Rapture of the Nerds

by Cory Doctorow

“I go where I’m needed,” she says. “Where I can lend a hand to people who want it. Your gang wants to play postapocaypse; that’s fine. I’m here to help the utopians play their game.”

  Huw has shut his eyes and is nearly faint with fury. I’m a fucking passenger again, nothing but a passenger on this trip—the alien flute-thing in his stomach squirms, shifting uncomfortably in response to his adrenaline and prostaglandin surge—fucking cargo. For an indefinite moment, Huw can’t hear anything above the drumbeat of his own rage: carrying the ambassador seems to be fucking with his hormonal balance, and his emotions aren’t as stable as they should be.

  Sam is still talking. “—Dad’s second liver,” he says to Bonnie. “So he cloned himself. Snipped out this, inserted that, force-grew it in a converted milk tank. Force-grew me. I’m supposed to be him, only stronger, better, smarter, bigger. Kept me in the tank for two years plugged in through the cortex speed-learning off the interwebnet then hauled me out, handed me a scalpel, painted a line on his abdomen, and said ‘cut here.’ The liver was a clone too, so I figured I oughta do like he said unless I wanted to end up next on the spare parts rota.”

  “Wow.” Bonnie sounds fascinated. “So you’re a designer Übermensch?”

  “Guess so,” Sam says slowly and a trifle bashfully. “After I got the new liver fitted, Dad kept me around to help out in the lab. Never asked me what I wanted, just set me to work. He’s Asperger’s. Me, I’m just poorly socialized with a recursive introspective agnosia and a deficient situational relationship model. That’s what the diagnostic expert systems tell me, anyway.”

  “You’re saying you’ve never been socialized.” Bonnie leans her head toward him. “You just hatched, like, fully formed from a tank—”

  “Yeah,” Sam says, and waits.

  “That’s so sad,” Bonnie says. “Did your dad mistreat you?”

  “Oh mercy, no! He just ignores ... Well, he’s Dad. He never pays much attention to me, he’s too busy looking for the alien space bats and trying not to get the Bishop mad at him.”

  “Is that why you were taking Huw into town?” asks Bonnie.

  “Huh, yeah, I guess so.” Sam chuckles. “Anything comes down in the swamp, you betcha they see it on radar. You came down in Dad’s patch, pretty soon they’ll come by and ask why he hasn’t turned you in. So you can’t really blame him, putting on the Holy Roller head and riding into town to hand over the geek.”

  “That’s okay,” Bonnie says as Sam’s shoulders tense, “I understand.”

  “It’s just a regular game-theoretical transaction, y’see?” Sam asks, his voice rising in a near whine: “He has to do it! He has to tit-for-tat with the Church or they’ll roll him over. ’Sides, the geek doesn’t know anything. The shipment—”

  “Hush.” Bonnie winks at the big guy. “Actually, your dad was wrong—the ambassad—the shipment requires a living host.”

  “Oh!” Sam’s eyebrows rise. “Then it’s a good thing you rescued him, I guess.” He looks wistful. “If’n I trust you. I don’t know much about people.”

  “That’s all right,” Bonnie says. “I’m not your enemy. I don’t hate you for picking us up. You don’t need to shut us up.” She looks up at where her wrists are trussed to the grab rail. “Let my hands free?”

  Sam listens to some kind of internal voice, then he raises the knife and slices away at Bonnie’s bonds. Huw tenses as she slumps down and then drapes herself across Sam’s muscular shoulder. “What do you want?” Sam asks.

  Bonnie cups his chin tenderly. “We all want the same thing,” she says. Sam shrinks back from her touch.

  “Sha,” she says. “You’re very handsome, Sam.” He squirms.

  Huw squirms too. “Bonnie,” he says, a warning.

  Sam twists to stare at him, and Huw sees that there’s something wild breaking loose behind his eyes. “Come on,” Bonnie says, “over here.” She takes his hand and leads him toward the driver’s cab of the APC. “Come with me.”

  Huw swallows his revulsion as the big guy slides past him, nimble on his big dinner-plate feet, hand enfolding Bonnie’s. He keeps his eyes down. He feels a stab of jealousy: but Bonnie’s sidelong glance silences him. He’s old enough to know the nature of this game.

