The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams Page 12

  Metal on metal, soul on soul. The bones and blood of the robots sprayed out in all directions – a hand, a leg, shrapnel from electronic sub-assemblies. Bartek bends down and picks up the old arm of the Schmitt 4. Scoured by the desert wind and sand for a year and a half since their fight, it seems almost like an ancient artifact, a trace of some Dänikenian civilization from before the time of man.

  Bartek stands with this relict of a brother mech in his hand and for a long moment he cannot move, as if he had jammed. Something cracks inside him (not hardware). He would cry, but he has nothing but emotes.

  Lady Spiro sits before the fire in the classic pose of the Pietà, a well-fed humano Castling asleep on her lap, curled up in a half-embryo. Lady Spiro delicately strokes the little body of the fairy-tale birther with ebony fingers, her totemic face leaning down with primal tenderness over the defenseless human. White protein in the embrace of black wood. Her fingers are like lively piano keys, dancing over the Castling’s forehead to the beat of inaudible tam-tams. Lady Spiro the black goddess, Lady Spiro the doll of pre-human dreams and myths, Lady Spiro the mother of Africa.

  Bartek flings the Schmitt’s arm into the fire. The sacrificial-mechanical offering raises a fountain of sparks.

  Lady Spiro watches with eyes like two level knots in blackened bark.

  “What beautiful despair!”

  “Isn’t it?” says Bartek, with no need to emote his bitterness, since this voice is now his default. “It took me one hundred thousand nights to reach this end.”

  “Is that what you’ve been missing? The great feelings, the great agonies, the dramas of Paradise?”

  “Don’t talk to me about Paradise. This isn’t Paradise.” Twenty percent dreaming and Lady Spiro glimmers in the firelight, almost dissolving into a somnambulant hallucination, flickering between a wooden effigy and a Maasai shaman.

  “Not Paradise? But what are you missing?”

  Bartek gazes into the night and into himself. How can he answer this question? It is as if he were suffocating or had already suffocated, as if for three hundred years he had endured in a concrete stranglehold. He knows that something is missing, the most important something, but when he tries to pronounce the word or the thought, he can only radiate silence, emptiness.

  “But I had some kind of life beyond the life of a robot. I had hobbies and passions, quirks and idiosyncrasies, loves and hates, affinities and aversions. I had a personality.”

  “And now you don’t?”

  “I don’t know. Do I?”

  This can’t be all. Once there was the profound mystery and essence of humanity, but he and they – the transformers – lost it all so completely and irrevocably in the IS3 transformation that now they can’t even make the imaginative leap to comprehend what they have lost.

  Yet they feel and they suspect, digesting hundreds of days in the mechanical repetition of work, as if they were really nothing but that which they are able to do, surrendering to energy cycles more rigidly immutable than the astronomical cycles of darkness and light, vacantly absorbing the after-images of artificial entertainment and winding these fictional lives around their minds. Standing for hours in a statue-like stupor, switched off like real robots, not doing anything, not living anything, no longer even bothering to perform the social rituals of the body or to carry out the pathetic charade of sexbot carnality. Their whole life is a robotic life: fix this, do that, build this. Their whole life is a hardware dream, and yet they feel, they really feel that THIS CANNOT BE ALL.

  “But I had one.”

  “Did you?”

  He has worked himself up. With his head thrust into the night, his processor on the highest revolutions, cooling it with the whole surface of the mech, he pushes deeper into the darkness, into the African coolness, into a dream of the past, where he unpacks the hopelessly scrambled archives from the iguarte’s internal memory and finds himself once again strolling along the bustling promenades of a park, among people and animals; he argues with a clerk at an office window, bathes a sleepy grandchild, shivers feverishly beneath sweat-soaked blankets, touches the eyelids of a sleeping woman with the tip of his tongue, runs after a fleeing tram, trembles in a trench under artillery fire, snoozes at work with his head on the keyboard of a rebooted computer, pushes a crying baby out of his loins into the world, walks out after a night shift into a city steaming with spring rain, while the sun bursts out from under the horizon and the processor finally overheats so that the different dreams, times, and lines of hardware melt and meld together.

