“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.