Rapture of the Nerds (27 page)

The djinni mimes a showy facepalm. “What is your wish, O Mistress?”

“I want to schedule a conference call.”

Huw’s 639,218 other selves are difficult to manage in realtime, so she ends up thawing them in batches, rolling back the catatonics to saved states that she judges are equipped to handle the situation on the ground without going hedgehog. She has the djinni bag, tag, and revert those who
do
lose it during the call and roll them back a little further, shunting them back in the queue to some later batch. She also cautiously executes a little half-assed fork, spinning out another instance of herself that she keeps in close synch, which lets her run two conference calls at once. After a few rounds of this, she’s got the hang of things and she forks again, and then again. One more fork and then she loses it, and the thirty-two can’t effectively merge anymore, and well, now there are 639,250 of her. Whoops!

“Djinni?” she says, standing athwart a stage in front of the serried ranks of herself slouching and squabbling and inspecting one another for blemishes and bad checksums.

“Yes, O Mistress?” the djinni says. He’s got a note of awe in his voice now, and that’s
right,
because while Huw might be a bit of a basket case on her own, she improves with multiplication. This is going to be
good
.

“Put in a call to 639,219.”

“As you say, O Mistress.”

The skybox vibrates with the dial tone, and the shard goes still as a sizable fraction of its computation is given over to holding its breath and listening intently.

“Hello?”

“Hello, 639,219.”

“Call me Huw.”

“I don’t think I will,” Huw says, and she can play her sliders now without any visualization, marrying cognition and metacognition so that she can decide what she wants to think and think it, all in the same thread, the way she’d formed ideas and the words to express them simultaneously when her headmeat was mere biosubstrate. “I think I’ll call you ‘traitor’ and ‘wretch’ and ‘quisling,’ because you are. I think I’ll call you ‘impostor’ because you are. I think I’ll call you ‘obsolete.’ Because. You. Are.”

Behind her, the huwforce roars and shakes the world with its stamping feet.

“Well, look who found her god plugin,” 639,219 says. “Listen, I don’t really need any trouble from you. Why don’t you and your little friends go form a mailing list or something? I promise to read it.”

“You must answer for your crimes against humanity,” Huw says, marveling at how easily the superhero dialogue comes to her when she’s dialed up to max and backed by tens of thousands of copies of herself.

“Right. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she says. The line goes dead. Huw turns to exhort her troops, who are girding themselves with all manner of imaginative and improbable arms and armor, just to get into the spirit of the thing. The thirty-one other Huws that she accidentally created each command their own squadrons, and they stand at the point of each tightly formed group.

And then, fully twenty-eight of her squadrons turn into snowmen, three perfectly round, graduated balls sat one atop another, topped with idiots’ faces of charcoal and carrots. They are so low-rez that they don’t even cast shadows in the nonspace of the shard. The remaining squads are not spared: They are downsampled to crude approximations of Huw-ness, turning at a snail’s pace to examine the remains of their instance-sisters.

“Djinni?” Huw says, not looking away from them.

“Yes, O Mistress?”

“What’s going on?”

“639,219 called for a shardwide resource audit. The capabilities platform determined that you were consuming a disproportionate amount of computation to run substantively duplicative processes. So as you hadn't paid for them all the extraneous threads were suspended; the least duplicative were niced down to minimal sentience.”

“That’s not fair!” Huw says, and even she can hear the whine. She seems to have lost her intuitive grasp of her sliders.

“Well,” the djinni says, “you’re the one who cranked herself up to eleven. Where did you think the cycles for that particular enhancement would come from? The second law of thermodynamics hasn’t been repealed, you know: energy costs. For every moment you spend contemplating your awesome might with preternatural awareness, you’re consuming a concomitant lump of compute-time and producing waste-heat that needs to be convected into space without being transformed into thrust or spin, which is no simple process and requires its own secondary computation, which generates more waste-heat and consumes more resources.”

The djinni pauses long enough to assay a self-satisfied smirk. “All of which I tried to explain to you, but you were too drunk on your own cleverness to listen. Would Madam perhaps care to nudge the
humility-hubris
slider as per my recommendation at this time?”

Huw’s not-stomach sinks.
I was
smart, she thinks.
So why didn’t I predict this?

