by Jacek Dukaj
Oh body! my homeland! thou art like steel
He had terabytes of construction plans and instruction manuals loaded onto his hard drives, and had amassed a comprehensive library of urban hardware catalogs, thick as bibles. These were divided into sections for the different lines of mechs: domestic, street, industrial, medical, municipal, military, recreational, air, and underwater. Slowly, from one page and catalog to the next, the mechs evolved into drones, which in turn evolved into stationary hardware and the Matternet itself: the Internet of Matter, a server-less network of ubiquitous microprocessors, operating on RFID, infrared, and NFC.
In the decade before the Extermination, billions of dollars had been pumped into the industry. Unemployment had risen, as one corporation after another switched from human workers to robots. Societies were aging, but instead of human children and grandchildren it was an army of patient and solicitous machines that was called upon to care for the elderly. And while the mech soldier may have cost a fortune to manufacture, its death on the battlefield cost nothing in public opinion polls.
Another ten or fifteen years and there would have been millions of these service robots tethered to radio leashes all over the world. But the Extermination struck at the very dawning of this new era.
If only Bartek could call a mech service center now! These catalogs were essentially compendiums of prototypes and demonstration models. He still couldn’t read the Japanese handbooks, and they were the ones that interested him the most.
In a Faraday cage at the back of the workshop, Bartek kept three complete sexbots, a medico, and a Beetle.
The irigotchi would not go near the cage. They bunched together in a herd and watched Bartek like fearful puppies.
“I’m not going to repair you,” he repeated to them, knowing full well that they couldn’t understand him. “I’m not a programmer. All I can do is bash together some arms and legs.”
Years before the Extermination, the programmers had reached such a level of harmony with the digital world that they had completely lost touch with hardware. This led to the emergence of a separate clan of IT whizzes, whose main task was to crawl underneath desks and grates, and in whose heads the priceless knowledge of which cable went into which port and which cards cooled the best under which radiators was preserved.
Bartek was the IT basement for those who worked in the IT basement.
Through a double-filtered USB, he plugged himself into a laptop hooked up to a satellite antenna perched on the roof of the Aiko building. The Royalists had just updated the zones of influence in Greater Tokyo on their side, as well as the colors of the alerts on the power lines from the plants in Tokyo and Hamaoka. The JPX server room at Nihonbashi Kabutocho, where the majority of Royalist transformers in Tokyo were processed, was glowing green. In the Chūō Akachōchin bar in Kyōbashi, the attendance meter registered seven transformers.
Bartek put his new leg through the whole testing process, performed a few squats, sighed, and motioned for the soft toys to approach.
“Okay, come to daddy. I’ll put you guys back together again somehow.”
They squeaked timidly and opened their comic-book eyes even wider.
It had all begun with Bartek putting himself back together.
He had clambered out into the real in Vladivostok. The Russian public, private, military, government, and commercial networks were all so impossibly tangled that it came down to a pure twist of fate whether one ended up stuck for centuries in the purgatorial appendix of a dedicated server or got shot straight onto a virtual highway to the FSB or the Pentagon.
Bartek was buried alive. He woke up in Vladivostok without any senses, without a body, and with only his instincts and the threshold of pain intact. He thrashed about in that confinement cell for a true eternity – or, more precisely, for four and a half minutes – until he found a crack no wider than a bit in the local Matternet and, slipping through it, entered the municipal CCTV network. Surveying the desolate streets, strewn with corpses, he fell into depression and slowed down to a hundred ticks per second.
Only when four of his partitions had already crashed, and the processors had overheated at the Vladivostok Gazprom LNG center, did Bartek’s survival instinct turn back on again. He pulled himself together and dragged himself out of apathy.
He switched over to the machines of the Pacific State Medical University, where he seized exclusive control of the reserve power supply (the hospital had a petrol generator that could be started from the level of the network administrator). At two gigahertz, Bartek’s curiosity came back.
