Rapture of the Nerds

by Cory Doctorow

  “You’re going to feed me to the ants,” he says.

  “God’s little helpers,” the guard to his right says.

  “What if I don’t cooperate?” Huw asks.

  The guard on his left hefts his cattle prod thoughtfully. “Then we’d have to work you over some more and do it again.” He hefts the prod in Huw’s direction. “Not that it’s any trouble, mind. All the same to us.”

  Huw backs away from the guards until he thumps into the outer door of the air lock. “Oh. Oh shit.” The guards are clad in hermetically sealed tupperwear. So are the official witnesses. A bell clangs from the front APC. Then the door he’s leaning against begins to grind down into the ground. Huw glances round and sees the guards and witnesses scurrying backwards to the safety of their armored vehicles, despite the security of their ant-proof suits. “God-bothering cowards!” he tries to yell, but it comes out as a cracked squawk. He’s on his own. Even the ambassador seems to be trying to hide in his stomach rather than face the music with him. Damn, I’m going to die and I don’t even get a good exit line. He turns back to face the opening door and takes a step out onto the blasted wilderness that used to be North America.

  It’s like the surface of the moon—or worse. A lightning strike somewhere up the coast has set one of the petrochemical forests on fire, and the resulting smogbank has smeared the sky with the apocalyptic glow of a bygone age. The sun itself is a bloated red torch aflame in a sea of shit-colored clouds that roil and bubble above a landscape the color of charred ash. Gas trees march into the distance from the flanks of the Glory City dome; the ground beneath them is muddy brown and shimmers slightly. At first Huw thinks it’s covered in a slick of escaping light fraction crude, but then he looks closer and sees that the shimmer is that of motion, the incessant febrile ratcheting digestive action of a gigantic superorganism. The ants are lords of all that they survey—and that includes him.

  Huw steps forward onto the desolate ground, leaving the tunnel mouth. He glances round once. Bastards, he mouths at the smugly merciful Bishop and his torturers, safe in their air-conditioned tanks. There’s a faint rattling humming noise in the air, and he takes a deep breath, wondering how long it’ll take the ants to notice him. What chance does he have of reaching another air lock? Probably not much—they wouldn’t be using this as an established means of execution if survival were easy, or even possible. But Huw has no intention of giving the assholes in the dome the satisfaction of actually seeing the ants get him. He takes another deep breath and lurches forward—one knee is very much the worse for wear, and he’s light-headed and nauseated from the beating he’s taken—trying to get away from the front of the air lock.

  “Huw?”

  At first he thinks he’s hallucinating. It’s Bonnie’s voice, distant and tinny, and that grinding rasping noise is back. There’s also a faint sizzling sound, like hot fat on a grill. He lurches on.

  The sizzling noise is back. The ground ahead is dark, like an oil spill. “Huw? Where are you? Hang on!” He stumbles to a halt. The oil slick is spreading like a shadow, and when he looks round he sees it extends between him and the dome. That’s odd. He looks down. Ants. They’re everywhere. He can’t outrun them. So he collapses to his knees and looks at them. They’re what’s making the sizzling noise. It’s the noise of a trillion millimeter-wide cutting machine mandibles chowing down on the universe. If they could speak, their message would be, You will be assimilated. He reaches out one shaky hand, and a winged ant alights on his fingertip. He brings it close to his face, ignoring the scattering of fiery bites on his legs and knees, trying to meet the eyes of his executioner.

  The ant stares at him with CCD scanners. It spreads its wings and Huw watches, entranced, trying to read the decals embossed on each flight surface. Chitin is waxy, isn’t it? He realizes, It would dissolve in the gasoline mangroves. So these aren’t—

  “Huw! Hang on! We’ll rescue you!”

  It is Bonnie’s voice, he realizes, looking round in disquiet. Massively amplified, it booms out across the wasteland from the top of a vehicle that looks like an old-fashioned swamp boat with a bulbous plastic body mounted on it. The boat is surfing over the ants, he thinks, until he realizes that there’s not much of a solid surface over there.

  “Can you hear me?” Bonnie yells.

  Huw waves.

  “Great! I’m going to pop the hatch and lay down an insecticide screen! When you see it go, I want you to run this way! Action in three! Two! One!” Bang.

