Rapture of the Nerds

by Cory Doctorow

  And Bonnie is still dead, for all that something that remembers being her is waking up upstairs, and he’s still lying here in a cell waiting to be chopped up by barbarians, and there’s something really weirdly wrong with the way he feels in his body, as if the ants have been making impromptu modifications, and as the ambassador says good-bye to the ants, a sense of despair fills him—

  The door opens.

  “Hello, my child.” It’s the other Bishop, the pansexual pervert in the polygenital suit. It winks at him: “Expecting someone else?”

  Huw tries to reply. His throat hurts too much for speech just yet, so he squirms up against the wall, trying to get away, for all the time an extra millimeter will buy him.

  “Oh, stop worrying,” the Bishop says. “I—ah, ah!—I just dropped by to say everything’s sorted out. Mission accomplished, I gather. The, ah, puritans are holed up upstairs watching a fake snuff video of your disassembly for spare organs—operating theaters make for great cinema and provide a good reason for not inviting them to the auto-da-fé in person. Isn’t CGI great? Which means you’re mostly off the hook now, and we can sort out repatriating you.”

  “Huh?” Huw blinks, unsure what’s going on. Is this a setup? But there’s no reason why the lunatics would run him through something like this, is there? It’s so weird, it’s got to be true, Rosa’s Tyburn Tales reality livecast notwithstanding. “Wh-whaargh, what do you mean?” He coughs horribly. His throat is full of something unpleasant and thick, and his chest feels sore and bloated.

  “We’re sending you home,” the Bishop says. It holds up a dainty hand and snaps its fingers; a pair of hermaphrodites in motley suits with bells on the tips of their pointy shoes steer in a wheelchair and go to work on what remains of Huw’s bonds with electric shears and a gentle touch. “You have our thanks for a job well done. I’d beatify you, except it’s considered bad form while the recipient is still alive, but you can rest assured that your lover is well on her way to being canonized as a full saint in the First Church of the Teledildonic. Giving up her life so that you might survive to bring the Hypercolony into the full Grace of the cloud certainly would qualify her for beatification, even if her other actions weren’t sufficient, which they were, as it happens.” The acolytes’ slim hands lift Huw into the wheelchair and wheel him through the door.

  “I feel weird,” Huw says, voice odd in his ears. My ears? For one thing, he’s got two of them and he could have sworn the Inquisitors took a hot wire to one. And for another ... He manages to look down and whimpers slightly.

  “Yes, that’s often one of the symptoms of beatification,” the Bishop says placidly. “The transgendered occupy a special place of honor in our rites, and to have it imposed on you by the Hypercolony is a special sign of grace.” And Huw sees that it’s true, but he doesn’t feel as upset about it as he knows he ought to. The ants have given him a whole goddamn new body while the ambassador was singing a duet with them, and he—she—is about five developmental-years younger, five centimeters shorter, and if her pubes are anything to go by, her hair’s going to come in two shades lighter than it was back when she was a man.

  It’s one realization too many, so Huw zones out as the Bishop’s minions wheel her up the corridor and into an elevator while the Bishop prattles on. The explanation that the Bishop is the leader of both the Church Temporal—the Fallen Baptists—and the Church Transcendental—the polyamorous perverts—passes her by. There’s some arcane theological justification for it all, references to Zoroastrian dualism, but in her depression and disorientation the main thing that’s bugging Huw is the fact that she survived—and Bonnie didn’t. That, and worrying about how to pay for a really good gender reassignment doc when she gets home.

  Huw tries to imagine what the old Huw, the Huw who went down to his pottery every day, would have felt about being turned into a woman by a bunch of quasi-sentient ants en route to immortal transcendence. A lot angrier, she thinks. But after all she’s been through, well, her moral outrage gland appears to have forgotten how to fire. (Or perhaps it wasn’t installed in this new body, which is an outrage, but she can’t get worked up about it, because, well, no moral outrage, right? The fact is, she can just have it all put back the way it was, and all the niggling differences between the original equipment and the new parts they’ll grow her just don’t seem that important anymore. Huw doesn’t really like personal growth, but some is inevitable.

