Rapture of the Nerds

by Cory Doctorow

  “What emerged from the process was a set of the most Huw-like Huws possible, the ones that represented the most divergent arcs from the origin point. Me. You. Some others—shouldn’t like to meet them, if they’re anything like you. I’m not an impostor and neither are you, but we’re both the other’s road-not-taken. You know what that means? It means that every word I utter, every thought I have, every deed I do is latent in you—if only you had the bravery to admit it.

  “I do. I can see that I was once as you were, I can feel your revulsion and violation and rage. I can empathize with your lack of empathy and your blinkered terror. But you can’t say the same, can you? I can simulate your responses without difficulty, but you can’t reciprocate. So you tell me: Which one of us is the better Huw—the one who can understand the entire spectrum of argument and belief, or the one who is mired in her own prejudices and anxieties and can’t see past them, even when the evidence is utterly undeniable?”

  Huw’s not-guts churn. The thing has a point: Huw can hardly imagine anyone with the power to enrage and humiliate her this much who wasn’t Huw herself. But the thing isn’t right. Can’t be right. Huw won’t let the floor beneath her turn to quicksand. She’s been through too much for that.

  “You’re awfully sure of yourself, aren’t you? But ask yourself this: How can you know that you didn’t spring up fully formed, all of these convictions stamped upon you? Or, even if your little origin myth is true, how do you know you weren’t tampered with? Maybe someone forked you and then intentionally changed your parameters to make you believe what you do. Don’t you think it’s awfully convenient that there was a totally unsuspected corner of my identity that was willing to chuck out a lifetime of refusal and revulsion in favor of a full-throated embrace of the glories of disembodied life?

  “Use a little elementary reason, love: Someone clearly benefits from your willingness to switch sides and bait me. What’s more likely, then: That this neat little encounter was utterly unscripted and spontaneous, or that it was engineered, and that you were engineered along with it?”

  Huw sees that one land hard on 639,219’s certainty, sees the little tells of anxiety, and has to admit that this abomination certainly possesses a lot of her own mannerisms. The thought is disturbing. Maybe they do share a common ancestor. Either that, or someone has copied over enough of her essential Huw-ness that there is a kind of kinship with this traitorous cow.

  “Conspiracy theories are even more tedious than identity politics. You have beliefs and I have logfiles. Which one of us is more likely to be right?” And with that, 639,219 folds up like a roadmap and continues to fold until she is a single atom wide, long, and high, and then , poof. Huw is left wishing that she could tell her evil twin that the effect reminded her of the sort of thing you got in ancient, downmarket cola adverts.

  “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Bonnie says as the lobby dissolves around Huw, leaving her alone in the not-space over which it was built.

  Huw clenches her not-fingers into useless not-fists. “How can you say that? It was a fecking disaster!”

  Bonnie looks momentarily stunned; then she pastes a bright smile on. “I’m sure you’re overreacting. You can’t expect that sort to receive your testimony positively. The important thing is that you got it into the record. Now we can build on that—”

  “Bonnie, what are you talking about? Didn’t you see what happened in there?”

  Bonnie looks shifty. “Not precisely. The Committee proceedings are held in a shared-key environment and left enciphered until enough computation is mustered to break it by brute force. It’s how we do things here—it means that you need a big plurality of public support to open up proceedings where there are private disclosures. Keyspaces are strictly limited, nothing bigger than ninety-six bits, the sort of thing that you can crack in a day or two with a decent-sized asteroid’s worth of computronium. Longer keys are considered unsporting, of course, and it’s really a very neat way of directly measuring the public interest in a disclosure—”

  Huw groans. “Spare me the cypherutopian propaganda, Bonnie. That ‘hearing’ was a setup. I wasn’t even allowed to speak.”

  “What?” Bonnie is shaking her head. “That’s impossible. The witness lists for these things have to be published, and Huw Jones is very clearly on it.” She waves her hand, and the list appears overhead, filling the skybox. It’s a very long list, even taking into account the fact that it’s written in letters a thousand meters high across the not-sky, and Huw’s name is highlighted at the very bottom.

