Rapture of the Nerds

like you’re about done, then.” The teapot at his belt translates efficiently, giving her a thick Brummie accent for no reason Huw understands.

“What the fuck is this shit?” Huw says, over his drone.

“No need for that sort of language,” she says primly. She gets up off her table and gestures toward it. “Up you go.”

Reluctantly, Huw climbs up, then watches the bush descend on him and encase him in a quintillion smart gossamer fingers.

“I uploaded your opportunistic code to a mailing list,” explains the hacker. “It was a big hit with the Euros— lucky for you it’s their waking hours, or it could have been another twelve hours before we heard back. You’ve solved quite a little mystery, you know.

“The betaware you’re infected with has been floating around the North Sea for about a month now, but it has failed to land a single successful somatic infection—until now. Lots of carriers but no afflicted. Best guess at its origin is a cometary mass extruded from the cloud that burned away protecting its payload.

“So it was quite the mystery until I pasted your genome into a followup. Then it was obvious—it’s looking for specific T helper lymphocytes. Welsh ones. Which begs another question: Why Welsh?

“And here we have the answer.” The bush’s tendrils stroked Huw’s growling voice box. “All those grotty Welsh vowel sounds and glottals. It needed a trained larynx to manifest.”

“Aaaagh,” Huw gargles, tensing angrily and trying to argue. The bush takes the opportunity to shove what feels like a wad of cotton wool into his mouth and extrude exploring wisps to brush samples from his epiglottis.

A histogram scrolls across the egg’s wall in time with Huw’s groan, spiking ferociously. “Oh, very nice,” she says. “You’re modulating a megabit a second over a spread-spectrum short-range audio link. Pushing the limits of info-sci, you are!”

Huw stutters another groan, then vomits a flood of obscenities: They’re enveloped in his di-vocal drone, and the histogram spikes in sympathy.

“No easy way to know what you’re spewing, of course. Lots of activity in your language and vision centers, though.” The bush firmly grips the sides of his head. “Do that again, will you? I’m going to run a PET scan.”

“I don’t think I can—,” he begins; then he bursts into Welsh profanity so foul, it triggers his old flinch reflex, some part of his limbic system certain that this sort of display will necessarily be accompanied by a ringing slap from his mother, however uploaded she might be these past fifty years.

“Right,” she says. “Right. Here’s my guess, then. You’re transmitting your sensoria—visual, auditory, olfactory, even tactile. Somewhere out there there’s a complementary bit of receiving equipment that can demodulate the signal. You’re a remote sensing apparatus.”

“Fuck,” Huw says. The histogram is still. He is voluntarily cursing.

“It’s kinky, yes?” she says. “Too kinky for you. One second.” Tentacles slither down his throat briskly, curl around inside his stomach, then come back out. It feels like he’s vomiting, except his guts are limp, and a big bolus of something or other is trying to stick in his throat on the way out. For a panicky moment he feels as if he’s choking—then the lump tears away with a bright stabbing pain, and he can breathe through his nose again.

“Ah, that’s better,” he hears distantly. “A beautiful little whistle! Easy to fence to some out-of-body perv, I think. Oh dear, did I say that aloud?” A fuzzy mat of bush tendrils peel away from his face to reveal an unsympathetic face peering down at him. “You did hear that, didn’t you? Hmm, what a pity. Well, your left kidney is in good shape—”

There’s a loud crash from outside the operating theater, followed by a wail from his belt. “In here!” screams his teapot. “Help, please come quickly!”

More crashing. The hacker straightens up, cursing under her breath. Casting around, her gaze falls on Huw’s biohazard burka. She grabs it and dives for the back door, sending a gleaming operating cart skidding across the floor. She dives out the back as something large batters at the entrance. The door bulges inward. Huw struggles to sit up, pushing back the suddenly quiescent instrument bush—it feels like wrestling with a half ton of candy floss. What now? he thinks wildly.

