Read The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams for Free Online Page B

SoulEater39.”
    “But you can google my whole life, and what do I know about you?”
    “What? And I’m supposed to be so sure about you? That you’ve given us your real name? You think there haven’t been others before you?”
    “What others? Pretending to be someone else?”
    “Pretending to be human.”
    Bartek felt as he had on the street in Vladivostok, staring into the window at a reflection that was his and not his. Before his very eyes, the hand of God was changing the world – set by set, character by character.
    “Who?”
    “Copies, bots, old IS avatars – God knows what. They impersonate the dead. It’s not hard: there are billions of identities from the Google and Facebook archives to choose from.”
    “So how do you tell the difference?”
    The Big Lebowski stretched and snorted on the spider’s screen.
    “We don’t.”
    “But you must believe I’m not lying, since you want me in your guild for my skills, my memory, my experience.”
    “I’m talking to you. There’ll be work to do. You’ll cope or you won’t. What difference does it make what you have inside you?”
    Bartek stared through astigmatic lenses at the red and yellow spider. He felt as if some indigestible food (he couldn’t eat anything) were turning his stomach (he didn’t have a stomach).
    “If it’s so easy, then why do you bother sticking with that nickname? Are you even a person?”
    “What kind of question is that?! Are you?”
    “Are you conscious?”
    “Are you?”
    “Are you?”
    “Are you?”
    “Are you?”
    “Are they?”
    “So you are conscious then?”
    SoulEater39 responded by playing a Polish punk band live in concert on his screen. The snarling lyrics spurted out of his speakers: BE CONSCIOUS! BE CONSCIOUS! BE CONSCIOUS!
    “Bart, my friend, we’re all transformers. But we don’t understand the nature of the transformation. InSoul3 couldn’t upload the whole brain – just some currents on the surface, the shadow of its structure, whatever made a good avatar bot. The rest was cheats and bullshit. You must have known that. There’d been no breakthrough in the digitalization of minds. Nobody had invented a way to turn IS3 into some magic psychopump. All the humans died twenty-three days ago. We’re all that’s left.”
    WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? THIS IS A CON!

    Frances Rory emoted multi-tiered courtesy and reverence from the doorway. As if she were visiting a sculptor’s workshop as his number one fan.
    “Did we by any chance meet in Africa?”
    “I slept through Africa.”
    Bartek was resorting to a metaphor here, since the transformers still hadn’t found a good plug-in for sleep.
    While the Royal Alliance was working with the Salamanders on the reactivation of some solar farms in Ghana, Bart found himself in the middle of another hardware depression and ticking slower than a cuckoo clock. He still didn’t really understand how the speed of the processor could affect the internal state of the program being processed.
    Frances showed up at his place in the basement of the Aiko tower in a mass-produced Honda sexbot: the Geisha IV. In downtown Tokyo, the Royalists didn’t have much of a selection of mechs at their disposal. She knelt down gracefully before the furry playpen of irigotchi, the aerodynamic plastic and steel curves of her thighs, back, neck and shoulders shimmering with the erotic fantasies of the old fetishists of Nippon – of suibokuga and the brushstrokes of Masamune Shirow. Bart felt intensely his lack of an endocrine system. No hormones stabbed his heart and his cock did not leap to attention.
    How rare it was to meet a genuinely female transformer! It had mostly been male gamers with gadgets like InSoul3 handy, even if they’d been playing as female avatars.
    SoulEater39 had dropped in for a moment as a four-armed Sony medico to vouch for Frances symbolically.
    “I’ve got to shoot over to Cuba. I don’t have time.”
    “You wanted to see the swarm intelligence of the