Who had survived? What had happened to his family and friends? What had happened to the whole world?
He was sitting on the Vladivostok servers because that’s how he had distributed himself on the day of the Apocalypse. Bartek’s copy number one was supposed to be crunched on the company machines in Warsaw, just like the first backup; then there was the Google backup, then the backup in the cloud, and only after that the fourth one, in Vladivostok. He had no way out onto the satellites and the open net, and that was in fact what had saved him.
Through the hundred eyes of the CCTV he spotted some Segways in a repair workshop on the shore of Amur Bay. Some of them had been adapted to perform unmanned patrols for local security companies and so they must have had some kind of radio input. After all, they were part of the Matternet – the Internet of Things scattered over a hodgepodge of a dozen competing protocols. Theoretically, they should have remained in constant communication with their surroundings. But the Internet of Matter looked completely different to a practical expert. Bartek constantly had had to explain to customers why their SmartHouse wasn’t so smart after all, why the fridge was unable to communicate with the oven, and why one set of keys after another went missing despite the three RFID tags embedded in each.
After half an hour of ineptly attempting to hack one of the two-wheelers, he finally succeeded. He rolled around aimlessly for a while, gazing at the lifelessness of the frigid city from street level, staring from the boulevards at the rolling mass of water… and once again, a cold and heavy sadness washed over Bartek.
He returned to the workshop, broke into a couple of repair machines, and fused a manipulator claw onto the Segway, together with a more powerful transmitter. After putting himself together like this, he set out to look for a functioning Internet terminal. That the Internet itself might not be working was a thought that Bartek wouldn’t even allow his mind to consider.
On Admiral Fokin Street he found himself slaloming between chaotically parked cars, concrete flower beds, and the desiccated bodies of people and birds. Suddenly, in his peripheral vision, he caught movement in the shop window to his right. Swiveling the camera he realized it was, of course, his own movement – which is to say, the Segway’s movement.
Bartek stared at his reflection and thought: “WALL-E.” He trundled on, while terabytes of Freudian associations came crashing down in the neuro-files of the InSoul3’s Karabach mod.
He peered inside the shops as he passed them, and saw computers, monitors, and keyboards – life-giving oxygen. The only problem was that the primitive architecture of the city wasn’t wheelchair-friendly – or Segway-friendly for that matter.
In the end, he simply snatched a tablet from the hand of a woman withering away into an anorexic mummy on a park bench beneath the expansive corpse of a tree.
Would you like to know more?
The tablet was working, but Bartek was completely unable to operate the touchscreen with the hard, clumsy gripper of his only limb. In any case, the screen could only sense electrostatic changes.
He racked his brain (non-brain), wobbling on his two wheels and squinting the camera around the street-morgue. The owner of the tablet, an Asian woman in jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with the image of a Bollywood star, stared with dark, unseeing eyes at an ugly sky devoid of birds or smoke or smog. A gust of wind blew a plastic bag onto her head, so that now it looked as if she were suffocating, gaspin
g for her last breath under the plastic.
Bartek reached for her hand and snapped off the mummy’s index finger. Now he could use the finger to operate the tablet.
The system showed seventeen networks, two of them open. Bartek connected to the one with the strongest signal.
The browser’s home page was Google, of course. When the page loaded, Bartek almost felt tears welling up in his eyes. (There were no tears, there were no eyes, but the feeling remained.)
It was like a return to his homeland, like a view over the roofs of his native city, or the taste of the bread of his childhood. At that moment, Bartek could have dropped to his knees and kissed the Holy Land of Google.
The feeling lasted for a fraction of a second. Then he saw the rest. On the search engine’s main page was a graphic showing tiny manga robots covering their square little heads with sheet metal and tinfoil. KEEP YOUR MINDS CLOSED! He pressed the graphic with the tip of the corpse’s finger. APOCALYPSE FAQ appeared on the screen.
First point of the FAQ: Under no circumstances connect the machine on which you’re processing to the Internet!
