Rapture of the Nerds

wore to the registry office. You don’t look identical to her, but there is a pronounced resemblance. We’ve run 65,536 distinct simulations against a variety of control models and assuming the judge is a fork of your father from after his primary uploading, wearing this outfit should deliver a marked fifteen percent empathy gain toward you: fond memories.”

“Really.” Huw looks at it dubiously. “And if it isn’t? A fork of David Jones?”

“Then you’re at no particular loss. Let’s get you into it, Makeup is waiting. ...”

After Costume and Makeup, there’s a Policy committee waiting for Huw in the boardroom: faceless suits— literally faceless, their features deliberately anonymized—to walk her through their analysis of the history and culture and philosophy of the Authority. It’s a sprawling area of scholarship, far too big for a single person to assimilate in less than subjective decades. Even with a gushing fire hydrant of simulation processing power at her disposal, Huw can’t hope to assimilate it all and still be the person who’s supposed to appear before the star chamber in a few hours’ time. But she can get a handle on the field—and, more important, a whistle-stop tour of what the cloud has inferred about galactic jurisprudential etiquette so that she won’t accidentally put herself in contempt.

“The federation has been around long enough that their judicial process isn’t based on a physical model anymore,” says the #1 faceless suit, from the head of the table: “They set up a simulation space, throw in all the available evidence—including the judge-inquisitor and the accused—and leave them to build a world. By consensus. They iterate a whole bunch of times, and whatever falls out is taken to be the truth of the claimed case. Then the judge decides what to do about it.”

“It’s a lot more informal than you might expect,” says faceless suit #2 with just a smidgen of disapproval.

“You say, ‘build a world.’” Huw thinkst. “Are we talking about trial by combat? Not fighting, exactly, but constructive engagement?”

“Something like that,” says #1 suit. “But we’re not sure. Nobody human has ever been through this process before.”

After Policy, Huw is finally whisked into chambers to be fitted with Counsel. The legal office is smaller and more spartan than the Policy committee, or even the wardrobe and makeup departments; it’s just Bonnie, looking slightly embarrassed and clutching a stuffed parrot plushie. “It’s the best we could manage at short notice,” he says, holding it out to her.

“A parrot.” Huw turns it over in her hands. It’s a handsome gray blue bird, seamlessly fabbed out of cheap velour fabric by a simulated couture robot. “No, don’t tell me, it’s—”

“Hello! I am your counsel! Put me on your shoulder! Rawwwk!” The parrot comes to animatronic life, blinks at Huw, and preens.

“What does it do, say ‘pieces of eight’ and crap down my back?” asks Huw.

“Witness deponeth not! Rawwwk!”

“It’s a prop, babe. Actually, it’s an emulation environment containing an entire university law school’s graduate research faculty, ready and waiting to brief you, but Psychology figured a plush toy would be a useful disarming gesture in the context of a parent-child confrontation: clutch it defensively and act like a kid and you’ll be able to guide ... your father ...” Bonnie trails off.

“You—” Huw raises the animatronic parrot: it sidles aboard and sinks its claws into one suit shoulder pad. “—have. No. Idea. Who. You’re. Talking. About.” She says it with quiet disgust, staring into Bonnie’s eyes at close range. “This is my dad. He’s immune to head-ology. He’s a really smart high-functioning Asperger’s case who deals with social interaction by emulating it in his head, running a set of social heuristics, and looking for positive-sum outcomes. If you try to game him, he’ll notice.” She extends a finger and pokes him in the abs experimentally. “You’ve met my mother. Do you think this chickenshit little-kid brain hack would fool her?”

Bonnie doesn’t back off. “Your mum approved it. She thinks it’s worth a try. Don’t you think you should maybe listen to her once in a while? She’s known him longer than you have!” He’s breathing hard, and looks like he’s biting back anger. “If you insist on going it alone and you get it wrong, we’ll all suffer.”

“Not for long.” Huw meets Bonnie’s gaze. He’s the same scrawny cute tattoo-boy with blue forelock that she first ran into in Sandra Lal’s kitchen the morning after, but somehow he looks smaller to her: wrapped up in and tied down by sad old ideological quarrels and Ade’s stupid political games. She feels a momentary stab of resurgent lust, tempered by self-contempt: Bonnie is flawed, she knows that—played like a fish by 639,219, the Igor to Ade’s Young Dr. Frankenstein. But she needs Bonnie on her side, at least for a short while. And there’s nothing like a good screaming match for cleaning the air. “Spill it, Bonnie. Whatever you’ve been bottling.”

“What I’m bottling? You’re the one who’s been having a crazy snit and trying to ignore reality for the past couple of weeks! The one who kept running away from jury service in Tripoli; then you were happy enough getting your ashes hauled on the way to Glory City until the shit hit the fan, and then you were all over your own feet trying to bug out, and then your mum comes to fetch you to deal with the biggest threat humanity has ever faced, and you’re all, No, I can’t deal with this, my grand aesthetic objection to the cloud is so important that I think I shall throw pots until we all die rather than face up to it, so I try to talk sense into you, and instead all you can do is blame me for—”

Huw freezes Bonnie in midrant.

Actually, it’s not so much that she freezes Bonnie as that she tweaks her own speed up by several orders of magnitude. Bonnie’s lips slow to a crawl, then stop: a stray droplet of spittle hangs glistening in the air in front of them. The light dims to red and the air becomes viscous and very chilly as Huw struggles to control her instinctive threatened-mammal response—an adrenaline reflex triggered by verbal attack—and rewinds her memories of the past few weeks (or years, or centuries) to compare them with Bonnie’s tirade.

So, Bonnie harbored uploading fantasies while back in the flesh, but was too weak to go through with it? And Bonnie got rooted by the scheming God-botherers back in Glory City. And Bonnie is righteously pissed off at Huw for, well, multitudinous failings too elaborate and embarrassing to enumerate (because, Huw is forced to admit, they’re mostly genuine).

Huw could just unfreeze him and rant straight back—and good luck with that, right before the court appearance of her life. That’d be the sort of thing the old Huw would do in a split second, because that Huw has made a profession, a career, a life out of grabbing opportunities by both hands and throwing them away as hard as he or she can. But the new Huw, emergent and self-aware after an iterative optimization course delivered via self-TV, is more mature, more forgiving of human weakness, and more than somehow reluctant to faceplank for the hell of it.

So she decides on her move, unfreezes time, and executes.

Unfortunately, iterative optimization delivered via self-TV tends to deliver a bunch of subconscious freight, including a payload of TV tropes that don’t necessarily work in reality quite the way they do on the glass teat, so when she grabs Bonnie and attempts to snog, Bonnie startles and pulls away, and the animatronic plush law academy unbalances and starts flapping and rawking. “Hey!” says Bonnie, “if you think you can shut me up with such a transparent manipulative gambit, you’ve got no fucking—”

“But I’m not, I—”

“I’ve had enough! That’s it! I’m outta—”

“I’m sorry?”

That shuts Bonnie up. He stares at her goggle-eyed. “Would you mind repeating what you just said?” he asks after a few seconds.

“I said,” Huw says, “I’m sorry. I take your point, and you’re entirely justified, and I’ve been a pain in the ass, and I’m sorry.”

“Uh.” Bonnie looks at the parrot. “Are you recording this? Because I’d like a copy.”

“Rawk! Witness deponeth not! Rawwwk!”

“When this is over,” Huw says, “I’d like to get away from here for a bit, hole up with you somewhere nice, and work out whether we maybe have a future, or just a fling, or something in between. How does that sound?”

Bonnie rubs his chin. There is a sparkle in his eyes. “After all this tsunami of shit, you’re asking me on a