’ve spent most of the past however long hating her guts. Isn’t this fit of sentimental sympathy a bit perverse?

  “Arb. Now,” Huw hears herself say. She watches her finger extend to touch Bonnie’s forehead, growing longer and stretching like a bizarre insectile appendage, multijointed and not part of her self-image. Bonnie is frozen, mouth half-open, hair caught in motion around her face. “You’ve got her? Connect us.” The djinni nods.

  “Well, fuck,” says Huw, staring at the same rootkit she saw in 639,219’s cognitive map. She glances at the djinni . “If we put this in front of the planning committee, along with the record from 639,219 ...”

  “Yes, that will provide an evidential chain suggesting that testimony provided by 639,219 must be discounted.” The djinni strokes his goatee. “There is an appeal stage where procedural errors can be raised. And proof of external tampering with evidence presented at the hearing will bring everything to a halt, if not result in a mistrial.” His expression is reserved, if not shifty.

  “Good.” Huw pauses. “But if I do that, I’ll be unable to unwind to before Bonnie killed 639,219. Won’t I?”

  The djinni points. “The answer is in your hands.”

  “Yes. I see.” Dully, Huw tweaks a helical slider past a detent labeled EMPATHY BLOCK, into a red zone flagged DANGER: SOCIOPATHIC PERSONALITY DISORDER. Instantly, she feels better. In fact, she feels great. “Cool! Let’s go!”

  The djinni smiles. “I knew you’d see sense eventually.”

  When they revert to realtime, Bonnie puts up a fight: crying, shaking, pleading with Huw for understanding, offering to kiss and make up.

  Huw finds that she doesn’t give a shit for this tiresome emo nonsense. It’s transparently clear that it’s not Bonnie talking anyway—it’s the rootkit, using Bonnie’s personality as a sock puppet to manipulate her. Well, that’s okay by Huw. Huw doesn’t feel anything, but she remembers how she ought to act, how she would have acted, back when she was in the throes of lust or love or something. It’s trivially easy to calm Bonnie’s fears, to apologize for not trusting her—to pretend not to have seen the rootkit lurking gray and bloated in the wreckage of her moral maze—to agree it’s all a misunderstanding and anyway Huw hated 639,219. And so she holds Bonnie’s wrists as the floor carries them toward the exit and the djinni spins them around and down through bubbling blue layers of reality, back to the polished floor of the lobby of the Tripoli Marriott.

  “It’s all going to be okay.” Huw soothes Bonnie, who is whimpering and writhing but evidently in the grip of some kind of BDSM compulsion field, courtesy of the lurking djinni : “We’re going to go in there and explain that it was all a mistake and I’ll give evidence. All right?” She can see that Bonnie—or the rootkit—doesn’t agree that it’s all right, but she sees no reason to let it faze her.

  “You don’t understand! If I go in there, they’ll, it’s going to, I won’t be able to—” She’s blubbering now, making a surprisingly corporeal mess. Huw nods
reassuringly.

  The djinni, rubbing a handheld slab of black glass against his cheek—very symbolic, very retro, an antique telephone—is mumbling to himself. He makes the glass slab vanish. “I filed a motion for the committee to hear an appeal,” he says. The doors to the conference room swing open. “After you—”

  “What is bzzt going on?”

  Huw looks round. A pepper pot-shaped automaton covered in knobbly hemispheres, probes jutting aggressively from beneath the black silk cap adorning its cortical turret, glides across the lobby behind her. The avatar’s unfamiliar, but Huw’d recognize that voice anywhere, and for once it doesn’t fill her with terror. “Rosa! How charming. We’re just about to explain to the Planning Committee how they’ve been subverted—”

  “You!” shrieks Rosa Giuliani . “Exterminate!” She twirls to point her stubby manipulators at Huw and unleashes a rather implausible-looking lightning bolt that, predictably, has no effect whatsoever.

  Huw waits for the light show to subside. “This is a no-PvP area,” she says. “And we’re on the same side. Unless you want to encourage them to demolish the Earth?”

