by Jacek Dukaj
“Seriously?”
“Don’t worry, it’s all there on the zip drive. You won’t hook up with anything. The Plague can’t get in. Filter it, if you like.”
“Holy crap, I’ve completely forgotten.”
“What?”
“Dreams. What it’s like,” said Bartek, emoting a signpost pointing into the shed, where Indy was spitting out a barrage of apple pips at the playful irigotchi. “Maybe it’ll be the same as with them. How are you meant to know if it’s a tasty apple when they’ve built your taste from scratch?”
“But we do remember. Dreams. Life.”
“Do we?” retorted Bartek, emoting irony as large and frigid as an iceberg.
“Don’t we?”
“Do you remember?”
“What?”
“Yourself.”
Dagenskyoll flashed all the Burg’s LED lights and lasers, exploding into seven colors in the night-time Garden like a Chinese firework dragon.
“I’m myself now!”
Ambystoma mexicanum – or rather its larva, the axolotl, the water monster – filled the Genesis terrariums at MIT as well as Bartek’s dreams.
The axolotl was one of the first animals on which Vincent Cho had tested his powers of resurrection. Geneticists before the Extermination hadn’t precisely recorded or archived species unthreatened by extinction, since there hadn’t been a pressing need to, while species that had long since died out – well, they had died out and it wasn’t easy to acquire the base material for science. The best candidates for species revival were therefore those that had been in the process of dying out, balanced precariously on the edge of extinction in the years before the Extermination. Aside from the DNA package, scientists had recorded their complete epigenetic recipes. The axolotl had been one of those animals on the fast track to extinction.
Bartek walked through the buildings of the Hatchery in a fragile humanoid mech, an American version of the popular Honda sexbot: the Lily V, produced by Tesla. The larger mechs simply didn’t fit here. After all, Cho hadn’t been thinking about space for robots when he crammed the various incubators, aquariums, terrariums, and biostats into the university blocks and laboratories he’d been appropriating one after another.
Already almost three-quarters of the MIT campus had been taken over for the purposes of synthesizing and breeding the various forms of Life 2.0. In fact, only the former IT departments, with their server rooms and super-computers, could resist the invasion of Project Genesis.
The Project itself had mesmerized the transformers, instilling in them an almost religious fascination, and gradually becoming one of the main points of reference for transformer culture. It wasn’t just a few diehard Heavy Metalheads keeping tabs on it, but dozens of diverse groups spawning as many trends. There was even a Vincent Cho fan club and a mod for Sid Meier’s Civilization, playing out the next thousand years of Project Genesis 2.0.
As a result, transformers from almost all the guilds and alliances were floating around the MIT campus, from the Harvard Bridge to the Longfellow Bridge, enticed by the myth of New Life. Once the satellite connection crashed, things calmed down a bit, but then the protein kids started arriving.
From the first-floor window of the synthesizer room in one of the Maclaurin Buildings, Bartek watched GE cargo mechs walking dappled piglets and shaggy heifers on leashes. (Epigenesis invariably surprised Cho and his merry band of self-taught scientists.) The Killian Court was covered with a dark blue crust of animal droppings - they were still a long way from reconstructing the spectrum of decomposing bacteria. Mutant kudzu had choked Memorial Drive and Massachusetts Avenue.
The campus Mothernet could not keep up with mapping the progress of the new biology. A strain of bacteria designed before the Extermination to biodegrade trash in the ocean, imprudently resurrected by Carter-Lagira, had eaten its way through plastic all over Boston, and it had become necessary to change half the sub-assemblies at CSAIL. Bartek had replaced them himself.
Bartek’s Little Burlesque Lily tapped a red ADNR fingernail against the thick glass of the terrarium.
An axolotl as pompous as a professor of Roman law strolled underwater over to the glass at the waterline and stared with its axolotl eyes at this mech torn from the pages of Playboy.
“We should let them go.”
“They’ll die.”