After that came lists of contact addresses, websites categorized by language, culture, and religion, links to HTL and MTL tables, and discussion forums and blogs on survival despair.
Naturally, Bartek and Rytka were not the only ones to have hit on the IS3 idea.
How could he have been so egocentrically blind! After all, it was hard to imagine that they alone among billions of people could have had the same fortuitous clash of neurons.
Who else? He frantically googled his family and friends. Danka – she’d survived, she must have survived, he could sense she’d survived. No. Danka was gone. His brother and his father – dead. Even Rytka was gone.
He managed to google their last recordings from the minutes, hours and days before the Extermination. In a masochistic impulse, he loaded them into the cache. Now he could watch Danka’s final selfies in endless loops – sunny recordings of a smiling redhead with the Vistula River shimmering in the background. She was saying something as she laughed at the camera, but her words had not been recorded for eternity. Only her face, hair, eyes and freckles would remain.
He made it through two loops before he crumbled. He went back to the FAQ and the guides to scavenging hardware.
So Bartek read the handbook of life after life in the shadow of the leafless body of the tree, until night fell and the battery went dead on the tablet.
He tossed away the finger and the tablet, then rolled off in the dark through the empty streets of Vladivostok.
He searched for facades of pre-apocalyptic normality: fossilized parks, cemeteries in their natural state, parking lots filled with cars in eternal slumber, street lights still shining, fountains and neon signs, cakes and bread shriveled into hard clay on supermarket shelves, a mute bundle in a pram – a baby so heavily wrapped in rompers and blankets that the little rag doll might just as easily have been sleeping or dead… until finally the power ran out on the Segway.
Curled up into a shivering ball on the hospital servers, Bartek gazed through a hundred CCTV eyes at the starry sky. Sleep would not come, since he had no application for sleep. So melancholy came instead.
“Melancholy’s king.”
“Manga blues, baby, manga blues.”
Manga blues - they sit on the terrace of the Kyōbashi Tower with a view of night-time Ginza. Every tenth advertisement and every twentieth screen glows bright. The screen above their terrace plays the scene from Blade Runner with Rutger Hauer dripping with rain and neon melancholy in an ironic loop. Meanwhile, they – sad robots – sit, stand, and trundle about, engaging in a misshapen parody of coffee talk.
“Another vodka?”
“Hit me.”
Steel fingers grip the delicate glass with surgical precision. There are special programs to support the motor skills required for vodka drinking.
Of course, they cannot really drink vodka, and the drinks are mere mock-ups. They cannot drink anything, they cannot eat anything – quarter-ton mechs in the Chūō Akachōchin bar. All they can do is perform these gestures of life, laboriously repeating the customs of bygone biology.
A barman in the shell of a mechanized barman pours out the Smirnoff. His three-jointed arm brushes against the polymer mitt of a transformer playing bar customer with the same desperation. The grating sound is audible even under Hauer’s monologue.
That’s the real curse, thinks Bart. Metal on metal, heart on heart, and every awkward moment multiplies the pathos of loneliness a thousand times. As if under a microscope. As if projected on a hundred-hectare screen.
We are monstrous shadows and scrapheaps of human beings, the molybdenum despair of empty hearts.
Manga blues – they sit on the Chūō Akachōchin terrace, under the last red lanterns, sad robots regaling one another with legends.
The first legend is about man.
