The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams Page 14

  The dull eyes of the ambystoma search the horizon. Everything wavers; the desert is the only constant. He has collapsed onto Roman paving stones and lost his back plate. Something is wrong with the iguarte’s batteries. He must wait for the dawn and drink in the sunlight. Only then can he raise himself to a higher energy curve and move on.

  And again, one foot in front of the other, limping, through Grenadas, Gothams, and Nessuses, all deserted and dead; through Florences and Shanghais; through the dried-up Sargasso Sea with millions of ships of the water, air, earth, and vacuum. The pedometers display absurd numbers. He would have crossed the continent by now. He reaches a line of ramshackle wind and solar power stations, and here he collapses under a white pole, as if beneath the fang of a prehistoric dragon bursting through the cracked earth; a fang, a rib, or a talon, scratching the sugary blue sky during the day and pecking out new craters in the disk of the moon at night. There is some kind of serious malfunction with the iguarte’s batteries. They won’t store energy through the night or fully charge themselves. The repair systems can’t deal with the problem either. There’s only just enough power in the broken-down mech to keep the processor going. Every movement of metal means one thought less. So he no longer moves. Propped up against the crystalline polished bone of the ancient beast, he has come to rest here before the vast altar of Africa. The machine inexorably loses its efficiency, entropy bites into the output of the sub-assemblies, and there is nothing else for it – he must gradually drop down to lower energy profiles, slowing down and cooling. He no longer notices the passage of the days, sometimes missing whole periods of sunlight and darkness. He is exposed to alternating seasons of murderous scorching heat and monsoonal downpours. Dunes of fine-grained sand rise up to his breastplate and then flow back down his inert limbs. The revolutions of the constellations accelerate; the Signs of the Zodiac and the Signs of Hardware spin round as if on a prayer wheel. More and more new sparks flash into existence between them – Rosettes and non-Rosettes, radio telescopes, habitats, solar mirrors, orbital elevators, and particle accelerators. He would wonder what they were building up there in space, but such thoughts would throw him into lethargy for a year, so he doesn’t wonder, but just lets himself be bathed in the current of time, the current of dreaming, the current of technology, the current of nature, no longer even able to tell them apart, while radiant metropolises succumb to equally stunning cataclysms, volcanic eruptions, meteor strikes, the march of many-footed lightning, fires and floods, then the invasions of carnival Life, the deserts blooming with ever stranger floras and Mothernets, metallic grasses, herds of migrating flowers, blotting paper forests of eosin photosynthesis, manga Mother jungles, hummingbird angels with little fractal wings hunting with mini-tridents and harpoons, sometimes even pricking and pecking at the sprawled-out scrap metal lying under the dragon’s rib, crumbling the last cinnabar plates of its head and breast; then the time of Miyazaki Life, and the plain crawling with swarms of timid little sprites, processions of kami and gods, armadas of wooden airships floating past among low-lying clouds; then once again the desert and the fallow land and the dead mirages; then once again the movement of self-animated matter, the stones speaking to the dunes, the dunes whispering to the moon, the sand swirling into tornadoes and towers and termite mounds and poetic biomechs, supernaturally baroque landscapes of Life without life, and all the while there is no energy left even for astonishment, with the vectors, natures, dreams, and civilizations flitting past so rapidly, 200K, 300K, a million days after the Extermination, and another million, and 5M, 10M, and probably nobody even remembers the Extermination any more, probably nobody remembers man any more; with no power or resources left for memory, is there any point at all, there’s no point, since there’s really no difference, no difference, and you know with absolute certainty that only hardware remains. 100M, 200M, 300M, the joyful clock of the void ticks on, and in the cracked lenses of the rusted mech galaxies and universes rise and set.

  Thus after a brief career of a few hundred thousand years, crowded with splendor and agony, the Seventeenth gave place to the Eighteenth, and, as it turns out, the Last, human species.

  …Indeed, only by some such trick could I do justice to the conviction that our whole present mentality is but a confused and halting first experiment.

  Last and First Men

  W. Olaf Stapledon

  July – December 2013

  GUILDS AND ALLIANCES

  BULL&BULL ALLIANCE ROYAL ALLIANCE BLACK CASTLE

  SMALL CASTLE G.O.A.T. DWARF FORTRESS

  PATAGONIA RIDERS TYRANNOSAURUS REX N.O.R.A.D.

