The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams (16 page)

He flew, flew, flew. The velvet pincers of the dream logic closed in tight on Bart. He lazily counted the orbital cycles. There was no way he would catch up with the dish on this revolution. But on which one? How much time did he have? He yawned, stretched, and began to unfurl the solar-panel wings of the Horus I, black as Lucifer’s breath. After half a revolution, the sun burst out from behind the rim of the planet, and Bartek felt the lash of living fire on his back. Whipped across his pseudo-spine, he tumbles out of the darkness into the fiery brightness of the African noon.

“Mama’s looking for you,” says a pale Castling, crouching over the Al-Asr as it digs itself out from underground. “Come to mama, come!”

Maybe it’s because of the light shining through the little protein bodies like photographic film, but for Bartek they now appear no more substantial than two-dimensional celluloid cut-outs.

He gets up and tries to shoo the Castling away. It keeps returning to him like a hungry dog. What was its name again? In the beginning, Bartek knew all of them by name and epigenome, even the unborn ones, the minuses of every litter. But two or three generations ago, he had stopped following the new genealogies of Lady Spiro. The Vincent Chos had long since become superfluous to the miracle of creating life. Culture engendered biology, which engendered culture, which engendered biology, which… He had stopped following it. Too many humanos had come into the world, in spontaneous bursts of the Mothernet, outside the villages of Paradise on Earth – too easily and too quickly.

He emotes a monk’s hood to the Castling and darkens his head into a coal-black boulder. From the north, a skein of enormous pelicans flies in with naked, pearl-skinned Peter Pans balanced on their backs like dragon riders – the transformer larvae of some future Hollywood Castlings in which Bartek no longer takes any interest. When the pelicans’ V formation descends to the lake and disappears behind the pink palms, Bartek feels the Breath of Stone like a hammer blow – melancholy has opened him up to the vector of animal biology. For a moment, he even envies the monkeys and Pokémon. Shaken and stunned, he sleep-morphs himself until nightfall and beyond.

In the heart of the paradisal African night, Lady Spiro sits by the fire and cooks the carcass of a plump rodent on a long stick. A Castling – the same one? – jumps up, tears off a strip of meat, bites into it, burns itself, spits it out, and jumps up again.

“Are you leaving?” she asks, tender and gentle towards Bartek as always. “I won’t hold you back, my dear. I can only kiss you goodbye and wish you a swift return. There are no slaves in Paradise: my only power is the sincere promise of happiness. Go ahead.”

She points at the horizon to the left with her other hand. Bartek gets up and leaves the circle of the firelight. The Al-Asr’s cinnabar armor gleams as if aflame, while the egg-tear of the iguarte’s empty head (the processor and memory are in his body) shimmers in colors from the faded purple of the fire to inky darkness. Bartek switches to infrared and recognizes Vultures’ Cliff, the boundary of Spiro’s Mothernet and the rosy life of Paradise on Earth. No more than twenty meters lie between him and the boundary. Above the Cliff, the ancient tower of the Marsabit National Park still stands.

Lady Spiro is in a wooden mech, hand-sculpted by her children from paradisal ebony. Her arms are slender poles, her legs cylindrical planks, her fingers plaits of coral, her breasts gourds of nuts, her face a totemic mask – all on carbon sinews and an invisible skeleton of grapheme driven by a GE clock hidden in her breast. When she comes to Bartek and stands behind his back (a head shorter than him and half a palm trunk slimmer), Bartek can hear the dry rattle of her wooden body in the silence of the night.

“Look how hungry he is.”

The Castling runs up with freshly-picked baguettes from the bushes. Lady Spiro tears the roasted animal into small chunks for him. They make freshly-steaming hot dogs, all practically under Bartek’s arm, right before his lenses.

The dream ripples on the border of darkness.

Bartek stares at the fervently munching humano and suddenly understands:

“Tigger.”

“What?”

“Tigger, from the Disney version of Winnie-the-Pooh.”

