The chair-orc rummages in her scale-mail and produces a familiar, dreadful cylinder. A whistle. “This won’t hurt a bit,” she says. “Now, say 'aaah.’”
Finally, an order Huw is glad to follow. The lack of an actual throat and actual lungs lets her scream much longer and louder than her meatself ever managed. The resulting esophageal tunnel makes a neat target for the chair, who tosses the whistle like a javelin; it lodges firmly in Huw’s windpipe and tunnels home with a fluting squeal of welcome.
Huw tiptoes out of the Marriott’s lobby in glazed disbelief, hands crossed over her chest protectively. The fact that it’s not her body being violated, but a mere representation of it, is of no comfort. Indeed, since the ambassador currently lodged in her not-windpipe is a lump of dense code created by the collective consciousness that evolved her digital representation, there’s no telling how entwined with her self it might be.
The djinni isn’t waiting for her. Even Bonnie is gone. Indeed, it takes a moment for Huw to realize that there’s nothing physical in this simspace. She is floating in a featureless void, except that floating isn’t the right verb to use, because she doesn’t have the sensation of floating, nor the sensation of not-floating. She is even more disembodied than usual.
“Well, look what the cat drug in, Sam,” says a familiar voice, which comes, of course, from everywhere and nowhere. “Amazing the sort of degenerate secondhander parasite you get, even here. I reckon we’ll have to take care of that, soon enough.”
The next voice she hears is likewise familiar—gravel in a cement-mixer, tinged with a kind of smug, celestial calm. “I reckon she’s a-here on a technicality,” Sam says. “Mean to say, from what I hear, she didn’t come under her own power.”
Huw attempts to propel herself into another sim, or out of this sim, but whatever trick is necessary for virtual locomotion in the absence of a virtual physicality, she doesn’t know it. Yet another thing she probably should have paid attention to back on the trainer. But it appears she can speak—or squeak. After a moment of high-pitched tweets, she and the ambassador recover their old, uneasy accommodation. “What are you guys doing here? I thought you were back on Earth, waiting for Zombie Jesus to return with Magic Sky Daddy and His heavenly host to sweep up the faithful.”
“Not that it’s any of your business, heathen,” Doc says, “but the Lord has spoken and His Prophet has clarified a few things about the uplifting and all.”
“Turns out we gotta prepare the way for holy war in cyberspace,” Sam says.
Huw boggles. “Cyberspace? Who even says ‘cyberspace’ anymore?”
“The Prophet, that’s who,” Doc says. “He knows how to talk like a real person, knows that the old language is best: if King James’s English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for him, he says. None of this ‘cloud’ and ‘sim’ business. He’s a plainspoken, people’s prophet. We’re Soldiers of the Lord, here to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven. And step one of that was to summon our army—all those who ain’t yet heard the Prophet’s word and don’t know what’s good for ’em. We had it all fixed, you know. Demolish the Earth, upload everyone dirtside in one go, and whompf, we’d of had an instant organized militia at our disposal, ready to start work on the final program. Then you made a hash of it all, with your foolish meddling, undid all the Prophet’s good work and all the work of His advance guard.”
“Us,” Sam says.
“Us,” the doc says. “And you don’t even belong here! You’re part of the heathen masses, scheduled to be swept up and quarantined in the Pre-Rapture for brainwashing and indoctrination. You try me, missy, you really do.”
“Guys,” Huw says, using her most reasonable voice, “this is all really fascinating, but I’ve been summoned to some sort of galactic tribunal to debate whether some vast, starry power will end the human race and its uplifted descendants, so perhaps we could do this later?”
“We’ve heard tell of this,” Doc says, “and we’re of two minds about it.”
“Yeah,” Sam says, “I think it’s just an unfortunate coincidence, mean to say, just one of those things.”
“And I think it’s the end times,” Doc says. “A snare of Satan. Which puts us behind schedule on our whole program of assembling our Army of Glory, but on the plus side, it’s all going to be moot soon.”
“What if the galactic tribunal decides we’re fit to join up with them?” Huw says. “They might be a really lovely bunch of chaps, with all sorts of excellent advice and technology for their new chums.”
