The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams Read Free Page B

rolling mass of water… and once again, a cold and heavy sadness washed over Bartek.
    He returned to the workshop, broke into a couple of repair machines, and fused a manipulator claw onto the Segway, together with a more powerful transmitter. After putting himself together like this, he set out to look for a functioning Internet terminal. That the Internet
itself
might not be working was a thought that Bartek wouldn’t even allow his mind to consider.
    On Admiral Fokin Street he found himself slaloming between chaotically parked cars, concrete flower beds, and the desiccated bodies of people and birds. Suddenly, in his peripheral vision, he caught movement in the shop window to his right. Swiveling the camera he realized it was, of course, his own movement – which is to say, the Segway’s movement.
    Bartek stared at his reflection and thought: “WALL-E.” He trundled on, while terabytes of Freudian associations came crashing down in the neuro-files of the InSoul3’s Karabach mod.
    He peered inside the shops as he passed them, and saw computers, monitors, and keyboards – life-giving oxygen. The only problem was that the primitive architecture of the city wasn’t wheelchair-friendly – or Segway-friendly for that matter.
    In the end, he simply snatched a tablet from the hand of a woman withering away into an anorexic mummy on a park bench beneath the expansive corpse of a tree.
    Would you like to know more
?
    The tablet was working, but Bartek was completely unable to operate the touchscreen with the hard, clumsy gripper of his only limb. In any case, the screen could only sense electrostatic changes.
    He racked his brain (non-brain), wobbling on his two wheels and squinting the camera around the street-morgue. The owner of the tablet, an Asian woman in jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with the image of a Bollywood star, stared with dark, unseeing eyes at an ugly sky devoid of birds or smoke or smog. A gust of wind blew a plastic bag onto her head, so that now it looked as if she were suffocating, gasping for her last breath under the plastic.
    Bartek reached for her hand and snapped off the mummy’s index finger. Now he could use the finger to operate the tablet.

    The system showed seventeen networks, two of them open. Bartek connected to the one with the strongest signal.
    The browser’s home page was Google, of course. When the page loaded, Bartek almost felt tears welling up in his eyes. (There were no tears, there were no eyes, but the feeling remained.)
    It was like a return to his homeland, like a view over the roofs of his native city, or the taste of the bread of his childhood. At that moment, Bartek could have dropped to his knees and kissed the Holy Land of Google.
    The feeling lasted for a fraction of a second. Then he saw the rest. On the search engine’s main page was a graphic showing tiny manga robots covering their square little heads with sheet metal and tinfoil. KEEP YOUR MINDS CLOSED! He pressed the graphic with the tip of the corpse’s finger. APOCALYPSE FAQ appeared on the screen.
    First point of the FAQ: Under no circumstances connect the machine on which you’re processing to the Internet!
    After that came lists of contact addresses, websites categorized by language, culture, and religion, links to HTL and MTL tables, and discussion forums and blogs on survival despair.
    Naturally, Bartek and Rytka were not the only ones to have hit on the IS3 idea.
    How could he have been so egocentrically blind! After all, it was hard to imagine that they alone among billions of people could have had the same fortuitous clash of neurons.
    Who else? He frantically googled his family and friends. Danka – she’d survived, she must have survived, he could sense she’d survived. No. Danka was gone. His brother and his father – dead. Even Rytka was gone.
    He managed to google their last recordings from the minutes, hours and days before the Extermination. In a masochistic impulse, he loaded them into