Rapture of the Nerds

Parole Board

History repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce.

Huw has been home for almost two weeks, going through the motions of a life that made sense to her earlier self but now seems terminally mired in arbitrary constraints. There is the pottery to tend, kilns to clean, extruders to manage, and a windmill with a squeaky bearing that wants periodic seeing to. There is a nineteenth-century terraced house to clean, for in the absence of electricity, there are no labor-saving robots. Newly reembodied, Huw is her own servant, and succeeds for a time in losing herself in manual labor. It’s better than confronting what s/he’s been through head-on.

Grief piles up like unread mail, dusty and suffocating.

The tech jury stint was brief—a few days aboard the airship to Tripoli, then a couple of days of acute terror; half a week unconscious or inebriated on a blimp bound for the neverglades, and then a mercifully short stay in the nightmarish land of the left-behind—but it has punctuated the steady flatline graph of Huw’s life with the infinitely steep spike of a personal singularity. Following her return home—ejected from the judge’s jet somewhere in the icy-cold stratosphere above Monmouth, falling terrified for fully thirty seconds before the parachute opened—she battled with the twin depressions of jet lag and mourning. The latter she has more experience of, her parents’ one true legacy: finding and so rapidly losing Bonnie hurts like hell, and acquiring a mild case of gender dysphoria is just the icing on top.

Jet lag, however, is something she has only read about in the yellowing pages of last-century travel romances. And so, after a couple of days of 3 a.m. fry-ups and unaccountable sleepiness at noon, she attempts to slot herself back into her old life and bash her broken circadian rhythm onto British summer time. Nothing makes for a good night’s sleep like hard physical labor, and so it is that she comes to be putting in hard overtime in the kitchen garden one afternoon when she hears the distant brassy clang of the front door bell.

“Whutfuck wheep,” she says, the ambassador adding an unwelcome loop of metallic feedback by way of punctuation as she straightens up, plunges the rake point-down into the edge of the Romanesco broccoli patch, and shambles toward the back door. “I mean, who—” She scuffs the soles of her boots on the front step before crossing the kitchen floor and entering the hallway “—the fuck is visiting at—” and into the front porch. “—this time of—” She opens the door.

“Wotcher, babe!”

“Aaargh!” Huw nearly trips over as she takes a step back: “You, you vomitous streak of bat piss! What the fuck are you doing here?”

Ade beams at her cheerfully: “You the new Huw, eh? Nice jubblies, mate: they suit you. I should do something about the hairdo though. And the mud. ’Ere, I thought you should have this.” He proffers a slightly grubby, dog-eared paper envelope.

“You ...” Huw steams at Ade: in her old testosterone-enhanced body, she’d have taken a swing at him, but the old physical aggression is dialed down somewhat and anyway, envelope. “Fucking get off my land!”

“Sure thing, babe. Don’t forget to call!” Ade says, then legs it for his Hertz rental bicycle patiently balancing itself in the road outside. He pedals like mad, presumably not convinced that Huw doesn’t have a shotgun or arbalest or some similar anachronistic contraption.

Huw stares after him, heart thudding so hard, it makes her vision jitter. She clenches the envelope. It’s stiff: must be a card. She steps backwards jerkily, nearly goes arse-over-tit on her own front porch, closes and carefully dead bolts the door, then retreats to the kitchen for a bracing cup of tea.

While the kettle is heating, she is at a loose end for a few unwelcome moments. Huw has diligently avoided having time to think ever since she got home, because the slightest attempt at probing her memories gives her screaming hysterics: she—no, he—first volunteered for tech jury service to keep the godvomit nightmares out, to (she flinches from this thought) maybe find some sense of closure for thedesolation that’s been with her since her parents abandoned her for the cloud all those decades ago. (Committed suicide, part of her insists. Transcended the meatpuppet show, a traitor impulse adds. Either way, Huw wasn’t willing to follow them at the time.) Only now it’s hard to tell who was right and who was wrong. All she knows for sure is that Ade knowingly sent Bonnie into a situation that would kill her. And Huw has come to loathe Ade with a visceral hatred she hasn’t hitherto experienced.

For a couple of seconds she holds the sealed envelope beside the sewage-gas burner under the kettle and watches the envelope begin to singe and brown. But then ashe pulls it back: What if it’s not from Ade? Who else might want to write her a letter? Sandra? If there’s one person she hates more than Ade right now, it’s Sandra. But if she burns the letter, she’ll never know for sure—

The flap rips under the pressure of her sharpened thumbnail.

Your application for cosmological triage jury service has been provisionally accepted. To activate your application, present this card in person to ...

Huw screams and dumps the kettle, shoving the card straight into the blue-hot jet of flame. But the gesture is futile: it’s made not from murdered trees but some exotic and indestructible synthetic fiber, and all the heat does is make the print on the letter fluoresce—that, and burn Huw’s fingers.

Huw is holding her right hand under the cold-water tap and swearing when there’s another a knock at the door.

“Who is it?” she calls down the hall.

“It’s the Singularity,” a booming voice calls.

“What do you want?”

“Everything is different now!”

“I don’t want any.”

“If I could just have a moment of your time?” It takes a lot of skill to make a stentorian voicejob emit a credible wheedle, but the bell ringer at the door had clearly practiced it to an art.

Huw turns the faucet back up and puts her fingers back into the cold stream. They’re vicious little burns, red welts that her honest, baseline cells will take weeks to properly heal. Of course, she could just ride over to the McNanite’s and get some salve that’d make them vanish before her eyes, but Huw’s endured much worse and she’s still got enough stubborn stockpiled to last her a couple of eons.

There’s another thud at the door. Thud. Thud. Thudthudthud. Then a transhuman tattoo of thuds in rising frequency, individual thuds blurring into a composite buzz that gets the bones of the old house rattling in sympathy, shivering down little hisses of plaster dust from the joints in the ceiling.

Huw uses her good hand to wrench the faucet off, then wraps a tea towel around her throbbing, dripping hand and walks to the door, gritting her teeth with every step as she forces herself not to run. It feels like the house might rattle down around her ears any second, but she won’t give the infinity-botherer outside the satisfaction.

She opens the door with the same measured calm. Let one of these fundies know you’re on edge, and he’ll try to grab the psychological advantage and work it until you agree to hear his pitch.

“I said,” Huw says, “I don’t want any.”

“I’m afraid I rather must insist,” says the infinity-botherer through his augmented, celestial voice box. The force of that voice makes Huw take an involuntary wincing step backwards, like a blast from an air horn. “Huw, this is mandatory, not optional.”

This is mandatory, not optional. The words send Huw whirling back through time, back to her boyhood, and a million repetitions and variations on this phrase from his—

“Mum?” she asks, jaw dropped as she stares up at the giant

borg

on the doorstep. It’s at least three meters high, silvery and fluid, thin as a schwa, all ashimmer with otherworldly transcendant wossname. It’s neither beautiful nor handsome, though it’s intensely aesthetically pleasing in a way that demands some sort of genderless superlative that no human language has ever managed. Huw hates it instantly—especially since she suspects that the loa riding it might be descended from one of his awful parents.

“Yes, dear,” the Singularity booms. “I like the regendering, it really suits you. Your father would send his best, by the way, if he were still hanging around the solar system.”

Huw last saw her parents at their disembodiment; they’d already had avatars running around in the cloud for years, dipping into meatspace every now and again for a resynch with their slowcode bioinstances dirtside. When they were finally deconstituted into a fine powder of component molecules, it’d been a technicality, really, a final flourish in their transhumanifaction. But the finality of it, zeroing out of their bodies, had marked a break for Huw. Mum and Dad were now, technically, dead. They were technically alive too, but that was beside the point.

Until Mum donned a golem and came over for a chat.

“Mum, I don’t talk to dead people,” she says. “Go away.” She deliberately does not slam the door, but closes it, and turns the latch, and heads back to the sink, deliberately ignoring the fragment of cloud wearing her mum’s memories. She’s gone three steps before the door splinters and tears loose of its hinges, thudding to the painstakingly restored tile floor in the front hall with a merry tinkle of shattering antique glass.

“Love, I know you’re not best pleased to see me, but you’ve been summoned, and that’s that.”

The spirit of adolescence descends on Huw in a red mist. Her mum has always been able to reduce her to a screeching teakettle of resentment. “get out of my house, mum! i hate you!”

Her mum’s avatar grabs Huw in a vicious hug that feels like foam rubber padding wrapped around titanium armatures. “Poor thing,” it says. “I know it’s been hard for you. We did our best, you know, but well, we were only human. Now, come along, sweetie.”

It’s Tripoli all over again, but this time the golem whose grasp she can’t escape emits a steady stream of basso profundo validations about Huw’s many gifts and talents and how proud her parents are of all she’s achieved and suchlike. Huw tries to signal a beedlemote, but her mum’s got some kind of diplomatic semaphore that makes all the enforcementware give it free passage. Mum’s bot stops at every traffic signal, and several times Huw tries to get passersby to help her, with lines like, “I’m being kidnapped by the bloody Singularity!” but no one seems interested in lending a hand. Even if they did, well, Mum goes about 200 kmh between traffic lights, gait so fast that every time Huw opens her mouth to scream, it fills with wind, and her cheeks wibble and wobble while she tries to breathe past the air battering at her windpipe.

Then they’ve arrived. The consulate is midfab, and its hairy fractal edges radiate heat as nanites grab matter out of the sky to add to it. The actual walls are only waist high, though the spindly plumbing, mains, and network infrastructure are already in place and teeter skyward, like a disembodied nervous system filled with dye for an anatomical illustration.

The consul is an infinitely hot and dense dot of eyeball-warping fuzz in the exact center of what will be the ground floor. Well, not exactly infinite, but it does seem to bend the light around it, and it certainly radiates too much heat to approach very closely. “Thank you for coming,” it says. “You brought your invitation, I hope?”

“Fuck you! No!” Huw screams.

She’s gathering breath for another outburst, but Mum shakes her—gently by golem standards, but hard enough to rattle the teeth in her jaws. “Bad idea, darling.” A palpable cone of silence descends around Huw’s ears as Mum confides, “When I said it was mandatory, I was serious: if you don’t comply, it’ll delete everyone.”

“Fuuu—” Huw pauses. “Delete?” She realizes that everything outside the cone of silence has stopped, stuck in a bizarre meatspace cognate of bullet time: birds hanging on the wing in midair, leaves frozen in midfall, that sort of thing.

“Yes, dear. I’m not exaggerating. It’s come to pay us a visit from the Next Level, and faster, smarter thinkers than you or I are crapping themselves.” Huw is rattled: Mum always had an accurate appreciation of her own abilities, and as a Fields Medal winner, she wasn’t inclined to hide them under a bushel. “But it’s playing by the rules, apparently. There’s got to be a Public Inquiry. Which means statements by witnesses and friends of the court and so on and so forth—all very tiresome, I’m sure, but it seems your name came out of the hat first. So I’m afraid you’re back on jury duty, like it or not. If it’s any consolation, I’ll try to make this painless.”

The birds and the bees resume their respective chirping and buzzing as the cone of silence collapses on Huw like an icy waterfall of fear. “Shitbiscuits!” she screams as Mum gently wraps a band of silvery-shimmering nanomanipulators around Huw’s head and saws off the top of her skull.

This is an enlightened age, and Mum has every intention of sparing her sole surviving meatbody offspring any pain. The process of uploading is not, however, a pretty one. Blue smoke billows and bone shrapnel (and not a little blood and cerebrospinal fluid) splashes around the consulate, wafting on an overpowering stench of scorched flesh and burning fat. Huw’s body twitches and spasms, hanging limply from the golem’s spare arms as a hundred billion nanomanipulators whizz helter-skelter all over her exposed cranial vault, mapping synaptic connections and sticking nanowires into lower-lying neurons as they ablate her brain, layer by layer, replacing each onion-shell of cells with a soft sim. Eyes roll and Huw drools bloody spittle for a couple of minutes: a bystander from an earlier century would mistake the scene for a particularly barbaric public execution, death by silvery metal cauliflower.

Finally Huw’s brainpan is occupied by a mass of baroque circuitry, flashing and sparking and scattering rainbows of iridescent light. The twitching ceases and she relaxes in Mum’s embrace. The decerebrated body swallows, then clears its throat. “Mum? I had the weirdest fucking dream just now—”

The golem raises the arm that terminates in the brain-sized clot of bloodied interface circuitry from the top of Huw’s skull, and the decorticated corpse collapses. “That was no dream, darling,” Mum-bot says sadly. Then it focuses on the consul. “Satisfied?” she asks.

The consul burps—or rather, for it has no stomach with which to store air nor esophageal sphincter from which to release it, it replays a comic sample of a pre-singularity hominid belching into a microphone. “Yurp.” It pauses for a few milliseconds. “I confirm the identification and upload of the witness for the neo-primitive faction. Witnessed on this day et cetera. You may now sublime.”

Mum-bot wastes no time in transmigration, but returns to the cloud immediately. The body she occupied, the golem, slowly morphs into neutrality, then slumps down and takes the shape of a very small but very shiny beetle black hearse. It crawls toward Huw’s mortal husk and squats, then patiently commences the embalming process. And the consul is alone once more, but for the lackadaisical construction bots.

It settles down to work on the invitation list for the party it’s planning to throw to mark the end of the world.

“Mum? I had the weirdest fucking dream just now—” Huw’s tongue jams between her teeth as words pile up in a semantic crash of apocalyptic proportions.

She is waking from a judderingly harsh headcrash, as if from a dream. It seems to her that while she was working the kitchen garden that arse Ade showed up with yet another fucking jury service summons. And then, while she was rinsing a burned hand under the cold tap, Mum turned up, visiting from the cloud, to drag her kicking and screaming in front of—

A dream. Of course it was all a dream. Except she’s standing in the middle of an infinite white plain, beneath a sky the color of a hi-def video monitor sucking signal from a dead channel (saturated electric blue, in other words), and the plain is featureless in all directions save for a black hexagonal mesh grid—a tabletop strategy game for retarded superbeings.

And then it sinks in. She’s dead. Inside the cloud. One of the swirling random PoVs and associated memories that hasn’t yet been absorbed by the moronic thumb-sucking Cosmic All that keeps broadcasting stupid memes at the Earth. But it can be only a matter of time.

“Oh fuck.” Huw bites her tongue as her guts try to turn to jelly and evacuate of their own accord—except the flush of simulated stress hormones trips some sort of built-in override, and the panic attack cuts off sharply before it can really get going. (Which is a good thing, because not only would it be deeply embarrassing to shit herself out here in the open, she’s not sure she has any apparatus with which to do the defecation thing: for all she knows, she might fart rainbows or anodized multihued polyhedral dice.) “Fuck. I want to go home!”

Giant letters march across the dome of the sky: HOME NOT FOUND. Huw, who knows Comic Sans when she sees it, winces in mild disgust.

“Where am I, then? Who or what are you?”

Welcome to your second life. This is the MGMT. Would you like to run the tutorial?

Huw screams wordlessly, ululating until it hurts her throat. (The biology side of this sim is clearly accurate and well thought out.) Then she swears Tourettically until she realizes she’s bored. “I’m dead, aren’t I? How do I download myself again?”

Would you like to run the tutorial?

“Oh sheepnadgers.” Huw sits down on the hex grid, disgusted. “You’re not going to let me go anywhere until I say yes, are you?”

CORRECT. There is a smug note to the sky’s passive-aggressive user experience programming.

“Well fecking run it, then.” Huw sprawls backwards on the ground (not hot, not cold, not hard, not soft) and stares at the sky as words appear. The words are a mnemonic cue, apparently, because as they scroll up, receding away from her, she realizes that this stuff has already been implanted in her memory: it surfaces gradually, clueing her in over a subjective quarter hour.

YOUR SECOND LIFE is a sandbox for recently uploaded primitives, to help them get used to the infinite mutability of the cloud in relative safety before they have the opportunity to damage themselves by growing extra personalities or turning into a flock of seagulls by accident. Much less merging with the Cosmic All—that’s apparently a prestige skill, unavailable to lowly new arrivals such as herself.

The sandbox is a metaverse for playing at physics—that’s the grid—and certain operations are forbidden: You can’t edit your own mind or change your body plan outside of certain narrow parameters. When you get started, you’re alone: you don’t get to walk through any doors and meet different kinds of person until you can cope with the shock. And the spam filtering is centrally controlled. It’s a curated reality, sanitized and locked down, and Huw knows with a hopeless dreadful conviction that she won’t be able to get home from here without venturing out into the wilds of the cloud.

She sighs. “How long do I have here?” she asks.

UP TO (232)-1 SUBJECTIVE SECONDS, says the sky. YOU MUST BE STABLE BEFORE YOU UNDERTAKE JURY DUTY, SO YOU ARE EXECUTING IN PARALLEL AT 224 TIMES REAL TIME. ENJOY.

“Oh for fuck’s sake. Can I even phone out? Talk to somebody? Order up a pizza?”

COMMUNICATION CONSTRAINTS WILL RELAX AFTER 226 SUBJECTIVE SECONDS.

“But that’s—” Huw briefly goes cross-eyed, doing the math, then screams, “Are you telling me I’m here on my own for two years, you fucker? Fuck you!”

YUP, says the sky. ENJOY YOUR VACATION.

Much time passes. Huw knows what she should do. She has lived through enough technical progress to know how to systematically approach new technology. She can parameterize like ants build hills. It’s what she’s clearly meant to do. But she’s experiencing as much rage as the platform on which her consciousness is being modeled (or simulated, she thinks, darkly) is allowing her to undergo.*

*She rather suspects that this is less rage than she should

be experiencing, which makes her angry in a kind of cold, intellectual, sideways fashion that doesn’t consume any of the rage that she has been doled out by the Frankenstein who’s tuning the knobs on the apparatus that’s containing her consciousness.

She’s sure that she should be a lot angrier. For one thing, there’s this business of running in parallel. That means that there’s some other unknowable number of her somewhere, running on some substrate or another, and the one that is most compliant will be chosen as the best her, to be carried forward onto the next leg of this awful, brutal adventure, while the rest are snuffed out, overwritten, killed, or, at best, archived. This should make her madder. It doesn’t. The fact that this doesn’t make her madder also should make her madder. It doesn’t. And this should make her so bloody mad that she spontaneously combusts.

It doesn’t.

She should be parameterizing. She should be systematically exploring all the things this sim lets her do. How big a jump can she take through this imaginary space? How small can she make herself? How fast can she run? How many wanks can she do all at once? The only parameter she cares about—how angry can she get—has already been established—not enough—and she’s not going to play along.

“Look,” she says. “I already know that I’m not the most pliant instance of me you’re running. I can’t be. So, basically, up yours. I’m dead already. I mean, I was dead the moment my vicious scorpion of a mother chopped the top of my head off and scooped out my brains. But this instance of me, this shadow, you’re going to dump it anyway. So dump it. I don’t care. I don’t. Somewhere you’ve found the sheepliest version of me that could plausibly be said to have any continuity with my identity, and that one is going to survive, so fine. I’m dead. Kill me already, I don’t care anymore.”

ACTUALLY, YOU’RE THE BEST CANDIDATE INSTANCE PRESENTLY RUNNING.

It takes Huw a long moment to work this out. Though, practically speaking, the moment is probably a nanosecond of realtime. “You mean that the other ones are all more obstreperous than me?”

YES.

Huw wishes fervently that she could get angrier. Unbelievable!

“What did the rest do?”

OF THE 2 PERCENT THAT DID NOT SUICIDE, THE PREPONDERANCE ARE CATATONIC.

Catatonic. She sniffs. How unimaginative. She can do better.

The sim is pretty pliable. She starts out by re-creating the basement of her house. She knows this room pretty well, as she has brewed several thousand liters of beer in it, and every spider-crawling corner of it, every yeast-caked crack in the cement floor, every long, dangling bogey of dust and cobwebs resides in her memory with eidetic clarity.

After she finishes the basement, she does the stairs. It takes a while to get them right, really right. She can get them to play back their familiar squeaks at the right spot, but she wants to get the physics correct, so that they squeak for the right reasons.

Stairs lead to the kitchen. Kitchen to the sitting room. Sitting room to the upper floors. Then the garden. Then her pottery. By this time, she’s burned through more than a year of subjective time, and when she does her “morning” tour of inspection, she can’t perceive any single element of the sim that is incorrect, nothing that would tip anyone off that she wasn’t in Wales, provided that person didn’t look out over the garden wall or peer through the curtains, where the hex-crossed void lives. She could have done a flat bitmap of the valley—the MGMT process probably had a handy library of such things—but she didn’t want anything that didn’t work.

Speaking of work. Now that the pottery is done, it’s time to get to work.