  After the hatch thumps shut, Huw strains to overhear the murmured converation from behind it, but all he can make out is thumps and grunts, and then, weirdly, a loud sob. “Oh, Daddy, why?” It’s Sam, and there are more sobs now, and more thumps, and Huw realizes they’re not sex noises—more like seizure noises.

  His ribs and shoulders are on fire, and he shifts from foot to foot, trying to find relief from the agony of hanging by his wrists. He steps on their pathetic pillowcase of possessions, and the lamp rolls free, Ade popping up.

  “My, you are a sight, old son,” the little hologram says. “Nice hat.”

  “It helps me think,” Huw says around the copper mesh of the balaclava. “It wouldn’t have hurt to have a couple of these on the zep, Ade.”

  “Live and learn,” the hologram says. “Next time.” It cocks its head and listens to the sobbing. “What’s all that about, then?”

  Huw shrugs as best as he can, then gasps at the chorous of muscle spasms this evinces from his upper body. “I thought Bonnie might be having a shag, but now I’m not sure. I think she might be conducting a therapy session.”

  “Saving the world as per usual,” Ade says. “So many virtues that boygirl has. Doctrinaire ideologues like her are the backbone of the movement, I tell you. Who’s she converting to pervtopic disestablishmentarianist personal politics, then?”

  “One of your trading partners,” Huw says. “Sam. Turns out he’s the doc’s son. Clone. I ’spect you knew that, though.”

  “Sam? Brick shithouse Sam?” There’s a distant, roaring sob and another crash. “Who’d have thought he had it in him?”

  “Whose side are you on, Ade? What have you been selling these bastards? I expect I’ll be dead by dusk, so you can tell me.”

  “I told you, but you didn’t listen. There is no conspiracy. The movement is an emergent phenomenon. It’s complexity theory, not ideology. The cloud wants to instantiate an ambassador, and events conspire to find a suitable host and get some godvomit down his throat.” Ade nods at him. “Now the cloud wants the ambassador to commune with something on the American continent, and there you are. How do I know the cloud wants this? Because you are there, on the American continent. QED. Maybe it wants to buy Manhattan for some beads. Maybe it wants to say hello to the ants. Maybe it wants to be sure that meatsuits are really as banal and horrible as it remembers.”

  “No ideology?” Huw says as another sob rattles the walls. “I think Bonnie might disagree with you.”

  “Oh, she might,” Ade says. “But in the end, she knows it as well as I do: Our mission is to be where events take us. Buying and selling a little on the side, it’s not counterrevolutionary. It’s not revolutionary. It’s just more complexity. More energy to pump into the dynamic system from whence the conspiracy may emerge.”

  “That’s all conveniently fatalist,” Huw says.

  “Imagine,” Ade says , “a technophobe lecturing me about fatalism.” The sobs have stopped, and now they hear the thunder of approaching footfalls. Bonnie comes through the door, trailing Sam behind her, as Ade disappears,.

  She takes both of his hands and stands on tiptoe to kiss him on the tip of his squashed nose. “You’re very beautiful, Sam,” she says. “And your feelings are completely normal. You tell the Bishop I told you to go see her. Him. It. They’ll help you out.”

  Sam’s eyes are red and his chin is slick with gob. He wipes his face on his checkered flannel shirttails. “I love you, Bonnie,” he says, his voice thick with tears.

  “I love you too, Sam,” she says. She reaches into his pocket and takes out his knife, opens it and cuts Huw down. “We’re going now, but I’ll never forget you. If you ever decide to come to Europe, you know how to find me.”

  Huw n
early keels over as his arms flap bloodlessly down to slap at his sides, but manages to stay upright as Sam thuds over to the ramp controls and sets the gangway to lowering.

  “Come on, Huw,” she says, picking up their pillowcase. “We’ve got to get to the coast.”

  “Court is in session,” screams a familiar voice as the ramp scrapes the rubberized tarmac. Three court golems—so big, they dwarf Sam—come up the ramp with alarming swiftness and grab all three of them before Huw has time to register anything more than a dim impression of an alleyway that’s lit like a soundstage for the cameras, and, in the middle of it, Judge Rosa

  Giuliani: encased in a dalekoid peppermill of a personal vehicle, draped in her robes of office, and scowling like she’s just discovered piss in her coffee cup.

