Read Online Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow - Free Book Online Page A

to tell me where the nearest heavy metal reclamation plant is?”
    “Eeek! Turn left! Left, I say! Yes, ahead of you! Please, do me no injury, sirrah!”
    Huw walks up to a featureless roc’s egg and taps on it. “Anyone at home?” he asks.
    A door dilates in the shell, emitting a purple-tinged light. “Enter,” says a distinctly robotic voice.
    Inside the shell, Huw finds himself in a room dominated by something that looks like a dentist’s chair as reinvented on behalf of the Spanish Inquisition by H. R. Giger. Standing beside it—
    “Does your sister work at the diner along the road?” he asks.
    “No, she’s my daughter.” The woman—who looks young enough to be the waitress’s twin, but wears medical white and doesn’t have any body piercings that blink at him—looks distinctly unimpressed. “And she’s got an attitude problem. She’s a goth, you know. Thinks it’s so rebellious.” She sniffs. “Did she send you here?”
    Huw holds up his arm. “I’m here because of this,” he says, dodging the question.
    “Aha.” She peers at his trefoil. “Do you know what it is?”
    “No, that’s why I’m here.”
    “Very well. If you take a seat and give me your debit token, I’ll try to find out for you.”
    “Will there be any trouble?” Huw asks, lying back on the couch and trying not to focus on the mandibles descending toward him.
    “I don’t know—yet.” She fusses and potters and mumbles to herself. “All right, then,” she says at length. “It’s in beta, whatever it is.”
    “Oh yes?” Huw says, in a way that he hopes sounds intelligent.
    “Certainly. That’s the watermark—it’s compliant with the INEE’s RFC 4253.11 on debug-mode self-replicating organisms. Whatever host medium it finds itself in, it advertises its presence by means of the trefoil.”
    “And—?” Huw says.
    “And that means that either the person who made it is conscientious, or is working with an RFC-compliant SDK.”
    “I see,” Huw says. He supposes that this is probably interesting to people in the biz, but he has no idea what it means. It’s an alien culture. He prefers concrete stuff he can get his hands on. None of these suspicious self-modifying abstractions that suddenly make you sprout antlers.
    The hacker mutters to herself some more. “Well,” she says, and “Hmmm,” and “Oh,” until Huw feels like bursting. “Right, then.”
    Huw waits. And waits. His whole fucking life seems to consist of conversations like this. He’s read some hilariously naïve accounts of life in the soi-disant “Information Age” about “Future Shock,” all those dim ancestors trying to make sense of their rapidly changing world. They fretted about the “singularity”—the point at which human history goes nonlinear and unpredictable and the world ceases to have any rhyme or reason. Future shock indeed—try living in the fucking singularity, and having your world inverted six times before breakfast.
    “Well, that’s it. I can do it
in vitro
or
in situ
, up to you.”
    “Do it?”
    “Accelerate it. What, you think I’m going to
decompile
this thing? That code is so obfuscated, it may as well be cuneiform for all the sense I can make of it. No, there’s only one way to find out what it does: accelerate its life cycle and see what happens. I can do it in your body—that’s best, it’s already halfway there—or I can do it in glass. Your choice.”
    “Glass!” Huw says, his heart racing at the vision of an unlicensed tech colony cutting out of his guts, like the thing in the courtroom.
    The hacker sighs a put-upon exhalation. “Fine,” she says. Let’s get you cloned, then.” Before he can jerk free, the instrument bush hovering over him has scraped a layer of skin from his forearm and drawn a few cmililiters of blood from the back of his hand, leaving behind an anesthetized patch of numb skin that spreads over his knuckles and down to his fingertips. Across the room, a tabletop