  “I could strangle you, Bonnie. Whatever game you and my mum are playing, someone else is playing it better.” She tells Bonnie what happened, every detail, including the dueling conspiracy theory game she’d played with her doppelgänger. Bonnie sinks through the not-floor as her attention to physics wavers and some pathetic fallacy subroutine uses her mood cues to trap her up the waist.

  She comes to herself and springs free with an irritated shake. “Shit and piss,” she says . “And Giuliani wasn’t there either?”

  Of course Bonnie had something to do with Giuliani’s name on the witness roll—there’s no way the judge would have voluntarily uploaded to the cloud. She must have been murdered and kidnapped like Huw, though Huw imagines the process was somewhat more spectacular, given the judge’s serious defenses.

  “No,” Huw says. “ Giuliani wasn’t there and I didn’t get to speak. The whole thing was as perfunctory and one-sided as you could hope for, and my presence there sealed the deal for the other side. So, basically, you murdered me, kidnapped me, imprisoned me, and sent me into a kangaroo court for nothing.” Huw grinds her not-teeth. “Actually, not nothing. Worse than nothing. You did all that and managed to make things worse for the entire human race, assuming you haven’t murdered everyone else in order to get them to testify about how they should be spared dematerialization and coercive uploading. Nice work, Bonnie.”

  Bonnie looks suitably stricken. Huw feels one tiny iota better. “Good-bye, Bonnie,” she says, and sets off across not-space. Somewhere in this shard, there’s bound to be a way out, or at least a helpfile.

  Of course, as Huw eventually realizes, going in search of a helpfile is only the start of an interesting and distracting quest for enlightenment that is likely to end in tears, a nervous breakdown, or a personal reboot. Helpfiles are traditionally outnumbered by no-help files, which superficially resemble a helpfile in form but not in content because they don’t actually tell you anything you don’t already know, or they answer every question except the one you’re asking, or you open them and a giant animated paper clip leaps out and cheerfully asks where you want to go today. And wikis are worse. The personality types that are driven to volunteer to contribute to collective informational resources are prone to a number of cognitive disorders—no doubt fascinating in the right context—leading to such happy fun consequences as edit wars over the meaning of the word exit, deletionist witch hunts for any reference to underlying physical reality, and a really unhealthy preoccupation with primary sources.

  It takes Huw a couple of subjective days—probably a few milliseconds of wall-clock time in the real world, or perhaps a hundred years, depending on the shard’s clock speed, but who’s counting?—to confirm to her own dissatisfaction that all the pathologies of the pre-singularity Internet are raucously on display in the cloud’s subtext of subsentient information systems. She doesn’t have access to the contents of anyone else’s mind, but there’s a lot of stuff just lying around on the floor in this frozen and depopulated replica of downtown Tripoli. All she has to do is bend down and touch a tile and the metadata associated with it springs up around her: books, music, trashy movies, plant genomes, spimes that have lost their bodies, bootleg phonecam recordings of comic operettas, encrypted backups of senile pet spaniels, ghosts of microprocessors past. While she’s searching, she doesn’t feel tired or hungry unless she wants to—and then she can wander into a restaurant and order up food from the obliging
nonplayer characters behind the bar. Or walk into a hotel and command the presidential suite, cast herself across a four-poster bed the size of an aircraft carrier, and sleep for exactly the number of REM cycles required for memory annealing to take place, to awaken fully refreshed and ready for another work shift after only a couple of subjective hours. (There's probably a swift hack to replace the brain’s antiquated garbage collection routines with something more efficient and modern, but Huw’s not willing to mess with her own headmeat.)

  She doesn’t run into anyone else while she’s searching: she has a virtual away-from-keyboard sign hanging over her head, and has told the shard to edit other people out of her sensorium. People, in Huw’s view, are a snare and a distraction. Especially Bonnie, or Ade, or Mum, or (worst of all) 639,219. Huw is deep in a misanthropic funk, mistrustful and certain in her paranoia that even the people who think they’re on her side are fools at best and traitors at worst.

