Rapture of the Nerds

by Cory Doctorow

  “Other— Rosa Giuliani, by any chance?” She asks, “Is there a person here called Bonnie? Or a—?”

  “I’m sure you’ll have time to catch up with your friends later.” The gorilla nudges. “But right now, Secretary Chakrabarti has asked me to see that you’re comfortably settled in and all your needs attended to first. To minimize culture shock, you understand.”

  Huw certainly understands, all right. The embassy is not just a very high fidelity sim, mimicking Earth-bound reality right down to the limits of direct sensory perception (despite the jumble of items from the architectural heritage dime store and the mad skyscape overhead); it’s also a capabilities-enforced PvP environment, the enlightened modern substitute for diplomatic immunity. And so she allows the gorilla to lead her to a teleport booth, and then to the gigantic jungle-infested lobby of the largest skyscraper in the Middle East, and up a roaring maglev express elevator (her ears pop, painfully and hyperrealistically, on the way) to a penthouse suite about the size of her entire street back home.

  “I hope you enjoy the facilities here,” says the gorilla with a wink. “Nothing but the best for our expert witnesses—we have hot and cold running everything.”

  It’s a far cry from jury duty accommodation in a crappy backpacker’s hostel in dusty Tripoli. Huw dials her time right up (sinfully extravagant: it’s the same kind of costly acceleration that got her into trouble when 639,219 called her on it) and orders the whirlpool-equipped hot tub with champagne to appear in the bathroom. Then she climbs in to marinate for subjective hours (a handful of seconds in everyone else’s reference frame) and to unkink for the first time in ages. After all, it’s not as if she’s consuming real resources here. And she needs to relax, recenter her emotions the natural way, and do some serious plotting.

  Of course, the sim is far too realistic. A virtual champagne bath should somehow manage to keep the champagne drinking-temp cold while still feeling warm to the touch. And it shouldn’t be sticky and hot and flat; it should feel like champagne does when it hits your tongue—icy and bubbly and fizzy. And when Huw’s nonbladder feels uncomfortably full and relaxed in the hot liquid and she lets a surreptitious stream loose, it should be magicked away, not instantly blended in with the vintage Veuve to make an instant tubworth of piss-mimosa.

  This is what comes of having too much compute-time at one’s disposal, Huw seethes. In constraint, there is discipline, the need to choose how much reality you’re going to import and model. Sitting on an Io’s worth of computronium has freed the Galactic Authority—and isn’t that an unimaginative corker of a name?—from having to choose. And with her own self simulated as hot and wide as she can be bothered with, she can feel every unpleasant sensation, each individual sticky bubble, each droplet clinging to her body as she hops out of the tub and into the six-jet steam-shower for a top-to-bottom rinse, and then grabs a towel—every fiber slightly stiff and plasticky, as if fresh out of the wrapper and never properly laundered to relax the fibers—and dries off. She discovers that she is hyperaware, hyperalert, feeling every grain of not-dust in the not-air individually as it collides with her not-skin.

  Oh, oh, oh, enough, she wants to shout. What is the point of all this rubbish?

  This is the thing that Huw has never wanted to admit: Her primary beef against the singularity has never been existential—it’s aesthetic. The power to be a being of pure thought, the unlimited, unconstrained world of imagination, and we build a world of animated gifs, stupid sight gags, lame van-art avatars, brain-dead “playful” environments, and brain-dead flame wars augmented by animated emoticons that allowed participants to express their hackneyed ad hominems, concern-trollery, and Godwin’s law violations through the media of cartoon animals and oversized animated genitals.

  Whether or not sim-Huw is really Huw, whether or not uploading is a kind of death, whether or not posthumanity is immortal or just kidding itself, the single, inviolable fact remains: Human simspace is no more tasteful than the architectural train wreck that the Galactic Authority has erected. The people who live in it have all the aesthetic sense of a senile jackdaw. Huw is prepared to accept—for the sake of argument, mind—that uploading leaves your soul intact, but she is never going give one nanometer on the question of whether uploading leaves your taste intact. If the Turing test measured an AI’s capacity to conduct itself with a sense of real style, all of simspace would be revealed for a machine-sham. Give humanity a truly unlimited field, and it would fill it with Happy Meal toys and holographic, sport-star, collectible trading card game art.

