Appeals Court

ﯺ

Appeals Court
by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
________________ Editorial note: Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross are the gold-dust twins of post-singularity social commentary. "Appeals Court" was first published in Argosy #2 (April/May, 2004), and is reprinted here in the Infinite Matrix for the benefit of the many who never got to see the final issue of that short-lived but well packaged magazine. It is a sequel to Stross and Doctorow's story "Jury Duty". For deep background, check out this provocative article on post-Singularity SF by Gregory Mone in Popular Science: "Is Science Fiction About to Go Blind?" at http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/e9fb0b4511b84010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html .
Cory and Charlie are releasing the story here under a by-ns-sa Creative Commons license. You are free to copy, distribute, and perform this work, and to create derivative works, as long as you attribute it to the authors, do not make commercial use of it, and distribute any derivative works under the same license. See the license agreement for complete details, at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ . (c) 2004, Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. _________________
Appeals Court
by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
What finally wakes Huw is the pain in his bladder. His head is throbbing, but his bladder has gone weak on him lately -- if he doesn't get up and find the john soon he's going to piss himself, so he struggles up from a sump-hole of somnolence.
He opens his eyes to find that he's lying face-down in a hammock. The hammock sways gently from side to side in the hot stuffy air. Light streams across him in a warm flood from one side of the room; the floor below the string mesh is gray and scuffed and something tells him he isn't on land any more. *Shit*, he thinks, pushing stiffly against the edge and trying not to fall as the hammock slides treacherously out from under him. *Why am I so tired?*
His bare feet touch the ground before he realises he's bare-ass naked. He shakes his head, yawning. His veins feel as if all the blood has been replaced by something warm and syrupy and full of sleep. *Drugs?* he think, blinking. The walls --
Three of them are bland, gray sheets of structural plastic with doors in them. The fourth is an outward-leaning sheet of plexiglass or diamond or something. And a very, very long way below him he can see wave-crests.
Huw gulps, his pulse speeding. Something strange is lodged in the back of his throat: he stifles a panicky whistle. There in a corner is his battered kit-bag, and a heap of travel-worn clothing. He leans against the wall. There's got to be a crapper somewhere nearby, hasn't there? The floor, now he's awake enough to pay attention, is thrumming with a low bass chord from the engines and the waves are sloshing by endlessly below. As he picks at a dirty shirt a battered copper teapot rolls away >from beneath it. "Shitfuckpissbugger," he swears, memories flooding back. Then he picks the teapot up and gives it a resentful rub.
"Wotcher, mate!" The djinn that materializes above the teapot is a hologram, so horribly realistic that for a moment Huw forgets his desperate need for a piss.
"Fuck you, too, Ade," he mumbles.
"What kind of way to welcome yer old mate is that, sunshine?" Hologram-Adrian's wearing bush jacket, pith helmet and shorts, a shotgun slung over one shoulder. "How yer feeling, anyway?"
"I feel like shit." Huw rubs his forehead. "Like I've been shat. Where am I? Where's Bonnie gotten to?"
"Flying the bloody ship. We can't all sleep. Don't worry, she's just hunky-dory. How about you?"
"Flying." Huw blinks. "Where the hell --"
"You've been sleeping like a baby for a good long while." Ade looks smug. "Don't worry, we got you out of Libya one jump ahead of Judge Rosa. You won't be arriving in Charleston, South Carolina for another four or five hours, why'n't you kick back and smoke some grass? I left at least a quarter of your stash --"
"*South Carolina?*" Huw screams, nearly dropping the teapot. "Unclefucking sewage filter, what do you want to send me *there* for?"
"Ah, pecker up. They're your co-religionists, aren't they? You won't find a more natural, flesh-hugging bunch on the planet than the Jesonians who got left behind in the Geek Rapture. Hell, they're the kind of down-home Luddites what make *you* look like Buck Rogers."
"They're *radioactive*," Huw wails. "And I'm an atheist. They burn atheists at the stake, don't they?" He rummages through his skanky clothes, turning them inside out and outside in as he searches for something not so a-crawl that he'd be unwilling to have it touch his nethers.
"Oh, hardly," says Adrian. "Just get a little activated charcoal and iodine in your diet and memorize the Lord's prayer and you'll be fine, sonny."
Huw ends up tying a t-shirt around his middle like a diaper and