The Breath of Stone retreated from the Mothernet, and some self-evident truths far removed from biology came to light. Bartek remembered Mickey’s banter as he had cuddled up to Bruce’s Hulk, and how Floki and Sloki had gorged themselves on hot muffins until the flush on their cheeks reached their ears and foreheads, and how Dedek had raced pelicans with Lady Spiro’s golden chariot, and their terribly serious chess duels on the roof of the arboretum, and the birth of Mickey and Dedek’s first daughter, and Dedek’s architectural games from the Park of Laughter…

He has to leave. He has to think by himself self self.

Lady Spiro does not stop Bartek. The night is merciful to the mech, concealing his mech-ness for a little while. He can pretend that he is just out for a stroll, after rising straight from a warm den, an animal of the day in the arms of the night, a living emote of DNA.

As he circles the tower, he stumbles over… a rock? A root? He reflexively changes the spectrum and sees the arm of an old Schmitt 4. That’s right – it was here that he once conversed with Dagenskyoll. And it was here that he and Dag—

“Dag! In the flesh!”

They hadn’t arranged to meet. Dag flew into Real Paradise 549 days ago on his way back from the randomites to the Eternal Empire. He landed his drone beyond the Fields of Plenty and surprised Bartek in the monkey grove, where Bart had been keeping an eye on some toddlers frolicking in color illusions and stimulators with the paradisal chimpanzees and Pokémon.

“In the flesh indeed. In the flesh and present.” Dagenskyoll had also switched into an iguarte. The travel Schmitt 4 could neither fit nor process the neurosoft of the three-hundred-year-old transformer, but the capacious memory of the drones was another matter, providing a safe expansion for the mech’s cramped little brain and a foolproof backup.

Bartek’s children scrutinized Dag’s mech and his slow emotes with fearless curiosity. One of the monkeys leapt up onto his arm. Green diodes began to flash. The monkey screeched indignantly.

The Mother was sleepy. The Headless Chicken vector hung suspended over the grove.

“They’ve grown accustomed to the Mothernet wiping their noses and changing their nappies. They can’t even hurt themselves, no matter how hard they try.”

Dagenskyoll cautiously removed the animal and emoted a gaping tourist.

“So this is Lady Spiro?”

“Let’s go.”

Bartek led him beyond the Mother of Real Paradise, right up to the old tower of the park ranger service.

Several mischievously curious humanos accompanied them, all evidently under the Frisky Pony. Bartek mechanically played Rorschach games with them, flashing a series of associations, cascades of fantastical riddles. Even after so many centuries, he still saw something of the irigotchi in them.

They passed the southern Fields of Plenty. The humanos collected the fruits of exquisite alcohols and serotonin drugs along the way. Bartek pretended to eat when they tied him up with a banqueting vector.

The lemony sun sizzled on the smooth metal panels of the mechs. Around them buzzed insects and micro-drones and fairy mechs, all indistinguishable from one another.

“The Hans still don’t want to sprinkle manna from heaven?”

The Schmitt 4 shook its angular head.

“You know there were attempts. But an economy of over-abundance doesn’t function in little pieces, in broken or partial versions – a little bit of infinity here and a little bit of finitude there. You have to enter it at one hundred percent, just like you’ve done here.” He emoted towards the Fields. “And then the problem of scale arises: for villages of a few hundred humanos, or for two hundred square kilometers tops, okay – maybe it does the job on that sort of provincial level. But not for a whole world.”

“Nobody’s tried it.”

Dagenskyoll poked Bartek with a steel paw, almost knocking over his Al-Asr.

“Be honest: Could you have succeeded with paradise anywhere other than Paradise?”

Bartek refrained from answering until they were standing over the Cliff in the shadow of the tower. From the top of the geological fault line, over a hundred meters up, they gazed out over the panorama of the sunburnt plain, which was almost completely dead, with only the occasional pimple of Life, no doubt carried there from Paradise by the wind or animals. In the distance, almost on the horizon, the skeletons of ancient mine shafts and wind farms flickered in waves of warm air, resembling ghostly impressions of technofantasy, even at maximum zoom.

