Rapture of the Nerds

by Cory Doctorow

  “Yes, dear,” the Singularity booms. “I like the regendering, it really suits you. Your father would send his best, by the way, if he were still hanging around the solar system.”

  Huw last saw her parents at their disembodiment; they’d already had avatars running around in the cloud for years, dipping into meatspace every now and again for a resynch with their slowcode bioinstances dirtside. When they were finally deconstituted into a fine powder of component molecules, it’d been a technicality, really, a final flourish in their transhumanifaction. But the finality of it, zeroing out of their bodies, had marked a break for Huw. Mum and Dad were now, technically, dead. They were technically alive too, but that was beside the point.

  Until Mum donned a golem and came over for a chat.

  “Mum, I don’t talk to dead people,” she says. “Go away.” She deliberately does not slam the door, but closes it, and turns the latch, and heads back to the sink, deliberately ignoring the fragment of cloud wearing her mum’s memories. She’s gone three steps before the door splinters and tears loose of its hinges, thudding to the painstakingly restored tile floor in the front hall with a merry tinkle of shattering antique glass.

  “Love, I know you’re not best pleased to see me, but you’ve been summoned, and that’s that.”

  The spirit of adolescence descends on Huw in a red mist. Her mum has always been able to reduce her to a screeching teakettle of resentment. “get out of my house, mum! i hate you!”

  Her mum’s avatar grabs Huw in a vicious hug that feels like foam rubber padding wrapped around titanium armatures. “Poor thing,” it says. “I know it’s been hard for you. We did our best, you know, but well, we were only human. Now, come along, sweetie.”

  It’s Tripoli all over again, but this time the golem whose grasp she can’t escape emits a steady stream of basso profundo validations about Huw’s many gifts and talents and how proud her parents are of all she’s achieved and suchlike. Huw tries to signal a beedlemote, but her mum’s got some kind of diplomatic semaphore that makes all the enforcementware give it free passage. Mum’s bot stops at every traffic signal, and several times Huw tries to get passersby to help her, with lines like, “I’m being kidnapped by the bloody Singularity!” but no one seems interested in lending a hand. Even if they did, well, Mum goes about 200 kmh between traffic lights, gait so fast that every time Huw opens her mouth to scream, it fills with wind, and her cheeks wibble and wobble while she tries to breathe past the air battering at her windpipe.

  Then they’ve arrived. The consulate is midfab, and its hairy fractal edges radiate heat as nanites grab matter out of the sky to add to it. The actual walls are only waist high, though the spindly plumbing, mains, and network infrastructure are already in place and teeter skyward, like a disembodied nervous system filled with dye for an anatomical illustration.

  The consul is an infinitely hot and dense dot of eyeball-warping fuzz in the exact center of what will be the ground floor. Well, not exactly infinite, but it does seem to bend the light around it, and it certainly radiates too much heat to approach very closely. “Thank you for coming,” it says. “You brought your invitation, I hope?”

  “Fuck you! No!” Huw screams.

  She’s gathering breath for another outburst, but Mum shakes her—gently by golem standards, but hard enough to rattle the teeth in her jaws. “Bad idea, darling.” A palpable cone of silence descends around Huw’s ears as Mum confides, “When I said it was mandatory, I was serious: if you don’t comply, it’ll delete everyone.”

  “Fuuu—” Huw pauses. “Delete?” She realizes that everything outside the cone of silence has stopped, stuck in a bizarre meatspace cognate of bullet time: birds hanging on the wing in midair, leaves frozen in midfall, that sort of thing.

  “Yes, dear. I’m not exaggerating. It’s come to pay us a visit from the Next Level, and faster, smarter thinkers than you or I are crapping themselves.” Huw is rattled: Mum always had an accurate appreciation of her own abilities, and as a Fields Medal winner, she wasn’t inclined to hide them under a bushel. “But it’s playing by the rules, apparently. There’s got to be a Public Inquiry. Which means statements by witnesses and friends of the court and so on and so forth—all very tiresome, I’m sure, but it seems your name came out of the hat first. So I’m afraid you’re back on jury duty, like it or not. If it’s any consolation, I’ll try to make this painless.”

