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

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.