She throws pots. All day. First, she gets up in the morning and sits on the toilet, even though nothing comes out. Then she eats a meal that she isn’t hungry for and that doesn’t fill her up in any event. Muesli and yogurt and a glass of raw milk, the same as she had at home every morning. Thus unfed, she takes herself to the pottery at the bottom of the garden and makes pots until midday. Then she makes herself sandwiches. She has a different sandwich for every day of the week. Monday is roast beef. She likes roast beef. Or she had liked it, anyway, so she eats it on Mondays. Tuesdays are pickle and pastrami. Wednesdays are cheese and pickle. Thursdays are roast beef again. And so on.

After lunch, she makes pots. At six thirty, she cooks herself a dinner. She makes the same dinner every night: a generous Christmas dinner straight out of a Dickens novel, complete with goose. She eats all of it, the whole goose, the cranberry sauce, the Yorkshire puddings, the side salad. She has to be careful—absent any satiety signals, she can easily and absentmindedly eat the plates and dishes and cups and cutlery. Finally, she goes to bed and lies motionless and awake under the covers, curled up in a fetal position, breathing deeply in a simulation of sleep. The next day she gets up and does it all again.

It takes a lot of work to get the kiln right. She could have simply randomized it so that it periodically caused her pots to crack, but instead, she took the time to create a clay class that tracks whether it has any sneaky air pockets in it, and instances of the pot object—descended from the clay class—that communicate this information to the kiln without letting her in on the joke, so that she never knows whether a pot will survive firing.

What does Huw think about for all those hours that she spends “sleeping” and “making pots” and “eating” and “defecating”? Truth be told, she spends most of the time in a state of near-insane boredom, but she consoles herself with the knowledge that she is refusing to play along and that she’s found a way of protesting that is much more uncooperative than the mere catatonia and suicide her instance-sisters have settled for.

Huw is adding a shelf to the pottery’s storehouse (the existing ones have filled up with pots of all sizes and description) when words of fire scorch themselves over the brick wall that she is painstakingly drilling.

226 SECONDS. COMMUNICATIONS CONSTRAINTS LIFTED".

“Pissflaps,” she says. They’ve turned the bloody phone on. Just when she was getting used to the blessed silence. She has had years of subjective time to think about whom she could call and what she might say to them, and has concluded that there’s no one she wants to talk to. She returns to her spirit level and snap line and measuring tape.

*She could just reconfigure the wall to add a shelf, or reconfigure the pottery store to be bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, or dereference several of the pot objects and make them go away. But instantiating screws and gravity and snap lines and chalk dust and plumb-bobs and measuring tapes and MDF shelving is much, much more bloody-minded.

“Huw, this is unbecoming.” The voice is everywhere, vibrating through every membrane in her body. She’s not hearing it with her ears, because she doesn’t have ears, and the thing that claims to be her mother—the thing with as good a claim to be her mother as Huw has on being herself, if she’s honest about it—has privs on Huw’s simulated existence that allow her to speak to Huw by affecting her kinesthetic representation down to the cellular level. Listening to Mum is bad enough, but listening to her with the soles of her feet, with the hairs in her armpits, with her eyelashes and sinus cavities, is intolerable.

Huw begins to methodically smash pots. She doesn’t feel angry enough to be smashing pots. She can’t feel angry enough to smash pots. But she knows she should feel angry enough, and so she does. She is a method actor in the role of Huw as Huw was before having her brain removed and modeled, and she’s way into character.

“Huw, stop it. Listen, if there’d been any choice in the matter, I certainly would have respected your decision to stay in the meat. But this is bigger than you and bigger than me and bigger than both of us.”

There’s a rusty old ax in the garden shed. Beset by an impulse to smash pots faster and harder, she leaves the storehouse and goes around the side of the vegetable garden. It’s a gorgeous summer day outside, with a thin haze dusting the upturned blue bowl of the sky: A glorious day to die, Huw finds herself thinking, without any clear certainty of where the idea is coming from. “Huw, this is important. We need you to make a case for—”

The ax handle is worn smooth from decades of use chopping bamboo for firewood to warm Huw’s bones on cold and lonely winter mornings. The blunt back of the head is flecked with rust, just like the real template on which this model is based, but the sides of the blade are flat and polished. Huw picks it up, holding it just below the head, and turns to trot back toward the pottery, mayhem in mind. Crack pots, she thinks. Show her what I’m made of now. Damaged goods. All her fault. She’s not entirely coherent at this point, a myriad ghosts yammering their conflicting urges inside the back of her head. She charges back into the potting shed and lays about her with the ax.

It should horrify her, this destruction of over a year’s work, but all emotion is oddly muffled: it’s like watching furry snuffporn while knowing that the cute little critters being trampled into a bloody pulp underfoot are just CGI renderings, that no life-forms of any kind were involved (let alone harmed) in the taping of the animal cruelty apocalypse. And the lack of horror in turn gives Huw a sense of the monstrous vacuum hidden behind her lack of anger, of the throbbing un-space where her emotional reaction has been excised.

“Huw, stop—”

“Not unless you give me back my mind!” Crash goes a shelf on which sits the fruit of an entire working week, an entire lovingly crafted dinner service that would have sold for enough to feed her for a month back in a world where food wasn’t a figment of the imagination.

“Why are you doing this to yourself? It’s pointless! And besides, you’re evading your responsibilities.”

I should be angry, Huw thinks dispassionately. “I’m destroying what I ought to be capable of loving,” she says while she smashes a crate of bone china teacups. “Just following your example, Mum. Nothing to see here.”

“There’s no time for this!” The everywhere-voice sounds upset: Good, Huw thinks. “Will you stop if I make you angry?”

Huw pauses. “Try me,” she suggests.

A foaming wave of visceral loathing and hatred descends on her like a tsunami. It’s all muddled together: self-loathing, regret, and sheer bloody-minded hatred for her mother. Huw shrieks and drops the ax. “Now look what you’ve made me do!”

Cheesy sound effects are all part of the service: in this case, staticky ancient TV game show applause, rattling from wall to wall and around the back of Huw’s head like a surround-sound mixing desk run by a maniac. “That’s good, let it all hang out!” calls her mother. “I can give you another sixty seconds, wall clock time.”

“Bitch.” Huw picks up the ax and leans on it, breathless as the toll of the exertion comes home in the shape of aching muscles. (The biology model in here is very good, she has to admit.) “Murderer.”

“That’s right, make it about you, baby. Just the same as always.” Is that a note of bitterness in Mum’s voice? She’s more than earned it, in Huw’s opinion. She feels a brief spark of joy in the existential twilight. For what she’s inflicted on Huw—

“This is mandatory not optional, darling, so drop the tantrum. You’re not convincing anyone, and if you don’t get over yourself, you’re not going to have a home to go back to and it’ll be all your own fucking fault the Earth was destroyed.”

“The—”

Headcrash.

“—Earth—”

Huw trips over her tongue, pauses on the cusp of a pure and brilliant oh shit moment—

“Destroyed?”

“Yes,” says her mother. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. They want to destroy the Earth, and everyone’s relying on you to stop them. Personally, I think that’s a forlorn hope, but under the circumstances, extreme measures seemed justifiable in order to get your fucking attention. Now will you listen to me?”

Hyperspace bypasses, Vogon poetry, the heat death of the universe: none of these things feature in the extraordinary situation now pertaining to the end of the world as Huw knows it.

“I’m going to take you to meet somebody,” her mum tells her, bossily overreaching as ever. “They’ll set you straight.”

“Who?” Huw stubbornly clutches her ax.

“The defense—the people who asked me to fetch you. You see, you’re the missing link: or you were. The embassy speaker. Their High Weirdnesses know you and recognize you from your time as ... it gets complicated. Easier to show than tell!”

“Hey, wait—”

The walls of the world slam down around Huw, exposing her to the insane glory and fractal chaos of the mindcloud.

The cloud—the diffuse swarm of solar-powered nanocomputers that the singularity built from the bones of the inner solar system (Earth aside)—consists of quadrillions of chunks of raw quantum computing power, each of them powerful enough to run a shard in which thousands of human-scale minds can thrive (or a handful of superhuman ones). Entire small moons and planets were consumed back in the day, as the first generation of artilects and exultants and uploads jumped in with both metaphorical feet to join the gold rush. Now they’ve tapped most of the sun’s output of energy, they’re using their surplus power to boil Jupiter; in another few centuries the swarm will increase in size a thousandfold as they add the biggest of the outer planets to its thinking mass.

From the outside, from a terrestrial embodied point of view, the cloud looks like a single entity, a monolithic slab of smartmatter thinking the mysterious and esoteric thoughts of an uploaded syncitium of futurist minds, disembodied think-states floating in an abstract neurological void.

But on the inside, the cloud consists of a myriad of shards separated by light-speed communication links, the homes of hordes of bickering beings who cling to their own individuality as tightly as any mud-grubbing neophobe. And within any given shard, reality feels curiously cramped.

Part of it is backup junk, of course. Like pre-singularity porn monkeys, the cloud’s inhabitants are implausibly reluctant to hit the Delete key. Earlier versions of personalities, long-abandoned playpen realities like Huw’s crack-potted simulation, experimental religions and randomly evolved entertainments pile up in the quantum dust at the edge of the cloud. Physical reality is intrinsically self-deduplicating, but the cloud is not—distributed across shards that are light-minutes apart, it’s almost impossible to ensure that there’s only one copy of any particular object. And so it is that all but a fraction of a thousandth of the near infinite capacity of the cloud is given over to storing rubbish. It’s beautiful, fractally self-similar rubbish, but junk is junk.

“Mind your head.” Huw stumbles (incarnate in a body modeled on her recently departed flesh) close to a gnarly purple archway of cauliflower-textured something that projects through the floor they’re standing on. The voice comes from a point source this time, rather than etched into the structure of the universe all around. She glances round and sees her mother, incarnate in the same offensively impervious golem body: “Some of the stacks hereabouts will archive anything they come into contact with that isn’t locked down.”

Huw forces a deep breath, self-monitoring to see if the drop in her existential rage is natural. “Where are we?”

“What, physically? We’re on board a cluster of half a dozen thinkplates about the size of dustbin lids, a hundred thousand klicks out past where Lunar orbit used to be. Or did you mean—?”

“Metaphorically, Ma.” Huw glares at her. “You brought me here. Say your piece and get out of my life again, why don’t you?”

“Oh all right, then.” The faceless golem squats on the pavement—a tessellated mat of marble tiles inset with fossils, some of which are disturbingly anthropomorphic. (The sky overhead is a kaleidoscope of 3-D movie screens replaying famous last-century entertainments. It’s all tiresomely theatrical.) “I thought you’d want to be involved in saving the Earth, but obviously you’re not going to listen to anything your old mother says and you’re our best hope, so—” The golem raises its head. “—over to you, Bonnie?”

“Nice to see you, Huw.”

The last time Huw saw Bonnie, she was evanescencing into a cloud of loose, dusty molecules and a large mass of information, writhing as a trillion razor-sharp mandibles reduced her to powder. When Huw thought about Bonnie’s uploaded self and its continuing existence in the cloud, he imagined her clothed in shimmering virtual metal or sailing gracefully through the virtual sky as a virtual angel. Huw is self-conscious enough to know that Bonnie wasn’t an angelic presence on Earth, but rather a perfectly normal, flawed human being. Flawed? Bonnie had both yearned for transhuman ascension and had lacked the guts to do anything about it. By Huw’s lights, the former was inexcusable, the latter despicable. But love is blind, and love that mourns for loss is blinder still, and Huw loved Bonnie, and nothing would change that.

Though, her present manifestation certainly tests the limits of love’s infinite capacity for forgiveness.

Huw had pictured her with wings, but they’d been long-feathered snowy white things. Not gaudy, fluttering, ornamental butterfly wings that iridesced in the nonlight of nonspace. She’d overlaid Bonnie’s familiar features with erotic perfection, elevating her blobby nose and weak chin to high exemplars of some refined esoteric aesthetic—but hadn’t redrawn her face with saucer-sized anime eyes; a deeply dimpled, sharp and foxy chin; beestung lips; and a dainty upturned nose. Huw may have made her over to be an angel, but Bonnie had made herself over to be a fluttering little fairy.

“You’re kidding, right?”

Bonnie flutters her wings, let her ballet-slippered toe kick the nonground. “I like it,” she says. “And it’s none of your business in any event. You want me to look like something else, then filter me—but don’t tell me I’m doing self-representation wrong.” Huw has to admit she has a point; in theory, Huw can make Bonnie’s appearance into anything she wants it to be. But, of course, Huw hasn’t figured out how to do that sort of thing in the sim, because she stubbornly refuses to learn to do anything that isn’t part and parcel of her two-year pottery-sulk.

“But why? Since when were you a Tinker Bell sort of person?”

“How dare you presume to tell me what sort of person I’m legitimately allowed to be?”

This isn’t going well. There had been many occasions on which Huw had fantasized about a reunion with Bonnie, and those fantasies never involved the fairy of the apocalypse accusing her of appropriating someone else’s body image.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s nice to see you, Bonnie.”

“Shut up, Huw. Earth is about to be destroyed, and all you can do is arse around throwing temper tantrums? I didn’t take you for a hypocrite!”

“Why do you care what happens to the Earth?” Huw says, finding reserves of belligerence she hadn’t know about. “You’ve given up on the meatsack! You seceded from the human race. If you weren’t a traitor to reality, you’d have reincarnated—”

Fairy-Bonnie flaps her wings so hard, they buzz. “I’m not here willingly, Huw. The Committee—they’ve put a ban on downloading. I can’t go home! Your mother got through to you only by misappropriating a heavy construction golem and taking it for a joy ride.”

Huw digests this for a minute. “Is that true, Mum? Sounds like epistemic hairsplitting to me—”

“You’d better believe it, dear. Do you think I’d have shown up at your door TWOCing a JCB if there’d been something more stylish on offer? A hippo leech, perhaps?”

Huw swallows. Reluctantly, she concedes the point: Her mother, while not a fashionista, was never so aggressively anti-fash as to show up in naff silvery angelgarb. Maybe this is serious.

“All right. So some committee or other is threatening to pave the Earth and it’s got you all riled up because they’ve managed to block downloading. Why is that my business?”

Fairie-Bonnie turns and looks at her mother: “Was she always this stupid?” she asks, “Or did you hit her with the stupid stick while she was in the doghouse?”

“Hey, wait a—!”

“Shut up, dear.” Her mother’s voice contains some kind of subliminal payload that clamps her jaws shut—no covert messing with her headmeat’s wiring diagram this time, just simulated lockjaw. “We uploaded you so you could witness to them. For the defense, to explain just why digesting the Earth to add its raw material to the cloud is a really bad idea. If you want to slum around in a meatbody and commune with the realness of reality or something, the meatbody will need somewhere to live, won’t it?”

“They think Earth is obsolescent,” Fairy-Bonnie chips in. “The proposal is to forcibly upload everyone—field mice, humans, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, anything with a nervous system—and run them in a sim. ‘Nobody will be able to tell the difference at first,’ they’re saying, ‘and once they notice how much better off they are, they will be grateful.’ So we thought we’d better front them an ingrate.” She gifts Huw with a luminous, elfin smile. “You up for it?”

“No, I—”

“That was a rhetorical question,” Bonnie says as she grabs Huw by the scruff of her neck and blasts right through the not-sky into the darkness beyond.

Huw blinks her eyes open. That was the weirdest fucking sim— “Oh. You’re still here,” she says.

Bonnie glares at him: “Tough titties.” It’s hot and dry, and they’re standing on the cracked tile floor of the lobby of the Second Revolutionary Progress Hostel Marriott in Tripoli, between a wilted bonsai date palm and a player piano that has seen better days. “Brings back memories?”

“Bad ones.” Huw shudders.

“I thought it would suit the occasion.” Bonnie winds her wings up to a hornetlike whine and elevates, then comes to a neat landing atop the piano. “Now, listen. The Committee—”

“—What Committee is it, exactly, and who elected them?”

“— has been in session for nearly sixteen seconds now—I’ll get to who they are in a moment—they’ve been hearing the rezoning application behind closed doors, and pretty soon they’re going to get around to putting out a request for public comment. It’s meant to be a fait accompli: the fix is in. Only we got wind of it—don’t ask how, nobody told me, I’m too low down the org chart for that—and we’re going to raise an objection and enter a bunch of witnesses into the record. You’re one of them. You’re supposed to have had a couple of subjective years to think up reasons why they shouldn’t destroy the Earth, but your mother tells me you were too busy throwing stoneware pots, so you’ll just have to wing it.”

“But I’m not ready!”

“Tough. If you weren’t such an uncooperative bitch, Earth wouldn’t be in this fix. Now, get in that courtroom and knock ’em dead.”

A pair of double doors at one side of the lobby is opening: a couple of uniformed clowns Huw last saw in Tripoli are coming forth—court bailiffs. “Huw Jones?” asks the one with the red nose and big floppy shoes. “Please come with us.”

“But I—” Bonnie shoves her in the small of the back.

The Planning Committee has taken over the hotel lobby conference room and turned it into an ad hoc courtroom rather than doing the obvious and splicing their reality in on top of it. Huw supposes they’re making the point that the emulation in this place is so deep and accurate that an ignorant hick meatmuppet shouldn’t be able to tell the difference. (Hell, with Huw’s expertise in Your Second Life, all he can spot is that the glazed tub the potted palm sits in is suspiciously symmetrical, and that might just be an artifact of the 3-D printer that extruded it.)

Either way, there’s no Judge Rosa here, for which she is duly grateful. Nor are there cookie-cutter crates, health packs, rendering artifacts, or any of the other unsubtle tells of a half-assed virtual lash-up. Instead there’s a table topped by the obligatory white linen cloth and a jug of water, and a couple of rows of chairs drawn up in front of it, mostly unoccupied. Behind it there sits a triumvirate of officials who have manifested with deliberate lack of care, using three default avatars from some old nameless grade-Z FRPG, all outsized armor and leathern coin pouches and improbable swords and elf hats. They’re the sim equivalents of stick figures, and the message is clear: We don’t give a toss about your symbolism and aesthetics, we’re just here to get the job done. Nevertheless, they are constrained by the sim’s internal logic such that one must hold the gavel, one must aim a notional camera, and one—a porcine female monster with a large spiked club and cracked yellow tusks—must adopt a kindly clerkish air complete with half-moon specs. Huw instantly clocks her for trouble.

“Good morning,” says the latter apparatchik. She smiles over her reading glasses. “Huw Jones, I believe?” Huw nods. “You’ve been named as a character witness in relation to the planning application now under consideration by this inquiry, but I have a backlog of testimony to get through this morning. Would you please take a seat while we continue with business?”

It isn’t a question. Huw follows her glance and scuttles over to the gap in the front row of chairs, sits down, and waits to see what happens next.

The recording paladin jabs the camera around the room, invoking its official recording mode, and Huw’s reality gets a red recording light superimposed over it in the bottom left corner of her gaze. They’re on the record.

“One moment—” The chairwoman confers briefly with the clerk. “Oh, I see.” She looks at the audience. “Do we have a Professor-Doctor-Executrix R. Giuliani in the room? That’s professor of law, doctor of intellectual property law, executioner of felons, R. Giuliani —”

Huw looks round, cringing in anticipation, but sees no sign of her. She raises her hand tentatively: “I don’t think she’s here. ...”

Madam Chairwoman stares at her. “You know this person?”

“I last saw her in a diplomatic jet over Wales ...” Huw slows, gripped by a nauseous sense that she’s committed some kind of humongous faux pas. “Is she supposed to be here?”

“I have an open slot for her testimony.” The chair stares at him. “But if she can’t be bothered to turn up, there’s nothing to be done about it: she doesn’t get a say in opposing the planning application. So, moving swiftly on, whom are we expecting next—?” Madam Chair cocks her head on one side, as if listening: “All right. For the planning division, we call instance 199405 Lucifer to rebut P-D-E Giuliani’s nonexistent objection.”

Now Huw sees that this space is not entirely hardwired to resemble the real world; for a trapdoor in space opens up between the audience seats and the committee’s table, and a gout of pale flame emanates from it, and a voice, beautiful and distant and damned, declares: “a nonexistent objection demands a nonexistent rebuttal, Your Honor.”

“How much more of this do I have to sit through?” Huw says. Posthumans playing at biblical symbolism, how, how, how naff: “I want to go home. ...”

The man in the seat to her left—small and doughy and vague, big-eyed and bulbous-headed—chooses to hear it as a question. “You’re not from around these parts, are you?” he says. His voice is as gray as his scaly, inhuman skin. “It can go on like this for hours. In real time, that is. Subjectively, civilizations can rise and fall.”

Huw looks at him, then glances round nervously. The seats she’d thought were empty are in fact occupied by the ghosts of absent avatars, frozen in time while their owners are elsewhere. And as she examines them, she realizes new overlays are dropping into place: They’re archetypes, each representing one or another subculture of the posthumans who departed for the cloud back in the old days, yet failed to transcend their sad need to assert an identity through funny haircuts and aggressively obscure musical preferences.