“It had wings like a butterfly’s dream,” says Dagenskyoll, his shoulder speaker crackling slightly on the sibilant consonants. “Propellers that whirred into light blue rainbows. Dawntreader XII, all nanofibers and carbon fiber, an angel stingray cross,” he continues, his chest screen displaying sketches and schematic diagrams of the plane ripped from Google caches. “Wingspan: 78 meters. Mass: 1.64 tons. It had just been serviced; they kept it in a hangar at the airport in Dallas. When the Death Ray hit the other hemisphere, they had enough time to load their families, some provisions, and equipment. They took off with a several hour head start on the Meridian. The Earth rotates at a speed of 1,674 kilometers an hour – but that’s at the equator. The Dawntreader couldn’t go faster than 300 kilometers an hour, so in order to keep ahead of the Death Meridian, they had to stay above the eightieth parallel. Of all the solar aircraft, only the Dawntreader could manage it.” Dagenskyoll displays the structure of the photoelectric cells that cover the wings and fuselage of the plane. In the pictures they really do shimmer like butterflies in the sun. “By their second circuit they were flying above an Earth roasted clean of all its organic life. Only machines answered their radio calls: the automatic systems of airports and armies. When the Ray died out after one hundred and seventy-seven hours, they could only reach this conclusion from the information being transmitted by machines from the other hemisphere. They made no contact with any transformers; they did not go online. They flew on. Votes were held on board the Dawntreader: to land or not to land? Should they land for a short while, stock up on provisions and then fly on, or wait and find out whether the Ray had really died out? In the end they split up. After two weeks, some of them had had enough, so they touched down somewhere in the north of Greenland, on a runway near an ice settlement, stocked up on water and food, offloaded the unwilling, and took off again.” Dagenskyoll raises one of his four skeletal-mosaic arms and points to the zenith of the starless sky over Tokyo. “They’re still up there, flying, circling above us on the transoceanic heights.”
Now everybody is sure that it’s a legend.
Bartek has seated himself on the edge of the terrace, clutching the sentimental prop of a beer can, a Budweiser covered with gaudy katakana characters. If you were to set it upright on a tabletop, it would begin to sway and gyrate like a hula-hoop dancer. Bartek holds the can motionless in the kilojoule grip of a Star Trooper.
We’re all gadgets, he thinks. In the distance, forty floors up, the wind sways a loose cable, sprinkling occasional fountains of electric sparks down on a darkened Tokyo. For a moment Bartek wonders how much electricity leaks out of the Royalist power plant like this. Then he thinks about fireworks and Hollywood special effects. The wind is cold, but metal cannot feel the wind. Metal cannot feel anything.
So this is how he spends his evenings.
A stranger in a strange land. Even stranger since there is not a single Japanese transformer. The whole of Japan was fried instantly the moment the Ray hit. Asia was in the hemisphere of death at Zero Hour.
“Anyhow.”
&n
bsp; The second legend is about paradise.
“They pulled it off. They did it. On the servers of one of the big studios in California they used ready-made scans to set up a whole world on the other side of the Uncanny Valley. Or at least a house, a garden, and some bodies. They created a foolproof filter, so that finally you could connect to the net – mind-to-mech and even mind-to-mind – without any risk of malware unstitching your memory or infecting your consciousness. So they log in, and there, on the other side, they have soft, warm, moist bodies again, miraculously fleshy to the touch. They can touch, smell, and taste again.” Dagenskyoll speeds up, and the hulking robots bunched around him in a spellbound circle press even closer, leaning in, sticking out microphone tongues and scanner tendrils. “They can drink and eat and drink.” He raises his glass of vodka and a long metallic grating sound rings out, krrrshaaahhrrr: the screeching interference of speakers and microphones, or maybe even the sighing of embarrassed machinery. “They drink, drink and sleep, even if they can’t dream, and they walk on the grass and bathe in the sunshine—”
Krrrshaaahhrrr!
“They have dogs, cats, birds, bugs. Mosquitoes bite them, dust and pollen get in their eyes, the sun blinds them, since the sun is always rising there, and they set up grills and burn their fingers—”
Krrrshaaahhrrr!
“—as they eat the steaming meat.”
Now this is too much, and the robots press up against Dagenskyoll, almost crushing him.
“Do you know the IP?”
“Only the bosses of the alliances know it. They’re the ones who meet there. To discuss strategies for the future, exchange information, and resolve disputes.”
A black medico mech roars from a distorted speaker straight into Dagenskyoll’s front display: