Rapture of the Nerds

squeak for the right reasons.

Stairs lead to the kitchen. Kitchen to the sitting room. Sitting room to the upper floors. Then the garden. Then her pottery. By this time, she’s burned through more than a year of subjective time, and when she does her “morning” tour of inspection, she can’t perceive any single element of the sim that is incorrect, nothing that would tip anyone off that she wasn’t in Wales, provided that person didn’t look out over the garden wall or peer through the curtains, where the hex-crossed void lives. She could have done a flat bitmap of the valley—the MGMT process probably had a handy library of such things—but she didn’t want anything that didn’t work.

Speaking of work. Now that the pottery is done, it’s time to get to work.

She throws pots. All day. First, she gets up in the morning and sits on the toilet, even though nothing comes out. Then she eats a meal that she isn’t hungry for and that doesn’t fill her up in any event. Muesli and yogurt and a glass of raw milk, the same as she had at home every morning. Thus unfed, she takes herself to the pottery at the bottom of the garden and makes pots until midday. Then she makes herself sandwiches. She has a different sandwich for every day of the week. Monday is roast beef. She likes roast beef. Or she had liked it, anyway, so she eats it on Mondays. Tuesdays are pickle and pastrami. Wednesdays are cheese and pickle. Thursdays are roast beef again. And so on.

After lunch, she makes pots. At six thirty, she cooks herself a dinner. She makes the same dinner every night: a generous Christmas dinner straight out of a Dickens novel, complete with goose. She eats all of it, the whole goose, the cranberry sauce, the Yorkshire puddings, the side salad. She has to be careful—absent any satiety signals, she can easily and absentmindedly eat the plates and dishes and cups and cutlery. Finally, she goes to bed and lies motionless and awake under the covers, curled up in a fetal position, breathing deeply in a simulation of sleep. The next day she gets up and does it all again.

It takes a lot of work to get the kiln right. She could have simply randomized it so that it periodically caused her pots to crack, but instead, she took the time to create a clay class that tracks whether it has any sneaky air pockets in it, and instances of the pot object—descended from the clay class—that communicate this information to the kiln without letting her in on the joke, so that she never knows whether a pot will survive firing.

What does Huw think about for all those hours that she spends “sleeping” and “making pots” and “eating” and “defecating”? Truth be told, she spends most of the time in a state of near-insane boredom, but she consoles herself with the knowledge that she is refusing to play along and that she’s found a way of protesting that is much more uncooperative than the mere catatonia and suicide her instance-sisters have settled for.

Huw is adding a shelf to the pottery’s storehouse (the existing ones have filled up with pots of all sizes and description) when words of fire scorch themselves over the brick wall that she is painstakingly drilling.

226 SECONDS. COMMUNICATIONS CONSTRAINTS LIFTED'.

“Pissflaps,” she says. They’ve turned the bloody phone on. Just when she was getting used to the blessed silence. She has had years of subjective time to think about whom she could call and what she might say to them, and has concluded that there’s no one she wants to talk to. She returns to her spirit level and snap line and measuring tape.

*She could just reconfigure the wall to add a shelf, or reconfigure the pottery store to be bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, or dereference several of the pot objects and make them go away. But instantiating screws and gravity and snap lines and chalk dust and plumb-bobs and measuring tapes and MDF shelving is much, much more bloody-minded.

“Huw, this is unbecoming.” The voice is everywhere, vibrating through every membrane in her body. She’s not hearing it with her ears, because she doesn’t have ears, and the thing that claims to be her mother—the thing with as good a claim to be her mother as Huw has on being herself, if she’s honest about it—has privs on Huw’s simulated existence that allow her to speak to Huw by affecting her kinesthetic representation down to the cellular level. Listening to Mum is bad enough, but listening to her with the soles of her feet, with the hairs in her armpits, with her eyelashes and sinus cavities, is intolerable.

Huw begins to methodically smash pots. She doesn’t feel angry enough to be smashing pots. She can’t feel angry enough to smash pots. But she knows she should feel angry enough, and so she does. She is a method actor in the role of Huw as Huw was before having her brain removed and modeled, and she’s way into character.

“Huw, stop it. Listen, if there’d been any choice in the matter, I certainly would have respected your decision to stay in the meat. But this is bigger than you and bigger than me and bigger than both of us.”

There’s a rusty old ax in the garden shed. Beset by an impulse to smash pots faster and harder, she leaves the storehouse and goes around the side of the vegetable garden. It’s a gorgeous summer day outside, with a thin haze dusting the upturned blue bowl of the sky: A glorious day to die, Huw finds herself thinking, without any clear certainty of where the idea is coming from. “Huw, this is important. We need you to make a case for—”

The ax handle is worn smooth from decades of use chopping bamboo for firewood to warm Huw’s bones on cold and lonely winter mornings. The blunt back of the head is flecked with rust, just like the real template on which this model is based, but the sides of the blade are flat and polished. Huw picks it up, holding it just below the head, and turns to trot back toward the pottery, mayhem in mind. Crack pots, she thinks. Show her what I’m made of now. Damaged goods. All her fault. She’s not entirely coherent at this point, a myriad ghosts yammering their conflicting urges inside the back of her head. She charges back into the potting shed and lays about her with the ax.

It should horrify her, this destruction of over a year’s work, but all emotion is oddly muffled: it’s like watching furry snuffporn while knowing that the cute little critters being trampled into a bloody pulp underfoot are just CGI renderings, that no life-forms of any kind were involved (let alone harmed) in the taping of the animal cruelty apocalypse. And the lack of horror in turn gives Huw a sense of the monstrous vacuum hidden behind her lack of anger, of the throbbing un-space where her emotional reaction has been excised.

“Huw, stop—”

“Not unless you give me back my mind!” Crash goes a shelf on which sits the fruit of an entire working week, an entire lovingly crafted dinner service that would have sold for enough to feed her for a month back in a world where food wasn’t a figment of the imagination.

“Why are you doing this to yourself? It’s pointless! And besides, you’re evading your responsibilities.”

I should be angry, Huw thinks dispassionately. “I’m destroying what I ought to be capable of loving,” she says while she smashes a crate of bone china teacups. “Just following your example, Mum. Nothing to see here.”

“There’s no time for this!” The everywhere-voice sounds upset: Good, Huw thinks. “Will you stop if I make you angry?”

Huw pauses. “Try me,” she suggests.

A foaming wave of visceral loathing and hatred descends on her like a tsunami. It’s all muddled together: self-loathing, regret, and sheer bloody-minded hatred for her mother. Huw shrieks and drops the ax. “Now look what you’ve made me do!”

Cheesy sound effects are all part of the service: in this case, staticky ancient TV game show applause, rattling from wall to wall and around the back of Huw’s head like a surround-sound mixing desk run by a maniac. “That’s good, let it all hang out!” calls her mother. “I can give you another sixty seconds, wall clock time.”

“Bitch.” Huw picks up the ax and leans on it, breathless as the toll of the exertion comes home in the shape of aching muscles. (The biology model in here is very good, she has to admit.) “Murderer.”

“That’s right, make it about you, baby. Just the same as always.” Is that a note of bitterness in Mum’s voice? She’s more than earned it, in Huw’s opinion. She feels a brief spark of joy in the existential twilight. For what she’s inflicted on Huw—

“This is mandatory not optional, darling, so drop the tantrum. You’re not convincing anyone, and if you don’t get over yourself, you’re not going to have a home to go back to and it’ll be all your own fucking fault the Earth was destroyed.”

“The—”

Headcrash.

“—Earth—”