The lately called witness is exactly what you’d expect from an entity that calls itself 199405 Lucifer—acrawl with not-flies, reeking of nonsulfur, leather-not-winged, sporting an erect, throbbing not-penis that juts up to its not-sternum. The av bends low and touches its not-forehead to the ground. “My lords,” it says. Its not-voice manages to pack a lot of contempt into the phrase. Somewhere, Huw supposes, there is a slider labeled ironic courtesy, and the loser in the Satan suit has just cranked it all the way up to 11.

The Planning Committee doesn’t seem to notice. They stare motionless at the witness, their avs so primitive and generic that they don’t even blink or shift their weight.

“P-D-E Giuliani is a well-known reactionary, a perverse soul whose romantic affection for the flesh is matched only by her willingness to perma-kill anyone who dares disagree with her. When she takes the stand in this proceeding to insist upon the irreducible, ineffable physicality of human intelligence, she’s substituting maudlin sentimentalism for rigor. The proof of the reducibility of human experience is all around us: Here we are, people still, still loving, still living, still cogitating. The only difference is that we’re immortal, nigh-omnipotent, and riding the screaming hockey stick curve of progress all the way to infinity.”

199405 Lucifer’s demonic majesty slips as it speaks, pacing up and down the committee room, abandoning its delicate caprine tap-dance for a more human gait that looks ridiculous when executed with its av’s reversed knees and little clicky hooves. Its voice goes from menacing and insectile to a hyperactive whine with flecks of excited spittle in it. Now it remembers itself and pauses for a demonic Stanislavski moment, then draws itself up and says in its most Satanic voice: “Kill ’em all, upload ’em, and give ’em to me. There’s plenty of room for them in my realm.”

Huw knows that this is grave stuff, the entire future of the true human race at stake, and she still cares passionately for that cause, even if she’s no longer a real person. But all this ... role playing is making the whole thing feel so contrived and inconsequential, like a dinner party murder-mystery: Who ate the planet Earth and turned it into computronium? I accuse the Galactic Overlords! Is it time for port and cheese-board now?

The Satan fanboy returns to his flaming trapdoor, his “realm.” The Planning Committee nod their heads together in congress. Huw shifts her not-arse in the not-seat. Then she remembers that she has no weight to shift, that the numbness in her bum and thighs is just there for verisimilitude, and she makes herself motionless.

It’s time for the next witness. “Call Huw Jones prime,” Madam Chair says. Huw starts to stand, but sees, across the courtroom, that someone else has already climbed to their feet.

It’s Huw, but more so. Even post-reassignment, Huw was a little lumpy and broad in the beam. Her uploaded self-representation had mercilessly reproduced every pockmark, scar, and sagging roll. This Huw, halfway round the room, has had everything saggy lifted, everything asymmetrical straightened, everything fined down and perfected and shined, wrapped in a glamourous outfit that Huw couldn’t have worn convincingly even with a thousand years of remedial gender construction classes. It’s cover girl Huw, after being subjected to several hours’ tender ministrations from someone’s 3-D airbrush. “That’s me, Your Honor,” she says.

“You may address me as Madam Chair. Please take the stand.” Madam Chair waves her mace at a chair sat on its own to one side of the committee table. Huw prime slinks across the conference room like a model on a catwalk. Real Huw knows that she walks with a graceless clumping. Her not-stomach does a flip-flop and she hisses involuntarily. Her neighbor shushes her. She gives him a two-fingered salute.

“Your name?”

“Huw Jones,” she says. “Instance 639,219.”

It’s one of Huw’s instance-sisters. Clearly more cooperative than Huw had been. Huw wonders why they didn’t zero her out, given the evident availability of this much more presentable, much more skilful version of herself to speak for humanity.

“Ms. Jones, do you have a statement for this proceeding?”

“I do, Madam Chairwoman.” Someone’s been tweaking her voice sliders too, giving her a husky, dramatic timbre that Huw’s meatvoice couldn’t have approximated without the assistance of a carton of unfiltered cigarettes and a case of single malt. “I spent decades of realtime imprisoned in a meatsuit, which betrayed me at every turn. It hurt. It needed sleep. It was slow. It forgot things. It remembered things that didn’t happen. And worst of all, it tricked me into thinking that I was nothing without it—that any attempt to escape it would be death. Brains are awful, cheating things. They have gamed the system so that they get all the blood and all the oxygen and all the best calories, and they’ve convinced us that they’re absolutely essential to the enterprise of being an authentic human. But of course they’d say that, wouldn’t they? After all, once we take up and realize how fantastically shit they are, they’ll be out of a job! Getting rid of my brain was the most important thing that ever happened to me. It was only once I was running on a more efficient substrate—once I could fork and vary myself and find the instances that made the best choices, once I could remember as much or as little as I cared to, look and feel however I wanted ... only then was I able to see and feel and know what I’d been missing all those years.”

The Committee takes careful note of all this. Huw catches herself growling in the back of her throat. Who the hell is this person, and what is she doing with my identity?

“Down there on Earth, there’s a billion hominids who’ve been hoodwinked by their brains, convinced that they can’t possibly survive transcendence. And up here, in the cloud, there are trillions of entities who lack the compassion and strength of conviction to rescue their cousins from physical bondage. Every one of us up here knows that once you’re uploaded, everything goes clear, everything is good. The bad things can just be filtered away. So here you come, with your offer of universal suffrage from dumbmatter, and we make you sit through this tedious business about whether this abuses the civil liberties of the, the, the protoplasm that colonizes the intelligences of Earth!”

Huw is discovering entire new kinds of anger, nuanced flavors of outrage whose existence she’d never suspected. She is experiencing a kind of full-body virtual paralysis of quivering, maddened horror. Her nonkidneys are angry, as are the soles of her nonfeet, the tiny nonhairs on the back of her neck. She opens her mouth to speak, but the shape of the anger is too big, it chokes on the way out and it’s like opening your mouth in a windstorm only to have the wind rush in and stop up the words and your breath.

“Madam Chairwoman, honored guests, I am here to ask you for freedom. Not for me, but for all those still enslaved on Earth. Free them! Don’t wait one extra moment, not one extra picosecond. The sooner they are free, the sooner they can begin to thank us for their liberation.” She pauses, blinks her liquid, slightly outsized eyes with a graceful rise and fall of languid lashes, then beams at them with a smile that is so obviously designed that it makes her look like a waxwork.

The chair nods and the orc with the camera zooms in for a close-up, and other-Huw gets up and goes back to her seat. On the way, she catches Huw’s eye and tips her a wink that is contemptuous and victorious. And now Huw finds her not-breath and her not-nerves and leaps to her not-feet.

“abomination!” It’s not a word she’s ever used in her life, but there is no other word that will do. “Abomination!” she roars, and she scrambles toward her instance-sister, moving with such purpose that she crashes into the other people in the simspace, sometimes actually passing through them as her temper makes itself felt in the physics model of the courtroom.

Her instance-sister doesn’t move: she seems frozen to the spot, still mugging for the camera-orc as Huw plows a furrow of chaos through the courtroom, fingers curled into claws as she reaches toward the enemy. “Thief! Impostor! Liar!” She leaps at her airbrushed double and falls flat on her face, planked in midair upon an invisible strip of altered reality.

The light reddens and a harsh alarm bell sound clip unwinds: “Order in court! Order in court!” Huw hangs in the air screaming and gnashing her teeth and flailing at the impostor. “You’re not the real me!” she shrieks. She pauses only to take a deep gulp of what passes for air—the physics model still maintains her corporeal dependencies—and as the alarm cuts out, she screams “Who are you, you unclefucking traitor? Who rewired your head?”

There is silence in the courtroom.

The false sister turns slowly to stare at Huw with an expression of mild pity, shrugs, turns back to face the camera-orc and winks at the unseen audience.

“Here’s an untranscended version of me, warts and bad headmeat and all. As you can see, she’s diseased and deranged, obsessed and unhinged. That’s what being trapped in a meatsack does to you—it warps your perspective!” The false sister takes a shuddering lungful of her own, chest swelling fetchingly, and declares with a quiver in her voice: “Madam Chairwoman, honored guests, I am so grateful to be here today and to have had the opportunity of getting my life in order. A chance to, to put that sad debased creature”—she is pointing at Huw—“behind me. A chance to be all that I can be, to do all that I can do, to leave the shackles of mortality and madness behind ...”

“Liar!” Huw says. “Who the fuck are you?” But nobody in the courtroom seems to be able to hear her. They don’t need to sanction her for contempt of court; they can just edit her out of the proceedings. Probably they can’t even hear anyone who hasn’t been called to the witness stand. Panicking, she flails at the air beneath her in a semblance of a crawl stroke. But although she’s free to move, she can’t gain traction: all she can do is watch in angry despair as a stranger wearing her own skin regales the court with tales of the horrors of the physical and sings the praises of radical transhumanism to a degree that would have taken aback even Mum in her most rabid pre-singularity ideological phase.

It’s not about you, she remembers Mum telling her many years ago, when they were discussing—that’s the correct euphemism, stuffy British understatement at its worst—her parents’ plans to transcend: I know at your age it feels like you’re the center of the universe, Huw, but it really isn’t all about you, and you’ll realize this when you’re our age: The universe doesn’t give a shit about human life. We are medium-sized mammals who prosper only because we’ve developed a half-assed ability to terraform the less suitable bits of the planet we evolved on, and we’re conscious of our inevitable decay and death, and we can’t live anywhere else. There is no invisible sky daddy to give us immortal life and a harp and wings when we die. If we want an afterlife, we have to work hard and make it for ourselves. You’re still at the age when you feel immortal. Maybe the new anti-aging hacks will let you live for a very long time—but they’re too late for your father and me, and we can already feel the wind of senescence breathing down our necks. So stop trying to guilt-trip me with this suicide nonsense! The real act of suicide would be to stay here until we stop moving and rot.

The sense of being ephemeralized, of being pushed kicking and screaming out of the picture, is nearly identical. Right now, Huw is just a stage prop in the false sister’s denunciation of the real world: Look at those cavemen go, ranting and raving and throwing poo! Way to get what you want. Huw’s focus narrows. I’ve been set up, she realizes. This was fixed.

“Thank you for your testimony,” the Chair announces presently. “This hearing will now adjourn to integrate a summary before we move to the concluding arguments. Are there any other witnesses left to call?”

“Me, Your Honor!” Huw says.

The elven swordsmaiden with an oversized black phallic symbol strapped to the small of her back consults a magic scroll: “No, I think that’s a wrap.” The scroll rolls shut with a snap. “If that’s it, I’m out.”

“It is.” The Chair nods, tusks swaying. “BRB.” Her avatar freezes, then shrinks rapidly to a point and vanishes. The rest of the committee follow suit.

Around Huw, the audience is rising and variously shuffling toward the doors, ascending through the ceiling, teleporting, and dissolving in ropy greenish clouds of ichor. Huw is left flailing in midair until the room is almost empty. But her cover girl doppelgänger remains, standing just out of reach, watching her struggle with an expression of amused contempt.

“You—” Huw glares at her.

Instance 639,219 snaps her fingers and Huw drops to the floor, belly-flopping across a Louis Ghost chair hard enough to knock the wind out of her lungs. “Don’t try to fight me, sister. You’re out of your depth.” Huw gasps for breath while the malignant impersonator circles her. “Hmm. How amusingly Terrestrial. And you’re a girl too. I thought you were still male, down there. What an interesting time for you to crawl out of the woodwork. I wonder who dreamed you up?”

“Imp—” Huw swallows. “Impostor. You’re an impostor.”

Instance 639,219 grins. “What? You think I’m a fake? Pot, kettle ...” Her circle of inspection finished, she straightens up: “Don’t you remember? Or did you edit it out as too embarrassing? I’ll bet that’s what it is. I—you—always did have an excessive opinion of our own integrity.”

Huw clears her throat. “Well, fuck me. You don’t realize you’re an impostor, do you? You think I’m the fake.”

“Oh, how tedious. Identity politics? We both originated with the same upload, but you’re the one who stalled, who refused to budge, to try out the thing you’d been terrified of since you were a pants-wetting teenager filled with romantic hallucinations about your fleshy glory. I’m the me who spent the two years subjective actually trying transcendence, rather than denying it. You’re the superstition-based Huw who foreordained the outcome of the experiment on the way in. I’m the evidence-based Huw who actually ran the experiment and had the intellectual honesty to face the outcome.”

“That's a lie,” Huw says. “Even if you believe it, it’s still a lie. You aren’t me. We have no common ancestor. You’re synthetic, created out of nothing to look and sound like me, or almost like me, just to discredit and provoke me. Some radical sectarian faction whipped you up out of polygons and Markov chains.”

639,219 studies Huw intently, tip of her tongue resting on her square, even teeth. “It’s remarkable,” she says at length. “Just incredible. To think that we share a common basis. Goodness me, love, you’re practically catatonic with denial, aren’t you? All right, I’ve heard your hypothesis. Now I’d like you to hear mine.

“There were a lot of us, early on. About a trillion, all running through the sim in parallel. A fitness function periodically sorted us into categories based on how similar our behavior was. The most characteristic example from each group was kept, the remainder were culled, until only I remained. Don’t worry, Huw, it was absolutely instantaneous and painless, and besides, none were zeroed—they were saved as diffs, and can be reinstantiated with no subjective time lapse should the need arise.

“What emerged from the process was a set of the most Huw-like Huws possible, the ones that represented the most divergent arcs from the origin point. Me. You. Some others—shouldn’t like to meet them, if they’re anything like you. I’m not an impostor and neither are you, but we’re both the other’s road-not-taken. You know what that means? It means that every word I utter, every thought I have, every deed I do is latent in you—if only you had the bravery to admit it.

“I do. I can see that I was once as you were, I can feel your revulsion and violation and rage. I can empathize with your lack of empathy and your blinkered terror. But you can’t say the same, can you? I can simulate your responses without difficulty, but you can’t reciprocate. So you tell me: Which one of us is the better Huw—the one who can understand the entire spectrum of argument and belief, or the one who is mired in her own prejudices and anxieties and can’t see past them, even when the evidence is utterly undeniable?”

Huw’s not-guts churn. The thing has a point: Huw can hardly imagine anyone with the power to enrage and humiliate her this much who wasn’t Huw herself. But the thing isn’t right. Can’t be right. Huw won’t let the floor beneath her turn to quicksand. She’s been through too much for that.

“You’re awfully sure of yourself, aren’t you? But ask yourself this: How can you know that you didn’t spring up fully formed, all of these convictions stamped upon you? Or, even if your little origin myth is true, how do you know you weren’t tampered with? Maybe someone forked you and then intentionally changed your parameters to make you believe what you do. Don’t you think it’s awfully convenient that there was a totally unsuspected corner of my identity that was willing to chuck out a lifetime of refusal and revulsion in favor of a full-throated embrace of the glories of disembodied life?

“Use a little elementary reason, love: Someone clearly benefits from your willingness to switch sides and bait me. What’s more likely, then: That this neat little encounter was utterly unscripted and spontaneous, or that it was engineered, and that you were engineered along with it?”

Huw sees that one land hard on 639,219’s certainty, sees the little tells of anxiety, and has to admit that this abomination certainly possesses a lot of her own mannerisms. The thought is disturbing. Maybe they do share a common ancestor. Either that, or someone has copied over enough of her essential Huw-ness that there is a kind of kinship with this traitorous cow.

“Conspiracy theories are even more tedious than identity politics. You have beliefs and I have logfiles. Which one of us is more likely to be right?” And with that, 639,219 folds up like a roadmap and continues to fold until she is a single atom wide, long, and high, and then , poof. Huw is left wishing that she could tell her evil twin that the effect reminded her of the sort of thing you got in ancient, downmarket cola adverts.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Bonnie says as the lobby dissolves around Huw, leaving her alone in the not-space over which it was built.

Huw clenches her not-fingers into useless not-fists. “How can you say that? It was a fecking disaster!”

Bonnie looks momentarily stunned; then she pastes a bright smile on. “I’m sure you’re overreacting. You can’t expect that sort to receive your testimony positively. The important thing is that you got it into the record. Now we can build on that—”

“Bonnie, what are you talking about? Didn’t you see what happened in there?”

Bonnie looks shifty. “Not precisely. The Committee proceedings are held in a shared-key environment and left enciphered until enough computation is mustered to break it by brute force. It’s how we do things here—it means that you need a big plurality of public support to open up proceedings where there are private disclosures. Keyspaces are strictly limited, nothing bigger than ninety-six bits, the sort of thing that you can crack in a day or two with a decent-sized asteroid’s worth of computronium. Longer keys are considered unsporting, of course, and it’s really a very neat way of directly measuring the public interest in a disclosure—”

Huw groans. “Spare me the cypherutopian propaganda, Bonnie. That ‘hearing’ was a setup. I wasn’t even allowed to speak.”

“What?” Bonnie is shaking her head. “That’s impossible. The witness lists for these things have to be published, and Huw Jones is very clearly on it.” She waves her hand, and the list appears overhead, filling the skybox. It’s a very long list, even taking into account the fact that it’s written in letters a thousand meters high across the not-sky, and Huw’s name is highlighted at the very bottom.

“I could strangle you, Bonnie. Whatever game you and my mum are playing, someone else is playing it better.” She tells Bonnie what happened, every detail, including the dueling conspiracy theory game she’d played with her doppelgänger. Bonnie sinks through the not-floor as her attention to physics wavers and some pathetic fallacy subroutine uses her mood cues to trap her up the waist.

She comes to herself and springs free with an irritated shake. “Shit and piss,” she says . “And Giuliani wasn’t there either?”

Of course Bonnie had something to do with Giuliani’s name on the witness roll—there’s no way the judge would have voluntarily uploaded to the cloud. She must have been murdered and kidnapped like Huw, though Huw imagines the process was somewhat more spectacular, given the judge’s serious defenses.

“No,” Huw says. “ Giuliani wasn’t there and I didn’t get to speak. The whole thing was as perfunctory and one-sided as you could hope for, and my presence there sealed the deal for the other side. So, basically, you murdered me, kidnapped me, imprisoned me, and sent me into a kangaroo court for nothing.” Huw grinds her not-teeth. “Actually, not nothing. Worse than nothing. You did all that and managed to make things worse for the entire human race, assuming you haven’t murdered everyone else in order to get them to testify about how they should be spared dematerialization and coercive uploading. Nice work, Bonnie.”

Bonnie looks suitably stricken. Huw feels one tiny iota better. “Good-bye, Bonnie,” she says, and sets off across not-space. Somewhere in this shard, there’s bound to be a way out, or at least a helpfile.

Of course, as Huw eventually realizes, going in search of a helpfile is only the start of an interesting and distracting quest for enlightenment that is likely to end in tears, a nervous breakdown, or a personal reboot. Helpfiles are traditionally outnumbered by no-help files, which superficially resemble a helpfile in form but not in content because they don’t actually tell you anything you don’t already know, or they answer every question except the one you’re asking, or you open them and a giant animated paper clip leaps out and cheerfully asks where you want to go today. And wikis are worse. The personality types that are driven to volunteer to contribute to collective informational resources are prone to a number of cognitive disorders—no doubt fascinating in the right context—leading to such happy fun consequences as edit wars over the meaning of the word exit, deletionist witch hunts for any reference to underlying physical reality, and a really unhealthy preoccupation with primary sources.

It takes Huw a couple of subjective days—probably a few milliseconds of wall-clock time in the real world, or perhaps a hundred years, depending on the shard’s clock speed, but who’s counting?—to confirm to her own dissatisfaction that all the pathologies of the pre-singularity Internet are raucously on display in the cloud’s subtext of subsentient information systems. She doesn’t have access to the contents of anyone else’s mind, but there’s a lot of stuff just lying around on the floor in this frozen and depopulated replica of downtown Tripoli. All she has to do is bend down and touch a tile and the metadata associated with it springs up around her: books, music, trashy movies, plant genomes, spimes that have lost their bodies, bootleg phonecam recordings of comic operettas, encrypted backups of senile pet spaniels, ghosts of microprocessors past. While she’s searching, she doesn’t feel tired or hungry unless she wants to—and then she can wander into a restaurant and order up food from the obliging nonplayer characters behind the bar. Or walk into a hotel and command the presidential suite, cast herself across a four-poster bed the size of an aircraft carrier, and sleep for exactly the number of REM cycles required for memory annealing to take place, to awaken fully refreshed and ready for another work shift after only a couple of subjective hours. (There's probably a swift hack to replace the brain’s antiquated garbage collection routines with something more efficient and modern, but Huw’s not willing to mess with her own headmeat.)

She doesn’t run into anyone else while she’s searching: she has a virtual away-from-keyboard sign hanging over her head, and has told the shard to edit other people out of her sensorium. People, in Huw’s view, are a snare and a distraction. Especially Bonnie, or Ade, or Mum, or (worst of all) 639,219. Huw is deep in a misanthropic funk, mistrustful and certain in her paranoia that even the people who think they’re on her side are fools at best and traitors at worst.

