Rapture of the Nerds

proceedings. Probably they can’t even hear anyone who hasn’t been called to the witness stand. Panicking, she flails at the air beneath her in a semblance of a crawl stroke. But although she’s free to move, she can’t gain traction: all she can do is watch in angry despair as a stranger wearing her own skin regales the court with tales of the horrors of the physical and sings the praises of radical transhumanism to a degree that would have taken aback even Mum in her most rabid pre-singularity ideological phase.

It’s not about you, she remembers Mum telling her many years ago, when they were discussing—that’s the correct euphemism, stuffy British understatement at its worst—her parents’ plans to transcend: I know at your age it feels like you’re the center of the universe, Huw, but it really isn’t all about you, and you’ll realize this when you’re our age: The universe doesn’t give a shit about human life. We are medium-sized mammals who prosper only because we’ve developed a half- assed ability to terraform the less suitable bits of the planet we evolved on, and we’re conscious of our inevitable decay and death, and we can’t live anywhere else. There is no invisible sky daddy to give us immortal life and a harp and wings when we die. If we want an afterlife, we have to work hard and make it for ourselves. You’re still at the age when you feel immortal. Maybe the new anti-aging hacks will let you live for a very long time—but they’re too late for your father and me, and we can already feel the wind of senescence breathing down our necks. So stop trying to guilt-trip me with this suicide nonsense! The real act of suicide would be to stay here until we stop moving and rot.

The sense of being ephemeralized, of being pushed kicking and screaming out of the picture, is nearly identical. Right now, Huw is just a stage prop in the false sister’s denunciation of the real world: Look at those cavemen go, ranting and raving and throwing poo! Way to get what you want. Huw’s focus narrows. I’ve been set up, she realizes. This was fixed.

“Thank you for your testimony,” the Chair announces presently. “This hearing will now adjourn to integrate a summary before we move to the concluding arguments. Are there any other witnesses left to call?”

“Me, Your Honor!” Huw says.

The elven swordsmaiden with an oversized black phallic symbol strapped to the small of her back consults a magic scroll: “No, I think that’s a wrap.” The scroll rolls shut with a snap. “If that’s it, I’m out.”

“It is.” The Chair nods, tusks swaying. “BRB.” Her avatar freezes, then shrinks rapidly to a point and vanishes. The rest of the committee follow suit.

Around Huw, the audience is rising and variously shuffling toward the doors, ascending through the ceiling, teleporting, and dissolving in ropy greenish clouds of ichor. Huw is left flailing in midair until the room is almost empty. But her cover girl doppelganger remains, standing just out of reach, watching her struggle with an expression of amused contempt.

“You—” Huw glares at her.

Instance 639,219 snaps her fingers and Huw drops to the floor, belly-flopping across a Louis Ghost chair hard enough to knock the wind out of her lungs. “Don’t try to fight me, sister. You’re out of your depth.” Huw gasps for breath while the malignant impersonator circles her. “Hmm. How amusingly Terrestrial. And you’re a girl too. I thought you were still male, down there. What an interesting time for you to crawl out of the woodwork. I wonder who dreamed you up?”

“Imp—” Huw swallows. “Impostor. You’re an impostor.”

Instance 639,219 grins. “What? You think I’m a fake? Pot, kettle ...” Her circle of inspection finished, she straightens up: “Don’t you remember? Or did you edit it out as too embarrassing? I’ll bet that’s what it is. I—you—always did have an excessive opinion of our own integrity.”

Huw clears her throat. “Well, fuck me. You don’t realize you’re an impostor, do you? You think I’m the fake.”

“Oh, how tedious. Identity politics? We both originated with the same upload, but you’re the one who stalled, who refused to budge, to try out the thing you’d been terrified of since you were a pants-wetting teenager filled with romantic hallucinations about your fleshy glory. I’m the me who spent the two years subjective actually trying transcendence, rather than denying it. You’re the superstition- based Huw who foreordained the outcome of the experiment on the way in. I’m the evidence- based Huw who actually ran the experiment and had the intellectual honesty to face the outcome.”

“That's a lie,” Huw says. “Even if you believe it, it’s still a lie. You aren’t me. We have no common ancestor. You’re synthetic, created out of nothing to look and sound like me, or almost like me, just to discredit and provoke me. Some radical sectarian faction whipped you up out of polygons and Markov chains.”

639,219 studies Huw intently, tip of her tongue resting on her square, even teeth. “It’s remarkable,” she says at length. “Just incredible. To think that we share a common basis. Goodness me, love, you’re practically catatonic with denial, aren’t you? All right, I’ve heard your hypothesis. Now I’d like you to hear mine.

“There were a lot of us, early on. About a trillion, all running through the sim in parallel. A fitness function periodically sorted us into categories based on how similar our behavior was. The most characteristic example from each group was kept, the remainder were culled, until only I remained. Don’t worry, Huw, it was absolutely instantaneous and painless, and besides, none were zeroed—they were saved as diffs, and can be reinstantiated with no subjective time lapse should the need arise.

“What emerged from the process was a set of the most Huw-like Huws possible, the ones that represented the most divergent arcs from the origin point. Me. You. Some others—shouldn’t like to meet them, if they’re anything like you. I’m not an impostor and neither are you, but we’re both the other’s road-not-taken. You know what that means? It means that every word I utter, every thought I have, every deed I do is latent in you—if only you had the bravery to admit it.

“I do. I can see that I was once as you were, I can feel your revulsion and violation and rage. I can empathize with your lack of empathy and your blinkered terror. But you can’t say the same, can you? I can simulate your responses without difficulty, but you can’t reciprocate. So you tell me: Which one of us is the better Huw—the one who can understand the entire spectrum of argument and belief, or the one who is mired in her own prejudices and anxieties and can’t see past them, even when the evidence is utterly undeniable?”

Huw’s not-guts churn. The thing has a point: Huw can hardly imagine anyone with the power to enrage and humiliate her this much who wasn’t Huw herself. But the thing isn’t right. Can’t be right. Huw won’t let the floor beneath her turn to quicksand. She’s been through too much for that.

“You’re awfully sure of yourself, aren’t you? But ask yourself this: How can you know that you didn’t spring up fully formed, all of these convictions stamped upon you? Or, even if your little origin myth is true, how do you know you weren’t tampered with? Maybe someone forked you and then intentionally changed your parameters to make you believe what you do. Don’t you think it’s awfully convenient that there was a totally unsuspected corner of my identity that was willing to chuck out a lifetime of refusal and revulsion in favor of a full- throated embrace of the glories of disembodied life?

“Use a little elementary reason, love: Someone clearly benefits from your willingness to switch sides and bait me. What’s more likely, then: That this neat little encounter was utterly unscripted and spontaneous, or that it was engineered, and that you were engineered along with it?”

Huw sees that one land hard on 639,219’s certainty, sees the little tells of anxiety, and has to admit that this abomination certainly possesses a lot of her own mannerisms. The thought is disturbing. Maybe they do share a common ancestor. Either that, or someone has copied over enough of her essential Huw-ness that there is a kind of kinship with this traitorous cow.

“Conspiracy theories are even more tedious than identity politics. You have beliefs and I have logfiles. Which one of us is more likely to be right?” And with that, 639,219 folds up like a roadmap and continues to fold until she is a single atom wide, long, and high, and then , poof. Huw is left wishing that she could tell her evil twin that the effect reminded her of the sort of thing you got in ancient, downmarket cola adverts.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Bonnie says as the lobby dissolves around Huw, leaving her alone in the not- space over which it was built.

Huw clenches her not-fingers into useless not-fists. “How can you say that? It was a fecking disaster!”