  “What is this? Explain!” Rosa—or the pint-sized robot tank containing what’s left of her malevolent mindware, post-upload—glides forward.

  “You got a summons too, didn’t you?” Huw asks. “But when you got here, you were too late because they’d closed the hearing.” She nods at Bonnie: “Well, here’s the evidence that the hearing’s been suborned: This one’s harboring an illegal rootkit. I reckon she was hacked by one of the players in Glory City, and they’ve been using her to mess with the evidence—”

  Bonnie struggles to get free. “That’s not true!” she says, “You’re making this up!”

  “Sorry, darling,” says Huw, and she drags Bonnie into the conference room. Which appears to be empty, until the instant her foot crosses the threshold.

  There are no spectators this time, and no regular witnesses. But the triumvirate of ill-assorted court bureaucrats bamf in one by one from whatever distant shard fragment they inhabit when the court isn’t in session. They do not look terribly happy. “Which one of you is Huw Jones?” says the chair, fingering one gold-capped tusk.

  “I am, Your Honor,” Huw says. “And this is Rosa Giuliani .” She gestures at the pepper pot.

  “Interesting. You aren’t the Huw Jones who testified at the last hearing, are you?”

  Huw swallows. “I’m afraid not. She’s dead. Terminally scrambled by this one, but not before I determined that she’d been infected by a rootkit prior to the hearing. I have evidence—” She gestures at the djinni, who coughs up a thumb-sized ruby, glinting with inner light, and tosses it at the chair.

  The chair swallows the gem. “Interesting.” Judging from her expression, that’s an understatement. “Who’s this?”

  Huw pushes Bonnie forward. Invisible bonds prevent her from fleeing. “This is Bonnie. She killed 639,219—my rootkitted sibling—inside a capability bar. Like me, she’s not thoroughly acclimated to the cloud: it turns out she’s been rootkitted too, and was running 639,219 on behalf of a botmaster, identity unknown, but probably resident in Glory City, South Carolina.”

  Bonnie falls to her knees. “What’s going on? I’m not a bot! You’re crazy, Huw, what’s gotten into you?”

  But the chair isn’t paying attention to Bonnie right now. “Judge Rosa Giuliani. You failed to attend the previous scheduled hearing. May I ask why?”

  “Extermin—” Rosa stops, pirouettes in place, and quietens. “Grr. Bzz. I was not notified of the hearing in time to attend. My clerk received the summons but unaccountably misfiled it for three days until exterminate damn this cheap off-the-shelf avatar! I came as soon as I could, after the summons came to light.”

  “Do you know why your clerk misfiled the court’s papers?” asks the second orc, deceptively calmly.

  “That is a very good question,”

  Giuliani says. “I believe certain parties in Glory City—while we were there attending to unpleasant but unavoidable businesses—suborned him. There are rumors about the depraved and perverted practices of the pulchritudinous protestant puritan plutocratic penis-people priesthood, of shadowy bacchanalian polyamorous practices. ... I suspect, to be blunt, someone was blackmailing him.”

  “You suspect? You did not investigate—?”

  “Hell, no!” says Giuliani, “I exterminate! All enemies of the—”

  The chair clears her throat. “This is rather disturbing,” she says. “Especially in view of the representations recently received.”

  For a moment the officers of the Planning Committee freeze and turn blurry and blue, segueing into quicktime to confer at leisure.

  Huw clears her throat, momentarily wishing there were an alien ambassador nestling in it to help get their attention. “What representations?” she asks, out of order but chancing her luck anyway.

  Bonnie sobs quietly.

  “The galactic federation,” says the chair, seguing back into real time and looking at her with the expression a kindly teacher might reserve for a slow learner. “Do try to keep up. You didn’t think we reconvened this hearing just in your behalf, did you? It’s the aliens. They sent us an email. All very traditional. Planning hearing will now recess while we discuss this other shit.”

  Huw feels stupid. “What galactic federation? That’s ridiculous! Some stupid griefer is playing games with you, a breakaway densethinker clade that’s bouncing its messages off Alpha Centauri to make them seem like they’re coming from the next galaxy. No?”

