“Gettir, Sam.”
“Oh fu—” Huw freezes. Bonnie turns and aims a punch at Sam’s face, simultaneously trying a vicious stomp and a disabling knee to the groin—none of which stop the man-mountain from placidly grabbing her fist and twisting her arm behind her back.
Huw tries to move, but his voluntary control of his musculature seems to have clocked off for the day: he can’t seem to do anything except stand there like a wallflower, cast-iron poker dangling limply from one hand.
I’ve been rooted! Horrified realization dawns as Doc steps over Ade’s prone form, pointing his baby blue Taser shotgun at Huw’s midriff.
“Greetings, heretic.” Doc’s smile—more of a carnivorous grin—doesn’t reach his eyes. “Where is she?”
“What? Who?”
“Don’t play the innocent with me.” Doc’s glare is positively deranged. Behind him, Sam stands impassive as a golem, holding Bonnie, whose struggles are clearly diminishing. Just how Doc has reasserted his control over Sam’s wetware puzzles Huw for a fraction of a second until the coin drops. If Doc has rooted him, then obviously Doc rooted Sam first, and probably everybody else he’s been able to get close to. Sam is, in fact, probably just as much a puppet in this show as Huw. “Her. The fountainhead, the one who brought the True Knowledge to Earth. The Prophet says she’s reincarnated here in this town, preaching. Where is she?” His voice rises to a ragged screech.
“Whoa!” Huw boggles at him. “I don’t know whom you’re—” He stops in midsentence and backtracks before Doc can wind up to another tirade. “—huh. You’re looking for Ayn Rand?”
Behind Doc, Bonnie stops struggling and emits a sound like a stifled, frightened giggle.
Huw rolls his eyes. “Bonnie? Did she tell you where—?”
Ade groans. Doc’s head whips around: “Be silent, heretic!”
“Let me get this straight?” Huw asks. “You reincarnated and came here because you heard that your Thought-Leader has returned and is preaching the rapture of the uploaded? And if you get her, you’ll take her back to Jesusland and do the whole storming heaven thing and leave us alone?”
“Don’t push your luck,” Doc says, his finger whitening on the trigger—just as the doorbell rings again.
“Hello, is Bonnie here? Would like to resume our discussion of the Sing— Oh!”
The skinny, dark-haired, intense-looking woman stares up at Sam. “Who is this?” Then she sees Doc’s shotgun, realizes Sam has Bonnie in a half nelson: “This will not do at all! You disgusting coercive thugs!” She lights up, incandescent with rage: “Coercive violence is an abomination! You should be ashamed of yourselves!”
Doc falls to his knees before her: “Holiness!” he says. “You have returned at last to lead us to the promised land!”
“I’ve what? No no no, that won’t do at all!” Her hair is almost standing on end, crackling with indignation: “What priest-ridden nonsense is this?” She grabs Doc by one ear and lifts. “Put that disgusting thing down right this instant, I say!” He lets go of the Taser shotgun as he rises, perforce to a stoop (for the Thought-Leader is not a tall person in this reincarnate body). “Do you call yourself an Objectivist? You aren’t fit to shine Alan Greenspan’s boots! And what’s this I hear about this bizarre superstitious plan to bring about a universal theocracy? Your illogic disgusts me! Truly pathological. Feh. You and I, we are going to have an open-minded discussion about the meaning of hypocrisy in the context of rational thought grounded on Aristotelian axioms. Here is a hint: You are going to lose. ...”
Ade groans again and clutches his head as Rand drags Doc through the door, groveling and scraping all the way out to the street beyond. “Whut?” he vocalizes, rolling on his back and gazing up at Sam, whose grip on Bonnie is slackening.
“Help,” Sam says.
“Me too,” adds Huw. “Been rooted.”
“Rooted.” Bonnie steps backwards nervously, looking around the three of them. “By Doc, I assume?”
“Yeah ...” Huw swallows.
“Okay, I’ll send you the security patch your mum gave me. Stand by. ...” She turns to Sam. “Doc dragged you here, did he?” Sam nods. “Do you want to be free?” Sam nods again. “Well, then you came to the right place. ...” But Huw doesn’t hear what she says next, as for a couple of seconds later everything goes blurry and fuzzy and a progress bar appears in front of his field of vision, crawling from left to right.