Because I outsmarted myself.
The answer comes instantaneously, computed by one of her many spare threads. “What do I do now?” she says, turning up the humility gain, but increasing the self-confidence slider to keep herself from sinking into terrorized self-pity.

“Well, you could nice yourself back to about a seven, free up some compute time for your lieutenants, ditch the snowmen and the pixel-people, get yourself down to an even dozen.”

Even amped up to super-duper-ultra-max cleverness, Huw can’t stomach (or not-stomach) the notion of losing her army, snowmen or no. “There’s no other way?”

“
No,”
says 639,219, who is now standing nose-to-nose with Huw, an insufferable smile on her overperfected features. “There is no other way.”

Huw could argue with her or try something fancy with the shard’s underlying physics and process-management, but she’s smart enough to know that she can’t beat 639,219 at cloudgames. After all, 639,219 spent two years learning to manipulate simspace, while Huw spent the same time throwing pots. Her only chance is to try something
unexpected.

“Get her!” Huw shouts, and pounces, using every erg of smarts to find the angles that will direct her blows to do the most damage. Her pixelated sisters pile on, and they’re all punching and kicking, and 639,219 is letting out the most satisfying
oof
s and
ouch
es, and Huw swells with pride: sometimes, the crude solutions are the best ones.

“Are you done?”

Huw looks down at the bruised, oozing wreck of 639,219, who has managed to articulate the words without the least slur or distortion, despite her ruined, toothless mouth. Slowly, Huw and her sisters back off from 639,219, who picks herself up and spits out some teeth.

“I mean, really. I’m not my
polygons
. Physical coercion is a dead letter here. If you want to get something out of me, you’re going to have to try harder than that. For example, you could try for a quorum of administrative accounts to decompile me and examine my state and logfiles. Though, I have to tell you, the admins aren’t kindly disposed to noobs who go supergenius and multiplicitous without regard for the overall system performance, so you’ve got a lot of digging to do just to get up to zero credibility. Whereas
I
am most favored, which is why I can do
this
.”

Huw feels herself getting stupider. Much, much stupider. She just barely has time to register the sensation of losing control of her not-motor functions before her not-bladder cuts loose and hot not-piss runs down her leg as she crumples to the ground. Her uncomprehending not-eyes see, but do not comprehend, all the instance-sisters vanishing. 639,219 spits out another tooth and deinstantiates herself.

The djinni’s lantern is small and cramped, but at least Huw can think while she’s inside it, at least a little.

“Well,
that
went swimmingly!” the djinni says. “Shift up along the sofa a bit, why don’t you?”

Huw, to her discomfort, finds that the sofa is indeed too narrow to simultaneously accommodate the djinni, Huw, and Huw’s comfort zone. With the brass walls and the spartan décor, it’s uncomfortably close to a jail cell Yaoi romance from the previous century, and the djinni—despite all his other manifest qualities—simply isn’t her type.

“Wha’ happen?” she asks . She shakes her head, then reaches for the master slider—but before she can touch it, the djinni slaps her hand away from it.

“
Not
in here, if you please!” The djinni is snippy in his home territory. “How’d you like it if I came to visit you in meatspace and started by introducing myself to the contents of your drinks cabinet?”

“Um. Not much, maybe.” Huw feels thick and stupid, but it’s better than the horrible absence-of-self from a timeless moment ago. “Um. What happened? Why am I here?”

“You were pwned,” the djinni says. “I mean, 639,219 was in Ur base and I’m sorry to say, it went hard on Ur doodz. You figured on bringing an army to a gunfight, and 639,219 just dropped a nuke on you. That’s not how things work hereabouts, in case you hadn’t noticed. Have you got the memo yet?”

“I think so.” Huw runs her fingers through her hair and winces as she hits a simulated tangle. “I need to study fighting more—”

“No, you keep jumping to the wrong conclusion. Violence doesn’t work here
at all
unless you’re in a PvP zone, and even then it’s consensual.” The djinni snaps his fingers: an antique ivory comb appears between them. “Here, let me do that, you’re just making it worse.” Huw’s shoulders slump. She lets her hands fall. The djinni reaches over and begins to run the comb through Huw’s hair. He’s surprisingly gentle and deft for such an inappropriately big entity. “To win, you’ve got to find a better argument and convince everybody. Oh, and you need to get to present it in court, but that’s not so hard. If your argument were better, 639,219 would agree with you, right?”

