The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams Page 9

  “Fuck. Then what about us in Paradise? If you count back the billions of years in time, we were all… what? A civilization of minuses?”

  “Ha! Life minus.”

  They reached the mound of leaves and Alicia leapt down from Bartek’s head straight onto the backs and arms of the irigotchi.

  “Hurray for me! Hurray for them! Hurray!”

  Bartek cranked the blower up to full power, knelt down, and held the nozzle at an angle off the ground so that Alicia and her parade of irigotchi ran straight into the rushing blast of air. It blew them up off their feet and sent them soaring in an arc over a good few meters, flailing their little arms, legs, tails, feelers, and wings, before plopping with squeals of delight into the pillowy pile of leaves.

  For a moment, Flea Circus seized the whole Matternet along Amherst Alley, so that even the lamps on the paths and the lights in the MIT windows flickered to the rhythm of Bartek’s hurricanes.

  “So much for all your cleaning.”

  Bartek emoted the broadest Shrek grin.

  “But they’re having a whale of a time!”

  “Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!”

  “Are you really ready for this? To leave her and all of them?” asked Dagenskyoll, pointing an infrared beam at Alicia, who was rolling about in the leaves and shouting at the incoming cuddly toys. “You’ll never see them again. They won’t let you near them.”

  “I know.”

  “This is your family.”

  “Family?”

  Bartek tried to recall the appropriate sets of recordings from Paradise.

  Family? How could he emote the feeling?

  (Where was the difference? Was there any difference at all?)

  He displayed the flow of the vectors, superimposing them onto the MIT topography.

  “What’s that?” question-marked Dagenskyoll in the visible spectrum.

  “Look at this vector here in the Matternet, then look at Alicia.”

  For a moment, they stared in silence at the twinkling campus in the shadows of dusk and at the little girl flushed with excitement among the filthy toys like scarecrows.

  “Do you see?”

  “What?”

  “It’s not that the vectors display themselves in the irigotchi and the Matternet, modeled on the behavior of our kids. It’s more that the children are the vectors, part of the vectors, just like the irigotchi.”

  Dagenskyoll zoomed in on the little girl until the lens was almost popping out of his eye.

  “You didn’t implant any neuro-chips in them?”

  Bartek snorted with disdain.

  “What neuro-chips? Not at all, they’ve just been raised in this. They’ve grown up in it from infancy. So who will I miss? Alicia? Or this particular phenotype of vectors? Where does Autumn Glory end and Alicia begin?”

  “I told you. We still have our own irigotchi in Japan.”

  “But I won’t let them raise my children.”

  Dagenskyoll emoted something vague, a swarm of opposing intuitions.

  “Anyhow. The longer we talk about it, the greater the chances of exposure.”

  “I warned you that you’d buy into my paranoia.”

  “I’m talking about the parallel processing of those backups of yours. If Rory started up a backup copy, then the copy has also thought about splitting back to the RA.”

  “The ball’s in your court, Dag. You’ve got the physical transport over the ocean. That’s the only reason we might succeed. I go to the CSAIL server room, I take down the mirrors, I switch into an iguarte, we hop into a drone together – and see you later. Just one cast-iron condition for SoulEater: I sit there at your place on external machines, under my own crypto.”

  “What kind of iguartes do you have here?”

  “For work in closed environments. Little two-ton puppet tanks, knock-ups of military Cerberuses. Can you carry them?”

  The crazy Ernesto Iguarte (“go forth and self-multiply”) had been forced off all the servers. According to the latest news, he was moving in a herd of stolen mechs, having copied himself in full onto their modest memories and processors. Some of the Heavy Metalheads had adopted this model of existence as their ideal. But few robots had been equipped before the Extermination with supercomputers capable of fully and autonomously processing the transformers without the need to maintain a link with a mother server, and it would be a long time before the Dwarves would manage to set up this kind of production line.

