The Old Axolotl: Hardware Dreams

These were times of such a decline in philosophical culture that it was considered a serious argument against the existence of the soul that it was nowhere to be found during an autopsy. It would be more correct to say that if the soul were found, then this would be an argument in favor of materialism.

Nikolai Berdyaev

On the day of the apocalypse, before the sky collapsed, the whole gang was set for lunch at the shopping mall, and Bartek only survived –
if
he survived – because his upstairs neighbor’s jolting washing machine had smashed a hole in the wall of her bathroom, flooding the gutted wiring and blowing the fuses throughout the building.

Bartek had passed as the resident handyman ever since his days at technical college, so he ended up getting stuck there until four o’clock. By then, he figured he might as well just head in to work, though it was his day off, to catch up on a few things from the day before.

In the IT department, down in the basement, it was always cooler. The Chief liked to go down there on especially stressful days and drink iced coffee with his forehead pressed against the cold housing of a server rack.

Bartek walked in and slid his dark glasses down over his eyes. The Chief heaved up his left eyelid.

“Don’t think I can’t see you.”

“I can’t see you, boss.”

He stumbled over a coil of cables.

“Fuck.”

“You can’t see shit. Did you get jumped by a gang of chimney sweeps?”

“Hardy ha ha.”

“Go and get yourself cleaned up.”

Bartek was completely covered in grease and plumbing lubricants. When he got back from the bathroom, an entirely different atmosphere had permeated the server room. The boss was hollering in English into his mobile phone, with his shirtsleeves rolled up. Rytka was banging away on a side terminal keyboard at the speed of a mad jazz musician. Big Bird, Joey, and Tatar stood with gobs wide open, gaping at the monitors streaming news channels from Poland and abroad.

“What’s up?”

“It’s motherfucking Armageddon,” gasped Rytka without lifting her head.

Nobody wanted to explain anything; they were all stunned. Bartek logged onto gazeta.pl and read the bold red headline: “EXTERMINATION?! NEUTRON WAVE TO HIT WARSAW AT 19:54.” Then gazeta.pl crashed and was replaced by Error 404.

“What the hell is a ‘neutron wave’?”

“Google it, moron.”

The whole world was googling. Wikipedia had crashed. He found some explanations for laymen on international websites. A neutron bomb kills with so-called fast neutrons, and not with the shock wave alone. Buildings and equipment remain unscathed, but all organic matter perishes. For the moment, this seemed to be the most accurate diagnosis of the catastrophe.

But in the case of a neutron bomb, there was still a limited range and a time lag of a few dozen hours between exposure to radiation and death. Here people were being fried almost instantaneously. Street cameras from the Asian metropolises captured thousands of pedestrians being mowed down on the spot, their corpses paving avenues over which the wind blew plastic bags and trash.

Tatar had studied nuclear physics, so he had to know something.

“How is it possible?”

“It’s
im
possible!” wailed the pale little Tatar. “The atmosphere soaks them up.”

“Well, apparently it’s not soaking jack.”

“But it should be! Even from fusion, neutrons at fourteen meg – hardly any of them would reach the surface of the Earth.”

“Meg?”

“Megaelectronvolts. Then you’re talking relativistic speeds – I don’t fucking know, a cannon from a neutron star or some shit.”

“So it’s coming from above?”

“But not from the sun, see.”

If the sun had suddenly scorched them, then everybody in Poland would already be dead. After all, Poland was in the hemisphere of day. It was four forty-one and seventeen seconds pm. Bartek rotated the planet on a BBC flash simulation. The wave had hit from 123ºW to 57ºE, more or less along the ecliptic, and it was heading west with the Earth’s rotation. They had three hours and thirteen minutes until annihilation.

Unless the wave died out first, just as unexpectedly and inexplicably as it had appeared.

Bartek began to google “miners” and “submarine crews”. Wouldn’t the mass of earth and water shield their organic matter? Or maybe he was confusing neutrons with neutrinos?

“But they’re not dying of radiation exposure. It’s more like the protein inside them curdling.”

“A microwave from the sky.”

“Then plastic should melt as well, right?”

“Is somebody even measuring it?”

“Autos. We’d have to remotely access the laboratory equipment behind the death meridian, take control of the gauges, and pull down the data via satellite.”

