The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams

by Jacek Dukaj

  Bartek stuck out an air sensor, emoted a breath, and spoke:

  “Alright, we’re alone here.”

  Dagenskyoll began without wasting a moment:

  “We’re going to have to drop an A-bomb on Patagonia.”

  “Say what?”

  “There’s no other way. SoulEater’s sweet-talking the IRS as we speak. There’s going to be a coalition: us – that is the two Japans, the Royalists from Europe, the Bully Boys, the Dwarves, maybe Rex, maybe the Salamanders. Patagonia’s gone with Little Castle. They’ll set all the drones of Russia and Brazil onto you. The only option is pre-emptive bombardment of their servers. But all the ballistic missiles buried in the silos have long since rusted and any attempt to launch them will just blow a hole in the ground as big as Moria. Only the IRS submarine drone is in working order.”

  “But it’s a total savage!”

  “We know. Do you have a better idea? I’m all ears.”

  “Persuade the Patagonians.”

  “Even if you persuade them now, where’s your guarantee that the Heavy Metal faction won’t gain the upper hand tomorrow? And you definitely won’t persuade Little Castle. Forget it.”

  “True. Little Castle is a fascist prick.”

  They emoted deep sighs. The black triangles reflected the golden glow of the setting sun over the mechs. The wind carried a green leaf and stuck it to the Star Trooper’s side guard. Bartek touched the little plant relic with the needle-like tip of his finger. He emoted another sigh.

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

  Heavy Metal had first hatched out of posts on the forums of the Doomsday Book, a late remnant of MTL, where the so-called progressive transformers were active. They opposed the conservative transformers – in other words, those still “clinging to life.”

  For the Metalheads – those progressives who fully accepted transformer existence in mechs and computers – Bartek and the entire Genesis 2.0 project were an example of fundamentalist conservatism, transformer backwardness, and ignorance.

  Heavy Metal, the roots of which had also produced the ideas of the “God Reset” and Alsatian anti-humanism, preached an unconditional affirmation of hardware and the necessity of a total and irrevocable surpassing of biological life. According to the Heavy Metalheads, the Extermination had only accelerated the inevitable. Now there was no going back, no possible return to Neanderthal existence and stinking flesh. So what were the Bully Boys doing with their Genesis 2.0? Turning back the wheel of history.

  The Patagonia Riders, the largest alliance in South America, which had gradually swallowed all the other guilds and freelancers down there, eventually became sufficiently numerous and internally diverse that in successive member votes it adopted opposing strategies and policies, switching from one to another like a chameleon. The Patagonians also changed their leaders more often than the oil in their mechs. For a while, they even had Loebner conversation bots negotiating for them.

  Little Castle was the exact opposite. Emerging as a separate alliance after the Black Castle schism, it had locked itself into Heavy Metal for good. Over the last 4K, the alliance had kept the same leader, Anemoza Quatro. There were even rumors that some of the transformers from Little Castle had transferred themselves entirely onto more powerful mech processors, following the example of Iguarte “the Seeker of Infinity,” chaining themselves once and for all to a single hunk of metal.

  Bartek viewed the Metalheads as a degenerate coterie of inspired idiots. He did not say so openly, but he suspected some kind of corruption in their software, a deep effect of the Plague or an IS3 malfunction during the upload before the Extermination.

  Heavy Metal was neither a worldview nor a political conviction – it was a religion, a perversion, and an operating system for the soul.

  “But why do you care so much? And why now? Little Castle has been a threat for ages.”

  “The Flood’s up to our necks. Either you get started on ocean life real quick, or it’s going to drown us for good.”

  The Star Trooper looked back to the south, where fields of tall green grass rippled in dark waves, the first grasses to grow so luxuriantly, the first greenery for twenty-seven years.

  Last spring, the weeds and flowers had finally succeeded. From remote cameras, Bartek had downloaded images proving that the wind had managed to scatter their seeds over a large section of New England. Flowers! He still impulsively zoomed in on every single spark of bright color among the monochrome blades of Gramineae.

