The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams (6 page)

“And those white ones?”

“Freelancers. Still unaffiliated. Uhuh, here you are.” SoulEater pointed with a spidery finger at Bartek’s white dot. “Guilds from all the language zones are going to throw themselves at you.”

Bartek instinctively rolled right back to the wall.

“But why?”

“Every single computer or robotics whizz is invaluable. Do you know how many real programmers we have? One! One for the whole planet!”

“He should copy himself.”

“He already has. But that doesn’t add anything to our knowledge. He keeps copying the same skills, and he can’t conjure up any new ones.”

“But why?” asked Bartek, pointing his manipulator at SoulEater’s display. “I see that the majority transformed along the border of the second hemisphere, where they had the most time to react, and there should have been the most programmers over there.”

“And there were. At least straight after the IS’ing. Then they went out into the open web, because they were the ones who knew how to do it, who knew how to flow into the Internet with their minds. Well, and they snuffed it.”

Bartek remembered the first point of the FAQ.

“Is it some kind of program error? A fault with IS3?”

“Damned if I know. Maybe some kind of malware released onto the net or the incompatibility of our software. I mean, it wasn’t written for this. For now, the only safe way is over dedicated connections with closed machines, pre-formatted to zero and under a tight RioBit protocol. You must have downloaded and installed it to log in here, right? It’s in the FAQ.”

“But it’s ridiculously inconvenient – typing on keyboards and tapping on screens when you only have these iron fingers.”

“We’re working on USB filters and bypasses. But that’s the problem: we don’t have any programmers. So who’s working on them? Amateurs, ignoramuses, and teenage gamers. How did you survive, anyway? You didn’t try to get out onto the net right away?”

“I tried. I certainly tried.”

If he had still had a spine, a cold shiver would have run down it. (Cold stray currents passed through him from his wheels to his antennas instead.) In that moment, Bartek realized that he had survived only because the Vladivostok LNG port, as a strategic site subject to the protocols of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, had shut down shortly after the Extermination in a belated response to a “terrorist attack,” while the hospital of the Pacific State Medical University didn’t have a backup router.

Only the fourth copy of Bartek hadn’t allowed itself to be devoured after waking by the malware spread across the web.

“If it is malware. The people on the western edge of our hemisphere had twelve hours to move, a whole half-rotation of the Earth. And yes, you’re right, most of them uploaded at the very last moment – a few dozen people, maybe a few hundred. It makes sense that some of them wouldn’t have had time to complete the process. The Meridian cut through them in the middle of the IS. There’s even a theory – you can read about it on the forums – a theory/cult claiming that this is exactly where all those rabid mind-eating programs came from.”

“From not-quite copied minds, neuro-chunks, remnants of brain structures?”

“Yep. But it gets even more necro-crazy: the idea that Death itself was scanned in, I mean, the moment their protein brains were fried. They were plugged into the IS3 when the Meridian went through them. And now it’s spreading across the servers, copying itself and infecting everything.”

“You mean… what’s spreading?”

“I just told you: Death.”

Meanwhile, a mobile police bollard (a ten-kilo mech) was chasing a factory mastodon hoist (a two-ton mech) through the Expo in a Wild Hunt of steel and plastic. Bartek and SoulEater had to flee their corner to avoid being crushed.

“The idiot IS’d his beloved sausage dog.”

The sausage dog was the elephantine carrier mech.

Bart had the overwhelming impression that he’d been dropped into a pastiched cartoon created for nerds.

SoulEater winked at him with his LEDs.

“Bit of a shock, eh?”

Bartek displayed Animal the Muppet beating his head against a wall.

“Like I’ve been buried alive – and all this is just the dreamy itching of the cerebral cortex.”

“Check out the MTL, the Moscow list, and you’ll see transformers split into separate copies. That’s how they test coping mechanisms on themselves: which applications and plug-ins stabilize your psyche and which ones drive you to suicide. Because there’s nothing simpler than deleting yourself. We all feel the same itch.”

