Fairie-Bonnie turns and looks at her mother: “Was she always this stupid?” she asks, “Or did you hit her with the stupid stick while she was in the doghouse?”
“Hey, wait a—!”
“Shut up, dear.” Her mother’s voice contains some kind of subliminal payload that clamps her jaws shut—no covert messing with her headmeat’s wiring diagram this time, just simulated lockjaw. “We uploaded you so you could witness to them. For the defense, to explain just why digesting the Earth to add its raw material to the cloud is a really bad idea. If you want to slum around in a meatbody and commune with the realness of reality or something, the meatbody will need somewhere to live, won’t it?”
“They think Earth is obsolescent,” Fairy-Bonnie chips in. “The proposal is to forcibly upload everyone—field mice, humans,
“No, I—”
“That was a rhetorical question,” Bonnie says as she grabs Huw by the scruff of her neck and blasts right through the not-sky into the darkness beyond.
Huw blinks her eyes open.
Bonnie glares at him: “Tough titties.” It’s hot and dry, and they’re standing on the cracked tile floor of the lobby of the Second Revolutionary Progress Hostel Marriott in Tripoli, between a wilted bonsai date palm and a player piano that has seen better days. “Brings back memories?”
“Bad ones.” Huw shudders.
“I thought it would suit the occasion.” Bonnie winds her wings up to a hornetlike whine and elevates, then comes to a neat landing atop the piano. “Now, listen. The Committee—”
“—What Committee is it, exactly, and who elected them?”
“— has been in session for nearly sixteen seconds now—I’ll get to who they are in a moment—they’ve been hearing the rezoning application behind closed doors, and pretty soon they’re going to get around to putting out a request for public comment. It’s meant to be a fait accompli: the fix is in. Only we got wind of it—don’t ask how, nobody told me, I’m too low down the org chart for that—and we’re going to raise an objection and enter a bunch of witnesses into the record. You’re one of them. You’re supposed to have had a couple of subjective years to think up reasons why they shouldn’t destroy the Earth, but your mother tells me you were too busy throwing stoneware pots, so you’ll just have to wing it.”
“But I’m not ready!”
“Tough. If you weren’t such an uncooperative bitch, Earth wouldn’t be in this fix. Now, get in that courtroom and knock ’em dead.”
A pair of double doors at one side of the lobby is opening: a couple of uniformed clowns Huw last saw in Tripoli are coming forth—court bailiffs. “Huw Jones?” asks the one with the red nose and big floppy shoes. “Please come with us.”
“But I—” Bonnie shoves her in the small of the back.
The Planning Committee has taken over the hotel lobby conference room and turned it into an ad hoc courtroom rather than doing the obvious and splicing their reality in on top of it. Huw supposes they’re making the point that the emulation in this place is so deep and accurate that an ignorant hick meatmuppet shouldn’t be able to tell the difference. (Hell, with Huw’s expertise in Your Second Life, all he can spot is that the glazed tub the potted palm sits in is suspiciously symmetrical, and that might just be an artifact of the 3-D printer that extruded it.)
Either way, there’s no Judge Rosa here, for which she is duly grateful. Nor are there cookie-cutter crates, health packs, rendering artifacts, or any of the other unsubtle tells of a half-assed virtual lash-up. Instead there’s a table topped by the obligatory white linen cloth and a jug of water, and a couple of rows of chairs drawn up in front of it, mostly unoccupied. Behind it there sits a triumvirate of officials who have manifested with deliberate lack of care, using three default avatars from some old nameless grade-Z FRPG, all outsized armor and leathern coin pouches and improbable swords and elf hats. They’re the sim equivalents of stick figures, and the message is clear:
“Good morning,” says the latter apparatchik. She smiles over her reading glasses. “Huw Jones, I believe?” Huw nods. “You’ve been named as a character witness in relation to the planning application now under consideration by this inquiry, but I have a backlog of testimony to get through this morning. Would you please take a seat while we continue with business?”
It isn’t a question. Huw follows her glance and scuttles over to the gap in the front row of chairs, sits down, and waits to see what happens next.
The recording paladin jabs the camera around the room, invoking its official recording mode, and Huw’s reality gets a red recording light superimposed over it in the bottom left corner of her gaze. They’re on the record.
“One moment—” The chairwoman confers briefly with the clerk. “Oh, I see.” She looks at the audience. “Do we have a Professor-Doctor-Executrix R. Giuliani in the room? That’s professor of law, doctor of intellectual property law, executioner of felons, R. Giuliani —”
Huw looks round, cringing in anticipation, but sees no sign of her. She raises her hand tentatively: “I don’t think she’s here. ...”
Madam Chairwoman stares at her. “You know this person?”
“I last saw her in a diplomatic jet over Wales ...” Huw slows, gripped by a nauseous sense that she’s committed some kind of humongous faux pas. “Is she supposed to be here?”
“I have an open slot for her testimony.” The chair stares at him. “But if she can’t be bothered to turn up, there’s nothing to be done about it: she doesn’t get a say in opposing the planning application. So, moving swiftly on, whom are we expecting next—?” Madam Chair cocks her head on one side, as if listening: “All right. For the planning division, we call instance 199405 Lucifer to rebut P-D-E Giuliani’s nonexistent objection.”
Now Huw sees that this space is
“How much more of this do I have to sit through?” Huw says. Posthumans playing at biblical symbolism, how, how, how
The man in the seat to her left—small and doughy and vague, big-eyed and bulbous-headed—chooses to hear it as a question. “You’re not from around these parts, are you?” he says. His voice is as gray as his scaly, inhuman skin. “It can go on like this for
Huw looks at him, then glances round nervously. The seats she’d thought were empty are in fact occupied by the ghosts of absent avatars, frozen in time while their owners are elsewhere. And as she examines them, she realizes new overlays are dropping into place: They’re archetypes, each representing one or another subculture of the posthumans who departed for the cloud back in the old days, yet failed to transcend their sad need to assert an identity through funny haircuts and aggressively obscure musical preferences.
The lately called witness is exactly what you’d expect from an entity that calls itself 199405 Lucifer—acrawl with not-flies, reeking of nonsulfur, leather-not-winged, sporting an erect, throbbing not-penis that juts up to its not-sternum. The av bends low and touches its not-forehead to the ground. “My lords,” it says. Its not-voice manages to pack a lot of contempt into the phrase. Somewhere, Huw supposes, there is a slider labeled ironic courtesy, and the loser in the Satan suit has just cranked it all the way up to
The Planning Committee doesn’t seem to notice. They stare motionless at the witness, their avs so primitive and generic that they don’t even blink or shift their weight.
“P-D-E Giuliani is a well-known reactionary, a perverse soul whose romantic affection for the flesh is matched