“In here!” shrieks the djinni, standing in holographic miniature on top of the teapot and waving its arms like a stranded sailor.

“You shut up,” Huw grunts. He manages to get his legs off the side of the chair and stumbles against the trolley. Another crash from the front door, and he sees something on the floor—something silvery and cylindrical, about ten centimeters long and one in diameter, for all the world like a pocket recorder covered in slime. That’s it? he puzzles, and thoughtlessly picks it up and pockets it just as the door gives up the uneven struggle and slams open to admit the two court golems, followed by an extremely irrate hanging judge.

“Arretez-vous!” yells his djinni. “He’s over here! Don’t let him get away this time!” With a sense of horror, Huw realizes that the little snitch is jumping up and down and pointing at him.

“No chance,” says Judge

Giuliani. “Get him!” she tells the golems, and they lurch toward him. “Your palanquin is outside, waiting to take you to the People’s Second Revolutionary Memorial Teaching Hospital. It’s quite secure,” she adds with an ugly grin. “Asshole. Do you want to spread it around? Have you any idea how much trouble you’re in already, breaking biocontainment?”

“The—the bastards, set me fucking shitting up—” The Tourette’s is threatening to break out, as is a residual urge to burst out in song even as the huge golems clamp inhumanly gentle six-fingered hands the size of ditch- diggers around his arms. “—party in fucking cockass Monmouth, fucking minger Bonnie slipped me the shit-shit-shitting godvomit raining on Northern fucking Europe, set me up that wasn’t the fucking New Libyan consulate at all, was it? And, and—”

One of the golems slaps a hand over his face. The hand has some kind of flexible membrane on it, with built- in antisound. Huw can hear himself chattering and cursing inside his own head, but nothing’s getting out. The golem slowly shrinkwraps his legs together from hip to ankle, and the other golem picks him up under one arm and carries him through the broken front door. The hands of the first golem part easily at the wrist and go with him, a temporary gag.

“We’ll discuss the charges later, in my chambers,”

Giuliani says in his ear. Then she whisks off in a flapping of black-winged robes as the golem lowers Huw into something that looks like a cross between a pedal-powered taxi and an upright coffin.

Bastard fucking bastard must stop fucking swearing, Huw thinks desperately, as he confronts a baby blue padded cell lined with ominous-looking straps. Bonnie set me up for this, bastard neophiliac, but why did the fucking tin whistle want to talk to the shit-monster? Why was the thing happy to hear me—? He stops as the lid closes behind him, momentarily shocked. Because that was the oddest thing about it: the way the godvomit responded to his unwanted flight of song—

As the golems start leaning on the pedals, something squirms in his pocket, like an inquisitive worm. It’s the whistle the hacker yanked out of his throat, he realizes, half-horrified that he’s locked in with it. Which is worse, he asks himself, a traitorous djinni or a musical instrument that wants to nest in my larynx? He gets his answer a moment later as the whistle squirms again, then digs in tiny claws and begins to inch up his shirt. Locked in a small box, on the way to the cells beneath the courthouse, Huw confronts his most primal fear, gives in, and screams himself hoarse behind his antisound gag.

Eventually, his screams taper off. But after a couple of minutes, he feels a heretofore subliminal buzzing against his hip, and screams afresh as he envisions spidery trefoils crawling over his pelvic girdle toward his crotch. Then reason takes over and he realizes that it’s his goddamned phone. Squirming around in the cramped box, he pulls it out and shakes it to life, holding it before his mute face. The picture on the other end resolves. Adrian and his bicycle, in some swarming souk. “Wotcher!” Adrian says. Huw waggles his eyebrows frantically at the pinhole cam. The whistle has climbed atop his chest and is stuck crawling in circles as it tries to locate a suitable aperture to return to its nest by.

“Saucy,” Adrian says. “Hadn’t figured you for bein’ inta that kink. Met a lucky lady, then?”