Rapture of the Nerds

convected into space without being transformed into thrust or spin, which is no simple process and requires its own secondary computation, which generates more waste-heat and consumes more resources.”

The djinni pauses long enough to assay a self-satisfied smirk. “All of which I tried to explain to you, but you were too drunk on your own cleverness to listen. Would Madam perhaps care to nudge the humility-hubris slider as per my recommendation at this time?”

Huw’s not-stomach sinks. I was smart, she thinks. So why didn’t I predict this?

Because I outsmarted myself. The answer comes instantaneously, computed by one of her many spare threads. “What do I do now?” she says, turning up the humility gain, but increasing the self- confidence slider to keep herself from sinking into terrorized self-pity.

“Well, you could nice yourself back to about a seven, free up some compute time for your lieutenants, ditch the snowmen and the pixel-people, get yourself down to an even dozen.”

Even amped up to super-duper-ultra-max cleverness, Huw can’t stomach (or not-stomach) the notion of losing her army, snowmen or no. “There’s no other way?”

“No,” says 639,219, who is now standing nose-to-nose with Huw, an insufferable smile on her overperfected features. “There is no other way.”

Huw could argue with her or try something fancy with the shard’s underlying physics and process- management, but she’s smart enough to know that she can’t beat 639,219 at cloudgames. After all, 639,219 spent two years learning to manipulate simspace, while Huw spent the same time throwing pots. Her only chance is to try something unexpected.

“Get her!” Huw shouts, and pounces, using every erg of smarts to find the angles that will direct her blows to do the most damage. Her pixelated sisters pile on, and they’re all punching and kicking, and 639,219 is letting out the most satisfying oofs and ouches, and Huw swells with pride: sometimes, the crude solutions are the best ones.

“Are you done?”

Huw looks down at the bruised, oozing wreck of 639,219, who has managed to articulate the words without the least slur or distortion, despite her ruined, toothless mouth. Slowly, Huw and her sisters back off from 639,219, who picks herself up and spits out some teeth.

“I mean, really. I’m not my polygons. Physical coercion is a dead letter here. If you want to get something out of me, you’re going to have to try harder than that. For example, you could try for a quorum of administrative accounts to decompile me and examine my state and logfiles. Though, I have to tell you, the admins aren’t kindly disposed to noobs who go supergenius and multiplicitous without regard for the overall system performance, so you’ve got a lot of digging to do just to get up to zero credibility. Whereas I am most favored, which is why I can do this.”

Huw feels herself getting stupider. Much, much stupider. She just barely has time to register the sensation of losing control of her not-motor functions before her not-bladder cuts loose and hot not-piss runs down her leg as she crumples to the ground. Her uncomprehending not-eyes see, but do not comprehend, all the instance-sisters vanishing. 639,219 spits out another tooth and deinstantiates herself.

The djinni’s lantern is small and cramped, but at least Huw can think while she’s inside it, at least a little.

“Well, that went swimmingly!” the djinni says. “Shift up along the sofa a bit, why don’t you?”

Huw, to her discomfort, finds that the sofa is indeed too narrow to simultaneously accommodate the djinni, Huw, and Huw’s comfort zone. With the brass walls and the spartan decor, it’s uncomfortably close to a jail cell Yaoi romance from the previous century, and the djinni—despite all his other manifest qualities—simply isn’t her type.

“Wha’ happen?” she asks . She shakes her head, then reaches for the master slider—but before she can touch it, the djinni slaps her hand away from it.

“Not in here, if you please!” The djinni is snippy in his home territory. “How’d you like it if I came to visit you in meatspace and started by introducing myself to the contents of your drinks cabinet?”

“Um. Not much, maybe.” Huw feels thick and stupid, but it’s better than the horrible absence-of-self from a timeless moment ago. “Um. What happened? Why am I here?”

“You were pwned,” the djinni says. “I mean, 639,219 was in Ur base and I’m sorry to say, it went hard on Ur doodz. You figured on bringing an army to a gunfight, and 639,219 just dropped a nuke on you. That’s not how things work hereabouts, in case you hadn’t noticed. Have you got the memo yet?”

“I think so.” Huw runs her fingers through her hair and winces as she hits a simulated tangle. “I need to study fighting more—”

“No, you keep jumping to the wrong conclusion. Violence doesn’t work here at all unless you’re in a PvP zone, and even then it’s consensual.” The djinni snaps his fingers: an antique ivory comb appears between them. “Here, let me do that, you’re just making it worse.” Huw’s shoulders slump. She lets her hands fall. The djinni reaches over and begins to run the comb through Huw’s hair. He’s surprisingly gentle and deft for such an inappropriately big entity. “To win, you’ve got to find a better argument and convince everybody. Oh, and you need to get to present it in court, but that’s not so hard. If your argument were better, 639,219 would agree with you, right?”

“No!” Huw tenses angrily, but is brought up short by a knot. “She’s a traitor—”

“No, she’s you. A version of you with a different value system, is all. Her stimulus led to cognitive dissonance and she dealt with it by changing her mind. It’s fun; you should try it some time. Not,” he adds hastily, “right now, but in principle. What do you wash this with, baking soda?”

“You’re telling me I have to change her mind,” Huw manages to say through gritted teeth.

“Something like that would do, yes. And to do it, you’ll need to come up with a better argument to explain why, oh, this lump of rock you’re so attached to is worth keeping around as something other than convenient lumps of computronium. Bearing in mind that the people you’re making the argument to are as attached to computronium as you are to rocks.”

“But there are tons of reasons!” Huw pauses, mustering her arguments. She’s been over them so many times in the past few decades that they’ve become touchstones of faith, worn down to eroded nubs of certainty that she holds to be true. “Firstly, any sim is lossy—you can’t emulate quantum processes on a classical system, or even another quantum system, without taking up more space, or more time, than the original, which isn’t supporting the overheads of an emulation layer. I’m just a pale shadow of the real me—when my neurons fire in here, they’re just simulated neurons! There are no microtubules in my axons, no complex cascade of action potentials along the surface of a lipid membrane separating ionic fluids, no complex peptide receptor molecules twitching and distorting as they encounter neurotransmitter molecules floating between cells. How do I even know that they’re good enough simulations to do the same job as the real thing? I’m drifting off into cyberspace here, becoming a worse and worse pencil-drawn copy of a copy of my original self.”

“Thank you,” the djinni says. “I’ll draw your attention to our immediate neighborhood. Next argument, please?”

“Whu-well, nothing happens in here that isn’t determined by some algorithm, so it’s not really real. For real spontaneity, you need—”

The djinni is sighing and shaking his head.

“Chinese room?” Huw offers hopefully.

A slot appears in the wall of the kettle, and a slip of paper uncoils from it. The djinni takes the slip and frowns. “Hmm, one General Tso’s chicken to go. And a can of Diet Slurm.” He reaches down into the floor, rummages around for a few seconds, pulls out a delivery bag, and shoves it through the wall next to the slot. “You were saying?”

“I’m really shit at this, aren’t I?”

“Inarticulate.” The djinni whistles tunelessly and returns to teasing the comb through Huw’s hair. Huw feels her roots itch. (Is it growing longer?) “You need practice. Rhetoric, debate,