Rapture of the Nerds

Whichever they are, they set his teeth on edge—so that he’s almost happy when Sam steers him into a cramped parking lot behind a tall gray slab of concrete and grunts, “This is the motel.”

It’s about two in the morning, and Huw catches himself yawning as Sam shakes Doc awake and extracts him from the sidecar. “C’mon in,” says Doc. “Let’s get some sleep. Got a long day tomorrow, son.”

The lobby of the motel is guarded by a fearsome-looking cast-iron gate. Huw unlatches his faceplate and heaves a breath: the air is humid and warm, cloying and laden with decay as sweet as a rotting tooth. Doc approaches the concierge’s desk while Sam hangs back, one meaty hand gripping Huw’s arm proprietorially. “Don’t you go getting no clever ideas,” Sam says like a quiet earthquake. “Doc tagged you with a geotracker chip. You go running away, you’ll just get him riled.”

“Uh. Okay.” Huw dry-swallows the muck lining his teeth.

Doc is at the desk, talking to a woman in long black dress. She wears a bonnet that looks like it’s nailed to her head, and she’s old, showing all the distressing signs of physical senescence. “Twenty cents for the suite,” she says, “and fifteen for the pen.” (Post-imperial deflation has taken its toll on the once-mighty dollar.) She wags a wrinkled finger under Doc’s nose: “And none of your filth!”

Doc draws himself up to his full height. “I assure you, I am here to do the Lord’s work,” he says. “Along with this misguided creep. And my assistant.”

Sam pushes Huw forward. “Doc gets the presidential suite whenever he stays here,” he says. “You get to sleep in the pen.”

“The—?”

“’Cause we don’t rightly trust you,” Sam says, pushing Huw toward a side door behind the reception area. “So a little extra security is called for.”

“Oh—,” Huw says, and stops. Oh, really now, Huw would say, except that the doc is holding at arm’s-length a squeeze bottle of something liquid and so cold that it is fogged with a rime of condensation. Huw’s throat is dry: suddenly he’s unable to ignore it.

“Thirsty, son?” the doc says, playfully jetting a stream of icy liquid in the air.

“Ahhh,” Huw says, nodding . Six hours in the suit with nothing but highly diruetic likker and any number of hours of direct sunlight in its insulated confines after the aircon broke down—he’s so dehydrated, he’s ready to piss snot.

“This a-way,” the doc says, and beckons with the bottle.

Huw lets Sam help him climb out of the sidecar, and he barely notices the rubbery feeling of his legs after hours of being cramped up in the little buggy. “Hotcha,” the doc says. “Come on, now, time’s a wastin’.” He gives the bottle another squeeze, and water spatters the dusty ground.

“Aaah,” Huw says, lumbering after it. He’s never felt quite this thirsty in all his days. Real thirsty. Thirsty as bones bleaching in the Sahara at noon during a drought.

The doc heads for a staircase behind a row of suppository-shaped elevator cages, standing open and gleaming beneath the white light of the holy sodiums overhead. Huw can barely keep up, but even if he had to drop to his knees and crawl, he’d do it. That’s holy stuff, that water, infused with the numinous glow of life itself. Didn’t the Christians have a hymn about it, “Jesus Gave Me Water”? Huw comes from a long line of trenchant Black Country atheists, a man who takes to religion the way that vegans take to huge suspicious wursts that look like cross-sectioned dachshunds, but he’s having an ecstatic experience right now, taking the stairs on trembling knees.

The doc spits on his thumb and smears the DNA across the auth-plate set in the door at the bottom of the stairs. It thinks for a long moment, then clanks open in a succession of armored layers.

“G’wan now, you’ve earned it,” the doc says, rolling the bottle into the cell behind the door.

Huw toddles after it, the Michelin suit making him waddle like he’s got a load in his diaper, but he doesn’t worry about that right now, because there’s a bottle of water with his name on it at the other side of the cell, a bottle so cold and pure that it cries out to him: Drink me! Drink me!

He’s sucking it down, feeling the cold straight through to his skull-bone, a delicious brain freeze the size of the Universe, when the teapot rattles angrily in his thigh pocket. He’s not so thirsty anymore, but there’s something else nagging at his attention. The sound is getting him down, distracting him from the sense of illumination appearing at the back of his mind’s eye as he gulps the water, so he pulls the thing out and looks at it, relaxing as he sees the shiny metal highlights gleaming happily at him.

