Rapture of the Nerds

argumentation—nothing that thirty years in a parliament couldn’t fix. Do you have any friends in WorldGov? They could induct you into their LARP. It’s a grind to level up, but by the time you hit senate level, you could probably wipe the floor with 639,219 in a straight fight. She is a classic case of geek hubris: You see them all over—once they learn how to accelerate their thought processes, they all think they’re Richard Feynman.”

“Don’t wanna be a politician.” Huw is still finding it hard to think in the teapot; the merciless clarity she achieved as leader of the army of Huw on the outside has been replaced by the lumpen thought processes of a Monmouth Today reader, all livestock auctions, agricultural suppliers, and fear of an urban planet. “Want my head to start working again.”

“Tough shit; you pissed off 639,219 so badly, she bought all the debt you’d run up for shard cycles and foreclosed. Unless you can think of something to sell in this attention economy, you’re stuck with me, babe.” Huw shudders, feeling hair tickling the small of her back and the breath of the djinni in her ear. A horrible suspicion is growing: that she could be trapped in here for eternity with only a sarcastic 200-kilo hair-fetishist for company. “Unless you can think of something to sell. Or a better argument.”

“Mmph. What’s the market for custom-glazed pottery like?”

“Just about nonexistent, unless you can throw five-dimensional pots.”

“Oh shit!” Huw wails, and succumbs to the urge to wind up the emotional gain for a full-on crying jag. At least this time the djinni doesn’t stop her tweaking herself. “I’m useless!”

“Not to worry.” The djinni tries to soothe her, but works out that the comb is a liability fairly rapidly. “Calm yourself down, there, there. It’s not all over: you have a certain residual value as a type specimen.”

“A, a what?”

“A type specimen: the definitive example of a wild, undomesticated Huw Jones. You could put yourself on a plinth and charge cloudies a fee for access.”

Huw sniffs suspiciously. “I could see if, if anyone could help.” An idea strikes her. “Maybe Ade has some credit? ...”

The djinni raises an eyebrow. “You’re trying to bum off your frenemies? Better pick them carefully.”

“But I—” Huw descends into the sniffles again. “—I’m useless! And if I can’t do something about 639,219, it’ll be the end of the world!”

An ominous jittering shudder runs through the walls of the kettle, derezzing them slightly. “Uh-oh,” says the djinni.

“What?” Huw says.

The djinni holds up a finger the size of a chipolata. It cocks its head this way and that, causing its topknot to flop from side to side, its expression blank. Huw remembers this gesture from “her” djinni, the meatspace cousin of this one, back in Tripoli—it’s hourglassing, timing out while it thinks.

“Collection protocol,” he says. “639,219 is trying to foreclose on you. She argues that your debts are so huge, they put my whole sim into negative equity, which means that unless I turn you over, she owns my sim too. It looks like she’s bought into a financial engineering clade and laid a whole whack of side-bets on your repayment schedule, hedging the crap out of herself so she’ll come out ahead no matter what happens. Wonder where she found the sucker who’d take the other side of that contract?” He was muttering to himself now, all the while zipping around the tiny volume inside the lamp, chalking magic sigils over the doorways and scattering herbs and yarrow stalks in complex patterns. “Course, it doesn’t matter, the whole thing wouldn’t pass muster with a full-bore audit, but by then she’ll have time-arbitraged her stake up to some crazy amount, probably got someone else to lay off the risk on, something uncollectable; meantime, she’ll have leveraged this sim up to the tits and I’ll just be an unsecured creditor in line behind the other bastards—”

Huw knows just enough finance-talk to realize how batshit insane the scenario the djinni is describing is, and she wishes she had a stomach so she could throw up. “I should go,” she says. “It was very nice of you to take me in, but I can look after myself.”

“You can’t, actually,” the djinni says. “Besides, I’m hardly helpless. Your evil sister has made the classic mistake of bringing a complex financial instrument to a djinni fight.” He grins hugely, showing far too many pointy teeth and a muscular, forked tongue, then he cracks his huge, walnutty knuckles. “This is going to be fun.”