  One end pops off the side of the swamp boat, and a cloud of foam drifts out. Bonnie follows it, something like a flamethrower strapped to her back. She’s pumping away in all directions, striding toward him on his little raised island, and Huw realizes that nothing, nothing has ever looked as beautiful to him as this pansexual posthuman, lithe and brilliant in her skintight neoprene suit, laying about her with grace and elegance and GABA-inhibitors as she comes to rescue him from this frankly insane situation—

  Huw starts into motion, a drunken and lopsided wobble impelled by a now-fiery burn at the side of his face. The ants have tasted blood, and they’re hungry. He howls as he runs, and Bonnie steps aside and spritzes him on the fly. “Go on!” she calls, “I’ll cover you!” He needs no urging, but lurches on toward the swamp boat rescue. Within the back of the translucent bubble, he can dimly see a figure—Sam, maybe?—working the controls, keeping the big blower on the back of the boat in ceaseless motion, sucking ants through the mincing blades—

  He’s on the ground, and he can’t remember how he got there. “Shit, this is no good,” says Bonnie. “What have they done to—? Oh fuck.” She picks him up and begins to drag him, her breath coming in gasps. The ants see their prey escaping and close in, an ominous sizzling hymn of destruction on the wing. “Go on!” she says, and Huw manages to get one leg working. They hop along together and Bonnie gives him an hard shove, boosting him up the side of the boat and in through the air lock. The open air lock bay is crawling with fiery red cyborg ants, the disassembler tool kits on their heads whining in an iridescent blur. Huw bats at them, and Bonnie stands up just outside the air lock to spritz down the swamp boat, and then something like a monstrous humming tornado falls on her with an audible thud. She screams once, and twitches, and Huw cowers at the back of the air lock.

  “fuck!” The door he’s lying against crashes backwards under him, tumbling him into the swamp boat as Sam leaps over his body and dives forward. “Bonnie!”

  With the last of his strength, Huw grabs one of Sam’s ankles, tumbling him into the lock. “Stop,” he gasps.

  “Bonnie!” Sam screams. But he freezes instead of throwing himself out into the gray storm.

  “Close the door or we’re both dead,” Huw says.

  “Bonnie!” One meaty hand reaches out—then closes on the air lock panel. “Oh god. Oh shit.” There’s a Bonnie-shaped outline just visible on its feet through the whirlwind, but it’s glowing white, the color of live bone, and something tells Huw that he’s looking at her skeleton, crucified on a storm of insectoid malice in the act of rescuing him from the swarm—they’ll be waiting for you—and Sam swings the door shut with a boom on its gaskets just as the pile of white bones at the heart of the tornado explodes outward and collapses across the wasteland in front of the air lock.

  They’re not out of danger. Sam howls and grabs at his face, falling backwards against the opposite wall of the air lock. “Spray!” he yells, like a dying desert explorer calling for water.

  Huw fumbles around the cramped cell, squishing bugs wherever he finds them until he sees the blue spray bottles strapped to one wall. He hauls himself upright and takes aim at Sam. “Where do you want it?” he says.

  Sam half turns toward Huw and holds his hands out from his face. Huw retches and holds the trigger down, blasting Sam in the—in what’s left of the front of his head. The ant tornado that came down on Bonnie must have shed waves of flying, biting deconstructors, for Sam’s head hosts a boiling pit of des
truction, cheeks bitten through and eye sockets seething. The noises Sam makes are piteous but coherent enough that Huw is sickly afraid that the man’s going to survive. And after what happened with Bonnie, he’s not sure what that means.

  Sam gurgles, and Huw yanks down the emergency first aid kit and pulls out a gel pack that says something about burns and bites and massive tissue injuries on its side. He lays it across the top of Sam’s face, making sure to leave a hole around his mouth, then hunts out a syrette full of something morphine-esque and whacks it into Sam’s upper arm. After a tense minute, Sam’s whistling breaths slow and the shuddering spasms relax into something like sleep.