Bartek instinctively searched with his lens for SoulEater’s face, but there was only a screen, which was still displaying the world transformer map.

“You must have all done a lot of thinking in those three weeks.”

“And where were you?”

Bartek flashed his lights gloomily.

“It got me down. I slowed myself down to a torpor.”

“Well, some people had the opposite problem. They sped up as much as the processors would allow. We’re three depressions ahead of you.”

Suddenly SoulEater39 wrapped a spidery arm around Bartek and yanked the heavy mech to one side. He was just in time too, as the hulking titanium hoist rolled past once again. It would have crushed Bartek like nothing.

“Daddy?! Has anybody seen my daddy?!”

Bartek zoomed in on the display of the bellowing cargo mech. It showed family photos and films, lolcats and Cartman.

“A kid.”

“We’ve got a few of them. If you have a choice, who do you IS before the Extermination? First you save your children – it’s an instinct imprinted in your DNA. Then yourself.”

SoulEater pointed to some colored dots on the American continent. A few dozen toddlers had logged in from right under the last meridian.

“The Californian Orphans.”

“Who looks after them?”

SoulEater undulated on the spot (arms up, arms down).

“We do,” he said. Then he displayed the logo of the GOATs: horns locked into horns in a tangle that flowed into the lines of an integrated circuit. “The guild.”

At that moment Bart, understood that he was being recruited.

“I don’t even know your name.”

“Yes you do. SoulEater39.”

“But you can google my whole life, and what do I know about you?”

“What? And I’m supposed to be so sure about you? That you’ve given us your real name? You think there haven’t been others before you?”

“What others? Pretending to be someone else?”

“Pretending to be human.”

Bartek felt as he had on the street in Vladivostok, staring into the window at a reflection that was his and not his. Before his very eyes, the hand of God was changing the world – set by set, character by character.

“Who?”

“Copies, bots, old IS avatars – God knows what. They impersonate the dead. It’s not hard: there are billions of identities from the Google and Facebook archives to choose from.”

“So how do you tell the difference?”

The Big Lebowski stretched and snorted on the spider’s screen.

“We don’t.”

“But you must believe I’m not lying, since you want me in your guild for my skills, my memory, my experience.”

“I’m talking to you. There’ll be work to do. You’ll cope or you won’t. What difference does it make what you have inside you?”

Bartek stared through astigmatic lenses at the red and yellow spider. He felt as if some indigestible food (he couldn’t eat anything) were turning his stomach (he didn’t have a stomach).

“If it’s so easy, then why do you bother sticking with that nickname? Are you even a person?”

“What kind of question is that?! Are you?”

“Are you conscious?”

“Are you?”

“Are you?”

“Are you?”

“Are you?”

“Are they?”

“So you are conscious then?”

SoulEater39 responded by playing a Polish punk band live in concert on his screen. The snarling lyrics spurted out of his speakers: BE CONSCIOUS! BE CONSCIOUS! BE CONSCIOUS!

“Bart, my friend, we’re all transformers. But we don’t understand the nature of the transformation. InSoul3 couldn’t upload the whole brain – just some currents on the surface, the shadow of its structure, whatever made a good avatar bot. The rest was cheats and bullshit. You must have known that. There’d been no breakthrough in the digitalization of minds. Nobody had invented a way to turn IS3 into some magic psychopump. All the humans died twenty-three days ago. We’re all that’s left.”

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? THIS IS A CON!

Frances Rory emoted multi-tiered courtesy and reverence from the doorway. As if she were visiting a sculptor’s workshop as his number one fan.

“Did we by any chance meet in Africa?”

“I slept through Africa.”

Bartek was resorting to a metaphor here, since the transformers still hadn’t found a good plug-in for sleep.

While the Royal Alliance was working with the Salamanders on the reactivation of some solar farms in Ghana, Bart found himself in the middle of another hardware depression and ticking slower than a cuckoo clock. He still didn’t really understand how the speed of the processor could affect the internal state of the program being processed.

