“What shall We do with you?” the Bishop says. “Officially, you’re dead, which is convenient, since it wouldn’t do to have the great unwashed discover that God’s will was apparently to let you go.
“The entity who alerted Us to your presence was adamant that the sinner here should be spared. You’re host to some kind of godvomit that many entities are interested in, and apparently it needs you intact in order to work. It’s very annoying: we can’t kill you again.”
“I’m thrilled.” Huw’s voice is a flat monotone. “But I ’spect that means that Sam here’s not going to live. Nor the judge?” Sam is strapped to a board and immobilized by more restraints than a bondage convention, but it’s mostly a formality. He’s barely breathing, and the compress on his face blooms with a thousand blood-colored roses.
“Well, of course not,” the Bishop says. “Heretics. Enemies of the state. They’re to be shoved out the lock as soon as We’re sure that they’ve got nothing of interest to impart to Us. A day or two, tops. Got that, Your Honor? As long as you say useful things, you live.”
The judge sputters angrily in her peppermill.
“Now, let’s get you prepped for the operating theater,” the Bishop says.
Huw can barely muster the will to raise an eyebrow at this. “Operating theater?”
“Yes. We’ve found that quadruple amputees are much more pliable and less apt to take it on the lam than the able-bodied. You’ll get used to it, trust us.”
The servants of the Inquisition, ranged around them, titter at this.
“Take them back to their cells,” the Bishop says, waving a hand. “And notify the surgeons.”
Huw is having a dream. He’s a disembodied head whose vocal cords thrum in three-part harmony with a whistle lodged in his stump of a throat. The song is weird and familiar, something he once sang to a beautiful girl, a girl who gave her life for him. The song is all around him, sonorous and dense, a fast demodulation of information from the cloud, high above, his truncated sensorium being transmitted to the curious heavens. The song is the song he sang to the beautiful girl, and she’s singing back.
His eyes open, waking. He’s on the floor of his cell, parched dry and aching, still shrink-wrapped but with the full complement of limbs. The whistle warbles deep in his throat, and the floor vibrates in sympathy, with the tromping of a trillion tiny feet and the scissoring of a trillion sharpened mouthparts.
The ants razor through the floor, and Huw squirms away from them as best as he can—but the best he can do is hump himself inchworm style into a corner, pressed up against the wall of the dome that forms the outer wall of his cell. The song pours out of his throat, unabated by his terror. Some part of him is surprised that he’s capable of caring about anything anymore, but he does not want to be eaten by the ants, does not want to be reduced to a Huw-shaped lump of brick red crawling insects.
The whistle’s really going to town now. The ambassador is having words with the Hypercolony, and Huw can just barely make out the sense of the song he’s singing: Ready for upload interface instructions.
The ants have covered him, covered the walls and the floor and the ceiling, they’ve eaten through his coating of shrink-wrap, but the expected stings don’t come. Instead, Huw is filled with the sense of vast clumps of information passing through his skin, through the delicate mucous membranes of his eyes and nostrils, through his ears and the roots of his hair, all acrawl with ants whose every step conveys something.
Something: the totality of the Hypercolony—its weird, sprawling consciousness, an emergent phenomenon of its complexity, oozing through his pores and through the ambassador and up to the cloud. It’s not just the ants, either—it’s everything they’ve ever eaten: everything they’ve ever disassembled.
Somewhere in that stream is every building, every car, every tree and animal and—and every person the ants have eaten. Have disassembled.
Bonnie is passing through him, headed for the cloud. Well, she always did want to upload.
Huw doesn’t know how long the ambassador holds palaver with the Hypercolony, only knows that when the song is done, he is so hoarse, he can barely breathe. (During a duet, do the musicians pay any attention to the emotional needs of their instruments?) He leans against the wall, throat raw as the ambassador chatters to the ant colony—biological carriers for the engines of singularity, its own ancestral bootstrap code—and he can just barely grasp what’s going on. There are complex emotions here, regret and loss and irony and schadenfreude and things for which human languages hold no words, and he feels very stupid and very small as he eavesdrops on the discourse between the two hive minds. Which is, when the chips are down, a very small discourse, for the ambassador doesn’t have enough bandwidth to transmit everything the ants have ever stored: it’s just a synchronization node, the key that allows the Hypercolony to talk to the cloud in orbit high above it.
And Bonnie is still dead, for all that something that remembers being her is waking up upstairs, and he’s still lying here in a cell waiting to be chopped up by barbarians, and there’s something really weirdly wrong with the way he feels in his body, as if the ants have been making impromptu modifications, and as the ambassador says good-bye to the ants, a sense of despair fills him—
The door opens.
“Hello, my child.” It’s the other Bishop, the pansexual pervert in the polygenital suit. It winks at him: “Expecting someone else?”
Huw tries to reply. His throat hurts too much for speech just yet, so he squirms up against the wall, trying to get away, for all the time an extra millimeter will buy him.
“Oh, stop worrying,” the Bishop says. “I—ah, ah!—I just dropped by to say everything’s sorted out. Mission accomplished, I gather. The, ah, puritans are holed up upstairs watching a fake snuff video of your disassembly for spare organs—operating theaters make for great cinema and provide a good reason for not inviting them to the auto-da-fé in person. Isn’t CGI great? Which means you’re mostly off the hook now, and we can sort out repatriating you.”
“Huh?” Huw blinks, unsure what’s going on. Is this a setup? But there’s no reason why the lunatics would run him through something like this, is there? It’s so weird, it’s got to be true, Rosa’s Tyburn Tales reality livecast notwithstanding. “Wh-whaargh, what do you mean?” He coughs horribly. His throat is full of something unpleasant and thick, and his chest feels sore and bloated.
“We’re sending you home,” the Bishop says. It holds up a dainty hand and snaps its fingers; a pair of hermaphrodites in motley suits with bells on the tips of their pointy shoes steer in a wheelchair and go to work on what remains of Huw’s bonds with electric shears and a gentle touch. “You have our thanks for a job well done. I’d beatify you, except it’s considered bad form while the recipient is still alive, but you can rest assured that your lover is well on her way to being canonized as a full saint in the First Church of the Teledildonic. Giving up her life so that you might survive to bring the Hypercolony into the full Grace of the cloud certainly would qualify her for beatification, even if her other actions weren’t sufficient, which they were, as it happens.” The acolytes’ slim hands lift Huw into the wheelchair and wheel him through the door.
“I feel weird,” Huw says, voice odd in his ears. My ears? For one thing, he’s got two of them and he could have sworn the Inquisitors took a hot wire to one. And for another ... He manages to look down and whimpers slightly.