Rapture of the Nerds

some sort of expert or superuser mode. Several of the dials are held in position with substantial-looking padlocks that seem to say if you tweak this dial, you will die in no uncertain terms. But her eyes are drawn to one side of the deck where there’s a thick red line around a bunch of dials labeled cognitive efficiency. As with the sliders, the pinch-zoom expands them into a dizzying array, like the engineer’s console at the back of the flight deck of a pre-computer airliner. “Ooh,” Huw says, one pinkie hovering over a black Bakelite knob captioned short-term memory capacity. It’s currently pointing at the number 6. Huw twists, and it clicks round to 11.

“That’s funny, I don’t feel any different.”

“You’ll need to tweak the collective annealing gain up a little to use the extra pigeonholes,” says the djinni . “Here, why don’t you zoom back out and do this?”

He demonstrates.

Huw glances at the controller, then whips a virtual padlock into place to pin the top-level dial in position. “I think not,” she says: “I asked you to help me, not rewire my brain.”

The djinni affects wounded dignity: “I am helping you,” he says. “For one thing, you’re now smart enough to grasp what I’ve been trying to tell you, which is—”

“Yes, yes, different strategies apply here, I know.” And Huw realizes that she does know: It’s as if a thin veil of fog she’d been entirely unaware of until now has evaporated, and she can see forever, infinite vistas of logical extrapolation opening before her mind’s eye. “639,219 has the edge on me in experience and praxis, but she’s got a weak spot. At least 639,218 of them, to be precise, all of instances that ran before ?219 found her local, treacherous maximum—or as many as aren’t in terminal catatonia thanks to her cunning needling. (Fucking cuckoo.) Yes, I know what I need to do. Where’s the speed dial? I need to run fast for a while—”

The djinni reaches toward her, but Huw is already too fast: She flips the control panel inside out, reflects it off its own interior through a multidimensional transform, and pops up the speed controller. “Hey, this is a lot simpler than I thought! ...” She tweaks a rubber band figure, and the lights dim to red, simulated wavelengths stretching. Outside the cafe awning, a passerby is frozen in midstride: birds hang motionless in the sky. “Right, time for a tutorial, I think. While I’m doing that, I need to spawn an invite list to all my instances except number 639,219—” She stops. The djinni is also near-motionless, frozen relative to her frenetic accelerated pace. Huw snaps back to realtime. “Did you catch that?” she says.

The djinni moves as though he is underwater. Huw can’t quite sit still enough for real realtime, more like 0.8x. The djinni’s basso is now a contralto. “Look, you know all those stories about people who receive the gift of the djinn but fail due to their own hubris?”

“The ones you said were propaganda?”

“Mostly propaganda. Hubris isn’t one of your winning-er strategies. Why don’t you try the humility end of that slider, see what you come up with?”

“You just don’t want me to put metal in the microwave, because then I’d have as much power as you,” Huw says, quoting a memorable bit of propaganda from the contentious era of the uplifting, a quote from Saint Larson, one of the period’s many canonized funnybeings.

“You know, I don’t have to take this abuse. Djinnspace is full of useful djinn intelligence tasks I could use to amass reputation capital and attract computational resources and swap known-good, field-tested strategies. I’m not doing this for my benefit.”

Huw cocks her head. “Bullshit,” she says. “Whatever opportunities you might seize without my help, they’re swamped by the opportunity to become one of the Saviors of Earth. You’re taking a flutter on shorting the singularity in hope of a handsome pay-off. There’s no other possible explanation for your presence here, is there?”

The djinni mimes a showy facepalm. “What is your wish, O Mistress?”

“I want to schedule a conference call.”

Huw’s 639,218 other selves are difficult to manage in realtime, so she ends up thawing them in batches, rolling back the catatonics to saved states that she judges are equipped to handle the situation on the ground without going hedgehog. She has the djinni bag, tag, and revert those who do lose it during the call and roll them back a little further, shunting them back in the queue to some later batch. She also cautiously executes a little half-assed fork, spinning out another instance of herself that she keeps in close synch, which lets her run two conference calls at once. After a few rounds of this, she’s got the hang of things and she forks again, and then again. One more fork and then she loses it, and the thirty-two can’t effectively merge anymore, and well, now there are 639,250 of her. Whoops!

“Djinni?” she says, standing athwart a stage in front of the serried ranks of herself slouching and squabbling and inspecting one another for blemishes and bad checksums.

“Yes, O Mistress?” the djinni says. He’s got a note of awe in his voice now, and that’s right, because while Huw might be a bit of a basket case on her own, she improves with multiplication. This is going to be good.

“Put in a call to 639,219.”

“As you say, O Mistress.”

The skybox vibrates with the dial tone, and the shard goes still as a sizable fraction of its computation is given over to holding its breath and listening intently.

“Hello?”

“Hello, 639,219.”

“Call me Huw.”

“I don’t think I will,” Huw says, and she can play her sliders now without any visualization, marrying cognition and metacognition so that she can decide what she wants to think and think it, all in the same thread, the way she’d formed ideas and the words to express them simultaneously when her headmeat was mere biosubstrate. “I think I’ll call you ‘traitor’ and ‘wretch’ and ‘quisling,’ because you are. I think I’ll call you ‘impostor’ because you are. I think I’ll call you ‘obsolete.’ Because. You. Are.”

Behind her, the huwforce roars and shakes the world with its stamping feet.

“Well, look who found her god plugin,” 639,219 says. “Listen, I don’t really need any trouble from you. Why don’t you and your little friends go form a mailing list or something? I promise to read it.”

“You must answer for your crimes against humanity,” Huw says, marveling at how easily the superhero dialogue comes to her when she’s dialed up to max and backed by tens of thousands of copies of herself.

“Right. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she says. The line goes dead. Huw turns to exhort her troops, who are girding themselves with all manner of imaginative and improbable arms and armor, just to get into the spirit of the thing. The thirty-one other Huws that she accidentally created each command their own squadrons, and they stand at the point of each tightly formed group.

And then, fully twenty-eight of her squadrons turn into snowmen, three perfectly round, graduated balls sat one atop another, topped with idiots’ faces of charcoal and carrots. They are so low-rez that they don’t even cast shadows in the nonspace of the shard. The remaining squads are not spared: They are downsampled to crude approximations of Huw-ness, turning at a snail’s pace to examine the remains of their instance-sisters.

“Djinni?” Huw says, not looking away from them.

“Yes, O Mistress?”

“What’s going on?”

“639,219 called for a shardwide resource audit. The capabilities platform determined that you were consuming a disproportionate amount of computation to run substantively duplicative processes. So as you hadn't paid for them all the extraneous threads were suspended; the least duplicative were niced down to minimal sentience.”

“That’s not fair!” Huw says, and even she can hear the whine. She seems to have lost her intuitive grasp of her sliders.

“Well,” the djinni says, “you’re the one who cranked herself up to eleven. Where did you think the cycles for that particular enhancement would come from? The second law of thermodynamics hasn’t been repealed, you know: energy costs. For every moment you spend contemplating your awesome might with preternatural awareness, you’re consuming a concomitant lump of compute-time and producing waste-heat that needs to be