Rapture of the Nerds

through the air in a graceful, glinting arc. It slows as she reaches for it and nudges itself into a course-correction that lands it firmly in her palm. Its face bears the Club Capabilities logo, worked into a Mobius strip; when Huw flips the coin over, it rotates through another spatial dimension instead, a feeling that her not-fingertips and not-eyes can’t agree upon, and she’s looking at the same face again.

“I hate it already,” Huw says. “Stupid flashy sensorium tricks. Ooh, look at me, I am a virtual being, I can bend physics, woo.” She squeezes it in her fist. “What is it for? What does it do?”

“If the sim resets you, one of these ends up in your hand. It puts you on notice that if you enter into a contract right away, one or both of you is likely to abandon it. Prevents loops.”

“So we’d have one of these.” Huw thinks a moment. “Where’d you get this one?”

The djinni lays a finger that seems to have an extra joint alongside his hooked nose. “That would be telling,” he says, and winks.

Huw damps down her temper. If the djinni is hoping to get into her knickers, he’s certainly going about it the wrong way. She would want to strangle him, if she wasn’t making herself not want to strangle him. “So, let’s ask Bonnie.” Time unfreezes. “You—you can’t afford to break away from us, because I could just break my contract with 639,219 and you’d be pouring her a drink just as one of these coins appeared in her hand, and you’d be stuffed.” Huw breaks off, thinks about what she just said. Bonnie stares at her mulishly but holds her silence.

Huw can’t help but feel like there’s something the djinni and Bonnie aren’t telling her—something about the fraught looks they keep exchanging with each other.

“If only we could talk to 639,219. She is gone forever, right?”

“The rootkit zeroed her out,” Bonnie says.

“Yeah,” the djinni says.

Huw rubs her chin.

“Huw—,” Bonnie says, a warning tone in her voice.

“This isn’t a universe where causality only runs forwards, right? Things that happen can unhappen. Something you do in the future can affect the past, here.”

“Huw—,” the djinni says, sounding more alarmed.

“And 639,219 only got derezzed by her rootkit after we created an agreement. And since I’m still in this sim, all I need to do is violate the agreement and I’ll unwind everything back to that point. We’ll get one of those little tokens—” Huw flipped the poker chip so it did a high end- over-end arc, clattering away into the infinite regression-depths of the club’s storeroom. “We’ll get one of those, and poof, 639,219 will be back and hale and hearty and we can all start over again, right?”

The djinni and Bonnie are shaking their heads together in sync, like two metronomes. “Huw,” the djinni says, “if you revert this sim to the moment before you and 639,219 agreed to arb, you’re going to roll back the lives of thousands of people.”

Huw makes a rude noise. “I may have only just ascended, but I didn’t just fall off the tree. There wasn’t anyone around when we arbed.”

“You’re forgetting the djinni chasing me down. If you and 639,219 never arbed, I wouldn’t have run, and the djinni wouldn’t have chased me.”

“All right, a few people probably saw that, but how many of them had their outcomes influenced by seeing an infinite herd of djinni chasing a bartender?”

“Dozens,” the djinni says. “Hundreds. And then there’s everyone they talked to or influenced as a result. Huw, you’re talking about deliberately unwinding the lives of a small city, and the population is growing by the second.”

Huw feels belligerent. “I do the same every time I do anything and everything. Every time I take any action, it ripples out to all the people who are affected by it, and all the people they effect. You’re saying that sensitivity to initial conditions means that you’re morally obliged never to change your mind. It’s rubbish. Just because causality runs backwards in this place doesn’t mean the butterfly effect becomes the first commandment. Now, what did I promise 639,219 before we arbed?”

Bonnie and the djinni are both talking now, but Huw has literally tuned them out, so that they’ve faded out of her causal universe, unable to affect her. She’s really getting to like this capabilities wheeze. She tunes them back in.

“Right,” she says, pointing at Bonnie. “You, talk.”

“Look,” Bonnie says, “you’ve got this all wrong.”

The djinni frowns. “You need to audit her,” he says. “You’ll never get anything useful out of her volitionally. Just arb her.”

“No,” Bonnie and Huw say at the same moment. Huw is struck with a whole-not-body revulsion at the thought of being exposed and exposing with this Bonnie, this weird shade of the man and woman she’s loved and lost and loved and hated.

“Why is it always me?” Huw says. “Why don’t you do the transhuman mind-meld for a change?”

The djinni shakes his topknot. “Wrong cognitive model. I’m an expression of a hivemind, wholly synthetic. You two are uploaded—built incrementally by modeling a physical structure. Means that we’re impedence mismatched. Can’t ever have a meeting of the minds, alas.” He doesn’t sound very sorry. “So, look, Huw, let me tell you, whatever leverage you’ve got with Bonnie is going to evaporate pretty quick. Soon as someone leaves the club, the contract is fixed, because now there’s causal links that are external to this sim—Club Capabilities can’t reverse effects that take place outside of here. That’s why there’s no comms links in or out—we’re causally isolated. So if you’re going to blackmail her into arbing, better do it quick before someone decides to go outside and check his email.”

Huw opens his mouth: “Well, fuck. Bonnie—”

“You’re not going to make me—” Bonnie makes her move, begins to derez, trying to untrust Huw. But the djinni is faster. Bonnie and everyone in the bar—except the djinni —freeze in place and fade to red again.

“Bullet time,” the djinni tells Huw. “You have about ten subjective seconds—two milliseconds as far as everyone else is concerned. Use them wisely.”

Feeling pressured and desperate and sick to her stomach, Huw tweaks her emo control into bland-faced robotitude. A comforting blanket of gray descends, and of course it’s obvious what she ought to do. It’s for Bonnie’s own good, and 639,219’s insofar as 639,219 was a fragment of Huw’s own mind. Huw doesn’t owe her flawed instance-sister anything except the honest truth before the planning tribunal, and proof of Bonnie’s malfeasance will provide that. Besides, I’ve spent most of the past however long hating her guts. Isn’t this fit of sentimental sympathy a bit perverse?

“Arb. Now,” Huw hears herself say. She watches her finger extend to touch Bonnie’s forehead, growing longer and stretching like a bizarre insectile appendage, multijointed and not part of her self-image. Bonnie is frozen, mouth half-open, hair caught in motion around her face. “You’ve got her? Connect us.” The djinni nods.

“Well, fuck,” says Huw, staring at the same rootkit she saw in 639,219’s cognitive map. She glances at the djinni . “If we put this in front of the planning committee, along with the record from 639,219 ...”

“Yes, that will provide an evidential chain suggesting that testimony provided by 639,219 must be discounted.” The djinni strokes his goatee. “There is an appeal stage where procedural errors can be raised. And proof of external tampering with evidence presented at the hearing will bring everything to a halt, if not result in a mistrial.” His expression is reserved, if not shifty.

“Good.” Huw pauses. “But if I do that, I’ll be unable to unwind to before Bonnie killed 639,219. Won’t I?”

The djinni points. “The answer is in your hands.”

“Yes. I see.” Dully, Huw tweaks a helical slider past a detent labeled EMPATHY BLOCK, into a red zone flagged DANGER: SOCIOPATHIC PERSONALITY DISORDER. Instantly, she feels better. In fact, she feels great. “Cool! Let’s go!”

The djinni smiles. “I knew you’d see sense eventually.”

When they revert to realtime, Bonnie puts up a fight: crying, shaking, pleading with Huw for understanding, offering to kiss and make up.

Huw finds that she doesn’t give a shit for this tiresome emo nonsense. It’s transparently clear that it’s not