“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 —”