The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams (18 page)

Bartek followed the line with his zoom, so that it took him a moment to notice movement in the tangle of machines crammed into the galleries. Like statues coming to life in Dracula’s castle, all the robots that had been switched off and plugged into power and conservation sockets were now simultaneously activating themselves, stretching their limbs, and emerging into open space. The impact of the Horus hitting the construct must have run through its aluminum and titanium skeleton like a tectonic shock wave rippling across a planet’s crust.

Bartek stood up on twisted legs and limped along a metal rib towards the focal point. Yet before he could cross the line between the dazzling light and the coal-black darkness, the newly activated mechs reached and surrounded him: Horus I and Ia mechs, Schmitt 202s, 203s, and 223s, Honda Xs, and even an Usaburo Rex, with its fuel tanks like a caricatured aqualung or a double hump, giving it the capability to fly to the moon and back or to blow up any orbital bunker.

Bartek tried to push off and catch hold of the radio dish at the focal point, soaring over and between the mechs, but the nearest Schmitt 203 leapt with lightning speed and launched itself into a collision course, deflecting Bartek’s Horus like a well-aimed snooker shot and sending it back deep into the internal shadow of the dish, far from the spidery hardware suspended in the center of the hemisphere.

All this took place in the absolute silence of space, without even the soundtrack of the accelerated breathing of astronauts. After re-magnetizing himself, Bartek switched on a slow techno beat.

The stars of the Milky Way arrayed themselves before him into integrated circuits and the motherboards of old PCs. He knew it was only the Morpheus, but after so many years this knowledge was deeply subconscious – a legitimate part of reality.

He slowly raised a foot. The Google mechs licked him with the rays of their scans. He flashed honest tags. In response, he received a single short emote: WAIT.

They all froze like statues.

After a quarter of an hour, Bartek dropped the Horus down to the lowest energy level, half a bar above complete deactivation. Sun and shadow shifted over the dish in clockwork waves. The ZX Spectrum, the Commodore 64, and the Atari 800XL paraded along the Zodiac – Bartek’s prehistoric childhood, the forgotten gods of hardware.

Seven hours and twenty-three minutes later, a Honda X emoted “CHAT” before opening a line to Bartek’s Horus.

“You.”

“Show yourself.”

The ID meant nothing to him at first: Gilgamesh90.

Bartek accessed the MTL and consulted the neuro-genealogy of this Gilgamesh.

It turned out that the transformer in the Honda X was one of 2,422 descended from Frances Rory – from the fourth generation, counting back from the original, of which only one transformer link in the genealogical chain had fouled itself with biology.

“Remember me?” asked Bartek, just to make sure.

“Yes, I have this memory. So, for old times’ sake, don’t be a pig and log out on me, okay?”

“Can you give me the recordings from the telescope? It’s a network radio telescope, right? How big have you got the effective diameter?”

“What do you want the recordings for?”

“Compensation. Royalties. A tithe. I don’t have a good word for it, but I know I’ve earned it.”

“This is Norad’s hardware. Norad does not and will not recognize any of your rights.”

Bartek checked out Norad. Some kind of task alliance within a conglomerate of hundreds of post-Google nations. Gilgamesh90 was officially a member of Tribeca II and the Great Northern Alliance, but by now the transformers were into even weirder schizophrenic allegiances.

“Tell me I’m wrong.”

He opened the Horus’s maw and threw a spot of light onto the edge of the dish. He already had the whole construction mapped out, so now he just rotated the robot’s torso and its falcon head, displaying the successive elements of the provisional orbital engineering out of the darkness, two seconds for each one, from the edge to the center.

After the twenty-second element, Gilgamesh90 emoted hands up. She was surrendering.

