Rapture of the Nerds

Huw shakes his head frantically, rolling his eyes. Slowly, he pans the phone around the box, then brings it back to eye level.

“Oh ho! Not voluntary, then.”

Huw nods so fiercely, his head smacks into the padded wall behind him.

“Right, then. See you in two ticks.” The picture on the phone swings crazily as Adrian clips it to one of the thousands of clever grabbers on the front of his wash-n-wears and pedals off on the bike. Periodically, his face looms in the screen as he looks down at the positional data that Huw’s phone is relaying.

Then Huw is looking at a jittery high-def image of the judge’s caravan, at the slowly moving lockbox he’s encased in. Adrian holds his phone up again and Huw sees that his eyes are, if anything, redder than they’d been that morning, nearly fluorescent with stoned glee. “You’re in there, yeah?” he says, and swings the phone toward the strongbox. Huw nods.

“Hrm.” Adrian says, “Tricky.” He clips his phone back to his shirt and turns around. Huw sees two young women swathed in paramilitary black bodysuits bulging with cargo pockets and clever sewn-in bandoliers. They exchange rapid hand signals; then the phone’s POV wheels sickeningly as Adrian does a tire-torturing doughnut and zips off to the head of the caravan. The camera frames the two impassive golems pumping the pedals of the palanquin. Adrian rolls the bike directly into their path, then makes terrified tourist squeaks as he rolls clear of the frame at the same moment as the golems plow through it. They grind to a sudden halt: their wheels have delaminated on impact with Huw’s bike’s frame, which has gone into self-defensive hedgehog mode. Huw hears the Vulture croaking enraged threats at Adrian, whom Huw is certain is shrugging with gormless English apologies.

Huw is thrown to one side, losing his phone in the process. A moment later, light scythes into Huw’s cell and he’s staring up into the eye-slit of a ceramic-reinforced veil. Strong, long-fingered hands lift him free and he’s unceremoniously slung over a hard female shoulder. Dangling upside down, he catches a glimpse of the smoking ceiling of the palanquin dissolving into blue goo. The Vulture waves her arms in their direction, her black robe spread out like tattered wings as she screams orders. The golems are lumbering toward them, but in a moment they’re in the crowd, lost in the swarm.

The safe house is another inflatable, half-buried in sand and ringed with a memory-wire fence that guards some shepherd’s noisome cache of mutant livestock—cows that give chocolate milk, goats that eat scrap plastic and excrete a soft spun cotton analogue, miniature hamster-sized chickens that seem even stupider than real chickens and flock like tropical fish. Adrian’s already waiting for them when they arrive, standing over the remains of Huw’s bicycle.

“Guess you get to keep the hash, old son,” Adrian says, kicking the wreckage. “Too bad—it was a lovely ride. I see you’ve met Maisie and Becky. Becky, love, would you mind setting Huw down now? He’s looking a little green and I’m sure he’d appreciate some terror firmer and the removal of that horrid gag.”

Neat as that, Huw is sitting plonk on his bottom in the sand, while Adrian laboriously pries back and snaps off each of the golem’s fingers. Adrian tosses them to the goats, and Maisie says something to him that Huw can’t understand.

Adrian shakes his head. “You worry too much—those buggers’ll eat anything.”

Once he’s free of the gag, Huw gives his jaw an experimental wiggle, then opens his mouth in a wide gasp. While he’s catching his breath, the whistle—which has staked out a hiding place behind his left ear—abseils around his jaw, nips inside his mouth, and darts down his throat. “Shit!” Huw chokes: and the whistle nestling in the back of his larynx supplies a buzzing harmonic counterpoint.

“Aha!” says Adrian. “You’re the designated carrier, all right. Excellent. The sisters want samples, later. You’re going to need a bath first, no offense. Come on in,” he says, kicking away sand to reveal a trapdoor. Hoisting it open, Adrian exposes a helical slide into the bounce-house’s depths; he slides in feetfirst and spirals down into the darkness.