  There’s a whole gang of dirtside refuseniks who make this their primary objection to transcendence. They’re severe Bauhaus cosplayers, so immaculately and plainly turned out that they look more like illustrations than humans. Huw’s never felt any affinity for them—too cringeworthy, too like a Southern belle who comes down with the vapors at the sight of a fish knife laid where the dessert fork is meant to go. It always felt unserious to object to a major debate over human evolution with an argument about style.

  But Huw appreciates their point, and has spent his and then her entire life complaining instead about the ineffable and undefinable humanness that is lost when someone departs for the cloud. She’s turned her back on her parents, refused to take their calls from beyond the grave, she’s shut herself up in her pottery with only the barest vestige of a social life, remade herself as someone who is both a defender of humanity and a misanthrope. All the while, she’s insisted—mostly to herself, because, as she now sees with glittering clarity, no one else gave a shit—that the source of her concerns all along has been metaphysical.

  The reality that stares her in the face now, as she reclines on the impeccably rendered 20-million-count non-Egyptian noncotton nonsheets, is that it’s always been a perfectly normal, absolutely subjective, totally meaningless dispute over color schemes.

  Now she’s got existential angst.

  The Burj Khalifa’s in-room TV gets an infinity of channels, evidently cross-wired from the cable feed for Hilbert’s hotel. It uses some evolutionary computing system to generate new programs on the fly, every time you press the channel-up button. This isn’t nearly as banal as Huw imagined it might be when she read about it on the triangular-folded cardboard standup that materialized in her hand as she reached for the remote. That’s because—as the card explained—the Burj has enough computation to model captive versions of Huw at extremely high speed, and to tailor the programming by sharpening its teeth against these instances-in-a-bottle so that every press of the button brings up eye-catching, attention-snaring material: soft-core pornography that involves pottery, mostly.

  Huw would like nothing better than to relax with the goggle-box and let her mind be lovingly swaddled in intellectual flannel, but her mind isn’t having any of it. The more broadly parallel she runs, the more meta-cognition she finds herself indulging in, so that even as she lies abed, propped up by a hill of pillows the size of a Celtic burial mound, her thoughts are doing something like this:

  Oh, that’s interesting, never thought of doing that sort of thing with glaze.

  Too interesting, if you ask me, it’s not natural, that kind of interesting, they’ve got to be simulating gigaHuws to come up with that sort of realtime optimization.

  There’ll be hordes of Huw-instances being subjected to much-less-interesting versions of this program and winking out of existence as soon as they get bored.

  Hell, I could be one of those instances, my life dangling on a frayed thread of attention.

  Every time I press the channel-up button, I execute thousands—millions? billions?—of copies of myself.

  Why don’t I care more about them? It’s insane and profligate cruelty but here’s me blithely pressing channel-up.

  Whoa, that’s interesting—she looks awfully like Bonnie, but with a bum that’s a little bit more like that girl I fancied in college.

  I could die at any instant, just by losing attention and pressing channel up.• That’s
wild, never noticed how those muscles—quadrati lumborum?—spring out when someone’s at the wheel, that bloke’s got QLs for days.

  If I were really ethically opposed to this sort of thing, I’d be vomming in my mouth with rage at the thought of all those virtual people springing into existence and being snuffed out.

  But I’m not, am I? Hypocrite, liar, poseur, mincing aesthete, that’s me, yeah?

  So long as it’s interesting and stylish, I’ll forgive anything.

  I’ve got as much existential introspection as a Mario sprite.

  Enough, already, she tells herself, and cools herself down to a single thread, then slows that down, hunting for the sweet spot at the junction of stupidity and calm. Then finding it, she settles down and watches TV for a hundred subjective years, slaughtering invisible hordes of herself without a moment’s thought.

  Satori.

  An indeterminate time later, the hotel room door opens.

  “Shit,” says a familiar voice.

