The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams

by Jacek Dukaj

  “What about them?” Bartek asked, pointing at the pair of mechs at the other end of the lab.

  Now Frances emoted a shrug.

  “I’m not going to copy myself, and so far I haven’t been able to trust anyone else. So what else was left? Bots tried and tested in battles and quests. That one there is a necromancer from the twenty-forth level of a Korean AMMORPG, and the other one is the Asteroid Hunter from the Blizzard space opera.

  “Why the weird walk?”

  “I plugged in some motor skills for it from a Chinese wuxia opera. Normally it flew on exoskeleton afterburners, mainly in zero gravity.”

  “I see – degradation.”

  “And gravitation. In a word: down.”

  Bartek wanted to laugh and nudge Frances with an elbow in a reflex of quasi-spontaneous affection. All he could manage was the smash of metal on metal, the cold echo reverberating throughout the lab.

  “Sorry.”

  He displayed a GIF image of Flip and Flip.

  But Frances was already two steps into the lab and into her story.

  “Alright. Take a look. We’re talking about something like this.”

  He stepped closer and zoomed in on the casings of machines as large as industrial refrigerators.

  “Okay, I’ve googled this line of Polygen products, high-temperature chemical synthesis, but I don’t really get—”

  “We’ll dig out the theory from the scientific databases, but we need somebody who can deal with the hardware, from the stupid cooling to cleaning the circuits. None of us understands how it actually works – only what we’re supposed to get in the output.”

  “What are you supposed to get?”

  “Life. A human being.”

  Of gods and bots

  Blank.

  And Bartek emoted a blank.

  “Huh?”

  “Not a single organic compound survived, right? All the protein chemistry was fried,” said Frances, going over to Bartek and turning down her speakers. “But think: Where did organic life on Earth come from in the first place? Where? From inorganic chemistry. In the beginning, you just had a hot soup of elements and a seething mass of high and low energies for millions of years. And then, boom: RNA, DNA, cells, plants, animals, a fish crawls out onto the shore, and voilà, Homo sapiens. But we don’t have to repeat that whole process step by step now. Before the Extermination, biochemists were already synthesizing chains of nucleotides fairly well. We have the building blocks ready, the whole chemistry of primordial ingredients, the transition from inorganic to organic. And we have the recipes: precise DNA maps from the Human Genome Project. Of course, we’ll have to synthesize the egg itself as well and prepare the wombs in incubators, but that technology also existed, exists.”

  Frances spoke while Bartek stood there, a dead lump of metal, listening and thinking.

  “It won’t work.”

  “Why not?”

  “In order to survive, a biological organism has to have the whole world of biology around it. Correct me if I’m wrong – I’m not a biologist, but I’ve read a few books. The simplest thing: bacterial flora in the stomach. And what about food? Human beings also consume protein: kilograms of other life. Tons, hundreds of tons over a period of years. It won’t work.” Frances displayed a lady of the manor curtseying low in a crinoline ball gown.

  “Of course. The whole world of biology. That’s exactly the point. It’ll be years of work. Are you in?”

  A machine-made man. A reset perpetrated by an Evil God, after which all the hierarchies have been reversed. Now robots were creating man. Bartek raised his metal arm and slid the sharp edge of his finger along the smooth, gleaming housing of the DNA/RNA synthesizer, pressing hard until a scratch appeared, metal on metal, with a high-pitched squeal that would have made his ears hurt (if he had had ears).

  “Are you in?”

  The show must go on

  He liked to walk along the empty and naturally deserted ocean beaches, and he liked the roofs of the skyscrapers in Minato. He had a simple system for walking up stairs. He would release the mech to climb up the hundred floors by itself and then come back into it only when the robot had reached the top. At night-time, Tokyo from this perspective looked like a postcard of Tokyo with holes burnt into it: great irregular stains of total darkness, here and there the bright pimples of advertisements, neon lights, LED mega-screens, a few 3D lasers, and illuminated sections of the labyrinth of streets. As long as the Royal Alliance controlled the power plant at Hamaoka, the gigawatts would flow into these empty stage sets. The Royalist transformers had voted time and again for the illumination of the deserted city. They could not cope psychologically in a totally darkened city.