“I’ll tell you a terrible secret, Dag. I don’t give a damn whether we succeed with this Paradise or not.”

“Aha, so she can’t hear us out here?” asked Dag, emitting the thunderous laughter of Orson Welles. “You old paranoiac!”

“Come on. I don’t have the energy to conspire anymore.” The Al-Asr sat down on the ground with disturbingly un-robotic grace, dragging its knees up under its chin. An emote of Parisian melancholy molded the face of Leonard Cohen. “Or to run away anywhere. How many times can you run? The same thing all over again. I really don’t want to anymore.”

The old Schmitt 4 sat down beside him, one and a half times bigger and heavier, a clumsy heap of industrial steel in contrast with the artistic Al-Asr gleaned from the pages of the
Arabian Nights
.

Dagenskyoll emoted offering a cigarette; Bartek emoted puffing on it, with a long draw followed by an exhalation of smoke. Then they emoted a companionable silence together.

It was so depressing that after 194 seconds Bartek turned up the Morpheus to thirty percent.

All those worlds will be lost, like tears in rain

Mirages of ships and cities sailed in front of him over and across the plain. Humanos and monkeys hurled stones and mummified axolotls at the two robots.

“So those are your little ones.”

“Mine, not mine…”

“Don’t be so modest,” said Dagenskyoll, switching onto a crypto-frequency. “How many attempts is it now?”

Bartek bristled at the very word: “Attempts!” Then he began to count them. If the first attempt had been with the original Vincent Cho in the original B&B Project Genesis, then the second and third were the Japanese birthers from the restarted Cho with the RA Castlings, followed by the three versions of Life with the Salamanders in Australia, then the Eternal Empire of the Hans, the epicultural Chinese people transformed out of the epics of Chinese fantasy and James Clavell, and their innumerable epigeneses from the deep Mothernet. And now here, Real Paradise and its generations, recycled over and over again…

“The eleventh or the fifteenth, depending on how you calculate it.”

“When I heard that you were building this First Paradise, I thought to myself: That makes sense. I mean, he never cared about anything except going back to the past.”

“That’s what we all care about.”

“But
we
accept that it’s impossible and that the best we can do is set up a crude illusion of California. But
you
– you were always a true engineer of nostalgia, like clockwork,” said Dagenskyoll, stubbing out a cigarette on his knee. (Sort of.) “But now I see that it turned out exactly the opposite. And that’s something completely new.”

Bartek put on the face of an elderly Dalai Lama.

“Partly because you’re looking at a late iteration. The founders of First Paradise were mainly first generation transformers from a loose faction of Black Castle, and we really had only one principle: to go beyond the lifestyle models from before the Extermination.

“Think about it. We’re not people, or at least not the same people. IS3 didn’t make full neuro-copies. We knew full well from the beginning that it was a fraud. None of us would pass any half-decent identity test. We’re transformers – and we don’t even know what that means. We don’t change, we don’t learn. We don’t sleep. We long for our bodies. We repeat ourselves mechanically, day after day, year after year, eternity after eternity. And through all this we have never managed to find any other life for ourselves but this awful parody of human life. Why? Why?

“To which Fergusson’s response – you remember him, a fellow Uralian; he planted the first Fields of Plenty after the Extermination – was as follows: it’s all thanks to capitalism. Don’t laugh! Until now, it’s always snuck up on us through the back door, together with all its ethics, aesthetics, mentalities, lifestyles, complexes, and dreams. Not because capitalism is a part of human nature, but because it makes for the simplest, most obvious solution to the problem of managing limited resources.

“Whereas for a transformer it’s just a theater of empty forms. I mean, what have we really been doing? Well, Dag? From the beginning, from the restart, after the Extermination, in every configuration and alliance. Me, you, all the Hans and Royalists and the Patagonian cauldron. What have we been doing? We squeeze transformers into lives as if into new suits, into pseudo-families, into quasi-houses. We engage in quasi-work, we simulate quasi-salaries and quasi-professions, using all the old rituals to give meaning to our mech existence. Don’t you see it? I know you can see it.