The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams (3 page)

Bartek was the IT basement for those who worked in the IT basement.

Through a double-filtered USB, he plugged himself into a laptop hooked up to a satellite antenna perched on the roof of the Aiko building. The Royalists had just updated the zones of influence in Greater Tokyo on their side, as well as the colors of the alerts on the power lines from the plants in Tokyo and Hamaoka. The JPX server room at Nihonbashi Kabutocho, where the majority of Royalist transformers in Tokyo were processed, was glowing green. In the Chūō Akachōchin bar in Kyōbashi, the attendance meter registered seven transformers.

Bartek put his new leg through the whole testing process, performed a few squats, sighed, and motioned for the soft toys to approach.

“Okay, come to daddy. I’ll put you guys back together again somehow.”

They squeaked timidly and opened their comic-book eyes even wider.

It had all begun with Bartek putting himself back together.

He had clambered out into the real in Vladivostok. The Russian public, private, military, government, and commercial networks were all so impossibly tangled that it came down to a pure twist of fate whether one ended up stuck for centuries in the purgatorial appendix of a dedicated server or got shot straight onto a virtual highway to the FSB or the Pentagon.

Bartek was buried alive. He woke up in Vladivostok without any senses, without a body, and with only his instincts and the threshold of pain intact. He thrashed about in that confinement cell for a true eternity – or, more precisely, for four and a half minutes – until he found a crack no wider than a bit in the local Matternet and, slipping through it, entered the municipal CCTV network. Surveying the desolate streets, strewn with corpses, he fell into depression and slowed down to a hundred ticks per second.

Only when four of his partitions had already crashed, and the processors had overheated at the Vladivostok Gazprom LNG center, did Bartek’s survival instinct turn back on again. He pulled himself together and dragged himself out of apathy.

He switched over to the machines of the Pacific State Medical University, where he seized exclusive control of the reserve power supply (the hospital had a petrol generator that could be started from the level of the network administrator). At two gigahertz, Bartek’s curiosity came back.

Who had survived? What had happened to his family and friends? What had happened to the whole world?

He was sitting on the Vladivostok servers because that’s how he had distributed himself on the day of the Apocalypse. Bartek’s copy number one was supposed to be crunched on the company machines in Warsaw, just like the first backup; then there was the Google backup, then the backup in the cloud, and only after that the fourth one, in Vladivostok. He had no way out onto the satellites and the open net, and that was in fact what had saved him.

Through the hundred eyes of the CCTV he spotted some Segways in a repair workshop on the shore of Amur Bay. Some of them had been adapted to perform unmanned patrols for local security companies and so they must have had some kind of radio input. After all, they were part of the Matternet – the Internet of Things scattered over a hodgepodge of a dozen competing protocols. Theoretically, they should have remained in constant communication with their surroundings. But the Internet of Matter looked completely different to a practical expert. Bartek constantly had had to explain to customers why their SmartHouse wasn’t so smart after all, why the fridge was unable to communicate with the oven, and why one set of keys after another went missing despite the three RFID tags embedded in each.

After half an hour of ineptly attempting to hack one of the two-wheelers, he finally succeeded. He rolled around aimlessly for a while, gazing at the lifelessness of the frigid city from street level, staring from the boulevards at the rolling mass of water… and once again, a cold and heavy sadness washed over Bartek.

He returned to the workshop, broke into a couple of repair machines, and fused a manipulator claw onto the Segway, together with a more powerful transmitter. After putting himself together like this, he set out to look for a functioning Internet terminal. That the Internet
itself
might not be working was a thought that Bartek wouldn’t even allow his mind to consider.

On Admiral Fokin Street he found himself slaloming between chaotically parked cars, concrete flower beds, and the desiccated bodies of people and birds. Suddenly, in his peripheral vision, he caught movement in the shop window to his right. Swiveling the camera he realized it was, of course, his own movement – which is to say, the Segway’s movement.

Bartek stared at his reflection and thought: “WALL-E.” He trundled on, while terabytes of Freudian associations came crashing down in the neuro-files of the InSoul3’s Karabach mod.

He peered inside the shops as he passed them, and saw computers, monitors, and keyboards – life-giving oxygen. The only problem was that the primitive architecture of the city wasn’t wheelchair-friendly – or Segway-friendly for that matter.

In the end, he simply snatched a tablet from the hand of a woman withering away into an anorexic mummy on a park bench beneath the expansive corpse of a tree.