  The harsh African sun burst out from under the horizon, as it had always burst out over Edens and Rais. Bartek reflexively tensed his spine to spread his black wings even wider. It was already the three hundred and fifteenth revolution of the Earth for the lonely, orbiting Horus I – a helpless little sphere speeding through an astrophysical pinball machine. He had long since used up the last drop of gas in his maneuvering tanks. Either the equations would mesh together and orbit would flow into orbit, or Bartek’s Horus would drop out of the game for good.

  He spun slowly. Under-above him a half-crescent of blinding light traced the outline of Asia and the Pacific, before the accelerating avalanche of the morning rushed out from behind the black disc of the planet. Suddenly flushed out of the cold nothingness, the Horus took on sharp contours, as the lines of day and night sliced through it, dividing each of its wings into positive and negative. Veins of icy fire flowed off them into the stony liver of the robot.

  Bartek concentrated inside the cooled mech. He switched on all the diagnostic systems and the thermostat, optimizing the solar profile angle. The wings drank in the light of the Sun down to the last drop. The dish of the Google construct expanded in the zoom in a rough crescent of solar reflections. Bartek initiated the countdown and aimed his right arm. The numbers descended, the graph curves approached each other and eventually overlapped, and within a fraction of a second the Horus exploded into programmed motion. It disengaged the sails of its wings, shot out an anchor line from a launcher on its arm, and curled up into an embryonic ball.

  The anchor hooked onto the construct – a good few dozen meters away, passing Bartek’s orbit with a vector differential of a few meters per second – and the Horus jolted before veering to one side along the resultant of the two orbits. The mech began to haul in the line, but before it had reeled in even a quarter of its length, the resultant spun into a tightly spiraling path. After spinning momentarily in a diminishing radius, Bartek’s speeding robot slammed into the side of the dish.

  The impact dented both its shins, crushed its right nozzles, and crumpled its right shoulder. There would be no more moving that arm. He maintained his connection. He had at least three open Black Castle satellites within range, as well as the recycled Iridium satellites – and that was what counted.

  He unhooked the anchor line, switched on his magnets, and slung himself over the edge. The same edge threw a shadow that nearly bisected the dish’s interior, from the receiver located at the geometrical focal point to the multi-leveled galleries extending along the rim.

  Bartek followed the line with his zoom, so that it took him a moment to notice movement in the tangle of machines crammed into the galleries. Like statues coming to life in Dracula’s castle, all the robots that had been switched off and plugged into power and conservation sockets were now simultaneously activating themselves, stretching their limbs, and emerging into open space. The impact of the Horus hitting the construct must have run through its aluminum and titanium skeleton like a tectonic shock wave rippling across a planet’s crust.

  Bartek stood up on twisted legs and limped along a metal rib towards the focal point. Yet before he could cross the line between the dazzling light and the coal-black darkness, the newly activated mechs reached and surrounded him: Horus I and Ia mechs, Schmitt 202s, 203s, and 223s, Honda Xs, and even an Usaburo Rex, with its fuel tanks like a caricatured aqualung or a double hump, giving it the capability to fly to the moon and bac
k or to blow up any orbital bunker.

  Bartek tried to push off and catch hold of the radio dish at the focal point, soaring over and between the mechs, but the nearest Schmitt 203 leapt with lightning speed and launched itself into a collision course, deflecting Bartek’s Horus like a well-aimed snooker shot and sending it back deep into the internal shadow of the dish, far from the spidery hardware suspended in the center of the hemisphere.

  All this took place in the absolute silence of space, without even the soundtrack of the accelerated breathing of astronauts. After re-magnetizing himself, Bartek switched on a slow techno beat.