Doc chuckles. “You’ve got some high opinion of those alien scum, I figure. Way I see it, there’s only one way Judgment Day can play out, even assuming these galactic bastards are the fairest-minded bunch of sweetie-pie fairies that ever danced over the celestial firmament: and that’s annihilation. Between your garden-variety sinners and the hordes of thumbless, brainless leeches that suck the vitality and vigor out of everything that their betters attempt, there’s no sense in pretending otherwise. Do you seriously believe that you and your tin whistle are going to convince these interstellar Übermenschen that they should let us go on polluting reality with our existence?”
Huw’s losing patience. “Isn’t the whole point of your faith that humanity is redeemable?”
Doc and Sam laugh together. “Missy,” Doc says, “I wouldn’t give you two wet farts for ‘humanity.’ A few select individuals, who understand the importance of humility before their betters, obedience to authority, piety and faith, sure, but those sorts’re pretty thin on the ground, even now that the least redeemable portion of the species have upped stakes for cyberspace.”
“I’m getting pretty tired of this business,” Huw says. “You do realize that I’m now the embodied avatar of the entire uplifted human race, thanks to the ‘tin whistle,’ right? It’s one thing to criminally endanger the planet Earth, but do you think that the WorldGovvers are going to sit still for an abduction? Whatever benighted bootleg sim you’ve kidnapped me to, they’re going to be able to trace me by using the ambassador. I don’t expect they’re going to be amused when they find you, either.”
“You just tend to your own knitting, little girl,” Doc says, demonstrating an unerring instinct for choosing the most irritating form of address. “We’ve got plenty of time to chat before anyone notices. ... Me and my coreligionists, we’re a lot deeper and wider than you give us credit for. We’ve got ourselves a damned hot and fast platform to run on, and a plan you wouldn’t believe. Your little council out there, whatever they want to call themselves, they’re running at about a bazillionth of the speed we’re at right now. We could jaw on here for hours of subjective time and still be done before they’d got through picking their noses.”
Huw doesn’t know whether to believe this or not, but she decides it’s at least plausible. The religion virus had been infecting the human race for millennia, and of course, anyone who’d plump for voluntary digital transcendence was already halfway bought into the whole spiritual pyramid scheme. Whoever this Prophet was, his mix of Objectivist pandering and Christian mystical eschatology could very well deliver a large fifth column of self-absorbed dingbats prepared to destroy the human race to save it (or at least the bit of it that they were dead certain they belonged to).
“I’ll stipulate that this is true,” Huw says. “So why the hell don’t you kill me or infect me or whatever it is you’re planning on doing? I’m a busy woman.”
“We’d have infected you some time ago if we thought that’d work,” Doc says after a pause.
“Doc reckons they’re going to be integrity-testing you pretty closely now they’ve found out about Bonnie,” Sam says.
“Which leaves us with only one course of action: We’re going to convince you to help us,” says Doc.
The funny thing is, Huw’s certain they’re not joking. “You’re kidding,” she says automatically, covering her confusion.
“No, we’re not,” says Doc. “Listen, what do you think we were put down t
here on Earth for? You think He did it just for yucks or a sick joke or something? No: we’re on a holy mission to bring about the Kingdom of God. Resurrection of the dead, redemption for all, immortality, the whole lot. Way the Prophet explains it, Saint John the Divine was a warning, a threat of what will happen if we don’t get our shit together. If we leave the Earth to God to fix up because we trash it, he’ll be pissed at us. But if we do his will and bring about the Kingdom of God, well, Armageddon’ll be averted, and that’s just for starters. Heaven on Earth!”
“You said resurrection.” Huw has a funny feeling she’s heard this stuff before. “And immortality. Isn’t that sort of what the whole Second Coming thing was supposed to be for?”
“Cometh the hour, cometh the man,” says Sam.
