Cosmos Incorporated

by Maurice G. Dantec

  The UHU doesn’t toy with that sort of deviance.

  Plotkin orders a light meal on the compartment’s console; a young Filipino Amtrak employee brings it to him a few minutes later. He swallows the pieces of transgenic sushi mechanically while the console, set to automatic mode, shows him the news on a screen set into the wall opposite him, part of the luxury cabin’s internal network. It is set to CNN-MTV’s News of the Hour, and text of the latest headlines scroll laterally by in a translucent gray band while an ethically approved erotic video clip plays in the background; two adolescent girls, barely out of puberty, sing in the rain amid fences and blank walls while an apathetic crowd watches. They are a revival of the group Tatu, a pair of young, Russian, faux-lesbian girls produced by Trevor Horn in the early 2000s. He is certain of all of this, down to the smallest detail, without knowing why.

  ONGOING NEGOTIATIONS FOR THE RATIFICATION OF THE TREATY OF ODESSA REMAIN STALLED OVER THE SAME QUESTIONS, a UHU representative, Mr. Zordaiev, informs us from the edge of the Black Sea. See Hyperpage 12-A for the interview with our special correspondent in Odessa….

  PRISCILLA PRESLEY III AND JENNIFER SLOANE-BARTOW, QUEEN OF AUSTRALIAN WINE, ON THE BRINK OF DIVORCE, says the Pacific Enquirer. Click to enter Hyperpage…

  TURKMENISTAN SIGNS AN ACCORD OF COOPERATION WITH TEXAS, New Petroleum Industries Syndicate said yesterday….

  MOROCCAN, LIBYAN, EGYPTIAN, LEBANO-SYRIAN, AND TURKISH TROOPS EN ROUTE TO MARSEILLE TO AID EUROFEDERALIST FORCES IN THEIR FIGHT AGAINST DISSIDENT ISLAMIC GUERRILLAS, Reuters-AP reports….

  ISLAMIC EUROPEAN FORCES HAVE ISSUED A STATEMENT FROM THEIR LONDON HEADQUARTERS THAT THEY WILL NOT ACCEPT ANY GOVERNMENT OTHER THAN ONE THAT IS SUBJECT TO SHARI’A LAW; THEIR BELGIAN AND FRENCH COUNTERPARTS HAVE FOLLOWED SUIT, says our special correspondent in the United Kingdom….

  THE 3,227 UNCLONED CHIHUAHUAS OF FORMER TV STAR OPRAH WINFREY, NOW 100 YEARS OLD, HAVE BEEN SOLD TO AN ANONYMOUS WEALTHY COLLECTOR ON BEHALF OF A FOUNDATION TO PROTECT NATURAL ANIMALS; see link to Century Stardom Magazine….

  THE AUTONOMOUS COMMUNIST GOVERNMENT OF WEST NEPAL WILL FORMALLY JOIN THE UHU SOMETIME NEXT YEAR; the UHU’s representative for Asia, Mrs. Chou Wei-Ling, has publicly expressed her happiness with the decision….

  THE WORLDWEATHER FIRM, WHICH HAS BEEN IN CONTROL OF GLOBAL CLIMATE FOR THE LAST FOUR YEARS, HOPES THAT ITS RECOMMENDATIONS WILL BE FOLLOWED BY THE UHU’S SCIENTIFIC COMMISSION. According to Mr. Juan-Carlos Silverstone, president of the Planetary Climate Control Consortium, primary contractors should be allowed to choose their regional subcontractors without being subject to the bureaucracy of the Office of Governance. “A little flexibility in the system would probably prevent some of the malfunctions we have encountered lately,” he asserts in a recent interview with Forbes magazine; see link to Global Economics Review….

  PEACE ACCORDS WITH THE VATICAN DO NOT MEAN THAT TRADITIONAL JUDEO-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS WILL BE REAUTHORIZED. Mrs. Xenakis, the spokeswoman for the UniGlobal Department of Religious Affairs, firmly dispelled these “unfounded and fantasist rumors” yesterday from her office in Singapore. “Only the agreement with the Islamic Conference will permit some UHU territories a degree of tolerable religious autonomy with UniWorld.” Her statement was echoed by the Official Papacy of the United Human Catholic Church from its Holy See in San Francisco: “Simply because the Vatican and the traditionalist Antipope will be accepted at a few political conferences concerning the fate of the former Italy does not mean that we will accept a return of the Catholic Church to the dark days of the Inquisition and the Crusades….”

