The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams (2 page)

The company had bought the most expensive industrial version on sale, with applications for clinics and universities, and with the highest resolution scan then available. For a few months, after yet another scandal involving leaks to the competition, the Chief had had every intention of using the IS3 as an in-house universal lie detector. Then the lawyers intervened and he dropped the idea. The boxes with the company’s unused units remained, stacked in a neglected corner of the IT basement. They were gradually auctioning them off on Allegro, where self-taught neurosoft artists were snapping them up at half price.

Bartek tore open the wrapping and took out the units. You were meant to put something like a rubber skullcap over your head and stick a whole bunch of cards, thicker than the latest 3D graphics cards and with dedicated processors, into the computer. The cooling systems alone weighed a pound.

While Bartek struggled with the set-up, Rytka read the instructions.

“Heaps of work with the configuration.”

He glanced at the clock.

“Can you make it?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Fire it up and we’ll see.”

They chose Tatar’s machine, since by then he had quite likely drowned himself in the can. Bart crawled under the metalwork, re-plugging the ports and checking the cables. Rytka pulled down the amateur applications for InSoul3. There were whole forums, wikis, and torrent categories dedicated to the neurosoft. In the meantime, the transfer rate was dropping by the minute.

Two hours later, the configuration was complete. Diagnostics gave the green light for the RAM and the processors.

Leaning against the wall, Big Bird was watching them, already baked on reefer.

“I played that shit. Heavy stuff.”

Bartek crawled out from among the fans and cables, brushing off his pants.

“This is no game. We’ve got the cheats for the full scan.”

Big Bird approached and twirled a headset fragrant with factory newness around his finger. Talcum powder sprinkled out of the skullcap.

“But it’s just a toy. You know that. There’s no way to read the whole thing – I mean, every atom of the cerebral cortex.”

“But how do you know how much we need to read? Maybe this is enough? You might as well ask for a scan of the quarks and strings.”

Big Bird took a long drag on his joint.

“You want any?” He belched out smoke. “Kandahar Blood. Right on for the apocalypse.”

“I’m not going to burn neurons in my final hour.”

“But this shit is awesome! If it can make you feel positive about the end of the world, then it can make you feel positive about anything. Even about
him
.”

He meant the boss, who was stalking about the building with a look of such vicious despair in his eyes that even the most feverish hysterics froze like icicles at the very sight of him. Now he was coming back to IT. He undid his tie and wound it around a clenched fist, to and fro, as tightly as if he’d been preparing for a bout with Mike Tyson.

Rytka and Bart flipped a coin.

“Tails.”

“Sock it to me.”

Rytka sat down at the keyboard; Bart selected an IS3 scanner.

Big Bird offered the Chief the joint, smoked down to a microscopic roach. The boss just spat. His teeth chattered and he cracked his knuckles.

Bartek put on the skullcap, while Rytka calibrated the scan. Then he took off the skullcap and they checked the configuration once again. Still green.

“Has it estimated how much time the full scan will take?”

“Damned if I know. The add-on takes over, and it’ll just keep running scans until it’s sucked everything it needs from your head.”

“Can’t you work out an average from the history of previous users? So that you’ll still have time to copy yourself as well. Whose work is it?”

“Some students from Karabach – the Ural Team. Do you want to have a read?”

“Without Google Translate? No thanks.”

On the television screens Athens was dying. Street cameras by cafés and monuments showed tourists sprawled out, as if felled by sunstroke, on the pavement and under the majestically impassive ruins of stone.

“Are you in, boss?”

“What the fuck do I care about your goddamn avatars when I’m a corpse anyway!”

“But your spirit – your spirit will survive.”

“What fucking spirit?! Spirit, my ass. Now get outta here – these are
my
toys!”

The Chief lunged at them, but Bartek cracked him over the head with an old Lenovo Ultrabook, instantly knocking the boss’s lights out.

“Computers rule the world.”

“True.”

“Sock it to me, Rytka.”

Bartek put on the skullcap. Rytka hit ENTER. And off it went.

All that lives must die, passing through steel to eternity

Beneath a two-storey billboard plastered with a poster for Michael Bay’s
Transformers 9
, in the middle of the deserted commercial district of Tokyo, two manga sexbots boxed at each other’s pouting polymer faces.