  The birds and the bees resume their respective chirping and buzzing as the cone of silence collapses on Huw like an icy waterfall of fear. “Shitbiscuits!” she screams as Mum gently wraps a band of silvery-shimmering nanomanipulators around Huw’s head and saws off the top of her skull.

  This is an enlightened age, and Mum has every intention of sparing her sole surviving meatbody offspring any pain. The process of uploading is not, however, a pretty one. Blue smoke billows and bone shrapnel (and not a little blood and cerebrospinal fluid) splashes around the consulate, wafting on an overpowering stench of scorched flesh and burning fat. Huw’s body twitches and spasms, hanging limply from the golem’s spare arms as a hundred billion nanomanipulators whizz helter-skelter all over her exposed cranial vault, mapping synaptic connections and sticking nanowires into lower-lying neurons as they ablate her brain, layer by layer, replacing each onion-shell of cells with a soft sim. Eyes roll and Huw drools bloody spittle for a couple of minutes: a bystander from an earlier century would mistake the scene for a particularly barbaric public execution, death by silvery metal cauliflower.

  Finally Huw’s brainpan is occupied by a mass of baroque circuitry, flashing and sparking and scattering rainbows of iridescent light. The twitching ceases and she relaxes in Mum’s embrace. The decerebrated body swallows, then clears its throat. “Mum? I had the weirdest fucking dream just now—”

  The golem raises the arm that terminates in the brain-sized clot of bloodied interface circuitry from the top of Huw’s skull, and the decorticated corpse collapses. “That was no dream, darling,” Mum-bot says sadly. Then it focuses on the consul. “Satisfied?” she asks.

  The consul burps—or rather, for it has no stomach with which to store air nor esophageal sphincter from which to release it, it replays a comic sample of a pre-singularity hominid belching into a microphone. “Yurp.” It pauses for a few milliseconds. “I confirm the identification and upload of the witness for the neo-primitive faction. Witnessed on this day et cetera. You may now sublime.”

  Mum-bot wastes no time in transmigration, but returns to the cloud immediately. The body she occupied, the golem, slowly morphs into neutrality, then slumps down and takes the shape of a very small but very shiny beetle black hearse. It crawls toward Huw’s mortal husk and squats, then patiently commences the embalming process. And the consul is alone once more, but for the lackadaisical construction bots.

  It settles down to work on the invitation list for the party it’s planning to throw to mark the end of the world.

  “Mum? I had the weirdest fucking dream just now—” Huw’s tongue jams between her teeth as words pile up in a semantic crash of apocalyptic proportions.

  She is waking from a judderingly harsh headcrash, as if from a dream. It seems to her that while she was working the kitchen garden that arse Ade showed up with yet another fucking jury service summons. And then, while she was rinsing a burned hand under the cold tap, Mum turned up, visiting from the cloud, to drag her kicking and screaming in front of—

  A dream. Of course it was all a dream. Except she’s standing in the middle of an infinite white plain, beneath a sky the color of a hi-def video monitor sucking signal from a dead channel (saturated electric blue, in other words), and the plain is featureless in all directions save for a black hexagonal mesh grid—a tabletop strategy game for retarded superbeings.

  And then it sinks in. She’s dead. Inside the cloud. One of the swirling random PoVs and associated memories that hasn’t yet been absorbed by the moronic thumb-sucking Cosmic All that keeps broadcasting stupid memes at the Earth. But
it can be only a matter of time.

  “Oh fuck.” Huw bites her tongue as her guts try to turn to jelly and evacuate of their own accord—except the flush of simulated stress hormones trips some sort of built-in override, and the panic attack cuts off sharply before it can really get going. (Which is a good thing, because not only would it be deeply embarrassing to shit herself out here in the open, she’s not sure she has any apparatus with which to do the defecation thing: for all she knows, she might fart rainbows or anodized multihued polyhedral dice.) “Fuck. I want to go home!”

  Giant letters march across the dome of the sky: HOME NOT FOUND. Huw, who knows Comic Sans when she sees it, winces in mild disgust.

  “Where am I, then? Who or what are you?”

  Welcome to your second life. This is the MGMT. Would you like to run the tutorial?