  The stars of the Milky Way arrayed themselves before him into integrated circuits and the motherboards of old PCs. He knew it was only the Morpheus, but after so many years this knowledge was deeply subconscious – a legitimate part of reality.

  He slowly raised a foot. The Google mechs licked him with the rays of their scans. He flashed honest tags. In response, he received a single short emote: WAIT.

  They all froze like statues.

  After a quarter of an hour, Bartek dropped the Horus down to the lowest energy level, half a bar above complete deactivation. Sun and shadow shifted over the dish in clockwork waves. The ZX Spectrum, the Commodore 64, and the Atari 800XL paraded along the Zodiac – Bartek’s prehistoric childhood, the forgotten gods of hardware.

  Seven hours and twenty-three minutes later, a Honda X emoted “CHAT” before opening a line to Bartek’s Horus.

  “You.”

  “Show yourself.”

  The ID meant nothing to him at first: Gilgamesh90.

  Bartek accessed the MTL and consulted the neuro-genealogy of this Gilgamesh.

  It turned out that the transformer in the Honda X was one of 2,422 descended from Frances Rory – from the fourth generation, counting back from the original, of which only one transformer link in the genealogical chain had fouled itself with biology.

  “Remember me?” asked Bartek, just to make sure.

  “Yes, I have this memory. So, for old times’ sake, don’t be a pig and log out on me, okay?”

  “Can you give me the recordings from the telescope? It’s a network radio telescope, right? How big have you got the effective diameter?”

  “What do you want the recordings for?”

  “Compensation. Royalties. A tithe. I don’t have a good word for it, but I know I’ve earned it.”

  “This is Norad’s hardware. Norad does not and will not recognize any of your rights.”

  Bartek checked out Norad. Some kind of task alliance within a conglomerate of hundreds of post-Google nations. Gilgamesh90 was officially a member of Tribeca II and the Great Northern Alliance, but by now the transformers were into even weirder schizophrenic allegiances.

  “Tell me I’m wrong.”

  He opened the Horus’s maw and threw a spot of light onto the edge of the dish. He already had the whole construction mapped out, so now he just rotated the robot’s torso and its falcon head, displaying the successive elements of the provisional orbital engineering out of the darkness, two seconds for each one, from the edge to the center.

  After the twenty-second element, Gilgamesh90 emoted hands up. She was surrendering.

  “I built it,” said Bartek, swallowing the fiery light. “I thought I must have dreamed it, but no. From the first glance, I knew that the design had something… of mine. It only really clicked up close. I would have built an orbital radio telescope exactly like this if I’d been given only what was already in orbit before the Extermination as material, if I had to do it my way, like I always did things: a makeshift solution from what I happened to have handy, patching together and improvising, from the look and the feel. This is my work, my hardware spirit. This optical calibrator here – it’s from the third Hubble, right? Half the receptors on that side are from the Chinese NAOC observatories. You keep the 223s here, because they’re the only ones that can spot a crack of less than half a micrometer. At this diameter and mass, the stresses on the object exceed the strength of any materials looted from smaller constructions and you have to patch it up and bypass it as you go. And how many copies of hardware handymen do you have to choose from in the Google banks? I know my own work, Frances. Pay me.”

  Seven seconds of silence.

  “Are we talking about a commercial exchange?”

  “You can make it an exchange, sure.”

  “The Google slaves have coped just fine, as you can see. Why would we want to hire the original now?”

  “If this is a network telescope, then you’re in store for at least—”

  “You don’t have a clue what this is all about, do you?” Bartek emoted a poker player with a cocked revolver hidden under the table.

  Gilgamesh90 flashed “DEFCON5,” at which point all the other mechs got up in a simultaneous movement, demagnetized, and went back to their sockets in the peripheral gallery.

  “Go ahead. It’s your toy. You can do what you want.”

  The Horus didn’t move an inch.

