“Shit,” says a familiar voice.
“Didn’t I tell you she has a tendency toward self-abuse? Why, when he was six, he managed to lock himself in the living room when David had left the key in the drinks cupboard, and by the time we realized he was missing he’d—”
A familiar embarrassment flushes through her veins, dragging her back toward the distant land mass that is consensus reality: “Shut up, Mum! Why are you always bringing that up?”
“He never ate his greens, either,” his mother says. “Think you can get through to her?”
“I’ll try,” says the other voice. Male, a little deeper than last time he’d heard her, her—Huw drags her gaze back from the glass teat and looks round.
“You!” she says. It’s Bonnie, back as a boy again, same blue forelock and skinny amphetamine build as before. “You rooted my sib! Prepare to—”
“Uh?” Bonnie looks surprised. Huw’s mum—dressed up in hyperreal drag as her very own pre-upload middle-aged self—raises a hand.
“Huw, it’s all right. Bonnie here is thoroughly dewormed. You don’t have to take my word for it; the galactic feds have vermifuges you wouldn’t believe.”
“Guh.” Huw struggles to sit up, mind still fuzzed from endless reruns of a This Is Your Life celebrity show starring one Huw Jones as seen from outside by an adoring throng of pot-worshippers. The narcotic effect of the television binge is fading rapidly, though. “Whassup?”
“Then there was the time he discovered David’s porn stash,” Huw’s mum confides in Bonnie, “when he was nine. David’s always had a bit of a clankie thing going, and for ages afterwards, Huw couldn’t look at a dalek without getting a—”
“Mum!” Huw throws a pillow. His mother deflects it effortlessly, exhibiting basketball-star reflexes that she’d never possessed in her lumpen nerd first life.
“Gotcha,” she says. “Turn the TV off, there’s a good girl, and pay attention. We have important things to discuss.” A note of steel enters her voice: “Compliance is—”
“Mandatory, I get it.” Huw zaps the screen, not merely muting it but also setting it into standby so that it’s not there in the corner as a distraction. “You want to talk.” She crosses her arms. “Talk, dammit.” She avoids looking at Bonnie. Some experiences are still too raw.
“Huw. My child.”
Uh-oh, Huw thinks. Here comes bad news.
“Yes, Mother dearest?” Huw says.
“We need to get you up to speed. In a very short subjective time, you are going to stand alone and naked before the galactic confederation, and you will speak on behalf of the human race, and if you are compelling in your defense of our species, we will join the confederation, with all the privileges accruing thereto. Or at least get a stay of execution.”
Huw pulled a face. “Yes, and if I cock it up, they annihilate us in an eyeblink. I’m way ahead of you, Mum. The only part I don’t understand is why?”
Huw’s mum inclined her head in Bonnie’s direction. He nodded smartly and declaimed, “Because they have divided the universe neatly into two kinds of civilizations: allies and potential threats. Anything that looks like the latter, well, zap. They’re playing a very, very long game, one that stretches so far out that they’re calculating the number of CPU cycles left before the Stelliferous Era ends, and deciding who gets what. You need to convince them that we, as a species, can be brought into their little social contract and behave ourselves and not run too many instances of ourselves and such.”
Huw reflects on her recent history. “I’m probably not the person best suited to this, you know.”
Bonnie and Huw’s mum nod their heads as one. “Oh, we know,” Bonnie says. “But they’ve asked for you. The ambassador, you know. Plus, well ...”
Huw’s mum gestures with one wrinkly hand, which bears a high-resolution mole with high-resolution hairs growing from it. There’s altogether too much reality in this sim, which is funny, because until pretty recently, Huw has been dedicated to the preservation of as much reality as is possible.
“Not now, Bonnie. Huw will get a chance soon enough.”
Now, here’s a familiar situation: conspirators who are privy to secrets that Huw is too delicate or strategically important or stupid to share. Huw knows how this one goes, and she isn’t prepared to sit through another round of this game.
“Mum,” Huw says very quietly. “That’s enough. I am through being a pawn. I’m the official delegate. If you’ve got something I should know, I require that you impart it.” Require—there was a nice verb. Huw is proud of it. “Or you can leave and Bonnie will tell me. This is not optional. Compliance is mandatory, as you keep saying.”
Her mum goes nearly cross-eyed with bad temper, but bottles it up just short of an explosion. After all, she’s been an ascended master for years, albeit in a sim where transcendence involves a heavenly realm with all the style and subtlety of a third-rate casino. Still, she’s learned a thing or two.
“It’s your father,” she says.
“What about him?” He’d been conspicuously absent from the noosphere, and Huw had noticed. But she’d assumed that the old man had diffused his consciousness or merged with one of the cluster organisms or something else equally maddening and self-indulgent.
“Well, he seti’ed himself.”
“He what now?”
“It’s not something one discusses, normally. Very distasteful. He concluded that the noosphere was too pedestrian for his tastes, so he transmitted several billion copies of himself by phased array antennas to distant points in the local group galaxies, and erased all local copies.”
Huw parses this out for a moment. “Dad defected to an alien civilization?”
“At least one. Possibly several.”
“You two have been dead to me ever since I left. Why should it matter what imaginary playworld he’s been inhabiting? Even if it’s in some other solar system?”
“Galaxy,” his mum says. “Don’t get me started on the causality problems. But apparently, he arrives there millions of years in the future and then they come here-now to follow up on it.”
“You’ve lost me,” Huw says, and makes to turn herself up.
Bonnie meekly raises a hand. “Huw, I know it’s difficult. Can I explain?”
“Yeah, whatever,” Huw says. Then he remembers his moral high ground. “Proceed.”
“Your father traveled a very great distance to join with the galactic federation. They instantiated him, got to know him, and decided that his species represented a potential threat.”
“On the basis of a sample size of one,” Huw’s mother says. “Knowing David, I can’t honestly say they were wrong. If we were all like him ...”
“Also, they concluded that, notwithstanding the dubiousness of his species, they rather liked and trusted him,” Bonnie says.
“He always was a lovable rogue,” says Mum.
“He’s the federation’s negotiator, isn’t he?” Huw says with a sinking sense of dread tickling at her stomach lining.
“What can I say? He’s a flake,” Huw’s mother says with a faintly apologetic tone, as if she’s passing judgment on her younger self’s juvenile indiscretions. “But a charismatic flake. Charming too, if you were as young and silly as I was in those days.”
She means between her first and second Ph.D.s, if Huw remembers her family history correctly. Mum and Dad had both been appallingly bright, gifted with a pedantic laser-sharp focus that only another borderline-aspie nerd could love. All things considered, it was a minor miracle that their sole offspring could walk and chew gum without counting the cracks in the pavement and the number of mastications. But general intelligence isn’t a strongly inherited trait, and humans breed back toward the mean: and so Huw’s childhood had been blighted by the presence of not one but two mad geniuses in the household, intermittently angsting over how they could possibly have given birth to a mind so mundane that their attempts to instill an understanding of the lambda calculus in him before he could walk had produced infant tantrums rather than enlightenment. (He had been twelve before he truly grokked Gödel’s theorem, by which time Dad had given up on him completely as a hopeless retard.)