  Upstairs in whatever dwelling they’re in, there’s a penthouse suite furnished in sybaritic luxury. Carpets of silky natural growing hair, wall-hanging screens showing views from the landscapes of imaginary planets, the obligatory devotional orgy beds and sex crucifixes of the Church of Teledildonics. The Bishop leads the procession in through the door, and a familiar voice squawks: “You’ll regret this!”

  “Perhaps.” The Bishop is calm, and Huw sees why fairly rapidly.

  Judge Giuliani spins her chair round and glares at them; then her eyes fasten on the wheelchair. “What happened here?” she says.

  “The alien artifact you so urgently seek,” the Bishop says with heavy irony. “It has accomplished its task, and we are blessed by the fallout. Its humble human vessel whom you see before you—” A hand caresses Huw’s shoulder. “—is permanently affected by the performance, and We are deeply relieved.”

  “Its. Task.”

  Giuliani is aghast. “Are you insane? You let it out?”

  “Certainly.” The Bishop smirks. “And we are all the ah, ah, better for it.” He pauses for a moment, sneezes convulsively, and shudders orgasmically. “Oh! Oh! That was good. Oh my. Yes, ah, the cloud has reestablished its communion with the North American continent, and I feel sure that the Hypercolony is deeply relieved to have offloaded almost two decades’ worth of uploads—everything that has happened since the Rapture of the Nerds, in fact.”

  “Ah.”

  Giulani glares at the Bishop, then gives it up as a bad job—the Bishop doesn’t intimidate easily. “Who’s this?” she says, staring at Huw.

  “This? Don’t you recognize her?” The Bishop simpers. “She’s your creation, after all. And you’re going to take very good care of her, aren’t you?”

  “Gack,” says Huw, blanching. She tries to lever herself out of the wheelchair, but she’s still weak as a baby.

  “If you think I’m—” A puzzled expression crawls over the judge’s face. “Why?” she says. She peers closer at Huw and hisses to herself: “You, you little rat-bastard! Court is in session—”

  “—

  Because the ambassador she carries is the main pacemaker for all uploads from the North American continent, and if you don’t look after her, the cloud will be very pissed off with you. And so will the Hypercolony. Oh, and if you don’t promise to look after her, you aren’t going home. Is that good enough for you?”

  “Ahem,” says

  Giuliani. She squints at Huw, eyebrows beetling evilly. “Main pacemaker for a whole continent? Is that true?”

  Huw nods, unable to trust her throat.

  “Hmm.”

  Giuliani clears her throat. “Then, goddamnit, I hereby find you not guilty of everything in general and nothing in particular. All charges are dismissed.” She glares at the Bishop. “I’ll even get her enrolled in the witness protection program. Will that do for now?”

  Huw shudders, but the Bishop nods agreeably. “Yes, that will be sufficient,” he says. “New skin, new identity, clean sheet. Just remember, you wouldn’t want the Hypercolony to come calling, er, crawling, would you?”

  The judge nods, meek submission winning out over bubbling rage.

  “Very well. There appears to be a jet with diplomatic clearance on final approach into Charleston right now. Shall we go and put you it?”

  Halfway across the Atlantic, Huw falls into a troubled sleep, cuddled restlessly in her first-class berth. Sitting up front in ambassador class, the judge mutters darkly to herself, occasionally glancing nervously over her shoulder in the di
rection of Huw and her passenger. Far above them, the cloud whirls in its orbit, tasting the meat with its mutifarious sensory apparati, holding its ineffable internal squabbles, thinking its ineffable thoughts, muttering in RF and gravity and eigenstate. Now there’s someone to talk to downstairs, signals synchronized by the beat of Huw’s passenger, it grows positively voluble: catching up with the neighborhood gossip, chuckling and chattering in many voices about the antics of those lovable but dim dreaming apes who remain below.