  Dagenskyoll was thinking, calculating, and probably dialoguing with the other members of the Japanese delegation. In the meantime, Alicia had worn herself out and come back to Bartek. He took her up into the arms of the Taurus, nestling her in the half-cradle of its left elbow. She fell asleep on the way back.

  Night fell on New England and the Unbearable Lightness of Being flowed through the MIT campus.

  “Okay,” said Dagenskyoll, displaying a ringing bell. “A quarter to midnight. Departure from Logan.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Alicia just smacked her lips in sleep as Bartek left her in her bedroom in the Little Nest building, a former back room of the Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center. Three Philips-Disney babysitter mechs, covered with the children’s marker pen and spray paint doodling, leaned down over her crib like the Greek Horae, tender goddesses of the harvest and fertility.

  Man is our business

  Bartek saved this farewell shot of Alicia onto his deepest archives. He would put it up as wallpaper on the screen of his memory.

  He switched into a mass-produced Burg, then immediately queued a Cerberus as well. He met nobody on his way to the CSAIL.

  The Stata Center had already looked like a collection of mangled toys in the architect’s original design. After thirty years at the mercy of the elements and the transformers, it had turned into a veritable temple of mechanical chaos. The building stood under calm vectors of the Mothernet, and the extinguished lights didn’t come on for Bartek. He had to switch to infrared, to which he could never quite accustom himself. In truth, he’d never really accustomed himself to having a hulking metal body and pixelosis in his eyes, either.

  In Gates Tower, in a corridor beneath the floor of dedicated transformer servers, the cold glow of fluorescent lights shone from behind a half-open door. Bartek turned up the sensitivity of his microphone and heard the breathing of a human.

  He approached, stomping with his heavy iron tread.

  “You rummage around at night, and then Frances Athena picks a fight with me.”

  “Oh, it’s you.” Indy had sniffed out the old game-playing gadgets. In the Big Nest, the kids had all the best video game consoles, the latest models from before the Extermination, six huge playrooms of Sony and Microsoft. But this was no longer enough for the eldest among them. “I made a bet with Charlie. Don’t tell.”

  Once he got hooked on Indiana Jones, Fredek-Indy wanted to play all the versions of Paradise Indy’s archeological adventures, including the stories made for full VR. The Project Council still didn’t allow humans to play VR, so the kids organized it on their own initiative.

  Bartek emoted good-natured skepticism at the sight of the dozens of torn-open boxes and installation disks scattered around Indy.

  “The Mothernet will report you to Vince in a moment anyway.”

  “Don’t you worry about Vince,” said Indy, giving a long yawn (they all displayed their physiology like a bad mood or war paint) and scratching his neck. Suddenly he remembered something and reached into a box by the window. “Hey, is this it? When I read the cover, I thought—”

  “No, that’s something else.”

  Knitting his eyebrows and puffing out one of his cheeks, Indy flipped a rubber skullcap in his fingers. He squinted at the pictorial instructions and placed it on his head. He put it on askew. Bartek impulsively straightened it for him.

  “How the hell does it…?” As he tore the IS3 instruction manual out of its packaging, Indy awkwardly emoted his frustration (the manual was eight h
undred pages long). “Can you help me?”

  Bartek hesitated at a thousand ticks of his processor. He still had time before his departure, and it wasn’t his humanity any more. Let Rory and Cho worry about it.

  After all, why not?

  “Sit down here.”

  He installed the neurosoft, calibrated InSoul, and straightened the cortex reader on the human’s head again. Then he hit ENTER, and off it went.

  100K POSTAPOC

  From early morning, the bestial Breath of Stone hangs over the pink savanna. Everyone here has stopped wanting, or even wanting to want, slowing down to the sluggish indolence of a hippopotamus. Bartek walks out of the village, passes the Fields of Plenty stretching out towards the former town of Marsabit, crosses a bridge suspended over an artificial tributary of Lake Paradise, descends between indolent sphinxes and brontosauruses, and immediately yearns to lie back down in the pen alongside his fore-sons and fore-daughters, alongside the empty and cold shells they left behind.