There is a strange feeling of congestion in his head; then a moment later a sense of release sweeps over him. He flexes his fingers: they tingle slightly, as if released from the confinement of invisible felt mittens. And everything comes crystal clear again.
Ade groans. Huw bends down and grabs his right hand. “Think you can stand?” he asks.
“C’n try ...” Huw heaves, and Ade slowly slides up the wall until he’s in an approximation of verticality. “Thnksss. Ack—thanks. Yer a card, mate.”
“Think nothing of it.” There is something up with his fingers. Huw flexes them in front of his face. What if that rootkit was hiding in wherever I keep my muscle memory? he wonders.
“That Doc, didn’t know he was, was in town—”
“Leave it,” Huw tells him firmly. “Look, just stop apologizing. If you want to be useful, help Bonnie sort out that overgrown kid there.” He nods at Sam. “Me, I’ve got more important things to deal with.”
With that, Huw heads back to the pottery out back, to find out if the magic has returned to his fingertips.
And as it turns out, it has.
The golem knocking at Huw’s door is the same model his mum wore, that fateful day, but there’s any number of them about now, quick and dirty embodiments for anyone from the cloud with a yen to indulge some fleshy pleasures for an hour or three. Huw spies it from the sitting room window, peeking out the corner of the curtains, and decides to wait it out.
It keeps knocking.
And knocking.
Soon, the whole house is shaking.
“Get that, will you?” Bonnie says. She’s waist-deep in some kind of erotipolymer stuff she’s downloaded from one of Adrian’s sex-ninjas, has been all week, and isn’t showing any signs of tiring of it. But the thudding is getting to her.
Huw grits his teeth and ignores her too.
Thud. Thud. thud. There’s a splintery sound from the lintel of the front door, not a full-blown tearing away, but a sound that tells you the hinges are reconsidering their relationship with the doorframe.
“Get it, for shit’s sake!”
Huw closes his eyes. He stomps to the door.
“Go away,” he says, and closes it again.
Except that the golem has inserted its foot in the door, and the door bounces back and hits him in the nose, and he takes a step backwards, clutching at it, and moans. “Please, go away.” Maybe politeness will work.
“Greetings, Jones, Huw,” it says in a neutral voice. It’s a goddamned NPC. Ambulatory spam. He’s just working up a head of really righteous steam when it says, “I have been dispatched by the office of interstellar harmony of the Galactic Authority to execute a survey of your species’ recent assimilation experience. We realize you are a busy organism, and this will take only a moment of your time. Your participation will help us shape our future species trials, and give our own staffers valuable feedback. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.”
And Huw starts to laugh. Laugh like a drain, laugh like a monkey trapped in a bariatric chamber filled with nitrous oxide, laugh like a man in the grips of a joke that encompasses the whole cosmos.
“All right, then,” he says, “let’s do it. Want a cup of tea?”
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Cory Doctorow is the New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother, Pirate Cinema and For the Win. He's a technology journalist and columnist for such publications as The Guardian, Publishers Weekly and Locus, and is co-owner/co-editor of the popular website Boing Boing. He's a fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and co-founded the UK-based Open Rights Group. In 2012, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University. Born in Canada, he now lives in London, England with his wife Alice, who runs a 3D printed toy company called MakieLab; and his daughter Poesy, who is learning to pick locks.
Charles Stross, 47, is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. The author of six Hugo-nominated novels and winner of the 2005 and 2010 Hugo awards for best novella ("The Concrete Jungle" and "Palimpsest"), Stross's works have been translated into over twelve languages.
Like many writers, Stross has had a variety of careers, occupations, and job-shaped-catastrophes in the past, from pharmacist (he quit after the second police stake-out) to first code monkey on the team of a successful dot-com startup (with brilliant timing he tried to change employer just as the bubble burst). Along the way he collected degrees in Pharmacy and Computer Science, making him the world's first officially qualified cyberpunk writer (just as cyberpunk curled up and died).
He's currently working on a series of near-future novels about the social impact of information networks on games, crime, and politics, including "Halting State" and "Rule 34".In 2013 he will be Creative in Residence at the UK-wide Centre for Creativity, Regulation, Enterprise and Technology, researching the business models and regulation of industries such as music, film, TV, computer games and publishing.
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