Bartek had just lost his left leg, so he spat out the Wire at them like an old sniper, lying flat on the roof of a kiosk on the other side of the street. Bullseye. The Faraday unfurled like a dream and a second later the two sexbots were on the ground, as if cut down. Bartek leapt up with delight, but yet again he had forgotten where and who he was, and so he crashed down through the cardboard roof into the kiosk with his Spit Gun and earthing cable. For Bartek walked the streets of Ginza as a half-ton Star Trooper Miharayasuhiro.

http://jacekdukaj.allegro.pl/en/#modern-3d-print

No sooner had he pinged a confirmation for the alliance through the satellite and limped over to roll up the Wire, then he was trampled by a herd of teddy bears.

He knelt down and braced himself on armored fists, weathering the first and second waves of irigotchi. When he got up, he saw the scattered toys jiggling about on the asphalt and under heaps of old rubbish, like fish spat out onto the shore by a high wave. Not just teddy bears either, but dogs, cats, Pokémon, dragons, and various fantastical and mythological little monsters with absurdly large eyes.

As he hopped back from the disconnected sexbots – he had ripped out their processors and would take his haul of hardware home in the morning – one-legged Bartek once again lost his balance, collapsing with a crash against, and sliding down, a pole crowned with a sagging cluster of thick cables.

Now he could exchange glances with the irigotchi almost on the same level. A bedraggled Totoro blinked sleepily at the Star Trooper and then extended its paw. Bartek waved at the fluffy character. The toy trembled and began to crawl awkwardly towards him.

Before he knew it, the Totoro, a teddy bear, and a Hello Kitty had all nestled themselves into his titanium chest.

He stood up and limped off, propping himself on his Spit Gun. He looked back. The irigotchi were still trailing after him.

He was missing a leg. He couldn’t run away.

“Just don’t suffocate me.”

The irigotchi knew neither Polish nor English. Only the fading lights of night-time Tokyo answered him in a blinking form of Morse code. It was day 847 PostApoc, and the next eternity was opening up before Bartek.

In the workshop of an underground garage, beneath the forty-storey Aiko apartment complex, he toiled away to make himself a replacement limb.

The parts for a boutique Miharayasuhiro were rare items. Even rarer were the skills required to make use of them. The Tokyo transformers of the Royal Alliance turned to Bartek when in need, and now he felt like the handyman to half the world. Surplus hardware was a kind of payment for the service. Hundreds of spare robot parts of varying sizes, acquired in this way, were now stacked against the workshop’s walls and piled high on the racks above Bartek.

Oh body! my homeland! thou art like steel

He had terabytes of construction plans and instruction manuals loaded onto his hard drives, and had amassed a comprehensive library of urban hardware catalogs, thick as bibles. These were divided into sections for the different lines of mechs: domestic, street, industrial, medical, municipal, military, recreational, air, and underwater. Slowly, from one page and catalog to the next, the mechs evolved into drones, which in turn evolved into stationary hardware and the Matternet itself: the Internet of Matter, a server-less network of ubiquitous microprocessors, operating on RFID, infrared, and NFC.

In the decade before the Extermination, billions of dollars had been pumped into the industry. Unemployment had risen, as one corporation after another switched from human workers to robots. Societies were aging, but instead of human children and grandchildren it was an army of patient and solicitous machines that was called upon to care for the elderly. And while the mech soldier may have cost a fortune to manufacture, its death on the battlefield cost nothing in public opinion polls.

Another ten or fifteen years and there would have been millions of these service robots tethered to radio leashes all over the world. But the Extermination struck at the very dawning of this new era.

If only Bartek could call a mech service center now! These catalogs were essentially compendiums of prototypes and demonstration models. He still couldn’t read the Japanese handbooks, and they were the ones that interested him the most.

In a Faraday cage at the back of the workshop, Bartek kept three complete sexbots, a medico, and a Beetle.

The irigotchi would not go near the cage. They bunched together in a herd and watched Bartek like fearful puppies.

“I’m not going to repair you,” he repeated to them, knowing full well that they couldn’t understand him. “I’m not a programmer. All I can do is bash together some arms and legs.”

Years before the Extermination, the programmers had reached such a level of harmony with the digital world that they had completely lost touch with hardware. This led to the emergence of a separate clan of IT whizzes, whose main task was to crawl underneath desks and grates, and in whose heads the priceless knowledge of which cable went into which port and which cards cooled the best under which radiators was preserved.