“You’ve got seventeen tanks of ambystoma and no carp. We made a deal with Rory and Jarlinka.”
“Jarlinka can kiss my ass,” said Vincent Cho, switching off the intercom.
Bartek initiated the procedure for fauna transfer from tanks 34 and 37.
The Matternet immediately slammed the gates shut.
Bartek tried to go around it, but with no success. Cho had administrative authority over the entire MIT Mothernet. Sometimes it seemed like Cho was the Mothernet.
Half a minute later, Rory Athena emoted herself over the terrarium control monitor. The heavy workload had forced Rory to multiply herself into various working units. Now she was making the decisions in internal votes and forming a personality guild. This particular Rory Athena was usually the focal point of Frances Rory’s guild.
“What’s come over you? We’ve got a political deadlock here, and now you’re pissing off Cho.”
“It was all agreed,” protested Bartek, emoting a nerd troll hard at work. “I’m just doing my job.”
“But does it have to be today? Let them deal with Patagonia, and then we’ll get back to the timetable.”
Bartek cursed through all his speakers with the roar of a tyrannosaurus. Then he slammed a swinging fist into the glass and smashed the wall of the terrarium.
A torrent of water, sand, stone, and weed swept over the slender mech. It kept its feet. The water flowed along the corridor and down the stairs.
Three axolotls flopped about at the feet of the Lily V. Many more of the goggle-eyed monsters were swept away by the current.
“Have you lost your mind?!”
“I’m sick of looking at them!”
He trampled all three ambystomas into a pulp and went out onto the roof of the building.
A wind was blowing from the east, from the ocean, fluttering through the solar sails – triangular panels five or six meters wide. Bartek walked around the roof four times, only slowing down on the fifth lap. Ever since he had started sleep-morphing, he spent more and more time staring at the empty horizon or the starry sky. (The cosmos was closer and brighter after the Extermination, since the atmosphere had cleansed itself.)
Through CCTV eyes, he watched the approaching Honda Spirit between the black sails of the roof. He didn’t turn around.
“Time to slow down,” said Rory Niobe in an Audrey Hepburn voice.
The Lily sat down on the edge of the roof, dangling its long film-star legs into the abyss. Rory sat down next to it. The two Hondas had the faces of stained-glass women, the smooth masks almost of angels, and Bartek, now looking at himself from the side and above, thought about the old manga comics born of the hormonal dreams of teenagers.
He thought and sleep-morphed himself to 10%. The sails of the solar panels hung over them like the black hoods of hunting cobras.
“I’m not hibernating through the next war.”
“You promised me. The Bully Boys will never accept the Uralians or the Xers.”
Bartek emoted the slow rotation of the planets over Stonehenge.
“I don’t believe in all that astrology.”
“It’s not astrology, it’s holes in the amateur software.”
Once again she displayed the MTL Zodiac for him.
Before Iguarte went completely insane, he had catalogued several thousand transformers from diverse alliances and countries according to the type of neurosoft they had used to IS before the Extermination. There had been hundreds of IS3 cheats circulating back then; Rytka had had no time to delve into the comparisons and Wikipedia articles. Yet the most popular versions had recurred often enough to reveal certain regularities. F
or instance, Iguarte claimed that people who had IS’d on the Chinese UltraBurner had no tolerance for humanoid mechs (Cho was a textbook example), while those who had transformed via Pyroxyna 6.1 sooner or later tended to auto-delete. He had the statistics to support his claims.
Iguarte assigned the IS3 cheats to constellations of stars and posted a version of the Moscow Transformer List arranged according to this software Zodiac.
At first, Bartek placed some credence in the theory, since Iguarte’s horoscope explained the periods of his own depressive deceleration. Apparently everybody who had IS’d via programs written by the Ural Team suffered from the same affliction. More or less every hundred days, they found themselves sunk into a heavy depression, which slowed them down to a few kilohertz.