They looked at Rytka.

“Fuck off, please, gentlemen,” she politely requested, hunched over her keyboard. “Or I’ll lose it.”

Bart experienced a textbook splitting of his self: in a few hours he was about to die, and yet at the same time he could view himself as a Lego man in toy town – little arm up, little arm down, little head to the right, stick him down on his feet, change the blocks around.

He walked out of IT.

On the upper floors, an entirely different atmosphere prevailed. Most of the employees who hadn’t already gone home were clustered around screens watching the news and commenting on the gory images while sipping coffee and beer. The strongest sign of tension was the nervous tittering of the oldest secretary. The chief accountant was selling off shares in Asian companies as fast as he could, while Legal was calculating the damages for contracts breached through the deaths of clients and sub-contractors. Of course, thought Bartek, it’s obvious: this kind of Hollywood Armageddon is impossible in the real.

On the order board, there were bets drawn up in marker pen to pick the meridian where the lethal radiation would stop.

Bart bought a Snickers and a can of Coke from the vending machine and went back down to the IT basement – where he instantly lost all hope.

The Chief was sitting cross-legged in a corner by the trash can, sobbing furiously into his smartphone. Big Bird had logged on to his MMO and was dashing through deserted dungeons: “At least I can reach the last level.” Tatar had locked himself in the bathroom, wailing like a chorus of zombies.

The clock over the door was counting down the seconds. It was five eighteen pm.

Bart drank the cola and ate the chocolate bar. The sugar in his blood glued his thoughts back together again. Bart came back to the real.

He called Danka: engaged. He called his brother: engaged. He called his father: the mobile network had crashed.

Józuś was rocking on his heels and slamming his head into the casing of the air conditioner.

“I don’t believe it I don’t believe it I don’t fucking believe it.”

Rytka had stopped banging away on the keyboard. Now she was sitting in silence with arms folded across her chest and the look of a disgusted witch on her face.

Bartek crouched down beside her.

“Well?”

“Let’s go get drunk.”

“What’ve you got there?”

“I’ve accessed the Chinese satellites. I’m getting the feed straight from Guó Jiā Háng Tiān Jú.”

“The whole of Asia’s fried – Asia and a slice of America too. You can see it live on the CNN and Al Jazeera cameras.”

“I wanted to pull down the raw data on the change in the wave’s intensity as the Earth rotates.”

“And? Is it decreasing?”

“It spiked for the first twenty seconds, then the chart went flat as a pancake.”

“What the hell is it? A supernova?”

“A supernova would have roasted us at all frequencies. Anyway… let’s go get drunk.”

She sat and chewed her lip even more gloomily.

Bartek gave her a nudge.

“It’ll be okay.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?!”

He whispered into her ear:

“We’ll all die in the same split second.”

She flinched as if he’d lashed her with a whip. Then immediately: a sigh, a wink, a wan smile – and calm.

They walked over to the kitchenette to make some tea.

“I knew something like this would happen,” she said, blowing into the mug and staring pensively into an upper corner of the room. “You can’t have as much luck as humanity’s had and not cop an anvil in the head eventually.”

The sugar had run out. Bart rummaged through the cupboard, behind the fridge, and under the sink. Finally, he peeked into the storeroom.

“Have you seen this?”

“What?”

“These boxes.”

He dragged the brand-name cartons out into the corridor. The boxes, with their styrofoam packaging still inside, were apparently ready to be sent back for refunds. At the bottom were stacks of old NVidias and Realteks.

“The boss crammed everything in here.”

InSoul3. Under the producer’s logo on the side of each box were the smiling faces of gamers with fountains of planets, moons, stars, and galaxies exploding from their crystal brains.

Bartek and Rytka exchanged wordless glances.

It was one of the new features for Xbox and PC. At first, the companies had marketed InSoul3 like crazy (they pumped hundreds of millions into the technology), but soon there were protests from various religious, political, and medical movements, as well as from consumer rights groups. The companies that were supposed to make money on the applications and games backed out, and the equipment was mostly left lying around unused. Then the source codes leaked out and the hobbyists began to tinker, adding all kinds of strange and unauthorized modifications, like the “mind copy and paste” functions, which were meant to generate the most faithful behavior possible in the avatar bots.