Rapture of the Nerds

“Oh fuck off, then,” snarls the judge. “Five minutes! Or you’ll be sorry!”

She yanks at the lid of the biohazard containment and Bonnie takes off, scampering behind the benches as if his arse is on fire—or maybe he’s just afraid that it will be, in a few seconds.

The box deconstructs itself into a pile of bubbling pink slime, to reveal the space monster the brothers Bey downloaded. It squats, curled up, in a nest of shredded teddy bears; two of its six legs are wrapped over what ought to be its snout, and it is making a faint whistling noise that it takes Huw a few seconds to recognize as snoring.

“Behold, the stinking pile of godvomit!” says the Vulture. She stands over it, arms akimbo, Swiss Army chain saw at the ready, looking almost pleased with herself. “Exhibit A: asleep. It’s been this way for the past eighteen days, ever since the Bey twins created it. Any questions?”

A susurrus of conversation sweeps the jury benches. “That’s funny,” Huw says, “my arm doesn’t itch anymore.”

“Shut up about your arm already!” Sandra says. “Look!” She points at the box, just as the space monster emits a deep grunting sigh and rolls over on its side, snuffling sleepily.

“Six limbs, bilateral symmetry, exoskeleton. Has anyone tried deconstructing its proteome yet?” asks Doc Dagbjort, looking rather more cheerful than the situation warrants.

“From inside the containment? No.” The Vulture looks thoughtful. “But from traces of carapace scraped off the walls of the Bey residence nursery, we have obtained a partial genotype. Tell your guidebooks or familiars or whatever to download Exhibit B for you. As you can see, the genome of the said item is chimeric and shows signs of crude tampering, but it’s largely derived from Drosophila, Mus musculus, and a twenty- first-century situationist artist or politician called Sarah Palin. Large chunks of its genome appear to be wholly artificial, though, written entirely in Arabic, and there’s an aqueous-phase Turing machine partially derived from octopus ribosomes to interpret them. It looks as if something has been trying to use the sharia code as a platform for implementing a legal virtual machine. We’re not sure why, unless it’s an obscure joke.”

“Does the metasphere have a sense of humor?” Huw says. He clears his throat—the dust must be getting to him, because it feels as if he’s developing a ticklish cough.

“If it didn’t, my life would be a lot simpler,” the Vulture says. A door at the back of the courtroom bangs, Bonnie coming back from the toilet. Huw notes with a spike of erotic shock that Bonnie is female again, a forelocked vision of heroin-chic skin and bones. “As it is, it makes it hard to tell a piece of sculpture from a practical joke, a new type of washing machine, or an alien superweapon.”

“Urk.” Huw subsides into a fit of coughing; it doesn’t help his throat.

“Can we wake it up?” Doc Dagbjort asks. “If I play it some music, perhaps it can the dream awaken from?”

Oh shit, musical dream therapy, Huw realizes with a sinking feeling. So that’s why she’s on this panel.

“That is a possibility,” the Vulture concedes. She prods the sleeping space monster with a steel-toe-capped boot, but it just snores louder and burrows deeper into its nest of disemboweled toys. “I prefer electroshock, myself.”

“Shit.” Sandra says. Huw glances sideways at her, sees her cowering away from him. “Shit!”

“What is it?” he asks.

“Your—” She stops, and rummages in her fanny pack. After pulling out a mirror, she passes it to him. “Throat.”

At the other end of the bench, Doc Dagbjort is explaining the healing properties of ambient postindustrial music to an interested judge and a couple of less skeptical jurors. Huw holds up the hand mirror and points it at his throat.

Huw stares at the mirror nearly cross-eyed and focuses on his stubbly Adam’s apple. It has been completely covered with a familiar biohazard trefoil, surrounded by ranked miniature trefoils, each of them fractally ringed with smaller duplicates, and so on, into hairy infinitude that no doubt extends down to mitochondrial detail.

Huw clutches his hands to his throat and feels it buzzing, vibrating, just as Dagbjort lets fly with an eerie ululation. She sings the quasi-melody rather well, noodling around from a ghostly, bluesy I-IV-V progression to something pentatonic that sounds like the wind whistling over the blasted steppes of some distant Eastern land and then into something Celtic and complicated.

