The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams (5 page)

“What the fuck?”

“Don’t tell me Godzilla just crawled out of the ocean.” Bart zoomed in on the muddy equipment behind the surveyor.

“Those are fishing nets, aren’t they?”

“Something like that. Automated.”

“A Mothernet?”

“No, they were aiming for complete autonomy. These nodes here, see, they worked like elements in a swarm. The Japanese were trying to get the whole basin’s fishing systems to self-organize and to learn the behavior of the fish schools in real time. So that they could somehow echo the schools themselves: the swarm intelligence of the trawl.”

Bart picked up the net, disentangled one of the nodes, and glowered at it from under his chest like a Cyclops.

SoulEater emoted a question mark, to which Bart replied by emoting a shrug of his shoulders.

“Come and see me at Aiko. I’ll show you.”

The surveyor transformer wound the tangled net around his arm.

“That thing at the bottom – you can see it here in the film – that’s the swarm intelligence of the trawl. There haven’t been any fish down there for three years, but nobody’s turned off the nets. They feed off the energy of the sea currents and they’re learning to hunt – but for what?”

“Maybe for the IRS.”

They laughed and parted ways.

(On 93 PostApoc the main program of the American Internal Revenue Service designed to hunt down tax dodgers copied itself onto the computers of an Ohio Drone ballistic missile submarine and disappeared into the depths of the Pacific. From time to time, rumors erupted here and there among the transformers about this rogue IRS patrol surfacing off the coast of one continent or another to fire Tomahawk missiles at unknown targets. It became their Loch Ness Monster.)

On 744 PostApoc, an earthquake registering over seven on the Richter scale struck Japan with its epicenter near Aogashima. The waves of the ensuing tsunami surged inland from the coast as they always had in the past. But unlike after the Tōhoku quake and all the previous ones, this time there was nobody to rebuild, to restore the devastated infrastructure, and to erase the traces of nature’s hostility from the urban grid. The Tokyo Bay Flood had marked the cityscape forever. The water reached Minamisunamachi and Nishikasai on the other side of the Arakawa. The inundated Matternet relayed precise information on the progress of the surge, as one saturated building, street, and flyover after another gave way to the cyclical ebb and flow of floodwater and collapsed.

High above the deluged city, Bart and SoulEater perched themselves on the uppermost ledge of a multi-storey parking lot. Beneath them, The Flood extended in every direction.

“You realize that this is how it’s going to look from now on.”

“What?”

With a casual sweep of his shogun arm, SoulEater indicated the entirety of this scene of oceanic catastrophe. Somewhere around the corner, the water must have flooded a textile factory or fashion house; hundreds of shirts, pants, coats, sweaters, and skirts were riding the cold waves, their blinking tags still visible beneath the surface of the water as their Mothernet slowly flickered out.

“Our flight from nature. How many spare parts do you have? Enough for how many repairs?”

“The Dwarves are still soldiering on.”

“They might even pull it off. But how many production lines like that would we have to start up just to maintain the status quo?”

“The riddle goes something like this: ‘How many robots do you need to run a simulation of human civilization?’”

The shogun lowered its black samurai helmet. The design of the Toshiba mech was based on the katahada-nugi armor from the Edo era, with a scale-covered imitation of a torso and limbs. It displayed nothing, and Bart couldn’t read the present mood of the metal.

The Dwarf Fortress, the main American alliance, was controlled by some old-time nerds and gamers who still fondly recalled their glory days within the randomly-generated worlds of Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress. For the last year, they had been trying to start up one of GE’s automated factories in Seattle. Over a hundred transformers were working on the project, and the Dwarves were enlisting the help of specialists from all the friendly alliances. Bartek had spent a few days there himself, battling with worn bearings and transmission line failures.

“Have they been asking for my help again?”

“Someone else has.”

“Who? The Patagonians?”

(The Patagonian Alliance was a thorn in the side of B&B.)

“So you’ve heard? That figures.” SoulEater39 scratched his spiky hand-glove over his painted breastplate. “Not the Patagonians, but it would probably be wise not to reveal anything to the Bully Boys for now. Can I trust you not to record this?”

“Ah, keeping secrets, are we?”

“Starting to, yes.” The shogun flashed up the grin of Jack Nicholson’s Joker. “It was inevitable.”

Bart slammed his right fist into his chest plate with a clatter.

“Scout’s honor.”

“Remember what I told you the first time we met? At the Wrocław Expo?”

“When you recruited me?”

“Well, it’s not just a bit of push and shove over resources any more: you know, which alliance can get its mitts on the best mechs, who can secure the servers and the power supply for themselves, who has the best firewalls against the Plague, or where we slice up the Mothernet between us. Now the real battle’s beginning – the battle for the future.”

“What future?”

“Exactly. What future? If you could choose, which side would you take?”

“Are there sides?”

“There will be soon. Did you read what that French dude from Alsace was circulating?”