Later he realized that this was really no explanation at all, since he still didn’t understand why the speed of the processor should have an impact on his emotional states. Even worse, the followers of Iguarte’s thought began to draw further conclusions from the MTL Zodiac, inferring the political beliefs of transformers from the type of IS3 software, together with their whole life paths. Those who had IS’d via the Xbox 6x666 – the hapless Xers – were banned from most of the alliances. Two of these transformers had either deliberately or accidentally committed an act of sabotage, opening local servers to the Plague, and now this tendency was regarded as an innate quality of the software.
What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Bartek viewed this as blatant neuro-profiling, and he refused to identify himself with any pre-defined “Ural personality.”
Meanwhile, the clock for his sign in the Iguarte Zodiac was clearly indicating that the time had come for his next deceleration.
“Did you want to sail through it in a dream?”
Bartek used the armored hand of his Honda to take the armored hand of Rory Niobe’s Honda and then planted a steel kiss on it. The black cobras sighed as they swayed from side to side.
“I dreamt that I swung the vote for a bombing attack on Noah’s Ark,” he said, before sleep-morphing himself to 20%.
The nearest cobra leaned down over him with maternal solicitude and bit him on the neck.
As the poison spread through the Lily, Bartek felt the metal turning into flesh. A moment later, he was sitting there as a naked girl of Eurasian appearance, hairless like a doll. A Burg I walking down the alley below waved its hand at her. The little Lily blew a coquettish kiss.
Rory emoted motherly concern.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m dreaming.”
He flipped the Morpheus 7.0 from one-fifth to one-third scale. A parliament of the axolotls he had flushed out of the terrarium was assembled on the lawn in front of the building to vote on the laws of life and metal. Bartek lasered them from the eyes and fingernails of the little Lily. The pompous amphibians turned into black and white figures, as if cut out of an exotic fairy tale.
Then suddenly it was night-time, and all the constellations of Iguarte’s insanity showed themselves in the sky.
Rory glowed with her own light under the black cobras, and every single one of her emotes came into the world as an origami figure folded out of thin steel, a sharp thicket of razor blades, fawning over the mech and the girl.
Soon Bartek-Lily began to bleed from these intrusive expressions of sympathy from Frances.
“What’s the deal with the axolotls?” she asked.
“A perversion of the Royalist dream book,” said Bartek, taking the Morpheus out of his head and displaying it on an open palm. “I installed it and started it up while I was doing the thyroid tests on the ambystomas, and I guess the little bastards must have saved themselves onto it as the template. Either that or I suffer from some kind of unconscious axolotl obsession that only comes out in dreams – now that Freud’s back out of the bottle after thirty years.”
“I told you to hold off on the Morpheus! The Royal Alliance is not your home any more, and you can’t just lap up their software without thinking.”
Bartek ostentatiously popped the Morpheus back into his mech.
Rory became irritated. Her irritation flitted around her on micro-valkyrie wings, squealing through a tiny battle horn.
Bartek-Lily emoted a smiling Buddha and pointed out the Axolotl constellation at the zenith.
“There’s nothing more useless.”
“Hmmm?”
“Ambystoma mexicanum. An entire life form for nothing, just for the hell of it, from a stupid impulse of evolution. What was meant to be a larval, transitional form ends up reproducing itself. And now look: the monster’s entire adult life turns out to be completely redundant. Just a freak of nature. Why does it exist? Why?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I dreamt it. The true history of mankind. Didn’t you know? Have you never felt it?”
“What?”
“We forget our real life the moment we’re born. As fetuses, cradled in the dark wombs of our mothers – it’s then that we are truly human beings, that we reach fulfillment, that we touch fullness. But then we clamber out into the world and lose all of that, we forget it, and so we wander the Earth, half-dead, great rotting hunks of flesh – the inertia of life on the straight road to the grave.”
“Wake up! Human fetuses don’t reproduce.”
“We should never have transformed. We injected the hormone – the IS – and what do we remember now of our humanity? What?”
“As if we had a choice!”
