The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams (20 page)

The shining cinnabar snout of the axolotl mutely gazes out of the heap at two black figures rising over the jagged line of the cliff: the totemic silhouette of Lady Spiro and the little form of the humano.

The Mother does not extend this far; Bartek has fallen outside the borders of Paradise. Lady Spiro has to lean out and strain and bleed out of herself to reach the Al-Asr.

“Come back, come back, come back!”

Why? he would reply. Why, why? You don’t need me for anything. Nobody needs me for anything.

“Come back, you don’t have to be needed in Paradise, that’s not what we live for. Were Adam and Eve created to answer somebody’s needs? To carry out tasks? No, they were created to live. Come back, come back, and
live
.”

You don’t want to let me go, because you’re afraid I’ll end up like all the others who IS’d on the Ural Team cheats – Arkon, Fergusson, the seven hundred copies of Perez. They were all swallowed by the same void, dream, no dream, the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

“Come back, the children like you so much.”

No. By myself self self. I have to do it by myself.

He has to do it. Lady Spiro will send her children after him in spite of everything. Bartek cannot lie down here at the gates of Paradise. At dusk, he finally rises to his feet. The lights of San Francisco show him the way. He limps heavily. He has lost all his roundness and smoothness; the gleam of glass cinnabar is no longer for him. He limps along and after a hundred steps his right forearm falls off. The Golden Gate Bridge looms over the desert like a trampoline for the full moon, while axolotls bored with life leap off it into the tumultuous current of a river of stones.

The call of Lady Spiro falters and breaks off. This is the limit of her reach.

“What are you running away from? What are you looking for? A human being? Really? Admit it! You can admit it to me – what terrifies you most is the quiet possibility that nothing, nothing, nothing has changed. That
there is no difference
, right through all the IS’s of the transformation, the mechs, the flattened-out epigenetics and epicultures. And this, this is the naked truth of existence: hardware clanging against hardware, the echo of empty scrap metal under the sky of infinity. You can’t escape. There is no escape from this.”

The heap of scrap staggers, stumbles, gets up, staggers off again, and wades further into dreaming and the wasteland. This can’t be the truth. He remembers - though he cannot give it a name - he remembers the difference, he is certain he has lost something irretrievably. But what? What?

“There’s no difference, my friend, no difference…”

The dull eyes of the ambystoma search the horizon. Everything wavers; the desert is the only constant. He has collapsed onto Roman paving stones and lost his back plate. Something is wrong with the iguarte’s batteries. He must wait for the dawn and drink in the sunlight. Only then can he raise himself to a higher energy curve and move on.

And again, one foot in front of the other, limping, through Grenadas, Gothams, and Nessuses, all deserted and dead; through Florences and Shanghais; through the dried-up Sargasso Sea with millions of ships of the water, air, earth, and vacuum. The pedometers display absurd numbers. He would have crossed the continent by now. He reaches a line of ramshackle wind and solar power stations, and here he collapses under a white pole, as if beneath the fang of a prehistoric dragon bursting through the cracked earth; a fang, a rib, or a talon, scratching the sugary blue sky during the day and pecking out new craters in the disk of the moon at night. There is some kind of serious malfunction with the iguarte’s batteries. They won’t store energy through the night or fully charge themselves. The repair systems can’t deal with the problem either. There’s only just enough power in the broken-down mech to keep the processor going. Every movement of metal means one thought less. So he no longer moves. Propped up against the crystalline polished bone of the ancient beast, he has come to rest here before the vast altar of Africa. The machine inexorably loses its efficiency, entropy bites into the output of the sub-assemblies, and there is nothing else for it – he must gradually drop down to lower energy profiles, slowing down and cooling. He no longer notices the passage of the days, sometimes missing whole periods of sunlight and darkness. He is exposed to alternating seasons of murderous scorching heat and monsoonal downpours. Dunes of fine-grained sand rise up to his breastplate and then flow back down his inert limbs. The revolutions of the constellations accelerate; the Signs of the Zodiac and the Signs of Hardware spin round as if on a prayer wheel. More and more new sparks flash into existence between them – Rosettes and non-Rosettes, radio telescopes, habitats, solar mirrors, orbital elevators, and particle accelerators. He would wonder what they were building up there in space, but such thoughts would throw him into lethargy for a year, so he doesn’t wonder, but just lets himself be bathed in the current of time, the current of dreaming, the current of technology, the current of nature, no longer even able to tell them apart, while radiant metropolises succumb to equally stunning cataclysms, volcanic eruptions, meteor strikes, the march of many-footed lightning, fires and floods, then the invasions of carnival Life, the deserts blooming with ever stranger floras and Mothernets, metallic grasses, herds of migrating flowers, blotting paper forests of eosin photosynthesis, manga Mother jungles, hummingbird angels with little fractal wings hunting with mini-tridents and harpoons, sometimes even pricking and pecking at the sprawled-out scrap metal lying under the dragon’s rib, crumbling the last cinnabar plates of its head and breast; then the time of Miyazaki Life, and the plain crawling with swarms of timid little sprites, processions of kami and gods, armadas of wooden airships floating past among low-lying clouds; then once again the desert and the fallow land and the dead mirages; then once again the movement of self-animated matter, the stones speaking to the dunes, the dunes whispering to the moon, the sand swirling into tornadoes and towers and termite mounds and poetic biomechs, supernaturally baroque landscapes of Life without life, and all the while there is no energy left even for astonishment, with the vectors, natures, dreams, and civilizations flitting past so rapidly, 200K, 300K, a million days after the Extermination, and another million, and 5M, 10M, and probably nobody even remembers the Extermination any more, probably nobody remembers man any more; with no power or resources left for memory, is there any point at all, there’s no point, since there’s really no difference, no difference, and you know with absolute certainty that only hardware remains. 100M, 200M, 300M, the joyful clock of the void ticks on, and in the cracked lenses of the rusted mech galaxies and universes rise and set.

Thus after a brief career of a few hundred thousand years, crowded with splendor and agony, the Seventeenth gave place to the Eighteenth, and, as it turns out, the Last, human species.

…Indeed, only by some such trick could I do justice to the conviction that our whole present mentality is but a confused and halting first experiment.

Last and First Men
W. Olaf Stapledon

July – December 2013