Read The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams for Free Online

might crush him.
    He was saved by a red-and-yellow-striped robot skeleton, which engulfed him with its nozzle arms and dragged him behind a glass partition that had once been a guard box.
    The transformer displayed as SoulEater 39, doubtless a web nickname from before the Extermination, and he was clearly held in high esteem, since the other mechs reluctantly relented.
    “Don’t worry about them. They’re lost souls.”
    As if on cue, a massive freight mech slammed into the partition with a titanium thigh.
    “Daddy! Has anybody seen my daddy? I’m looking for my daddy. Daddy! Daddy!”
    The giant mech droned out the same words, over and over, the bass of its speakers crackling and distorting into the drawn-out bellow of a whale.
    “Do you realize how few specialists IS’d themselves?”
    Bart hadn’t yet picked up the jargon.
    “IS’d?”
    “Transformed via IS3.”
    “Well, I thought the majority would be programmers: they would have had the gear handy on the day of the Extermination.”
    “Actually, it was mostly gamers who had the gear, and they’re the majority here. They already had their structures and guilds in place. Now the alliances are forming.”
    SoulEater displayed a map of the world for Bartek with colored dots representing logged-in transformers.
    Since the Death Ray had blazed at Zero Hour from Seattle to Oman, nobody from Asia had had any time to react. It was almost exclusively people from Europe, Africa, the United States, and South America who had scanned themselves in with the clumsy neurosoft. Bartek noticed the distinct over-representation of Mexico and California, which the Death Meridian had only reached at the very end.
    “And those white ones?”
    “Freelancers. Still unaffiliated. Uhuh, here you are.” SoulEater pointed with a spidery finger at Bartek’s white dot. “Guilds from all the language zones are going to throw themselves at you.”
    Bartek instinctively rolled right back to the wall.
    “But why?”
    “Every single computer or robotics whizz is invaluable. Do you know how many real programmers we have? One! One for the whole planet!”
    “He should copy himself.”
    “He already has. But that doesn’t add anything to our knowledge. He keeps copying the same skills, and he can’t conjure up any new ones.”
    “But why?” asked Bartek, pointing his manipulator at SoulEater’s display. “I see that the majority transformed along the border of the second hemisphere, where they had the most time to react, and there should have been the most programmers over there.”
    “And there were. At least straight after the IS’ing. Then they went out into the open web, because they were the ones who knew how to do it, who knew how to flow into the Internet with their minds. Well, and they snuffed it.”
    Bartek remembered the first point of the FAQ.
    “Is it some kind of program error? A fault with IS3?”
    “Damned if I know. Maybe some kind of malware released onto the net or the incompatibility of our software. I mean, it wasn’t written for this. For now, the only safe way is over dedicated connections with closed machines, pre-formatted to zero and under a tight RioBit protocol. You must have downloaded and installed it to log in here, right? It’s in the FAQ.”
    “But it’s ridiculously inconvenient – typing on keyboards and tapping on screens when you only have these iron fingers.”
    “We’re working on USB filters and bypasses. But that’s the problem: we don’t have any programmers. So who’s working on them? Amateurs, ignoramuses, and teenage gamers. How did you survive, anyway? You didn’t try to get out onto the net right away?”
    “I tried. I certainly tried.”
    If he had still had a spine, a cold shiver would have run down it. (Cold stray currents passed through him from his wheels to his antennas instead.) In that moment, Bartek realized that he had survived only because the Vladivostok LNG port, as a strategic site subject to the protocols