  ACCORDING TO GENERAL STATISTICS, THE AVERAGE FERTILITY RATE AMONG HUMAN MALES REMAINS FIXED AT AROUND 10% OF POTENT SPERMATOZOA. GLOBAL POPULATION SHRINKAGE WILL NOT BE STOPPED BEFORE THE END OF THE CENTURY, EVEN WITH THE MOST MODERN CLONING AND NON–Y CHROMOSOME FERTILIZATION TECHNIQUES. The scientific division of the Office of Governance confirmed in a report released yesterday that the global population will shrink by the record amount of around 1.5 billion people over the next fifteen to twenty years, returning global demographic levels to the same figures as twenty-five years ago. The percentage of males in the population is expected to drop dramatically to less than 41 percent of the current worldwide figure, or less than 30 percent. See link to Science Global Review….

  ADRIAN-LOUISE VON TIMBERLECK, ANDROGYNOUS HIP-HOP PORNO MEGASTAR, SELLS ITS SCOTTISH CASTLE, HALF OF ITS SHARES IN THE FIRM BIOTECH NEONICS, AND ALL OF ITS CALIFORNIAN, CANADIAN, AND HAWAIIAN PROPERTIES TO PURCHASE A HIGH-SECURITY FLOATING CITY IN ASSOCIATION WITH JOANNA-CAROLINE TRUMP AND THE CHINESE GENETICS TYCOON MR. WEN LU-CHAN. See Hyperpage 6 for the story from our special envoy to the Maputo naval shipyards….

  The world in a few minutes of magnetic ribbon. The world in a dozen sentences. The world in a few short paragraphs. After the news comes a short commercial for Amtrak; images of a silent train against the enchanting backdrop of the British Columbian Rocky Mountains….

  This, it seems, is the plan’s predetermined signal. The signal to activate the last inactive cells. Another rhizome, another coil of memory, unwinds itself. Several million neurons are suddenly freed from his subconscious black box and unleashed in a spray of cortical molecules.

  It is an entire library, one that was hidden away deep in his own brain. It is an entire life that now, finally, takes shape.

  It is an entire network of meanings that combine to give what previously had been nothing more than a mass of organs the appearance, the structure, the body of a life.

  It is an entire history placed suddenly in his hands, in the quicksilver fire of electric light and high speed.

  First, the Siberian childhood in Novosibirsk under the steely post-Soviet sky is abruptly supplanted by images of a gripping underworld. These new memories are no less vivid than the earlier ones: light, neon, lead glass, stars in the electric night, alcohol, dope, dancing, nightclubs, cash, girls, sex, big money, power, more neon, more lead glass, more stars, more girls, more sex. The scene whirls in his head for several seconds; it is as if an entire life—or, more accurately, an entire postadolescence—passes before his eyes.

  What was that? Hello? He wants to shout at the instruction program. Rewind the tape; show me again—I couldn’t quite catch all of it….

  He heard English being spoken; he is sure of that much. Did he recognize parts of London somewhere in there? Hadn’t he caught a glimpse of Leicester Square? And the cars—shit, they were Jaguars, weren’t they, or classic Aston Martins? And the girls…typically British beauties at first; Celto-Saxons, brunettes with gray-blue eyes streaked with pale green, and the famous dentistry, teeth a bit prominent…and then—yes, the carnival had become more worldly; the scenes had been from all over: Latin America, South Africa, Central Asia, Iran, Russia, Japan…

  Money. Drugs. Sex. The polar opposite of his gray childhood in the stricken Siberia of the 2010s. How did the boy of twelve, pedaling on his battered bicycle, become the young man of twenty, driving an E-type Jaguar down a Sussex country road with four supermodels along for the ride?

  What is this?

  His question hangs, unanswered.