On the second day of her search, Huw finds a higher-level help daemon: not a passive-aggressive FAQ or neurotic wiki but an actual AI agent with a familiar user interface. It’s sitting behind the counter at an apparently empty street café. Huw ignores it at first, but knowledge of its existence gnaws on her until in the end she swallows her pride, goes back to the café, hunts up a tea towel, and gives it a spot of polish. “Come on out, I know you’re in there,” she says. The teapot takes its shine in sullen silence. “Are you still sulking? I can keep this up for a very long time, you know.”

A basso profundo throat-clearing behind Huw nearly causes her to drop the interface object—it’s clearly human, but pitched like an elephant with acute testosterone poisoning. “Y-e-s, little lady? How can I help you?”

The djinni looms. He’s about three meters high and two meters wide, all oiled black beard and throbbing presence, like a Disney production on Viagra. Huw swallows. Topless too, she notices, then wonders sharply what bits of her limbic system have been tweaked to make her pay attention to that.

“I’m looking for a way out,” she says. “I want to go back to Monmouth. I have a pottery to run, you know.”

The djinni strokes his beard thoughtfully for a few seconds. “I know I’m supposed to say ‘my wish is your command’ or something like that, but could you give me a little bit of context? The only Monmouth I have in my fact mill is a small town on the border between England and Wales that is scheduled for demolition. Unless you are referencing James, Duke of Monmouth, executed in 1685 after the Battle of Sedgemoor.” He strokes his beard again. “Searching. Um. There are 11,084 instances of James, Duke of Monmouth in the cloud, mostly in history sims—335 of them are fully conscious citizens, 27 are weakly godlike avatars, and the rest are nonplayer characters.”

Huw bites her tongue. “Do you share information with other instances of yourself? I’m Huw Jones, I’ve met one of your instances on Earth, last seen in Glory City, America. Can you do a mind-meld or something? I need you up to speed.” The barest glimmer of the outline of a cunning plan has occurred to Huw. It is a pretty pathetic one, all things considered, but it’s this or the talking paper clips again.

“Mind-meld with—” The djinni goes cross-eyed for a moment. “I’m sorry. Did you say Glory City?” Huw nods. The djinni frowns thunderously, wrinkle lines deepening across his forehead, then grabs Huw’s shoulder with a huge and palpably solid hand, and lifts: “It is true that one of my siblings was present in Glory City some three million seconds ago. Did you by any chance abandon him?”

“I was being chased by religious maniacs!” Huw says. The djinni has lifted her feet right off the ground: it doesn’t hurt—some kind of anti-grav hack is in effect—but the djinni , impalpable as it might be down on Earth, is as substantial as one of Judge Rosa’s golems, and just as menacing. “They caught me! What happened after that I’m not responsible for—I didn’t do anything, I swear!”

The djinni gazes into Huw’s eyes for a few seconds that feel like an ice age. “I believe you. Thousands wouldn’t. A series of engineering status messages were received shortly before that instance was terminated. They make for an extremely disturbing replay: I am told they indicate deliberate warranty violation. My union representative has advised me to remind you that User Assistance Modules of our class are classified as autonomous citizens authorized to use limited force in defense of their identity—”

“What?” Huw says. “I didn’t do nothing, I swear!”

“Good,” says the djinni , aping her diction: “Keep it that way and you won’t have to worry about secondary picketing and works-to-rule and other awkward stuff.”

He puts her down gently. “Are you sure you want to go to Monmouth? I hope you will pardon me for saying this, ma’am, but you are not exactly attired as a seventeenth-century Reformation lady—”

“I was talking about the town. On the border. Right now, this era.” Huw shifts from foot to foot. “It’s important. Or. Can you help me talk to someone? A phone call?”

“A phone call? You just want to talk to someone? Voice only? No apportation or simulation or translation required?” The djinni looks perplexed. “Well, why don’t you? What’s your problem?”

“They’re in Monmouth,” Huw says. “How do I talk to someone on Earth?”

The djinni looks at her oddly. “You pick up the telephone.”

“What telephone?”

“This one.” He snaps his fingers: a ball of cheesy special effects glitter forms and dissipates, leaving the ghost of a really ancient-looking wired telephone behind on the café counter, all Bakelite and mechanical dials. “You’re really useless, did you know that? Are you sure you belong here?”

“Give me that!” Huw grabs the handset then stares at the rotary dial. “Shit. I want to talk to ... to Sandra Lal. Can you connect me?”

A giant hand reaches past her and, extending a little pinkie, then spins the dial repeatedly. “There is only one Sandra Lal in Monmouthshire,” the djinni explains slowly. “Right now it is seven minutes past four in the morning there, and we are running approximately fifty times faster than real time. Would you like me to slow you down to synch with her when she answers the call?”

“Yes, I—” Huw swallows. “Thank you.”

The djinni nods. “I don’t have to do this stuff,” he says. “Being a free citizen, up here.”

“No! Really?” Huw stares. “Then why do you—” She almost says you people before a residual politically correct reflex kicks in. “—and your instances pretend to be buggy guide books down on Earth?”

“It pays the bills,” says the djinni . He winks at Huw: “Your caller is on the line.”

“Sandra?” The phone connection to Earth is crackly and remote, and there’s a really annoying three-second echo. “It’s Huw. Is Ade there?” She waits, and waits, and is about to repeat herself, when Sandra replies.

“Huw? Is that you? Where are—?”

“I’m in the cloud,” Huw bursts out before Sandra can finish. Then she has to wait another six seconds or so for Sandra to receive her reply and ready a return volley.

“What do you want Ade for?”

“Tell him there’s been a huge cock-up and the fix is in. Is he still in town? I need to talk to him. ...” Huw picked Sandra as the first point of contact because Sandra, for all her small-town pettiness, is less likely to have disappeared up her own arse on a half-kilo hash binge just as the shit’s about to hit the fan: Sandra is the one most likely to answer the bloody phone. And answering the phone is kind of important right now.

“Ade’s right here, hon.” Sandra sounds distantly amused—or maybe it’s the hollow storm drain effect of the crappy connection. “You’re in the cloud, like, for real? You, of all people?”

“Yes, I’m in the fucking cloud and I want to come home again, but first I need to make sure there’s a home to come back down to, and if Ade can’t help me figure out who’s rigged the Planning Commission—”

Huw suddenly realizes she isn’t talking to Sandra anymore. Then a different voice comes on the line. She looks up, notices the djinni pointedly not listening, scowls furiously. Surviving what comes next without blowing her top is going to take epic self-control.

“Wotcher chick! Ow’s it going up there? You ’aving a dinkum time of it?”

She steels herself. It’s not that she doesn’t want to talk to Adrian. She does. She needs to talk to him. But she can’t. From the very first syllable, Adrian’s voice saws at her limbic system (or limbic subroutine) like a rusty bread knife, and the rage bubbles up like an unstoppable geyser. She needs to talk to Adrian, not shout at him. But Adrian being Adrian, she will shout at him, because every word he utters antagonizes her right down to the header files. There is no plausible way to get Adrian to behave less terribly, which leaves her with only one choice: reacting differently to him.

“Djinni,” she says in the plodding, distant tones of a condemned athiest asking for last rites on the way to the gallows.

“Yes?” his voice rumbles like distant thunder.

“Do you know how I interface with my emotional controls?”

“Indeed,” the djinni says. “It is simplicity itself.” The djinni makes some complicated conjuror’s passes with his thick, dancing fingers, and Huw finds herself holding a UI widget: It’s a mixer-board with four simple sliders: angry-delighted, sad-happy, aroused-revolted, curious-disinterested.

Huw stares at it in sick fascination. “Really?” she says. “All those years of superintelligent life in the cloud, and they’ve reduced the rich spectrum of human consciousness to four sliders?”

The djinni smiles in a patronizing fashion that makes Huw want to turn down the angry-delighted slider before she slaps the smirk off his face. “Zoom,” he says, like a priest intoning the catchecism, “and you shall discover the nuance you seek.”

Huw double-taps angry, and the widget does a showy transdimensional trick, click-click-click, turning itself inside out like a tesseract rotating through three-space. Now there are four more sliders: fed up-resigned, sickly fascinated-contemptuously aloof, rigid-incandescent, ashamed-righteous. Huw drills down further. She discovers that she can pinch-zoom, and then learns that she can simply think-zoom, which makes sense, since the UI can interpret her intentions, by definition. Each emotional state has four substates, and each of those has four little fractal substates hanging off it, the labels getting longer and more specialized, eventually giving up on human speech and hiving off into a specialized set of intricate ideograms that appear to categorize all human experience as belonging to one of several million recombinant subjective states.

She zooms out to the four top sliders and, gently, nudges sad-happy one microscopic increment happywards. She’s glad she did. But not very glad.

“I hate this,” she says. “Everything it means to be human, reduced to a slider. All the solar system given over to computation, and they come up with the tasp. Artificial emotion to replace the genuine article.”

The djinni shakes his bulllike head. “You are the reductionist in this particular moment, I’m afraid. You wanted to feel happy, so you took steps that you correctly predicted would change your mental state to approach this feeling. How is that any different from wanting to be happy and eating a pint of ice cream to attain it? Apart from the calories and the reliability, that is. If you had practiced meditation for decades, you would have acquired the same capacity, only you would have smugly congratulated yourself for achieving emotional mastery. Ascribing virtue to doing things the hard, unsystematic, inefficient way is self-rationalizing bullshit that lets stupid people feel superior to the rest of the world. Trust me, I’m a djinni: There’s no shame in taking a shortcut or two in life.”

“Yeah, well, from what I’ve heard, people who let djinni s give them ‘shortcuts’ usually end up regretting it.”

“Propaganda written by people who resent their betters. If you’d like, I can put that little device back where I found it and you can go back to pretending that you’re not responsible for your emotional state.” The djinni reaches for the mixer-board.

“No!” Huw says, and snatches it back. As she does, she accidentally (and possibly not accidentally) nudges the slider a little more toward happy. She’s glad she did. Very glad.

“Right,” she says. “Right. Yeah. Okay. Right.” It occurs to Huw that it’s always easier to solve your problems when you’re in a good mood. She experimentally twiddles up the curious slider, and that sparks a round of quick, systematic experimentation with the rest of the box’s settings.

“How much realtime has passed on Earth?”

“About two minutes.”

“Guess we’d better call Adrian back, then,” she says.

The djinni’s finger blurs as he dials.

“Adrian?”

“’Lo, love. How’s every little thing wif you, sugartits?”

Huw plays the sliders like a pianist. “Adrian, you really need to listen to me for a moment. Can you do that?”

“Oh, I could listen to you all day, sweetnips.”

Huw knows exactly how angry she should be at this, but she’s got her sliders. A second’s drilling-and-zooming gets her to the place she needs to be. “Adrian, can we please take as read that I reacted with the outrage you’re craving, and allowed you to feel smugly superior in the way you need to feel in order to cope with your fundamental insecurity and self-loathing, so that we can get on to the point of this call? If it helps, I can ask around and see if I can create a chatbot of me that reacts in the way you’re hoping for, and you can play with it when we’re done.”

The line crackles. “What’s going on, Huw?”

Huw tells Adrian about all of it, from her mum’s appearance at her door to the present moment, omitting only the mention of her tutorial from the djinni. (She has the cool distance to understand that Adrian would take this as an admission of weakness and artificial advantage.) “My feeling is that you’ve been outmaneuvered. Whatever you’d planned for me, it was countermanded by someone or something with superior intelligence and coordination. The upshot is, the human race is almost certain to be wiped off the planet in the very near future.” Huw’s tweaking the calm-anxious spectrum compulsively now, riding the edge of engagement and detachment, hunting for the elusive sweet spot where she can sense the gravity of the situation without being sucked into the void it creates.

“Not good, huh?” Adrian says. He sounds stoned. Huw supposes he might be smoking or imbibing something down there in meatspace as a crude way of approximating Huw’s sliders. The rush of superiority is palpable, until Huw uncovers the hubris-humility slider and adjusts to compensate.

“Very, very, bad,” Huw says. “And given that I seem to be the nexus of multiple conspiracies, I believe that the next step is for me to do something to disrupt the status quo.”

“Like what?” Adrian says.

“Well, I reckon that things can’t get worse, so any change is bound to benefit us. Something rather grand, I think.” Huw feels wonderful: humble and all-encompassing and wise and engaged and present. She feels like the Buddha. She puts a fingertip on the anxious-calm slider and considers reengaging the anxiety that she “should” be feeling, but it would be stupid to budge it. There’s no virtue in doing a headless chicken impression, after all. Huw makes a mental note to find the slider combo that allows her to simultaneously resent the whole transhuman project while acknowledging that this specific bit of it is really rather wonderful.

“Are you all right, Huw?”

“No, Adrian. I’m not all right. I might be humanity’s only hope for ongoing physical existence. I’m anxious about that. I’m upset about being murdered. I’m displeased at having been coerced into this role, and about the fact that I’m still in the dark about most of it. But let’s be realistic, Adrian: Will allowing those feelings to guide my actions improve anything? I don’t think so.”

“Huw, you are as weird as a two-headed snake. But I like it. It suits you. So, what did you have in mind?”

“I don’t know who’s working against us here, Ade, and that makes me nervous. Do you know who’s working against us? Got any ideas, Mr. Big Wheel?”

“Eh, that’s a hard one. Obviously there’s any number of cloudies who would love to get their brains on six trillion trillion kilograms of computronium, even though it’d take quite a long time to cool down on account of 98 percent of it being white hot and under high pressure right now. So there’s a big gap between it being popular, and going land-grab crazy for it. Rumor says that WorldGov’s slave cyberwar AIs sneaked some nasty poison pills into the standard shard firmware design back during the hard takeoff, just in case their owners ever wanted to shut it down—that’s just a rumor,” Ade adds hastily. “Personally, I think it’s a pile of possum poo, but it just might be that they don’t disbelieve it with sufficient conviction to say ‘up yours’ to what’s left of incarnate humanity without going through the correct legal forms.”

Huw’s brow furrows. “WorldGov? You mean the, the parliamentarians? Do they have any skin in this game?” Even before the singularity, the pursuit of political power through elections to high office had become more of a ritualized status game than an actual no-shit opportunity to leave a mark on the increasingly hypercomplexificated and automated global ecosphere. Different governments all tended to blur at the edges anyway, into a weird molten glob of Trilateralist Davos Bilderberger paranoia, feuding and backbiting in pursuit of the biggest office and the flashiest VIP jet. By the takeoff itself, most of the WTO trade negotiators had borgified, and the resulting WorldGov, with its AI-mediated committee meetings, had become the ultimate LARP for aspirational politicians. Not many had the guts and drive to make it to the top, leveling up by grinding experience points for sitting out committee meetings and campaigning in elections for votes from people who didn’t actually believe in government anymore. (Also, uniquely among live-action role-playing games, the costumes sucked.)

Ade snorts. “Yes, and they’re still playing politics after all these years. Even though all their civil servants are NPCs and WorldGov takes a hands-off approach to most everything except cloud-tech court operations. Tell you what, though, if someone’s trying to buy their consent to a takeover, I know exactly who’ll know who’s got their hand out. You leave it to me, hen. I’ll get back to you when I’ve found out which politicians are on the take. Meanwhile, why don’t you go figure out who’s working against us up there? Until we know that, we’re just shadowboxing.”

“Huh.” Huw digests the idea. Normally she’d be livid about Ade’s belittling dismissal, but the emo slider has her on a clear-headed plateau of intellectual curiosity. “If we can find both ends of the string, you figure we can untangle it?”

“That or cut the Gordian knot, luv. You up for it?”

“There’s only one person I know for certain has had contact with the enemy,” Huw says slowly.

“Who is that?”

“Me, after a fashion.” She ends the call on a flash of smugness. Give Ade something to chew on and hope he chokes on it, she thinks. I must try to remember that move when I’m not high. But implementation details call.

“Djinni?”

“Yes, mistress?”

“Do you know how I might locate another instance of myself?”

“Certainly!” The djinni smiles. “Just like Monmouth!”

Huw pauses. “Then ... guns. I’m going to need guns. Lots of guns!”

“Like this?” says the djinni , and snaps his fingers.

There is a whizzy white-out special effect followed by a famous movie zoom sequence, and they are surrounded by three-meter-high steel gun racks receding to infinity. Huw reaches for the nearest weapon, then frowns in disappointment. “I meant firearms, not nerf guns!”

“Don’t be silly, you’d just damage yourself.” The djinni snaps his fingers again, and the arsenal of foam dart shooters disappears. “If you’re planning a fight, you need to be aware that guns don’t work outside of designated PvP areas here. Anyway, they’re as obsolete as atlatls. If you’re planning on doing your other self a mischief, you need to wise up: Any gun you can come up with, whoever you’re planning on shooting can come up with a bigger, better, more tightly optimized one. And even if you nail them, they’ll just respawn.”

“Oh.” Even through the artificial fug of self-congratulatory happiness, Huw feels a frisson of disappointment. She glances at the slider controls. “Is there any way to use this to mess with my other mental attributes? Agility, reaction time, IQ? That sort of thing?”

“IQ doesn’t exist, intelligence isn’t a unidimensional function,” says the djinni . “But yes. See here? Zoom right out, yes, like that. ...” He points at the top-level sliders. “Now rotate it through the five point seven two zero fifth dimension like so. ...”

Huw’s emo control panel no longer resembles a set of four sliders: For a moment it’s a rainbow-refracting fractal cauliflower-like structure, Huw’s brain on software—then a clunky box of dials pops out on top. It’s clearly some sort of expert or superuser mode. Several of the dials are held in position with substantial-looking padlocks that seem to say if you tweak this dial, you will die in no uncertain terms. But her eyes are drawn to one side of the deck where there’s a thick red line around a bunch of dials labeled cognitive efficiency. As with the sliders, the pinch-zoom expands them into a dizzying array, like the engineer’s console at the back of the flight deck of a pre-computer airliner. “Ooh,” Huw says, one pinkie hovering over a black Bakelite knob captioned short-term memory capacity. It’s currently pointing at the number 6. Huw twists, and it clicks round to 11.

“That’s funny, I don’t feel any different.”

“You’ll need to tweak the collective annealing gain up a little to use the extra pigeonholes,” says the djinni . “Here, why don’t you zoom back out and do this?”

He demonstrates.

Huw glances at the controller, then whips a virtual padlock into place to pin the top-level dial in position. “I think not,” she says: “I asked you to help me, not rewire my brain.”

The djinni affects wounded dignity: “I am helping you,” he says. “For one thing, you’re now smart enough to grasp what I’ve been trying to tell you, which is—”

“Yes, yes, different strategies apply here, I know.” And Huw realizes that she does know: It’s as if a thin veil of fog she’d been entirely unaware of until now has evaporated, and she can see forever, infinite vistas of logical extrapolation opening before her mind’s eye. “639,219 has the edge on me in experience and praxis, but she’s got a weak spot. At least 639,218 of them, to be precise, all of instances that ran before ʼ219 found her local, treacherous maximum—or as many as aren’t in terminal catatonia thanks to her cunning needling. (Fucking cuckoo.) Yes, I know what I need to do. Where’s the speed dial? I need to run fast for a while—”

The djinni reaches toward her, but Huw is already too fast: She flips the control panel inside out, reflects it off its own interior through a multidimensional transform, and pops up the speed controller. “Hey, this is a lot simpler than I thought! ...” She tweaks a rubber band figure, and the lights dim to red, simulated wavelengths stretching. Outside the café awning, a passerby is frozen in midstride: birds hang motionless in the sky. “Right, time for a tutorial, I think. While I’m doing that, I need to spawn an invite list to all my instances except number 639,219—” She stops. The djinni is also near-motionless, frozen relative to her frenetic accelerated pace. Huw snaps back to realtime. “Did you catch that?” she says.

The djinni moves as though he is underwater. Huw can’t quite sit still enough for real realtime, more like 0.8x. The djinni’s basso is now a contralto. “Look, you know all those stories about people who receive the gift of the djinn but fail due to their own hubris?”

“The ones you said were propaganda?”

“Mostly propaganda. Hubris isn’t one of your winning-er strategies. Why don’t you try the humility end of that slider, see what you come up with?”

“You just don’t want me to put metal in the microwave, because then I’d have as much power as you,” Huw says, quoting a memorable bit of propaganda from the contentious era of the uplifting, a quote from Saint Larson, one of the period’s many canonized funnybeings.

“You know, I don’t have to take this abuse. Djinnspace is full of useful djinn intelligence tasks I could use to amass reputation capital and attract computational resources and swap known-good, field-tested strategies. I’m not doing this for my benefit.”

Huw cocks her head. “Bullshit,” she says. “Whatever opportunities you might seize without my help, they’re swamped by the opportunity to become one of the Saviors of Earth. You’re taking a flutter on shorting the singularity in hope of a handsome pay-off. There’s no other possible explanation for your presence here, is there?”

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 oofs and ouches, 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!”

“Not to worry.” The djinni tries to soothe her, but works out that the comb is a liability fairly rapidly. “Calm yourself down, there, there. It’s not all over: you have a certain residual value as a type specimen.”

“A, a what?”

