The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams (14 page)

The Breath of Stone grips the whole Mother from the ruins of the city in the north to Fergusson’s Karare backwater in the south-west. Bartek wades into a bend in the river, scratches the sphinxes and gummy bears behind their ears, crosses a causeway, and mechanically splashes water from the artificial overflow onto the Castlings playing in the pearly sunshine.

Their little bodies, elfishly slender and pale, unexpectedly release a feeling of guilt in Bart. He ponders: I’ve fucked up the Creation of the World yet again. The Paradisal Castlings are infertile. Their bodies have no space for reproductive systems. Too fragile and ethereal, they multiply only through transformations, through intermediary, IS forms. (Larval.)

“Come on, read our fortune for us!”

“I don’t know anything about fortunes.”

“Ha, then you won’t cheat!”

Bartek’s iguarte, an Al-Asr, a handmade masterpiece from the Arab Dwarves of the nomadic Trash Metal swarms, has a metamatter mask of a face, and Bartek keeps a whole separate channel of emotes for the old facial expression emoticons: smiley, sad, astonished, melancholic. In response to the teasing enticement of the Castlings –
come, come, he won’t come, of course he’ll come, come to us, come
– he heaves a sigh with his mech until the mask coagulates into the enormous emote of a sigh like a scream.

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

Lady Spiro strokes his head, which resembles an obsidian egg, with her fingers of golden rays.

“What beautiful despair! What marvelous anger!”

Bartek sits down and then reclines onto his back in the pink grass on the bank. What does Lady Spiro see from the safety of her zenith? The cinnabar limbs of a metal sculpture polished to a porcelain finish; a humanoid model like a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci, with a gorget embossed with a Koranic quotation on its chest plate, all crowned with a head like a frozen teardrop of mercury, with no eyes, ears, nose, or mouth. When the mask isn’t emoting any specific facial emotion, it isn’t a face at all.

And Bartek is not emoting anything now. He lies motionless in the valley between emotions. He would like to enter the vector of the Castlings (Pranky Prankster or Triangle Caprice), but the Breath of Stone is too heavy, enveloping him and pressing him down into the earth – the hand of a giant that has devoured the world.

Bartek reaches out an arm towards the blue sky, as the scorching azure radiates over fluid curves of vermilion. It is called “Al-Asr,” or eventide, because the sky over Medina at sunset is precisely this color, and the Muslim copies of the ancient nerds of America take their vocation just as seriously.

Through a frame formed by Bartek’s thumb and index finger, he sees swarms of alabaster axolotls grazing in Lady Spiro’s hair.

“Why are you leaving, my dear?”

“I’ve got to think. For myself. By myself. Without you, beyond you.”

“For yourself, ooh, but won’t you lose yourself, by yourself, one on one with yourself self self…?”

With a clenched fist, he blocks her out and blots out the sun. The voice of the Mothernet goes quiet and dies away. The stones, the blades of grass, and the insects all fall silent.

The Castlings on the shore of the lake are making a lumpy four-armed human figure from mud and grass. The Mother vectors it at once and guides it in leaps and bounds over stones and branches. The human figure reaches Bartek and crawls up his thigh to his hips and chest, where it weaves its nest of reeds and conducts its fortune-telling rituals. Bartek watches them with the patience of Atlas staring up through his eyelashes at the intimately close dances of meteorites and the sleigh rides of comets.

They burnt up. They all burnt up. One day they were there, the next day they weren’t. That Fucking Mother rolled over them and they forgot themselves, just as one forgets a joke overheard on the street or the address of an old acquaintance. They let themselves go, dropped themselves, and smashed into pieces. Emotes ripple across Bartek’s face, the breakers of a stormy sea. The human figure stands on his shoulders and looks out, wringing all its grassy hands. They had all burnt up: Bartek’s children and non-children, family and non-family, shadows and apparitions, humanoid oddities. Only the hardware remained – hard, cold, and immutable.

The little straw man flees in terror.

The Castlings run up to Bartek with reproachful looks.

“You’ve ruined our fortune! We don’t like you anymore. Go away!”

“That’s what you wanted.”

“You cheated us!”

It’s always the same with them.

Bartek has covered himself with a blanket of pink grass, and now he tosses in his bed of sand and clay (nineteen percent dreaming). An axolotl tattooed with Zodiacs and Mercators digs itself out from underground like a mole and kisses the Al-Asr on the cinnabar egg of its skull. The earth engulfs Bartek. He sinks under the ground. Crushed beneath it, he ceases to feel its weight, and suddenly he discovers he’s become really and truly weightless in the cramped darkness, face to face with living Zodiacs and Mercators. The stars flow in a dense stream, as he rotates in zero g along the axis of his mech.

A third of the planet has been sliced off by the meridian of darkness, while the other two-thirds glow with a soothing blue light.

“In California, I could show you all the orbits.”

“California gives me a headache.”

They walked on the magnets of their feet over the trussed skeleton of the habitat. Each of them in a Horus I, lightweight skeletoids adapted to open space, they had no need of safety cords or tethers. They had no need of oxygen or a regular power supply, either. If the necessity arose, the Horuses could unfold their solar cells like the wings of black angels. They could get by without communication lasers aimed at the Earth as well, since the station had its own servers and fast processors from the Dwarves’ latest forge. And the Horus II was in the pipeline – a full iguarte.

