It’ll be years of work. Are you in?”
A machine-made man. A reset perpetrated by an Evil God, after which all the hierarchies have been reversed. Now robots were creating man. Bartek raised his metal arm and slid the sharp edge of his finger along the smooth, gleaming housing of the DNA/RNA synthesizer, pressing hard until a scratch appeared, metal on metal, with a high-pitched squeal that would have made his ears hurt (if he had had ears).
“Are you in?”
The show must go on
He liked to walk along the empty and naturally deserted ocean beaches, and he liked the roofs of the skyscrapers in Minato. He had a simple system for walking up stairs. He would release the mech to climb up the hundred floors by itself and then come back into it only when the robot had reached the top. At night-time, Tokyo from this perspective looked like a postcard of Tokyo with holes burnt into it: great irregular stains of total darkness, here and there the bright pimples of advertisements, neon lights, LED mega-screens, a few 3D lasers, and illuminated sections of the labyrinth of streets. As long as the Royal Alliance controlled the power plant at Hamaoka, the gigawatts would flow into these empty stage sets. The Royalist transformers had voted time and again for the illumination of the deserted city. They could not cope psychologically in a totally darkened city.
Bartek liked to walk in his mech to the very edge of the rooftop, until his gyroscopes trembled from the slightest breath of wind. There he would observe the life of the dead city, the urban zombie, from the brink of a monumental abyss. One night, he saw the movement of red points on the sky over the skyscrapers. The Patagonians had released their air-drones into the RA neighborhoods. Another night, he made the final step forward and plummeted down to the pavement, recording the whole flight millisecond by millisecond.
When the Patagonians and Black Castle robbed a third sex shop in a row, he began to go out on night patrols near the Aiko Tower. The spare parts for the Hondas would run out one day as well. Previously, he had paid no attention to the territorial scramble between the alliances, but now he checked the maps of influence and the reports on foreign mechs encountered on RA territory every day – the alarm signals of the Tokyo Mothernet. He took a Spit Gun and some spare batteries (he couldn’t feel their weight anyway), and went out on long walks. The bones of Japanese people and the finer bones of electronic gadgets and plastic junk crunched under the metal tread of his feet. He stayed out until the bulging sun emerged from behind the skyscrapers of Shiodome, and he could finally bring yet another night of cold loneliness to an end. (They still had not found a good plugin for sleep.)
So went the mechanical post-apocalyptic calendar. Patagonia and Black Castle had begun to fight among themselves, sexbot on sexbot, fist to polymer mug. Someone in Chūō Akachōchin was spreading rumors about an attack on the Three Gorges Power Plant. Two more satellites dropped out of their orbits and burnt up. On 1011 PostApoc, a man named Ernesto Iguarte from the Patagonians developed serious schizogeny and began to copy himself with abandon. He jammed all the Patagonian servers and spilled out onto the B&B machines. One alliance after another cut itself off from the open satellite net. The IRS reportedly fired on some installations on the coast of New Zealand. Bart copied himself onto a neighboring partition and had a conversation with himself for several hours. Then one of the Barteks completely deleted itself.
He still enjoyed his nocturnal strolls through Tokyo. Life was in motion; life was motion. For a while, he tried to learn Japanese, but soon conceded defeat. He was indeed a stranger in a strange land. All around him were unfamiliar symbols, faces of politicians, slogans. Everything was weird, alienating, distancing, and inhibiting. Xenoarcheology. He stood before the
A machine-made man. A reset perpetrated by an Evil God, after which all the hierarchies have been reversed. Now robots were creating man. Bartek raised his metal arm and slid the sharp edge of his finger along the smooth, gleaming housing of the DNA/RNA synthesizer, pressing hard until a scratch appeared, metal on metal, with a high-pitched squeal that would have made his ears hurt (if he had had ears).
“Are you in?”
The show must go on
He liked to walk along the empty and naturally deserted ocean beaches, and he liked the roofs of the skyscrapers in Minato. He had a simple system for walking up stairs. He would release the mech to climb up the hundred floors by itself and then come back into it only when the robot had reached the top. At night-time, Tokyo from this perspective looked like a postcard of Tokyo with holes burnt into it: great irregular stains of total darkness, here and there the bright pimples of advertisements, neon lights, LED mega-screens, a few 3D lasers, and illuminated sections of the labyrinth of streets. As long as the Royal Alliance controlled the power plant at Hamaoka, the gigawatts would flow into these empty stage sets. The Royalist transformers had voted time and again for the illumination of the deserted city. They could not cope psychologically in a totally darkened city.
Bartek liked to walk in his mech to the very edge of the rooftop, until his gyroscopes trembled from the slightest breath of wind. There he would observe the life of the dead city, the urban zombie, from the brink of a monumental abyss. One night, he saw the movement of red points on the sky over the skyscrapers. The Patagonians had released their air-drones into the RA neighborhoods. Another night, he made the final step forward and plummeted down to the pavement, recording the whole flight millisecond by millisecond.
When the Patagonians and Black Castle robbed a third sex shop in a row, he began to go out on night patrols near the Aiko Tower. The spare parts for the Hondas would run out one day as well. Previously, he had paid no attention to the territorial scramble between the alliances, but now he checked the maps of influence and the reports on foreign mechs encountered on RA territory every day – the alarm signals of the Tokyo Mothernet. He took a Spit Gun and some spare batteries (he couldn’t feel their weight anyway), and went out on long walks. The bones of Japanese people and the finer bones of electronic gadgets and plastic junk crunched under the metal tread of his feet. He stayed out until the bulging sun emerged from behind the skyscrapers of Shiodome, and he could finally bring yet another night of cold loneliness to an end. (They still had not found a good plugin for sleep.)
So went the mechanical post-apocalyptic calendar. Patagonia and Black Castle had begun to fight among themselves, sexbot on sexbot, fist to polymer mug. Someone in Chūō Akachōchin was spreading rumors about an attack on the Three Gorges Power Plant. Two more satellites dropped out of their orbits and burnt up. On 1011 PostApoc, a man named Ernesto Iguarte from the Patagonians developed serious schizogeny and began to copy himself with abandon. He jammed all the Patagonian servers and spilled out onto the B&B machines. One alliance after another cut itself off from the open satellite net. The IRS reportedly fired on some installations on the coast of New Zealand. Bart copied himself onto a neighboring partition and had a conversation with himself for several hours. Then one of the Barteks completely deleted itself.
He still enjoyed his nocturnal strolls through Tokyo. Life was in motion; life was motion. For a while, he tried to learn Japanese, but soon conceded defeat. He was indeed a stranger in a strange land. All around him were unfamiliar symbols, faces of politicians, slogans. Everything was weird, alienating, distancing, and inhibiting. Xenoarcheology. He stood before the
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