“No!” Huw tenses angrily, but is brought up short by a knot. “She’s a traitor—”
“No, she’s you. A version of you with a different value system, is all. Her stimulus led to cognitive dissonance and she dealt with it by changing her mind. It’s fun; you should try it some time. Not,” he adds hastily, “right now, but in principle. What do you wash this with, baking soda?”
“You’re telling me I have to change her mind,” Huw manages to say through gritted teeth.
“Something like that would do, yes. And to do it, you’ll need to come up with a better argument to explain why, oh, this lump of rock you’re so attached to is worth keeping around as something other than convenient lumps of computronium. Bearing in mind that the people you’re making the argument to are as attached to computronium as you are to rocks.”
“But there are tons of reasons!” Huw pauses, mustering her arguments. She’s been over them so many times in the past few decades that they’ve become touchstones of faith, worn down to eroded nubs of certainty that she holds to be true. “Firstly, any sim is lossy—you can’t emulate quantum processes on a classical system, or even another quantum system, without taking up more space, or more time, than the original, which isn’t supporting the overheads of an emulation layer. I’m just a pale shadow of the real me—when my neurons fire in here, they’re just simulated neurons! There are no microtubules in my axons, no complex cascade of action potentials along the surface of a lipid membrane separating ionic fluids, no complex peptide receptor molecules twitching and distorting as they encounter neurotransmitter molecules floating between cells. How do I even know that they’re good enough simulations to do the same job as the real thing? I’m drifting off into cyberspace here, becoming a worse and worse pencil-drawn copy of a copy of my original self.”
“Thank you,” the djinni says. “I’ll draw your attention to our immediate neighborhood. Next argument, please?”
“Whu-well, nothing happens in here that isn’t determined by some algorithm, so it’s not really real. For real spontaneity, you need—”
The djinni is sighing and shaking his head.
“Chinese room?” Huw offers hopefully.
A slot appears in the wall of the kettle, and a slip of paper uncoils from it. The djinni takes the slip and frowns. “Hmm, one General Tso’s chicken to go. And a can of Diet Slurm.” He reaches down into the floor, rummages around for a few seconds, pulls out a delivery bag, and shoves it through the wall next to the slot. “You were saying?”
“I’m really shit at this, aren’t I?”
“Inarticulate.” The djinni whistles tunelessly and returns to teasing the comb through Huw’s hair. Huw feels her roots itch. (Is it growing longer?) “You need practice. Rhetoric, debate, argumentation—nothing that thirty years in a parliament couldn’t fix. Do you have any friends in WorldGov? They could induct you into their LARP. It’s a grind to level up, but by the time you hit senate level, you could probably wipe the floor with 639,219 in a straight fight. She is a classic case of geek hubris: You see them all over—once they learn how to accelerate their thought processes, they all think they’re Richard Feynman.”
“Don’t wanna be a politician.” Huw is still finding it hard to think in the teapot; the merciless clarity she achieved as leader of the army of Huw on the outside has been replaced by the lumpen thought processes of a Monmouth Today reader, all livestock auctions, agricultural suppliers, and fear of an urban planet. “Want my head to start working again.”
“Tough shit; you pissed off 639,219 so badly, she bought all the debt you’d run up for shard cycles and foreclosed. Unless you can think of something to sell in this attention economy, you’re stuck with me, babe.” Huw shudders, feeling hair tickling the small of her back and the breath of the djinni in her ear. A horrible suspicion is growing: that she could be trapped in here for eternity with only a sarcastic 200-kilo hair-fetishist for company. “Unless you can think of something to sell. Or a better argument.”
“Mmph. What’s the market for custom-glazed pottery like?”
“Just about nonexistent, unless you can throw five-dimensional pots.”
“Oh shit!” Huw wails, and succumbs to the urge to wind up the emotional gain for a full-on crying jag. At least this time the djinni doesn’t stop her tweaking herself. “I’m useless!”
“Not to worry.” The djinni tries to soothe her, but works out that the comb is a liability fairly rapidly. “Calm yourself down, there, there. It’s not all over: you have a certain residual value as a type specimen.”
“A, a what?”
“A type specimen: the definitive example of a wild, undomesticated Huw Jones. You could put yourself on a plinth and charge cloudies a fee for access.”
Huw sniffs suspiciously. “I could see if, if anyone could help.” An idea strikes her. “Maybe Ade has some credit? ...”
The djinni raises an eyebrow. “You’re trying to bum off your frenemies? Better pick them carefully.”
“But I—” Huw descends into the sniffles again. “—I’m useless! And if I can’t do something about 639,219, it’ll be the end of the world!”
An ominous jittering shudder runs through the walls of the kettle, derezzing them slightly. “Uh-oh,” says the djinni.
“What?” Huw says.
The djinni holds up a finger the size of a chipolata. It cocks its head this way and that, causing its topknot to flop from side to side, its expression blank. Huw remembers this gesture from “her” djinni, the meatspace cousin of this one, back in Tripoli—it’s hourglassing, timing out while it thinks.
“Collection protocol,” he says. “639,219 is trying to foreclose on you. She argues that your debts are so huge, they put my whole sim into negative equity, which means that unless I turn you over, she owns my sim too. It looks like she’s bought into a financial engineering clade and laid a whole whack of side-bets on your repayment schedule, hedging the crap out of herself so she’ll come out ahead no matter what happens. Wonder where she found the sucker who’d take the other side of that contract?” He was muttering to himself now, all the while zipping around the tiny volume inside the lamp, chalking magic sigils over the doorways and scattering herbs and yarrow stalks in complex patterns. “Course, it doesn’t matter, the whole thing wouldn’t pass muster with a full-bore audit, but by then she’ll have time-arbitraged her stake up to some crazy amount, probably got someone else to lay off the risk on, something uncollectable; meantime, she’ll have leveraged this sim up to the tits and I’ll just be an unsecured creditor in line behind the other bastards—”
Huw knows just enough finance-talk to realize how batshit insane the scenario the djinni is describing is, and she wishes she had a stomach so she could throw up. “I should go,” she says. “It was very nice of you to take me in, but I can look after myself.”
“You can’t, actually,” the djinni says. “Besides, I’m hardly helpless. Your evil sister has made the classic mistake of bringing a complex financial instrument to a djinni fight.” He grins hugely, showing far too many pointy teeth and a muscular, forked tongue, then he cracks his huge, walnutty knuckles. “This is going to be fun.”
And then he forks into four instances of himself, and all four begin barking buy/sell orders. At first, they use normal voices, but they quickly ramp up to high-pitched squeals, and then burst the nonsound barrier with a nonboom that rattles Huw’s teeth with impressive pseudophysics. The three new instances diff-and-merge back into the djinni with a trio of comic pops and the djinni rubs his hands together. “Had to raid the pension fund to do it, but I think I’ve done for little what’s-her-number. An insult to one is an insult to all, so I just brought in the rest of my instance-sibs and margin-called that bitch so hard, she’ll be begging for spare cycles for the next hundred in realtime.” He shakes his head. “Noobs are all the same; think that once they’ve been around the block a few times, they can do whatever they want.”