The orbital stations of the transformers were generally constructed from nothing but trussing, along with the machines and antennas attached to it, forming loose rafts of prefab elements that drifted like jellyfish above the giant globe of the Earth. Mechs with ever-less-humanoid features scrambled over them like monkeys across the tangled crowns of trees. It was much easier to build orbital installations now that there was no need to design them as hermetic cans of warm air for protein wimps.

Yet this is just what SoulEater843.17.8 was proposing.

“A rosette or a Star of David, because when you draw them up on the ellipses of their orbits, that’s exactly the kind of figures you’ll see. We’ll set them up at equal angular distances around the Earth – at first three, and then eventually six habitats in opposing orbits. Then even if the Death Ray hits us again, at least one treasure house of life will remain safe, shielded by the Earth’s mass. They’ll never reset the biosphere on us again.”

Bartek circled around the second, perpendicular spine of the station, flipping upside down as he did so. He had a plug-in that blocked inner ear simulation, so he could take any orientation in the 3D cosmos.

“How many of these balloons are you planning?”

“Seventy-six for every station. Then we’ll think about a second cluster, on the arm of the counterweight. And if it can withstand the stress, we’ll wind the station like a dumbbell, at least to a quarter of Earth’s gravitation.”

Two white globes were already hanging from a trussed arm stretching into the darkness. Bartek went closer, the micro-vibrations of the station transmitting themselves into the Horus with every step.

He inspected the construction of the airlocks and the IN/OUT sockets for power and communications.

“Who’s doing it for you, the Children of Nemo?”

“And the Circus Freaks.”

The Heavy Metalheads, who had sat at the bottom of the ocean for the last two centuries, exploiting the energy from hydrothermal vents, had resurrected the forgotten arts of material engineering down there, weaving the wonders of 21st-century engineering from polymers, fullerenes, and nanotubes. After being pumped full of air, this kind of habitat balloon was twelve meters in diameter. A cargo rocket took them up into orbit from Baikonur in batches of two dozen packed down to the size of melons. Once fully inflated, they were slowly growing an anti-meteorite shield: a carbon moss with the toughness of diamond.

The Patagonia Circus was responsible for the construction of the links between the balloons and the engineering of the life-support systems.

“So where’s the problem?”

SoulEater opened the birdlike beak of his Horus and projected a bright spot of light onto the contact point between two of the balloons, illuminating the flange of the airlock and the coupling cables.

“Can you see it?”

“What is it?”

Bartek adjusted his focus and saw the sparkling of microscopic diamonds around the flange.

“An air leak,” said SoulEater.

“Connections not tight enough?”

“Worse: the strength of the material,” said SoulEater, slamming his jaws shut and swallowing the light. “The Patagonians received specifications for temperature scales for objects in a vacuum over Earth – so, from O Kelvin to 200 Celsius max. And okay, they managed that just fine. But our underwater Hephaestuses didn’t think to do any albedo tests on the carbon shields and—”

“The reflected light heats the Patagonian coupling between the balloons to more than two hundred degrees.”

“Exactly. At the join itself, there’s a goddamn oven of mirrors, reflections of reflections of reflections. In full sunlight, you could raise plasma here.”

Bartek switched off his magnets, bounced off the trussing, and flew around the ring between the balloons, casually shooting out gas from the mech’s built-in nozzle.

After recording the balloons and their coupling in a single shot from three hundred and sixty degrees, he came to a halt, suspended at right angles to SoulEater’s Horus.

“Hmmm, it’s basically a question of material, chemistry, and atomic physics. I don’t know if I can do anything.”

SoulEater emoted the wind and the sea.

“Listen, I’m playing the long game here. This is only the beginning of the first habitat, and these kinds of engineering issues are going to accumulate – the further we get, the more there’ll be. We’ve got to have an expert here to resolve the various hardware conundrums as they arise.”

“So go and hire a Google slave.”

“What, and let a Trojan into the very heart? No thanks.”

Bartek suspected SoulEater of a certain insincerity here. Everybody hired G-slaves. Were Bartek’s services really so indispensable? Or did he simply feel sorry for his old buddy when Dagenskyoll got back to Asia and told him about Bartek’s paradisal existence? So they invented this pretext, a last practical challenge for the last hardware handyman.

“So hire them exclusively with the right to delete the copies once the work is done.”

“Do you know how much that costs? I’d have to sell myself into slavery.”

As the conversation veered towards Google slaves, Bartek couldn’t resist emoting the smoking ruins after the bombing of Hiroshima or some other similarly apocalyptic irony. His copies stolen by Frances Rory were only the beginning of an enormous bank of voluntary and involuntary backup transformers that the heirs of the Bull & Bull Alliance had accumulated over nearly three centuries in the server rooms belonging in the ancient past to Google. Bartek no longer bothered keeping up with who had his hands on which archives. There had been schisms, mergers, coups, sabotage, grand larceny, and great plagues. Even a religion and several innovative political systems had arisen. For in mech democracy was it hardware or software that voted? And if it was software, did one vote mean one process, a single live neuro-program, or the whole continuum of processes for a single identity? Would it not have made sense to compute the definite integral for the voting power of a transformer according to the history of his upgrades – for instance, by encompassing all the versions of SoulEater from 843.0.0 to 843.17.8 under a single curve? So what was stopping somebody from buying additional computational power for copies created exclusively to gain temporary voting power? Then democracy became nothing more than a paper mask for Darwinian capitalism, since each vote would automatically be won by whoever had the cash to buy the greatest number of simultaneously processing copies. Thus the transformers parted ways forever with the rule of the people as an idea. In the Paradise of the 20th century, dozens of thrillers and television series could have been made about this.