  Huw dreams she’s back at Sandra Lal’s house, in the aftermath of that memorable party that started this whole thing off. Only she’s definitely she—wearing her new body, aware of it but comfortable in it at the same time. She’s in the kitchen, chewing over epistemology with Bonnie. A sense of sadness spills over her, but Bonnie laughs at something, waving—Bonnie is male, this time—at the window. Then he holds out his hand to Huw. Huw walks into his embrace and they hold each other for a long time. Bonnie doesn’t say anything, but his question is clear in Huw’s head as she leans her chin on his shoulder. “Not yet,” Huw says. “I’m not ready for that. Not till I’ve kicked Ade’s butt halfway into orbit and cleared it with the judge. They’re making you a saint, did you know that?”

  Bonnie nods, and makes a weird warbling singsong noise in the back of her throat. It soothes Huw, and she can feel an answering song rising from the ambassador. “No, don’t worry about me,” Huw murmurs. “I’ll be all right. We’ll get together sometime; I just have some loose ends to tie up first.”

  And the funny thing is that even inside her dream, she believes it.

  Parole Board

  History repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce.

  Huw has been home for almost two weeks, going through the motions of a life that made sense to her earlier self but now seems terminally mired in arbitrary constraints. There is the pottery to tend, kilns to clean, extruders to manage, and a windmill with a squeaky bearing that wants periodic seeing to. There is a nineteenth-century terraced house to clean, for in the absence of electricity, there are no labor-saving robots. Newly reembodied, Huw is her own servant, and succeeds for a time in losing herself in manual labor. It’s better than confronting what s/he’s been through head-on.

  Grief piles up like unread mail, dusty and suffocating.

  The tech jury stint was brief—a few days aboard the airship to Tripoli, then a couple of days of acute terror; half a week unconscious or inebriated on a blimp bound for the neverglades, and then a mercifully short stay in the nightmarish land of the left-behind—but it has punctuated the steady flatline graph of Huw’s life with the infinitely steep spike of a personal singularity. Following her return home—ejected from the judge’s jet somewhere in the icy-cold stratosphere above Monmouth, falling terrified for fully thirty seconds before the parachute opened—she battled with the twin depressions of jet lag and mourning. The latter she has more experience of, her parents’ one true legacy: finding and so rapidly losing Bonnie hurts like hell, and acquiring a mild case of gender dysphoria is just the icing on top.

  Jet lag, however, is something she has only read about in the yellowing pages of last-century travel romances. And so, after a couple of days of 3 a.m. fry-ups and unaccountable sleepiness at noon, she attempts to slot herself back into her old life and bash her broken circadian rhythm onto British summer time. Nothing makes for a good night’s sleep like hard physical labor, and so it is that she comes to be putting in hard overtime in the kitchen garden one afternoon when she hears the distant brassy clang of the front door bell.

  “Whutfuck wheep,” she says, the ambassador adding an unwelcome loop of metallic feedback by way of punctuation as she straightens up, plunges the rake point-down into the edge of the Romanesco broccoli patch, and shambles toward the back door. “I mean, who—” She scuffs the soles of her boots on the front step before crossing the kitchen floor and entering the hallway “—the fuck is visiting at—” and into the front porch. “—this time of—” She opens the door.

  “Wotcher, babe!”

  “Aaargh!” Huw nearly trips over as she takes a step back: “You, you vomitous streak of bat piss! What the fuck are you doing here?”

  Ade beams at her cheerfully: “You the new Huw, eh? Nice jubblies, mate: they suit you. I should do something about the hairdo though. And the mud. ’Ere, I thought you should have this.” He proffers a slightly grubby, dog-eared paper envelope.

  “You ...” Huw steams at Ade: in her old testosterone-enhanced body, she’d have taken a swing at him, but the old physical aggression is dialed down somewhat and anyway, envelope. “Fucking get off my land!”

  “Sure thing, babe. Don’t forget to call!” Ade says, then legs it for his Hertz rental bicycle patiently balancing itself in the road outside. He pedals like mad, presumably not convinced that Huw doesn’t have a shotgun or arbalest or some similar anachronistic contraption.

