She shrugs and emits a rapid-fire stream of Arabic. Then, seeing he doesn’t understand, she shrugs again and points at the slide. “Oh, I get it,” says Huw. He peers at her closely. “Do I know you from somewhere?”
She says something else, this time sharply. Huw sighs. “Okay, I don’t know you.” His throat feels a bit odd, but not as odd as it ought to for someone who’s just swallowed an alien communication device. I need to know what’s going on, he realizes, eyeing the trapdoor uneasily. Oh well. Steeling himself, he lowers his legs into the slide and forces himself to let go.
The room at the bottom is a large bony cavern, its ceiling hung with what look like gigantic otoliths: the floor is carpeted with pink sensory fronds. Adrian is messing around with a very definitely nonsapient teapot on a battered Japanese camping stove. The other one of the ninjette twins is sitting cross-legged on the floor, immersed in some kind of control interface to the Red Crescent omnifab that squats against one wall, burbling and occasionally squirting glutinously to itself. “Ah, there y’are. Cup of tea, mate?” says Adrian.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Huw replies. “Just what the fuck fuck fuck clunge-swiving hell—’scuse me—is going on?” Who are you and why have you been stalking me from Wales?
“Siddown.” Adrian waves at a beanbag. “Milk, sugar?”
“Both, thanks. Agh—damn. Got anything for-for Tourette’s?”
“’Cording to the user manual, it’ll go away soon. No worries.”
“User manual? Sh—you mean this thing comes with a warranty? That sort of thing?”
“Sure.” Adrian pours boiling water into the teapot and sets it aside to stew. Then he sits down besides the oblivious Libyan woman and pulls out a stash tin. He begins to roll a joint, chatting as he does so. “It’s been spamming to hell and back for the past six months. Seems something up there wants us to, like, talk to it. One of the high transcendents, several gazillion subjective years removed from mere humanity. For some years now, it’s not had much of a clue about us, but it’s finally invented, bred, resurrected, whatever, an interface to the the wossname, human deep grammar engine or whatever they’re calling it these days. Sort of like the crappy teapots the embassy issues everyone with. Trouble is, the interface is really specific, so only a few people can assimilate it. You—” Adrian shrugs. “I wasn’t involved,” he says.
“Who was?” asks Huw, his knuckles whitening. “If I find them—”
“It was sort of one of those things,” Adrian says. “You know how it happens? Someone does some deep data mining on the proteome and spots a correlation. Posts their findings publicly. Someone else thinks, Hey, I know that joe, and invites them to a party along with a bunch of their friends. Someone else spikes the punch while they’re chatting up a Sheila, and then a prankster at the New Libyan embassy thinks, Hey, we could maybe rope him into the hanging judge’s reality show, howzabout that? Boy, you can snap your fingers and before you know what’s happening, there’s a flash conspiracy in action—not your real good, old-fashioned secret new world order, nobody can be arsed tracking those things these days, but the next best thing. A self-propagating teleology meme. Goal-seeking Neat Ideas are the most dangerous kind. You smoke?”
“Thanks,” says Huw, accepting the joint. “Is the tea ready?”
“Yeah.” And Adrian spends the next minute pouring a couple of mugs of extremely strong breakfast tea, while Huw does his best to calm his shattered nerves by getting blasted right out of his skull on hashishim dope.
“’Kay, lemme get this straight. I was never on tech jury call, right? Was a setup. All along.”
“Well, hurm. It was a real jury, all right, but that doesn’t mean your name was plucked out of the hat at random, follow?”
“All right. Nobody planned, not a conspiracy, just a set of accidents ’cause the cloud wants to talk. Huh?” Huw leans back on the beanbag and bangs his head on a giant otolith, setting it vibrating with a deep gut-churning rumble. “’Sh cool stuff. Fucking cloud. Why can’t it send a letter if it wanna talk to me?”
“Yer the human condition in microcosm, mate. Here, pass the spliff.”
“’Kay. So what wants to talk?”
“Eh, well, you’ve met the ambassador already, right? S’okay, Bonnie’ll be along in a while with it.”
“And whothefuck are you? I mean, what’re you doing in this?”
“Hell.” Adrian looks resigned. “I’m just your ordinary joe, really. Forget the Nobel Prize, that doesn’t mean anything. ’S all a team effort these days, anyway, and I ain’t done any real work in cognitive neuroscience for thirty, forty years. Tell the truth, I was just bumming around, enjoying my second teenage Wanderjahr
when I heard ’bout you through the grapevine. Damn shame we couldn’t get a sane judge for the hearing. None of this shit would be necessary if it wasn’t for Rosa’s thing.”
“Rosa—”
“Rosa
Giuliani. Hanging judge and reality show host. She’s like, a bit conservative. Hadn’t you noticed?”
“A bit. Conservative.”
“Yeah, she’s an old-time environmentalist, really likes conserving things—preferably in formalin. Including anyone who’s been infected by a communications vector.”
“Oh.” Normally this description of
Giuliani’s politics would fill Huw with the warm fuzzies, but the thing in his throat is a reminder that he’s currently further outside his comfort zone than he’s ventured in decades. He’s still trying to digest the indigestible thought through a haze of amiability-inducing smoke, when the local unplugs herself from the omnifab’s console, stands up and stretches, then plugs in a language module.
“Your bicycle will be healed again in a few hours,” she says, nodding at Huw, just as the omni burps and then hawks up a passable replica of a Shimano dynamo hub. “Can you put it together with tools?”
“I, uh—” Huw gawks at her. “Do I know you?” he asks. “You look just like this hacker—”
She shrugs irritably. “I am not responsible for my idiot clone-aunts!”
“But you—” He stops. “There are lots of you?”
“Oh yes.” She smiles tightly. “Ade, my friend, I am taking a walk. Don’t get up to anything I wouldn’t.”
“I won’t, Becky. Promise.”
“Good. I’m Maisie, though.” She climbs onto a toadstool-shaped bone and rapidly rises toward the ceiling on a pillar of something that might be muscle, but probably isn’t.
“Lovely girls,” Adrian says when she’s gone. “Where was I? Ah, yes: the ambassador.”
“Ambassador?”
“Yeah, ambassador. It’s a special kind of communications node: needs enough brains to talk to that thing in your throat and translate what you send it into something the cloud can work with. You’re the interpreter, see. We’ve been expecting it for a while, but didn’t reckon with those idiot script kiddies ending up in court. It’ll be along—”
There’s a clattering noise behind Huw, and he looks round so abruptly that he nearly falls off his sack, and though he’s feeling mellow—far better disposed toward his fellow man than he was an hour ago—it’s all Huw can do to refrain from jumping up, shrieking.