The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams (17 page)

“But has any kind of humanity ever existed just as naturally – that is, without commandments, prohibitions, or ideological systems – without capitalism? Well, Fergusson found it: before the Neolithic revolution, fifteen thousand years ago, before Homo sapiens began to till the soil. When prehistoric man still lived in hunter-gatherer cultures, satisfying his needs exclusively with what wild nature provided. Back then, he was healthier and stronger, he lived longer, almost without violence, without exploitation, with equality between women and men, without hierarchies of power, almost without working. This was the real paradise, the Golden Age, Eden, the exile from which is remembered by all human mythologies, in every culture, on every continent. Because we really were exiled: man discovered the cultivation of the soil. Civilization began, but with it came the fall into capitalism and the slavery of work with its whole cultural superstructure. And to this day we haven’t managed to free ourselves from it. We don’t even have the imaginative tools to do so.

“You don’t work – so what are you living for? Can you find any meaningful existence in doing nothing, in stagnation, in the vegetative passing of days and years? A robot standing still is a robot out of work, which is a dead robot. A robot exists to work.

“But if we preserved that memory of thousands of years of hunter-gatherer culture, then we could live like that. The transformers could live a genuinely transformer life, a pure transformer life, instead of just forcing ourselves to stage this ghostly theatrical reenactment of human beings
working in order to live
.

“So we invented this Paradise. But then we were hit by the curse of dreams come true. Because the moment you say ‘Paradise,’ you think of all the idealizations of the world from before the Extermination that fill the archives – a sugar-coated Hollywood. Our first humanos absorbed it through every pore of their imaginations. Then the mishmash began, like everywhere else: the humanos start to IS, transform, enter alliances, and give birth to their own humanos, this time on a heavily Hollywood-influenced epigenesis, and it all gradually eats into the Mother, vectors superimpose themselves on vectors – you hit fast forward and after thirty kilodays this is the Paradise you get: The Lion King, a compendium of Disney and Pixar, a kiddie park of cartoons and comics, more and more infantile with every generation, and more and more disconnected from the truth about man.

“Or maybe this is just how I see it.”

Dagenskyoll emoted Sartre and Haneke and another cigarette.

Bartek emoted Woody Allen and Paul Bowles.

They sat and smoked. (Not really. But sort of.)

“Lady Spiro can’t help?”

“And who’s in charge at your place?” snapped Bartek. “Don’t tell me it’s a democracy.”

“Honestly? I’m not really sure myself.”

“Exactly. Remember how administration worked before the Extermination in the larger networks? Somebody has the power, but who exactly? The person or the program? The collective or the procedure? Everything overlaps, blurs, and turns into process. I’m damned if I’ve got the slightest clue whether Lady Spiro comes from some humano-transformer mishmash, from a long-lived vector of the Matternet, or from pure managerial software. She certainly doesn’t know herself. She’s grown into the Mother of Paradise. We’re probably breathing her now,” said Bartek, emoting a breath until his mech mask was stamped with the face of the Greek Boreas. “But I heard that the randomites on the Canaries uprooted their Internet of Matter. Is that true?”

Dag uneasily displayed an uneasy expression.

“Those are some hardcore fucked-up dudes. They really do randomize themselves in the neuro and DNA: sometimes one thing suits them, sometimes another. A week of negotiation and I thought I’d go nuts over there,” said Dag, nudging Bartek’s Al-Asr once again. “Seeing you feels like coming back to my senses.”

Beneath the cliff, an upside-down Venice floated by. Las Vegas, El Dorado, and Metropolis followed close on its heels as the Al-Asr nudged the Schmitt back.

From the entire repertoire of physical intimacy – transformer and transformer, two slaves of hardware drowned in an ocean of boundless loneliness – what was left to them?

The Schmitt slapped the Al-Asr on the metal plate of his back so that something jangled on the vermilion mech. The Al-Asr cracked the Schmitt from a squatting position with a lightning uppercut.