“Yup,” Doc says. “God loves those who help themselves—that’s basic, isn’t it? A is A, right? Let’s get our axioms in order. God loves those who help themselves, and God wants us to prosper. As long as we’re living a godly life and doing God’s will, of course. So anyway, what is God’s will? Well, God’s got plans for us which include prospering and being good custodians of the world and, uh, well, we haven’t done so good at that. But God’s other plans include resurrecting the dead. And the elect living in paradise on Earth for a very long time, with all the formerly dead sinners as their personal servants. Death is obviously the enemy of humanity and God, so the Prophet says we’re first going to make ourselves immortal, then we’re going to resurrect everyone who has ever lived, and simulate every human who ever might have lived so that we can incarnate them too. And we’re to colonize space—”
Huw is zoning out at this point. Because she has a very funny feeling that she’s heard it all before. This is the religious wellspring of the whole extropian transhumanist shtick, after all: the name’s on the tip of her tongue—
“Federov,” she says.
“Whut?” Sam sounds suspicious.
“An early Russian cosmist, sort of a fossil transhumanist mystic. My dad was a big fan of Federov,” she adds.
“Was he a Commie?” Doc asks. “What’s he got to do with the Kingdom of God?”
“Tell me.” Huw has a feeling that if she can fake it well enough, Sam and Doc might just let her go: “Your Prophet. He says ... hmm. Is there stuff about learning to photosynthesize and fly to other worlds and live free in space?”
“Yes! Yes!” Sam is excited.
“And stuff about bringing life to the galaxy?” she says.
“Might be.” Doc is less forthcoming. “This stuff you got from that Feeder-of guy?”
“A is A,” Huw dog-whistles a call-out to another Russian philosopher Dad was excessively fond of quoting. It’s so much easier to deal with Doc and Sam when she’s not suffering from concussion, god-module hackery, or a hangover. “Anyway, Federov died a long time ago. Did you know he taught Tsiolkovsky?” This stuff is all coming back, stuff Dad was big on: the drawback of being in the cloud is that mortal bit rot no longer applies. “Tsiolkovsky—the guy who invented the rocket equation and space colonization? Ayn Rand was a fan of both of them.”
“Now, hold on, girlie, no need to be taking the name of Saint Ayn in vain!” Doc sounds ticked off, and for a moment Huw thinks she’s gone too far. “But I take your point. If he’d not been one of those godless Orthodox types, he’d probably be a saint too. Serves him right. But there’ll be time to convert him after he’s resurrected.”
“Gotcha,” says Sam. “But listen, babe, before we can resurrect everyone, we’ve got to take over the cloud, dismantle the Earth, turn the entire solar system into the biggest damn computing cloud you can imagine, and simulate all possible paths of human history. Then bring everybody to the Prophet’s way. Once we’ve done that, then we can go git ourselves some more planets and reincarnate everybody and bring about heaven on as many earths as necessary. But do ya think the galactic satanists will let us do that, huh? Do you?”
“I don’t know,” Huw says, “but we’re all on the same side, aren’t we? We’re all human, all in favor of resurrecting everyone in the flesh, right?”
“Right,” Doc says.
“Even though you think I’m a godless pervert, right?”
“Ye-es,” Sam says.
“But we share a bunch of core beliefs, don’t we? We can agree to disagree for a little while about some minor stuff while I go and try to convince the galactic federation that they really don’t need to exterminate us like bugs, right? Because that would put a cramp on the Prophet’s scheme, wouldn’t it?”
“Don’t be entirely sure about that, missy,” Doc says. “If it’s God’s will to ring the curtain down on us, then I guess it’ll just be time for Jesus to come sort us all out.”
“But you don’t want that—” Enlightenment strikes Huw like a lightning bolt. “—because all the secondhanders would get their reward for believing, even if they never lifted a finger or worked an honest day in their life! Your years of hard work and struggle would go unnoticed and unrewarded if God has to roll his sleeves up and send his son to sort out the mess. So it’s best if we build the Kingdom of Heaven ourselves, right? Then we can enjoy the just rewards of creative genius.”
“Speaking for myself, that’s exactly what I’m cogitating,” Doc says. “Y’know, you weren’t the sharpest knife in the drawer as a boy, but I’ll swear you’re reading my mind. What—?”
“There’s this slider control.” Huw desperately searches for a plausible lie: “I’m thinking faster here, is all? So we can reach an uh, agreement?”
“I like the way you think,” says Doc: “After we build the Kingdom, you can be my handmaid!”