Would you like to know more
?

The tablet was working, but Bartek was completely unable to operate the touchscreen with the hard, clumsy gripper of his only limb. In any case, the screen could only sense electrostatic changes.

He racked his brain (non-brain), wobbling on his two wheels and squinting the camera around the street-morgue. The owner of the tablet, an Asian woman in jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with the image of a Bollywood star, stared with dark, unseeing eyes at an ugly sky devoid of birds or smoke or smog. A gust of wind blew a plastic bag onto her head, so that now it looked as if she were suffocating, gasping for her last breath under the plastic.

Bartek reached for her hand and snapped off the mummy’s index finger. Now he could use the finger to operate the tablet.

The system showed seventeen networks, two of them open. Bartek connected to the one with the strongest signal.

The browser’s home page was Google, of course. When the page loaded, Bartek almost felt tears welling up in his eyes. (There were no tears, there were no eyes, but the feeling remained.)

It was like a return to his homeland, like a view over the roofs of his native city, or the taste of the bread of his childhood. At that moment, Bartek could have dropped to his knees and kissed the Holy Land of Google.

The feeling lasted for a fraction of a second. Then he saw the rest. On the search engine’s main page was a graphic showing tiny manga robots covering their square little heads with sheet metal and tinfoil. KEEP YOUR MINDS CLOSED! He pressed the graphic with the tip of the corpse’s finger. APOCALYPSE FAQ appeared on the screen.

First point of the FAQ: Under no circumstances connect the machine on which you’re processing to the Internet!

After that came lists of contact addresses, websites categorized by language, culture, and religion, links to HTL and MTL tables, and discussion forums and blogs on survival despair.

Naturally, Bartek and Rytka were not the only ones to have hit on the IS3 idea.

How could he have been so egocentrically blind! After all, it was hard to imagine that they alone among billions of people could have had the same fortuitous clash of neurons.

Who else? He frantically googled his family and friends. Danka – she’d survived, she must have survived, he could sense she’d survived. No. Danka was gone. His brother and his father – dead. Even Rytka was gone.

He managed to google their last recordings from the minutes, hours and days before the Extermination. In a masochistic impulse, he loaded them into the cache. Now he could watch Danka’s final selfies in endless loops – sunny recordings of a smiling redhead with the Vistula River shimmering in the background. She was saying something as she laughed at the camera, but her words had not been recorded for eternity. Only her face, hair, eyes and freckles would remain.

He made it through two loops before he crumbled. He went back to the FAQ and the guides to scavenging hardware.

So Bartek read the handbook of life after life in the shadow of the leafless body of the tree, until night fell and the battery went dead on the tablet.

He tossed away the finger and the tablet, then rolled off in the dark through the empty streets of Vladivostok.

He searched for facades of pre-apocalyptic normality: fossilized parks, cemeteries in their natural state, parking lots filled with cars in eternal slumber, street lights still shining, fountains and neon signs, cakes and bread shriveled into hard clay on supermarket shelves, a mute bundle in a pram – a baby so heavily wrapped in rompers and blankets that the little rag doll might just as easily have been sleeping or dead… until finally the power ran out on the Segway.

Curled up into a shivering ball on the hospital servers, Bartek gazed through a hundred CCTV eyes at the starry sky. Sleep would not come, since he had no application for sleep. So melancholy came instead.

“Melancholy’s king.”

“Manga blues, baby, manga blues.”

Manga blues - they sit on the terrace of the Kyōbashi Tower with a view of night-time Ginza. Every tenth advertisement and every twentieth screen glows bright. The screen above their terrace plays the scene from
Blade Runner
with Rutger Hauer dripping with rain and neon melancholy in an ironic loop. Meanwhile, they – sad robots – sit, stand, and trundle about, engaging in a misshapen parody of coffee talk.

“Another vodka?”

“Hit me.”

Steel fingers grip the delicate glass with surgical precision. There are special programs to support the motor skills required for vodka drinking.

Of course, they cannot really drink vodka, and the drinks are mere mock-ups. They cannot drink anything, they cannot eat anything – quarter-ton mechs in the Chūō Akachōchin bar. All they can do is perform these gestures of life, laboriously repeating the customs of bygone biology.

A barman in the shell of a mechanized barman pours out the Smirnoff. His three-jointed arm brushes against the polymer mitt of a transformer playing bar customer with the same desperation. The grating sound is audible even under Hauer’s monologue.