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

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