Rapture of the Nerds

emotional needs of their instruments?) He leans against the wall, throat raw as the ambassador chatters to the ant colony—biological carriers for the engines of singularity, its own ancestral bootstrap code—and he can just barely grasp what’s going on. There are complex emotions here, regret and loss and irony and schadenfreude and things for which human languages hold no words, and he feels very stupid and very small as he eavesdrops on the discourse between the two hive minds. Which is, when the chips are down, a very small discourse, for the ambassador doesn’t have enough bandwidth to transmit everything the ants have ever stored: it’s just a synchronization node, the key that allows the Hypercolony to talk to the cloud in orbit high above it.

And Bonnie is still dead, for all that something that remembers being her is waking up upstairs, and he’s still lying here in a cell waiting to be chopped up by barbarians, and there’s something really weirdly wrong with the way he feels in his body, as if the ants have been making impromptu modifications, and as the ambassador says good-bye to the ants, a sense of despair fills him—

The door opens.

“Hello, my child.” It’s the other Bishop, the pansexual pervert in the polygenital suit. It winks at him: “Expecting someone else?”

Huw tries to reply. His throat hurts too much for speech just yet, so he squirms up against the wall, trying to get away, for all the time an extra millimeter will buy him.

“Oh, stop worrying,” the Bishop says. “I—ah, ah!—I just dropped by to say everything’s sorted out. Mission accomplished, I gather. The, ah, puritans are holed up upstairs watching a fake snuff video of your disassembly for spare organs—operating theaters make for great cinema and provide a good reason for not inviting them to the auto-da-fe in person. Isn’t CGI great? Which means you’re mostly off the hook now, and we can sort out repatriating you.”

“Huh?” Huw blinks, unsure what’s going on. Is this a setup? But there’s no reason why the lunatics would run him through something like this, is there? It’s so weird, it’s got to be true, Rosa’s Tyburn Tales reality livecast notwithstanding. “Wh-whaargh, what do you mean?” He coughs horribly. His throat is full of something unpleasant and thick, and his chest feels sore and bloated.

“We’re sending you home,” the Bishop says. It holds up a dainty hand and snaps its fingers; a pair of hermaphrodites in motley suits with bells on the tips of their pointy shoes steer in a wheelchair and go to work on what remains of Huw’s bonds with electric shears and a gentle touch. “You have our thanks for a job well done. I’d beatify you, except it’s considered bad form while the recipient is still alive, but you can rest assured that your lover is well on her way to being canonized as a full saint in the First Church of the Teledildonic. Giving up her life so that you might survive to bring the Hypercolony into the full Grace of the cloud certainly would qualify her for beatification, even if her other actions weren’t sufficient, which they were, as it happens.” The acolytes’ slim hands lift Huw into the wheelchair and wheel him through the door.

“I feel weird,” Huw says, voice odd in his ears. My ears? For one thing, he’s got two of them and he could have sworn the Inquisitors took a hot wire to one. And for another ... He manages to look down and whimpers slightly.

“Yes, that’s often one of the symptoms of beatification,” the Bishop says placidly. “The transgendered occupy a special place of honor in our rites, and to have it imposed on you by the Hypercolony is a special sign of grace.” And Huw sees that it’s true, but he doesn’t feel as upset about it as he knows he ought to. The ants have given him a whole goddamn new body while the ambassador was singing a duet with them, and he—she—is about five developmental-years younger, five centimeters shorter, and if her pubes are anything to go by, her hair’s going to come in two shades lighter than it was back when she was a man.

It’s one realization too many, so Huw zones out as the Bishop’s minions wheel her up the corridor and into an elevator while the Bishop prattles on. The explanation that the Bishop is the leader of both the Church Temporal— the Fallen Baptists—and the Church Transcendental—the polyamorous perverts—passes her by. There’s some arcane theological justification for it all, references to Zoroastrian dualism, but in her depression and disorientation the main thing that’s bugging Huw is the fact that she survived—and Bonnie didn’t. That, and worrying about how to pay for a really good gender reassignment doc when she gets home.

Huw tries to imagine what the old Huw, the Huw who went down to his pottery every day, would have felt about being turned into a woman by a bunch of quasi-sentient ants en route to immortal transcendence. A lot angrier, she thinks. But after all she’s been through, well, her moral outrage gland appears to have forgotten how to fire. (Or perhaps it wasn’t installed in this new body, which is an outrage, but she can’t get worked up about it, because, well, no moral outrage, right? The fact is, she can just have it all put back the way it was, and all the niggling differences between the original equipment and the new parts they’ll grow her just don’t seem that important anymore. Huw doesn’t really like personal growth, but some is inevitable.

Upstairs in whatever dwelling they’re in, there’s a penthouse suite furnished in sybaritic luxury. Carpets of silky natural growing hair, wall-hanging screens showing views from the landscapes of imaginary planets, the obligatory devotional orgy beds and sex crucifixes of the Church of Teledildonics. The Bishop leads the procession in through the door, and a familiar voice squawks: “You’ll regret this!”

“Perhaps.” The Bishop is calm, and Huw sees why fairly rapidly.

Judge Giuliani spins her chair round and glares at them; then her eyes fasten on the wheelchair. “What happened here?” she says.

“The alien artifact you so urgently seek,” the Bishop says with heavy irony. “It has accomplished its task, and we are blessed by the fallout. Its humble human vessel whom you see before you—” A hand caresses Huw’s shoulder. “—is permanently affected by the performance, and We are deeply relieved.”

“Its. Task.”

Giuliani is aghast. “Are you insane? You let it out?”

“Certainly.” The Bishop smirks. “And we are all the ah, ah, better for it.” He pauses for a moment, sneezes convulsively, and shudders orgasmically. “Oh! Oh! That was good. Oh my. Yes, ah, the cloud has reestablished its communion with the North American continent, and I feel sure that the Hypercolony is deeply relieved to have offloaded almost two decades’ worth of uploads—everything that has happened since the Rapture of the Nerds, in fact.”

“Ah.”

Giulani glares at the Bishop, then gives it up as a bad job—the Bishop doesn’t intimidate easily. “Who’s this?” she says, staring at Huw.

“This? Don’t you recognize her?” The Bishop simpers. “She’s your creation, after all. And you’re going to take very good care of her, aren’t you?”

“Gack,” says Huw, blanching. She tries to lever herself out of the wheelchair, but she’s still weak as a baby.

“If you think I’m—” A puzzled expression crawls over the judge’s face. “Why?” she says. She peers closer at Huw and hisses to herself: “You, you little rat-bastard! Court is in session—”

“—

Because the ambassador she carries is the main pacemaker for all uploads from the North American continent, and if you don’t look after her, the cloud will be very pissed off with you. And so will the Hypercolony. Oh, and if you don’t promise to look after her, you aren’t going home. Is that good enough for you?”

“Ahem,” says

Giuliani. She squints at Huw, eyebrows beetling evilly. “Main pacemaker for a whole continent? Is that true?”

Huw nods, unable to trust her throat.

“Hmm.”

Giuliani clears her throat. “Then, goddamnit, I hereby find you not guilty of everything in general and nothing in particular. All charges are dismissed.” She glares at the Bishop. “I’ll even get her enrolled in the witness protection program. Will that do for now?”

Huw shudders, but the Bishop nods agreeably. “Yes, that will be sufficient,” he says. “New skin, new identity, clean sheet. Just remember, you wouldn’t want the Hypercolony to come calling, er, crawling, would you?”

The judge nods, meek submission winning out over bubbling rage.

“Very well. There appears to be a jet with diplomatic clearance on final approach into Charleston right now.