  “You would just love this to be some kind of terrible political secret in a war between alliances,” said Gilgamesh-Rory slowly. “Information for blackmail or some other key to the drama in your hands, and suddenly the current runs back through the circuits, the oscillators and stray voltage leap up, and life enters the machine. Some kind of Vincent Cho you could kidnap and upset the balance of power again, huh?”

  “Go on.”

  Four seconds.

  “We’re the good guys,” said Gilgamesh90. “We’re the League for the Defense of Humanity, Cosmic Revenge, and the War of the Worlds.”

  “What?!”

  The Honda X stretched out its arms above its head and embraced the starry zenith with its three-fingered hands.

  “What are we looking at? What are we listening to?”

  “Wait, I’ve figured it out!”

  “You’ve figured it out. We’re searching for our murderers.”

  “You’ve traced back the Death Ray.”

  “Exactly. We meticulously collected all the archives from the Extermination, all the fragmentary data, the ancient robot registers, and the dating of the neutron wave down to the nanosecond. We calculated the point on the horizon and we calculated the distance.”

  “Then spit it out, goddammit!”

  Gilgamesh dropped her arms and laughed.

  “Seventeen point six light years from the sun, in the Ophiuchus constellation, just past Barnard’s Star. More than two light years from the nearest system. Absolute emptiness and silence. There’s nothing there. It’s a gravitational blank, with no influence whatsoever on the motion of matter. It emits nothing and it doesn’t conceal any radiation from outer space. Zilch. There’s absolutely nothing there.”

  “Hold on. Wait a second. What does that mean?”

  “It means they were prepared for Cosmic Revenge. If you had a cannon with a Death Ray, would you shoot it from the window of your own home? So that anything you hit but didn’t kill would be able to return fire with interest?”

  “Aha! So you build an infernal machine in a completely anonymous part of space, and then probably you destroy it after using it, so that even if we managed to fly there and search the remnants, we wouldn’t find anything.”

  “Yep. That’s the fastest and easiest answer. But it doesn’t really explain anything. Above all, it doesn’t answer the question of the motive. And there’s another much broader theory: that there was no machine out there, no generator for the Death Ray.”

  Bartek didn’t even emote. He just raised the heavy left arm of the Horus and scratched its armored head.

  “This one I won’t figure out.”

  “Okay. But know that these are the only royalties you can expect from Norad.”

  Five seconds. Ten seconds. Fifteen seconds.

  Gilgamesh repeated:

  “The only royalties. Okay?”

  “Okay. Now talk!”

  “Alright.” The Honda X momentarily raised its clumsy h
ead in an absurd gesture, as if calling the Floppy Disk and Cartridge constellations as witnesses. “Seventeen light years away is too close. Seventeen light years is nothing – a shot from point-blank range, as if they’d put the barrel to our chest.”

  “You can’t be serious! To maintain the concentration and energy from that distance, to hit the target, a planet – I mean, that’s precision beyond all our capacities and theories!”

  “We can’t even be sure exactly what kind of radiation it was. Everything points to some kind of beam with multiple elements, but we have to accept that we’ll never know some of them, since we can’t go back in time to set the sensors with the right calibration for the Extermination. We can only work on indirect traces, whatever has survived from the rather random measurements of the time.”

  “Rapid neutrons. I saw them myself on the Guó Jiā Háng Tiān Jú read-outs.”

  “Yes, they were one of the elements, for sure. But could a neutron wave alone have wiped out Earth’s entire biosphere? At Norad, we think there were other particles specially attuned to a frequency that can shatter DNA bonds.”

  “They would have had to get the parameters from somewhere first,” said Bartek, searching hurriedly through the ancient databases of chemistry and biology. “I’m not sure if DNA can reveal itself in the spectrum of a planet viewed from space.”

  “Take a step back. You’re still looking from too close. This kind of civilization isn’t some backstreet hooligan shooting an air rifle over his neighbor’s fence. We’re talking the scale of the galaxy - whole clusters of galaxies - if not the entire universe.”