Rapture of the Nerds

Bonnie talking anyway—it’s the rootkit, using Bonnie’s personality as a sock puppet to manipulate her. Well, that’s okay by Huw. Huw doesn’t feel anything, but she remembers how she ought to act, how she would have acted, back when she was in the throes of lust or love or something. It’s trivially easy to calm Bonnie’s fears, to apologize for not trusting her—to pretend not to have seen the rootkit lurking gray and bloated in the wreckage of her moral maze—to agree it’s all a misunderstanding and anyway Huw hated 639,219. And so she holds Bonnie’s wrists as the floor carries them toward the exit and the djinni spins them around and down through bubbling blue layers of reality, back to the polished floor of the lobby of the Tripoli Marriott.

“It’s all going to be okay.” Huw soothes Bonnie, who is whimpering and writhing but evidently in the grip of some kind of BDSM compulsion field, courtesy of the lurking djinni : “We’re going to go in there and explain that it was all a mistake and I’ll give evidence. All right?” She can see that Bonnie—or the rootkit— doesn’t agree that it’s all right, but she sees no reason to let it faze her.

“You don’t understand! If I go in there, they’ll, it’s going to, I won’t be able to—” She’s blubbering now, making a surprisingly corporeal mess. Huw nods reassuringly.

The djinni, rubbing a handheld slab of black glass against his cheek—very symbolic, very retro, an antique telephone—is mumbling to himself. He makes the glass slab vanish. “I filed a motion for the committee to hear an appeal,” he says. The doors to the conference room swing open. “After you—”

“What is bzzt going on?”

Huw looks round. A pepper pot-shaped automaton covered in knobbly hemispheres, probes jutting aggressively from beneath the black silk cap adorning its cortical turret, glides across the lobby behind her. The avatar’s unfamiliar, but Huw’d recognize that voice anywhere, and for once it doesn’t fill her with terror. “Rosa! How charming. We’re just about to explain to the Planning Committee how they’ve been subverted—”

“You!” shrieks Rosa Giuliani . “Exterminate!” She twirls to point her stubby manipulators at Huw and unleashes a rather implausible-looking lightning bolt that, predictably, has no effect whatsoever.

Huw waits for the light show to subside. “This is a no-PvP area,” she says. “And we’re on the same side. Unless you want to encourage them to demolish the Earth?”

“What is this? Explain!” Rosa—or the pint-sized robot tank containing what’s left of her malevolent mindware, post-upload—glides forward.

“You got a summons too, didn’t you?” Huw asks. “But when you got here, you were too late because they’d closed the hearing.” She nods at Bonnie: “Well, here’s the evidence that the hearing’s been suborned: This one’s harboring an illegal rootkit. I reckon she was hacked by one of the players in Glory City, and they’ve been using her to mess with the evidence—”

Bonnie struggles to get free. “That’s not true!” she says, “You’re making this up!”

“Sorry, darling,” says Huw, and she drags Bonnie into the conference room. Which appears to be empty, until the instant her foot crosses the threshold.

There are no spectators this time, and no regular witnesses. But the triumvirate of ill-assorted court bureaucrats bamf in one by one from whatever distant shard fragment they inhabit when the court isn’t in session. They do not look terribly happy. “Which one of you is Huw Jones?” says the chair, fingering one gold-capped tusk.

“I am, Your Honor,” Huw says. “And this is Rosa Giuliani .” She gestures at the pepper pot.

“Interesting. You aren’t the Huw Jones who testified at the last hearing, are you?”

Huw swallows. “I’m afraid not. She’s dead. Terminally scrambled by this one, but not before I determined that she’d been infected by a rootkit prior to the hearing. I have evidence—” She gestures at the djinni, who coughs up a thumb-sized ruby, glinting with inner light, and tosses it at the chair.

The chair swallows the gem. “Interesting.” Judging from her expression, that’s an understatement. “Who’s this?”

Huw pushes Bonnie forward. Invisible bonds prevent her from fleeing. “This is Bonnie. She killed 639,219—my rootkitted sibling—inside a capability bar. Like me, she’s not thoroughly acclimated to the cloud: it turns out she’s been rootkitted too, and was running 639,219 on behalf of a botmaster, identity unknown, but probably resident in Glory City, South Carolina.”

Bonnie falls to her knees. “What’s going on? I’m not a bot! You’re crazy, Huw, what’s gotten into you?”

But the chair isn’t paying attention to Bonnie right now. “Judge Rosa Giuliani. You failed to attend the previous scheduled hearing. May I ask why?”

“Extermin—” Rosa stops, pirouettes in place, and quietens. “Grr. Bzz. I was not notified of the hearing in time to attend. My clerk received the summons but unaccountably misfiled it for three days until exterminate damn this cheap off-the-shelf avatar! I came as soon as I could, after the summons came to light.”

“Do you know why your clerk misfiled the court’s papers?” asks the second orc, deceptively calmly.

“That is a very good question,”

Giuliani says. “I believe certain parties in Glory City—while we were there attending to unpleasant but unavoidable businesses—suborned him. There are rumors about the depraved and perverted practices of the pulchritudinous protestant puritan plutocratic penis-people priesthood, of shadowy bacchanalian polyamorous practices. ... I suspect, to be blunt, someone was blackmailing him.”

“You suspect? You did not investigate—?”

“Hell, no!” says Giuliani, “I exterminate! All enemies of the—”

The chair clears her throat. “This is rather disturbing,” she says. “Especially in view of the representations recently received.”

For a moment the officers of the Planning Committee freeze and turn blurry and blue, segueing into quicktime to confer at leisure.

Huw clears her throat, momentarily wishing there were an alien ambassador nestling in it to help get their attention. “What representations?” she asks, out of order but chancing her luck anyway.

Bonnie sobs quietly.

“The galactic federation,” says the chair, seguing back into real time and looking at her with the expression a kindly teacher might reserve for a slow learner. “Do try to keep up. You didn’t think we reconvened this hearing just in your behalf, did you? It’s the aliens. They sent us an email. All very traditional. Planning hearing will now recess while we discuss this other shit.”

Huw feels stupid. “What galactic federation? That’s ridiculous! Some stupid griefer is playing games with you, a breakaway densethinker clade that’s bouncing its messages off Alpha Centauri to make them seem like they’re coming from the next galaxy. No?”

The chair holds up a green-skinned and gnarly finger and wags it at Huw. “No. We’re completely sure. For one thing, they took Io.”

“Took what?”

“The moon. Io. Atomized it. It’s now dust. And for another, they’ve rooted the three largest simspaces and claimed them as ambassadorial missions.”

“It could still be a griefer—?”

“They sent us an email. Instructions for setting up a protocol converter. When you speak to it—which you will, Ms. Jones, you will—then you will know. This isn’t anything descended from meatpeople that we were or uplifted. It’s Other, capital O, and when you meet it, you won’t have any doubt.”

Huw has a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. “This isn’t really about the planning application for dismantling the Earth, is it? It’s all about me again!”

“Could be.” The chair’s expression is bland, behind her tusks. Huw glances round. The djinni is stationed before the closed doors, his expression frozen. Judge Rosa’s pocket tank is parked beside him, weaponlike appendages pointing at ... well. Bonnie is a crying lump on the floor, no help there even if she were rootkit-free. “Ms. Jones. Please reset your emotional balance to normal, there’s a good being? What we are about to discuss is not suitable for psychopaths.”

“Feh.” Huw brings up her emo box and tosses it up in the air. As it comes down again, a nameless sleet of strange emotional states shakes her to her core. She looks at Bonnie, feels a stab of remorse, grief, revulsion, and