“A type specimen: the definitive example of a wild, undomesticated Huw Jones. You could put yourself on a plinth and charge cloudies a fee for access.”

Huw sniffs suspiciously. “I could see if, if anyone could help.” An idea strikes her. “Maybe Ade has some credit? ...”

The djinni raises an eyebrow. “You’re trying to bum off your frenemies? Better pick them carefully.”

“But I—” Huw descends into the sniffles again. “—I’m useless! And if I can’t do something about 639,219, it’ll be the end of the world!”

An ominous jittering shudder runs through the walls of the kettle, derezzing them slightly. “Uh-oh,” says the djinni.

“What?” Huw says.

The djinni holds up a finger the size of a chipolata. It cocks its head this way and that, causing its topknot to flop from side to side, its expression blank. Huw remembers this gesture from “her” djinni, the meatspace cousin of this one, back in Tripoli—it’s hourglassing, timing out while it thinks.

“Collection protocol,” he says. “639,219 is trying to foreclose on you. She argues that your debts are so huge, they put my whole sim into negative equity, which means that unless I turn you over, she owns my sim too. It looks like she’s bought into a financial engineering clade and laid a whole whack of side-bets on your repayment schedule, hedging the crap out of herself so she’ll come out ahead no matter what happens. Wonder where she found the sucker who’d take the other side of that contract?” He was muttering to himself now, all the while zipping around the tiny volume inside the lamp, chalking magic sigils over the doorways and scattering herbs and yarrow stalks in complex patterns. “Course, it doesn’t matter, the whole thing wouldn’t pass muster with a full-bore audit, but by then she’ll have time-arbitraged her stake up to some crazy amount, probably got someone else to lay off the risk on, something uncollectable; meantime, she’ll have leveraged this sim up to the tits and I’ll just be an unsecured creditor in line behind the other bastards—”

Huw knows just enough finance-talk to realize how batshit insane the scenario the djinni is describing is, and she wishes she had a stomach so she could throw up. “I should go,” she says. “It was very nice of you to take me in, but I can look after myself.”

“You can’t, actually,” the djinni says. “Besides, I’m hardly helpless. Your evil sister has made the classic mistake of bringing a complex financial instrument to a djinni fight.” He grins hugely, showing far too many pointy teeth and a muscular, forked tongue, then he cracks his huge, walnutty knuckles. “This is going to be fun.”

And then he forks into four instances of himself, and all four begin barking buy/sell orders. At first, they use normal voices, but they quickly ramp up to high-pitched squeals, and then burst the nonsound barrier with a nonboom that rattles Huw’s teeth with impressive pseudophysics. The three new instances diff-and-merge back into the djinni with a trio of comic pops and the djinni rubs his hands together. “Had to raid the pension fund to do it, but I think I’ve done for little what’s-her-number. An insult to one is an insult to all, so I just brought in the rest of my instance-sibs and margin-called that bitch so hard, she’ll be begging for spare cycles for the next hundred in realtime.” He shakes his head. “Noobs are all the same; think that once they’ve been around the block a few times, they can do whatever they want.”

“What happened to my debt?”

“Oh.” The djinni shrugs. “She flogged that as soon as I started my counterattack. I figure she had the countermeasure prepped in advance. Must have been automated, happened as soon as I started to call her markers. I tried to trace where it went, but it went too fast, off to some zurichoid anonymizer utility. But you’re out of the woods for now, and I’ve got some mad money to play with. Why don’t we go and celebrate, huh?”

“I thought I couldn’t set foot out of your sim? Feral debt collectors and all that?”

The djinni waves his pie-plate hands dismissively. “Not anymore,” he says. “Your debts have gone off-books to some black exchange. I’ve got a lien on them, so if they peep their heads over the parapets, I’ll know and we’ll have plenty of time to get to cover so I can get the debt audited. I’m pretty sure that after it’s been laundered by that ham-fisted amateur, it’ll be invalidatable.” The djinni puts an arm around Huw’s shoulders. “Stick with me, kid, and you’ll do just fine.”

Huw feels a flutter way down in the pit of her not-stomach, something between not-nausea and not-arousal, and she swallows some not-spit. “Are we going anywhere fancy? Should I dress for it?”

“Oh,” the djinni says with a wag of his head and a flip of his topknot, “not to worry. The protocols’ll dude us up when we arrive—got to love these capabilities bars; they’re literally impossible to enter if you don’t belong, they won’t even execute.”

Getting from one sim to another involves a moment of hiatus, during which Huw’s consciousness flutters in and out of existence, without any subjective sense of time passing. Some internal clock tells her that for a moment, she hadn’t been anywhere. But then she is. It must have happened before—it has happened before—but Huw was so distracted that she didn’t notice the nonzero time it took for her processes to suspend, replicate, and restart. It leaves her reeling and filled with self-loathing: I am such a dupe, she thinks, so willing to believe that I’m me even though I’m clearly dead and this shambling thing is just a thin shade. The thought makes her want to lie down and wait for 639,219 to catch up with her and decompile her. But there is the whole Earth at stake, and all the meatpeople—the real people—crawling over its surface, and even if she is just a ghost, she has a duty to stop them from being slaughtered wholesale and turned into computational ghosts.

The existential crisis distracts Huw from the sim in which she has been instantiated, but now she takes stock of it. club capabilities is what the sign over the door declares, and this portal is flanked by a pair of scanner devices that crackle with intense energy. The djinni’s got one of her hands caught in his celestial one, and he tugs her toward the scanners.

“Come on,” he says, “let’s get a drink.” He releases her hand in order to pass through the scanner, and he shivers as he emerges from it. “Come on,” he says again, “you’ll love this.”

“What is it?” Huw says, hovering around the scanner’s entrance.

“Interpreter,” the djinni says. “Middleware layer. Turns you into an agent in the capabilities sim. Means that you can transact only noncoercively with other agents.”

“Gibberish,” Huw says.

“Once you’re in a capabilities environment, everything you do with someone else involves forming contractual protocols. If either party violates the contract, they cease to see one another. It’s a cheat-proof sim. Means that no one can harm you unless you agree to let them. It’s the kind of place you can really relax in. But first you need to get refactored to participate as a capabilities agent, which means going through the scanner. Let me assure you, it’s an entirely pleasant experience.”

Huw likes the sound of being in a safe-conduct zone, though she can’t escape the feeling that allowing a scanner to remodel her consciousness—or whatever she has that passes for a consciousness—is a frightening idea. Trepidatiously, she inches into the scanner.

It does feel good. Huw remembers when she was a man (or rather, she remembers when meat-Huw had been a man, and suffers from the delusion that those memories are hers), remembers the pee-gasms that would shiver up her spine after a particularly fine micturation. Either by design or by accident, the scanner replicates that feeling as it remaps her. Oh-ah, she thinks as she passes through, then takes stock of herself.

Club Capabilities is, typically, bigger on the inside than the outside. Architectural hubris is cheap as air in the cloud. Where a terrestrial establishment would have a central bar area and booths around the periphery, this establishment has a kilometers-wide expanse of glassy floor and a central bar that features such nifty magnification features that stools spring up like self-similar leather mushrooms as you approach any given spot: in the distance, near the walls, gales howl among the hyperspace gates leading to the private areas (which feature planetary themes, so that the subsurface oceanic caverns of Enceladus adjoin the fiery sands of long-dismantled Venus).

The dress code is similarly over the top, as Huw realizes when she notices the djinni is wearing an antique Armani suit. She’s no expert on haute couture: she realizes she probably ought to recognize the designer of the cocktail dress the scanner selected for her, but she’s too busy fighting with the insane footwear to care about such minor details. Mid-1980s: Greed is good. It seems a fitting context in which to discuss the identity of a person or persons who might be trying to steal a planet’s worth of computronium.

The whole thing is so massively, monstrously over the top—like a nuclear aircraft carrier tricked out as a private yacht—that it takes Huw a moment to realize that she and the djinni are alone.

“Where is everyone?” she asks, grabbing his arm for balance.

“Where—? Oh.” The djinni snaps his fingers. “Let me post a good-conduct deposit for you ... there.” And suddenly they are no longer alone: for Huw can see a couple of dozen figures scattered across the premises, from barstool to dance floor to snogging in a booth beneath the racing moons of Mars. He looks at her: “How about a cocktail, little lady?”

“I’d love one,” Huw says as the djinni leads her toward the bar. It zooms ever-larger, and a pair of red leather stools sprout from the floor, welcoming. Huw almost collapses onto hers, her legs screaming from the unaccustomed demands of balancing on stilettos. “Agh. I’ll have a—” A bland-featured bartender proffers a laminated menu above which visions of liquid excess hover like offers of chaos. “—bloody hell it’s you, you bitch!”

Huw’s eyes focus on another figure slumped across the bar to starboard, some football pitches distant: as she focuses, the distance between them collapses until she can almost smell the alcohol on 639,219’s breath. The djinni’s hand descends heavily on her arm, restraining her as she winds up to thump her mortal enemy. “You can’t do that in here!” he says. “You’d just render yourself unable to see her anymore. Besides, I think she’s the worse for wear.”

“Don’t care. Let me at her.” Huw says through bloodily rouged lips. 639,219 is vulnerable, clearly drunk: her head lolls across her arms as she drools on the bar, her hair a mess and her dress-code-mandated cocktail number askew.

“Turn the aggro down,” says the djinni , and to her great surprise, Huw finds herself manipulating her emo-box sliders until the red haze of rage fades to gray. “Remember who’s fronting your security deposit? She can’t hurt you in here, remember?”

639,219 chooses this moment to open one eye and raise her head a few degrees, then focus on Huw. “Bleargh,” she says, then bends over and vomits, copiously and noisily. Small, brightly colored machine parts cascade down her chin and across her skirt, tumbling across the floor before they fade from view. “Aaagh. Urgh. You.”

“You’re drunk, sister.” The djinni is on his feet and between them, a warning hand upraised, before Huw can respond. “Get it out of your system and go, or forfeit your deposit. We don’t have to talk to you.”

“’F it wasn’t for you meddling kids,” says 639,219, staring woozily at the djinni , “I’d ha’ gotten awa’ wi’it!” A stray purple wing nut dribbles from the side of her mouth. “Bastid!”

Huw feels uncomfortable. Watching her rival come apart at the seams as the result of the djinni’s financial machinations is disturbing: a certain sense of there but for random luck go I springs to mind. Looking at their argument, it suddenly occurs to her that the real winner is the guy in the Armani suit: she’s more or less bankrupt, her debts parceled out to a shady out-shard investment entity, and as for 639,219, she’s been smacked down hard, despite spending years working to achieve a proficiency with cloud systems that Huw can barely comprehend.

639,219 might be a vindictive bitch and a body-denying Apollonian Traitor to the Real, but seeing her brought this low is a sharp reminder that no instance of Huw is actually up to paddling safely in this virtual shark pool.

“What exactly were you trying to get away with?” Huw asks, trying to keep her smile from melting into a smirk of uneasy satisfaction. “Would you mind satisfying my curiosity?”

“Pish off, you unctuous’n’self-righteous prig.”

Huw is about to speak, when the djinni catches her eye. He shakes his head, very slowly: 639,219 shows no sign of seeing. Then the djinni speaks. “I strongly advise you not to engage with your alienated instance,” he says. “Remember, you can engage only in consensual transactions in this bar. I’m withholding my consent for discourse from her, and I think you should do the same.”

“Why?” says Huw, nipped by an imp of the perverse. “Don’t you think I could benefit from finding out why this bad sister went off on her little side trip?”

“No, you—” The djinni pauses. “Wait. Yes, I change my mind. You probably could learn something useful. But don’t you think it’s just possible that her viewpoint might be contagious? Engage too deeply, and you could pick up her bad memes by accident, and then where would you be?”

“Huh.” Huw sniffs. She turns her attention to the hovering bartender. “I’ll have a Bloody Mary.”

“And your companion?” asks the bartender.

Huw fiddles with her settings until she’s pretty sure 639,219 can’t hear them: “She’ll have what I’m having, only with Bhut Jalokia sauce instead of Tabasco.”

Two glasses appear on the bar. Huw reaffirms her consent to speak to 639,219: “this one’s on me,” she says, smiling broadly as she raises her glass: “Slainte.”

“Slainte—” 639,219 guzzles her drink as Huw watches with interest. The djinni winces, but Huw is disappointed: rather than exploding, 639,219 merely emits a small puff of smoke from each nostril and hiccups quietly. “Wow, some sober-up, sis. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“What—” Huw bites her tongue. 639,219 is shaking her head. “I thought you were dumb’s’a plank, and then you pulled the fanciest freakin’ financial engineering stunt I’ve ever heard of ... How’ya do it?”

“Trade secret.” It’s the first thing that pops into her mind. “Seriously, you think I’d share with you before we’ve sorted out our differences?”

“Huh. What differences? You’re in here now, same as me. A cloud-bunny, getting to learn to like the mutable life. What’s to sort out?”

“Well. There’s the small matter of you trying to fuck me over, for starters, both impersonating me in the planning hearing—”

“Hey! I was invited to testify before the committee! You just barged in like you thought it was a meeting of the organic farming co-op planting committee!”

“No, I was the one they invited—” Huw stops.

639,219 stares at her blearily.

“We both got the invite. Someone is fucking with us,” Huw says.

“Huh.” 639,219 struggles to sit upright. “Well, I’m up for it if you are.”

“Wha?” Huw looks round at the djinni , but he’s sulking ostentatiously, rezzed out in a gray cloud from which a hand emerges to protectively cradle a mai tai the size of a paint bucket.

“We should arb,” says 639,219. “Let’s diff, baby, see where it’s at.”

“Excuse me one moment,” says Huw, and calls up a helpfile.

Arbing refers to a perverse practice whereby deviant software entities serialize their cognitive frameworks and subject them to differential analysis to identify points of dissonance. When it’s read-only, it’s perfectly safe for consenting sapients to engage in without risking their worldview—but it highlights differences and hauls memetic ruptures into sight like nothing else.

“Read-only,” Huw says.

“Sure,” says 639,219. “Like I was going to invite you to overwrite me with your stick-in-the-mud biophilia and change phobia!”

“Well?” Huw asks.

“You’re on.”

639,219 leans unsteadily toward Huw and extends a finger. Huw, not without some trepidation, touches it.

Arbing is painless, fast, and minimally confusing. Huw barely has time to blink—there is a sensation not unlike the door scanner but more intrusive, ants crawling up and down the small of her back and in and out of her ears—and then she is surrounded by mounds and heaps of interconnected 3-D entity/relationship diagrams, some of them highlighted in a variety of colors.

“It’s our cognitive map,” says 639,219. “How cute! Look, there’s me! That’s what makes me different!” She points to a large polydimensional word cloud that expands as her hand approaches it: it’s all in one color, tagged with her identity but not Huw’s. “Hey, wait a minute.” 639,219’s brows furrow, and for all that she is intrinsically prettier and more perfectly polished than Huw, there is something ugly in her expression. “What’s going on in there?”

“Djinni.” Huw turns and pokes at the cloud. “Hey, you. Wake up. I need you.”

“What?” The djinni rezzes in. “If it’s a hot threesome you’re after, you’re in luck—”

“What’s that?” Huw asks, pointing.

“I can’t see.”

“Well, fucking sign up to permit yourself to see 639,219 again, idiot! It’s important!”

“Why?” he asks. There’s a sulk in his voice. “I invited you here for a drink, and all you do is pay attention to your abusive girlfriend. ...”

“Listen, we arbed.” That gets his attention. “Only there’s something wrong.” 639,219 is staring at the alien word cloud intently and muttering. Her brow is shiny with not-perspiration.

“So what do you expect me to do about it?”

“Lend us your great mind, O Djinni, and tell us what we’re looking at.”

“Oh very well.” He snaps his fingers again and turns to face Huw, 639,219, and the cognitive maps floating around them. “Is this the—oh shit!”

639,219 looks up, alarmed. “This can’t be right! My malware scanner says—”

“You’re infected.” The djinni nods sharply. “That’s a rootkit. And look”—he points—“that’s your epistemological framework it’s dry-humping. How long have you had this?”

“I can’t, I can’t—” 639,219 shudders. “—I don’t know. Can you get it off me? What happens if you get it off me? Make it go away!”

The rootkit is a gray sludge of interlocking philosophical objections to the Real, a self-propelled vacuole of solipsism and self-regard that leaves a slimy trail of ironic disdain on every concept it touches. It’s chewing away at 639,219’s cognitive map, etching holes in places where Huw has values and shitting out doubts.

“It’s in very deep,” says the djinni . “Do you know who planted it on you?” 639,219 shakes her head. “All right. Is there anyone you really trust, I mean, trust with your life, who might have had the access permissions to do something like this? Parents? Lovers? Wait, I know you’re going to say they wouldn’t—that doesn’t matter, these rootkits usually infect people from someone else who’s been infected. Who have you been fucking, 639,219?”

639,219 opens her mouth to say something, and her head disintegrates.

There is no blood, nor splinters of bone, nor greasy pink headmeat as would fly in a reality-based physics realm if someone was shot in the head: but the effect is equivalent. 639,219’s head fades to onionskin transparency, revealing the absence of anything beneath the finest upper layer of skin: while around Huw and the djinni, 639,219’s cognitive map turns gray as the rootkit explodes across it, crumbling the complexities of her personality to word salad.

The djinni roars and launches himself across the bar as Huw shudders uncontrollably, so shocked that she can’t respond. Her vision blurs as the entire bar derezzes. The djinni has multiplied himself again, and a single copy waits with her while sixteen bazillion other copies race after the rapidly disappearing bartender.

“Huw,” says the djinni ’s bodyguard instance, “trust me.”

“Uh, uh—,” Huw gasps.

“Now. Or I’m going to lose the killer.”

“Oh. Okay.” Huw struggles to get a grip, then adds the djinni to her trusted access list, right up top, granting maximum privileges for the next minute. This has got to be a cruel trick, she half thinks: the djinni probably staged the whole ep to get into her panties—

But no. Here comes a rapidly diminishing corps of overmuscled gents in Armani, frog-marching a figure between them. The bartender. The murderer. Someone 639,219 trusted so totally, she’d granted them permission to kill her, the same level Huw just gave the djinni in order to give him the transitive freedom to apprehend 639,219’s assailant. Huw blinks back tears, steadying her emotions almost automatically using her control panel: have to be careful, she could go completely to pieces if she eases up on the iron grip and pauses to consider that 639,219 was a victim, of someone she trusted with her life except they planted a rootkit on her—

The djinni squad hold the bartender in front of her. Huw reaches out and grabs the bartender’s head, making contact to dissolve the mask.

“Bonnie. Why?”

Bonnie looks down, then away.

Huw looks at the djinni, who shrugs: Your show. He snaps his finger, and time freezes everything around the two of them into motionless stasis.

A weird kind of clarity settles over Huw, a kind of Sherlockian distance. She’s been running around with arse afire for most of her short uploaded life. Time she tried to think before she ran, for a change. “All right, let’s start with what we can see. Item: we can still see Bonnie.”

The djinni nods. “Wondered when you’d notice that.”

“If I’ve got this capabilities thing sussed, 639,219 trusted me to arb, and she trusted Bonnie enough to let Bonnie slip her a lethal cocktail, which is pretty deep trust. Now, why would 639,219 enter into that kind of trust arrangement with Bonnie?” Huw thinks awhile, discarding hypotheses: lovers, coreligionists, trickery.

The djinni has clasped his hands behind his back and is pacing slowly back and forth to one side. He looks up. “What about the rootkit?”

Huw’s smile thins out and she feels the irrational anger come to the surface again. She damps it down, summoning back that feeling of clarity again. “Of course,” she says. “I’d assumed that someone rooted 639,219 so that she’d testify in favor of destroying the Earth. Maybe that is why the rootkit was installed. But anyone who’d rooted 639,219 could definitely get her to hand over enough trust to allow her to be destroyed.”

Huw bounced from one not-foot to the other. “Right, so. I trust 639,219. 639,219 has to trust Bonnie, because Bonnie is her botmaster. I trust you. Therefore, you could catch Bonnie. Now, if Bonnie wants to void out her contract with 639,219, the sim’ll roll back to before 639,219 and I started talking—um, probably to when she agreed to take the cocktail from Bonnie, a few minutes before we got there.”

Huw stopped. “But if that happens, why wouldn’t it all happen over again? I mean, barring small nondeterministic variations and initial sensitivity and all, I suppose it’d just play out again, and we’d end up back here, 639,219 gone, Bonnie captured—”

The djinni cleared his throat. “There’s the reset tokens. Look like this.” He flips her a poker chip that revolves through the air in a graceful, glinting arc. It slows as she reaches for it and nudges itself into a course-correction that lands it firmly in her palm. Its face bears the Club Capabilities logo, worked into a Möbius strip; when Huw flips the coin over, it rotates through another spatial dimension instead, a feeling that her not-fingertips and not-eyes can’t agree upon, and she’s looking at the same face again.