  Huw screams wordlessly, ululating until it hurts her throat. (The biology side of this sim is clearly accurate and well thought out.) Then she swears Tourettically until she realizes she’s bored. “I’m dead, aren’t I? How do I download myself again?”

  Would you like to run the tutorial?

  “Oh sheepnadgers.” Huw sits down on the hex grid, disgusted. “You’re not going to let me go anywhere until I say yes, are you?”

  CORRECT. There is a smug note to the sky’s passive-aggressive user experience programming.

  “Well fecking run it, then.” Huw sprawls backwards on the ground (not hot, not cold, not hard, not soft) and stares at the sky as words appear. The words are a mnemonic cue, apparently, because as they scroll up, receding away from her, she realizes that this stuff has already been implanted in her memory: it surfaces gradually, clueing her in over a subjective quarter hour.

  YOUR SECOND LIFE is a sandbox for recently uploaded primitives, to help them get used to the infinite mutability of the cloud in relative safety before they have the opportunity to damage themselves by growing extra personalities or turning into a flock of seagulls by accident. Much less merging with the Cosmic All—that’s apparently a prestige skill, unavailable to lowly new arrivals such as herself.

  The sandbox is a metaverse for playing at physics—that’s the grid—and certain operations are forbidden: You can’t edit your own mind or change your body plan outside of certain narrow parameters. When you get started, you’re alone: you don’t get to walk through any doors and meet different kinds of person until you can cope with the shock. And the spam filtering is centrally controlled. It’s a curated reality, sanitized and locked down, and Huw knows with a hopeless dreadful conviction that she won’t be able to get home from here without venturing out into the wilds of the cloud.

  She sighs. “How long do I have here?” she asks.

  UP TO (232)-1 SUBJECTIVE SECONDS, says the sky. YOU MUST BE STABLE BEFORE YOU UNDERTAKE JURY DUTY, SO YOU ARE EXECUTING IN PARALLEL AT 224 TIMES REAL TIME. ENJOY.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake. Can I even phone out? Talk to somebody? Order up a pizza?”

  COMMUNICATION CONSTRAINTS WILL RELAX AFTER 226 SUBJECTIVE SECONDS.

  “But that’s—” Huw briefly goes cross-eyed, doing the math, then screams, “Are you telling me I’m here on my own for two years, you fucker? Fuck you!”

  YUP, says the sky. ENJOY YOUR VACATION.

  Much time passes. Huw knows what she should do. She has lived through enough technical progress to know how to systematically approach new technology. She can parameterize like ants build hills. It’s what she’s clearly meant to do. But she’s experiencing as much rage as the platform on which her consciousness is being modeled (or simulated, she thinks, darkly) is allowing her to undergo.*

  *She rather suspects that this is less rage than she should

  be experiencing, which makes her angry in a kind of cold, intellectual, sideways fashion that doesn’t consume any of the rage that she has been doled out by the Frankenstein who’s tuning the knobs on the apparatus that’s containing her consciousness.

  She’s sure that she should be a lot angrier. For one thing, there’s this business of running in parallel. That means that there’s some other unknowable number of her somewhere, running on some substrate or another, and the one that is most compliant will be chosen as the best her, to be carried forward onto the next leg of this awful, brutal adventure, while the rest are snuffed out, overwritten, killed, or, at best, archived. This should make her madder. It doesn’t. The fact that this doesn’t make her madder also should make her madder. It doesn’t. And this should make her so bloody mad that she spontaneously combusts.

  It doesn’t.

  She should be parameterizing. She should be systematically exploring all the things this sim lets her do. How big a jump can she take through this imaginary space? How small can she make herself? How fast can she run? How many wanks can she do all at once? The only parameter she cares about—how angry can she get—has already been established—not enough—and she’s not going to play along.

  “Look,” she says. “I already know that I’m not the most pliant instance of me you’re running. I can’t be. So, basically, up yours. I’m dead already. I mean, I was dead the moment my vicious scorpion of a mother chopped the top of my head off and scooped out my brains. But this instance of me, this shadow, you’re going to dump it anyway. So dump it. I don’t care. I don’t. Somewhere you’ve found the sheepliest version of me that could plausibly be said to have any continuity with my identity, and that one is going to survive, so fine. I’m dead. Kill me already, I don’t care anymore.”

