The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams (19 page)

“Don’t you? It’s not like we were planning some Blitzkrieg of the cosmos.”

“Did Australopithecus plan Hiroshima? This gardener of the universe, as you call him – he doesn’t look a hundred years ahead. He has a map of the probability of civilizational development for millions, even billions of years into the future. And in a billion years’ time, who knows what kinds of cosmic perversions the heirs and descendants of Homo sapiens might be into?”

The truth is out there

Bartek thought of the irigotchi, Cho’s birthers, the Mothernet vectors, and Fergusson’s paradisal epigenetics.

“A billion years – that’s impossible to know.”

“But he knows! Not because he understands logical consequence, but because he has statistics including all the stars and planets of the universe, all the forms of biology and reason. It’s not a question of guilt and punishment – it’s a question of hygiene.”

“And what? And that’s why it was seventeen light years? Don’t you see how many assumptions you’ve had to pull out of your sleeve? It’s a fairy tale.”

“Not a fairy tale, but a tested hypothesis. The seventeen light years weren’t to stop us finding their home planet or the remnants of their hyper-cannon, but to stop us reading the signature of the wormhole – its IP, my dear Mr. Hardware.”

Gilgamesh90 once again put her mech into a priestly pose, extending its arms to embrace the nebulae and quasars into which the dish of the hybrid telescope was aimed.

“Do you know what this knock-up of ours is listening for? The echoes of the waste radiation from the opening of the wormhole. You can’t just open it cleanly – it always leaves a mark. It’s pure physics. We dug up the calculations.”

Five seconds.

“You’re verifying the hypothesis.”

“We’re verifying the hypothesis. There are no fairy tale assumptions here, only logical consequences. If they really fired the Ray at us through a wormhole, it means there’s at least one civilization out there with access above the speed of light to the entire observable and non-observable universe, which implies in turn that they have a complete database of all possible trajectories of life and technology, which then implies a Gardener of the Universe and everything else I’ve told you here.”

But Bartek was looking in the opposite direction, under his feet, through the sparse skeleton of the dish, at the bright side of the Earth suspended beneath them.

“But why? Why, why, why? Why did they have to sterilize us so ingeniously? I mean, these wormhole badasses could have just gulped the Earth down a black hole and that would have been the end of that. So it really wasn’t a Death Ray at all. Since they made it so specifically like that, then they wanted to achieve exactly what they achieved. Not an extermination. They didn’t kill us.”

“And they achieved it.”

“What did they achieve? A few centuries delay in the inexorable cavalcade of progress? What’s the difference between human civilization before the Extermination and human civilization after the Extermination?”

Gilgamesh90 emoted a bearded old man strolling with a dog through an autumnal wasteland.

“What did they achieve… you really can’t see it? This isn’t human civilization! Or a civilization of machines, either. It’s not a question of progress at all: there’s been no great leap over the Technological Singularity… No, no, I’m not explaining it right. Go back!” Gilgamesh emitted “REWIND,” and then demagnetized and floated slowly towards Bartek’s Horus. “Do you remember all those questions? Those challenges, problems, and limits? I have this memory. ‘Human or not human,’ ‘machine or not machine,’ ‘conscious or not conscious,’ ‘single mind or multiple mind,’ ‘organic or not organic,’ and so on and so forth, over and over. Don’t you see what they’ve achieved?” The Honda X blew gently from under its front plate and came to a halt, suspended right in front of the Horus I, emote to emote. “What happened to the objects of all those efforts and enquiries, which seemed to us then more important than anything else?
They dissolved
.”

Emote to emote:

An empty freeway under a stormy sky.

Disintegrating churches and crumbling Roman statues.

A kite torn off its string.

“What once had meaning has no meaning.”

“Every civilization changes and evolves. We would have gone through this stage of development anyway.”

“But this isn’t development! Don’t you see? We haven’t discovered anything new. We haven’t added a single little brick to the pyramid of knowledge. We don’t use any technologies that didn’t already exist before the Extermination. Home and industrial robotics, superficial neuro-scans, the Internet, RFID, the Matternet, telepresences and neuro-prosthetics, chemical and biological synthesis, DNA from a test tube and man from a test tube, the archives of genetics and genetic tailoring, metamaterials, carbon fiber and molecular engineering – we had all that before. With varying levels of sophistication and implementation, but already invented and assimilated by the civilization. After the Extermination, we’ve just been forced to use these tools
differently
. The Ray blasted us out of one-track complacency. The technology hasn’t changed; only the aims and meanings we apply to it have changed.”

Suspended in space perpendicular to the Horus, the Honda stretched out a hand and tapped a screwdriver finger on the chest of Bartek’s mech.

“Honestly, when was the last time these questions even entered your mind: ‘Am I human?’ ‘Am I conscious?’”

“At the beginning, we all thought about those things.”

“But now? You don’t ask those questions, because you know:
they don’t make sense
.”

Bartek emoted Fergusson’s Fields of Plenty and the paradisal tribes of birthers.

Animated sprites and little creatures giving birth to comic-book humanos.

Dappled prosimians perched on the shoulders of a two-ton mech.