  An individual person is also a singular entity interwoven into the continuum of history, with a lineage all his own, but the instruction program’s neuro-implants give him only scanty information in this area. He knows nothing of his parents other than their names, which are part of his basic ID file, and he has no idea if he has brothers, sisters, uncles, cousins…. Born in 2001, Sergei has known nothing but war: the Grand Jihad. It is the only thing in his memory that makes any sense—albeit in a detached, historical way. Dates, figures, events. Almost five hundred million deaths in four decades. Twenty-five metropolises razed by nuclear bombardment, six on the North American continent and a dozen in the Russian Federation. More than a hundred of the world’s large cities destroyed in various ways: radium bombs, chemical attacks, bacterial warfare…not to mention the countless smaller towns and villages ravaged by the Great Planetary C
ivil War. Even now, on the periphery of the unified world, men are still being killed with machine guns, and with bombs, and by hand. Some countries were simply and completely wiped from the map. And only now were the tens, no, the hundreds of millions of indirectly caused deaths being realized, for as postwar spirits had risen, so had global temperatures, bringing their own insidious brand of catastrophe.

  After finishing his studies, about which he still remembers very little, it seems that he joined one of the numerous paramilitary security and counterespionage organizations thriving on the postwar globe: the Red Star Order. Formed by former career Soviet and post-Soviet Red Army officers, and with bases in California and South America, the Order had quickly risen to the top of the ranks of high-tech transnational companies, renting the services of its cyborg samurai to paragovernmental shoguns and techno-mafiosi; they were moving shadows; barely detectable, elite mercenaries in tight digital flux; assassins in constant competition in the new planetary world created by the UHU—this new feudal world forged by the fires of the Grand Jihad, even after it was supposedly long over. In truth, the war had never really ended. It could not end. There was nothing now but a world slowly collapsing to the rhythm of its own technospherical unification, a world surviving only through terror, espionage, nexuses, and biological special effects.

  The man had had his back turned to him for a long time now, standing in front of a large bay window dominated by a view of Lake Baikal. The waters were deepest blue, ultramarine striped with myriad shades of cobalt, and they filled the entire lower half of the window. Above them, the sky was a fiery, blinding yellow. The scene was as pure as a religious icon.

  The man had turned toward him once more now, but in Plotkin’s newly reawakened memory his face remained hazy, the distinctive features blurred by an encrypted neurodigital procedure. In all probability, he would never have been able to identify the face anyway, even with the aid of cortical nanosurgery. There are things one knows just by guessing them; it is what is generally called “intuition,” but it is only the simple act of letting people figure you out.

  “You will act completely alone until the time of your retrieval. You will receive a large bonus for it—if you are successful.

  “Your client will pay a very large bonus just for him. You will need to be very sure that all the data is in order. If something doesn’t match up, I will drop the whole thing immediately. I will keep the advance to cover costs and damages; you will keep the rest, and no one will be able to accuse me of breaking the contract. There, you’ve been warned. My lawyers in Micronesia have a copy of your papers; they’ll take care of everything. You don’t kill the mayor of a large American city without taking a lot of big risks these days.

  “He’s only an Indian, and it’s not really that big of a city. You’ll hardly even be on U.S. soil, really—or Canadian soil, for that matter. Consider it a sort of extraterritorial zone; they call it autonomous territory. Believe me, you won’t do any better than seventy-five-thousand Pan-Am dollars plus expenses these days.”

  “If you want me to act alone, you’d better be prepared for a lot of expenses; I’m telling you that right now. I’m going to have to grease a lot of palms.”

  “You don’t need to worry about that. You’ll act alone, and you’ll develop your own plan, but we’ll be in charge of the overall scheme.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll receive one—one—communiqué during your trip. That will be your only help from the outside. I don’t know what the e-mail will say, or when it will be sent to you. But I do know that it will give you a substantial advantage over the other guy’s security system. Don’t ask me any more than that. All the information is locked up tighter than a tomb.”

  “That’s a good beginning. You know I’ll be taking an antipod shuttle to the American East Coast, or maybe a simple supersonic—it doesn’t matter—but then I’ll have to get past more than one checkpoint in one of the highest-security astroports in the world, and I don’t mean your stronghold. I’m talking about the Windsor Astroport Complex.”

  “I told you, don’t worry. Everything’s been taken care of. You’ll see; you’ll slide through it like a neutrino passing through a cloud.”

  “I’d like a more specific answer, if you don’t mind. I guess I don’t know as much about neutrinos as I should.”

  The man, whom he knows only as Vassily, had grinned widely at that.

  The grin has stayed with him, suspended in the blank space of a face without an identity. Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat seems vastly more human in comparison.

  In his memory, the grin speaks again. “We’ve planned everything to make sure you succeed,” it says. “We are prepared to pay you more money than you can possibly imagine.

  “With your permission, we are going to remake you completely.”