Adrian pops out of the teapot, so angry, he’s almost war-dancing. He curses: “Fucking suggestibility ray! Bible-thumping pud-fuckers can’t be happy unless they’ve tasped someone into ecstasy. Come on, Huw, snap out of it.”

“Go ’way,” Huw mumbles. “I’m havin’ a trash-transcential-transcendental ’sperience.” He gulps some more water then squats, leaning against the wall. Something loves him, something vaster than mountains and far stronger, and it’s bringing tears to his eyes. Except the teapot will have none of it.

“Wake up, dishrag! Jesus, didn’t they tell you anything in class when you was a kid? They infuse your cerebrospinal fluid with nanobots. Some go for your hypothalamus, make you feel hungry or thirsty. Others have a built-in tropism for the god module in your temporal lobe. Tickle it with a broadband signal, and you’ll see God, angels square-dancing in heaven, fuck knows what. Get a grip on yourself!”

“It’s God?” Huw’s got a name for the sensation now, and he grins idiotically at the opposite wall of his cell. It’s a slab of solid aluminum, scratched and dented and discolored along the welds: and it’s as beautiful to Huw as fluted marble pillars supporting the airy roof of a pleasure dome, pennants snapping overhead in the delightful breeze blowing off the waters of the underground river Alph—

“It’s not God, it’s a fucking tasp! Snap out of it, gobshite. They’re only using it on you ’cause they want you nice and addled when they sell you to the Inquisition tomorrow! Then, no more god module!”

“Huh?” Huw ponders the question for an eternity of proximate grace, as serried ranks of angels blow trumpets of glory in the distant clouds that wreath his head. “I’m ... so, I’m happy. This way. I’ve found it.”

“What you’ve found is a bullet in the back of the head if you stay here, you cheeseridge!” Ade shakes his fists from the top of the teapot. “Think, damn you! What would you have thought of this yesterday?”

“Yesterday?” Yesterday, all his troubles, so far away. Huw nods, thinking deeply. “I’ve always been missing ’thing like this, even if I didn’t know it. Feels right. Everything makes sense.” The presence of the ultimate, even if it’s coming from right inside his own skull courtesy of a 5.4-gigahertz transmission from God-botherer Central, is making it hard for Huw to concentrate on anything else. “Wanna be like this till I die, if’s all the same to you.”

“They’ll kill you, man!” Ade pauses in his frantic fist-waving. “Doesn’t that mean something to you?”

“Mmf. Lemme think about it.” Huw slowly slumps back against the wall, his suit bulking and billowing around him and digging sharp joints into his bruised body, sanctifying and mortifying his flesh. “If I believed in an actual, like, God, this’d be marvelous. But God’s such a goddamned primitive fetish, isn’t it? So I’m’a, an atheist. Always have been, always will be. But this thing is like, inside me, and it’s huge, so blindingly brilliant, it’s like my own reflection on infinity.” His eyes widen. “Hey, that means I’m God. I’m like, transcendentistry, right? I think therefore I guess I am. If they try to shoot me, I’ll just zap ’em with my god-powers.” He giggles for a while, pointing his fingers at the ceiling, walls, and floor, lightning bolts of the illuminated imagination spraying every which way. “It’s a solipsystem! Nobody here but me. I am God. I am God. I am God—”

The teapot zaps him with an electric shock, and Ade vanishes in a huff.

“Ouch.” Huw sucks his thumb for a moment and meditates on the celestial significance of the autodeity sending him messages from his subconscious via a curved metal antiquity stuffed with black market New Libyan electronics. Then he tucks it away in his pocket and settles back down to work on regaining his sense of omnipotent brilliance. And he’s still sitting in that pose the next morning, staring at the wall, when the sense of immanence vanishes, the doors grind open, and Doc and Sam come to take him downtown to face the Inquisition.

They parade him down the road in the drab gray morning light of Glory City, past the filling stations, the churches, the diners, the other filling stations, the refinery, the cathedral, the filling station-memorabilia market, the GasHaus, the corkscrew apartment blocks where every neighbor can look in on every other’s window, and the