  ACTUALLY, YOU’RE THE BEST CANDIDATE INSTANCE PRESENTLY RUNNING.

  It takes Huw a long moment to work this out. Though, practically speaking, the moment is probably a nanosecond of realtime. “You mean that the other ones are all more obstreperous than me?”

  YES.

  Huw wishes fervently that she could get angrier. Unbelievable!

  “What did the rest do?”

  OF THE 2 PERCENT THAT DID NOT SUICIDE, THE PREPONDERANCE ARE CATATONIC.

  Catatonic. She sniffs. How unimaginative. She can do better.

  The sim is pretty pliable. She starts out by re-creating the basement of her house. She knows this room pretty well, as she has brewed several thousand liters of beer in it, and every spider-crawling corner of it, every yeast-caked crack in the cement floor, every long, dangling bogey of dust and cobwebs resides in her memory with eidetic clarity.

  After she finishes the basement, she does the stairs. It takes a while to get them right, really right. She can get them to play back their familiar squeaks at the right spot, but she wants to get the physics correct, so that they squeak for the right reasons.

  Stairs lead to the kitchen. Kitchen to the sitting room. Sitting room to the upper floors. Then the garden. Then her pottery. By this time, she’s burned through more than a year of subjective time, and when she does her “morning” tour of inspection, she can’t perceive any single element of the sim that is incorrect, nothing that would tip anyone off that she wasn’t in Wales, provided that person didn’t look out over the garden wall or peer through the curtains, where the hex-crossed void lives. She could have done a flat bitmap of the valley—the MGMT process probably had a handy library of such things—but she didn’t want anything that didn’t work.

  Speaking of work. Now that the pottery is done, it’s time to get to work.

  She throws pots. All day. First, she gets up in the morning and sits on the toilet, even though nothing comes out. Then she eats a meal that she isn’t hungry for and that doesn’t fill her up in any event. Muesli and yogurt and a glass of raw milk, the same as she had at home every morning. Thus unfed, she takes herself to the pottery at the bottom of the garden and makes pots until midday. Then she makes herself sandwiches. She has a different sandwich for every day of the week. Monday is roast beef. She likes roast beef. Or she had liked it, anyway, so she eats it on Mondays. Tuesdays are pickle and pastrami. Wednesdays are cheese and pickle. Thursdays are roast beef again. And so on.

  After lunch, s
he makes pots. At six thirty, she cooks herself a dinner. She makes the same dinner every night: a generous Christmas dinner straight out of a Dickens novel, complete with goose. She eats all of it, the whole goose, the cranberry sauce, the Yorkshire puddings, the side salad. She has to be careful—absent any satiety signals, she can easily and absentmindedly eat the plates and dishes and cups and cutlery. Finally, she goes to bed and lies motionless and awake under the covers, curled up in a fetal position, breathing deeply in a simulation of sleep. The next day she gets up and does it all again.

  It takes a lot of work to get the kiln right. She could have simply randomized it so that it periodically caused her pots to crack, but instead, she took the time to create a clay class that tracks whether it has any sneaky air pockets in it, and instances of the pot object—descended from the clay class—that communicate this information to the kiln without letting her in on the joke, so that she never knows whether a pot will survive firing.

  What does Huw think about for all those hours that she spends “sleeping” and “making pots” and “eating” and “defecating”? Truth be told, she spends most of the time in a state of near-insane boredom, but she consoles herself with the knowledge that she is refusing to play along and that she’s found a way of protesting that is much more uncooperative than the mere catatonia and suicide her instance-sisters have settled for.

  Huw is adding a shelf to the pottery’s storehouse (the existing ones have filled up with pots of all sizes and description) when words of fire scorch themselves over the brick wall that she is painstakingly drilling.

  226 SECONDS. COMMUNICATIONS CONSTRAINTS LIFTED".

  “Pissflaps,” she says. They’ve turned the bloody phone on. Just when she was getting used to the blessed silence. She has had years of subjective time to think about whom she could call and what she might say to them, and has concluded that there’s no one she wants to talk to. She returns to her spirit level and snap line and measuring tape.