  With an outstretched arm pointing out over the grass at a dark line on the horizon, he emoted the majestic flight of an eagle.

  “Those woods – you see? – they’ve been standing there mummified for a quarter of a century. They’re our goal for this year and the next. First, Cho will release the fungi and bacteria so that we can finally decompose the corpses of the trees. Then, a fresh forest will grow on the compost, from digital DNA.”

  Dagenskyoll leaned out over the edge of the roof and stared through a red lens at the Garden, which was veiled in the long shadow of the Farm building. He surveyed the puny and misshapen adolescent trunks of apple trees, plum trees, mulberry bushes, chestnuts, pines, and maples.

  “So far it doesn’t seem to be going too well.”

  “Oh, have a chat with Cho. You don’t know what you’re talking about. This is deep genetic Kabbalah. I’m just here to fix the sprinklers and stir the vats of artificial shit.”

  “Yeah, right!” The Burg straightened up and ran a short climatological simulation on its display, with electric spirals of clouds, the rapid pulse of ocean currents, sunrises and sunsets. “These things escape their attention, because it’s all on an engineering scale. You understand it, I understand it, but not some DNA Talmudist who can’t even put on his own mech.”

  Vincent Cho was famous for his aversion to humanoid robots. The Metalheads couldn’t decide if this made him a hardcore progressive or a protein ultra-conservative. Cho was a secret agent of the Bully Boys and the main reason for the alliance between Project Genesis and the B&B Alliance. From the very beginning, he had sat on the Google servers, using nothing more than drone insects, laboratory manipulators, and the Mothernet. He could go for weeks without once sticking his consciousness outside the simulations of carbon chemistry and virtual evolutionary games.

  Bartek was inclined to agree with the view that Cho, as a transformer, had become a much better geneticist than before his IS’ing. Somebody had dubbed him “the Stephen Hawking of transformers,” and the name had stuck.

  “Take this to Rory. She deals with this kind of thing. It’s politics, right?”

  “Plankton!” boomed Dagenskyoll, flapping his solar wings and disco-strobing the accelerated clouds over the Pacific. “It’s plankton, mechafucker, not politics!”

  The sun was setting, so the Star Trooper couldn’t see much on the Burg’s screen, but Bartek knew full well what the Japanese transformers wanted. Playing for time, he emoted a monkey scratching its head.

  The Extermination of life on Earth had soon caused climatic changes on a scale surpassing even that of anything the whole filthy civilization of man had managed to set in motion in the past. The greatest harm came from the disappearance of what might have seemed to be the least important elements: all those specks of ocean life whose existence nobody apart from the microbiologists had even suspected. In fact, the plankton had absorbed enormous quantities of carbon dioxide, sucking it in from the atmosphere and trapping it in the ocean depths. Without this dispersed CO2 suction pump, the level of the gas in the atmosphere had risen three times over, causing the Earth’s average temperature to spike by five degrees Celsius in the process. Meanwhile, the very same plankton had once released the majority of the atmosphere’s dimethyl sulfate, around which the clouds had condensed – especially those low, dense clouds that radiated heat away from the surface of the planet. In a world without plankton, the ocean clouds had become distinctly darker, abs
orbing significantly more heat, which added at least another three degrees to the greenhouse effect. The polar ice caps melted, as if in a time-lapse film, the sea levels rose by almost a meter, and six years earlier the Gulf Stream had stopped. Japan was slipping underwater together with all of its amazing robots.

  Unless, that is, life could proliferate once again in the oceans.

  The monkey picked its nose and snorted loudly.

  “They’d have to completely change tack. No more man and continental flora, but oceanography. I don’t know if they even have the genomes in their databases.”

  “They have them, they definitely have them. And if they don’t, then they’re packed away somewhere on the old servers for sure. Say the word, and half the Royalist GOATs and Big Castle will get to work on the research.”

  “Do you think it’s so simple? Do you have any idea how Cho does it?” asked the Star Trooper, mechanically sweeping an arm across the darkening landscape of recycled nature. “Do you realize that first he has to recreate the whole epigenesis in simulation? Whole generational cycles, hormonal environments, and non-existent biotopes. Then, according to the results, he manually cranks out the DNA syntheses and incubations. He would have to suddenly switch from one field to a completely different one.”