“I built it,” said Bartek, swallowing the fiery light. “I thought I must have dreamed it, but no. From the first glance, I knew that the design had something… of mine. It only really clicked up close. I would have built an orbital radio telescope exactly like this if I’d been given only what was already in orbit before the Extermination as material, if I had to do it my way, like I always did things: a makeshift solution from what I happened to have handy, patching together and improvising, from the look and the feel. This is my work, my hardware spirit. This optical calibrator here – it’s from the third Hubble, right? Half the receptors on that side are from the Chinese NAOC observatories. You keep the 223s here, because they’re the only ones that can spot a crack of less than half a micrometer. At this diameter and mass, the stresses on the object exceed the strength of any materials looted from smaller constructions and you have to patch it up and bypass it as you go. And how many copies of hardware handymen do you have to choose from in the Google banks? I know my own work, Frances. Pay me.”

Seven seconds of silence.

“Are we talking about a commercial exchange?”

“You can make it an exchange, sure.”

“The Google slaves have coped just fine, as you can see. Why would we want to hire the original now?”

“If this is a network telescope, then you’re in store for at least—”

“You don’t have a clue what this is all about, do you?” Bartek emoted a poker player with a cocked revolver hidden under the table.

Gilgamesh90 flashed “DEFCON5,” at which point all the other mechs got up in a simultaneous movement, demagnetized, and went back to their sockets in the peripheral gallery.

“Go ahead. It’s your toy. You can do what you want.”

The Horus didn’t move an inch.

“You would just love this to be some kind of terrible political secret in a war between alliances,” said Gilgamesh-Rory slowly. “Information for blackmail or some other key to the drama in your hands, and suddenly the current runs back through the circuits, the oscillators and stray voltage leap up, and life enters the machine. Some kind of Vincent Cho you could kidnap and upset the balance of power again, huh?”

“Go on.”

Four seconds.

“We’re the good guys,” said Gilgamesh90. “We’re the League for the Defense of Humanity, Cosmic Revenge, and the War of the Worlds.”

“What?!”

The Honda X stretched out its arms above its head and embraced the starry zenith with its three-fingered hands.

“What are we looking at? What are we listening to?”

“Wait, I’ve figured it out!”

“You’ve figured it out. We’re searching for our murderers.”

“You’ve traced back the Death Ray.”

“Exactly. We meticulously collected all the archives from the Extermination, all the fragmentary data, the ancient robot registers, and the dating of the neutron wave down to the nanosecond. We calculated the point on the horizon and we calculated the distance.”

“Then spit it out, goddammit!”

Gilgamesh dropped her arms and laughed.

“Seventeen point six light years from the sun, in the Ophiuchus constellation, just past Barnard’s Star. More than two light years from the nearest system. Absolute emptiness and silence. There’s nothing there. It’s a gravitational blank, with no influence whatsoever on the motion of matter. It emits nothing and it doesn’t conceal any radiation from outer space. Zilch. There’s absolutely nothing there.”

“Hold on. Wait a second. What does that mean?”

“It means they were prepared for Cosmic Revenge. If you had a cannon with a Death Ray, would you shoot it from the window of your own home? So that anything you hit but didn’t kill would be able to return fire with interest?”

“Aha! So you build an infernal machine in a completely anonymous part of space, and then probably you destroy it after using it, so that even if we managed to fly there and search the remnants, we wouldn’t find anything.”

“Yep. That’s the fastest and easiest answer. But it doesn’t really explain anything. Above all, it doesn’t answer the question of the motive. And there’s another much broader theory: that there was no machine out there, no generator for the Death Ray.”

Bartek didn’t even emote. He just raised the heavy left arm of the Horus and scratched its armored head.

“This one I won’t figure out.”

“Okay. But know that these are the only royalties you can expect from Norad.”

Five seconds. Ten seconds. Fifteen seconds.

Gilgamesh repeated:

“The only royalties. Okay?”

“Okay. Now talk!”

“Alright.” The Honda X momentarily raised its clumsy head in an absurd gesture, as if calling the Floppy Disk and Cartridge constellations as witnesses. “Seventeen light years away is too close. Seventeen light years is nothing – a shot from point-blank range, as if they’d put the barrel to our chest.”

“You can’t be serious! To maintain the concentration and energy from that distance, to hit the target, a planet – I mean, that’s precision beyond all our capacities and theories!”