The buzzing under his sweating fingertips heightens. The godvomit is vibrating too, beginning a bobbing sinuous cobra dance, and it begins to sing too, a low droning ommmmmm that resonates in Huw’s bones, in Huw’s throat, in Huw’s mind.

His tongue stirs in his mouth and he feels a great, preverbal welling from his larynx. He feels a burst of Tourettic obscenities tickling at his lips like a sneeze, and he moves his hands from his throat and claps them over his mouth, but it’s too late: he’s singing too.

If you can call it singing. He’s giving voice to two wordless melodies simultaneously, meshing in artful discord with each other and the joint song of the Kleinmonster and Dagbjort. One voice is basso profundo, the other a Tiny Tim falsetto, and the Kleinmonster is turning its attention on him—he can hear it thinking joyful thoughts to itself. His skin crawls with creeping horror as his voice box secedes from his autonomic nervous system, and he flees the courtroom, pursued by the mystified stares of his co-jurors and the glare of the Vulture.

He stumbles for the loo, struggling to keep the alien song inside his chest, lips clamped tightly shut. He has a titanic, painful, rock-hard erection, and he thinks wildly of autoerotic asphyxiators who blow their loads in ecstatic writhing as their oxygen-starved brains stage endorphin-fueled fireworks displays on the backs of their eyelids. He is certain he is dying. He falls to his knees on the rubber tiles of the lav’s floor and begins to retch and weep.

He feels a tentative hand caressing his shoulder and he turns his head. Through a haze of tears, he recognizes Bonnie, her eyes smoldering with barely controlled lust. “You’re so fucking transhuman,” s/he says, and clamps her mouth to his, ramming her tongue in almost to his gag reflex. She pins him to the yielding tiles and straddles him, grinding her/his crotch against his.

It’s enough to shock him out of despair and into anger. He pushes hard against her bony xylophone chest and spits. “You are sick,” he says, rolling away. The song is dying now, just a buzz of harmonics that pick at his pulse. “God!”

Bonnie smirks at him and does a cat stretch on the tile before climbing to her feet. She shakes herself and tosses her fringe and gives him another smirk. “Really? I could have sworn you wanted it,” she says, and leaves him alone.

Huw pulls himself to his feet and staggers for the door, his throat no longer itching, but wriggling. He pushes weakly against the door and steps out into the corridor, where he confronts the entire court, which has apparently adjourned to follow him. The Vulture’s fists are fiercely planted on her hips.

“You’re infected,” the Vulture says. Her voice is ominously calm. “That’s unfortunate. We’ve got a nanocontainment box for you until we sort it out. We’ll pull an alternate juror from the pool.” Sandra, Bonnie, Dagbjort, the caveman, and the centenarian are all staring at him like he’s a sideshow curiosity. “Come along now, the guardsmen will take you to your box.” The guardsmen are a pair of hulking golems, stony-faced and brutal- looking. They advance on him with a thunderous tread, brandishing manacles like B-movie Inquisitors.

Huw’s mind blanks with fear and rage. Bastards! he tries to scream, and what comes out is an eerie howl that makes the jurors wince and probably terrifies every dog within a ten-kilometer radius. He feints toward them, then spins on his heel and dashes for the front doors. Curare darts spang off the rubber walls and rebound around him, but none hit him. He leaps off the courtroom steps and runs headlong into the humanswarm, plowing into its midst.

He runs without any particular direction, but his feet take him back to the hacker’s egg-shaped clinic of their own accord. He turns his head and scans the crowd for jurors or officers of the court. Seeing none, he thumps the egg until the door irises open, then dives through it.

The hacker is laid out on her table, encased in the instrument bush. Her fingers and toes work its tendrils in response to unknowable feedback from its goggles and earphones. Huw coughs in three-part harmony, and she gives her fingers a decisive waggle that causes the bush to contract into a fist near the ceiling.

She looks at him, takes in Huw’s watermarked throat and two-part snoring drone. “Right,” she says. “Looks