  “You are charged with violating WorldGov biohazard regulations, with wanton epidemiological disregard, with threatening the fragile peace of our world’s orderly acquisition and adoption of technology, and with being a fugitive from justice.”

  “You’re out of your tiny little jurisdiction,” Bonnie says.

  “I’ll get to you,” the judge says. “I never execute a criminal without offering her last words, so you just sit tight until I call on you.”

  Sam is thrashing hard at his golem, trying to buck it off him, but he might as well be trying to lift Glory City itself for all the good it does him. For Huw, being trapped in the iron grip of a golem is oddly nostalgic, harking back to a simpler time when he knew he could trust his perceptions and the honest virtue of neo-Luddism.

  He closes his eyes, clears his mind, and prepares to defend himself. It’s bankrupt, he’ll say. Your WorldGov is a sham. There’s no more virtue in your deliberation over which technologies to adopt than there is in this benighted shithole’s wholesale rejection of everything that doesn’t burn petrol or heretics or both. He’ll say, The “other side” in this fight doesn’t even notice that it’s fighting you. Its leaders are opportunists and scoundrels; its proponents are patsies at best and sadists at worst.

  Huw sucks in air to give the speech that will deliver him to the gibbet—ignoring the many aches and owies that light up his body like acupuncture needles—just as there is a tremendous crash. Another APC crunches down in the alleyway behind the judge, its ramp falling to reveal ranked men in white robes, numerous as ants, clutching tasp wands, scimitars, pulse guns, muskets, and cruciform spears that hum with sinister energy.

  “It’s the Inquisition,” Bonnie says. “I told you you were out of your jurisdiction!” She looks like she’s ready to say more, but Sam breaks free of his golem’s grip with a roar and snatches her up, flings her over his shoulder, and disappears into the guts of his APC, which clanks away amid the whining ricochets of small arms fire from the soldiers of the Inquisition.

  Judge Rosa’s spinning turret give the Inquisitors pause, especially after it blasts a molten crater out of the ground between them. Finally, one brave soul darts forward and jams a spear tip down its barrel: he falls to the ground as the judge nails him with enough electricity to curl his pubes and his prophet’s beard.

  They give up on moving her, surrounding her instead with bristling guns. “I have diplomatic immunity, you God-bothering imbeciles,” she screams, the amplified howls knifing through their skulls and dropping a few of the remaining Inquisitors to their knees.

  They hustle Huw into the APC, kicking him to the grippy deck plates and pinning him there with a gun barrel dug hard against one kidney. Then they leave a detail to watch the judge and clank away with him to the auto-da-fé.

  “This is gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts us,” one of the Inquisitors breathes right in Huw’s ear as the ramp drops in the main plaza of Glory City, where a crowd of thousands awaits his appearance.

  They drag him up by his much-abused arms, letting his feet scrape the ground. He loses a shoe on the way to the stage, and the other on the way up the steps. His overalls tear on the ground, so that by the time he’s hauled erect before the crowd, the skin covering one whole side of his chest is abraded, a weepy, striated road-pizza left behind.

  A white robe is draped around him and snapped shut behind and around his arms. The crowd roars with anticipation, and their faces swim before him, each one a savage rictus . Huw wishes he still believed in his god-self, but they’ve left him his copper balaclava, so he’s out of the god-box.

  “Sinner?” a voice says in his ear. It echoes off the walls of the plaza, off the balconies crowded with hooting spectators who fall silent when these amplified syllables are sounded. “Sinner, can you hear me?”

  The speaker is right there in his ear, as close as a lover, breath moist. “I can hear you,” Huw says.

  “Will you confess your sins and be cleansed of them before we end your life on God’s earth?”

  “Sure,” Huw says. “Why the fuck not?”

  There’s a disapproving murmur from the crowd, and the left side of Huw’s head lights up like someone’s stuck a live wire to it. A chunk of his ear falls wetly to the stage before him, and more roaring as the hot blood courses down his face.

  “You will not profane this courtroom,” the hisser hisses.