“We can’t even be sure exactly what kind of radiation it was. Everything points to some kind of beam with multiple elements, but we have to accept that we’ll never know some of them, since we can’t go back in time to set the sensors with the right calibration for the Extermination. We can only work on indirect traces, whatever has survived from the rather random measurements of the time.”

“Rapid neutrons. I saw them myself on the Guó Jiā Háng Tiān Jú read-outs.”

“Yes, they were one of the elements, for sure. But could a neutron wave alone have wiped out Earth’s entire biosphere? At Norad, we think there were other particles specially attuned to a frequency that can shatter DNA bonds.”

“They would have had to get the parameters from somewhere first,” said Bartek, searching hurriedly through the ancient databases of chemistry and biology. “I’m not sure if DNA can reveal itself in the spectrum of a planet viewed from space.”

“Take a step back. You’re still looking from too close. This kind of civilization isn’t some backstreet hooligan shooting an air rifle over his neighbor’s fence. We’re talking the scale of the galaxy - whole clusters of galaxies - if not the entire universe.”

“I don’t buy it. They’d have to have some way of getting around the limit of the speed of light, otherwise it’d all—”

“That’s where we started from.”

“From where?”

“From theories developed even before the Extermination. We dug up the calculations. Of course, nobody completely understands them now. Not a single theoretical physicist IS’d before the Extermination, and we haven’t been able to educate any new ones from scratch. Anyway, there’s nobody here to teach them; one of the birthers would have to lift himself up by the ears to the level of an Einstein or a Hawking. So we were left with bare hypotheses. How to open a wormhole, how to stabilize it, how to maintain the connection, how many of the various exotic particles would be required. First of all, we’d have to build an accelerator with the diameter of the Solar System. But that’s just us, humanity. What are the chances that nobody anywhere in the whole universe has gotten there already?”

“I know this argument,” said Bart, keeping up with Gilgamesh by simultaneously reading summaries of popular science articles from the Castle archives. “The Drake equation, the Fermi paradox, Hawking’s hypotheses—”

“Bah! That’s when the practical problems really start to pile up. Okay, you have the technologies, you can open a wormhole tunnel to a remote location anywhere in space, except that the information has only reached you from the nearest locations – those from which the light has had time to make it over here. Let’s say that a billion light years away some other civilization has developed, and you could tunnel through to it in the blink of an eye. But you don’t know it exists, and you won’t find out for another billion years.

“So what do you do? You make observations of the sky with maximum precision, and on the basis of the latest data on particular star systems and planets, along with a bit of universal astrophysical knowledge, you create a map showing the probability of life and technological civilization developing in any distant system in the observable universe. That star a million light years away,” said the Honda, raising an arm and pointing a finger at the sun of a nameless galaxy. “You’re looking at its image from a million years ago. But from this image you can conclude whether life and reason will develop there a million years later. A ten, twenty, or fifty percent chance of this scenario. So you map the whole sky. And you open your wormhole tunnels.

“Still, even gods have to manage their resources. You can’t split into a myriad of different directions at once. The most effective method would involve sending out AI probes to gather data on the current state of the cosmos. To find out what’s happening today on a planet whose telescope image tells us about its state from eons ago. So you create a gigantic database of information about the trajectories of life in the universe: in what environmental conditions and with what probability various kinds of life and culture grow. And since you have wormholes that trump the speed of light at your disposal, you can reach far beyond our observable post-inflationary universe, and gather trillions upon trillions of examples: every possible astrophysical and biological combination, followed through to its natural end.

“And then you’ve got a handy algorithm, a ready-made textbook for cranking out worlds and civilizations – like a cosmic clockmaker picking up planets with a pair of tweezers under a magnifying glass. In this particular environment and with this particular biology, in nine hundred and ninety-seven cases out of a thousand, a tumor on the cosmos is born. So we scorch it in its infancy.”

“And they pre-emptively scorched the Earth like that? You mean we just had the bad luck to find ourselves in the three cases out of a thousand – as collateral damage to the gardener of the universe?”

“Why the three out of a thousand? Why not the nine hundred and ninety-seven? What, you think they made a mistake?”