  “Didn’t I tell you she has a tendency toward self-abuse? Why, when he was six, he managed to lock himself in the living room when David had left the key in the drinks cupboard, and by the time we realized he was missing he’d—”

  A familiar embarrassment flushes through her veins, dragging her back toward the distant land mass that is consensus reality: “Shut up, Mum! Why are you always bringing that up?”

  “He never ate his greens, either,” his mother says. “Think you can get through to her?”

  “I’ll try,” says the other voice. Male, a little deeper than last time he’d heard her, her—Huw drags her gaze back from the glass teat and looks round.

  “You!” she says. It’s Bonnie, back as a boy again, same blue forelock and skinny amphetamine build as before. “You rooted my sib! Prepare to—”

  “Uh?” Bonnie looks surprised. Huw’s mum—dressed up in hyperreal drag as her very own pre-upload middle-aged self—raises a hand.

  “Huw, it’s all right. Bonnie here is thoroughly dewormed. You don’t have to take my word for it; the galactic feds have vermifuges you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Guh.” Huw struggles to sit up, mind still fuzzed from endless reruns of a This Is Your Life celebrity show starring one Huw Jones as seen from outside by an adoring throng of pot-worshippers. The narcotic effect of the television binge is fading rapidly, though. “Whassup?”

  “Then there was the time he discovered David’s porn stash,” Huw’s mum confides in Bonnie, “when he was nine. David’s always had a bit of a clankie thing going, and for ages afterwards, Huw couldn’t look at a dalek without getting a—”

  “Mum!” Huw throws a pillow. His mother deflects it effortlessly, exhibiting basketball-star reflexes that she’d never possessed in her lumpen nerd first life.

  “Gotcha,” she says. “Turn the TV off, there’s a good girl, and pay attention. We have important things to discuss.” A note of steel enters her voice: “Compliance is—”

  “Mandatory, I get it.” Huw zaps the screen, not merely muting it but also setting it into standby so that it’s not there in the corner as a distraction. “You want to talk.” She crosses her arms. “Talk, dammit.” She avoids looking at Bonnie. Some experiences are still too raw.

  “Huw. My child.”

  Uh-oh, Huw thinks. Here comes bad news.

  “Yes, Mother dearest?” Huw says.

  “We need to get you up to speed. In a very short subjective time, you are going to stand alone and naked before the galactic confederation, and you will speak on behalf of the human race, and if you are compelling in your defense of our species, we will join the confederation, with all the privileges accruing thereto. Or at least get a stay of execution.”

  Huw pulled a face. “Yes, and if I cock it up, they annihilate us in an eyeblink. I’m way ahead of you, Mum. The only part I don’t understand is why?”

  Huw’s mum inclined her head in Bonnie’s direction. He nodded smartly and declaimed, “Because they have divided the universe neatly into two kinds of civilizations: allies and potential threats. Anything that looks like the latter, well, zap. They’re playing a very, very long game, one that stretches so far out that they’re calculating the number of CPU cycles left before the Stelliferous Era ends, and deciding who gets what. You need to convince them that we, as a species, can be brought into their little social contract and behave ourselves and not run too many instances of ourselves and such.”

  Huw reflects on her recent history. “I’m probably not the person best suited to this, you know.”

  Bonnie and Huw’s mum nod their heads as one. “Oh, we know,” Bonnie says. “But they’ve asked for you. The ambassador, you know. Plus, well ...”

  Huw’s mum gestures with one wrinkly hand, which bears a high-resolution mole with high-resolution hairs growing from it. There’s altogether too much reality in this sim, which is funny, because until pretty recently, Huw has been dedicated to the preservation of as much reality as is possible.

  “Not now, Bonnie. Huw will get a chance soon enough.”

  Now, here’s a familiar situation: conspirators who are privy to secrets that Huw is too delicate or strategically important or stupid to share. Huw knows how this one goes, and she isn’t prepared to sit through another round of this game.

  “Mum,” Huw says very quietly. “That’s enough. I am through being a pawn. I’m the official delegate. If you’ve got something I should know, I require that you impart it.” Require—there was a nice verb. Huw is proud of it. “Or you can leave and Bonnie will tell me. This is not optional. Compliance is mandatory, as you keep saying.”

