The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams (10 page)

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 following 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.”

“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. For 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.