Frances showed up at his place in the basement of the Aiko tower in a mass-produced Honda sexbot: the Geisha IV. In downtown Tokyo, the Royalists didn’t have much of a selection of mechs at their disposal. She knelt down gracefully before the furry playpen of irigotchi, the aerodynamic plastic and steel curves of her thighs, back, neck and shoulders shimmering with the erotic fantasies of the old fetishists of Nippon – of suibokuga and the brushstrokes of Masamune Shirow. Bart felt intensely his lack of an endocrine system. No hormones stabbed his heart and his cock did not leap to attention.

How rare it was to meet a genuinely female transformer! It had mostly been male gamers with gadgets like InSoul3 handy, even if they’d been playing as female avatars.

SoulEater39 had dropped in for a moment as a four-armed Sony medico to vouch for Frances symbolically.

“I’ve got to shoot over to Cuba. I don’t have time.”

“You wanted to see the swarm intelligence of the trawl.”

“Mmhmmm?”

Bart shoved past Frances in his Star Trooper. The accumulation of mobile metal must have put the irigotchi on edge, since they gathered into a tight little herd and retreated behind the boxes of toy electronic sub-assemblies.

Bart stretched out his hand towards them, flashing the LED tip of a finger.

A Totoro crept out slowly and cautiously.

“I’m teaching them light sequences. It turns out they’re also sensitive to radio signals. But the emotes for those are too tricky for me.”

“Do they charge themselves by USB?”

“There are plenty of open public ports left in the city, in cafés and shopping centers, and the Royal Alliance pumps energy into them like for the lights and computers. The irigotchi have come to know the locations, you see, like animals remember all the watering holes in an area, and they move around Tokyo between them. When they came out of nowhere to trample me for the umpteenth time, I finally began to track the daily circulation of the teddy bears.”

“What for?”

“I’m going to start catching them.”

Bartek opened, closed, and opened a steel fist. The Totoro awkwardly scrambled up onto his shoulder. The Star Trooper stood up and held itself erect. The remaining soft toys pattered out from behind the boxes and arrayed themselves in a crooked fan formation along the wall.

“You see?” Bartek brought up a floor plan of the room on his display with the positions of the irigotchi marked. “It’s a single mind, a neural network on high frequency bands.”

Frances tried to stroke the Totoro’s dirty fur. The polymer fingertips of the sexbot slid over the synthetic hair of the toy, and Bartek felt that he was missing yet another crucial gland.

It was no longer just melancholy. He was hit by a wave of condensed bitterness and envy. But whom did he envy? His own past self. Not even himself, but the memory of the old Bart, of somebody else.

“Anyhow. I’ve been playing around with it.”

Frances looked at him inquiringly, which is to say that she performed the look: a turn of the head, an expression on her face/mask, a narrowing of the eyes. All human.

“We’ve thought about that. Whether it wouldn’t be better for our mental health to wean ourselves onto some kind of Tamagotchi – a substitute for animals.”

Bartek remembered the Chūō Akachōchin blues.

“We all feel it, even if we don’t admit it, like Mr. Tough Guy over here,” he said, pointing at SoulEater. “That something has been ripped out of us, that something’s missing.”

“A body.”

“I’m not talking about the body. I’m talking about something inside, something that didn’t make it through the IS3 scans.”

Frances pinched the Totoro’s belly. The irigotchi silently sneezed.

“Let’s say the soul got stuck in the wires, that it didn’t get through the IS. How would you tell the difference? How would you know? Where’s the model, the template man to put next to us and compare?”

Bartek turned back towards the irigotchi. A Hello Kitty and a Mr. Worm were facing each other by the wall of racks, mimicking all the gestures and the whole choreography of the conversation between the Star Trooper Miharayasuhiro and the Honda sexbot. The Hello Kitty nibbled the air, while the Mr. Worm flashed its eyes and snout.