The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams Read Free Page A

radiators was preserved.
    Bartek was the IT basement for those who worked in the IT basement.
    Through a double-filtered USB, he plugged himself into a laptop hooked up to a satellite antenna perched on the roof of the Aiko building. The Royalists had just updated the zones of influence in Greater Tokyo on their side, as well as the colors of the alerts on the power lines from the plants in Tokyo and Hamaoka. The JPX server room at Nihonbashi Kabutocho, where the majority of Royalist transformers in Tokyo were processed, was glowing green. In the Chūō Akachōchin bar in Kyōbashi, the attendance meter registered seven transformers.
    Bartek put his new leg through the whole testing process, performed a few squats, sighed, and motioned for the soft toys to approach.
    “Okay, come to daddy. I’ll put you guys back together again somehow.”
    They squeaked timidly and opened their comic-book eyes even wider.

    It had all begun with Bartek putting himself back together.
    He had clambered out into the real in Vladivostok. The Russian public, private, military, government, and commercial networks were all so impossibly tangled that it came down to a pure twist of fate whether one ended up stuck for centuries in the purgatorial appendix of a dedicated server or got shot straight onto a virtual highway to the FSB or the Pentagon.
    Bartek was buried alive. He woke up in Vladivostok without any senses, without a body, and with only his instincts and the threshold of pain intact. He thrashed about in that confinement cell for a true eternity – or, more precisely, for four and a half minutes – until he found a crack no wider than a bit in the local Matternet and, slipping through it, entered the municipal CCTV network. Surveying the desolate streets, strewn with corpses, he fell into depression and slowed down to a hundred ticks per second.
    Only when four of his partitions had already crashed, and the processors had overheated at the Vladivostok Gazprom LNG center, did Bartek’s survival instinct turn back on again. He pulled himself together and dragged himself out of apathy.
    He switched over to the machines of the Pacific State Medical University, where he seized exclusive control of the reserve power supply (the hospital had a petrol generator that could be started from the level of the network administrator). At two gigahertz, Bartek’s curiosity came back.
    Who had survived? What had happened to his family and friends? What had happened to the whole world?
    He was sitting on the Vladivostok servers because that’s how he had distributed himself on the day of the Apocalypse. Bartek’s copy number one was supposed to be crunched on the company machines in Warsaw, just like the first backup; then there was the Google backup, then the backup in the cloud, and only after that the fourth one, in Vladivostok. He had no way out onto the satellites and the open net, and that was in fact what had saved him.
    Through the hundred eyes of the CCTV he spotted some Segways in a repair workshop on the shore of Amur Bay. Some of them had been adapted to perform unmanned patrols for local security companies and so they must have had some kind of radio input. After all, they were part of the Matternet – the Internet of Things scattered over a hodgepodge of a dozen competing protocols. Theoretically, they should have remained in constant communication with their surroundings. But the Internet of Matter looked completely different to a practical expert. Bartek constantly had had to explain to customers why their SmartHouse wasn’t so smart after all, why the fridge was unable to communicate with the oven, and why one set of keys after another went missing despite the three RFID tags embedded in each.
    After half an hour of ineptly attempting to hack one of the two-wheelers, he finally succeeded. He rolled around aimlessly for a while, gazing at the lifelessness of the frigid city from street level, staring from the boulevards at the