  The chair holds up a green-skinned and gnarly finger and wags it at Huw. “No. We’re completely sure. For one thing, they took Io.”

  “Took what?”

  “The moon. Io. Atomized it. It’s now dust. And for another, they’ve rooted the three largest simspaces and claimed them as ambassadorial missions.”

  “It could still be a griefer—?”

  “They sent us an email. Instructions for setting up a protocol converter. When you speak to it—which you will, Ms. Jones, you will—then you will know. This isn’t anything descended from meatpeople that we were or uplifted. It’s Other, capital O, and when you meet it, you won’t have any doubt.”

  Huw has a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. “This isn’t really about the planning application for dismantling the Earth, is it? It’s all about me again!”

  “Could be.” The chair’s expression is bland, behind her tusks. Huw glances round. The djinni is stationed before the closed doors, his expression frozen. Judge Rosa’s pocket tank is parked beside him, weaponlike appendages pointing at ... well. Bonnie is a crying lump on the floor, no help there even if she were rootkit-free. “Ms. Jones. Please reset your emotional balance to normal, there’s a good being? What we are about to discuss is not suitable for psychopaths.”

  “Feh.” Huw brings up her emo box and tosses it up in the air. As it comes down again, a nameless sleet of strange emotional states shakes her to her core. She looks at Bonnie, feels a stab of remorse, grief, revulsion, and pity. “Why?” she asks.

  “It calls itself the Authority. It claims it represents a hive-intelligence merged from about 216

  intelligent species from the oldest part of the galaxy. It claims that there were once about four orders of magnitude more such species, but the rest were wiped out in vicious, galactic resource wars that only ended with the merger of the remaining combatants into a single entity. Now it patrols the galaxy to ensure that any species that attempt transcendence are fit to join it. If it finds a species wanting, pfft! It takes care of them before they get to be a problem.”

  “You’re saying that this thing can move faster than the speed of light, and that it’s descended from species that had the same ability?”

  “We don’t know much about its capabilities, but yes, those sound about right.”

  “No, on the contrary: That sounds completely crazy. You’ve been had. Why would a civilization that could beat light
speed bother to fight wars? What, precisely, could they fight over? If your neighbor wants your rocks, go somewhere else with more of the same rocks. Unclaimed rocks and sunlight aren’t scarce; otherwise, the neighbors would have dismantled us for computronium back in the Triassic. So the resource wars they’re talking about are a big hairy fib. And that’s leaving out all the causality stuff, which is a bit of a reach. Put it all together, and it stinks of bullshit.”

  “We don’t think so.” The chair of the Planning Committee is intently focused on Huw, and it’s making her skin crawl. “They are many millions of years older than we are. They command an understanding of physics that makes us look like naked, rock-worshipping neolithics. We do not know what led to their wars—aesthetic jihad? A philosophical crusade? A bad hand of poker? Whatever it is, they say that there’s a pretty good chance we’ll grow up to want to do it too, and if that turns out to be the case, they plan on doing something about it, preemptively.

  “Which is where you come in. When the Authority manifested here, it demanded that we send it an ambassador to parlay. Well, we just happened to have one lying around.”

  “You didn’t.” Huw’s eyes widen.

  “We did.” Does the chair for a moment sound just slightly smug? “And we need you to interface with it.”

  Huw bolts. A moment later she’s on the floor, nose-to-nose with Bonnie. Oddly, her feet don’t seem to want to work properly. “I told you she’d do that,” says the djinni.

  Fuck, another traitor, Huw realizes despairingly. Does anyone in here not have a covert agenda?

  The chair looms over Huw. “Ms. Jones, this unseemly and improper display notwithstanding, this court needs representation before the Authority. And so, we are hereby deputizing you to speak on all our behalfs. Do the job right and when you get back here we will listen to your testimony before the Planning Committee with a sympathetic ear. Fuck up, and there won’t be a Planning Committee to testify to. Or an Earth, in whose behalf to speak, for that matter.”