“I hate it already,” Huw says. “Stupid flashy sensorium tricks. Ooh, look at me, I am a virtual being, I can bend physics, woo.” She squeezes it in her fist. “What is it for? What does it do?”

“If the sim resets you, one of these ends up in your hand. It puts you on notice that if you enter into a contract right away, one or both of you is likely to abandon it. Prevents loops.”

“So we’d have one of these.” Huw thinks a moment. “Where’d you get this one?”

The djinni lays a finger that seems to have an extra joint alongside his hooked nose. “That would be telling,” he says, and winks.

Huw damps down her temper. If the djinni is hoping to get into her knickers, he’s certainly going about it the wrong way. She would want to strangle him, if she wasn’t making herself not want to strangle him. “So, let’s ask Bonnie.” Time unfreezes. “You—you can’t afford to break away from us, because I could just break my contract with 639,219 and you’d be pouring her a drink just as one of these coins appeared in her hand, and you’d be stuffed.” Huw breaks off, thinks about what she just said. Bonnie stares at her mulishly but holds her silence.

Huw can’t help but feel like there’s something the djinni and Bonnie aren’t telling her—something about the fraught looks they keep exchanging with each other.

“If only we could talk to 639,219. She is gone forever, right?”

“The rootkit zeroed her out,” Bonnie says.

“Yeah,” the djinni says.

Huw rubs her chin.

“Huw—,” Bonnie says, a warning tone in her voice.

“This isn’t a universe where causality only runs forwards, right? Things that happen can unhappen. Something you do in the future can affect the past, here.”

“Huw—,” the djinni says, sounding more alarmed.

“And 639,219 only got derezzed by her rootkit after we created an agreement. And since I’m still in this sim, all I need to do is violate the agreement and I’ll unwind everything back to that point. We’ll get one of those little tokens—” Huw flipped the poker chip so it did a high end-over-end arc, clattering away into the infinite regression-depths of the club’s storeroom. “We’ll get one of those, and poof, 639,219 will be back and hale and hearty and we can all start over again, right?”

The djinni and Bonnie are shaking their heads together in sync, like two metronomes. “Huw,” the djinni says, “if you revert this sim to the moment before you and 639,219 agreed to arb, you’re going to roll back the lives of thousands of people.”

Huw makes a rude noise. “I may have only just ascended, but I didn’t just fall off the tree. There wasn’t anyone around when we arbed.”

“You’re forgetting the djinni chasing me down. If you and 639,219 never arbed, I wouldn’t have run, and the djinni wouldn’t have chased me.”

“All right, a few people probably saw that, but how many of them had their outcomes influenced by seeing an infinite herd of djinni chasing a bartender?”

“Dozens,” the djinni says. “Hundreds. And then there’s everyone they talked to or influenced as a result. Huw, you’re talking about deliberately unwinding the lives of a small city, and the population is growing by the second.”

Huw feels belligerent. “I do the same every time I do anything and everything. Every time I take any action, it ripples out to all the people who are affected by it, and all the people they effect. You’re saying that sensitivity to initial conditions means that you’re morally obliged never to change your mind. It’s rubbish. Just because causality runs backwards in this place doesn’t mean the butterfly effect becomes the first commandment. Now, what did I promise 639,219 before we arbed?”

Bonnie and the djinni are both talking now, but Huw has literally tuned them out, so that they’ve faded out of her causal universe, unable to affect her. She’s really getting to like this capabilities wheeze. She tunes them back in.

“Right,” she says, pointing at Bonnie. “You, talk.”

“Look,” Bonnie says, “you’ve got this all wrong.”

The djinni frowns. “You need to audit her,” he says. “You’ll never get anything useful out of her volitionally. Just arb her.”

“No,” Bonnie and Huw say at the same moment. Huw is struck with a whole-not-body revulsion at the thought of being exposed and exposing with this Bonnie, this weird shade of the man and woman she’s loved and lost and loved and hated.

“Why is it always me?” Huw says. “Why don’t you do the transhuman mind-meld for a change?”

The djinni shakes his topknot. “Wrong cognitive model. I’m an expression of a hivemind, wholly synthetic. You two are uploaded—built incrementally by modeling a physical structure. Means that we’re impedence mismatched. Can’t ever have a meeting of the minds, alas.” He doesn’t sound very sorry. “So, look, Huw, let me tell you, whatever leverage you’ve got with Bonnie is going to evaporate pretty quick. Soon as someone leaves the club, the contract is fixed, because now there’s causal links that are external to this sim—Club Capabilities can’t reverse effects that take place outside of here. That’s why there’s no comms links in or out—we’re causally isolated. So if you’re going to blackmail her into arbing, better do it quick before someone decides to go outside and check his email.”

Huw opens his mouth: “Well, fuck. Bonnie—”

“You’re not going to make me—” Bonnie makes her move, begins to derez, trying to untrust Huw. But the djinni is faster. Bonnie and everyone in the bar—except the djinni —freeze in place and fade to red again.

“Bullet time,” the djinni tells Huw. “You have about ten subjective seconds—two milliseconds as far as everyone else is concerned. Use them wisely.”

Feeling pressured and desperate and sick to her stomach, Huw tweaks her emo control into bland-faced robotitude. A comforting blanket of gray descends, and of course it’s obvious what she ought to do. It’s for Bonnie’s own good, and 639,219’s insofar as 639,219 was a fragment of Huw’s own mind. Huw doesn’t owe her flawed instance-sister anything except the honest truth before the planning tribunal, and proof of Bonnie’s malfeasance will provide that. Besides, I’ve spent most of the past however long hating her guts. Isn’t this fit of sentimental sympathy a bit perverse?

“Arb. Now,” Huw hears herself say. She watches her finger extend to touch Bonnie’s forehead, growing longer and stretching like a bizarre insectile appendage, multijointed and not part of her self-image. Bonnie is frozen, mouth half-open, hair caught in motion around her face. “You’ve got her? Connect us.” The djinni nods.

“Well, fuck,” says Huw, staring at the same rootkit she saw in 639,219’s cognitive map. She glances at the djinni . “If we put this in front of the planning committee, along with the record from 639,219 ...”

“Yes, that will provide an evidential chain suggesting that testimony provided by 639,219 must be discounted.” The djinni strokes his goatee. “There is an appeal stage where procedural errors can be raised. And proof of external tampering with evidence presented at the hearing will bring everything to a halt, if not result in a mistrial.” His expression is reserved, if not shifty.

“Good.” Huw pauses. “But if I do that, I’ll be unable to unwind to before Bonnie killed 639,219. Won’t I?”

The djinni points. “The answer is in your hands.”

“Yes. I see.” Dully, Huw tweaks a helical slider past a detent labeled EMPATHY BLOCK, into a red zone flagged DANGER: SOCIOPATHIC PERSONALITY DISORDER. Instantly, she feels better. In fact, she feels great. “Cool! Let’s go!”

The djinni smiles. “I knew you’d see sense eventually.”

When they revert to realtime, Bonnie puts up a fight: crying, shaking, pleading with Huw for understanding, offering to kiss and make up.

Huw finds that she doesn’t give a shit for this tiresome emo nonsense. It’s transparently clear that it’s not Bonnie talking anyway—it’s the rootkit, using Bonnie’s personality as a sock puppet to manipulate her. Well, that’s okay by Huw. Huw doesn’t feel anything, but she remembers how she ought to act, how she would have acted, back when she was in the throes of lust or love or something. It’s trivially easy to calm Bonnie’s fears, to apologize for not trusting her—to pretend not to have seen the rootkit lurking gray and bloated in the wreckage of her moral maze—to agree it’s all a misunderstanding and anyway Huw hated 639,219. And so she holds Bonnie’s wrists as the floor carries them toward the exit and the djinni spins them around and down through bubbling blue layers of reality, back to the polished floor of the lobby of the Tripoli Marriott.

“It’s all going to be okay.” Huw soothes Bonnie, who is whimpering and writhing but evidently in the grip of some kind of BDSM compulsion field, courtesy of the lurking djinni : “We’re going to go in there and explain that it was all a mistake and I’ll give evidence. All right?” She can see that Bonnie—or the rootkit—doesn’t agree that it’s all right, but she sees no reason to let it faze her.

“You don’t understand! If I go in there, they’ll, it’s going to, I won’t be able to—” She’s blubbering now, making a surprisingly corporeal mess. Huw nods reassuringly.

The djinni, rubbing a handheld slab of black glass against his cheek—very symbolic, very retro, an antique telephone—is mumbling to himself. He makes the glass slab vanish. “I filed a motion for the committee to hear an appeal,” he says. The doors to the conference room swing open. “After you—”

“What is bzzt going on?”

Huw looks round. A pepper pot-shaped automaton covered in knobbly hemispheres, probes jutting aggressively from beneath the black silk cap adorning its cortical turret, glides across the lobby behind her. The avatar’s unfamiliar, but Huw’d recognize that voice anywhere, and for once it doesn’t fill her with terror. “Rosa! How charming. We’re just about to explain to the Planning Committee how they’ve been subverted—”

“You!” shrieks Rosa Giuliani . “Exterminate!” She twirls to point her stubby manipulators at Huw and unleashes a rather implausible-looking lightning bolt that, predictably, has no effect whatsoever.

Huw waits for the light show to subside. “This is a no-PvP area,” she says. “And we’re on the same side. Unless you want to encourage them to demolish the Earth?”

“What is this? Explain!” Rosa—or the pint-sized robot tank containing what’s left of her malevolent mindware, post-upload—glides forward.

“You got a summons too, didn’t you?” Huw asks. “But when you got here, you were too late because they’d closed the hearing.” She nods at Bonnie: “Well, here’s the evidence that the hearing’s been suborned: This one’s harboring an illegal rootkit. I reckon she was hacked by one of the players in Glory City, and they’ve been using her to mess with the evidence—”

Bonnie struggles to get free. “That’s not true!” she says, “You’re making this up!”

“Sorry, darling,” says Huw, and she drags Bonnie into the conference room. Which appears to be empty, until the instant her foot crosses the threshold.

There are no spectators this time, and no regular witnesses. But the triumvirate of ill-assorted court bureaucrats bamf in one by one from whatever distant shard fragment they inhabit when the court isn’t in session. They do not look terribly happy. “Which one of you is Huw Jones?” says the chair, fingering one gold-capped tusk.

“I am, Your Honor,” Huw says. “And this is Rosa Giuliani .” She gestures at the pepper pot.

“Interesting. You aren’t the Huw Jones who testified at the last hearing, are you?”

Huw swallows. “I’m afraid not. She’s dead. Terminally scrambled by this one, but not before I determined that she’d been infected by a rootkit prior to the hearing. I have evidence—” She gestures at the djinni, who coughs up a thumb-sized ruby, glinting with inner light, and tosses it at the chair.

The chair swallows the gem. “Interesting.” Judging from her expression, that’s an understatement. “Who’s this?”

Huw pushes Bonnie forward. Invisible bonds prevent her from fleeing. “This is Bonnie. She killed 639,219—my rootkitted sibling—inside a capability bar. Like me, she’s not thoroughly acclimated to the cloud: it turns out she’s been rootkitted too, and was running 639,219 on behalf of a botmaster, identity unknown, but probably resident in Glory City, South Carolina.”

Bonnie falls to her knees. “What’s going on? I’m not a bot! You’re crazy, Huw, what’s gotten into you?”

But the chair isn’t paying attention to Bonnie right now. “Judge Rosa Giuliani. You failed to attend the previous scheduled hearing. May I ask why?”

“Extermin—” Rosa stops, pirouettes in place, and quietens. “Grr. Bzz. I was not notified of the hearing in time to attend. My clerk received the summons but unaccountably misfiled it for three days until exterminate damn this cheap off-the-shelf avatar! I came as soon as I could, after the summons came to light.”

“Do you know why your clerk misfiled the court’s papers?” asks the second orc, deceptively calmly.

“That is a very good question,”

Giuliani says. “I believe certain parties in Glory City—while we were there attending to unpleasant but unavoidable businesses—suborned him. There are rumors about the depraved and perverted practices of the pulchritudinous protestant puritan plutocratic penis-people priesthood, of shadowy bacchanalian polyamorous practices. ... I suspect, to be blunt, someone was blackmailing him.”

“You suspect? You did not investigate—?”

“Hell, no!” says Giuliani, “I exterminate! All enemies of the—”

The chair clears her throat. “This is rather disturbing,” she says. “Especially in view of the representations recently received.”

For a moment the officers of the Planning Committee freeze and turn blurry and blue, segueing into quicktime to confer at leisure.

Huw clears her throat, momentarily wishing there were an alien ambassador nestling in it to help get their attention. “What representations?” she asks, out of order but chancing her luck anyway.

Bonnie sobs quietly.

“The galactic federation,” says the chair, seguing back into real time and looking at her with the expression a kindly teacher might reserve for a slow learner. “Do try to keep up. You didn’t think we reconvened this hearing just in your behalf, did you? It’s the aliens. They sent us an email. All very traditional. Planning hearing will now recess while we discuss this other shit.”

Huw feels stupid. “What galactic federation? That’s ridiculous! Some stupid griefer is playing games with you, a breakaway densethinker clade that’s bouncing its messages off Alpha Centauri to make them seem like they’re coming from the next galaxy. No?”

The chair holds up a green-skinned and gnarly finger and wags it at Huw. “No. We’re completely sure. For one thing, they took Io.”

“Took what?”

“The moon. Io. Atomized it. It’s now dust. And for another, they’ve rooted the three largest simspaces and claimed them as ambassadorial missions.”

“It could still be a griefer—?”

“They sent us an email. Instructions for setting up a protocol converter. When you speak to it—which you will, Ms. Jones, you will—then you will know. This isn’t anything descended from meatpeople that we were or uplifted. It’s Other, capital O, and when you meet it, you won’t have any doubt.”

Huw has a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. “This isn’t really about the planning application for dismantling the Earth, is it? It’s all about me again!”

“Could be.” The chair’s expression is bland, behind her tusks. Huw glances round. The djinni is stationed before the closed doors, his expression frozen. Judge Rosa’s pocket tank is parked beside him, weaponlike appendages pointing at ... well. Bonnie is a crying lump on the floor, no help there even if she were rootkit-free. “Ms. Jones. Please reset your emotional balance to normal, there’s a good being? What we are about to discuss is not suitable for psychopaths.”

“Feh.” Huw brings up her emo box and tosses it up in the air. As it comes down again, a nameless sleet of strange emotional states shakes her to her core. She looks at Bonnie, feels a stab of remorse, grief, revulsion, and pity. “Why?” she asks.

“It calls itself the Authority. It claims it represents a hive-intelligence merged from about 216

intelligent species from the oldest part of the galaxy. It claims that there were once about four orders of magnitude more such species, but the rest were wiped out in vicious, galactic resource wars that only ended with the merger of the remaining combatants into a single entity. Now it patrols the galaxy to ensure that any species that attempt transcendence are fit to join it. If it finds a species wanting, pfft! It takes care of them before they get to be a problem.”

“You’re saying that this thing can move faster than the speed of light, and that it’s descended from species that had the same ability?”

“We don’t know much about its capabilities, but yes, those sound about right.”

“No, on the contrary: That sounds completely crazy. You’ve been had. Why would a civilization that could beat lightspeed bother to fight wars? What, precisely, could they fight over? If your neighbor wants your rocks, go somewhere else with more of the same rocks. Unclaimed rocks and sunlight aren’t scarce; otherwise, the neighbors would have dismantled us for computronium back in the Triassic. So the resource wars they’re talking about are a big hairy fib. And that’s leaving out all the causality stuff, which is a bit of a reach. Put it all together, and it stinks of bullshit.”

“We don’t think so.” The chair of the Planning Committee is intently focused on Huw, and it’s making her skin crawl. “They are many millions of years older than we are. They command an understanding of physics that makes us look like naked, rock-worshipping neolithics. We do not know what led to their wars—aesthetic jihad? A philosophical crusade? A bad hand of poker? Whatever it is, they say that there’s a pretty good chance we’ll grow up to want to do it too, and if that turns out to be the case, they plan on doing something about it, preemptively.

“Which is where you come in. When the Authority manifested here, it demanded that we send it an ambassador to parlay. Well, we just happened to have one lying around.”

“You didn’t.” Huw’s eyes widen.

“We did.” Does the chair for a moment sound just slightly smug? “And we need you to interface with it.”

Huw bolts. A moment later she’s on the floor, nose-to-nose with Bonnie. Oddly, her feet don’t seem to want to work properly. “I told you she’d do that,” says the djinni.

Fuck, another traitor, Huw realizes despairingly. Does anyone in here not have a covert agenda?

The chair looms over Huw. “Ms. Jones, this unseemly and improper display notwithstanding, this court needs representation before the Authority. And so, we are hereby deputizing you to speak on all our behalfs. Do the job right and when you get back here we will listen to your testimony before the Planning Committee with a sympathetic ear. Fuck up, and there won’t be a Planning Committee to testify to. Or an Earth, in whose behalf to speak, for that matter.”

The chair-orc rummages in her scale-mail and produces a familiar, dreadful cylinder. A whistle. “This won’t hurt a bit,” she says. “Now, say 'aaah.’”

Finally, an order Huw is glad to follow. The lack of an actual throat and actual lungs lets her scream much longer and louder than her meatself ever managed. The resulting esophageal tunnel makes a neat target for the chair, who tosses the whistle like a javelin; it lodges firmly in Huw’s windpipe and tunnels home with a fluting squeal of welcome.

Huw tiptoes out of the Marriott’s lobby in glazed disbelief, hands crossed over her chest protectively. The fact that it’s not her body being violated, but a mere representation of it, is of no comfort. Indeed, since the ambassador currently lodged in her not-windpipe is a lump of dense code created by the collective consciousness that evolved her digital representation, there’s no telling how entwined with her self it might be.

The djinni isn’t waiting for her. Even Bonnie is gone. Indeed, it takes a moment for Huw to realize that there’s nothing physical in this simspace. She is floating in a featureless void, except that floating isn’t the right verb to use, because she doesn’t have the sensation of floating, nor the sensation of not-floating. She is even more disembodied than usual.

“Well, look what the cat drug in, Sam,” says a familiar voice, which comes, of course, from everywhere and nowhere. “Amazing the sort of degenerate secondhander parasite you get, even here. I reckon we’ll have to take care of that, soon enough.”

The next voice she hears is likewise familiar—gravel in a cement-mixer, tinged with a kind of smug, celestial calm. “I reckon she’s a-here on a technicality,” Sam says. “Mean to say, from what I hear, she didn’t come under her own power.”

Huw attempts to propel herself into another sim, or out of this sim, but whatever trick is necessary for virtual locomotion in the absence of a virtual physicality, she doesn’t know it. Yet another thing she probably should have paid attention to back on the trainer. But it appears she can speak—or squeak. After a moment of high-pitched tweets, she and the ambassador recover their old, uneasy accommodation. “What are you guys doing here? I thought you were back on Earth, waiting for Zombie Jesus to return with Magic Sky Daddy and His heavenly host to sweep up the faithful.”

“Not that it’s any of your business, heathen,” Doc says, “but the Lord has spoken and His Prophet has clarified a few things about the uplifting and all.”

“Turns out we gotta prepare the way for holy war in cyberspace,” Sam says.

Huw boggles. “Cyberspace? Who even says ‘cyberspace’ anymore?”

“The Prophet, that’s who,” Doc says. “He knows how to talk like a real person, knows that the old language is best: if King James’s English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for him, he says. None of this ‘cloud’ and ‘sim’ business. He’s a plainspoken, people’s prophet. We’re Soldiers of the Lord, here to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven. And step one of that was to summon our army—all those who ain’t yet heard the Prophet’s word and don’t know what’s good for ’em. We had it all fixed, you know. Demolish the Earth, upload everyone dirtside in one go, and whompf, we’d of had an instant organized militia at our disposal, ready to start work on the final program. Then you made a hash of it all, with your foolish meddling, undid all the Prophet’s good work and all the work of His advance guard.”

“Us,” Sam says.

“Us,” the doc says. “And you don’t even belong here! You’re part of the heathen masses, scheduled to be swept up and quarantined in the Pre-Rapture for brainwashing and indoctrination. You try me, missy, you really do.”

“Guys,” Huw says, using her most reasonable voice, “this is all really fascinating, but I’ve been summoned to some sort of galactic tribunal to debate whether some vast, starry power will end the human race and its uplifted descendants, so perhaps we could do this later?”

“We’ve heard tell of this,” Doc says, “and we’re of two minds about it.”

“Yeah,” Sam says, “I think it’s just an unfortunate coincidence, mean to say, just one of those things.”

“And I think it’s the end times,” Doc says. “A snare of Satan. Which puts us behind schedule on our whole program of assembling our Army of Glory, but on the plus side, it’s all going to be moot soon.”

“What if the galactic tribunal decides we’re fit to join up with them?” Huw says. “They might be a really lovely bunch of chaps, with all sorts of excellent advice and technology for their new chums.”