They pounded each other again and again – one, two, three – rising to their feet and reeling from the blows right up to the foot of the tower.

Joyful emotes sprayed in fountains. Alhambras and Teotihuacans paraded past on the sandy plain. The noise of battered metal resounded across the wasteland.

The Castlings ran around them, clapping and singing:

“The transformers are fighting! The transformers are bashing!”

They bashed and fought and wrecked each other with an abandon worthy of the First and Last Paradise. Dag played the roars of Godzilla, King Kong, and the Alien from his archive; Bartek replied with the primal howl of Bruce Lee and the wail of a ship’s fog siren.

Under the fists of the mechs, Africa trembled and the clouds tore themselves from the sky. Aiming his head like a torpedo, Bartek slammed into Dag’s hip joints; Dag grabbed Bartek around the middle and hurled the robot onto the stone under the tower. The tower tilted and the sun jolted askew on the blue sky.

“The transformers are fighting!”

The Al-Asr slammed its fist under the Schmitt’s breastplate and tore out a tangle of cables. The Schmitt broke off a pillar from the tower – a two-ton lump of wood and metal and concrete – and clubbed the Al-Asr with it. Laughter carried across the Mothernet. They stood on the decks of sinking aircraft carriers and smashed dozens of fighters and helicopters. Around them, the continents of alien planets caved in, while they kept boxing with their pile driver fists. They fell into exploding supernovas on the backs of inhuman mech gods, and still they battered away at each other at three hundred decibels while goggle-eyed axolotls gorged themselves on popcorn around them.

Metal on metal, soul on soul. The bones and blood of the robots sprayed out in all directions – a hand, a leg, shrapnel from electronic sub-assemblies. Bartek bends down and picks up the old arm of the Schmitt 4. Scoured by the desert wind and sand for a year and a half since their fight, it seems almost like an ancient artifact, a trace of some Dänikenian civilization from before the time of man.

Bartek stands with this relict of a brother mech in his hand and for a long moment he cannot move, as if he had jammed. Something cracks inside him (not hardware). He would cry, but he has nothing but emotes.

Lady Spiro sits before the fire in the classic pose of the Pietà, a well-fed humano Castling asleep on her lap, curled up in a half-embryo. Lady Spiro delicately strokes the little body of the fairy-tale birther with ebony fingers, her totemic face leaning down with primal tenderness over the defenseless human. White protein in the embrace of black wood. Her fingers are like lively piano keys, dancing over the Castling’s forehead to the beat of inaudible tam-tams. Lady Spiro the black goddess, Lady Spiro the doll of pre-human dreams and myths, Lady Spiro the mother of Africa.

Bartek flings the Schmitt’s arm into the fire. The sacrificial-mechanical offering raises a fountain of sparks.

Lady Spiro watches with eyes like two level knots in blackened bark.

“What beautiful despair!”

“Isn’t it?” says Bartek, with no need to emote his bitterness, since this voice is now his default. “It took me one hundred thousand nights to reach this end.”

“Is that what you’ve been missing? The great feelings, the great agonies, the dramas of Paradise?”

“Don’t talk to me about Paradise. This isn’t Paradise.” Twenty percent dreaming and Lady Spiro glimmers in the firelight, almost dissolving into a somnambulant hallucination, flickering between a wooden effigy and a Maasai shaman.

“Not Paradise? But what are you missing?”

Bartek gazes into the night and into himself. How can he answer this question? It is as if he were suffocating or had already suffocated, as if for three hundred years he had endured in a concrete stranglehold. He knows that something is missing, the most important something, but when he tries to pronounce the word or the thought, he can only radiate silence, emptiness.

“But I had some kind of life beyond the life of a robot. I had hobbies and passions, quirks and idiosyncrasies, loves and hates, affinities and aversions. I had a personality.”

“And now you don’t?”

“I don’t know. Do I?”