And Huw is abruptly ejected from whatever pocket nulliverse the Prophet’s fifth column have installed in the lobby of the virtual Tripoli Mariott, to a destination even more profoundly alienating than the cloud itself.
“Welcome to the embassy, Witness Jones,” says the gorilla.
He’s a very polite gorilla, thoroughly diplomatic: nattily turned out in a tuxedo and white spats (the effect overall only slightly spoiled by his failure to wear shoes). Huw would indeed be entirely charmed by him if not for a lingering bigoted prejudice against furries that she acquired at an early age. The gorilla looks naggingly familiar, and Huw has a forehead-slapping moment when she recognizes the beloved commercial mascot of a long-extinct brand of breakfast cereal—offered as a free, high-resolution avatar in many early game systems as part of a canny, much-copied marketing strategy. The Galactic Authority’s infinite power is apparently so vast that it needn’t bother itself about looking like an utterly naff simspace newbie who still thinks digital hair is cool.
“I’m very pleased to be here.” But not for the reason you expect. “Have you seen my djinni ?”
“Your—?” The gorilla’s expression sours. “He’s yours, is he? Yes, I’ve certainly seen him. I believe he’s camping in the rose garden around the back.” The gorilla gestures vaguely around the side of the building they’re standing in front of.
As befits an embassy to a galactic civilization, the cloud-dwellers have thrown together something rather posh. Unfortunately, they didn’t bother to vet the components for architectural coherency, which is why, within the gigantic outer ramparts of the Tokugawa-era Edo Castle (big enough to surround a medium-scale city, steep enough to repel tanks), they’ve installed Buckingham Palace as a reception suite; the Executive Office Building from Washington, D.C., as an administrative center; and an assortment of other tasteless excrescences—the Centre Pompidou to house an Arts and Culture Expo, the Burj Khalifa for hotel accommodation, and the Great Pyramid of Giza for no obvious reason at all.
To Huw’s not-terribly-trained nose, it all reeks of desperate insecurity. Even if they had been physically built, rather than merely rendered, these monumental buildings wouldn’t be remotely impressive compared to the cloud itself: but they were all designed to testify to the power and grandeur of their pre-singularity creators, in a manner that is deeply reassurin
g to a future-shocked primate trying to face up to overwhelming neighbors. And the neighbors are overwhelming. The embassy is embedded within the fragment of the pan-galactic inter-cloud hosted by the repurposed remains of Io, and the aliens aren’t going to let anyone forget it: beyond the embassy compound lies a remarkably realistic-looking re-creation of the moon’s icy, sulfurous surface. Above it hangs the marmalade-and-cottage-cheese-streaked gibbous ball of Jupiter. Illumination, such as it is, comes from the distant reddish disk of the cloud, occulting and scattering much of the sunlight trapped within its Dyson sphere layers. And spanning fully 180 degrees of the sky beyond Jupiter and cloud lies ...
The Milky Way. But not as Huw knows it.
Her Milky Way is a timid smear of dimness, wheeling in the sky high above the nighttime hills of Wales. This Milky Way is a map of communications density, a dream of thought slashed livid across a billion inhabited star systems, pulsing with intellect, bubbling with fallow voids between the various conjoined empires. It reminds Huw of maps and visualizations Dad printed out in her—his—childhood, showing the early days of the Internet, mere trickling exabytes and petabytes of data zinging through the wires between population centers. But the points of light in this dazzling mist of data aren’t web browsers, they’re entire uploaded civilizations. If it’s meant to impress, it’s succeeding. If it’s meant to intimidate, it’s doing that too.
“Thanks, I’ll find him later. Uh, where am I staying? And what do I need to know for the process I’m supposed to be part of?”
“I can see you have a lot of questions, there. You’re staying in a suite on the two hundred eighty-sixth floor of the tower, there—” The gorilla points at the Burj Khalifa. “—and as for the rest, you are scheduled for an orientation meeting later. Perhaps you’d like to move in, freshen up, and collect your djinni ? The Cultural Secretary will talk you through the diplomatic process later, but for the time being, she’s rather busy seeing to the other witnesses.”
Rapture of the Nerds Page 24