  FIRST PARADISE RANDOMITES ETERNAL EMPIRE

  SALAMANDERS INSOUL3 MIT

  STL – SLAVE TRANSFORMERS LIST CHILDREN OF NEMO GREAT NORTHERN ALLIANCE

  HTL – HELSINKI TRANSFORMERS LIST MTL – MOSCOW TRANSFORMERS LIST CHŪŌ AKACHŌCHIN

  PROJECT GENESIS SPECTERS

  Figures:

  Now We're Dying

  Dead Man's FAQ

  Melancholy's King

  Hammering in Tokyo

  Diving into the Dream

  Horus Rising

  Our Lady of Paradise

  Joyful Clock of the Void

  Ex-librises:

  All that lives must die, passing through steel to eternity

  Oh body! my homeland! thou art like steel

  Would you like to know more?

  Death is not the end

  Would you kindly… kill!

  Bots may safely charge when the man guards them well

  Of gods and bots

  The show must go on

  The sky above paradise was the color of television, tuned to an axolotl channel

  So mech created man in his own image, in the image of gadget created he him; child and child created he them

  What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  War, war never changes

  We will be friends until forever, just you wait and see

  Man is our business

  One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star

  All those worlds will be lost, like tears in rain

  The truth is out there

  Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth

  The mech is not enough

  Remaining time unknown

  JACEK DUKAJ

  this Polish writer

  author of novels, novellas, short stories, essays

  worldbuilder, storyteller & idea man

  at the limits of humanity, reason & language

  practices his art of the great narrative & immersive fiction

  Notable works:

  The Cathedral, in which you investigate the sainthood of an astronaut who has died on a distant planetoid, and now his Cathedral grows around you from the seeds of nanotechnology on the site of an ancient cosmic mystery;

  Black Oceans, in which you wage Economic Wars through memetics, AI, genetically engineered telepathy and viral precognition, while running for your life through the streets of New York City in a gothic augmented reality;

  Extensa, in which you lead the peaceful country life of a farmer in preindustrial Green Land, while simultaneously being the cosmic-scale invasion thousands of light years from Earth, intimately linked to moons, planets and starships through the quantum entanglement of neurons;

  Other Songs, where Aristotle was right, there are no atoms, just five elements, Form and Matter, the Sun circles the Earth, man’s habits build his virtue, and you must will yourself up to the habits of a great strategos in order to face the formless chaos of Those That Cannot Be Described;

  An Ideal Imperfection, in which you are resurrected in the 29th century in a posthuman world of metaphysics, multibodied identities, cosmic AIs, multiple alien and human civilizations converging toward one mode of existence, and every player in this game of powers wants to steal the secrets of the universe buried deep in your memory;

  Ice, in which an otherworldly me
tal from the Tunguska Meteorite possesses logic-changing properties, and its impact has turned the Russian Empire into a land of the two-valued logic of Winter, where the philosophy of history is the new physics, it’s the year 1924, and you’ve just boarded the Transsiberian Express along with Nicola Tesla, tsarist spies, aristocrats and industrialists, and all the while you know you don’t exist;

  The Crowe, in which you are a little boy during Poland’s Martial Law of 1981, the monstrous Crowe has snatched your father in the middle of night and now you have to save him, to find him in the hypnotic labyrinths of this dark fairy-tale – a small boy in the concrete wonderland of a totalitarian nightmare;

  Line of Resistance, in which you are immortal, young and safe, living in endless free luxury, while the looming shadow of the Technological Singularity eclipses all human desires and aspirations, and the last possible endeavor for man is the creation of meanings for his life: his lines of resistance.

  Jacek Dukaj was born in 1974. He lives in Krakow, Poland. Currently he is working on his next novel entitled Recursion.

  More at: dukaj.pl/eng

  STANLEY BILL

  Stanley Bill grew up in Perth, Australia. He first went to Poland as an English teacher, and then spent almost a decade in the country. He has translated various works of fiction and non-fiction from Polish into English, while also publishing academic articles on Polish literature and writing a blog, “Notes from Poland”. He is currently Lecturer in Polish Studies at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.