Huw looks round, cringing in anticipation, but sees no sign of her. She raises her hand tentatively: “I don’t think she’s here. ...”
Madam Chairwoman stares at her. “You know this person?”
“I last saw her in a diplomatic jet over Wales ...” Huw slows, gripped by a nauseous sense that she’s committed some kind of humongous faux pas. “Is she supposed to be here?”
“I have an open slot for her testimony.” The chair stares at him. “But if she can’t be bothered to turn up, there’s nothing to be done about it: she doesn’t get a say in opposing the planning application. So, moving swiftly on, whom are we expecting next—?” Madam Chair cocks her head on one side, as if listening: “All right. For the planning division, we call instance 199405 Lucifer to rebut P-D-E Giuliani’s nonexistent objection.”
Now Huw sees that this space is not entirely hardwired to resemble the real world; for a trapdoor in space opens up between the audience seats and the committee’s table, and a gout of pale flame emanates from it, and a voice, beautiful and distant and damned, declares: “a nonexistent objection demands a nonexistent rebuttal, Your Honor.”
“How much more of this do I have to sit through?” Huw says. Posthumans playing at biblical symbolism, how, how, how naff: “I want to go home. ...”
The man in the seat to her left—small and doughy and vague, big-eyed and bulbous-headed—chooses to hear it as a question. “You’re not from around these parts, are you?” he says. His voice is as gray as his scaly, inhuman skin. “It can go on like this for hours. In real time, that is. Subjectively, civilizations can rise and fall.”
Huw looks at him, then glances round nervously. The seats she’d thought were empty are in fact occupied by the ghosts of absent avatars, frozen in time while their owners are elsewhere. And as she examines them, she realizes new overlays are dropping into place: They’re archetypes, each representing one or another subculture of the posthumans who departed for the cloud back in the old days, yet failed to transcend their sad need to assert an identity through funny haircuts and aggressively obscure musical preferences.
The lately called witness is exactly what you’d expect from an entity that calls itself 199405 Lucifer—acrawl with not-flies, reeking of nonsulfur, leather-not-winged, sporting an erect, throbbing not-penis that juts up to its not-sternum. The av bends low and touches its not-forehead to the ground. “My lords,” it says. Its not-voice manages to pack a lot of contempt into the phrase. Somewhere, Huw supposes, there is a slider labeled ironic courtesy, and the loser in the Satan suit has just cranked it all the way up to 11.
The Planning Committee doesn’t seem to notice. They stare motionless at the witness, their avs so primitive and generic that they don’t even blink or shift their weight.
“P-D-E Giuliani is a well-known reactionary, a perverse soul whose romantic affection for the flesh is matched only by her willingness to perma-kill anyone who dares disagree with her. When she takes the stand in this proceeding to insist upon the irreducible, ineffable physicality of human intelligence, she’s substituting maudlin sentimentalism for rigor. The proof of the reducibility of human experience is all around us: Here we are, people still, still loving, still living, still cogitating. The only difference is that we’re immortal, nigh-omnipotent, and riding the screaming hockey stick curve of progress all the way to infinity.”
199405 Lucifer’s demonic majesty slips as it speaks, pacing up and down the committee room, abandoning its delicate caprine tap-dance for a more human gait that looks ridiculous when executed with its av’s reversed knees and little clicky hooves. Its voice goes from menacing and insectile to a hyperactive whine with flecks of excited spittle in it. Now it remembers itself and pauses for a demonic Stanislavski moment, then draws itself up and says in its most Satanic voice: “Kill ’em all, upload ’em, and give ’em to me. There’s plenty of room for them in my realm.”
Huw knows that this is grave stuff, the entire future of the true human race at stake, and she still cares passionately for that cause, even if she’s no longer a real person. But all this ... role playing is making the whole thing feel so contrived and inconsequential, like a dinner party murder-mystery: Who ate the planet Earth and turned it into computronium? I accuse the Galactic Overlords! Is it time for port and cheese-board now?
The Satan fanboy returns to his flaming trapdoor, his “realm.” The Planning Committee nod their heads together in congress. Huw shifts her not-arse in the not-seat. Then she remembers that she has no weight to shift, that the numbness in her bum and thighs is just there for verisimilitude, and she makes herself motionless.
It’s time for the next witness. “Call Huw Jones prime,” Madam Chair says. Huw starts to stand, but sees, across the courtroom, that someone else has already climbed to their feet.
It’s Huw, but more so. Even post-reassignment, Huw was a little lumpy and broad in the beam. Her uploaded self-representation had mercilessly reproduced every pockmark, scar, and sagging roll. This Huw, halfway round the room, has had everything saggy lifted, everything asymmetrical straightened, everything fined down and perfected and shined, wrapped in a glamourous outfit that Huw couldn’t have worn convincingly even with a thousand years of remedial gender construction classes. It’s cover girl Huw, after being subjected to several hours’ tender ministrations from someone’s 3-D airbrush. “That’s me, Your Honor,” she says.
“You may address me as Madam Chair. Please take the stand.” Madam Chair waves her mace at a chair sat on its own to one side of the committee table. Huw prime slinks across the conference room like a model on a catwalk. Real Huw knows that she walks with a graceless clumping. Her not-stomach does a flip-flop and she hisses involuntarily. Her neighbor shushes her. She gives him a two-fingered salute.
“Your name?”
“Huw Jones,” she says. “Instance 639,219.”
It’s one of Huw’s instance-sisters. Clearly more cooperative than Huw had been. Huw wonders why they didn’t zero her out, given the evident availability of this much more presentable, much more skilful version of herself to speak for humanity.
“Ms. Jones, do you have a statement for this proceeding?”
“I do, Madam Chairwoman.” Someone’s been tweaking her voice sliders too, giving her a husky, dramatic timbre that Huw’s meatvoice couldn’t have approximated without the assistance of a carton of unfiltered cigarettes and a case of single malt. “I spent decades of realtime imprisoned in a meatsuit, which betrayed me at every turn. It hurt. It needed sleep. It was slow. It forgot things. It remembered things that didn’t happen. And worst of all, it tricked me into thinking that I was nothing without it—that any attempt to escape it would be death. Brains are awful, cheating things. They have gamed the system so that they get all the blood and all the oxygen and all the best calories, and they’ve convinced us that they’re absolutely essential to the enterprise of being an authentic human. But of course they’d say that, wouldn’t they? After all, once we take up and realize how fantastically shit they are, they’ll be out of a job! Getting rid of my brain was the most important thing that ever happened to me. It was only once I was running on a more efficient substrate—once I could fork and vary myself and find the instances that made the best choices, once I could remember as much or as little as I cared to, look and feel however I wanted ... only then was I able to see and feel and know what I’d been missing all those years.”