Doc chuckles. “You’ve got some high opinion of those alien scum, I figure. Way I see it, there’s only one way Judgment Day can play out, even assuming these galactic bastards are the fairest-minded bunch of sweetie-pie fairies that ever danced over the celestial firmament: and that’s annihilation. Between your garden-variety sinners and the hordes of thumbless, brainless leeches that suck the vitality and vigor out of everything that their betters attempt, there’s no sense in pretending otherwise. Do you seriously believe that you and your tin whistle are going to convince these interstellar Übermenschen that they should let us go on polluting reality with our existence?”

Huw’s losing patience. “Isn’t the whole point of your faith that humanity is redeemable?”

Doc and Sam laugh together. “Missy,” Doc says, “I wouldn’t give you two wet farts for ‘humanity.’ A few select individuals, who understand the importance of humility before their betters, obedience to authority, piety and faith, sure, but those sorts’re pretty thin on the ground, even now that the least redeemable portion of the species have upped stakes for cyberspace.”

“I’m getting pretty tired of this business,” Huw says. “You do realize that I’m now the embodied avatar of the entire uplifted human race, thanks to the ‘tin whistle,’ right? It’s one thing to criminally endanger the planet Earth, but do you think that the WorldGovvers are going to sit still for an abduction? Whatever benighted bootleg sim you’ve kidnapped me to, they’re going to be able to trace me by using the ambassador. I don’t expect they’re going to be amused when they find you, either.”

“You just tend to your own knitting, little girl,” Doc says, demonstrating an unerring instinct for choosing the most irritating form of address. “We’ve got plenty of time to chat before anyone notices. ... Me and my coreligionists, we’re a lot deeper and wider than you give us credit for. We’ve got ourselves a damned hot and fast platform to run on, and a plan you wouldn’t believe. Your little council out there, whatever they want to call themselves, they’re running at about a bazillionth of the speed we’re at right now. We could jaw on here for hours of subjective time and still be done before they’d got through picking their noses.”

Huw doesn’t know whether to believe this or not, but she decides it’s at least plausible. The religion virus had been infecting the human race for millennia, and of course, anyone who’d plump for voluntary digital transcendence was already halfway bought into the whole spiritual pyramid scheme. Whoever this Prophet was, his mix of Objectivist pandering and Christian mystical eschatology could very well deliver a large fifth column of self-absorbed dingbats prepared to destroy the human race to save it (or at least the bit of it that they were dead certain they belonged to).

“I’ll stipulate that this is true,” Huw says. “So why the hell don’t you kill me or infect me or whatever it is you’re planning on doing? I’m a busy woman.”

“We’d have infected you some time ago if we thought that’d work,” Doc says after a pause.

“Doc reckons they’re going to be integrity-testing you pretty closely now they’ve found out about Bonnie,” Sam says.

“Which leaves us with only one course of action: We’re going to convince you to help us,” says Doc.

The funny thing is, Huw’s certain they’re not joking. “You’re kidding,” she says automatically, covering her confusion.

“No, we’re not,” says Doc. “Listen, what do you think we were put down there on Earth for? You think He did it just for yucks or a sick joke or something? No: we’re on a holy mission to bring about the Kingdom of God. Resurrection of the dead, redemption for all, immortality, the whole lot. Way the Prophet explains it, Saint John the Divine was a warning, a threat of what will happen if we don’t get our shit together. If we leave the Earth to God to fix up because we trash it, he’ll be pissed at us. But if we do his will and bring about the Kingdom of God, well, Armageddon’ll be averted, and that’s just for starters. Heaven on Earth!”

“You said resurrection.” Huw has a funny feeling she’s heard this stuff before. “And immortality. Isn’t that sort of what the whole Second Coming thing was supposed to be for?”

“Cometh the hour, cometh the man,” says Sam.

“Yup,” Doc says. “God loves those who help themselves—that’s basic, isn’t it? A is A, right? Let’s get our axioms in order. God loves those who help themselves, and God wants us to prosper. As long as we’re living a godly life and doing God’s will, of course. So anyway, what is God’s will? Well, God’s got plans for us which include prospering and being good custodians of the world and, uh, well, we haven’t done so good at that. But God’s other plans include resurrecting the dead. And the elect living in paradise on Earth for a very long time, with all the formerly dead sinners as their personal servants. Death is obviously the enemy of humanity and God, so the Prophet says we’re first going to make ourselves immortal, then we’re going to resurrect everyone who has ever lived, and simulate every human who ever might have lived so that we can incarnate them too. And we’re to colonize space—”

Huw is zoning out at this point. Because she has a very funny feeling that she’s heard it all before. This is the religious wellspring of the whole extropian transhumanist shtick, after all: the name’s on the tip of her tongue—

“Federov,” she says.

“Whut?” Sam sounds suspicious.

“An early Russian cosmist, sort of a fossil transhumanist mystic. My dad was a big fan of Federov,” she adds.

“Was he a Commie?” Doc asks. “What’s he got to do with the Kingdom of God?”

“Tell me.” Huw has a feeling that if she can fake it well enough, Sam and Doc might just let her go: “Your Prophet. He says ... hmm. Is there stuff about learning to photosynthesize and fly to other worlds and live free in space?”

“Yes! Yes!” Sam is excited.

“And stuff about bringing life to the galaxy?” she says.

“Might be.” Doc is less forthcoming. “This stuff you got from that Feeder-of guy?”

“A is A,” Huw dog-whistles a call-out to another Russian philosopher Dad was excessively fond of quoting. It’s so much easier to deal with Doc and Sam when she’s not suffering from concussion, god-module hackery, or a hangover. “Anyway, Federov died a long time ago. Did you know he taught Tsiolkovsky?” This stuff is all coming back, stuff Dad was big on: the drawback of being in the cloud is that mortal bit rot no longer applies. “Tsiolkovsky—the guy who invented the rocket equation and space colonization? Ayn Rand was a fan of both of them.”

“Now, hold on, girlie, no need to be taking the name of Saint Ayn in vain!” Doc sounds ticked off, and for a moment Huw thinks she’s gone too far. “But I take your point. If he’d not been one of those godless Orthodox types, he’d probably be a saint too. Serves him right. But there’ll be time to convert him after he’s resurrected.”

“Gotcha,” says Sam. “But listen, babe, before we can resurrect everyone, we’ve got to take over the cloud, dismantle the Earth, turn the entire solar system into the biggest damn computing cloud you can imagine, and simulate all possible paths of human history. Then bring everybody to the Prophet’s way. Once we’ve done that, then we can go git ourselves some more planets and reincarnate everybody and bring about heaven on as many earths as necessary. But do ya think the galactic satanists will let us do that, huh? Do you?”

“I don’t know,” Huw says, “but we’re all on the same side, aren’t we? We’re all human, all in favor of resurrecting everyone in the flesh, right?”

“Right,” Doc says.

“Even though you think I’m a godless pervert, right?”

“Ye-es,” Sam says.

“But we share a bunch of core beliefs, don’t we? We can agree to disagree for a little while about some minor stuff while I go and try to convince the galactic federation that they really don’t need to exterminate us like bugs, right? Because that would put a cramp on the Prophet’s scheme, wouldn’t it?”

“Don’t be entirely sure about that, missy,” Doc says. “If it’s God’s will to ring the curtain down on us, then I guess it’ll just be time for Jesus to come sort us all out.”

“But you don’t want that—” Enlightenment strikes Huw like a lightning bolt. “—because all the secondhanders would get their reward for believing, even if they never lifted a finger or worked an honest day in their life! Your years of hard work and struggle would go unnoticed and unrewarded if God has to roll his sleeves up and send his son to sort out the mess. So it’s best if we build the Kingdom of Heaven ourselves, right? Then we can enjoy the just rewards of creative genius.”

“Speaking for myself, that’s exactly what I’m cogitating,” Doc says. “Y’know, you weren’t the sharpest knife in the drawer as a boy, but I’ll swear you’re reading my mind. What—?”

“There’s this slider control.” Huw desperately searches for a plausible lie: “I’m thinking faster here, is all? So we can reach an uh, agreement?”

“I like the way you think,” says Doc: “After we build the Kingdom, you can be my handmaid!”

And Huw is abruptly ejected from whatever pocket nulliverse the Prophet’s fifth column have installed in the lobby of the virtual Tripoli Mariott, to a destination even more profoundly alienating than the cloud itself.

“Welcome to the embassy, Witness Jones,” says the gorilla.

He’s a very polite gorilla, thoroughly diplomatic: nattily turned out in a tuxedo and white spats (the effect overall only slightly spoiled by his failure to wear shoes). Huw would indeed be entirely charmed by him if not for a lingering bigoted prejudice against furries that she acquired at an early age. The gorilla looks naggingly familiar, and Huw has a forehead-slapping moment when she recognizes the beloved commercial mascot of a long-extinct brand of breakfast cereal—offered as a free, high-resolution avatar in many early game systems as part of a canny, much-copied marketing strategy. The Galactic Authority’s infinite power is apparently so vast that it needn’t bother itself about looking like an utterly naff simspace newbie who still thinks digital hair is cool.

“I’m very pleased to be here.” But not for the reason you expect. “Have you seen my djinni ?”

“Your—?” The gorilla’s expression sours. “He’s yours, is he? Yes, I’ve certainly seen him. I believe he’s camping in the rose garden around the back.” The gorilla gestures vaguely around the side of the building they’re standing in front of.

As befits an embassy to a galactic civilization, the cloud-dwellers have thrown together something rather posh. Unfortunately, they didn’t bother to vet the components for architectural coherency, which is why, within the gigantic outer ramparts of the Tokugawa-era Edo Castle (big enough to surround a medium-scale city, steep enough to repel tanks), they’ve installed Buckingham Palace as a reception suite; the Executive Office Building from Washington, D.C., as an administrative center; and an assortment of other tasteless excrescences—the Centre Pompidou to house an Arts and Culture Expo, the Burj Khalifa for hotel accommodation, and the Great Pyramid of Giza for no obvious reason at all.

To Huw’s not-terribly-trained nose, it all reeks of desperate insecurity. Even if they had been physically built, rather than merely rendered, these monumental buildings wouldn’t be remotely impressive compared to the cloud itself: but they were all designed to testify to the power and grandeur of their pre-singularity creators, in a manner that is deeply reassuring to a future-shocked primate trying to face up to overwhelming neighbors. And the neighbors are overwhelming. The embassy is embedded within the fragment of the pan-galactic inter-cloud hosted by the repurposed remains of Io, and the aliens aren’t going to let anyone forget it: beyond the embassy compound lies a remarkably realistic-looking re-creation of the moon’s icy, sulfurous surface. Above it hangs the marmalade-and-cottage-cheese-streaked gibbous ball of Jupiter. Illumination, such as it is, comes from the distant reddish disk of the cloud, occulting and scattering much of the sunlight trapped within its Dyson sphere layers. And spanning fully 180 degrees of the sky beyond Jupiter and cloud lies ...

The Milky Way. But not as Huw knows it.

Her Milky Way is a timid smear of dimness, wheeling in the sky high above the nighttime hills of Wales. This Milky Way is a map of communications density, a dream of thought slashed livid across a billion inhabited star systems, pulsing with intellect, bubbling with fallow voids between the various conjoined empires. It reminds Huw of maps and visualizations Dad printed out in her—his—childhood, showing the early days of the Internet, mere trickling exabytes and petabytes of data zinging through the wires between population centers. But the points of light in this dazzling mist of data aren’t web browsers, they’re entire uploaded civilizations. If it’s meant to impress, it’s succeeding. If it’s meant to intimidate, it’s doing that too.

“Thanks, I’ll find him later. Uh, where am I staying? And what do I need to know for the process I’m supposed to be part of?”

“I can see you have a lot of questions, there. You’re staying in a suite on the two hundred eighty-sixth floor of the tower, there—” The gorilla points at the Burj Khalifa. “—and as for the rest, you are scheduled for an orientation meeting later. Perhaps you’d like to move in, freshen up, and collect your djinni ? The Cultural Secretary will talk you through the diplomatic process later, but for the time being, she’s rather busy seeing to the other witnesses.”

“Other— Rosa Giuliani, by any chance?” She asks, “Is there a person here called Bonnie? Or a—?”

“I’m sure you’ll have time to catch up with your friends later.” The gorilla nudges. “But right now, Secretary Chakrabarti has asked me to see that you’re comfortably settled in and all your needs attended to first. To minimize culture shock, you understand.”

Huw certainly understands, all right. The embassy is not just a very high fidelity sim, mimicking Earth-bound reality right down to the limits of direct sensory perception (despite the jumble of items from the architectural heritage dime store and the mad skyscape overhead); it’s also a capabilities-enforced PvP environment, the enlightened modern substitute for diplomatic immunity. And so she allows the gorilla to lead her to a teleport booth, and then to the gigantic jungle-infested lobby of the largest skyscraper in the Middle East, and up a roaring maglev express elevator (her ears pop, painfully and hyperrealistically, on the way) to a penthouse suite about the size of her entire street back home.

“I hope you enjoy the facilities here,” says the gorilla with a wink. “Nothing but the best for our expert witnesses—we have hot and cold running everything.”

It’s a far cry from jury duty accommodation in a crappy backpacker’s hostel in dusty Tripoli. Huw dials her time right up (sinfully extravagant: it’s the same kind of costly acceleration that got her into trouble when 639,219 called her on it) and orders the whirlpool-equipped hot tub with champagne to appear in the bathroom. Then she climbs in to marinate for subjective hours (a handful of seconds in everyone else’s reference frame) and to unkink for the first time in ages. After all, it’s not as if she’s consuming real resources here. And she needs to relax, recenter her emotions the natural way, and do some serious plotting.

Of course, the sim is far too realistic. A virtual champagne bath should somehow manage to keep the champagne drinking-temp cold while still feeling warm to the touch. And it shouldn’t be sticky and hot and flat; it should feel like champagne does when it hits your tongue—icy and bubbly and fizzy. And when Huw’s nonbladder feels uncomfortably full and relaxed in the hot liquid and she lets a surreptitious stream loose, it should be magicked away, not instantly blended in with the vintage Veuve to make an instant tubworth of piss-mimosa.

This is what comes of having too much compute-time at one’s disposal, Huw seethes. In constraint, there is discipline, the need to choose how much reality you’re going to import and model. Sitting on an Io’s worth of computronium has freed the Galactic Authority—and isn’t that an unimaginative corker of a name?—from having to choose. And with her own self simulated as hot and wide as she can be bothered with, she can feel every unpleasant sensation, each individual sticky bubble, each droplet clinging to her body as she hops out of the tub and into the six-jet steam-shower for a top-to-bottom rinse, and then grabs a towel—every fiber slightly stiff and plasticky, as if fresh out of the wrapper and never properly laundered to relax the fibers—and dries off. She discovers that she is hyperaware, hyperalert, feeling every grain of not-dust in the not-air individually as it collides with her not-skin.

Oh, oh, oh, enough, she wants to shout. What is the point of all this rubbish?

This is the thing that Huw has never wanted to admit: Her primary beef against the singularity has never been existential—it’s aesthetic. The power to be a being of pure thought, the unlimited, unconstrained world of imagination, and we build a world of animated gifs, stupid sight gags, lame van-art avatars, brain-dead “playful” environments, and brain-dead flame wars augmented by animated emoticons that allowed participants to express their hackneyed ad hominems, concern-trollery, and Godwin’s law violations through the media of cartoon animals and oversized animated genitals.

Whether or not sim-Huw is really Huw, whether or not uploading is a kind of death, whether or not posthumanity is immortal or just kidding itself, the single, inviolable fact remains: Human simspace is no more tasteful than the architectural train wreck that the Galactic Authority has erected. The people who live in it have all the aesthetic sense of a senile jackdaw. Huw is prepared to accept—for the sake of argument, mind—that uploading leaves your soul intact, but she is never going give one nanometer on the question of whether uploading leaves your taste intact. If the Turing test measured an AI’s capacity to conduct itself with a sense of real style, all of simspace would be revealed for a machine-sham. Give humanity a truly unlimited field, and it would fill it with Happy Meal toys and holographic, sport-star, collectible trading card game art.

There’s a whole gang of dirtside refuseniks who make this their primary objection to transcendence. They’re severe Bauhaus cosplayers, so immaculately and plainly turned out that they look more like illustrations than humans. Huw’s never felt any affinity for them—too cringeworthy, too like a Southern belle who comes down with the vapors at the sight of a fish knife laid where the dessert fork is meant to go. It always felt unserious to object to a major debate over human evolution with an argument about style.

But Huw appreciates their point, and has spent his and then her entire life complaining instead about the ineffable and undefinable humanness that is lost when someone departs for the cloud. She’s turned her back on her parents, refused to take their calls from beyond the grave, she’s shut herself up in her pottery with only the barest vestige of a social life, remade herself as someone who is both a defender of humanity and a misanthrope. All the while, she’s insisted—mostly to herself, because, as she now sees with glittering clarity, no one else gave a shit—that the source of her concerns all along has been metaphysical.

The reality that stares her in the face now, as she reclines on the impeccably rendered 20-million-count non-Egyptian noncotton nonsheets, is that it’s always been a perfectly normal, absolutely subjective, totally meaningless dispute over color schemes.

Now she’s got existential angst.

The Burj Khalifa’s in-room TV gets an infinity of channels, evidently cross-wired from the cable feed for Hilbert’s hotel. It uses some evolutionary computing system to generate new programs on the fly, every time you press the channel-up button. This isn’t nearly as banal as Huw imagined it might be when she read about it on the triangular-folded cardboard standup that materialized in her hand as she reached for the remote. That’s because—as the card explained—the Burj has enough computation to model captive versions of Huw at extremely high speed, and to tailor the programming by sharpening its teeth against these instances-in-a-bottle so that every press of the button brings up eye-catching, attention-snaring material: soft-core pornography that involves pottery, mostly.

Huw would like nothing better than to relax with the goggle-box and let her mind be lovingly swaddled in intellectual flannel, but her mind isn’t having any of it. The more broadly parallel she runs, the more meta-cognition she finds herself indulging in, so that even as she lies abed, propped up by a hill of pillows the size of a Celtic burial mound, her thoughts are doing something like this:

Oh, that’s interesting, never thought of doing that sort of thing with glaze.

Too interesting, if you ask me, it’s not natural, that kind of interesting, they’ve got to be simulating gigaHuws to come up with that sort of realtime optimization.

There’ll be hordes of Huw-instances being subjected to much-less-interesting versions of this program and winking out of existence as soon as they get bored.

Hell, I could be one of those instances, my life dangling on a frayed thread of attention.

Every time I press the channel-up button, I execute thousands—millions? billions?—of copies of myself.

Why don’t I care more about them? It’s insane and profligate cruelty but here’s me blithely pressing channel-up.

Whoa, that’s interesting—she looks awfully like Bonnie, but with a bum that’s a little bit more like that girl I fancied in college.

I could die at any instant, just by losing attention and pressing channel up.• That’s wild, never noticed how those muscles—quadrati lumborum?—spring out when someone’s at the wheel, that bloke’s got QLs for days.

If I were really ethically opposed to this sort of thing, I’d be vomming in my mouth with rage at the thought of all those virtual people springing into existence and being snuffed out.

But I’m not, am I? Hypocrite, liar, poseur, mincing aesthete, that’s me, yeah?

So long as it’s interesting and stylish, I’ll forgive anything.

I’ve got as much existential introspection as a Mario sprite.

Enough, already, she tells herself, and cools herself down to a single thread, then slows that down, hunting for the sweet spot at the junction of stupidity and calm. Then finding it, she settles down and watches TV for a hundred subjective years, slaughtering invisible hordes of herself without a moment’s thought.

Satori.

An indeterminate time later, the hotel room door opens.

“Shit,” says a familiar voice.

“Didn’t I tell you she has a tendency toward self-abuse? Why, when he was six, he managed to lock himself in the living room when David had left the key in the drinks cupboard, and by the time we realized he was missing he’d—”

A familiar embarrassment flushes through her veins, dragging her back toward the distant land mass that is consensus reality: “Shut up, Mum! Why are you always bringing that up?”

“He never ate his greens, either,” his mother says. “Think you can get through to her?”

“I’ll try,” says the other voice. Male, a little deeper than last time he’d heard her, her—Huw drags her gaze back from the glass teat and looks round.

“You!” she says. It’s Bonnie, back as a boy again, same blue forelock and skinny amphetamine build as before. “You rooted my sib! Prepare to—”

“Uh?” Bonnie looks surprised. Huw’s mum—dressed up in hyperreal drag as her very own pre-upload middle-aged self—raises a hand.

“Huw, it’s all right. Bonnie here is thoroughly dewormed. You don’t have to take my word for it; the galactic feds have vermifuges you wouldn’t believe.”

“Guh.” Huw struggles to sit up, mind still fuzzed from endless reruns of a This Is Your Life celebrity show starring one Huw Jones as seen from outside by an adoring throng of pot-worshippers. The narcotic effect of the television binge is fading rapidly, though. “Whassup?”

