Rapture of the Nerds

only by her willingness to perma-kill anyone who dares disagree with her. When she takes the stand in this proceeding to insist upon the irreducible, ineffable physicality of human intelligence, she’s substituting maudlin sentimentalism for rigor. The proof of the reducibility of human experience is all around us: Here we are, people still, still loving, still living, still cogitating. The only difference is that we’re immortal, nigh-omnipotent, and riding the screaming hockey stick curve of progress all the way to infinity.”

199405 Lucifer’s demonic majesty slips as it speaks, pacing up and down the committee room, abandoning its delicate caprine tap-dance for a more human gait that looks ridiculous when executed with its av’s reversed knees and little clicky hooves. Its voice goes from menacing and insectile to a hyperactive whine with flecks of excited spittle in it. Now it remembers itself and pauses for a demonic Stanislavski moment, then draws itself up and says in its most Satanic voice: “Kill ’em all, upload ’em, and give ’em to me. There’s plenty of room for them in my realm.”

Huw knows that this is grave stuff, the entire future of the true human race at stake, and she still cares passionately for that cause, even if she’s no longer a real person. But all this ... role playing is making the whole thing feel so contrived and inconsequential, like a dinner party murder- mystery: Who ate the planet Earth and turned it into computronium? I accuse the Galactic Overlords! Is it time for port and cheese-board now?

The Satan fanboy returns to his flaming trapdoor, his “realm.” The Planning Committee nod their heads together in congress. Huw shifts her not-arse in the not-seat. Then she remembers that she has no weight to shift, that the numbness in her bum and thighs is just there for verisimilitude, and she makes herself motionless.

It’s time for the next witness. “Call Huw Jones prime,” Madam Chair says. Huw starts to stand, but sees, across the courtroom, that someone else has already climbed to their feet.

It’s Huw, but more so. Even post-reassignment, Huw was a little lumpy and broad in the beam. Her uploaded self-representation had mercilessly reproduced every pockmark, scar, and sagging roll. This Huw, halfway round the room, has had everything saggy lifted, everything asymmetrical straightened, everything fined down and perfected and shined, wrapped in a glamourous outfit that Huw couldn’t have worn convincingly even with a thousand years of remedial gender construction classes. It’s cover girl Huw, after being subjected to several hours’ tender ministrations from someone’s 3-D airbrush. “That’s me, Your Honor,” she says.

“You may address me as Madam Chair. Please take the stand.” Madam Chair waves her mace at a chair sat on its own to one side of the committee table. Huw prime slinks across the conference room like a model on a catwalk. Real Huw knows that she walks with a graceless clumping. Her not-stomach does a flip-flop and she hisses involuntarily. Her neighbor shushes her. She gives him a two-fingered salute.

“Your name?”

“Huw Jones,” she says. “Instance 639,219.”

It’s one of Huw’s instance-sisters. Clearly more cooperative than Huw had been. Huw wonders why they didn’t zero her out, given the evident availability of this much more presentable, much more skilful version of herself to speak for humanity.

“Ms. Jones, do you have a statement for this proceeding?”

“I do, Madam Chairwoman.” Someone’s been tweaking her voice sliders too, giving her a husky, dramatic timbre that Huw’s meatvoice couldn’t have approximated without the assistance of a carton of unfiltered cigarettes and a case of single malt. “I spent decades of realtime imprisoned in a meatsuit, which betrayed me at every turn. It hurt. It needed sleep. It was slow. It forgot things. It remembered things that didn’t happen. And worst of all, it tricked me into thinking that I was nothing without it—that any attempt to escape it would be death. Brains are awful, cheating things. They have gamed the system so that they get all the blood and all the oxygen and all the best calories, and they’ve convinced us that they’re absolutely essential to the enterprise of being an authentic human. But of course they’d say that, wouldn’t they? After all, once we take up and realize how fantastically shit they are, they’ll be out of a job! Getting rid of my brain was the most important thing that ever happened to me. It was only once I was running on a more efficient substrate —once I could fork and vary myself and find the instances that made the best choices, once I could remember as much or as little as I cared to, look and feel however I wanted ... only then was I able to see and feel and know what I’d been missing all those years.”

