The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams by Jacek Dukaj Read Free Book Online

trawl.”
    “Mmhmmm?”
    Bart shoved past Frances in his Star Trooper. The accumulation of mobile metal must have put the irigotchi on edge, since they gathered into a tight little herd and retreated behind the boxes of toy electronic sub-assemblies.
    Bart stretched out his hand towards them, flashing the LED tip of a finger.
    A Totoro crept out slowly and cautiously.
    “I’m teaching them light sequences. It turns out they’re also sensitive to radio signals. But the emotes for those are too tricky for me.”
    “Do they charge themselves by USB?”
    “There are plenty of open public ports left in the city, in cafés and shopping centers, and the Royal Alliance pumps energy into them like for the lights and computers. The irigotchi have come to know the locations, you see, like animals remember all the watering holes in an area, and they move around Tokyo between them. When they came out of nowhere to trample me for the umpteenth time, I finally began to track the daily circulation of the teddy bears.”
    “What for?”
    “I’m going to start catching them.”
    Bartek opened, closed, and opened a steel fist. The Totoro awkwardly scrambled up onto his shoulder. The Star Trooper stood up and held itself erect. The remaining soft toys pattered out from behind the boxes and arrayed themselves in a crooked fan formation along the wall.
    “You see?” Bartek brought up a floor plan of the room on his display with the positions of the irigotchi marked. “It’s a single mind, a neural network on high frequency bands.”
    Frances tried to stroke the Totoro’s dirty fur. The polymer fingertips of the sexbot slid over the synthetic hair of the toy, and Bartek felt that he was missing yet another crucial gland.
    It was no longer just melancholy. He was hit by a wave of condensed bitterness and envy. But whom did he envy? His own past self. Not even himself, but the memory of the old Bart, of somebody else.
    “Anyhow. I’ve been playing around with it.”
    Frances looked at him inquiringly, which is to say that she performed the look: a turn of the head, an expression on her face/mask, a narrowing of the eyes. All human.
    “We’ve thought about that. Whether it wouldn’t be better for our mental health to wean ourselves onto some kind of Tamagotchi – a substitute for animals.”
    Bartek remembered the Chūō Akachōchin blues.
    “We all feel it, even if we don’t admit it, like Mr. Tough Guy over here,” he said, pointing at SoulEater. “That something has been ripped out of us, that something’s missing.”
    “A body.”
    “I’m not talking about the body. I’m talking about something inside, something that didn’t make it through the IS3 scans.”
    Frances pinched the Totoro’s belly. The irigotchi silently sneezed.
    “Let’s say the soul got stuck in the wires, that it didn’t get through the IS. How would you tell the difference? How would you know? Where’s the model, the template man to put next to us and compare?”
    Bartek turned back towards the irigotchi. A Hello Kitty and a Mr. Worm were facing each other by the wall of racks, mimicking all the gestures and the whole choreography of the conversation between the Star Trooper Miharayasuhiro and the Honda sexbot. The Hello Kitty nibbled the air, while the Mr. Worm flashed its eyes and snout.
    “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