The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams (15 page)

Not even the tags were left of the Bully Boys themselves, while slave copies of Bartek and other rare and valuable specialists still lived on American servers. The services of these G-slaves were bought and sold on the free market at auctions held on the HTL, MTL, and STL. Yet nobody ever sold the G-slaves themselves – that is, their neuro-codes. The slaveholders did everything they could to maintain exclusive control over their goods. For instance, before the Extermination, only a single meteorological expert had managed to IS himself (a certain Lee D. Muschko), so whenever anybody encountered a problem requiring expertise on a level beyond what they could glean from the three-hundred-year-old scientific archives, they had to turn to Doctor Muschko, or to a copy of him. Even worse, the software diseases described in the Iguarte Zodiac had already mown down a great many transformers, so that in many fields only the copies were left – G-slaves hired out by the hour under a hard crypto.

And since you had hired a slave living on the Google machines, you had to live with the fact that it would give them all the information about the job it was doing for you.

The B&B Alliance no longer existed, but the same spirit of paranoid suspicion surrounded all the later heirs of Google.

Bartek, on the other hand, sprinkled with the ashes of Hiroshima, could afford a more honest irony. Had anything really changed here since before the Extermination? One way or another, Google had kept neuro-copies of every single person on the planet – if not generated by IS3, then compiled from patterns of Internet activity.

“There are still…”

“Who? What?”

Bart desynchronized. He stared at the coupling ring between the balloons. A spotted axolotl clambered out from the shadow under the ring and glowered haughtily at the two Horuses.

“There are still the humanos,” continued Bartek, twisting his back to the dream. “They’ve set up California, so they must be learning something.”

“And what, I’m supposed to put a live person in a rocket and shoot it into orbit?”

“Well, you’ve got to stick somebody in these balloons.”

SoulEater emitted a demonic smile.

“I’ll stick a whole zoo in there! Noah’s Ark! Terrariums and DNA banks! Do you really think any birther would allow himself to be shut in there for his whole life?”

“He could live in California. You’d just keep his body here.”

SoulEater’s Horus belched out gas from its three front nozzles into the face of Bartek’s Horus. Since SoulEater was magnetized to the trussing, the blast was nothing more than a physical emote of derision, the mechanical gesture of a mech.

“You really haven’t taken a look at the place. All their virtual realities barely reach the resolution of the last Grand Theft Auto. There’s still a lot of Mothernet to pass under the bridge before the virtual California becomes genuinely indistinguishable from the California of reality.”

“I told you. This stuff makes my head hurt.”

Not a head, of course, but it felt like a head.

Bartek understood full well the transformers’ nostalgia for the lost life. This was their main unifying emotion, a kind of transformer patriotism, where the homeland was not a place, but a time: the years before the Extermination.

Over the last 25K, since the mind-to-mind protocols had been completely immunized against the Plague, VR had sucked in more and more transformers. California and the other full virtual reality environments had mainly been built by birthers – by now, the tenth to fifteenth generations of Homo sapiens on artificial epigenesis – since for them it was the only way to enter Paradise Lost, the only way to experience life in a civilization of ten billion people, in the natural environment of man. Yet even back then, in Paradise, this kind of VR demanded undertakings on the scale of Hollywood mega-productions or government military programs, employing hundreds and thousands of specialists and using the resources of entire corporations and agencies.

But now the amateur efforts of the transformers and the self-taught knowledge of the humanos had to suffice. So it was what it was.

Nevertheless, Bartek had attempted on several occasions to enter this California. He remembered these attempts as traumatic experiences. For the same reason that most of the transformers were not psychologically capable of bearing life unless it was anchored in a humanoid body, even a metallic and ridiculously mechanical body restricted to two or three senses, they were equally incapable of standing it in VR environments that simulated the real world so clumsily. Even the Uncanny Valley would have been a great success, but so far they hadn’t even come close.

Bart had faltered on the very threshold of California: on the sense of the weight and inertia of the body. The birthers had not paid much attention to this problem, because they received all their impressions for free from their protein bodies. They could log in without needing to overlay this sense. But the transformers didn’t have bodies. They logged into California, put on virtual bodies, and then realized that something was missing, that they couldn’t
feel
them or the world on some completely fundamental level, which was still very difficult to express in words.

How could they pin down the missing piece and distill their lost humanity? This was a completely different valley: the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Meanwhile, the real California – the hardware California – was just floating under/over the head of Bartek’s Horus, dusted with a gray covering of clouds and impertinently underlined by a single stray lock from a little hurricane under Florida.

Bartek blew gently from below his knees, spinning round to face the Earth. The gleaming-shadowy tangle of right angles, semi-domes, and stiff cables, crowned with the two white balls, swayed over/behind Bartek, as if the whole horizon had suddenly accelerated its rotation. A side arm of the station appeared in his rear lens, with three empty Horuses hanging from it in a row like sleeping bats. Monstrous irigotchi cobbled together from scraps of spacesuits and the frozen bodies of dead astronauts frolicked between them. Bartek felt uncomfortable in orbit and every so often this discomfort would rise to the surface of wakefulness in these nightmare bubbles.

He closed his rear eye. The balloons of the habitat winked at him in reply.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just my Xanax,” said Bart, emoting his sign of the Iguarte Zodiac. “Either it’s full-on depression and breakdown on a regular basis, or this constant Morpheus hit at a dozen percent or so. After centuries of trial and error, the Ural brotherhood has developed a method. You, you’ve got it easy.”