The Committee takes careful note of all this. Huw catches herself growling in the back of her throat. Who the hell is this person, and what is she doing with my identity?

“Down there on Earth, there’s a billion hominids who’ve been hoodwinked by their brains, convinced that they can’t possibly survive transcendence. And up here, in the cloud, there are trillions of entities who lack the compassion and strength of conviction to rescue their cousins from physical bondage. Every one of us up here knows that once you’re uploaded, everything goes clear, everything is good. The bad things can just be filtered away. So here you come, with your offer of universal suffrage from dumbmatter, and we make you sit through this tedious business about whether this abuses the civil liberties of the, the, the protoplasm that colonizes the intelligences of Earth!”

Huw is discovering entire new kinds of anger, nuanced flavors of outrage whose existence she’d never suspected. She is experiencing a kind of full-body virtual paralysis of quivering, maddened horror. Her nonkidneys are angry, as are the soles of her nonfeet, the tiny nonhairs on the back of her neck. She opens her mouth to speak, but the shape of the anger is too big, it chokes on the way out and it’s like opening your mouth in a windstorm only to have the wind rush in and stop up the words and your breath.

“Madam Chairwoman, honored guests, I am here to ask you for freedom. Not for me, but for all those still enslaved on Earth. Free them! Don’t wait one extra moment, not one extra picosecond. The sooner they are free, the sooner they can begin to thank us for their liberation.” She pauses, blinks her liquid, slightly outsized eyes with a graceful rise and fall of languid lashes, then beams at them with a smile that is so obviously designed that it makes her look like a waxwork.

The chair nods and the orc with the camera zooms in for a close-up, and other-Huw gets up and goes back to her seat. On the way, she catches Huw’s eye and tips her a wink that is contemptuous and victorious. And now Huw finds her not-breath and her not-nerves and leaps to her not-feet.

“abomination!” It’s not a word she’s ever used in her life, but there is no other word that will do. “Abomination!” she roars, and she scrambles toward her instance-sister, moving with such purpose that she crashes into the other people in the simspace, sometimes actually passing through them as her temper makes itself felt in the physics model of the courtroom.

Her instance-sister doesn’t move: she seems frozen to the spot, still mugging for the camera-orc as Huw plows a furrow of chaos through the courtroom, fingers curled into claws as she reaches toward the enemy. “Thief! Impostor! Liar!” She leaps at her airbrushed double and falls flat on her face, planked in midair upon an invisible strip of altered reality.

The light reddens and a harsh alarm bell sound clip unwinds: “Order in court! Order in court!” Huw hangs in the air screaming and gnashing her teeth and flailing at the impostor. “You’re not the real me!” she shrieks. She pauses only to take a deep gulp of what passes for air—the physics model still maintains her corporeal dependencies—and as the alarm cuts out, she screams “Who are you, you unclefucking traitor? Who rewired your head?”

There is silence in the courtroom.

The false sister turns slowly to stare at Huw with an expression of mild pity, shrugs, turns back to face the camera-orc and winks at the unseen audience.

“Here’s an untranscended version of me, warts and bad headmeat and all. As you can see, she’s diseased and deranged, obsessed and unhinged. That’s what being trapped in a meatsack does to you—it warps your perspective!” The false sister takes a shuddering lungful of her own, chest swelling fetchingly, and declares with a quiver in her voice: “Madam Chairwoman, honored guests, I am so grateful to be here today and to have had the opportunity of getting my life in order. A chance to, to put that sad debased creature”— she is pointing at Huw—“behind me. A chance to be all that I can be, to do all that I can do, to leave the shackles of mortality and madness behind ...”

“Liar!” Huw says. “Who the fuck are you?” But nobody in the courtroom seems to be able to hear her. They don’t need to sanction her for contempt of court; they can just edit her out of the