The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams (7 page)

“The intelligence of the trawl, see. They were meant to be cuddly toy friends for children in Japan. The neuro-architecture installed in their processors was plastic enough for them to constantly learn from their owners, each of them from the individual child it was bought for. The kid’s personality, behavior, moods, habits, caprices, emotions. Little brothers and sisters for only children. The individual irigotchi couldn’t develop beyond the level of lizards, but when they started to form herds after the Extermination – how many of them would there be in Tokyo? a million? – and when they began to modify the integrated neuro-structure in the absence of even a single human being. … Like those deep-sea nets, SoulEater. I mean, tell me, what or who do they wrap themselves around?”

SoulEater displayed a crucified Christ and a dissected frog.

“Around you?”

“The street herd gallops over me without even noticing. For the herd, I’m just a minor irregularity in the terrain. But if I were to start from a single toy, a few toys, and then gradually build up the network, winding it around myself like cotton candy on a stick…”

Bart set the Totoro on the desktop by the monitor. The soft toy immediately started tapping something out on the keyboard. They looked at the screen: random babble.

Bart emoted a shrug of his shoulders.

“It’s not a person, I know, not a dog, not a cat, not a hamster. But it’s still something else – a not-I, a second someone.”

“A million lizards.”

Was he joking? It was impossible to tell. The speaker was set to a neutral tone.

Frances gently moved the Totoro aside and manually entered an IP and a long RioBit code.

“Go ahead, check it.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

SoulEater39 nodded his clumsy head.

This was a serious issue, perhaps the most important point of transformer etiquette: to trust someone else’s hardware. Would a back door suddenly open through which the Plague could install itself in your mind? After all, its nature had still not been determined. A safe limit had been established by a method of trial and error: files less than 70MB did not risk infection. So at least they could happily emote from Google, but not much else besides.

Of course, nobody transferred himself onto the processors of the robots themselves. They were much too weak to deal with the whole neurosoft at IS3 standard. Instead, you just opened up a hard link with the robot, with a one-millisecond feedback. Yet even like this a great many transformers mashed themselves irretrievably in the first days after the Extermination.

“Okay.”

He parked the Star Trooper by the workshop servers. He didn’t have to do anything, since the link switch was in his mind. He checked the privacy protocols, then switched the sensorics over to himself from Frances’s IP – image and sound okay – and finally put on the whole new robot together with the feedback.

They found themselves in a windowless but brightly illuminated storeroom full of boxes, plastic containers, and glass bottles. RioBit recognized the drivers of the General Electric Cypher 4.2: a humanoid office robot put into production just before the Extermination. Frances Rory stood beside him in her Cypher. The two machines differed only in the color of their side casing – this was a unisex model.

“This way.”

They walked out through a corridor to an elevator, which was working. Everywhere glowed broad LED strips. The rooms were clean, almost gleaming, and Bart felt as if he were on an excursion into the science fiction of his childhood.

The Mothernet wasn’t responding to his pings, and he couldn’t even see the tags of the doors and thresholds. In a hall on the third floor, he managed to zoom in and read the contents of some old fliers pinned to a cork noticeboard: announcements about doctoral studies. They were at MIT.

“Good transfer.”

“Our satellite.”

Frances flashed out the light sequences to open a series of doors.

They entered an enormous laboratory, packed to the ceiling with complicated medical machinery.

“Wow.”

“Now you get it. Every single hardware whizz is worth his weight in gold to us.”

The laboratory was so vast – with glass partitions instead of walls and multiple rows of centrifuges, sequencers, sterilizers, diffusers, spectroscopes, and microscopes behind them – that it took Bartek a moment to pick up the movement at the back of the room: two GE mechs buzzing about by the IBM shelves.

After spotting them, he immediately recognized something unnatural about their movements – or rather something un-transformerlike.

He emoted a furrowed brow.

“Who are they?”

Frances emitted a long sigh.

“We don’t have the people. And I’m not even talking about specialists, but about loyalties to the guilds and alliances.”

“That reminds me, I didn’t manage to google you – you’re a freelancer, right?”

“This project has to be freelance if it’s going to make any sense at all. That’s why I’m talking directly with SoulEater and with you, and not with the royal council or even with the GOATs. There’s me, there’s Cho, who was an assistant here in the grants department when he was alive, and there’s Lagira, a postdoc from São Paulo. And now you.”

“What about them?” Bartek asked, pointing at the pair of mechs at the other end of the lab.

Now Frances emoted a shrug.

“I’m not going to copy myself, and so far I haven’t been able to trust anyone else. So what else was left? Bots tried and tested in battles and quests. That one there is a necromancer from the twenty-forth level of a Korean AMMORPG, and the other one is the Asteroid Hunter from the Blizzard space opera.

“Why the weird walk?”