  “Let him copy himself.”

  “Fuck you and your tech.”

  “You just don’t care. You play around with your little soft people, but deep down you’re a Metalhead, like the Soft Metal of early Patagonia.”

  “Should I be offended?” droned the Star Trooper from its iron depths. “Go ahead and bomb whoever the hell you like. We’ll do our own thing. These woods – which apparently don’t interest you in the least – will do you a lot of good,” he said, turning back towards the southern horizon. “Do you know why the interiors of the continents heated up and dried out only days and weeks after the Extermination? Because it’s the meadows and woods that release water from the soil into the atmosphere. They sweat from their leaves and with their leaves, sweltering out the clouds and the rain. And without the plants binding it together, the soil will erode down to bare rock; it’s already eroding. Nobody before the Extermination thought to map the genomes of soil bacteria, but without them the biocenosis is running like an engine without oil. Do you know how much work that is?”

  “But it’s all too late – all your woods and meadows, you’re talking about decades. And we’re being flooded right now.”

  “So go ahead and campaign and win the Bull Boy vote.”

  “You know perfectly well that your vote is the most important.”

  “That’s not true. Rory and Cho and Carter-Lagira lead the discussions here.”

  “But you’re the silent power in the background. You’ve got your hands in the clay.”

  The Star Trooper raised its metal mitts, closing and opening them again and again, as if it were checking with astonishment whether it had actually made a human being from mud with these tools.

  “I just know which cable goes in which plug.”

  “And that’s the foundation of all empires.”

  The thunderclap of a little storm struck – no, it was a mechanical rumble, flowing out of the fiery darkness of the dusk. Bartek unconsciously leaned down towards it in his old mech, squatting like a gargoyle on the roof of the Farm.

  A rapid zoom and he spotted it: a trail of dust on the old road and the gleam of polished metal.

  “Do you want to play with our mascot?”

  The Star Trooper jumped down from the roof and marched towards the road. The whole mangy herd of irigotchi hurtled out of the Garden, no longer as Shining Dawn, but rather Horse & Frog.

  Bartek stood at the side of the road and waved an arm around as if making semaphore signals, flashing blue LED lights from shoulder to wrist.

  A motorcycle fishtailed and skidded to a halt. The engine stalled and a kid leapt out of the saddle. The bike was far too big for him. He could barely reach the pedals with his feet, which only just touched the ground even with the machine tipped almost entirely on its side. Which is how he parked the motorcycle: on its side, tires spinning.

  “Fredek, Dagenskyoll. Dagenskyoll, Fredek.

  “Not Fredek, just Indy,” said Fredek (not Fredek).

  Bartek displayed a caricature of Dr. Jones staring intensely at a little television screen.

  “He has all the films in the world to watch. He’s just reached Indiana Jones.”

  Indy had exited the laboratory womb on 4882 PostApoc, so now he was almost fourteen years old. Like the rest of the First Litter (Margo, Diablo, Sierra, and Nurmi), he had been raised by the transformers of the Bull & Bull Alliance and on the digital archives of human culture, while the Mothernet and hospital nurse robots had fed him and rocked him to sleep.

  In his heart of hearts (ah, these metaphors of meat!), Bartek didn’t believe that any of the Homo sapiens synthesized and incubated in the First and Second Litters were really human, just as the transformers weren’t human.

  Yet obviously there was no way of proving or disproving his theory.

  “Have you got those apples? The ones at Terry’s were real sour.” Indy grimaced like a Pokémon, almost dislocating his jaw.

  Bartek took down a mental note (working log): When you are raised exclusively by cartoons, you pick up cartoon facial expressions and a cartoon mentality.

  Only the Fourth and Fifth Litters would be able to grow up among organic human beings – only Alicia and her peers.

  But wouldn’t they adopt the same caricatured software psyche from their elders? Would it even be possible then to restart Humanity 2.0? Wasn’t there a risk that this orphan pack’s version of childhood would establish, for all eternity, precedents for the entire nascent culture of PostApoc Homo sapiens?