  Bartek liked to walk in his mech to the very edge of the rooftop, until his gyroscopes trembled from the slightest breath of wind. There he would observe the life of the dead city, the urban zombie, from the brink of a monumental abyss. One night, he saw the movement of red points on the sky over the skyscrapers. The Patagonians had released their air-drones into the RA neighborhoods. Another night, he made the final step forward and plummeted down to the pavement, recording the whole flight millisecond by millisecond.

  When the Patagonians and Black Castle robbed a third sex shop in a row, he began to go out on night patrols near the Aiko Tower. The spare parts for the Hondas would run out one day as well. Previously, he had paid no attention to the territorial scramble between the alliances, but now he checked the maps of influence and the reports on foreign mechs encountered on RA territory every day – the alarm signals of the Tokyo Mothernet. He took a Spit Gun and some spare batteries (he couldn’t feel their weight anyway), and went out on long walks. The bones of Japanese people and the finer bones of electronic gadgets and plastic junk crunched under the metal tread of his feet. He stayed out until the bulging sun emerged from behind the skyscrapers of Shiodome, and he could finally bring yet another night of cold loneliness to an end. (They still had not found a good plugin for sleep.)

  So went the mechanical post-apocalyptic calendar. Patagonia and Black Castle had begun to fight among themselves, sexbot on sexbot, fist to polymer mug. Someone in Chūō Akachōchin was spreading rumors about an attack on the Three Gorges Power Plant. Two more satellites dropped out of their orbits and burnt up. On 1011 PostApoc, a man named Ernesto Iguarte from the Patagonians developed serious schizogeny and began to copy himself with abandon. He jammed all the Patagonian servers and spilled out onto the B&B machines. One alliance after another cut itself off from the open satellite net. The IRS reportedly fired on some installations on the coast of New Zealand. Bart copied himself onto a neighboring partition and had a conversation with himself for several hours. Then one of the Barteks completely deleted itself.

  He still enjoyed his nocturnal strolls through Tokyo. Life was in motion; life was motion. For a while, he tried to learn Japanese, but soon conceded defeat. He was indeed a stranger in a strange land. All around him were unfamiliar symbols, faces of politicians, slogans. Everything was weird, alienating, distancing, and inhibiting. Xenoarcheology. He stood before the window of a shop selling Elvis Presley wigs, glasses and suits, scaled down to local dimensions. A Japanese Elvis looped on a screen in performance on a stage in Las Vegas, baring his fluorescent white teeth. Bartek stopped and stood there, unable to tear himself away. Something looped inside him, as if all the branches of an algorithm were leading to the same node, to an Asian King of Rock and Roll. Until all of a sudden he took a two-hundred-pound hammer to the head and was sent flying through the shop’s plate-glass window.

  Would you kindly… kill!

  It wasn’t actually a hammer, but the fist of an industrial Schmitt. The red and green mech, with its asymmetrical skeleton, stomped over the scattered screens, wigs, and glasses, and began to trample Bartek like a pile driver. It couldn’t fit through the window, so it tore through the ceiling with its jagged head, showering plaster down over the battlefield. Bartek couldn’t even tell if it was someone from
Black Castle or Patagonia. He pinged out an alarm on the RA frequency. The Schmitt smashed his freshly repaired leg. Then it shot out its own Faraday mesh from under a fist at the Star Trooper Miharayasuhiro. The other mech was one and a half times bigger and four times heavier. The Star Trooper would not rise again after the impact. Bartek decided to log out and then hightail it back to the location in an armored Drill Master GE.

