Rapture of the Nerds

get refactored to participate as a capabilities agent, which means going through the scanner. Let me assure you, it’s an entirely pleasant experience.”

Huw likes the sound of being in a safe-conduct zone, though she can’t escape the feeling that allowing a scanner to remodel her consciousness—or whatever she has that passes for a consciousness—is a frightening idea. Trepidatiously, she inches into the scanner.

It does feel good. Huw remembers when she was a man (or rather, she remembers when meat-Huw had been a man, and suffers from the delusion that those memories are hers), remembers the pee-gasms that would shiver up her spine after a particularly fine micturation. Either by design or by accident, the scanner replicates that feeling as it remaps her. Oh-ah, she thinks as she passes through, then takes stock of herself.

Club Capabilities is, typically, bigger on the inside than the outside. Architectural hubris is cheap as air in the cloud. Where a terrestrial establishment would have a central bar area and booths around the periphery, this establishment has a kilometers-wide expanse of glassy floor and a central bar that features such nifty magnification features that stools spring up like self-similar leather mushrooms as you approach any given spot: in the distance, near the walls, gales howl among the hyperspace gates leading to the private areas (which feature planetary themes, so that the subsurface oceanic caverns of Enceladus adjoin the fiery sands of long-dismantled Venus).

The dress code is similarly over the top, as Huw realizes when she notices the djinni is wearing an antique Armani suit. She’s no expert on haute couture: she realizes she probably ought to recognize the designer of the cocktail dress the scanner selected for her, but she’s too busy fighting with the insane footwear to care about such minor details. Mid-1980s: Greed is good. It seems a fitting context in which to discuss the identity of a person or persons who might be trying to steal a planet’s worth of computronium.

The whole thing is so massively, monstrously over the top—like a nuclear aircraft carrier tricked out as a private yacht—that it takes Huw a moment to realize that she and the djinni are alone.

“Where is everyone?” she asks, grabbing his arm for balance.

“Where—? Oh.” The djinni snaps his fingers. “Let me post a good-conduct deposit for you ... there.” And suddenly they are no longer alone: for Huw can see a couple of dozen figures scattered across the premises, from barstool to dance floor to snogging in a booth beneath the racing moons of Mars. He looks at her: “How about a cocktail, little lady?”

“I’d love one,” Huw says as the djinni leads her toward the bar. It zooms ever-larger, and a pair of red leather stools sprout from the floor, welcoming. Huw almost collapses onto hers, her legs screaming from the unaccustomed demands of balancing on stilettos. “Agh. I’ll have a—” A bland-featured bartender proffers a laminated menu above which visions of liquid excess hover like offers of chaos. “—bloody hell it’s you, you bitch!”

Huw’s eyes focus on another figure slumped across the bar to starboard, some football pitches distant: as she focuses, the distance between them collapses until she can almost smell the alcohol on 639,219’s breath. The djinni’s hand descends heavily on her arm, restraining her as she winds up to thump her mortal enemy. “You can’t do that in here!” he says. “You’d just render yourself unable to see her anymore. Besides, I think she’s the worse for wear.”

“Don’t care. Let me at her.” Huw says through bloodily rouged lips. 639,219 is vulnerable, clearly drunk: her head lolls across her arms as she drools on the bar, her hair a mess and her dress-code-mandated cocktail number askew.

“Turn the aggro down,” says the djinni , and to her great surprise, Huw finds herself manipulating her emo-box sliders until the red haze of rage fades to gray. “Remember who’s fronting your security deposit? She can’t hurt you in here, remember?”

639,219 chooses this moment to open one eye and raise her head a few degrees, then focus on Huw. “Bleargh,” she says, then bends over and vomits, copiously and noisily. Small, brightly colored machine parts cascade down her chin and across her skirt, tumbling across the floor before they fade from view. “Aaagh. Urgh. You.”

“You’re drunk, sister.” The djinni is on his feet and between them, a warning hand upraised, before Huw can respond. “Get it out of your system and go, or forfeit your deposit. We don’t have to talk to you.”

“’F it wasn’t for you meddling kids,” says 639,219, staring woozily at the djinni , “I’d ha’ gotten awa’ wi’it!” A stray purple wing nut dribbles from the side of her mouth. “Bastid!”

Huw feels uncomfortable. Watching her rival come apart at the seams as the result of the djinni’s financial machinations is disturbing: a certain sense of there but for random luck go I springs to mind. Looking at their argument, it suddenly occurs to her that the real winner is the guy in the Armani suit: she’s more or less bankrupt, her debts parceled out to a shady out-shard investment entity, and as for 639,219, she’s been smacked down hard, despite spending years working to achieve a proficiency with cloud systems that Huw can barely comprehend.

639,219 might be a vindictive bitch and a body-denying Apollonian Traitor to the Real, but seeing her brought this low is a sharp reminder that no instance of Huw is actually up to paddling safely in this virtual shark pool.

“What exactly were you trying to get away with?” Huw asks, trying to keep her smile from melting into a smirk of uneasy satisfaction. “Would you mind satisfying my curiosity?”

“Pish off, you unctuous’n’self-righteous prig.”

Huw is about to speak, when the djinni catches her eye. He shakes his head, very slowly: 639,219 shows no sign of seeing. Then the djinni speaks. “I strongly advise you not to engage with your alienated instance,” he says. “Remember, you can engage only in consensual transactions in this bar. I’m withholding my consent for discourse from her, and I think you should do the same.”

“Why?” says Huw, nipped by an imp of the perverse. “Don’t you think I could benefit from finding out why this bad sister went off on her little side trip?”

“No, you—” The djinni pauses. “Wait. Yes, I change my mind. You probably could learn something useful. But don’t you think it’s just possible that her viewpoint might be contagious? Engage too deeply, and you could pick up her bad memes by accident, and then where would you be?”

“Huh.” Huw sniffs. She turns her attention to the hovering bartender. “I’ll have a Bloody Mary.”

“And your companion?” asks the bartender.

Huw fiddles with her settings until she’s pretty sure 639,219 can’t hear them: “She’ll have what I’m having, only with Bhut Jalokia sauce instead of Tabasco.”

Two glasses appear on the bar. Huw reaffirms her consent to speak to 639,219: “this one’s on me,” she says, smiling broadly as she raises her glass: “Slainte.”

“Slainte—” 639,219 guzzles her drink as Huw watches with interest. The djinni winces, but Huw is disappointed: rather than exploding, 639,219 merely emits a small puff of smoke from each nostril and hiccups quietly. “Wow, some sober-up, sis. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“What—” Huw bites her tongue. 639,219 is shaking her head. “I thought you were dumb’s’a plank, and then you pulled the fanciest freakin’ financial engineering stunt I’ve ever heard of ... How’ya do it?”

“Trade secret.” It’s the first thing that pops into her mind. “Seriously, you think I’d share with you before we’ve sorted out our differences?”

“Huh. What differences? You’re in here now, same as me. A cloud-bunny, getting to learn to like the mutable life. What’s to sort out?”

“Well. There’s the small matter of you trying to fuck me over, for starters, both impersonating me in the planning hearing—”

“Hey! I was invited to testify before the committee! You just barged in like you thought it was a meeting of the organic farming co-op planting committee!”

“No, I was the one they invited—” Huw stops.

639,219 stares at her blearily.

“We both got the invite. Someone is fucking with us,” Huw says.

“Huh.” 639,219 struggles to sit upright. “Well, I’m up for it if you are.”

“Wha?” Huw looks round at the djinni , but he’s sulking ostentatiously, rezzed out in a gray cloud from which a hand emerges to protectively cradle a mai tai the size of a paint bucket.