  “You’ll have to see for yourself.”

  They went over to a garden shed. The irigotchi flocked around Indy, completely ignoring the two mechs. Horse & Frog turned into Ping-Pong, and then into Garfield. Indy was wearing jeans and a light-colored T-shirt, which the toys managed to splatter with mud before they even reached the fruit house.

  The boy ate some apples there with a rubber octopus wrapped around his neck and a plastic monkey hanging from his elbow.

  “Bleh, they’re kind of, ummm, fleshy.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Well I don’t like them.”

  “How do you even know how they’re supposed to taste?”

  “I’ve seen everybody stuffing themselves on them in Paradise, picking them straight off the branches.”

  (Paradise was mostly Hollywood films.)

  “But how do you know they had the same taste buds?”

  “Vince says there’s no difference.”

  “Riiiight, so Vince is a big master chef now.”

  Genesis 2.0 had already recreated such a diverse range of flora and fauna from the digital archives that the teenagers from the First Litter, after watching various television cooking shows, had started playing chef. For the last week, Bartek had had to put up with their whims, caprices, and unexpected visits in search of highly specific ingredients for increasingly elaborate dishes. In particular, the children just couldn’t forgive Cho and Bartek for having neglected to include entire groups of Asian and Middle Eastern spices in their resurrection plan, not to mention the vegetables, fruits, and trees of Africa and Asia.

  Bartek winked his side LEDs at Dagenskyoll.

  “They were determined to bake an American apple pie. Carnage.”

  The Burg emoted an ellipsis.

  Bartek suddenly remembered the legends Dagenskyoll had once recounted in Chūō Akachōchin. He remembered the lyrical nostalgia of his squeakily synthesized speech as he spun his tales about the virtual House of the Rising Sun, where all the old pleasures of the flesh would be returned to the transformers.

  He zoomed in on Dagenskyoll’s mech.

  The Burg stood motionless, as if struck by lightning – still as a stone, with only his lenses fol
lowing the little human.

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

  Bartek had witnessed this kind of reverence before, as transformers found themselves, for the first time, standing in their own mechs before a living, breathing, organic Human 2.0. Dagenskyoll had been hit hard, but he was by no means an exception.

  Indy bit into the apple; the juice dribbled over his chin and neck. Indy chewed the pulp and swallowed the masticated pieces, working his mandible and esophagus, the skin on his neck taut, cheeks bulging, wet tongue slipping out from between his teeth. Indy squinted his eyes, pulled a face, smacked his lips, and wiped his mouth on a tanned forearm. The lenses of Dagenskyoll’s Burg almost jumped out of its cameras, straining at maximum zoom. If the mech had been a better fit, Dagenskyoll would probably have fallen on his knees at the human’s feet and licked his hand with the tip of a sensor.

  Finally, Bartek led him behind the fruit house, under the vats of compost.

  “He came out okay, huh?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “An adorable little human. Just admit it,” said Bartek, slapping metal on Dagenskyoll’s metal with the warmth of a half-ton bulldozer. “You came here in person because you knew they were buzzing around the Farm.”

  Dagenskyoll finally rebooted himself.

  “Give me a break. It’s all just a pointless game anyway if we can’t stop the goddamn greenhouse. There’ll be no protein humanity on an Earth cooked like Venus.”

  “So what’s SoulEater’s offer? You’ll save us from Little Castle and Patagonia if we get to work on ocean life?” “Oh we’ll save you either way. What do you take us for?”

  “What, no blackmail, no bribery?”

  Dagenskyoll opened a concealed compartment in the Burg’s hip and took out a small flash drive.

  “Here you are. A present from the Royal Alliance for old times’ sake.”

  Bartek accepted the drive, but didn’t plug it into himself.

  “What is it?”

  “Morpheus Seven, the first stable version. A copy of a copy of a Royalist engineer from Europe wrote it. We’re not releasing it just yet, so keep it to yourself. I’ve checked it. It works. That’s right – Morpheus, the plug-in for sleep.”