Since he was at one-third dream, they were on land and under water at the same time, though they could feel no water around them. Still, the axolotls swam freely between them and the protective cobras, while worried emotes poked the fish-lizard monsters in their bellies and tails.
Bartek-Lily raised an arm and straightened it out. A rotund axolotl lay down over it from elbow to collar.
“The real life – we’re losing it, we’re forgetting.”
“Make me a civilization,” demanded the axolotl with a rumble.
“Cho injects them with thyroxine to make them mature, to make them skip from the larval phase to the adult form. Because someone always, always has to come from outside, and only then are they ripped by force out of their axolotlness. But why? Why?”
Two other axolotls sat themselves down on Rory. She paid them no mind.
“Look, it’s weighing you down. I can see it, I can hear it. These are classic symptoms of Ural depression. You have to slow down.”
“No, no, I just need Morpheus, this time just Morpheus.”
By now, he had reached the half scale. The dream welled up in a warm wave. Bartek felt its rocking motion, as the synthesizer building uprooted itself from the ground and floated slowly into the air, drifting inland over the continent, driven by the night wind blowing into the sails of the cobras.
They trailed the long intestines of pipes and cables behind them. Other animals clung to them – the twisted products of Cho & Co.
Rory refused to back down.
“Who’ll take care of the equipment if you freak out on us? I’d really rather not lose you even for a couple of weeks, but if I have to lose you for good… What are you doing to it?”
(The axolotl was blowing and singing into Lily-Bartek’s ear.)
“Ah, it’s telling me the secrets of the universe.”
“How many times have I asked you to copy yourself and skip a phase ahead? That way we’d always have one of you in full health.”
“And what, you think you’d gain something from that? Have you ever heard of a transformer making a discovery, really learning something new, changing his occupation or his habits? The next ten thousand rotations of the Earth will pass and we still won’t have trained a single new technician or increased the number of programmers and geneticists. The same transformers will keep coating the same scraps of knowledge in metal, googling the treasure houses of the past in search of schoolboy recipes for superconductors and RNA.”
“Maybe you’re right. But it’s all faster, more efficient, better.”
They floated over the streets of the campus, over the playing fields and tennis courts. Niobe leaned out over the edge of the roof and picked out the distinct figures of children with her laser vision, always surrounded by little herds of irigotchi, mech minders, and the spirits of the Mothernet. Light washed over these little 2.0 humans, the sons and daughters of later litters, tiny tots and chubby little toddlers barely able to support themselves on their own two legs, romping about under the watchful lenses of groups of babysitter machines from the luxury lines of domestic help appliances. These humanoid “life partners” for millionaires – stylishly sexy with the labels of Yves Saint Laurent, Gucci, and Tom Ford – truly looked like humans from a distance.
And so they arranged themselves into idyllic images of families with children – mothers and fathers with their pride and joy offspring.
For a moment, Bartek thought he could see Alicia down there. But no, it was not even a dream of Alicia.
Rory highlighted the 2.0 children with a stroboscopic rainbow, piercing the roofs and straight down through the ground to spy them in the basement incubators and playrooms open to the world. Fifty percent dreaming was enough to make the poetic metaphors come to life.
They were also their children, Bartek’s and Frances’s, their real offspring. Bartek-Lily reached out towards them from the heights with hands and emotes. The emotes were his hands.
“My little robots! My warm-blooded Lego! They will build us.”
“Make me a civilization!” croaked the axolotl, by now firmly attached to Bartek’s cheek.
Bartek caressed the cold metal of Frances’s Honda with a warm hand, stroking the curves of her symmetrical muscles.
“See, no transforming can liberate us from this.” He looks, they look: metal shoulders, metal necks, metal skulls. “In theory, we could do things completely differently, but we can’t help ourselves – we have to keep walking around in these clumsy mechs, these misshapen Disney figurines, these caricatures of bodies. Why? Cho can cope without it, because he’s an autistic nerd, but a normal person needs the illusion of humanity even after death.”