The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams (4 page)

That’s the real curse, thinks Bart. Metal on metal, heart on heart, and every awkward moment multiplies the pathos of loneliness a thousand times. As if under a microscope. As if projected on a hundred-hectare screen.

We are monstrous shadows and scrapheaps of human beings, the molybdenum despair of empty hearts.

Manga blues – they sit on the Chūō Akachōchin terrace, under the last red lanterns, sad robots regaling one another with legends.

The first legend is about man.

“It had wings like a butterfly’s dream,” says Dagenskyoll, his shoulder speaker crackling slightly on the sibilant consonants. “Propellers that whirred into light blue rainbows. Dawntreader XII, all nanofibers and carbon fiber, an angel stingray cross,” he continues, his chest screen displaying sketches and schematic diagrams of the plane ripped from Google caches. “Wingspan: 78 meters. Mass: 1.64 tons. It had just been serviced; they kept it in a hangar at the airport in Dallas. When the Death Ray hit the other hemisphere, they had enough time to load their families, some provisions, and equipment. They took off with a several hour head start on the Meridian. The Earth rotates at a speed of 1,674 kilometers an hour – but that’s at the equator. The Dawntreader couldn’t go faster than 300 kilometers an hour, so in order to keep ahead of the Death Meridian, they had to stay above the eightieth parallel. Of all the solar aircraft, only the Dawntreader could manage it.” Dagenskyoll displays the structure of the photoelectric cells that cover the wings and fuselage of the plane. In the pictures they really do shimmer like butterflies in the sun. “By their second circuit they were flying above an Earth roasted clean of all its organic life. Only machines answered their radio calls: the automatic systems of airports and armies. When the Ray died out after one hundred and seventy-seven hours, they could only reach this conclusion from the information being transmitted by machines from the other hemisphere. They made no contact with any transformers; they did not go online. They flew on. Votes were held on board the Dawntreader: to land or not to land? Should they land for a short while, stock up on provisions and then fly on, or wait and find out whether the Ray had really died out? In the end they split up. After two weeks, some of them had had enough, so they touched down somewhere in the north of Greenland, on a runway near an ice settlement, stocked up on water and food, offloaded the unwilling, and took off again.” Dagenskyoll raises one of his four skeletal-mosaic arms and points to the zenith of the starless sky over Tokyo. “They’re still up there, flying, circling above us on the transoceanic heights.”

Now everybody is sure that it’s a legend.

Bartek has seated himself on the edge of the terrace, clutching the sentimental prop of a beer can, a Budweiser covered with gaudy katakana characters. If you were to set it upright on a tabletop, it would begin to sway and gyrate like a hula-hoop dancer. Bartek holds the can motionless in the kilojoule grip of a Star Trooper.

We’re all gadgets, he thinks. In the distance, forty floors up, the wind sways a loose cable, sprinkling occasional fountains of electric sparks down on a darkened Tokyo. For a moment Bartek wonders how much electricity leaks out of the Royalist power plant like this. Then he thinks about fireworks and Hollywood special effects. The wind is cold, but metal cannot feel the wind. Metal cannot feel anything.

So this is how he spends his evenings.

A stranger in a strange land. Even stranger since there is not a single Japanese transformer. The whole of Japan was fried instantly the moment the Ray hit. Asia was in the hemisphere of death at Zero Hour.

“Anyhow.”

The second legend is about paradise.

“They pulled it off. They did it. On the servers of one of the big studios in California they used ready-made scans to set up a whole world on the other side of the Uncanny Valley. Or at least a house, a garden, and some bodies. They created a foolproof filter, so that finally you could connect to the net – mind-to-mech and even mind-to-mind – without any risk of malware unstitching your memory or infecting your consciousness. So they log in, and there, on the other side, they have soft, warm, moist bodies again, miraculously fleshy to the touch. They can touch, smell, and taste again.” Dagenskyoll speeds up, and the hulking robots bunched around him in a spellbound circle press even closer, leaning in, sticking out microphone tongues and scanner tendrils. “They can drink and eat and drink.” He raises his glass of vodka and a long metallic grating sound rings out, krrrshaaahhrrr: the screeching interference of speakers and microphones, or maybe even the sighing of embarrassed machinery. “They drink, drink and sleep, even if they can’t dream, and they walk on the grass and bathe in the sunshine—”

Krrrshaaahhrrr!

“They have dogs, cats, birds, bugs. Mosquitoes bite them, dust and pollen get in their eyes, the sun blinds them, since the sun is always rising there, and they set up grills and burn their fingers—”

Krrrshaaahhrrr!

“—as they eat the steaming meat.”

Now this is too much, and the robots press up against Dagenskyoll, almost crushing him.

“Do you know the IP?”

“Only the bosses of the alliances know it. They’re the ones who meet there. To discuss strategies for the future, exchange information, and resolve disputes.”

A black medico mech roars from a distorted speaker straight into Dagenskyoll’s front display:

“BUT WHERE! WHERE IS IT?!”

