The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams (13 page)

Dagenskyoll froze in the middle of Bartek’s tirade.

“You want to come over to us…” That was all he heard.

Bartek heaved a ten-meter sigh with his nozzle. Alicia and the irigotchi chased his sigh to a crossway of paths.

“I told you: I won’t do you any good. I’m a hardware janitor. I don’t know anything about life two zero. Or about life one zero, for that matter. I know about machines.”

“So?”

“I’m a hardware janitor. I have all the keys and skeleton keys. I’m the one who cleans out the motherboards for them and scrubs the optical memory. Rory could hack into the neurosoft, but I’m down in the basement server rooms, pulling out memory drives and setting up RAIDs.”

“You’re talking about physical theft.”

“You better believe it! I don’t need to break the security software or play the IT expert – which I’m not – to twist out some screws and unplug a few Thunderbolts. Then the GOATs of the Royal Alliance will surely plow through it on their own computers in Japan via the method of brute force and you’ll open your own Chos and Carters and Jarlinkas – the whole Project Genesis team.”

“They voted against us, and you think they’d suddenly want to work for us over there?”

“Think about it. You’ll do exactly what Rory did to checkmate me. You’ll keep starting up Cho over and over, again and again, until one of the versions decides for itself that it wants to repeat the creation of the world with you. I’d even be willing to bet on its motivations: Humph, I’m not that Cho, I’m a different Cho, a better Cho, the best Cho, and now I’m going to show old Vincent how to make life!”

“And what, then there’ll be two Genesis Projects 2.0, two natures, two humanities?”

“
At least
two.”

In the meantime, Autumn Glory had spread across most of the networked matter on the Charles River. Dozens of irigotchi were bustling about at the steel feet of Bartek and Dagenskyoll, arranging the leaves and branches into beautiful fractal mandalas, like Tibetan sand mantras. Bartek immediately blew them away towards the trash heap, but this didn’t seem to bother the melancholy vector of the Matternet/irigotchi. It just began again, this time scrawling symmetrical graffiti patterns on the Mothernet surfaces of the buildings and paths. A few days earlier, Bartek had watched from the roof of the Media Lab as irigotchi vectors as large as five or even ten square kilometers flowed across the MIT Mothernet. Then at night-time they had shone as the last remaining lights on the Boston skyline.

“And you?” asked Dagenskyoll, scraping metal over Bartek’s metal in a brutal echo of the chummy affections of the body. “What’s in it for you? Apart from revenge.”

“I want the impossible, of course. The same as everybody else: a return to Paradise,” said Bartek, turning off the blower and hoisting the giggling Alicia up onto his shoulder. “If you start work from scratch on Homo sapiens, I want to raise him my way. From epigenesis to bedtime stories. Not like here. Here it was just a freestyle experiment. They didn’t know what they were doing.”

“Nobody knew the first time around, either.”

“The first time?”

“Yeah, in Paradise. Evolution. From the amoeba. The natural history of mankind. That was pretty much freestyle, wasn’t it?”

Bartek paused in a meaningful silence (no emote was still a kind of emote).

“Do you know what the ‘minuses’ are in Project slang? I’d show you if we had time. Jarlinka keeps them in formaldehyde next to his comics. Some of them even look like that: straight out of Marvel. They treat litter number one like the birth of Christ. It was only years later that they started to clock the whole Project back to it, recombination after recombination. Before that, they’d racked up more than a dozen botched attempts at epigenesis. In theory, the DNA was all hunky-dory, but it gave birth to a monster. Or it didn’t make it that far, just withering away in the incubator womb. Those are the ‘minuses’: litters minus one, minus two, minus five, minus fifteen.”

“Fuck. Then what about us in Paradise? If you count back the billions of years in time, we were all… what? A civilization of minuses?”

“Ha! Life minus.”

They reached the mound of leaves and Alicia leapt down from Bartek’s head straight onto the backs and arms of the irigotchi.

