The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams Read Free

take his haul of hardware home in the morning – one-legged Bartek once again lost his balance, collapsing with a crash against, and sliding down, a pole crowned with a sagging cluster of thick cables.
    Now he could exchange glances with the irigotchi almost on the same level. A bedraggled Totoro blinked sleepily at the Star Trooper and then extended its paw. Bartek waved at the fluffy character. The toy trembled and began to crawl awkwardly towards him.
    Before he knew it, the Totoro, a teddy bear, and a Hello Kitty had all nestled themselves into his titanium chest.
    He stood up and limped off, propping himself on his Spit Gun. He looked back. The irigotchi were still trailing after him.
    He was missing a leg. He couldn’t run away.
    “Just don’t suffocate me.”
    The irigotchi knew neither Polish nor English. Only the fading lights of night-time Tokyo answered him in a blinking form of Morse code. It was day 847 PostApoc, and the next eternity was opening up before Bartek.

    In the workshop of an underground garage, beneath the forty-storey Aiko apartment complex, he toiled away to make himself a replacement limb.
    The parts for a boutique Miharayasuhiro were rare items. Even rarer were the skills required to make use of them. The Tokyo transformers of the Royal Alliance turned to Bartek when in need, and now he felt like the handyman to half the world. Surplus hardware was a kind of payment for the service. Hundreds of spare robot parts of varying sizes, acquired in this way, were now stacked against the workshop’s walls and piled high on the racks above Bartek.
    Oh body! my homeland! thou art like steel
    He had terabytes of construction plans and instruction manuals loaded onto his hard drives, and had amassed a comprehensive library of urban hardware catalogs, thick as bibles. These were divided into sections for the different lines of mechs: domestic, street, industrial, medical, municipal, military, recreational, air, and underwater. Slowly, from one page and catalog to the next, the mechs evolved into drones, which in turn evolved into stationary hardware and the Matternet itself: the Internet of Matter, a server-less network of ubiquitous microprocessors, operating on RFID, infrared, and NFC.
    In the decade before the Extermination, billions of dollars had been pumped into the industry. Unemployment had risen, as one corporation after another switched from human workers to robots. Societies were aging, but instead of human children and grandchildren it was an army of patient and solicitous machines that was called upon to care for the elderly. And while the mech soldier may have cost a fortune to manufacture, its death on the battlefield cost nothing in public opinion polls.
    Another ten or fifteen years and there would have been millions of these service robots tethered to radio leashes all over the world. But the Extermination struck at the very dawning of this new era.
    If only Bartek could call a mech service center now! These catalogs were essentially compendiums of prototypes and demonstration models. He still couldn’t read the Japanese handbooks, and they were the ones that interested him the most.
    In a Faraday cage at the back of the workshop, Bartek kept three complete sexbots, a medico, and a Beetle.
    The irigotchi would not go near the cage. They bunched together in a herd and watched Bartek like fearful puppies.
    “I’m not going to repair you,” he repeated to them, knowing full well that they couldn’t understand him. “I’m not a programmer. All I can do is bash together some arms and legs.”
    Years before the Extermination, the programmers had reached such a level of harmony with the digital world that they had completely lost touch with hardware. This led to the emergence of a separate clan of IT whizzes, whose main task was to crawl underneath desks and grates, and in whose heads the priceless knowledge of which cable went into which port and which cards cooled the best under which