“California. The House of the Rising Sun.”

Death is not the end

A legend. A legend too beautiful to be true.

Meanwhile, Johnny sits down next to Bartek. Johnny has smashed up his showpiece Terminator mech, so now he’s in the same sexbot as most of the other transformers in Japan: female model, assembly-line face, Geisha V or VI.

“Someone’s looking for you.”

“Who?”

Johnny displays a photograph of a robot painted in black and yellow stripes with enormous shoulder girdles.

“Never seen him before. Some kind of makeshift from salvage?” asks Bartek. “Why didn’t he send an email?”

“Ha! Maybe he doesn’t get along with the Bully Boys.”

The Bull & Bull Alliance is one of the smallest, but since it controls the Google servers most transformers regard it as the shadowy power pulling all the strings after the Extermination – the contemporary equivalent of the Illuminati or the Freemasons. There’s also a widespread belief that the Bully Boys inherited the treasures and passwords of the NSA, so they can read everybody’s email, however strongly encrypted, and that they’re now trying to slither into the transformers’ minds through sloppily formatted hardware.

“Did he introduce himself?”

“I only heard that he asked SoulEater about you. They had a long chat over by the Flood.”

Bartek takes another look at Johnny’s display.

“But for them to give him a mech at all, he must be a friend.”

“Or he came on foot.”

Almost all of the alliances are based in Japan. Only here do they have such an abundance of humanoid robots at their disposal. In them, the transformers can feel alive in a living world again – at least a little bit; at least in quotation marks and metal.

Mainly these are various models of mechanical dolls from sex shops and whorehouses – the Japanese were justly famous for their ingenuity in the field of perversion – as well as medical robots, domestic medicos designed to take care of the elderly and infirm. At the moment of the Extermination, Japan was the oldest society on the planet and medical robotics had become a prodigious branch of their industry.

And only in Japan did the infrastructure required for the transformers’ survival – the servers and their power sources – operate automatically to a sufficient extent not to require human beings to keep it functioning. After three years, Tokyo has still not entirely flickered out. After Fukushima, the Japanese had safeguarded their nuclear power stations so paranoically against the plagues of nature and man – including biblical tsunamis, nuclear war, and an attack from Godzilla – that they could run unmanned as long as entropy didn’t overcome the material and the supplies of uranium didn’t run out.

Meanwhile, the rest of the human world is disintegrating. The electric cable whips against a window of the building, scattering sparks as clouds of spiraling trash rush down the canyons of the streets.

The third legend is of the Evil God.

“… and then he hit RESET, and everything alive began to die…”

Bart touches the can with the tip of his finger-gripper and watches the Budweiser rock to and fro in front of him. A mech can freeze motionless like no living organism; motion is what gives it life. A robot that does not work is a pile of scrap metal and nothing more. Frozen into stony stillness, Bart and Johnny watch the dancing can. On the big screen above them, millions of lights glow in
Blade Runner
’s nocturnal city – a festival of luminosity shimmering against the gloomy backdrop of PostApoc Tokyo.

As if to the rhythm of the lurching can, the hulking masses of two sexbots rock and writhe as they perform a grotesque parody of a human sex act on a podium at the back of the bar. Geisha on Geisha, two female mechs on unknown transformers simulate lesbian kisses with the precision and tenderness of tempered steel, caresses of breasts and buttocks, armored fingers on armored loins, machines turning the dance of animal desire monstrous in a cold ritual stroboscopically lit by laser light and set to the deafening bass of militant striptease music. Bartek stares and stares, emoting a cringe of embarrassment. How many levels of artifice? How many layers of quotation marks? He soon loses count. They cannot get drunk; they do not even have the programs to simulate being drunk. They cannot have sex; they do not have the programs for sexual chemistry or arousal. All they have left is this clinical performance of sex by robots originally constructed for the erotic servicing of real, organic people. Rooted to the spot, like a statue, Bartek watches for two hundred and eighty-seven seconds before he cannot take any more of it. He gets up with a screech of metallic sinews. The cup of Tokyo bitterness has overflowed.

“Melancholy’s king, melancholy’s the Mikado…”

The next day, SoulEater39 invited Bartek to one of the waterside warehouses of the Royal Alliance in the Keiyō Industrial Zone. Two districts away, the Flood began. SoulEater had logged onto his shogun (as the leader of the alliance in Japan and the head of the GOATs, he always had first choice of machine), and so they marched along the monorail track over the empty streets and rooftops.

Bart was in a heavy Shift series XIV, a headless mech built for work in the toughest conditions during natural disasters. The Royal Alliance had kept dozens of these Japanese mechs in oil and nitrogen, with their fast-paced processors and memories as pure as an infant’s dreams.

After descending to ground level, they passed another RA transformer on his way back from a daily survey of the sea. He was dragging a wet tangle of trash and fiber-optic cables behind him over the cracked asphalt.

“What’s that?”

Instead of answering, the mech projected the flickering 3D scans from an underwater probe.