  He hadn’t noticed when he’d lost his Spit Gun – probably when he smashed through the shop window. He soon figured out where it was though, when he saw the Totoro and two Winnie-the-Poohs leaping from an Elvis mannequin onto the Schmitt’s shoulders, stretching Bartek’s mesh on its earthing Wire over the mech. The Schmitt waved its fists about, trying to knock them off, but a second and third wave of irigotchi poured through the showroom over the shelves and mannequins. Within a few seconds, there were two dozen stuffed toys – Bartek’s entire neuro-family – jumping, stomping, and dancing over the industrial pile driver. One of them must have pulled the trigger of the Spit Gun. They didn’t wait for earthing or for the signal to cut out. They just burnt straight through the robot, exactly as Bartek liked to do it.

  The Schmitt crashed to the floor like a toppled monument, imprinting a coffin-shaped hole and crushing an unlucky Pokémon. Bartek extracted the toy with care, checking its little legs and arms, twisting its little head. The other irigotchi settled all over the Star Trooper from his knees to his shoulders, whimpering in their peculiar way, gesticulating like little monkey people.

  “Just don’t suffocate me.”

  He heaved himself up onto one leg. The little Totoro stretched out a paw towards him, as if offering its help or support to the half-ton robot. Bartek emoted a broad smile. The intelligence of the trawl! He responded with the very same gesture, and so they went out onto the street as a new day dawned, the crippled Miharayasuhiro leaning on the Spit Gun and the plump Totoro clinging to its steel thumb, with the rest of Bartek’s frolicsome brood following close behind.

  10K POSTAPOC

  The First Transformer War broke out over resources, just as SoulEater had predicted. It broke out, raged across the planet, and then subsided. Now everybody knew exactly who owned all the working servers and power plants.

  On 4529 PostApoc, the last white dot disappeared from the map of the world. No unaffiliated transformer was able to independently provision himself with constant hardware maintenance and a regular power supply.

  “We’re entering the era of feudalism,” joked Bartek. “Instead of a castle on a hill, we’ve got a robot forge.”

  On 7899 PostApoc, something went wrong with the last telecommunications satellite still transmitting signals across the Atlantic Ocean. The cables stretched across the ocean floor had succumbed long before. The minor repairs that human beings had constantly been conducting, unbeknownst to billions of Internet users, ceased on the day of the Extermination, and the inevitable accumulation of faults together with ordinary entropy overcame all the transoceanic lines one after another. Engineering work deep in the ocean was one of those things that there was no point even attempting without the support of a whole civilization.

  With that, the transformers could forget about freely logging into mechs anywhere in the world. The guilds and alliances ossified into regular nations, since now they were united not only by language and culture, but also by time and place.

  The GOATs and Black Castle divided Tokyo and its power plants between them. They united, split into factions, and then united again. Now they were really Japanese.

  Bartek had not paid them a visit for over eight years, so he was astonished when Shining Dawn announced Dagenskyoll’s arrival.

  “Cockroach,” said Shining Dawn. “Brrr!”

  The Bully Boys packed all their non-local guests into mass-produced GE mechs from the Burg I series, which resembled two-legged scarab beetles more than humanoids. The Dwarf Fortress was selling them to all the American transnations along with the spare parts. It was the only model for which it had proven possible to reboot production and – since 8488 PostApoc – intermittently keep it going. Shining Dawn and other extroverted vectors had developed a deep aversion for this design. Bartek figured that it must have had something to do with the trauma after the Iguarte Republic’s attack on the Farm in the last years of the war.

  Dagenskyoll entered the garden with a flourish, flapping the black solar panels of his bug wings in all directions. The sun was about to set, and green shadows rustled over the bushes and flower beds.

  Shining Dawn hid behind some grapevines and began to throw stones at Dagenskyoll from behind the gnarled trunks of the apple trees.

  “Why don’t you just set the dogs on me?” cooed Dagenskyoll.

  “We don’t have dogs yet.”

  Bartek stood up straight, unplugging his USB mustache from the condenser lines. He was working in a specialized Mandrake II-A, on six praying-mantis legs, with batteries of agro-cultural tools sticking out from under the casing. The corporations had been trying to replace farmers with machines. Enormous sums of money had been invested in these agronomical mechs just before the Extermination.

