Rapture of the Nerds

“Yer the human condition in microcosm, mate. Here, pass the spliff.”

“’Kay. So what wants to talk?”

“Eh, well, you’ve met the ambassador already, right? S’okay, Bonnie’ll be along in a while with it.”

“And whothefuck are you? I mean, what’re you doing in this?”

“Hell.” Adrian looks resigned. “I’m just your ordinary joe, really. Forget the Nobel Prize, that doesn’t mean anything. ’S all a team effort these days, anyway, and I ain’t done any real work in cognitive neuroscience for thirty, forty years. Tell the truth, I was just bumming around, enjoying my second teenage Wanderjahr

when I heard ’bout you through the grapevine. Damn shame we couldn’t get a sane judge for the hearing. None of this shit would be necessary if it wasn’t for Rosa’s thing.”

“Rosa—”

“Rosa

Giuliani. Hanging judge and reality show host. She’s like, a bit conservative. Hadn’t you noticed?”

“A bit. Conservative.”

“Yeah, she’s an old-time environmentalist, really likes conserving things—preferably in formalin. Including anyone who’s been infected by a communications vector.”

“Oh.” Normally this description of

Giuliani’s politics would fill Huw with the warm fuzzies, but the thing in his throat is a reminder that he’s currently further outside his comfort zone than he’s ventured in decades. He’s still trying to digest the indigestible thought through a haze of amiability-inducing smoke, when the local unplugs herself from the omnifab’s console, stands up and stretches, then plugs in a language module.

“Your bicycle will be healed again in a few hours,” she says, nodding at Huw, just as the omni burps and then hawks up a passable replica of a Shimano dynamo hub. “Can you put it together with tools?”

“I, uh—” Huw gawks at her. “Do I know you?” he asks. “You look just like this hacker—”

She shrugs irritably. “I am not responsible for my idiot clone-aunts!”

“But you—” He stops. “There are lots of you?”

“Oh yes.” She smiles tightly. “Ade, my friend, I am taking a walk. Don’t get up to anything I wouldn’t.”

“I won’t, Becky. Promise.”

“Good. I’m Maisie, though.” She climbs onto a toadstool-shaped bone and rapidly rises toward the ceiling on a pillar of something that might be muscle, but probably isn’t.

“Lovely girls,” Adrian says when she’s gone. “Where was I? Ah, yes: the ambassador.”

“Ambassador?”

“Yeah, ambassador. It’s a special kind of communications node: needs enough brains to talk to that thing in your throat and translate what you send it into something the cloud can work with. You’re the interpreter, see. We’ve been expecting it for a while, but didn’t reckon with those idiot script kiddies ending up in court. It’ll be along—”

There’s a clattering noise behind Huw, and he looks round so abruptly that he nearly falls off his sack, and though he’s feeling mellow—far better disposed toward his fellow man than he was an hour ago—it’s all Huw can do to refrain from jumping up, shrieking.

“You!” says Bonnie, clutching a large and ominously familiar black box in her arms as she slides to a halt at the foot of the spiral. “Hey, Ade, is this your party?”

The box twitches in her arms, as if something inside it is trying to escape. Huw can feel a scream welling up in his throat, and it isn’t his—it’s a scream of welcome, a paean of politics. He bites it back with a curse. “How the hell did you get that?” he says.

“Stole it while the judge was running after you,” Bonnie says. “There’s a README with it that says it needs a translator. That would be you, huh?” She looks at him with ill-concealed lust. “Prepare to plug into the ride of your life!”

“God, no,” he says.

Adrian pats his shoulder. “Pecker up. It’s all for the best.”

The box opens and the Kleinmonster bobs a curtsy at him, then warbles. His throat warbles in response. The hash has loosened his vocal cords so that there isn’t the same sense of forced labor, just a mellow, easy kind of song. His voices and the Kleinmonster’s intertwine in an aural handshake and gradually his sensoria fades away, until he’s no longer looking out of his eyes, no longer feeling through his skin, but rather he’s part of the Cloudmind, smeared across space and time and a billion identities all commingled and aswirl with unknowable convection currents of thought and deed.

Somewhere there is the Earth, the meatspace whence the Cloudmind has ascended. His point of view inverts and now the Earth is enveloped in him, a messy gobstopper dissolving in a probabilistic mindmouth. It’s like looking down at a hatched-out egg, knowing that once upon a time you fit inside that shell, but now you’re well shut of it. Meat, meat, meat. Imperfect and ephemeral and needlessly baroque and kludgy, but it calls to the cloud with a gravitic tug of racial memory.

And then the sensoria recedes and he’s eased back into his skin, singing to the Kleinmonster and its uplink to the cloud. He knows he’s x-mitting his own sensoria, the meat and the unreasoning demands of dopamine and endorphin. Ah, says the ambassador. Ah. Yes. This is what it was like. Ah.

Awful.

Terrible.

Ah.

Well, that’s done.

The Kleinmonster uncoils and stretches straight up to the ceiling, then gradually telescopes back into itself until it’s just a button of faintly buzzing nanocrud. The buzzing gains down and then vanishes, and it falls still.

Bonnie shakes his shoulders. “What happened?” she says, eyes shining.

“Got what it needed,” Huw says with a barely noticeable under-drone.

“What?”

“What? Oh, a bit of a reminder, I expect. A taste of the meat.”

“That’s it?” Bonnie says. “All that for—what? A trip down memory lane? All that fucking work and it doesn’t even want to stick around and chat?”

Huw shrugs. “That’s the cloud for you. In-fucking-effable. Nostalgia trip, fact-finding mission, what’s the difference?”

“Will it be back? I wanted to talk to it about ...” She trailed off, blushing. “I wanted to know what it was like.”

Huw thinks of what it was like to be part of the matryoshka-brain, tries to put it into words. “I can’t quite describe it,” he says. “Not in so many words. Not right now. Give me a while, maybe I’ll manage it.” He’s got a nasty case of the pasties and he guzzles a cup of lukewarm milky tea, swirling it around his starchy tongue. “Of course, if you’re really curious, you could always join up.”

Bonnie looks away and Adrian huffs a snort. “I’ll do it someday,” she says. “Just want to know what I’m getting into.”

“I understand,” he says. “Don’t worry, I still think you’re an anti-human race-traitor, girlie. You don’t need to prove anything to me.”

“Fucking right I don’t!” Bonnie says. She’s blushing rather fetchingly.

“Right,” Huw says.

“Right.”

Huw begins to hum a little, experimenting with his new transhuman peripheral. The drone is quite nice: it reminds him vaguely of a digeridoo. Or bagpipes. He sings a little of the song from the courthouse, in two-part discord. Bonnie’s flush deepens and she rubs her palms against her thighs, hissing like a teakettle.

Huw cocks his head at her and leans forward a bit, and she grabs his ears and drags him down on top of her.

Adrian taps him on the shoulder a moment later. “Sorry to interrupt,” he says, “but Judge Rosa’s bound to come looking for you eventually. We’d best get you out of Libya sharpish.”

Huw ignores him, concentrating on the marimba sensation of Bonnie’s rib cage grinding over his chest.

Adrian rolls his eyes. “I’ll just go steal a blimp or something, then, shall I?”