Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross

Author:Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross [Doctorow Cory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf

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.

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