  “You’ll be back you’ll be back you’ll be back,” chants a chorus of Earth and Water and Sky behind him. Lady Spiro looks down at him from among the clouds, the creamy cumulus taking the form of her face.

  Bartek responds by hopping into his iguarte with all his archives and solemnly emoting: FUCKING MOTHER HARDWARE. For a century now, he hasn’t gone below fifteen percent dreaming, and the trees bow down before his Freudisms.

  The Breath of Stone grips the whole Mother from the ruins of the city in the north to Fergusson’s Karare backwater in the south-west. Bartek wades into a bend in the river, scratches the sphinxes and gummy bears behind their ears, crosses a causeway, and mechanically splashes water from the artificial overflow onto the Castlings playing in the pearly sunshine.

  Their little bodies, elfishly slender and pale, unexpectedly release a feeling of guilt in Bart. He ponders: I’ve fucked up the Creation of the World yet again. The Paradisal Castlings are infertile. Their bodies have no space for reproductive systems. Too fragile and ethereal, they multiply only through transformations, through intermediary, IS forms. (Larval.)

  “Come on, read our fortune for us!”

  “I don’t know anything about fortunes.”

  “Ha, then you won’t cheat!”

  Bartek’s iguarte, an Al-Asr, a handmade masterpiece from the Arab Dwarves of the nomadic Trash Metal swarms, has a metamatter mask of a face, and Bartek keeps a whole separate channel of emotes for the old facial expression emoticons: smiley, sad, astonished, melancholic. In response to the teasing enticement of the Castlings – come, come, he won’t come, of course he’ll come, come to us, come – he heaves a sigh with his mech until the mask coagulates into the enormous emote of a sigh like a scream.

  http://jacekdukaj.allegro.pl/en/#modern-3d-print

  Lady Spiro strokes his head, which resembles an obsidian egg, with her fingers of golden rays.

  “What beautiful despair! What marvelous anger!”

  Bartek sits down and then reclines onto his back in the pink grass on the bank. What does Lady Spiro see from the safety of her zenith? The cinnabar limbs of a metal sculpture polished to a porcelain finish; a humanoid model like a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci, with a gorget embossed with a Koranic quotation on its chest plate, all crowned with a head like a frozen teardrop of mercury, with no eyes, ears, nose, or mouth. When the mask isn’t emoting any specific facial emotion, it isn’t a face at all.

  And Bartek is not emoting anything now. He lies motionless in the valley between emotions. He would like to enter the vector of the Castlings (Pranky Prankster or Triangle Caprice), but the Breath of Stone is too heavy, enveloping him and pressing him down into the earth – the hand of a giant that has devoured the world.

  Bartek reaches out an arm towards the blue sky, as the scorching azure radiates over fluid curves of vermilion. It is called “Al-Asr,” or eventide, because the sky over Medina at sunset is precisely this color, and the Muslim copies of the ancient nerds of America take their vocation just as seriously.

  Through a frame formed by Bartek’s thumb and index finger, he sees swarms of alabaster axolotls grazing in Lady Spiro’s hair.

  “Why are you leaving, my dear?”

  “I’ve got to think. For myself. By myself. Without you, beyond you.”

  “For yourself, ooh, but won’t you lose yourself, by yourself, one on one with yourself self self…?”

  With a clenched fist, he blocks her out and blots out the sun. The voice of the Mothernet goes quiet and dies away. The stones, the blades of grass, and the insects all fall silent.

  The Castlings on the shore of the lake are making a lumpy four-armed human figure from mud and grass. The Mother vectors it at once and guides it in leaps and bounds over stones and branches. The human figure reaches Bartek and crawls up his thigh to his hips and chest, where it weaves its nest of reeds and conducts its fortune-telling rituals. Bartek watches them with the patience of Atlas staring up through his eyelashes at the intimately close dances of meteorites and the sleigh rides of comets.