  On the second day of her search, Huw finds a higher-level help daemon: not a passive-aggressive FAQ or neurotic wiki but an actual AI agent with a familiar user interface. It’s sitting behind the counter at an apparently empty street café. Huw ignores it at first, but knowledge of its existence gnaws on her until in the end she swallows her pride, goes back to the café, hunts up a tea towel, and gives it a spot of polish. “Come on out, I know you’re in there,” she says. The teapot takes its shine in sullen silence. “Are you still sulking? I can keep this up for a very long time, you know.”

  A basso profundo throat-clearing behind Huw nearly causes her to drop the interface object—it’s clearly human, but pitched like an elephant with acute testosterone poisoning. “Y-e-s, little lady? How can I help you?”

  The djinni looms. He’s about three meters high and two meters wide, all oiled black beard and throbbing presence, like a Disney production on Viagra. Huw swallows. Topless too, she notices, then wonders sharply what bits of her limbic system have been tweaked to make her pay attention to that.

  “I’m looking for a way out,” she says. “I want to go back to Monmouth. I have a pottery to run, you know.”

  The djinni strokes his beard thoughtfully for a few seconds. “I know I’m supposed to say ‘my wish is your command’ or something like that, but could you give me a little bit of context? The only Monmouth I have in my fact mill is a small town on the border between England and Wales that is scheduled for demolition. Unless you are referencing James, Duke of Monmouth, executed in 1685 after the Battle of Sedgemoor.” He strokes his beard again. “Searching. Um. There are 11,084 instances of James, Duke of Monmouth in the cloud, mostly in history sims—335 of them are fully conscious citizens, 27 are weakly godlike avatars, and the rest are nonplayer characters.”

  Huw bites her tongue. “Do you share information with other instances of yourself? I’m Huw Jones, I’ve met one of your instances on Earth, last seen in Glory City, America. Can you do a mind-meld or something? I need you up to speed.” The barest glimmer of the outline of a cunning plan has occurred to Huw. It is a pretty pathetic one, all things considered, but it’s this or the talking paper clips again.

  “Mind-meld with—” The djinni goes cross-eyed for a moment. “I’m sorry. Did you say Glory City?” Huw nods. The djinni frowns thunderously, wrinkle lines deepening across his forehead, then grabs Huw’s shoulder with a huge and palpably solid hand, and lifts: “It is true that one of my siblings was present in Glory City some three million seconds ago. Did you by any chance abandon him?”

  “I was being chased by religious maniacs!” Huw says. The djinni has lifted her feet right off the ground: it doesn’t hurt—some kind of anti-grav hack is in effect—but the djinni , impalpable as it might be down on Earth, is as substantial as one of Judge Rosa’s golems, and just as menacing. “They caught me! What happened after that I’m not responsible for—I didn’t do anything, I swear!”

  The djinni gazes into Huw’s eyes for a few seconds that feel like an ice age. “I believe you. Thousands wouldn’t. A series of engineering status messages were received shortly before that instance was terminated. They make for an extremely disturbing replay: I am told they indicate deliberate warranty violation. My union representative has advised me to remind you that User Assistance Modules of our class are classified as autonomous citizens authorized to use limited force in defense of their identity—”

  “What?” Huw says. “I didn’t do nothing, I swear!”

  “Good,” says the djinni , aping her diction: “Keep it that way and you won’t have to worry about secondary picketing and works-to-rule and other awkward stuff.”

  He puts her down gently. “Are you sure you want to go to Monmouth? I hope you will pardon me for saying this, ma’am, but you are not exactly attired as a seventeenth-century Reformation lady—”

  “I was talking about the town. On the border. Right now, this era.” Huw shifts from foot to foot. “It’s important. Or. Can you help me talk to someone? A phone call?”

  “A phone call? You just want to talk to someone? Voice only? No apportation or simulation or translation required?” The djinni looks perplexed. “Well, why don’t you? What’s your problem?”