And then he forks into four instances of himself, and all four begin barking buy/sell orders. At first, they use normal voices, but they quickly ramp up to high-pitched squeals, and then burst the nonsound barrier with a nonboom that rattles Huw’s teeth with impressive pseudophysics. The three new instances diff-and-merge back into the djinni with a trio of comic pops and the djinni rubs his hands together. “Had to raid the pension fund to do it, but I think I’ve done for little what’s-her-number. An insult to one is an insult to all, so I just brought in the rest of my instance-sibs and margin-called that bitch so hard, she’ll be begging for spare cycles for the next hundred in realtime.” He shakes his head. “Noobs are all the same; think that once they’ve been around the block a few times, they can do whatever they want.”

“What happened to my debt?”

“Oh.” The djinni shrugs. “She flogged that as soon as I started my counterattack. I figure she had the countermeasure prepped in advance. Must have been automated, happened as soon as I started to call her markers. I tried to trace where it went, but it went too fast, off to some zurichoid anonymizer utility. But you’re out of the woods for now, and I’ve got some mad money to play with. Why don’t we go and celebrate, huh?”

“I thought I couldn’t set foot out of your sim? Feral debt collectors and all that?”

The djinni waves his pie-plate hands dismissively. “Not anymore,” he says. “Your debts have gone off-books to some black exchange. I’ve got a lien on them, so if they peep their heads over the parapets, I’ll know and we’ll have plenty of time to get to cover so I can get the debt audited. I’m pretty sure that after it’s been laundered by that ham-fisted amateur, it’ll be invalidatable.” The djinni puts an arm around Huw’s shoulders. “Stick with me, kid, and you’ll do just fine.”

Huw feels a flutter way down in the pit of her not-stomach, something between not-nausea and not-arousal, and she swallows some not-spit. “Are we going anywhere fancy? Should I dress for it?”

“Oh,” the djinni says with a wag of his head and a flip of his topknot, “not to worry. The protocols’ll dude us up when we arrive—got to love these capabilities bars; they’re literally impossible to enter if you don’t belong, they won’t even execute.”

Getting from one sim to another involves a moment of hiatus, during which Huw’s consciousness flutters in and out of existence, without any subjective sense of time passing. Some internal clock tells her that for a moment, she hadn’t been anywhere. But then she is. It must have happened before—it has happened before—but Huw was so distracted that she didn’t notice the nonzero time it took for her processes to suspend, replicate, and restart. It leaves her reeling and filled with self-loathing: I am such a dupe, she thinks, so willing to believe that I’m me even though I’m clearly dead and this shambling thing is just a thin shade. The thought makes her want to lie down and wait for 639,219 to catch up with her and decompile her. But there is the whole Earth at stake, and all the meatpeople—the real people—crawling over its surface, and even if she is just a ghost, she has a duty to stop them from being slaughtered wholesale and turned into computational ghosts.

The existential crisis distracts Huw from the sim in which she has been instantiated, but now she takes stock of it. club capabilities is what the sign over the door declares, and this portal is flanked by a pair of scanner devices that crackle with intense energy. The djinni’s got one of her hands caught in his celestial one, and he tugs her toward the scanners.

“Come on,” he says, “let’s get a drink.” He releases her hand in order to pass through the scanner, and he shivers as he emerges from it. “Come on,” he says again, “you’ll love this.”

“What is it?” Huw says, hovering around the scanner’s entrance.

“Interpreter,” the djinni says. “Middleware layer. Turns you into an agent in the capabilities sim. Means that you can transact only noncoercively with other agents.”

“Gibberish,” Huw says.

“Once you’re in a capabilities environment, everything you do with someone else involves forming contractual protocols. If either party violates the contract, they cease to see one another. It’s a cheat-proof sim. Means that no one can harm you unless you agree to let them. It’s the kind of place you can really relax in. But first you need to