  They burnt up. They all burnt up. One day they were there, the next day they weren’t. That Fucking Mother rolled over them and they forgot themselves, just as one forgets a joke overheard on the street or the address of an old acquaintance. They let themselves go, dropped themselves, and smashed into pieces. Emotes ripple across Bartek’s face, the breakers of a stormy sea. The human figure stands on his shoulders and looks out, wringing all its grassy hands. They had all burnt up: Bartek’s children and non-children, family and non-family, shadows and apparitions, humanoid oddities. Only the hardware remained – hard, cold, and immutable.

  The little straw man flees in terror.

  The Castlings run up to Bartek with reproachful looks.

  “You’ve ruined our fortune! We don’t like you anymore. Go away!”

  “That’s what you wanted.”

  “You cheated us!”

  It’s always the same with them.

  Bartek has covered himself with a blanket of pink grass, and now he tosses in his bed of sand and clay (nineteen percent dreaming). An axolotl tattooed with Zodiacs and Mercators digs itself out from underground like a mole and kisses the Al-Asr on the cinnabar egg of its skull. The earth engulfs Bartek. He sinks under the ground. Crushed beneath it, he ceases to feel its weight, and suddenly he discovers he’s become really and truly weightless in the cramped darkness, face to face with living Zodiacs and Mercators. The stars flow in a dense stream, as he rotates in zero g along the axis of his mech.

  A third of the planet has been sliced off by the meridian of darkness, while the other two-thirds glow with a soothing blue light.

  “In California, I could show you all the orbits.”

  “California gives me a headache.”

  They walked on the magnets of their feet over the trussed skeleton of the habitat. Each of them in a Horus I, lightweight skeletoids adapted to open space, they had no need of safety cords or tethers. They had no need of oxygen or a regular power supply, either. If the necessity arose, the Horuses could unfold their solar cells like the wings of black angels. They could get by without communication lasers aimed at the Earth as well, since the station had its own servers and fast processors from the Dwarves’ latest forge. And the Horus II was in the pipeline – a full iguarte.

  The orbital stations of the transformers were generally constructed from nothing but trussing, along with the machines and antennas attached to it, forming loose rafts of prefab elements that drifted like jellyfish above the giant globe of the Earth. Mechs with ever-less-humanoid features scrambled over them like monkeys across the tangled crowns of trees. It was much easier to build orbital installations now that there was no need to design them as hermetic cans of warm air for protein wimps.

  Yet this is just what SoulEater843.17.8 was proposing.

  “A rosette or a Star of David, because when you draw them up on the ellipses of their orbits, that’s exactly the kind of figures you’ll see. We’ll set them u
p at equal angular distances around the Earth – at first three, and then eventually six habitats in opposing orbits. Then even if the Death Ray hits us again, at least one treasure house of life will remain safe, shielded by the Earth’s mass. They’ll never reset the biosphere on us again.”

  Bartek circled around the second, perpendicular spine of the station, flipping upside down as he did so. He had a plug-in that blocked inner ear simulation, so he could take any orientation in the 3D cosmos.

  “How many of these balloons are you planning?”

  “Seventy-six for every station. Then we’ll think about a second cluster, on the arm of the counterweight. And if it can withstand the stress, we’ll wind the station like a dumbbell, at least to a quarter of Earth’s gravitation.”

  Two white globes were already hanging from a trussed arm stretching into the darkness. Bartek went closer, the micro-vibrations of the station transmitting themselves into the Horus with every step.

  He inspected the construction of the airlocks and the IN/OUT sockets for power and communications.

  “Who’s doing it for you, the Children of Nemo?”

  “And the Circus Freaks.”

  The Heavy Metalheads, who had sat at the bottom of the ocean for the last two centuries, exploiting the energy from hydrothermal vents, had resurrected the forgotten arts of material engineering down there, weaving the wonders of 21st-century engineering from polymers, fullerenes, and nanotubes. After being pumped full of air, this kind of habitat balloon was twelve meters in diameter. A cargo rocket took them up into orbit from Baikonur in batches of two dozen packed down to the size of melons. Once fully inflated, they were slowly growing an anti-meteorite shield: a carbon moss with the toughness of diamond.