Rapture of the Nerds

date?”

Huw shrugs, trying to get the parrot to sit still on her shoulder. “Why not? There’s always a first time.”

Bonnie takes a deep breath. “You’ve got a galactic federation to convince first. If you don’t succeed, date’s off. How about that?”

“I can live with that.” Huw manages to smile, despite a tremulous feeling that she nearly fucked her whole life up by accident. “Well, technically not, but you know what I mean. Where’s the courtroom?”

“Over there.” Bonnie points at a blank wall. “You ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.” She squares her shoulder. “I don’t see a—”

A door emerges from the surface of the wall: classically proportioned, paneled, pillars to either side. “Go break a leg,” says Bonnie as Huw steps toward it.

“Hello, Dad,” Huw says, stepping into the sim. “You’re looking well.”

The old man—David, her dad—has manifested in a personsuit that approximates his earthly appearance with a few years tacked on. He wears modestly simulated clothes of modest cut and modest style. His mustache is a little unkempt and has little shoots of gray mixed in with the gingery brown.

“Huw,” he says, “what have they got you wearing?”

Huw looks self-consciously at his party outfit, which is computed in such obsessive detail that it practically strobes. He shrugs. Then he notices—he’s a he again. Why not? Gender’s just a slider, just like everything else. Someone or something’s slid it malewards, at that razor-sharp moment when Huw crossed over from there to here. The tailored suit has sized to fit, but it’s tailored for a slim, young womanly shape, and Huw is back to his gently spread-out, unkempt male shape. This strikes him as a dirty trick, a bit of cheap back-footery, but no one ever said the feds were fair. They don’t need to be fair. They have time-traveling, star-powered lasers. And of the legal-minded parrot there is no sign: he’s on his own.

“Nothing to do with me,” Huw says. “Psyops from the naked apes, to be honest. How’s life among the superbeings, then?”

“Better than you can imagine. Literally. You haven’t the sensory apparatus or the context for it.”

“Well, that’s pretty convenient,” Huw says. “It’s the 3.0 version of ‘You’ll understand when you grow up.’”

“What’s the 2.0?”

“‘If you have to ask, you can’t understand.’ Or maybe, ‘Ask your mother’. All of which is as convenient as anything. Whatever happened to, ‘If you can’t explain it, you don’t understand it yourself?”

“A good general principle, but it’s not dispositive. Not here. Some things are genuinely transcendent. Some things inhabit a physics that you can’t access. Sorry if that’s not very satisfying. Sometimes the truth is a pain in the arse.”

“Right, so you can’t explain how you are. Can you explain what comes next? The prep team were a little fuzzy on this one. Are we meant to build a world now or something?”

Huw’s father looks uncomfortable. “Something like that. You and I are about to play God. We’ve got a little worldbuilding kit—” He points out the window of the small study they’re sat in. Huw realizes that they’re in another modest, slightly blocky sim of his father’s old study, where Huw had been forbidden to tread as a boy, and into which he had sneaked at every opportunity. Out the window, where there should be iron gray Welsh sky and the crashing sea, there is, instead, a horizon-spanning skybox hung with ornament-sized pieces of reality, hung in serried ranks: trees, houses, buildings, people, livestock, CO2, rare earths, bad ideas, literary criticism, children’s books, food additives, tumbleweeds, blips, microorganisms, lamentable fashion, copy editors’ marks, pulsars, flint axes, cave drawings, mind-numbingly complex mathematical proofs, van art, mountains, molehills, uplifted ant colonies.

Huw sees now that it had been a mistake to think of this as a low-powered sim. This sim—and his identity in it—consumes more compute-time than anything he’s ever seen, than everything he’s ever seen combined, but it doesn’t waste any of it on fancy graphics and fanciful landscapes. The feds’ court system uses its might to be as comprehensive as possible, to encompass every conceivable significant variable. Huw’s consciousness has expanded, somehow, to take all of it in. Not by running in parallel, or by running at higher speed, but by running differently, in a way that he can’t explain or understand. But it’s there, and he can’t deny it.

“So those are the game tokens, and we’re the players, and what, we set up a model train diorama and see how it runs?”

“It’s not the worst analogy,” his father says. “But I can tell you think that this is a trivial way of settling important issues. The federation isn’t callous. It recognizes the gravity of wiping out entire civilizations, entire species. It does so only when it has a high degree of certainty that the species in question is apt to reject any social contract that involves managed resource consumption.”

“So if they think we’re likely to pig out at the galactic buffet, they’ll wipe us out? They’re interstellar eco- cops?”

“Yes, but again, without the gloss of triviality you put on the explanation. There’s one reality, and we all inhabit it. You know there are physical limits to how much computation you can do with a universe? To date, it’s managed only 10122 quantum operations on roughly 1090 bits registered in quantum fields; the entire future of the Stelliferous Era will raise that by, at most, only six to nine orders of magnitude—and a lot of the universe will be off-limits to us due to cosmological expansion. So every civilization must learn how to manage its resources peacefully, without pursuing infinite growth—or we face a Malthusian catastrophe in the deep future. The universe must either come under a peace agreement or dissolve into war. If they let one rogue planet-bound species through in this era, they risk a conflict that destroys galaxies. We are playing the very longest, deepest game, and the federation will do everything they can for peace.”

“Including genocide.” Huw feels the slight spiritual lift he used to get whenever he rhetorically outmaneuvered his father.

“Yes,” his father says. “Including that.” The old bastard robs Huw of his satisfaction with the simple acknowledgment. “But as little as possible, and not without due deliberation beforehand. Look at it this way: If I handed you the keys to a time machine, wouldn’t you feel duty-bound to assassinate Hitler in his crib? If not, why not? How could you justify not preventing tens of millions of deaths by taking preemptive action? They don’t want to exterminate us; that’s why we’re holding this hearing. But you need to demonstrate at least some minimal redeeming features. The ability to get into art school instead of growing up to be a tyrant, say.”

“So we lay out our model train set.”

“We do, laying out the pieces as optimally as either of us can imagine. You get a veto over every placement. We set out every element that either of us believes to be of moment—every idea, every personality, every thought, every celestial body—and, having built that best of all possible worlds, we examine the interaction of all these elements, and decide, together, whether the outcome that emerges from all those parts rubbing up against one another is a net benefit to the universe and law-abiding, resource-sharing inhabitants.”

“That sounds perfectly ridiculous,” Huw says, but there’s something in his newly expanded consciousness that whispers, What a reasonable way to sort all this out. “And you’ve messed my head up too. How can that be—?” What? Fair? Reasonable? Right? All concepts that slide off the galactic scale of the thing like sweat dribbling down an ass-crack.

“It’s the smallest change we could make. You’re intact enough to still credibly claim to be you. When we’re done, if it’s still material, you can change it back.”

Huw looks around. “How long do we have?”

“Six days.” Dad doesn’t crack a smile. “But time’s kind of elastic in here.”

“Six—” Huw glares at him. “Where’s the Holy Ghost, wise guy?”

David looks innocent. “What, you want spooks? Design them yourself, you’ve got the capabilities.” And Huw realizes—or rather, an extension of Huw’s awareness that he wasn’t previously conscious of realizes—that he does, indeed, have the ability to conjure up the ghosts of anyone who has ever lived, or might have lived. In this courtroom he is, in fact, embedded in Federov’s rapture, the ghost in the machine at the end of time. But it’s a treacherous and precarious kind of omnipotence: if he makes a misstep, he could be responsible for the extinction of humanity.