Huw gasps for breath, balanced on the fine edge between nervousness and stark screaming terror. Normalcy wins: The whistle doesn’t hurt, indeed barely feels as if it’s there. A goat sidles up behind him with evil in its eyes and leans over his shoulder, sniffing to determine if he’s edible; the hot breath on his ear reminds him that he’s still alive, and not even unable to talk. One of the Libyan goth ninjettes is squatting patiently by the door. “Hello?” he says, experimentally rubbing his throat.

She shrugs and emits a rapid-fire stream of Arabic. Then, seeing he doesn’t understand, she shrugs again and points at the slide. “Oh, I get it,” says Huw. He peers at her closely. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

She says something else, this time sharply. Huw sighs. “Okay, I don’t know you.” His throat feels a bit odd, but not as odd as it ought to for someone who’s just swallowed an alien communication device. I need to know what’s going on, he realizes, eyeing the trapdoor uneasily. Oh well. Steeling himself, he lowers his legs into the slide and forces himself to let go.

The room at the bottom is a large bony cavern, its ceiling hung with what look like gigantic otoliths: the floor is carpeted with pink sensory fronds. Adrian is messing around with a very definitely nonsapient teapot on a battered Japanese camping stove. The other one of the ninjette twins is sitting cross-legged on the floor, immersed in some kind of control interface to the Red Crescent omnifab that squats against one wall, burbling and occasionally squirting glutinously to itself. “Ah, there y’are. Cup of tea, mate?” says Adrian.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Huw replies. “Just what the fuck fuck fuck clunge-swiving hell—’scuse me—is going on?” Who are you and why have you been stalking me from Wales?

“Siddown.” Adrian waves at a beanbag. “Milk, sugar?”

“Both, thanks. Agh—damn. Got anything for-for Tourette’s?”

“’Cording to the user manual, it’ll go away soon. No worries.”

“User manual? Sh—you mean this thing comes with a warranty? That sort of thing?”

“Sure.” Adrian pours boiling water into the teapot and sets it aside to stew. Then he sits down besides the oblivious Libyan woman and pulls out a stash tin. He begins to roll a joint, chatting as he does so. “It’s been spamming to hell and back for the past six months. Seems something up there wants us to, like, talk to it. One of the high transcendents, several gazillion subjective years removed from mere humanity. For some years now, it’s not had much of a clue about us, but it’s finally invented, bred, resurrected, whatever, an interface to the the wossname, human deep grammar engine or whatever they’re calling it these days. Sort of like the crappy teapots the embassy issues everyone with. Trouble is, the interface is really specific, so only a few people can assimilate it. You—” Adrian shrugs. “I wasn’t involved,” he says.

“Who was?” asks Huw, his knuckles whitening. “If I find them—”

“It was sort of one of those things,” Adrian says. “You know how it happens? Someone does some deep data mining on the proteome and spots a correlation. Posts their findings publicly. Someone else thinks, Hey, I know that joe, and invites them to a party along with a bunch of their friends. Someone else spikes the punch while they’re chatting up a Sheila, and then a prankster at the New Libyan embassy thinks, Hey, we could maybe rope him into the hanging judge’s reality show, howzabout that? Boy, you can snap your fingers and before you know what’s happening, there’s a flash conspiracy in action—not your real good, old-fashioned secret new world order, nobody can be arsed tracking those things these days, but the next best thing. A self-propagating teleology meme. Goal-seeking Neat Ideas are the most dangerous kind. You smoke?”

“Thanks,” says Huw, accepting the joint. “Is the tea ready?”

“Yeah.” And Adrian spends the next minute pouring a couple of mugs of extremely strong breakfast tea, while Huw does his best to calm his shattered nerves by getting blasted right out of his skull on hashishim dope.

“’Kay, lemme get this straight. I was never on tech jury call, right? Was a setup. All along.”

“Well, hurm. It was a real jury, all right, but that doesn’t mean your name was plucked out of the hat at random, follow?”

“All right. Nobody planned, not a conspiracy, just a set of accidents ’cause the cloud wants to talk. Huh?” Huw leans back on the beanbag and bangs his head on a giant otolith, setting it vibrating with a deep gut-churning rumble. “’Sh cool stuff. Fucking cloud. Why can’t it send a letter if it wanna talk to me?”