“I plugged in some motor skills for it from a Chinese wuxia opera. Normally it flew on exoskeleton afterburners, mainly in zero gravity.”

“I see – degradation.”

“And gravitation. In a word: down.”

Bartek wanted to laugh and nudge Frances with an elbow in a reflex of quasi-spontaneous affection. All he could manage was the smash of metal on metal, the cold echo reverberating throughout the lab.

“Sorry.”

He displayed a GIF image of Flip and Flip.

But Frances was already two steps into the lab and into her story.

“Alright. Take a look. We’re talking about something like this.”

He stepped closer and zoomed in on the casings of machines as large as industrial refrigerators.

“Okay, I’ve googled this line of Polygen products, high-temperature chemical synthesis, but I don’t really get—”

“We’ll dig out the theory from the scientific databases, but we need somebody who can deal with the hardware, from the stupid cooling to cleaning the circuits. None of us understands how it actually works – only what we’re supposed to get in the output.”

“What are you supposed to get?”

“Life. A human being.”

Of gods and bots

Blank.

And Bartek emoted a blank.

“Huh?”

“Not a single organic compound survived, right? All the protein chemistry was fried,” said Frances, going over to Bartek and turning down her speakers. “But think: Where did organic life on Earth come from in the first place? Where? From inorganic chemistry. In the beginning, you just had a hot soup of elements and a seething mass of high and low energies for millions of years. And then, boom: RNA, DNA, cells, plants, animals, a fish crawls out onto the shore, and voilà,
Homo sapiens
. But we don’t have to repeat that whole process step by step now. Before the Extermination, biochemists were already synthesizing chains of nucleotides fairly well. We have the building blocks ready, the whole chemistry of primordial ingredients, the transition from inorganic to organic. And we have the recipes: precise DNA maps from the Human Genome Project. Of course, we’ll have to synthesize the egg itself as well and prepare the wombs in incubators, but that technology also existed, exists.”

Frances spoke while Bartek stood there, a dead lump of metal, listening and thinking.

“It won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“In order to survive, a biological organism has to have the whole world of biology around it. Correct me if I’m wrong – I’m not a biologist, but I’ve read a few books. The simplest thing: bacterial flora in the stomach. And what about food? Human beings also consume protein: kilograms of other life. Tons, hundreds of tons over a period of years. It won’t work.” Frances displayed a lady of the manor curtseying low in a crinoline ball gown.

“Of course. The whole world of biology. That’s exactly the point. It’ll be years of work. Are you in?”

A machine-made man. A reset perpetrated by an Evil God, after which all the hierarchies have been reversed. Now robots were creating man. Bartek raised his metal arm and slid the sharp edge of his finger along the smooth, gleaming housing of the DNA/RNA synthesizer, pressing hard until a scratch appeared, metal on metal, with a high-pitched squeal that would have made his ears hurt (if he had had ears).

“Are you in?”

The show must go on

He liked to walk along the empty and naturally deserted ocean beaches, and he liked the roofs of the skyscrapers in Minato. He had a simple system for walking up stairs. He would release the mech to climb up the hundred floors by itself and then come back into it only when the robot had reached the top. At night-time, Tokyo from this perspective looked like a postcard of Tokyo with holes burnt into it: great irregular stains of total darkness, here and there the bright pimples of advertisements, neon lights, LED mega-screens, a few 3D lasers, and illuminated sections of the labyrinth of streets. As long as the Royal Alliance controlled the power plant at Hamaoka, the gigawatts would flow into these empty stage sets. The Royalist transformers had voted time and again for the illumination of the deserted city. They could not cope psychologically in a totally darkened city.

Bartek liked to walk in his mech to the very edge of the rooftop, until his gyroscopes trembled from the slightest breath of wind. There he would observe the life of the dead city, the urban zombie, from the brink of a monumental abyss. One night, he saw the movement of red points on the sky over the skyscrapers. The Patagonians had released their air-drones into the RA neighborhoods. Another night, he made the final step forward and plummeted down to the pavement, recording the whole flight millisecond by millisecond.

When the Patagonians and Black Castle robbed a third sex shop in a row, he began to go out on night patrols near the Aiko Tower. The spare parts for the Hondas would run out one day as well. Previously, he had paid no attention to the territorial scramble between the alliances, but now he checked the maps of influence and the reports on foreign mechs encountered on RA territory every day – the alarm signals of the Tokyo Mothernet. He took a Spit Gun and some spare batteries (he couldn’t feel their weight anyway), and went out on long walks. The bones of Japanese people and the finer bones of electronic gadgets and plastic junk crunched under the metal tread of his feet. He stayed out until the bulging sun emerged from behind the skyscrapers of Shiodome, and he could finally bring yet another night of cold loneliness to an end. (They still had not found a good plugin for sleep.)