  Bartek emoted a handshake. Dagenskyoll emoted an evening spent over a beer or two. Bartek emoted a table and chair. They stood facing each other in the garden as if they were seated.

  “You Yankee Bull Boy Mengele.”

  “You vampire kamikaze Jap.”

  They emoted amicable guffaws.

  “I’ll gobble him up, gobble him, gobble him,” sang out Shining Dawn.

  Dagenskyoll displayed a question mark.

  “You’re as good as gobbled,” said Bartek, pointing at the irigotchi stealing up from the north side of the garden – stuffed animal Frankensteins, covered in filth and caked with mud; a veritable cornucopia of furry patchwork creatures cobbled together from dozens of mechanical toys drawn from the gamut of pre-Extermination cultures and age categories. “Tomorrow they’ll be talking and walking you from morning to evening.”

  The black cockroach shuddered, as if a shiver had just run through it.

  “Can we talk somewhere out of earshot?”

  Bartek pointed his manipulator at his dorsal plate.

  “I’ve got a hard link to Wiesner.”

  Bartek was processing on the servers of the MIT Media Lab with extra B&B backup from the shipping containers of portable Google servers near Boston.

  North America had stuck together over the land lines, from California to New England. The Dwarves were already producing fiber-optic cables, Intel bless them.

  “I mean, I know you’re not sitting in this praying mantis here, and I’m not talking to some Iguarte. But I guess I can trust you, right?”

  “And you? Where are you living from? Surely not from Tokyo.”

  “It’s a long story. Haven’t you heard? We finally rebuilt the transoceanic drones. I copied myself onto some flash drives. Me and the delegation. The first flight went down somewhere near Hawaii. They’re no Dawntreaders, I’ll tell you that. But the second time around we caught the jet stream at twelve thousand meters and we were in luck. Now we’re on the Dwarves’ computers, and I’m probably running over the same line from Cambridge as you are.”

  “A big operation. Strange that I didn’t get it in the news.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it, just get them off me.”

  The irigotchi were pouring sand into the gears of Dagenskyoll’s mech and poking sticks into its joints and between its steel tendons.

  “Come on.”

  The two transformers – a cockroach and a praying mantis – waddled off creaking and grating into the setting sun, while dozens of grubby little mechanical furballs circled around them like a swarm of ground insects.

  The insects buzzing in the air – round bugs gleaming with silver and lilac luster – were Thumbelina drones, mass-produced mini-robots for pollinating plants that couldn’t yet be pollinated by species of insects still to be resurrected in a Farm lab.

  Dagenskyoll gl
ared suspiciously at the irigotchi with all his lenses.

  “Do they have a problem with me or what?

  “It depends on the vector.”

  “Huh?”

  “Once you’ve spent some time with them, you’ll learn to pick it.”

  “Do you know what happened to the rest of those furry little shits in Tokyo?”

  “What?”

  “Big Castle tagged them and turned them into scouts.”

  “All of them?”

  “Come off it – without repairs, most of them had already fallen apart.”

  “They break easily, it’s true. Sometimes I don’t do anything else all day. Just repair them.”

  “So why do you bother?”

  “I don’t want to kill them, do I?”

  Dagenskyoll emoted a man with the head of a pig.

  “Who don’t you want to kill?”

  “I don’t know, but I know that it would be killing. You see that vector? I call it Shining Dawn, because it’s always got the energy of early morning on a summer’s day. It gets me going like a rainbow or a guitar solo.”

  “Why ‘vector’”?

  “Because the irigotchi themselves don’t count – just their configuration. Split a brain into two hundred parts and put them together in various combinations of twenty, thirty, forty. One time you’ll get this personality, the next time a different one.”

  They entered a long garage. Bartek parked his Mandrake under a maintenance hood and came out of the shadows in an old Star Trooper (a model identical to the Japanese Miharayasuhiro).

  They climbed the external stairs onto the roof of the main building of the Farm, under triangular solar panels. The irigotchi could not follow, since the steps were too steep for most of the component toys of the vector. A vector has an instinct for self-preservation; it will not disassemble of its own free will.