“The one about the Evil God? I know that legend.”

“It’s a version of it. An apocryphal tale, let’s say,” said the shogun, raising its hands, splaying out its fingers, and tilting back its head, as if it were about to tear something from the sky or drink up the clouds. “Man got what he deserved, but we were saved for a reason. The transformers are the new chosen people, Bart.”

“And this Patagonian quasi-Patagonian has blown in here spouting this bullshit?” retorted Bartek, heaving himself up onto his feet and moving away from the parking tower’s ledge. “I like to keep my distance from fuck-ups and Linux freaks.”

“Then you’ve chosen your side,” said SoulEater, rising to his feet after Bartek. “Frances will pay you a visit this evening. You can make up your own mind. For your information, the Royal Alliance is going to support her project, so I ask you to keep the matter confidential. But you’ll do as you please.”

Bartek displayed a disgusted and confused John Cleese picking his nose.

“So what did you drag me out here for?”

The shogun whipped its sword out of its sheath and framed a panoramic view of the Flood with four mechanical strokes.

“So that you can have that in the back of your mind when Frances asks you. Slowly, little by little, year by year, we will drown.” With the point of the sword, he prodded some electrical wiring ripped out of a nearby car and scattered over the concrete in a fan-shaped mandala. “What will be left after us? Rust and a billion silent smartphones.”

Bots may safely charge when the man guards them well

When he recruited Bartek in a meeting at the Wrocław Expo, a day after Bart’s awakening in Vladivostok, on 23 PostApoc, SoulEater39 was in a red and yellow spider mech built for skyscraper work.

All the cool robots had long since been nabbed, so Bartek was left to choose between various industrial lugs on wheels or tread, completely devoid of any humanoid charm. In the end, he logged into a half-ton pest control machine manufactured in Radom. At least it had sensitive lenses.

In the entrance to the main hall, the three-jointed arm of a Police Chief (retro series, model 1924) clapped everybody affectionately on the metal, while an obliging machine from the Warsaw Industrial Research Institute for Automation and Measurements handed out speakers, microphones, and LED displays. Some of the transformers’ machines were deaf mutes and most had no external screens. Bartek fixed the square LED patch to his chest, leaving it slightly askew.

To begin with, they displayed network calling cards – after all, you couldn’t recognize a transformer just from the look of his current machine. Midnight struck and there were over a dozen robots circulating under the main dome of the Expo. When Bartek had checked back in Vladivostok, he had found 17,946 names on the Helsinki Transformer List (HTL). That was how many people had managed to upload themselves via IS3.

When he sorted the HTL by nationality, he counted twenty-seven names under the icon of the red and white flag. Transpolonia met in a mech park on the grounds of the old Wrocław Expo.

Bartek turned out to be the only newbie, and he immediately caused a real pile-up of curious scrap metal. The robots crowded around him, peppering him with the kinds of questions with which customers would normally have plagued an IT service center.

Small wonder. The moment he signed onto the HTL, they all must have googled him right down to his great-grandfather and the details of his Facebook diet.

A barrel-shaped, multi-tooled octopus with the voice of a squeaky synthesizer plied Bartek with questions about methods for retrieving data from fried hard drives, while a police traffic bot waved all its arms about as it bellowed something about the software for calibrating a multi-core processor.

“I’m very sorry, but I’m not a programmer.”

“But can you fix my audio sync? Can you fix it? Can you fix it?”

Bartek was afraid that in another moment these frisky tanks might crush him.

He was saved by a red-and-yellow-striped robot skeleton, which engulfed him with its nozzle arms and dragged him behind a glass partition that had once been a guard box.

The transformer displayed as SoulEater 39, doubtless a web nickname from before the Extermination, and he was clearly held in high esteem, since the other mechs reluctantly relented.

“Don’t worry about them. They’re lost souls.”

As if on cue, a massive freight mech slammed into the partition with a titanium thigh.

“Daddy! Has anybody seen my daddy? I’m looking for my daddy. Daddy! Daddy!”

The giant mech droned out the same words, over and over, the bass of its speakers crackling and distorting into the drawn-out bellow of a whale.

“Do you realize how few specialists IS’d themselves?”

Bart hadn’t yet picked up the jargon.

“IS’d?”

“Transformed via IS3.”

“Well, I thought the majority would be programmers: they would have had the gear handy on the day of the Extermination.”

“Actually, it was mostly gamers who had the gear, and they’re the majority here. They already had their structures and guilds in place. Now the alliances are forming.”

SoulEater displayed a map of the world for Bartek with colored dots representing logged-in transformers.

Since the Death Ray had blazed at Zero Hour from Seattle to Oman, nobody from Asia had had any time to react. It was almost exclusively people from Europe, Africa, the United States, and South America who had scanned themselves in with the clumsy neurosoft. Bartek noticed the distinct over-representation of Mexico and California, which the Death Meridian had only reached at the very end.