Rapture of the Nerds

therapy. He’s a veteran, after all. A veteran with a scorching case of posttraumatic stress disorder (self-diagnosed). It’s not fair.

He picks up another lump of clay, kneads it, dipping his fingers into the water with a practiced, unconscious gesture, working the water into the clay. He’s complained to the cloud, of course, but they assured him that he checksummed correctly—that is, the body they’ve built for him is the body he left with, functionally speaking. The inarguable and obvious fact that this body is different in a very significant way is of no moment to the cloud. Checksums don’t lie.

Huw pats and squeezes the clay into shape and thunks it dead bull’s-eye center into the middle of his wheel. He wets his hands again, rocks back so his tailbone is well behind him and his sitz bones are well beneath him, braces his elbows on his thighs, and makes ready to ruin another pot.

“Give it a rest already, will you?” Bonnie says from behind him. He doesn’t startle, because he’s sensed her presence for some minutes, every since she slipped into his pottery. Technically it isn’t off-limits to her, but no one apart from Huw can really feel comfortable in the narrow space with its high shelves. There’s nowhere to sit or stand apart from his wheel, and everything is covered with dried clay-dust that is hungry for hair, clothes, and skin on which to stick. So Bonnie usually hangs out in the house or walks around the valleys while Huw’s wasting clay and cursing the fates.

Huw feels somehow honor-bound to scold Bonnie for interrupting him, but the truth is that he’s quite grateful to her for giving him an excuse to down tools. So he spins on his stool and stands, putting himself right up against her. (The only way two people can stand up in his pottery at once is if they’re willing to breathe each others’ exhaust streams.)

“Fine,” he says. “Let’s get some air.”

Bonnie slips her fingers into his as they step outside, letting the pottery door squeak and slam shut with a dusty bang. “You just need practice,” she says. “Or possibly rest. In any event, it’s nothing to get upset about.”

“Easy for you to say. Your body works.” What’s more, Bonnie’s upgraded, because she’s not trying to square the circle between a lifetime of techno-asceticism and a newfound love of the cloud; she’s an unabashed transhuman on a meatvacation. She’s got the unobtanium in her bones, the eyes that can see into the infrared and detect environmental toxins, true love, and flop sweat at a hundred meters. She’s got a metabolism that politely discards any calories it doesn’t need in neat little poos that smell like roses. She’s got a peripheral nervous system that she can dial up in moments of crashing orgasm, and tamp down in moments of crashing boredom. Her body doesn’t just work, it performs. Huw pretends not to notice this.

“Oh, yours works just fine, Huw, where it counts. Listen, you’ve had your consciousness extracted from its biosubstrate, forked thousands of times, run in parallel, diffed and merged, and hauled through millions of subjective years while trying to save the universe—sorry, solar system. Then it was decanted back into an artificial, assembled substrate, with limitations that you specified, and now it’s got a few wrinkles to solve. What’s so surprising about that? If you want to throw pots, just ask your mum to bake you some pottery firmware. But stop moping and moaning. That’s not what I signed up for.”

She’s probably right. Huw knows there’s no meaningful difference between running a clayworking app that someone else wrote and a clayworking app that was algorithmically derived from a digital representation of his headmeat. But there’s a principle at stake. He can’t say what principle exactly, and he suspects that Bonnie would clobber him if he got into an argument about it with her, so he changes the subject.

“Sorry, love, you’re right. What have you been up to? Anything nice? Want to do something together today, then?”

“Arguing with missionaries, mostly. Cloud-botherers have been ringing your doorbell all week while you’ve been hiding out with the clay.”

That’s a new thing since the last time he had a body: Cloud-botherers going door to door, pressing innocents with uninterruptable sermonettes about the miraculous life that awaited all if we’d only listen to reason and take the transcendence treatment. Bonnie loathed them because she felt they put the whole movement in a bad odor with the punters. With friends like these, who needs enemies? she’d explained when he asked. No one likes a door-to-door missionary. She quite enjoyed arguing them to a standstill, and viewed it as a service to the cause, since a missionary arguing with her was a missionary who wasn't bothering the neighbors.

“Everyone needs a hobby,” he says. “Converted any of them yet?”

She doesn't say anything.

“You didn’t,” he says.

“Well, only a little. She was such a silly thing, one of the newly reincarnated, and all her arguments for uploading were really daft. I had her in for some tea, and she stayed for hours. Came back the next day to say I’d changed her mind, and she was going to work to show people why they shouldn’t disembody.” Bonnie shrugs. “I guess some people just aren’t happy unless they’ve got a cause.”

“But you got rid of them?” Huw asks.

“Yes, it’s safe to come out now.”

Huw glances at the window. It’s afternoon, and the light will be fading before long. Which means it’s time to clear up, wash up, and think about fixing some dinner. “I’m just about through here,” he says. “Put the kettle on? I’ll be through in a quarter of an hour.”

Bonnie heads for the house, leaving Huw to the mundane routine of cleaning up and shutting the pottery—the trouble with real clay is that you can’t hit Save and expect it to still be malleable tomorrow—and check that the kiln has enough fuel. He washes thoroughly to get the reddish powder off his hands and arms, then latches the door behind him and ambles, whistling tunelessly, through the kitchen garden toward the back door.

Bonnie is in the kitchen, slaving over a hot reactor. Huw may have previously banished electricity from his home, but Bonnie has other ideas, and some domestic give-and-take—or push-and-shove—has resulted in her installing a fuel cell system and some bizarre extreme cooking tech in the niche where once a mechanical refrigerator had whirred. The reactor isn’t radioactive, but given enough energy and random garbage to break down, it can brew up just about any biomolecular soup she orders. Right now she’s trying to get the damn thing to cough up a prefabricated megatherium steak, but judging from the amount of cussing, something is persistently going wrong. “This festering pile keeps suggesting alternatives,” she says as Huw closes the door. “Why would anyone want to eat koala? They’re saturated with eucalyptus oil. ...”

“Maybe it thinks you’ve got a cold?” Huw asks. “Hey, you’re not subscribing to a Plague of the Month club?” There are some aspects of historic reenactment that are too gross even for Huw.

“No. A-choo!” Bonnie rubs at her nose. “Oh dear.”

“It’s probably hay fever.”

“I’ll have to get my immune system tweaked again. Ech. Do you feel like peeling some spuds?”

So it is that Huw is up to his armpits in cold water, scrubbing (he doesn’t hold with that peeling fetish) a bunch of wholesome organic home-grown potatoes when the doorbell rings.

“I’ll get it—” Bonnie is off while Huw is still dripping. “—you, you fucker!”

“Wotcher, chick,” says a cheery, familiar, and utterly unwelcome voice. “Is His Ambassadorship available?”

Huw palms a couple of oversized pink fir apples in one hand and grabs the cast-iron poker from its spot by the stove. “Ade,” he says as he heads for the front hall, “the embassy is closed. Go away.”

“You what? And here was I, thinking you’d like your bike back!” Ade is leaning against the inside of the front door, one arm wrapped around Bonnie’s shoulders: Bonnie’s expression suggests that she can’t make up her mind whether to kiss him or bite him. Huw can just discern, behind them, the frame of a long-lost friend.

“My bike? That’d be good. But the embassy is still closed.” Huw leans against the passage wall, the poker lowered. He has Ade’s number: knows how to deal with him. No violence needed, just a reinforced concrete wall. “You are an absolute arse, Ade. Every time I have run into you, you have comprehensively fucked up my life while making out that it was my fault, and the one time I needed you to get off your behind and do something for all our sakes, you cocked it up. There’s an old saying about never attributing to a conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence. So I hope you can understand that, while