  Huw is nearly out of it by this time, drunk on a cocktail of terror, pity, pain, and exhaustion. The world seems to be spinning as he hauls himself through the rear door and into the cockpit at the back of the craft. Smuggler’s swamp boat, he realizes. Doc must not have wanted to show this anywhere near Glory City. As he studies the unfamiliar controls, he comes to the unpleasant conclusion that he’s not going anywhere on his own. Don’t know how to operate it, and if I did, I wouldn’t know where to go, he thinks. He glances out the windshield at the gathering darkness punctuated by the evil, fire red bellies of ants that are trying their luck on the diamond-reinforced sapphire laminate. (Some of them are even leaving gouges in it.) Just a temporary reprieve ...

  There’s a crackle from a grille on the dash. “Ready to accept WorldGov jurisdiction, you miscreant?” croaks a familiar tenor. Huw stares at the speaker as floodlights come on behind him in the depths of the swamp, spearing the cab of the smuggler’s boat with a blue white glare. “Or would you rather I crack that toy open like an egg and leave you to the ants?”

  Christ, Huw thinks. It’s not as though I know how to drive this goddamned thing, anyway. He presses a button next to the grille. “Can you hear me?” he says. He repeats this with four more likely-looking buttons until Judge Judy’s cackle answers him back.

  “You going to come along peacefully?”

  “Sure looks like it,” he says. “Do I get to stand trial somewhere civilized?”

  The judge chuckles fatalistically. “Once we shoot our way off this fucking continent and nuke it in our wake, I fully intend to drag your pimply ass all the way back to New Libya for a proper trial. Does that suit you?”

  “Down to the ground,” Huw says. “Now what?”

  “Herro,” Ade says, popping up out of his lantern after the judge has Huw shrink-wrapped and tossed in a narrow hold, her dalek suit and the golems filling up all the available space on Sam’s boat. “Ew,” he says when he catches sight of Sam’s ruin of a face. “That can’t be doing good things for Rosa’s audience ratings. Wasn’t supposed to be a horror show. ...”

  “He’ll get fixed up once he gets to civilization,” Huw says. “Judge is taking us to New Libya.” He sighs and attempts to get comfortable in his enforced, plastic-wrapped vermicularitude. “The ants ate Bonnie,” he says, his voice hollow and echoing in the cramped hold.

  “You don’t say?” Ade says. “Well, that’s too bad. Scratch one useful idiot.”

  “You know, it’s going to be a pleasure to rat you out to the court,” Huw says bitterly. “A pleasure to get the ambassador cut free and fed to a disassembler. Your movement stinks.”

  The tiny Adrian plants its hands on its hips and cocks its head at Huw. “Useful idiots I have patience for,” he says. “Useless idiots, well, that’s something else altogether.”

  The boat judders to a halt. A tearing noise, like a sheet the size of the sky being ripped asunder, ripples overhead: then the floor shakes with a series of percussive thuds from either side. We’re being bombed, Huw realizes, eerily calm, afloat with the pure, cold fatalism that is possible only with a burned-out adrenal gland. The boat bounces like a pea on a plate. “Sam, are you conscious yet?” he says aloud. Sam doesn’t move. Just as well, he thinks, and prepares to die.

  Adrian says, “I radioed your position to the Bishop so that he could capture you, not kill you. The ambassador needs a host.”

  He hears the golems slam past his hold and run out to do battle, then more jouncing crashes.

  “I have diplomatic immunity,” the judge says as something drags her past his cell. A moment later, the hatch opens, and Huw and Sam are lifted, dumped into a gigantic airtight hamster-ball, sealed, and rolled away back toward Glory City.

  “Children,” the Bishop says. He is thin and weak-chinned and watery-eyed, and his voice is familiar. It takes Huw a moment to place it, and then he remembers the voice, moist in his ear: Sinner, can you hear me?

  “You are in: So. Much. Trouble.” Judge

  Giuliani is no longer hissing like a teakettle, but her rage is still clearly barely under control. “What do the words ‘diplomatic immunity’ mean to you?”

  “Not an awful lot, We’re afraid,” the Bishop says, and witters a little laugh. “We don’t much go in for formalities here in the new world, you know.”

  They’ve amputated the dalek suit’s gun and damped its public address system, so that Judge Judy is reduced to a neutered head on a peppermill with a black robe of office draped round it. Nevertheless, she is still capable of giving looks that could curdle milk and make sheep miscarry. Huw numbly watches her glare at the Bishop, and the Bishop’s watery answering stare.

  “What shall We do with you?” the Bishop says. “Officially, you’re dead, which is convenient, since it wouldn’t do to have the great unwashed discover that God’s will was apparently to let you go.