“That’s still a change, though, you can’t deny it – a kind of motion or evolution.”

“A kind of motion?! Before the Extermination every motion had to be forward. There was only one direction: growth, development, progress. You tell me: Is Fergusson’s Paradise progress?”

“But you can’t really say we’re going backwards, either.”

“Because now there are more than just two directions. Now there are all kinds of ups and downs,” said Gilgamesh, rotating her mech on all its axes, spinning it round in zero gravity in front of Bartek like a 3D compass. “We’ve dropped outside the old system of coordinates.”

The kite. The wasteland. The freeway.

Bartek felt that he was slowly floating away. Gilgamesh had inundated him, drowning him with her diatribe, emoting him to kingdom come with wormholes and galaxies.

“Come on, why are you really looking for the radiation from the wormhole? Do you want to take revenge on them – or maybe just thank them?”

“Ha, but imagine the form of that revenge!” The Honda X played a satirical medley straight into the Horus’s mask, from Monty Python to The Simpsons. “Anyway, these are matters for Norad. I’ve already paid you. Do you still want the monitoring recordings and the coordinates of the wormhole?”

Bartek could no longer look at Gilgamesh’s mask. He aimed his lenses down, down and to the side, at the welds of the meshing and the rivets of the trussing on the dish of the radio telescope.

He demagnetized his left foot and stomped it down.

“This knock-up of yours is about to fall apart. Do you really think the Google slaves can deal with it?”

“And how exactly would you be better than them?” asked Gilgamesh-Rory, pouring out false sympathy. “Oh! You were hoping we’d beg you! That’s why you hauled yourself over here – you really got yourself excited. A sudden reprieve from the daily grind of a paradisal robot! Because we
need
you, we can’t get by
without
you. Geez!”

Gilgamesh90 launched herself more powerfully towards the Horus, flying onto a mech on mech tangent. Bartek demagnetized his other foot to avoid having the robot’s leg broken and then pushed off to his left.

But the Honda X rapidly corrected its course and caught the Horus over the dish, shoving it over its edge. The masses of the two mechs were similar, and so they bounced off each other in Newtonian style: Bartek down towards the Earth, under the shadow of the radio telescope, and Gilgamesh90 over the curve of the dish, towards the Babbage and Jobs constellations.

“We don’t need you for anything,” she broadcast from a distance, as she shrank among the stars, while emotes of indulgent amusement puffed out around her mech in a furry halo. “Go back home to your Fergusson game and your precious single personhood.”

As he fell, Bartek crashed through deeper and deeper layers of dreaming. He passed satellites of Aztec pyramids, where Pokémon made sacrifices of half-dismantled mechs. He passed clouds of wild RNA soup, where Zeus-Cho raged with his thunder bolts, bringing thousands of monstrous genealogies to life with a demonic smile. Bartek kept falling in a stormy rain together with these monsters. Finally, he punched through the last layer of clouds and tumbled into bright light, into the day, into another dream, a dream of the present, into the almost cloudless blue over an ochre continent, into the open arms of Africa, into the ebony embrace of Lady Spiro.

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth

“We really don’t need you for anything.”

“So why don’t you leave me in peace?”

“Because I like you. My children like you. They’ll miss you.”

Bartek can only laugh with derision. The emote is terrible and pitiless: an axolotl fleeing a syringe filled with hormones.

The Al-Asr approaches the edge of the cliff and stares down into the abyss. The cinnabar egg of its head turns into the ovular snout of an axolotl. The bulging eyes of an amphibian frozen in its development scan the endlessly bright expanse of the continent of death and dreaming.

“Mika, Floki and Sloki, Dedek, Philomenka – they let themselves be vectored in a single moment, and not one of them even said goodbye. Do they like me? I’m a piece of furniture for them, a cupboard of vacuum tubes, an old PC or a blow-up doll. Maybe you like that old scratched and battered computer, but do you say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ to a puter?”

“But they haven’t gone anywhere. Can’t you see them? Can’t you feel them?”

Lady Spiro removes the scorched arm of the Schmitt 4 from among the embers of the dying fire and performs a miracle of paradisal creation in a mere minute. She strips the scrap metal down to its component parts, weaves it back together again with twigs, grass, charcoaled logs from the fire, and bones from the roasted rodent, rips out a clock spring from under her own ribs and fits it into the new rag doll; then just a little sand, a little water, a kiss from Lady Spiro’s wooden lips, and a humano-unbirther stands there on two hoofs, shakes its spiny head, hops up and down in a Dedek-like way on its right, left, right leg, grins a colorful emote of affection, and marches briskly towards Bartek.

In a reflex of pure horror, he leaps back and falls into the abyss.

The mech is not enough

When he hits the first shelf of rock, the recording cuts out, and he only comes back to his senses – to the machine – at the very bottom, at the foot of the cliff. The Al-Asr can repair itself internally, but several hours will pass before the iguarte can get back on its feet. Smashed and twisted out of shape, it bears no resemblance to the exotic handwork of the transformers of Allah. It is nothing but a colorful heap of scrap metal.