Free Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow Page A

carapace scraped off the walls of the Bey residence nursery, we have obtained a partial genotype. Tell your guidebooks or familiars or whatever to download Exhibit B for you. As you can see, the genome of the said item is chimeric and shows signs of crude tampering, but it’s largely derived from
Drosophila, Mus musculus,
and a twenty-first-century situationist artist or politician called Sarah Palin. Large chunks of its genome appear to be wholly artificial, though, written entirely in Arabic, and there’s an aqueous-phase Turing machine partially derived from octopus ribosomes to interpret them. It looks as if something has been trying to use the sharia code as a platform for implementing a legal virtual machine. We’re not sure why, unless it’s an obscure joke.”
    “Does the metasphere have a sense of humor?” Huw says. He clears his throat—the dust must be getting to him, because it feels as if he’s developing a ticklish cough.
    “If it didn’t, my life would be a lot simpler,” the Vulture says. A door at the back of the courtroom bangs, Bonnie coming back from the toilet. Huw notes with a spike of erotic shock that Bonnie is female again, a forelocked vision of heroin-chic skin and bones. “As it is, it makes it hard to tell a piece of sculpture from a practical joke, a new type of washing machine, or an alien superweapon.”
    “Urk.” Huw subsides into a fit of coughing; it doesn’t help his throat.
    “Can we wake it up?” Doc Dagbjört asks. “If I play it some music, perhaps it can the dream awaken from?”
    Oh shit, musical dream therapy,
Huw realizes with a sinking feeling.
So
that’s
why she’s on this panel
.
    “That is a possibility,” the Vulture concedes. She prods the sleeping space monster with a steel-toe-capped boot, but it just snores louder and burrows deeper into its nest of disemboweled toys. “I prefer electroshock, myself.”
    “Shit.” Sandra says. Huw glances sideways at her, sees her cowering away from him. “Shit!”
    “What is it?” he asks.
    “Your—” She stops, and rummages in her fanny pack. After pulling out a mirror, she passes it to him. “Throat.”
    At the other end of the bench, Doc Dagbjört is explaining the healing properties of ambient postindustrial music to an interested judge and a couple of less skeptical jurors. Huw holds up the hand mirror and points it at his throat.
    Huw stares at the mirror nearly cross-eyed and focuses on his stubbly Adam’s apple. It has been completely covered with a familiar biohazard trefoil, surrounded by ranked miniature trefoils, each of them fractally ringed with smaller duplicates, and so on, into hairy infinitude that no doubt extends down to mitochondrial detail.
    Huw clutches his hands to his throat and feels it buzzing, vibrating, just as Dagbjört lets fly with an eerie ululation. She sings the quasi-melody rather well, noodling around from a ghostly, bluesy I-IV-V progression to something pentatonic that sounds like the wind whistling over the blasted steppes of some distant Eastern land and then into something Celtic and complicated.
    The buzzing under his sweating fingertips heightens. The godvomit is vibrating too, beginning a bobbing sinuous cobra dance, and it begins to sing too, a low droning
ommmmmm
that resonates in Huw’s bones, in Huw’s throat, in Huw’s mind.
    His tongue stirs in his mouth and he feels a great, preverbal welling from his larynx. He feels a burst of Tourettic obscenities tickling at his lips like a sneeze, and he moves his hands from his throat and claps them over his mouth, but it’s too late: he’s singing too.
    If you can call it singing. He’s giving voice to
two
wordless melodies simultaneously, meshing in artful discord with each other and the joint song of the Kleinmonster and Dagbjört. One voice is basso profundo , the other a Tiny Tim falsetto, and the Kleinmonster is turning its attention on him—he can
hear
it thinking joyful thoughts to itself. His skin