Bartek and SoulEater39’s relationship

Bartek and SoulEater39’s relationship is a long-running alliance between a recruit and the recruiter who recognizes his usefulness, but it grows beyond guild membership into a partnership tested by war, technological change, and competing ideas about what should be built next. Their bond is expressed less through intimacy than through rescue, recruitment, argument, and continued collaboration: SoulEater39 brings Bartek into a collective project, while Bartek questions the assumptions and practical choices that project entails.

First Meeting and Recruitment

SoulEater39 recruits Bartek at the Wrocław Expo on 23 PostApoc, the day after Bartek awakens in Vladivostok. SoulEater39 is piloting a red-and-yellow spider mech designed for skyscraper work. Bartek, by contrast, has been left with few attractive options: the humanoid machines have already been claimed, so he logs into a half-ton pest-control machine made in Radom, choosing it at least partly for its sensitive lenses. The difference between their machines establishes an early contrast between SoulEater39’s imposing, conspicuous presence and Bartek’s less glamorous but observant equipment.

Their first connection is forged amid physical danger. When the other mechs threaten to crush Bartek, SoulEater39’s red-and-yellow machine pulls him behind a glass partition that once served as a guard box. The other machines relent reluctantly, suggesting that SoulEater39 commands standing among them. His intervention gives Bartek immediate reason to regard him as more than a recruiter: SoulEater39 has already acted to keep him safe before asking him to join anything.

The recruitment itself becomes clear when SoulEater39 displays the GOATs emblem, a design of interlocked horns flowing into an integrated-circuit pattern. Bartek realizes that the conversation has been leading toward membership and asks for SoulEater39’s name; SoulEater39 answers that Bartek already knows it. The exchange turns an uncertain encounter into a named affiliation. Bartek’s response is not unqualified trust. He points out that SoulEater39 must consider him valuable for his skills, memory, and experience, even though the two do not yet know what is inside one another. SoulEater39 redirects the question of inner identity toward the work ahead: Bartek will either cope with it or not. The relationship therefore begins on practical terms, with usefulness and shared work taking precedence over certainty about personhood.

A Shared Future, and Disagreement About Its Scale

SoulEater39 frames the conflict confronting them as larger than competition over mechs, servers, power supplies, firewalls against the Plague, or divisions of the Mothernet. Recalling their first meeting, he tells Bartek that the real struggle is now a battle for the future. That expansive political framing gives their recruitment encounter a longer significance: Bartek was not merely being enlisted for immediate guild work but drawn into a conflict over which forms of life and organization will persist.

Their cooperation takes place against the threat of armed escalation. Dagenskyoll tells Bartek that a coalition is forming and that SoulEater39 is speaking with the Internal Revenue Service; he presents a pre-emptive bombardment of Patagonia as the only available option, since the old ballistic missiles have rusted and only the Internal Revenue Service submarine drone still works. This is Dagenskyoll’s account of the crisis, not a decision attributed to Bartek and SoulEater39 together. It nevertheless shows SoulEater39 operating as a political intermediary while Bartek is drawn into a conflict whose stakes have grown well beyond the guild’s original recruitment.

The pair also confront the question of how individual minds and collective systems relate. Bartek explains the history of the irigotchi: toys made to learn from individual children, whose neuro-architecture later allowed them to form herds and modify a shared structure in the absence of humans. He imagines building such a network gradually from a few toys, winding it around himself rather than being overwhelmed by the street herd. The proposal is not simply about machines serving people; it reverses the direction of dependence, making an individual’s relation to a collective network something that must be constructed. SoulEater responds with images, including a crucified Christ and a dissected frog, and asks whether the network might wrap itself around Bartek. Their exchange gives the relationship an intellectual dimension: SoulEater presses the implications of Bartek’s idea, while Bartek describes a way to engage the network on a smaller, more personal scale.

Collaboration and the Work of Building

Later, Bartek and Dagenskyoll stand amid irigotchi arranging leaves and branches into fractal mandalas along the Charles River. Bartek blows the work away, but the melancholy vector begins again, making symmetrical patterns on Mothernet surfaces instead. The scene places Bartek’s impatience beside the persistence of a nonhuman process that does not appear to take his dismissal personally. Around the same period, irigotchi vectors spanning five or even ten square kilometers move across the MIT Mothernet and shine at night as some of the last lights on the Boston skyline. This changing landscape sharpens the problem that Bartek and SoulEater’s shared future must address: networked life is already reshaping its surroundings, whether or not the builders approve of its forms.

Bartek states that he wants a return to Paradise and, if humanity is started again from scratch, wants to raise Homo sapiens his way, from epigenesis to bedtime stories. He distinguishes that deliberate undertaking from the earlier free-form experiment, whose creators did not know what they were doing. The ambition is Bartek’s, not a jointly agreed plan, but it sits alongside SoulEater’s efforts to build for a future in which life can survive catastrophe. Their different roles bring them into productive tension: SoulEater advances infrastructure and long-term protection, while Bartek insists that rebuilding life also involves choices about how humans are formed and cared for.

That infrastructure takes physical shape in orbit. Bartek and SoulEater move across the habitat’s trussed skeleton in Horus I machines, without safety cords, oxygen, or a regular power supply; the mechs can unfold solar cells, and the station has its own servers and processors. SoulEater proposes a sequence of habitats arranged at equal angular distances around Earth, first three and eventually six in opposing orbits, forming a rosette or Star of David when mapped against their orbital paths. The arrangement is meant to preserve at least one refuge for life if the Death Ray strikes again, preventing another reset of the biosphere. The proposal translates their shared concern with survival into a concrete design, one built around redundancy rather than confidence that catastrophe can be prevented.

Bartek does not simply endorse the plan. When SoulEater explains that further stages will bring accumulating engineering problems, Bartek doubts that he can solve them and suggests hiring a Google slave. SoulEater emotively displays wind and sea, then insists that an expert needs to be present from the beginning to resolve the hardware conundrums as they arise. This disagreement reveals both dependence and friction: SoulEater wants Bartek’s expertise within the project, while Bartek resists the assumption that he should be enlisted for every difficulty. Their collaboration advances through negotiation rather than effortless agreement.

Changing Responsibilities

The later conversations suggest that SoulEater’s work has changed in emphasis without losing its underlying continuity. Bartek observes that SoulEater is looking after children instead of servers. SoulEater questions whether that counts as a change, since he understands both activities as taking care of hardware. The exchange recasts their earlier concern with machinery: care for servers and care for children may look like different duties, yet SoulEater describes them as versions of the same practice. Bartek’s observation recognizes a shift in what SoulEater is responsible for; SoulEater’s answer refuses to treat the new responsibility as a break with his former self.

This continuity gives the relationship its distinctive shape. SoulEater first recruits Bartek because he needs his skills, memory, and experience; later, he asks him to remain available as an expert for a project intended to preserve life. Bartek, meanwhile, challenges both the scale of that demand and the assumptions behind rebuilding humanity. Their alliance does not resolve those disagreements. It persists through them, joining immediate technical work to the more difficult question of what, and whom, a technological civilization should care for.