  Her mum goes nearly cross-eyed with bad temper, but bottles it up just short of an explosion. After all, she’s been an ascended master for years, albeit in a sim where transcendence involves a heavenly realm with all the style and subtlety of a third-rate casino. Still, she’s learned a thing or two.

  “It’s your father,” she says.

  “What about him?” He’d been conspicuously absent from the noosphere, and Huw had noticed. But she’d assumed that the old man had diffused his consciousness or merged with one of the cluster organisms or something else equally maddening and self-indulgent.

  “Well, he seti’ed himself.”

  “He what now?”

  “It’s not something one discusses, normally. Very distasteful. He concluded that the noosphere was too pedestrian for his tastes, so he transmitted several billion copies of himself by phased array antennas to distant points in the local group galaxies, and erased all local copies.”

  Huw parses this out for a moment. “Dad defected to an alien civilization?”

  “At least one. Possibly several.”

  “You two have been dead to me ever since I left. Why should it matter what imaginary playworld he’s been inhabiting? Even if it’s in some other solar system?”

  “Galaxy,” his mum says. “Don’t get me started on the causality problems. But apparently, he arrives there millions of years in the future and then they come here-now to follow up on it.”

  “You’ve lost me,” Huw says, and makes to turn herself up.

  Bonnie meekly raises a hand. “Huw, I know it’s difficult. Can I explain?”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Huw says. Then he remembers his moral high ground. “Proceed.”

  “Your father traveled a very great distance to join with the galactic federation. They instantiated him, got to know him, and decided that his species represented a potential threat.”

  “On the basis of a sample size of one,” Huw’s mother says. “Knowing David, I can’t honestly say they were wrong. If we were all like him ...”

  “Also, they concluded that, notwithstanding the dubiousness of his species, they rather liked and trusted him,” Bonnie says.

  “He always was a lovable rogue,” says Mum.

  “He’s the federation’s negotiator, isn’t he?” Huw says with a sinking sense of dread tickling at her stomach lining.

  “What can I s
ay? He’s a flake,” Huw’s mother says with a faintly apologetic tone, as if she’s passing judgment on her younger self’s juvenile indiscretions. “But a charismatic flake. Charming too, if you were as young and silly as I was in those days.”

  She means between her first and second Ph.D.s, if Huw remembers her family history correctly. Mum and Dad had both been appallingly bright, gifted with a pedantic laser-sharp focus that only another borderline-aspie nerd could love. All things considered, it was a minor miracle that their sole offspring could walk and chew gum without counting the cracks in the pavement and the number of mastications. But general intelligence isn’t a strongly inherited trait, and humans breed back toward the mean: and so Huw’s childhood had been blighted by the presence of not one but two mad geniuses in the household, intermittently angsting over how they could possibly have given birth to a mind so mundane that their attempts to instill an understanding of the lambda calculus in him before he could walk had produced infant tantrums rather than enlightenment. (He had been twelve before he truly grokked Gödel’s theorem, by which time Dad had given up on him completely as a hopeless retard.)

  “Are you sure it’s him?” Huw says. “I mean, he didn’t just upload: he beamed himself at the galactic empire. They could have done anything with the transmission! It might be some kind of seven-headed tentacle monster using Dad’s personality as a sock puppet, for all you know? ...” She tries to keep the hopeful note out of her voice.

  “Good question.” Bonnie looks thoughtful. “You’re right: We can’t rule that out. But—”

  “He thinks like David!” Mum says. “We were together for nearly thirty years before we uploaded, and a couple of subjective centuries afterwards—linear experiential centuries, if you unroll the parallelisms and the breakups and back-togethers—there are even a couple of instances of us who couldn’t untangle enough to resume autonomous existence, so they permanently merged at the edges, the idiots. They’re out in the cloud somewhere or other.” She draws herself up. “The one who seti’d out was the real one, though. And we kept in touch, despite the divorce. I’d know him anywhere, the devious little shitweasel—”