“Hurray for me! Hurray for them! Hurray!”

Bartek cranked the blower up to full power, knelt down, and held the nozzle at an angle off the ground so that Alicia and her parade of irigotchi ran straight into the rushing blast of air. It blew them up off their feet and sent them soaring in an arc over a good few meters, flailing their little arms, legs, tails, feelers, and wings, before plopping with squeals of delight into the pillowy pile of leaves.

For a moment, Flea Circus seized the whole Matternet along Amherst Alley, so that even the lamps on the paths and the lights in the MIT windows flickered to the rhythm of Bartek’s hurricanes.

“So much for all your cleaning.”

Bartek emoted the broadest Shrek grin.

“But they’re having a whale of a time!”

“Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!”

“Are you really ready for this? To leave her and all of them?” asked Dagenskyoll, pointing an infrared beam at Alicia, who was rolling about in the leaves and shouting at the incoming cuddly toys. “You’ll never see them again. They won’t let you near them.”

“I know.”

“This is your family.”

“Family?”

Bartek tried to recall the appropriate sets of recordings from Paradise.

Family? How could he emote the feeling?

(Where was the difference? Was there any difference at all?)

He displayed the flow of the vectors, superimposing them onto the MIT topography.

“What’s that?” question-marked Dagenskyoll in the visible spectrum.

“Look at this vector here in the Matternet, then look at Alicia.”

For a moment, they stared in silence at the twinkling campus in the shadows of dusk and at the little girl flushed with excitement among the filthy toys like scarecrows.

“Do you see?”

“What?”

“It’s not that the vectors display themselves in the irigotchi and the Matternet, modeled on the behavior of our kids. It’s more that the children are the vectors, part of the vectors, just like the irigotchi.”

Dagenskyoll zoomed in on the little girl until the lens was almost popping out of his eye.

“You didn’t implant any neuro-chips in them?”

Bartek snorted with disdain.

“What neuro-chips? Not at all, they’ve just been raised in this. They’ve grown up in it from infancy. So who will I miss? Alicia? Or this particular phenotype of vectors? Where does Autumn Glory end and Alicia begin?”

“I told you. We still have our own irigotchi in Japan.”

“But I won’t let them raise my children.”

Dagenskyoll emoted something vague, a swarm of opposing intuitions.

“Anyhow. The longer we talk about it, the greater the chances of exposure.”

“I warned you that you’d buy into my paranoia.”

“I’m talking about the parallel processing of those backups of yours. If Rory started up a backup copy, then the copy has also thought about splitting back to the RA.”

“The ball’s in your court, Dag. You’ve got the physical transport over the ocean. That’s the only reason we might succeed. I go to the CSAIL server room, I take down the mirrors, I switch into an iguarte, we hop into a drone together – and see you later. Just one cast-iron condition for SoulEater: I sit there at your place on external machines, under my own crypto.”

“What kind of iguartes do you have here?”

“For work in closed environments. Little two-ton puppet tanks, knock-ups of military Cerberuses. Can you carry them?”

The crazy Ernesto Iguarte (“go forth and self-multiply”) had been forced off all the servers. According to the latest news, he was moving in a herd of stolen mechs, having copied himself in full onto their modest memories and processors. Some of the Heavy Metalheads had adopted this model of existence as their ideal. But few robots had been equipped before the Extermination with supercomputers capable of fully and autonomously processing the transformers without the need to maintain a link with a mother server, and it would be a long time before the Dwarves would manage to set up this kind of production line.

Dagenskyoll was thinking, calculating, and probably dialoguing with the other members of the Japanese delegation. In the meantime, Alicia had worn herself out and come back to Bartek. He took her up into the arms of the Taurus, nestling her in the half-cradle of its left elbow. She fell asleep on the way back.

Night fell on New England and the Unbearable Lightness of Being flowed through the MIT campus.

“Okay,” said Dagenskyoll, displaying a ringing bell. “A quarter to midnight. Departure from Logan.”

“I’ll be there.”