SoulEater843.17.8 made no comment. It wasn’t good taste among transformers to belabor the subject of software genealogies of the soul.

“I can put up with you here even with your dreams. Come on, don’t make me beg. I mean, what do you have that’s so important to do down there? The Hans kicked you out, right?”

“In fact, they wanted to buy out your Tokyo Mother. They just hadn’t predicted such a massive IS of the Children of Mao: that the Paradise of Communism would turn out to be so infectious for Chinese people born of a Hollywood copy of China. And I’d rather delete myself than raise a hand to help build the next red empire. Or the next game in a red empire. Anyway, what’s the difference?”

“So what then, you’ll just sit in that weird pseudo-Paradise of yours, scratching toy hippopotamuses behind the ears, while the Earth goes to Cho?”

Bartek had thought of another play on words: the Earth is Cho-king.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star

America crept slowly into the dark night and they could now see the Atlantic and a slice of Africa from the orbital heights, all these lands already parceled out to a life digitally restarted by one of the versions of Vincent Cho. Bartek could have pointed them out with the talons of his Horus: Life Three of the RA on the British Isles, Life Eleven of the Dwarven tribes on the Gulf of Mexico, Life Three and Four of the Specters on the Iberian Peninsula, the great central plains of North America overrun by the Life One Plus of the original Cho, and there, there on the Canary Islands – Klaus and Klaus’s randomites. Central Africa and its First Paradise – the domain of Lady Spiro – is just dawning.

“So what exactly are you working on down there?

“Do I have to be working on something?”

SoulEater emitted a white noise of confusion.

“Well, what are you doing then?”

“I’m raising children.”

SoulEater slowly floated towards Bartek. Mech crashed against mech. They magnetized to each other. SoulEater emoted a buddy movie.

“And they say that transformers never change. That they’re incapable of changing.”

“Have I changed?”

“You said it yourself: you’re looking after children instead of servers.”

“What’s the difference? Really, I’ve always done the same thing: take care of hardware.”

Something flashed on a higher orbit. Bartek zoomed in with the side lens of his Horus. Suddenly the dream logic prevailed and they both found themselves on the other side of the station, where the flash was more clearly visible.

Bartek projected the long curves of the intersecting orbits onto the background of space. Monkeys and humanos swung from the white lines of the astro-mathematics. The dream dragged him deeper and deeper. He fought against it by concentrating on the practical engineering.

“There’s one more fatal possibility,” he said. “That the Ray would strike exactly at right angles to the orbit of the Rosette. Then it could hit all the stations simultaneously, and we’d be back to square one.”

SoulEater’s Horus flashed an LED grin from weld to weld.

“You don’t really think that our Rosette will be the only one. Before long every Life will be setting up its own backups here. In California, I could show you all the orbits. In any case, they don’t overlap with one another.” SoulEater couldn’t display the 3D projection, so he pointed with his hand. “The Triangle of Heavenly Harmony runs over there; the Rosette of First America – your beloved Frances – is there, almost from the Pole; while the Klausites and the Salamander Fault have also made announcements.”

“What about that?”

“What?”

Another flash, the same rapid reflex – a profile of light among the shadows and stars.

“That,
that
.”

Bartek pushed the zoom to the very limit of its resolution. An object was moving in the upper zone of a low orbit – one thousand seven hundred, one thousand eight hundred kilometers. At the angle from which he and SoulEater were looking, the nature of the installation was difficult to determine. The scale must have slightly deceived him, for when he calculated the diameter of the gray curvature, it came out to more than eighty meters. For a moment, he suspected that it must be part of the dream, until the nearest axolotl shook its head in the negative.

“Holy crap,” said SoulEater, displaying the eye of Big Brother.

“What?”

“They’ve moved from over the Arctic. They’re burning through fuel like the Hans.”

“Who?”

“The Google litter – ugh, ask your Frances. I know they don’t admit anybody apart from old Bully Boys. But that’s got nothing to do with—”

Bartek wasn’t paying attention. SoulEater nudged him. The soundless thud passed through the metal in a wave of vibration.

“Wake up.”

“It’s almost like I know this construction from somewhere. You say they assembled it over the North Pole?”

“I don’t know where they assembled it. They only give information about orbital changes, so that we won’t collide.”

“It’s a goddamn beast.”

Bartek drew in a deep breath (non-breath) and synchronized.

Spinning back round towards the spheres of the habitat, he emoted: RESTART.

“Okay. You know what you can do in the meantime? Stretch the mirror from the nano-sail between the station and the sun.”

SoulEater843.17.8 didn’t react. He stood as still as a statue, magnetized fast to the trussing. Bartek began to suspect that SoulEater’s Horus had been cut off from the server.

But no. Eventually, he emoted a long “FUCK” and spun head over heels, tumbling into the shadow of the station.

Bartek emoted a furrowed brow. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t think of this.”

“We didn’t think of it.”

“Seriously, Soul, even a child could—”

“We didn’t think of it, really. What are you doing?”

What was he doing? What
was
he doing? He failed to notice when the Morpheus wave hit him and slapped him into two-thirds dreaming. Without the slightest sense of astonishment, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Bartek contemplated a reckless flight in pursuit of the receding dish of the Google construct. In the meantime – in the mean-dream – he must have bounced off the habitat of the Japanese GOATs and blasted off with the nozzles of his Horus I to climb into a higher orbit. Now he zoomed the rear lens in on SoulEater’s station; it was visible only as a small, silvery pinprick of light. So he had been flying like that for a long time.