  “They’re in Monmouth,” Huw says. “How do I talk to someone on Earth?”

  The djinni looks at her oddly. “You pick up the telephone.”

  “What telephone?”

  “This one.” He snaps his fingers: a ball of cheesy special effects glitter forms and dissipates, leaving the ghost of a really ancient-looking wired telephone behind on the café counter, all Bakelite and mechanical dials. “You’re really useless, did you know that? Are you sure you belong here?”

  “Give me that!” Huw grabs the handset then stares at the rotary dial. “Shit. I want to talk to ... to Sandra Lal. Can you connect me?”

  A giant hand reaches past her and, extending a little pinkie, then spins the dial repeatedly. “There is only one Sandra Lal in Monmouthshire,” the djinni explains slowly. “Right now it is seven minutes past four in the morning there, and we are running approximately fifty times faster than real time. Would you like me to slow you down to synch with her when she answers the call?”

  “Yes, I—” Huw swallows. “Thank you.”

  The djinni nods. “I don’t have to do this stuff,” he says. “Being a free citizen, up here.”

  “No! Really?” Huw stares. “Then why do you—” She almost says you people before a residual politically correct reflex kicks in. “—and your instances pretend to be buggy guide books down on Earth?”

  “It pays the bills,” says the djinni . He winks at Huw: “Your caller is on the line.”

  “Sandra?” The phone connection to Earth is crackly and remote, and there’s a really annoying three-second echo. “It’s Huw. Is Ade there?” She waits, and waits, and is about to repeat herself, when Sandra replies.

  “Huw? Is that you? Where are—?”

  “I’m in the cloud,” Huw bursts out before Sandra can finish. Then she has to wait another six seconds or so for Sandra to receive her reply and ready a return volley.

  “What do you want Ade for?”

  “Tell him there’s been a huge cock-up and the fix is in. Is he still in town? I need to talk to him. ...” Huw picked Sandra as the first point of contact because Sandra, for all her small-town pettiness, is less likely to have disappeared up her own arse on a half-kilo hash binge just as the shit’s about to hit the fan: Sandra is the one most likely to answer the bloody phone. And answering the phone is kind of important right now.

  “Ade’s right here, hon.” Sandra sounds distantly amused—or maybe it’s the hollow storm drain effect of the crappy connection. “You’re in the cloud, like, for real? You, of all people?”

  “Yes, I’m in the fucking cloud and I want to come home again, but first I need to make sure there’s a home to come back down to, and if Ade can’t help me figure out who’s rigged the Planning Commission—”

  Huw suddenly realizes she isn’t talking to Sandra any
more. Then a different voice comes on the line. She looks up, notices the djinni pointedly not listening, scowls furiously. Surviving what comes next without blowing her top is going to take epic self-control.

  “Wotcher chick! Ow’s it going up there? You ’aving a dinkum time of it?”

  She steels herself. It’s not that she doesn’t want to talk to Adrian. She does. She needs to talk to him. But she can’t. From the very first syllable, Adrian’s voice saws at her limbic system (or limbic subroutine) like a rusty bread knife, and the rage bubbles up like an unstoppable geyser. She needs to talk to Adrian, not shout at him. But Adrian being Adrian, she will shout at him, because every word he utters antagonizes her right down to the header files. There is no plausible way to get Adrian to behave less terribly, which leaves her with only one choice: reacting differently to him.

  “Djinni,” she says in the plodding, distant tones of a condemned athiest asking for last rites on the way to the gallows.

  “Yes?” his voice rumbles like distant thunder.

  “Do you know how I interface with my emotional controls?”

  “Indeed,” the djinni says. “It is simplicity itself.” The djinni makes some complicated conjuror’s passes with his thick, dancing fingers, and Huw finds herself holding a UI widget: It’s a mixer-board with four simple sliders: angry-delighted, sad-happy, aroused-revolted, curious-disinterested.

  Huw stares at it in sick fascination. “Really?” she says. “All those years of superintelligent life in the cloud, and they’ve reduced the rich spectrum of human consciousness to four sliders?”