  Huw struggles to remember his brave speech for the judge, but it won’t come. “I—,” he says. They’re going to kill me, he realizes, a sick certainty rising with his gorge. “I—”

  “You stand accused!” the speaker shrieks in his ear. “Unclean! You have consorted with vile demons and the sky-born minions of Satan! You did willfully escape from the custody of your arresting officer and were found in wanton congress with the degenerate scum who swirl in the cesspit of their own tumescent desires in the swamp of iniquity for which we are all damned to hellfire!” His accuser’s voice rises. “Lo, these three score years less fourteen we have dwelt since the Rapture, the ascent of those who are bathed in the blood of the Lamb, and what is it, you faithful among the fallen ask, what is it that holds us back to this land of sorrows? And I answer you: It is the likes of this miserable sinner! Behold the man, lost in the sorrow and degradation of his evil!”

  Huw manages to stay silent while the inquisitor gets himself worked up into a Holy Roller frenzy of foaming denunciation, from which it would appear that Huw has single-handedly doomed every living human on the North American continent to a fiery and perpetual immolation in boiling battery acid by virtue of his pursuit of sins both trivial and esoteric, from sodomy to simony by way of barratry and antimony. Concentration is hard. He’s weak at the knees, and the entire side of his head feels as if it’s been dipped in molten lead. He listens to the condemnation with mounting disbelief, but not even the accusations of ministering iced tea enemas to the ailing baby ground squirrels in the petting zoo manages to drag a protest from him in the face of likely punishment. He can see the score to this scene, and his words would merely serve as punctuation for random acts of degradation and violence against his person. Finally the inquisitor winds down, his voice ratcheting into a gloating hiss. “How do you plead, sinner?”

  “Does it make any difference?” Huw asks the sudden silence, hating the tremor in his voice. “You’re going to kill me anyway.”

  The small of his back explodes and he falls over, unable to draw breath with which to scream. Dimly he registers a couple of shadowy figures standing over him—one of them having just clubbed him in the kidneys.

  “How do you plead, sinner?”

  Huw isn’t about to plead anything, because he can barely breathe, but the inquisitor seems to view this as deliberate recalcitrance: he raises a hand, and another guard steps forward and clubs Huw between the legs.

  “How does he plead? Anyone?” The inquisitor hollers at the crowd, hidden amplifiers boosting his voice and scattering it across the plaza like a shotgun blast.

  “Guilty! guilty! guilty!” roars the crowd.

  “The prosecution, having made its case before God and man, rests,” says the inquisitor, leaning heavily on a baseball bat.

  “Hmm.” Hu
w is distantly conscious of another, more thoughtful voice. “And what do you say, minister for the defense?”

  “Nothing to say, Your Grace.” The defense attorney’s voice is thin and reedy and quavers a little. “My client is obviously guilty as sin.”

  “Then I guess we are in agreement. Okay, y’all, let justice be done.” Guards pick Huw up off the ground and bear him to the front of the stage. “In the name of the authority vested in me by the law of the Lord, as Bishop of this principality, I hereby find you guilty of whatever the hell you’re charged with. We don’t get to give justice, that’s His Upstairs’s job. So the sentence of this court, handed down in mercy rather than in anger, is that we’re going to give you a one-way ticket to ask the Holy Father for clemency and forgiveness in person. To heaven’s gate!”

  The crowd roars its approval and people begin to stream out of the square like ants, boiling and shifting to repel an invasion of their territory. Huw groans, gasps for air, and coughs up blood. “It won’t hurt,” the judge says, almost kindly. “Not for long, anyway.”

  There’s another brief journey by APC, this time barely out of the square and back round a couple of side roads. The guards let Huw lie on a bench seat, which is a mercy, because his legs aren’t working too well. Just get it over with, he wishes dismally. Is anyone going to tell Sandra? he wonders. She got me into this—

  The APC parks up and the ramp rumbles down. They’re in another of the huge access tunnels that run through the wall of the dome, like the one Doc and Sam dragged him through almost a day ago. It’s been a very long day—the longest in his life. Vast blast-proof doors close behind the APC, slamming shut with a thunderous boom. The guards frog-march Huw down the ramp and out, up the tunnel to the next set of doors. There’s another APC behind the one he arrived in, and a handful of dignitaries steps out of it to witness the proceedings.

  The guard on his left lets go of him. “When the doors open, run forward,” he says. “If you dance and stamp your feet a bit, they’ll figure out where you are faster. They know they’re going to be fed, so they’ll be waiting for you. If you make them come inside, they’ll take their time.”