  Huw stares after him, heart thudding so hard, it makes her vision jitter. She clenches the envelope. It’s stiff: must be a card. She steps backwards jerkily, nearly goes arse-over-tit on her own front porch, closes and carefully dead bolts the door, then retreats to the kitchen for a bracing cup of tea.

  While the kettle is heating, she is at a loose end for a few unwelcome moments. Huw has diligently avoided having time to think ever since she got home, because the slightest attempt at probing her memories gives her screaming hysterics: she—no, he—first volunteered for tech jury service to keep the godvomit nightmares out, to (she flinches from this thought) maybe find some sense of closure for thedesolation that’s been with her since her parents abandoned her for the cloud all those decades ago. (Committed suicide, part of her insists. Transcended the meatpuppet show, a traitor impulse adds. Either way, Huw wasn’t willing to follow them at the time.) Only now it’s hard to tell who was right and who was wrong. All she knows for sure is that Ade knowingly sent Bonnie into a situation that would kill her. And Huw has come to loathe Ade with a visceral hatred she hasn’t hitherto experienced.

  For a couple of seconds she holds the sealed envelope beside the sewage-gas burner under the kettle and watches the envelope begin to singe and brown. But then ashe pulls it back: What if it’s not from Ade? Who else might want to write her a letter? Sandra? If there’s one person she hates more than Ade right now, it’s Sandra. But if she burns the letter, she’ll never know for sure—

  The flap rips under the pressure of her sharpened thumbnail.

  Your application for cosmological triage jury service has been provisionally accepted. To activate your application, present this card in person to ...

  Huw screams and dumps the kettle, shoving the card straight into the blue-hot jet of flame. But the gesture is futile: it’s made not from murdered trees but some exotic and indestructible synthetic fiber, and all the heat does is make the print on the letter fluoresce—that, and burn Huw’s fingers.

  Huw is holding her right hand under the cold-water tap and swearing when there’s another a knock at the door.

  “Who is it?” she calls down the hall.

  “It’s the Singularity,” a booming voice calls.

  “What do you want?”

  “Everything is different now!”

  “I don’t want any.”

  “If I could just have a moment of your time?” It takes a lot of skill to make a stentorian voicejob emit a credible wheedle, but the bell ringer at the door had clearly practiced it to an art.

  Huw turns the faucet back up and puts her fingers back into the cold stream. They’re vicious little burns, red welts that her honest, baseline cells will take weeks to properly heal. Of course, she could just ride over to the McNanite’s and get some salve that’d make them vanish before her eyes, but Huw’s endured much worse and she’s still got enough stubborn stockpiled to last her a couple of eons.

  There’s another thud at the door. Thud. Thud. Thudthudthud. Then a transhuman tattoo of thuds in rising frequency, individual thuds blurring into a composite
buzz that gets the bones of the old house rattling in sympathy, shivering down little hisses of plaster dust from the joints in the ceiling.

  Huw uses her good hand to wrench the faucet off, then wraps a tea towel around her throbbing, dripping hand and walks to the door, gritting her teeth with every step as she forces herself not to run. It feels like the house might rattle down around her ears any second, but she won’t give the infinity-botherer outside the satisfaction.

  She opens the door with the same measured calm. Let one of these fundies know you’re on edge, and he’ll try to grab the psychological advantage and work it until you agree to hear his pitch.

  “I said,” Huw says, “I don’t want any.”

  “I’m afraid I rather must insist,” says the infinity-botherer through his augmented, celestial voice box. The force of that voice makes Huw take an involuntary wincing step backwards, like a blast from an air horn. “Huw, this is mandatory, not optional.”

  This is mandatory, not optional. The words send Huw whirling back through time, back to her boyhood, and a million repetitions and variations on this phrase from his—

  “Mum?” she asks, jaw dropped as she stares up at the giant

  borg

  on the doorstep. It’s at least three meters high, silvery and fluid, thin as a schwa, all ashimmer with otherworldly transcendant wossname. It’s neither beautiful nor handsome, though it’s intensely aesthetically pleasing in a way that demands some sort of genderless superlative that no human language has ever managed. Huw hates it instantly—especially since she suspects that the loa riding it might be descended from one of his awful parents.