  “The entity who alerted Us to your presence was adamant that the sinner here should be spared. You’re host to some kind of godvomit that many entities are interested in, and apparently it needs you intact in order to work. It’s very annoying: we can’t kill you again.”

  “I’m thrilled.” Huw’s voice is a flat monotone. “But I ’spect that means that Sam here’s not going to live. Nor the judge?” Sam is strapped to a board and immobilized by more restraints than a bondage convention, but it’s mostly a formality. He’s barely breathing, and the compress on his face blooms with a thousand blood-colored roses.

  “Well, of course not,” the Bishop says. “Heretics. Enemies of the state. They’re to be shoved out the lock as soon as We’re sure that they’ve got nothing of interest to impart to Us. A day or two, tops. Got that, Your Honor? As long as you say useful things, you live.”

  The judge sputters angrily in her peppermill.

  “Now, let’s get you prepped for the operating theater,” the Bishop says.

  Huw can barely muster the will to raise an eyebrow at this. “Operating theater?”

  “Yes. We’ve found that quadruple amputees are much more pliable and less apt to take it on the lam than the able-bodied. You’ll get used to it, trust us.”

  The servants of the Inquisition, ranged around them, titter at this.

  “Take them back to their cells,” the Bishop says, waving a hand. “And notify the surgeons.”

  Huw is having a dream. He’s a disembodied head whose vocal cords thrum in three-part harmony with a whistle lodged in his stump of a throat. The song is weird and familiar, something he once sang to a beautiful girl, a girl who gave her life for him. The song is all around him, sonorous and dense, a fast demodulation of information from the cloud, high above, his truncated sensorium being transmitted to the curious heavens. The song is the song he sang to the beautiful girl, and she’s singing back.

  His eyes open, waking. He’s on the floor of his cell, parched dry and aching, still shrink-wrapped but with the full complement of limbs. The whistle warbles deep in his throat, and the floor vibrates in sympathy, with the tromping of a trillion tiny feet and the scissoring of a trillion sharpened mouthparts.

  The ants razor through the floor, and Huw squirms away from them as best as he can—but the best he can do is hump himself inchworm style into a corner, pressed up against the wall of the dome that forms the outer wall of his cell. The song pours out of his throat, un
abated by his terror. Some part of him is surprised that he’s capable of caring about anything anymore, but he does not want to be eaten by the ants, does not want to be reduced to a Huw-shaped lump of brick red crawling insects.

  The whistle’s really going to town now. The ambassador is having words with the Hypercolony, and Huw can just barely make out the sense of the song he’s singing: Ready for upload interface instructions.

  The ants have covered him, covered the walls and the floor and the ceiling, they’ve eaten through his coating of shrink-wrap, but the expected stings don’t come. Instead, Huw is filled with the sense of vast clumps of information passing through his skin, through the delicate mucous membranes of his eyes and nostrils, through his ears and the roots of his hair, all acrawl with ants whose every step conveys something.

  Something: the totality of the Hypercolony—its weird, sprawling consciousness, an emergent phenomenon of its complexity, oozing through his pores and through the ambassador and up to the cloud. It’s not just the ants, either—it’s everything they’ve ever eaten: everything they’ve ever disassembled.

  Somewhere in that stream is every building, every car, every tree and animal and—and every person the ants have eaten. Have disassembled.

  Bonnie is passing through him, headed for the cloud. Well, she always did want to upload.

  Huw doesn’t know how long the ambassador holds palaver with the Hypercolony, only knows that when the song is done, he is so hoarse, he can barely breathe. (During a duet, do the musicians pay any attention to the emotional needs of their instruments?) He leans against the wall, throat raw as the ambassador chatters to the ant colony—biological carriers for the engines of singularity, its own ancestral bootstrap code—and he can just barely grasp what’s going on. There are complex emotions here, regret and loss and irony and schadenfreude and things for which human languages hold no words, and he feels very stupid and very small as he eavesdrops on the discourse between the two hive minds. Which is, when the chips are down, a very small discourse, for the ambassador doesn’t have enough bandwidth to transmit everything the ants have ever stored: it’s just a synchronization node, the key that allows the Hypercolony to talk to the cloud in orbit high above it.