Rapture of the Nerds

still a human and worthy of all that respect and compassion.

Huw begins to cry.

The sound has an odd, hitching quality to it, an irregular whistling that is piped straight out of the ambassador embedded in his virtual windpipe. The sound is so ridiculous that it drags Huw out of his maudlin revelations and sets him giggling. He is Huw, he is still Huw, he will forever be Huw— ambassador or no ambassador, on biological substrate or running on computronium tweezed out of the bones of stars and planets, alive or technically dead.

And what’s more, he will save the fucking universe.

The father-thing sets the heavens whirling. Huw stops them and nudges them around, then sets them spinning again, but with the aesthetic rigor he’s pursued all his life. It’s ascetic, but asceticism is what the cloud needs: when confronted with limitless possibility and potential, the only legitimate response is to voluntarily assume constraint. Free jazz has its place, but it’s interesting only in contrast to the rigid structures in which it is embedded.

The father-thing sets societies in motion, vast parties whose secret engines are petty jealousies, immature appetites, one-upmanship, desperation, and release. Huw puts them at rest and rearranges the seating plan and the DJ’s set list so that the night ends in a moment of transcendent happiness for each and every reveler.

The father-thing shows the cloud and the meatpeople as they are. Huw rearranges them as they could be. What more could the feds want? Not the certainty of eternal harmony, for there is no certainty in this light-cone, but the possibility of harmony, an internally consistent narrative that explains how humanity and its posthuman offspring might someday come to inhabit the galaxy without presenting a clear and present danger to it.

Oh, thinks Huw. Oh, this is it, and the ambassador whistles a happy tune because it is helping him, showing him the worth and the worthiness of the cloud he’d dismissed all his life. I am doing it! Huw thinks. His father-thing is working with him now, not trying to sabotage his work, but using all his knowledge of the feds and of humanity and of the cloud to serve as Huw’s sous-chef.

“Sioux chef?” his father-thing says. “More like Lakota chef, son. We use the whole possibility-space.”

Huw’s dad hasn’t punned at him in a lifetime. It’s a homecoming. Huw works faster.

When the limit is reached, it jars Huw’s self-sense like a long fall to a hard floor, every virtual bone and joint buckling and bending, spine compressing, jaws clacking together. It has been going so well, the end in sight, the time running fast but Huw and father-thing and ambassador running faster, and now—

“I’m stuck,” Huw says.

“Not a problem. We could play this game forever—the number of variables gives rise to such a huge combinatorial explosion that there isn’t enough mass in this universe to explore all the possible states. The objective of the exercise was to procure a representative sample of moves, played by a proficient emissary, and we’ve now delivered that.”

“Hey, wait a minute! ...” Huw’s stomach does a backflip, followed by a triple somersault, and is preparing to unicycle across a tightrope across the Niagara Falls while carrying a drunken hippo on his back: “You mean that was it?”

“Son, do you know how long you were in there?” His dad raises an eyebrow. “You spent nearly a million subjective days shoving around sims, and so did the other billion instances of you that came through the door. If a trillion subjective years isn’t enough for—”

“Hang on, you respawned me? In parallel? Why can’t I remember—?”

“Oh, I just shut ’em all down,” the father-thing says dismissively. “Wouldn’t have done you any good to carry all those memories around, anyway.”

“But you, but you—” Huw has the jitters. “—you genocided me! I’m your son!”

“Don’t worry, each of them lived two thousand seven hundred subjective years that differ from your experience only in the minutiae. In fact, your personality states overlap so closely that you’ll never notice anything missing. I had to prune a bunch of your memories along the way—wouldn’t do for you to try to retain a couple of millennia in detail, the human neural architecture just isn’t up to it—but you’ve got the gist of—”

“Dad!” Huw glares at his father, who is sitting in his recliner looking placidly content with the pocket universe they’ve created outside the imaginary window. “That’s not the point! Those were my memories, and now you’re telling me you’ve cut huge chunks out of them? What about the other people we simulated—?”

“What do you care about them?” his father asks, cheek twitching. “You might as well accept that you’re just a holey ghost. But for what it’s worth, I turned loose the ones who weren’t nonplayer characters. The cloud can sort them out.”

“Dad—” Huw swallows. An ancient, cobwebby sense of deja vu unfolds in the recesses of his mind: He’s been here before, with dad cracking infernally dreadful jokes in an attempt to distract him from doom-laden news. “What’s the outcome?”

“What?”

“Did I pass—?”

His father cups a hand around one ear: “I can’t hear you. What did you say?”

“Did I pass the exam?”

“Did you ...what? Pass the jam?”

“Dad ...”

“What do you think, son?”

“I don’t—” Huw stares at the being that contains a superset of his father and an entire galactic civiliation sitting in judgment over him and his kind, gathering his nerve. “You’re still here. But the Big Zap ... you wouldn’t still be here if it was coming, would you? So it’s not coming. The galactic federation decided to let us alone. We won!”

His father sniffs. “Don’t get your hopes up, son. Everyone dies eventually: individuals, nations, planetary civilizations, galactic federations, universal overminds.”

“But! But-but!”

“I appreciate you’re feeling kind of good right now because you’re right, you just about satisfied the Authority that post-humanity is not, in fact, a malignant blight upon the galaxy. Their satisfaction is conditional, by the way, on the human-origin cloud not changing its mind, pulling on its metaphorical jackboots, and going all SS Death Star supergalactic on the neighborhood: that would be a deal-breaker.” He gives Huw a stern glare. “Don’t get above yourself: ethical stocks can go down as well as up.” He takes a deep breath. “But I must admit that you surprised me back there. In a good way.”

“Bububub.” Huw manages to regain control of his larynx and shuts up momentarily. “What happens now?”

“Now?” David points at the door: “We leave this space. You get to go home again, at least as far as the cloud. Me, I’ve got a starship to catch after I dismantle this embassy: I’m needed three thousand light-years away.” Something approximating a weak smile wobbles onto his father’s face, takes bashful center stage: “We probably won’t meet again.”

“Dismantle the—?” Huw’s brain is still trying to catch up. “No, wait, Dad!” He stands. “You can’t go yet, it’s been fifty years!” His head is full of uncomfortable realization.

“Forty-seven years, four months, nine days, three hours, forty-four minutes, and eleven point six one four seconds, to be precise. And you didn’t write, son, not once. I checked with your mom.”

“But I was—” Huw swallows again. “—being a real dick.” Also, setting the all-time record for the world’s longest adolescent snit, he doesn’t add.

“That’s all right, son.” His dad holds his arms open.

A moment later, Huw is leaning on his shoulder, bawling like a little kid. “I’m too damn old for this.” He sniffs. “I missed you, you know.”

“I do.” His dad pats his back awkwardly. “I was a dick too, if it helps. I had what I thought were plenty good reasons but I didn’t work through the fact that they weren’t good enough for you. I didn’t mean to fuck you