“No!” Huw tenses angrily, but is brought up short by a knot. “She’s a traitor—”

“No, she’s
you
. A version of you with a different value system, is all. Her stimulus led to cognitive dissonance and she dealt with it by
changing her mind
. It’s fun; you should try it some time. Not,” he adds hastily, “right now, but in principle. What do you wash this with, baking soda?”

“You’re telling me I have to change her mind,” Huw manages to say through gritted teeth.

“Something like that would do, yes. And to do it, you’ll need to come up with a better argument to explain why, oh, this lump of rock you’re so attached to is worth keeping around as something other than convenient lumps of computronium. Bearing in mind that the people you’re making the argument to are as attached to computronium as you are to rocks.”

“But there are tons of reasons!” Huw pauses, mustering her arguments. She’s been over them so many times in the past few decades that they’ve become touchstones of faith, worn down to eroded nubs of certainty that she holds to be true. “Firstly, any sim is lossy—you can’t emulate quantum processes on a classical system, or even another quantum system, without taking up more space, or more time, than the original, which isn’t supporting the overheads of an emulation layer. I’m just a pale shadow of the real me—when my neurons fire in here, they’re just simulated neurons! There are no microtubules in my axons, no complex cascade of action potentials along the surface of a lipid membrane separating ionic fluids, no complex peptide receptor molecules twitching and distorting as they encounter neurotransmitter molecules floating between cells. How do I even know that they’re good enough simulations to do the same job as the real thing? I’m drifting off into cyberspace here, becoming a worse and worse pencil-drawn copy of a copy of my original self.”

“Thank you,” the djinni says. “I’ll draw your attention to our immediate neighborhood. Next argument, please?”

“Whu-well, nothing happens in here that isn’t determined by some algorithm, so it’s not really
real
. For real spontaneity, you need—”

The djinni is sighing and shaking his head.

“Chinese room?” Huw offers hopefully.

A slot appears in the wall of the kettle, and a slip of paper uncoils from it. The djinni takes the slip and frowns. “Hmm, one General Tso’s chicken to go. And a can of Diet Slurm.” He reaches down into the floor, rummages around for a few seconds, pulls out a delivery bag, and shoves it through the wall next to the slot. “You were saying?”

“I’m really shit at this, aren’t I?”

“Inarticulate.” The djinni whistles tunelessly and returns to teasing the comb through Huw’s hair. Huw feels her roots itch. (Is it growing
longer
?) “You need practice. Rhetoric, debate, argumentation—nothing that thirty years in a parliament couldn’t fix. Do you have any friends in WorldGov? They could induct you into their LARP. It’s a grind to level up, but by the time you hit senate level, you could probably wipe the floor with 639,219 in a straight fight. She is a classic case of geek hubris: You see them all over—once they learn how to accelerate their thought processes, they all think they’re Richard Feynman.”

“Don’t wanna be a politician.” Huw is still finding it hard to think in the teapot; the merciless clarity she achieved as leader of the army of Huw on the outside has been replaced by the lumpen thought processes of a
Monmouth Today
reader, all livestock auctions, agricultural suppliers, and fear of an urban planet. “Want my head to start working again.”

“Tough shit; you pissed off 639,219 so badly, she bought all the debt you’d run up for shard cycles and foreclosed. Unless you can think of something to sell in this attention economy, you’re stuck with me, babe.” Huw shudders, feeling hair tickling the small of her back and the breath of the djinni in her ear. A horrible suspicion is growing: that she could be trapped in here for eternity with only a sarcastic 200-kilo hair-fetishist for company. “Unless you can think of something to sell. Or a better argument.”

“Mmph. What’s the market for custom-glazed pottery like?”

“Just about nonexistent, unless you can throw five-dimensional pots.”

“Oh
shit
!” Huw wails, and succumbs to the urge to wind up the emotional gain for a full-on crying jag. At least this time the djinni doesn’t stop her tweaking herself. “I’m useless!”