This can’t be all. Once there was the profound mystery and essence of humanity, but he and they – the transformers – lost it all so completely and irrevocably in the IS3 transformation that now they can’t even make the imaginative leap to comprehend what they have lost.

Yet they feel and they suspect, digesting hundreds of days in the mechanical repetition of work, as if they were really nothing but that which they are able to do, surrendering to energy cycles more rigidly immutable than the astronomical cycles of darkness and light, vacantly absorbing the after-images of artificial entertainment and winding these fictional lives around their minds. Standing for hours in a statue-like stupor, switched off like real robots, not doing anything, not living anything, no longer even bothering to perform the social rituals of the body or to carry out the pathetic charade of sexbot carnality. Their whole life is a robotic life: fix this, do that, build this. Their whole life is a hardware dream, and yet they feel, they really feel that THIS CANNOT BE ALL.

“But I had one.”

“Did you?”

He has worked himself up. With his head thrust into the night, his processor on the highest revolutions, cooling it with the whole surface of the mech, he pushes deeper into the darkness, into the African coolness, into a dream of the past, where he unpacks the hopelessly scrambled archives from the iguarte’s internal memory and finds himself once again strolling along the bustling promenades of a park, among people and animals; he argues with a clerk at an office window, bathes a sleepy grandchild, shivers feverishly beneath sweat-soaked blankets, touches the eyelids of a sleeping woman with the tip of his tongue, runs after a fleeing tram, trembles in a trench under artillery fire, snoozes at work with his head on the keyboard of a rebooted computer, pushes a crying baby out of his loins into the world, walks out after a night shift into a city steaming with spring rain, while the sun bursts out from under the horizon and the processor finally overheats so that the different dreams, times, and lines of hardware melt and meld together.

The harsh African sun burst out from under the horizon, as it had always burst out over Edens and Rais. Bartek reflexively tensed his spine to spread his black wings even wider. It was already the three hundred and fifteenth revolution of the Earth for the lonely, orbiting Horus I – a helpless little sphere speeding through an astrophysical pinball machine. He had long since used up the last drop of gas in his maneuvering tanks. Either the equations would mesh together and orbit would flow into orbit, or Bartek’s Horus would drop out of the game for good.

He spun slowly. Under-above him a half-crescent of blinding light traced the outline of Asia and the Pacific, before the accelerating avalanche of the morning rushed out from behind the black disc of the planet. Suddenly flushed out of the cold nothingness, the Horus took on sharp contours, as the lines of day and night sliced through it, dividing each of its wings into positive and negative. Veins of icy fire flowed off them into the stony liver of the robot.

Bartek concentrated inside the cooled mech. He switched on all the diagnostic systems and the thermostat, optimizing the solar profile angle. The wings drank in the light of the Sun down to the last drop. The dish of the Google construct expanded in the zoom in a rough crescent of solar reflections. Bartek initiated the countdown and aimed his right arm. The numbers descended, the graph curves approached each other and eventually overlapped, and within a fraction of a second the Horus exploded into programmed motion. It disengaged the sails of its wings, shot out an anchor line from a launcher on its arm, and curled up into an embryonic ball.

The anchor hooked onto the construct – a good few dozen meters away, passing Bartek’s orbit with a vector differential of a few meters per second – and the Horus jolted before veering to one side along the resultant of the two orbits. The mech began to haul in the line, but before it had reeled in even a quarter of its length, the resultant spun into a tightly spiraling path. After spinning momentarily in a diminishing radius, Bartek’s speeding robot slammed into the side of the dish.

The impact dented both its shins, crushed its right nozzles, and crumpled its right shoulder. There would be no more moving that arm. He maintained his connection. He had at least three open Black Castle satellites within range, as well as the recycled Iridium satellites – and that was what counted.

He unhooked the anchor line, switched on his magnets, and slung himself over the edge. The same edge threw a shadow that nearly bisected the dish’s interior, from the receiver located at the geometrical focal point to the multi-leveled galleries extending along the rim.