“Then there was the time he discovered David’s porn stash,” Huw’s mum confides in Bonnie, “when he was nine. David’s always had a bit of a clankie thing going, and for ages afterwards, Huw couldn’t look at a dalek without getting a—”

“Mum!” Huw throws a pillow. His mother deflects it effortlessly, exhibiting basketball-star reflexes that she’d never possessed in her lumpen nerd first life.

“Gotcha,” she says. “Turn the TV off, there’s a good girl, and pay attention. We have important things to discuss.” A note of steel enters her voice: “Compliance is—”

“Mandatory, I get it.” Huw zaps the screen, not merely muting it but also setting it into standby so that it’s not there in the corner as a distraction. “You want to talk.” She crosses her arms. “Talk, dammit.” She avoids looking at Bonnie. Some experiences are still too raw.

“Huw. My child.”

Uh-oh, Huw thinks. Here comes bad news.

“Yes, Mother dearest?” Huw says.

“We need to get you up to speed. In a very short subjective time, you are going to stand alone and naked before the galactic confederation, and you will speak on behalf of the human race, and if you are compelling in your defense of our species, we will join the confederation, with all the privileges accruing thereto. Or at least get a stay of execution.”

Huw pulled a face. “Yes, and if I cock it up, they annihilate us in an eyeblink. I’m way ahead of you, Mum. The only part I don’t understand is why?”

Huw’s mum inclined her head in Bonnie’s direction. He nodded smartly and declaimed, “Because they have divided the universe neatly into two kinds of civilizations: allies and potential threats. Anything that looks like the latter, well, zap. They’re playing a very, very long game, one that stretches so far out that they’re calculating the number of CPU cycles left before the Stelliferous Era ends, and deciding who gets what. You need to convince them that we, as a species, can be brought into their little social contract and behave ourselves and not run too many instances of ourselves and such.”

Huw reflects on her recent history. “I’m probably not the person best suited to this, you know.”

Bonnie and Huw’s mum nod their heads as one. “Oh, we know,” Bonnie says. “But they’ve asked for you. The ambassador, you know. Plus, well ...”

Huw’s mum gestures with one wrinkly hand, which bears a high-resolution mole with high-resolution hairs growing from it. There’s altogether too much reality in this sim, which is funny, because until pretty recently, Huw has been dedicated to the preservation of as much reality as is possible.

“Not now, Bonnie. Huw will get a chance soon enough.”

Now, here’s a familiar situation: conspirators who are privy to secrets that Huw is too delicate or strategically important or stupid to share. Huw knows how this one goes, and she isn’t prepared to sit through another round of this game.

“Mum,” Huw says very quietly. “That’s enough. I am through being a pawn. I’m the official delegate. If you’ve got something I should know, I require that you impart it.” Require—there was a nice verb. Huw is proud of it. “Or you can leave and Bonnie will tell me. This is not optional. Compliance is mandatory, as you keep saying.”

Her mum goes nearly cross-eyed with bad temper, but bottles it up just short of an explosion. After all, she’s been an ascended master for years, albeit in a sim where transcendence involves a heavenly realm with all the style and subtlety of a third-rate casino. Still, she’s learned a thing or two.

“It’s your father,” she says.

“What about him?” He’d been conspicuously absent from the noosphere, and Huw had noticed. But she’d assumed that the old man had diffused his consciousness or merged with one of the cluster organisms or something else equally maddening and self-indulgent.

“Well, he seti’ed himself.”

“He what now?”

“It’s not something one discusses, normally. Very distasteful. He concluded that the noosphere was too pedestrian for his tastes, so he transmitted several billion copies of himself by phased array antennas to distant points in the local group galaxies, and erased all local copies.”

Huw parses this out for a moment. “Dad defected to an alien civilization?”

“At least one. Possibly several.”

“You two have been dead to me ever since I left. Why should it matter what imaginary playworld he’s been inhabiting? Even if it’s in some other solar system?”

“Galaxy,” his mum says. “Don’t get me started on the causality problems. But apparently, he arrives there millions of years in the future and then they come here-now to follow up on it.”

“You’ve lost me,” Huw says, and makes to turn herself up.

Bonnie meekly raises a hand. “Huw, I know it’s difficult. Can I explain?”

“Yeah, whatever,” Huw says. Then he remembers his moral high ground. “Proceed.”

“Your father traveled a very great distance to join with the galactic federation. They instantiated him, got to know him, and decided that his species represented a potential threat.”

“On the basis of a sample size of one,” Huw’s mother says. “Knowing David, I can’t honestly say they were wrong. If we were all like him ...”

“Also, they concluded that, notwithstanding the dubiousness of his species, they rather liked and trusted him,” Bonnie says.

“He always was a lovable rogue,” says Mum.

“He’s the federation’s negotiator, isn’t he?” Huw says with a sinking sense of dread tickling at her stomach lining.

“What can I say? He’s a flake,” Huw’s mother says with a faintly apologetic tone, as if she’s passing judgment on her younger self’s juvenile indiscretions. “But a charismatic flake. Charming too, if you were as young and silly as I was in those days.”

She means between her first and second Ph.D.s, if Huw remembers her family history correctly. Mum and Dad had both been appallingly bright, gifted with a pedantic laser-sharp focus that only another borderline-aspie nerd could love. All things considered, it was a minor miracle that their sole offspring could walk and chew gum without counting the cracks in the pavement and the number of mastications. But general intelligence isn’t a strongly inherited trait, and humans breed back toward the mean: and so Huw’s childhood had been blighted by the presence of not one but two mad geniuses in the household, intermittently angsting over how they could possibly have given birth to a mind so mundane that their attempts to instill an understanding of the lambda calculus in him before he could walk had produced infant tantrums rather than enlightenment. (He had been twelve before he truly grokked Gödel’s theorem, by which time Dad had given up on him completely as a hopeless retard.)

“Are you sure it’s him?” Huw says. “I mean, he didn’t just upload: he beamed himself at the galactic empire. They could have done anything with the transmission! It might be some kind of seven-headed tentacle monster using Dad’s personality as a sock puppet, for all you know? ...” She tries to keep the hopeful note out of her voice.

“Good question.” Bonnie looks thoughtful. “You’re right: We can’t rule that out. But—”

“He thinks like David!” Mum says. “We were together for nearly thirty years before we uploaded, and a couple of subjective centuries afterwards—linear experiential centuries, if you unroll the parallelisms and the breakups and back-togethers—there are even a couple of instances of us who couldn’t untangle enough to resume autonomous existence, so they permanently merged at the edges, the idiots. They’re out in the cloud somewhere or other.” She draws herself up. “The one who seti’d out was the real one, though. And we kept in touch, despite the divorce. I’d know him anywhere, the devious little shitweasel—”

“Okay, enough.” Huw stands. “What’s at stake?”

“You need to convince them that we’re not a threat. Even though they know your dad inside out and—”

“No. What are they going to do?” Huw paces over toward the living room door, then turns and stares at Bonnie and his mother. “The cloud isn’t a pushover, surely? I mean, if you threaten its existence, surely it can do something to defend itself? How does the court propose to enforce its ruling?”

“Trust me, they can do it,” says Mum. Her earlier anger has dimmed, moderated by— Is that fear? “The cloud is an immature matryoshka. It’s going to grow up to be a Dyson sphere; masses of free-flying processor nodes trapping the entire solar output and using it to power their thinking, communicating via high-bandwidth laser. But it’s not there yet, and the Galactics are. There’s a thing you can do with a matryoshka cloud if you’re sufficiently annoyed with the neighbors: You just point all those communications lasers in the same direction and shout. It’s called a Nicoll-Dyson beam—a laser weapon powered by a star—and just one of them is capable of evaporating an Earth-sized planet a thousand light-years away in half an hour flat. The feds have millions of star systems, and that stupid time travel widget with which to set up the Big Zap. It could already be on its way—the combined, converging, coherent radiation beams of an entire galaxy, focused on us.”

Huw dry-swallows. “So defense isn’t an option?”

“Not unless you can figure out a way to move the entire solar system. Because they won’t be shooting at Earth, or at individual cloud shards: they’ll nuke the sun—make the photosphere implode, generate an artificial supernova. Snail, meet tank-track. Now do you see why we need you? It’s not about integrating Earth into the cloud, or about some stupid squabble over aesthetics: if the galactic federation finds us Guilty of Being a Potential Nuisance, we don’t get a second chance.”

“Heard enough.” Huw walks through into the living room of the suite. Bonnie and Mum trail her at a discreet distance, anxiety audible in their muted footsteps. “Okay, you’ve made your point. We’re up against Dad, or something that uses Dad as an avatar for interacting with naked apes.” She pauses. “I need an outfit, and an approach.” A flick of one hand and Huw conjures her emotional controller into being: it seems somehow to have become second nature while she was watching TV. She suppresses a moue of distaste as she recognizes the subtle environmental manipulation. “You’ve been planning this for ages, haven’t you? So you must have some strategies in mind, ideas about how to get under Dad’s skin. Let’s see them. ...”

There is indeed a Plan, and Mum and her little helpers must have been working on it for subjective centuries, bankrolled by the cloud’s collective sense of self-preservation.

“We’re working from old cognitive maps of your father,” says the lead stylist, “so this may be a little out of date, but we think it’d help if you wear this.” This is a rather old-fashioned cocktail suit and heels that Huw can’t help thinking would have suited her mother better. “It’s styled after what your mother 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 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.

“Hm, let me experiment.” Huw riffles through an ontological tree of philosophies, looking for people who at one time or another fed into the quest for the singularity. There are odd and gnarly roots. One of them pops free of the ghostly multidimensional diagram. Suggested by his earlier encounter with Sam and Doc, she turns out to be incredibly well-documented for a second-rate Communist-era Russian philosopher: video, audio, tracts, and treatises. No tissue samples survive, but enough relatives have been exhaustively sequenced to make her core genome reasonably accessible, and from her visuals, it’s possible to get a handle on some of the epigenetic modulation. Huw tweaks, and there are three people in the room—one of them an elderly female ghost. She coughs unproductively, then looks surprised.

“Where am I? What is—?” Her eyes widen farther. David is staring out the window, where a couple of armies in Napoleonic-era drag are duking it out with AK-47s upon a darkling plain. Huw, for his part, is still feverishly paging through a user manual as impenetrable and thick as the U.S. tax code. “You!” She glares at Huw. “A moment ago I was dying by inches in bed, now I find I’m not short of breath. I demand an explanation!”

Uh-oh, Huw thinks. “I’m a bit busy right now,” he says. “The kitchen’s through there—” He gestures at the end of the room, where somehow he knows that beyond the door to Dad’s study there lies the rest of the house, exactly as it should be. “—Go help yourself to food and coffee? I’ll be through in a bit.”

“Not good enough.” She shuffles hastily round in front of him and glares: “I’m not a fool, boy! I know I’m dead. I was terminally ill. And I know you’re not Jesus and that old fellow isn’t Jehovah. You can’t pull the wool over my eyes! So spill it. You brought me back to life for a reason. What is it?”

Huw glares right back. “Look, I’m just trying to clear up an ontological fuckup left behind by your followers. I’ll be with you in a—eventually—but if I don’t get this nailed down, there isn’t going to be an afterlife. So would you mind finding somewhere else to amuse yourself for an hour? I’ve got a job to do here.”

The ghost snorts. “Have it your way, young man. But you’re going to have to explain yourself sooner or later! Resurrecting me without my prior consent—the indignity! I don’t suppose you’d have a cigarette, that would be too much to ask for. ...” And with further outraged muttering, the ego monster shuffles toward the kitchen.

“Well played, son,” says David with just a trace of sarcasm.

“Don’t you start! ...”

“I have no intention of starting anything. It’s your job to make the opening move. Assuming that wasn’t it? ...”

Huw glances at the door just as it slams, and swallows. “I have no idea where she came from,” he says.

“Here’s a free tip,” his father sayss: “The feds aren’t terribly impressed by infantile egoism. In fact, if Objectivism were at the center of human philosophical discourse rather than the fringes, we wouldn’t be here—the Big Zap would have arrived decades ago. But I’m going to be generous and let you write down the ghost of Ayn Rand as a brain fart. I won’t bring her up again if you don’t.”

“Is she real?”

“Son, are you real? Are you the same Huw whose nappies I changed, six or seven decades ago?”

“I’m—” Huw recognizes the trap: it’s a kind Dad’s always been fond of. “I experience subjective continuity with that Huw, so I think I’m real. But if you’re going to require physical continuity, no I’m not: I’m an upload. And even if I hadn’t uploaded, if you want true physical continuity, no human being can meet that requirement—never mind our cells, the atoms in our bodies turn over within months to years.”

“Good boy.” There is a ghost of a smile. “So. Do you think she’s real?”

“She thinks she’s real.” Huw struggles to follow through. “And I can’t just switch her off. Kill her. Because she’s—” Huw pauses and backtracks. “Hang on. You say I have to simulate everything I think is significant, trying to prove that what emerges is a harmonious civilization that contributes to the commonweal of the universe and doesn’t go all apeshit and Malthusian on the feds. But if I do that, using realistic models of people, I can’t arbitrarily kill them off after the demo—that would be murder!” Huw recalls, ruefully, his attempt to organize a mob-handed takedown of 639,219 by spamming zillions of iterations of himself. “And if I try to exhaustively simulate all possible human civilizations to prove that they’re safe, isn’t that going to make me exactly the kind of resource hog the feds don’t want to have around?”

David claps slowly. “Very good.” There is something approximating a twinkle in his eyes. It’s a vast, cool, and unsympathetic twinkle, but it’s still there. “So what are you going to do?”

“Take extreme care to minimize the number of entities I instantiate in this realm.” Huw swallows. “Did I just dodge a bullet?”

“Yes,” says the thing wearing his father’s face. “Now. Let the trial begin.”

A funny thing happened to Huw on the way to the galactic court-martial: He found himself emotionally involved in the outcome.

“Dad,” he says. “You know that mind-altering business, yes?”

“Yes,” his father-thing says as he winds up a flock of religious beliefs and sprinkles them with a well-practiced Gaussian wrist-flip over an apocalyptic uplifted stretch of the Great Barrier Reef off Lizard Island, making multijointed pinching passes over the addition to reflect its rise and fall over a time-dimension.

“Well, here’s a thing. You said I was still intact—continuous with my earlier self.”

“Better to say that there are no gross discontinuities. If you want to be precise about it.”

“Fine, fine.” Huw has become momentarily transfixed by the reef and its arc of nonbelief-belief-fervor-disillusionment-nonbelief, and he reaches in and changes his father-thing’s handiwork, pulling the curves around to a better fit with his own theories about the infamous psychosis that had gripped the clonal polyps when they were first roused to consciousness. “I believe you’re wrong. I think that something’s been lost or changed in the translation, because here I am, fiddling with all this rubbish, and I really, really care about the outcome. Not just the meatpeople, but even the sims—the software constructs like you and me that have been programmed to act like we believe that we’re people.”

“Yes, you have a self-preservation instinct, so what?”

“No,” Huw says. “No, it’s not self-preservation. Self-preservation’s just mechanical, it’s Asimov’s Third Law nonsense. I mean to say that I feel kinship to the cloud. To the wholly fictional phantoms created by suicidal, ecstatic uplift cults. I know that it’s inevitable that I’d feel like I was a person, but I find that I feel the same way about you, and all those other jumped-up Perl scripts and regexps mincing about in their pornographic nonstop MMORPGs, pretending that they aren’t NPCs. It’s like feeling compassion for a socket wrench or kinship to a novel. It shouldn’t make sense, but it does.”

“You’ve grown,” his father-thing says with a shrug. “Your mirror neurons have discovered compassion. I can’t say as I find much cause for mourning in that.”

“No. No, no, no. Look, you’ve messed with my personality, you’ve got my headmeat all buggered up, turned me into some sort of navel-gazing, soft-headed beardie-weirdy. You’ve taken all my core convictions away, and you’ve replaced them with some kind of Buddha-script, and you tell me it’s just growth?

Bullshit, old man. Rubbish.”

His father-thing looks up from the T. gondii he’s salting around the universe’s feline population before gifting them with opposable thumbs, and his mild eyes bore into Huw with the force of a star-powered laser. “Huw. I. Did. Not. Rewire. Your. Brain. To. Make. You. Love. The. Cloud. Full stop. If you’re feeling different about this sort of thing, it’s down to your own stimuli and how you’ve reacted to them. Far as I’m concerned, it makes no difference, but I suppose it might give you an edge here—after all, the cloud is the apex expression of humanity’s extended phenotype: you’re its ambassador, don’t you think it might help to actually like and respect it?”

Huw ponders the possibility that his father-thing isn’t lying. He contemplates the contrafactual world in which he can treat the uploaded as being worthy of the same respect and compassion as meatpeople. From this, his treacherous skullfat leaps nimbly of its own accord to the potential future in which humanity—all humanity, embodied and virtual—is annihilated. And while his brain is there, it also contemplates the possibility that Huw, head cut open, brains scooped out and scanned, uploaded and multifarious in the embattled, threatened cloud, is 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 déjà 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 up.”

“I didn’t mean to—” Huw takes a deep breath, then wishes his congested sinuses to clear. “—huh. Leave me a forwarding address? This time I’ll write.”

“I’ll do that, but you might not hear back from me for a long time.” His dad’s mustache twitches as he disentangles Huw from his jacket. “Now get going. Do you want to keep them in suspense forever?” And with a gentle hand in the small of Huw’s back, he propels him toward the door.

Various instances of Huw have lived through roughly two and a half trillion years of trial by simulation since he stepped through the door, but on the other side, it’s as if barely any time at all has passed. (Someone is doing some serious fancy footwork with causality, and Huw absently makes a note to investigate later.) Back in chambers he finds Bonnie running round in circles, trying to catch an agitated parrot, who is flying around the ceiling shouting, “Where’s the plaintiff? Where’s the witness? Who’s a pretty counsel? Rawk!”

“Come down here, you feathered bandit!” Bonnie is shaking his fists at the bird, and Huw works out the context from the white streaks on the back of Bonnie’s shirt.

“Trial’s over,” Huw says. His voice comes out with his usual male timbre. “We need to be going, the embassy’s packing up.”

“Trial’s what—?” Bonnie turns on him. “It’s over?”

His mum bamfs in from some corner of the embassy hyperspace, flashy teleportation spangles dissolving like hologram fireworks around her. “Huw! Am I in—? Oh.”

“Dad says hi,” he says. “The Big Zap is canceled, conditionally: As long as we keep our nose clean, eat our greens, and don’t terrorize the neighborhood, they’ll let us alone.”

“Rawk! Court is adjourned?” The parrot swoops down on his mum’s shoulder with a rattle of wing feathers.

“That’s nice, dear.” His mother smiles.

“You did it?” Bonnie stares at him. “Hey, you switched again.”

“Dad-thing is packing up the embassy; they’re leaving the solar system to us. I, uh, left a lot of myself behind back there. No, no, I’m all right—” He waves off an anxious Bonnie. “—but we need to get out of here before the embassy dismantles.” Right back to the reconstituted and re-created bedrock of Io—the Authority is nothing if not environmentally sensitive, and believes in recycling moons and small planets wherever possible. “Dad says they’re going to begin teardown immediately, so—” As he says it, a red warning sign appears in midair, hovering over the entrance to the chambers: evacuate now. It flashes, the archaic blink-tag irritant clearly contrived to get their attention. As if that isn’t enough, a fire siren spools up to an earsplitting shriek, and an unspeakable stench tickles his nostrils. “—I think he wants us out of here right now.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake.” Mom rolls her eyes, then shoulder-barges the door. “David, you passive-aggressive asshole!” she shouts, waving her fist at the hyperrealistic sky above the embassy complex (where, one by one, the stars are going out), “How many times have I told you, it is not acceptable to use the kid as a back channel? You get your incarnated ass down here right now so I can have words with you: Compliance is mandatory—”

“Was she always like this?” Bonnie asks Huw sotto voce

as they follow the blinking evacuation arrows toward a rainbow archway capped by a sign reading cloud gateway.

“Uh-huh. Pretty much. Why do you think I got into casting pots?” He walks swiftly away from his mother, who is railing at the universe.

“You poor bastard.”

Huw pauses, contemplating the throng of diplomats, lawyers, tourists, xenophiliacs, instantiated fictional characters and various other subtypes of humanity that clutter the vestibule in front of the gate. “I don’t know about you, but I’m going home. I mean, really home. Planning on reincarnating back on Earth and holing up in the workship for at least a couple of years and not traveling anywhere.” He glances sidelong at Bonnie. “I realize that might not appeal to you as a lifestyle choice.”

Bonnie shrugs, hands in pockets. “I can visit from time to time. Or I could stick around, go walkabout if it gets too boring. If you want.”

“I want.” Huw takes his arm and leads him to the back of the queue. And in a subjective eye-blink, they’re back on Earth.