Alicia just smacked her lips in sleep as Bartek left her in her bedroom in the Little Nest building, a former back room of the Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center. Three Philips-Disney babysitter mechs, covered with the children’s marker pen and spray paint doodling, leaned down over her crib like the Greek Horae, tender goddesses of the harvest and fertility.

Man is our business

Bartek saved this farewell shot of Alicia onto his deepest archives. He would put it up as wallpaper on the screen of his memory.

He switched into a mass-produced Burg, then immediately queued a Cerberus as well. He met nobody on his way to the CSAIL.

The Stata Center had already looked like a collection of mangled toys in the architect’s original design. After thirty years at the mercy of the elements and the transformers, it had turned into a veritable temple of mechanical chaos. The building stood under calm vectors of the Mothernet, and the extinguished lights didn’t come on for Bartek. He had to switch to infrared, to which he could never quite accustom himself. In truth, he’d never really accustomed himself to having a hulking metal body and pixelosis in his eyes, either.

In Gates Tower, in a corridor beneath the floor of dedicated transformer servers, the cold glow of fluorescent lights shone from behind a half-open door. Bartek turned up the sensitivity of his microphone and heard the breathing of a human.

He approached, stomping with his heavy iron tread.

“You rummage around at night, and then Frances Athena picks a fight with me.”

“Oh, it’s you.” Indy had sniffed out the old game-playing gadgets. In the Big Nest, the kids had all the best video game consoles, the latest models from before the Extermination, six huge playrooms of Sony and Microsoft. But this was no longer enough for the eldest among them. “I made a bet with Charlie. Don’t tell.”

Once he got hooked on Indiana Jones, Fredek-Indy wanted to play all the versions of Paradise Indy’s archeological adventures, including the stories made for full VR. The Project Council still didn’t allow humans to play VR, so the kids organized it on their own initiative.

Bartek emoted good-natured skepticism at the sight of the dozens of torn-open boxes and installation disks scattered around Indy.

“The Mothernet will report you to Vince in a moment anyway.”

“Don’t you worry about Vince,” said Indy, giving a long yawn (they all displayed their physiology like a bad mood or war paint) and scratching his neck. Suddenly he remembered something and reached into a box by the window. “Hey, is this it? When I read the cover, I thought—”

“No, that’s something else.”

Knitting his eyebrows and puffing out one of his cheeks, Indy flipped a rubber skullcap in his fingers. He squinted at the pictorial instructions and placed it on his head. He put it on askew. Bartek impulsively straightened it for him.

“How the hell does it…?” As he tore the IS3 instruction manual out of its packaging, Indy awkwardly emoted his frustration (the manual was eight hundred pages long). “Can you help me?”

Bartek hesitated at a thousand ticks of his processor. He still had time before his departure, and it wasn’t his humanity any more. Let Rory and Cho worry about it.

After all, why not?

“Sit down here.”

He installed the neurosoft, calibrated InSoul, and straightened the cortex reader on the human’s head again. Then he hit ENTER, and off it went.

From early morning, the bestial Breath of Stone hangs over the pink savanna. Everyone here has stopped wanting, or even wanting to want, slowing down to the sluggish indolence of a hippopotamus. Bartek walks out of the village, passes the Fields of Plenty stretching out towards the former town of Marsabit, crosses a bridge suspended over an artificial tributary of Lake Paradise, descends between indolent sphinxes and brontosauruses, and immediately yearns to lie back down in the pen alongside his fore-sons and fore-daughters, alongside the empty and cold shells they left behind.

“You’ll be back you’ll be back you’ll be back,” chants a chorus of Earth and Water and Sky behind him. Lady Spiro looks down at him from among the clouds, the creamy cumulus taking the form of her face.

Bartek responds by hopping into his iguarte with all his archives and solemnly emoting: FUCKING MOTHER HARDWARE. For a century now, he hasn’t gone below fifteen percent dreaming, and the trees bow down before his Freudisms.