“Are you sure it’s him?” Huw says. “I mean, he didn’t just upload: he beamed himself at the galactic empire. They could have done anything with the transmission! It might be some kind of seven-headed tentacle monster using Dad’s personality as a sock puppet, for all you know? ...” She tries to keep the hopeful note out of her voice.
“Good question.” Bonnie looks thoughtful. “You’re right: We can’t rule that out. But—”
“He thinks like David!” Mum says. “We were together for nearly thirty years before we uploaded, and a couple of subjective centuries afterwards—linear experiential centuries, if you unroll the parallelisms and the breakups and back-togethers—there are even a couple of instances of us who couldn’t untangle enough to resume autonomous existence, so they permanently merged at the edges, the idiots. They’re out in the cloud somewhere or other.” She draws herself up. “The one who seti’d out was the real one, though. And we kept in touch, despite the divorce. I’d know him anywhere, the devious little shitweasel—”
“Okay, enough.” Huw stands. “What’s at stake?”
“You need to convince them that we’re not a threat. Even though they know your dad inside out and—”
“No. What are they going to do?” Huw paces over toward the living room door, then turns and stares at Bonnie and his mother. “The cloud isn’t a pushover, surely? I mean, if you threaten its existence, surely it can do something to defend itself? How does the court propose to enforce its ruling?”
“Trust me, they can do it,” says Mum. Her earlier anger has dimmed, moderated by— Is that fear? “The cloud is an immature matryoshka. It’s going to grow up to be a Dyson sphere; masses of free-flying processor nodes trapping the entire solar output and using it to power their thinking, communicating via high-bandwidth laser. But it’s not there yet, and the Galactics are. There’s a thing you can do with a matryoshka cloud if you’re sufficiently annoyed with the neighbors: You just point all those communications lasers in the same direction and shout. It’s called a Nicoll-Dyson beam—a laser weapon powered by a star—and just one of them is capable of evaporating an Earth-sized planet a thousand light-years away in half an hour flat. The feds have millions of star systems, and that stupid time travel widget with which to set up the Big Zap. It could already be on its way—the combined, converging, coherent radiation beams of an entire galaxy, focused on us.”
Huw dry-swallows. “So defense isn’t an option?”
“Not unless you can figure out a way to move the entire solar system. Because they won’t be shooting at Earth, or at individual cloud shards: they’ll nuke the sun—make the photosphere implode, generate an artificial supernova. Snail, meet tank-track. Now do you see why we need you? It’s not about integrating Earth into the cloud, or about some stupid squabble over aesthetics: if the galactic federation finds us Guilty of Being a Potential Nuisance, we don’t get a second chance.”
“Heard enough.” Huw walks through into the living room of the suite. Bonnie and Mum trail her at a discreet distance, anxiety audible in their muted footsteps. “Okay, you’ve made your point. We’re up against Dad, or something that uses Dad as an avatar for interacting with naked apes.” She pauses. “I need an outfit, and an approach.” A flick of one hand and Huw conjures her emotional controller into being: it seems somehow to have become second nature while she was watching TV. She suppresses a moue of distaste as she recognizes the subtle environmental manipulation. “You’ve been planning this for ages, haven’t you? So you must have some strategies in mind, ideas about how to get under Dad’s skin. Let’s see them. ...”
There is indeed a Plan, and Mum and her little helpers must have been working on it for subjective centuries, bankrolled by the cloud’s collective sense of self-preservation.
“We’re working from old cognitive maps of your father,” says the lead stylist, “so this may be a little out of date, but we think it’d help if you wear this.” This is a rather old-fashioned cocktail suit and heels that Huw can’t help thinking would have suited her mother better. “It’s styled after what your mother wore to the registry office. You don’t look identical to her, but there is a pronounced resemblance. We’ve run 65,536 distinct simulations against a variety of control models and assuming the judge is a fork of your father from after his primary uploading, wearing this outfit should deliver a marked fifteen percent empathy gain toward you: fond memories.”
“Really.” Huw looks at it dubiously. “And if it isn’t? A fork of David Jones?”
“Then you’re at no particular loss. Let’s get you into it, Makeup is waiting. ...”
After Costume and Makeup, there’s a Policy committee waiting for Huw in the boardroom: faceless suits—literally faceless, their features deliberately anonymized—to walk her through their analysis of the history and culture and philosophy of the Authority. It’s a sprawling area of scholarship, far too big for a single person to assimilate in less than subjective decades. Even with a gushing fire hydrant of simulation processing power at her disposal, Huw can’t hope to assimilate it all and still be the person who’s supposed to appear before the star chamber in a few hours’ time. But she can get a handle on the field—and, more important, a whistle-stop tour of what the cloud has inferred about galactic jurisprudential etiquette so that she won’t accidentally put herself in contempt.
“The federation has been around long enough that their judicial process isn’t based on a physical model anymore,” says the #1 faceless suit, from the head of the table: “They set up a simulation space, throw in all the available evidence—including the judge-inquisitor and the accused—and leave them to build a world. By consensus. They iterate a whole bunch of times, and whatever falls out is taken to be the truth of the claimed case. Then the judge decides what to do about it.”
“It’s a lot more informal than you might expect,” says faceless suit #2 with just a smidgen of disapproval.
“You say, ‘build a world.’” Huw thinkst. “Are we talking about trial by combat? Not fighting, exactly, but constructive engagement?”
“Something like that,” says #1 suit. “But we’re not sure. Nobody human has ever been through this process before.”
After Policy, Huw is finally whisked into chambers to be fitted with Counsel. The legal office is smaller and more spartan than the Policy committee, or even the wardrobe and makeup departments; it’s just Bonnie, looking slightly embarrassed and clutching a stuffed parrot plushie. “It’s the best we could manage at short notice,” he says, holding it out to her.
“A parrot.” Huw turns it over in her hands. It’s a handsome gray blue bird, seamlessly fabbed out of cheap velour fabric by a simulated couture robot. “No, don’t tell me, it’s—”
“Hello! I am your counsel! Put me on your shoulder! Rawwwk!” The parrot comes to animatronic life, blinks at Huw, and preens.