Rapture of the Nerds

There’s a crackle from a grille on the dash. “Ready to accept WorldGov jurisdiction, you miscreant?” croaks a familiar tenor. Huw stares at the speaker as floodlights come on behind him in the depths of the swamp, spearing the cab of the smuggler’s boat with a blue white glare. “Or would you rather I crack that toy open like an egg and leave you to the ants?”

Christ, Huw thinks. It’s not as though I know how to drive this goddamned thing, anyway. He presses a button next to the grille. “Can you hear me?” he says. He repeats this with four more likely-looking buttons until Judge Judy’s cackle answers him back.

“You going to come along peacefully?”

“Sure looks like it,” he says. “Do I get to stand trial somewhere civilized?”

The judge chuckles fatalistically. “Once we shoot our way off this fucking continent and nuke it in our wake, I fully intend to drag your pimply ass all the way back to New Libya for a proper trial. Does that suit you?”

“Down to the ground,” Huw says. “Now what?”

“Herro,” Ade says, popping up out of his lantern after the judge has Huw shrink-wrapped and tossed in a narrow hold, her dalek suit and the golems filling up all the available space on Sam’s boat. “Ew,” he says when he catches sight of Sam’s ruin of a face. “That can’t be doing good things for Rosa’s audience ratings. Wasn’t supposed to be a horror show. ...”

“He’ll get fixed up once he gets to civilization,” Huw says. “Judge is taking us to New Libya.” He sighs and attempts to get comfortable in his enforced, plastic-wrapped vermicularitude. “The ants ate Bonnie,” he says, his voice hollow and echoing in the cramped hold.

“You don’t say?” Ade says. “Well, that’s too bad. Scratch one useful idiot.”

“You know, it’s going to be a pleasure to rat you out to the court,” Huw says bitterly. “A pleasure to get the ambassador cut free and fed to a disassembler. Your movement stinks.”

The tiny Adrian plants its hands on its hips and cocks its head at Huw. “Useful idiots I have patience for,” he says. “Useless idiots, well, that’s something else altogether.”

The boat judders to a halt. A tearing noise, like a sheet the size of the sky being ripped asunder, ripples overhead: then the floor shakes with a series of percussive thuds from either side. We’re being bombed, Huw realizes, eerily calm, afloat with the pure, cold fatalism that is possible only with a burned-out adrenal gland. The boat bounces like a pea on a plate. “Sam, are you conscious yet?” he says aloud. Sam doesn’t move. Just as well, he thinks, and prepares to die.

Adrian says, “I radioed your position to the Bishop so that he could capture you, not kill you. The ambassador needs a host.”

He hears the golems slam past his hold and run out to do battle, then more jouncing crashes.

“I have diplomatic immunity,” the judge says as something drags her past his cell. A moment later, the hatch opens, and Huw and Sam are lifted, dumped into a gigantic airtight hamster-ball, sealed, and rolled away back toward Glory City.

“Children,” the Bishop says. He is thin and weak-chinned and watery-eyed, and his voice is familiar. It takes Huw a moment to place it, and then he remembers the voice, moist in his ear: Sinner, can you hear me?

“You are in: So. Much. Trouble.” Judge

Giuliani is no longer hissing like a teakettle, but her rage is still clearly barely under control. “What do the words ‘diplomatic immunity’ mean to you?”

“Not an awful lot, We’re afraid,” the Bishop says, and witters a little laugh. “We don’t much go in for formalities here in the new world, you know.”

They’ve amputated the dalek suit’s gun and damped its public address system, so that Judge Judy is reduced to a neutered head on a peppermill with a black robe of office draped round it. Nevertheless, she is still capable of giving looks that could curdle milk and make sheep miscarry. Huw numbly watches her glare at the Bishop, and the Bishop’s watery answering stare.

“What shall We do with you?” the Bishop says. “Officially, you’re dead, which is convenient, since it wouldn’t do to have the great unwashed discover that God’s will was apparently to let you go.

“The entity who alerted Us to your presence was adamant that the sinner here should be spared. You’re host to some kind of godvomit that many entities are interested in, and apparently it needs you intact in order to work. It’s very annoying: we can’t kill you again.”

“I’m thrilled.” Huw’s voice is a flat monotone. “But I ’spect that means that Sam here’s not going to live. Nor the judge?” Sam is strapped to a board and immobilized by more restraints than a bondage convention, but it’s mostly a formality. He’s barely breathing, and the compress on his face blooms with a thousand blood-colored roses.

“Well, of course not,” the Bishop says. “Heretics. Enemies of the state. They’re to be shoved out the lock as soon as We’re sure that they’ve got nothing of interest to impart to Us. A day or two, tops. Got that, Your Honor? As long as you say useful things, you live.”

The judge sputters angrily in her peppermill.

“Now, let’s get you prepped for the operating theater,” the Bishop says.

Huw can barely muster the will to raise an eyebrow at this. “Operating theater?”

“Yes. We’ve found that quadruple amputees are much more pliable and less apt to take it on the lam than the able-bodied. You’ll get used to it, trust us.”

The servants of the Inquisition, ranged around them, titter at this.

“Take them back to their cells,” the Bishop says, waving a hand. “And notify the surgeons.”

Huw is having a dream. He’s a disembodied head whose vocal cords thrum in three-part harmony with a whistle lodged in his stump of a throat. The song is weird and familiar, something he once sang to a beautiful girl, a girl who gave her life for him. The song is all around him, sonorous and dense, a fast demodulation of information from the cloud, high above, his truncated sensorium being transmitted to the curious heavens. The song is the song he sang to the beautiful girl, and she’s singing back.

His eyes open, waking. He’s on the floor of his cell, parched dry and aching, still shrink-wrapped but with the full complement of limbs. The whistle warbles deep in his throat, and the floor vibrates in sympathy, with the tromping of a trillion tiny feet and the scissoring of a trillion sharpened mouthparts.

The ants razor through the floor, and Huw squirms away from them as best as he can—but the best he can do is hump himself inchworm style into a corner, pressed up against the wall of the dome that forms the outer wall of his cell. The song pours out of his throat, unabated by his terror. Some part of him is surprised that he’s capable of caring about anything anymore, but he does not want to be eaten by the ants, does not want to be reduced to a Huw-shaped lump of brick red crawling insects.

The whistle’s really going to town now. The ambassador is having words with the Hypercolony, and Huw can just barely make out the sense of the song he’s singing: Ready for upload interface instructions.

The ants have covered him, covered the walls and the floor and the ceiling, they’ve eaten through his coating of shrink-wrap, but the expected stings don’t come. Instead, Huw is filled with the sense of vast clumps of information passing through his skin, through the delicate mucous membranes of his eyes and nostrils, through his ears and the roots of his hair, all acrawl with ants whose every step conveys something.

Something: the totality of the Hypercolony—its weird, sprawling consciousness, an emergent phenomenon of its complexity, oozing through his pores and through the ambassador and up to the cloud. It’s not just the ants, either—it’s everything they’ve ever eaten: everything they’ve ever disassembled.

Somewhere in that stream is every building, every car, every tree and animal and—and every person the ants have eaten. Have disassembled.

Bonnie is passing through him, headed for the cloud. Well, she always did want to upload.

Huw doesn’t know how long the ambassador holds palaver with the Hypercolony, only knows that when the song is done, he is so hoarse, he can barely breathe. (During a duet, do the musicians pay any attention to the