  Later, as he walked through the city streets toward the great lake, he requested an optic download of several maps and video and photographic documents from databases in Canada. By the time he reached the lakeshore, he had, in the right corner of his stereo-optic screen, photos of the Great Lakes that identically matched what he would have seen with his normal vision.

  As the high-speed train glides silently along on its cushion of air, a sudden realization strikes him: according to his newly reactivated memory, he had sat on a bank of the promenade lining the gray and pink pebbled beach, against the backdrop of hills ringing the bay with its crenellated cliffs and peaks, dotted here and there with old, half-ruined Soviet-era buildings and the new structures erected to support the tourism that had been revived over the past fifty years thanks to global warming and, more recently, the “official” end of the Grand Jihad. Now, as he superimposes the plains of the American-Canadian border, here between Quebec and Ontario, on the Siberian landscape of his recollections, the two sets of images seem almost identical. Or—are there really four images? Two split universes—two spaces, two times? There is the original one, implanted in his memory cells, which seems to unwind in tandem with the train’s magnetic suspension track, but which also appears to contain the image of Lake Baikal that now imprints itself so strongly on top of the view out the window. And there are the new images too, the ones so unlike the view outside the train, that stem from the memories he has just remembered….

  His reactivated memory now allows him to access data about the world, data that the instruction program sent him several days earlier, but that has only now risen to the surface of his “awareness.” It is an impossible paradox: through his memories, he is receiving information that he will only understand later on, and that will superimpose itself on the “real” world flashing by outside the train windows. It is called “inclusive feedback,” the instruction program tells him, as it simultaneously incites the synthesis of a particular endorphin that will keep him from falling into a state of parapsychotic crisis.

  The topological similarity between the two worlds naturally strengthens this reciprocal inclusion of reactivated memory and “real” world data. He moves as if interfacing between two barely distinct mirror images in space and time. There, in Siberia, sitting still on the shores of Lake Baikal. Here, speeding toward steppes newly created by global warming. And now, passing vast lakes, immense flat plains, forests of birch and conifer separated by wider and wider stretches of open space…

  And the local Baikonur at the end of the journey.

  While walking on the beaches of Lake Baikal, he had studied the data provided by the Corp—all the data available on the contract hit, down to the color of his boxer shorts, and everything about Grand Junction, the private city he ran.

  But that he was not supposed to run for much longer.

  His memory implants had downloaded the equivalent of an entire dictionary into his brain at superhuman speed, while he waited for Vassily and his men to take him to the Order’s laboratory, where he would undergo transgenic reforming and the imposition of partial amnesia before being flown to Windsor, Ontario.

 
; Now, while the outside world unfurled like a series of concentric waves of which he was the temporary center, the foundations of his personality appeared, tracing the specific topography of his psyche as if weaving a semantic plot ceaselessly reflecting this end of the limitless world.

  The memories themselves are black boxes, full of secret operations, clandestine information, gestating crimes, and twists that defy common sense.

  His personality itself, with the exception of the information planted there by the neuronal instruction program, is undoubtedly formed of a daring and inexplicable mixture of real and false memories. He has several lives in one, but none of them is complete. Nothing is true or false any longer. But there is at least a general schema in place now, shaping his view of the world and of himself.

  He is a hired killer en route to Grand Junction, this city-cosmodrome, this vast Amerindian territory where spatial industry is in the hands of private entrepreneurs, insane businessmen, and the Amerindian gambling mafiosi.

  It is the derelict Las Vegas of the Orbital Paradise, the last Free City, the newest Space Boomtown. It is the last private point of entry to the High Frontier left on North American soil.

  He has been sent there to kill a man named Orville Blackburn.

  Orville Blackburn is the Mohawk mayor of Grand Junction. He is rich, powerful, well protected. He will not be an easy target. But this man has broken some promise to the largest Russo-American mafia in the northeast.

  He is a dead man.

  The train is passing by an abandoned section of highway. A few grain silos stand in the distance like zeppelins vertically suspended by reverse gravity. The landscape is flat. The sky is deep indigo. Night is falling.

  Soon he will arrive at his destination.

  > THE HOTEL LAIKA

  The Grand Junction high-speed-train station is a cosmopolitan shambles where the crowds throng like a human octopus in a city immediately reminiscent of Babel—that is, a mixture of Nero’s Rome and Hollywood Boulevard.