Cosmos Incorporated

by Maurice G. Dantec

  It isn’t as bad as a village of particleboard houses, but it isn’t the Ritz, either.

  It takes him only a few minutes to undress and run a shower in the collapsible bathroom that unfolds slowly from the side wall. He is irresistibly attracted to the mirror, which reflects the ceiling light, a spray of fiery gold in the little rectangle.

  He stands facing his own image.

  And doesn’t recognize it.

  Which is exactly what he expected.

  > CAPSULE 108

  The image staring back at him from the mirror is that of a man with gray streaks in both his blue eyes and his black hair, thin lips, a scissor slash of a mouth, and a long face, somewhat triangular in shape. It tells him nothing at all.

  At first glance, the man in the mirror looks to be around forty years old. That corresponds to his identity, and to his specific biomedical profile—two transgenic rejuvenation cures.

  For long moments, he contemplates this stranger in front of him, hoping that the instruction program will pass along a few memories, or even a scrap or two of information. But nothing happens.

  The program does not seem to react at all to what is happening, in fact. It seems completely indifferent to the fact that, while the re-identification process had more or less functioned smoothly up to this point, the mirror phenomenon has obviously caused some sort of serious blockage.

  The retractable shower extends slowly behind him, its antiviral diaphragm releasing a tiny spiral galaxy that diffuses in a bronze-colored halo around his head. The machines obey; that is, they regulate the world they perceive. For him, a man whose identity itself is fabricated, nothing seems planned.

  The humming of the electric motor stops. Plotkin stares at his image, itemizing every detail, while his ears take in the noises of Capsule 108 and of the entire hotel beyond it.

  He is able to sort out the chaotic mélange of sounds in short order: There is the deep, dull infrabass rhythm that must surely come from the building’s hydrogen reactor. It is a sine curve pulsation—rising, falling, rising, falling—with an unvarying frequency, barely discernible beneath the various other sounds filling all auditory space.

  There is the noise of the suction pumps that distribute severely rationed water to the capsules. There are the small staccato sounds of electric, lighting, heating, and air-conditioning circuitry. There are the various individual noises of the active antimicrobial filters, antiviral diaphragms, ventilators, airlocks, and alarm and security systems. He also hears the clickety-clacking of the micromachines that burrow through the pipes and cables inside the walls, operating, repairing, tinkering. There is the characteristic vibration of the nacelle elevators as they move up and down the building’s façade. Then there is the wind, blowing gently and causing soft quivers in the structure of polymetallic alloys, composite materials, and Recyclo™ concrete like a ship abandoned on top of a hill after the flood. And there are the crackles of the structure itself, thin threads of sound just barely audible when gusts of wind strike the hilltop.

  He listens closely to the living sounds of this organic-mechanical structure; he listens, and he sees, and he hears, and he observes.

  But he cannot recognize himself in the mirror.

  Some people say—he doesn’t know how he knows this—that life in Grand Junction’s capsule hotels is the best training for life in space. As the last tiny droplet of water is vaporized from his body by the shower’s atomizer, he begins to understand the truth of that phrase.

  The retractable shower consists of a square cubicle with a sanitary system, closet, self-lighting mirror, chemical phosphorescent overhead lights, and the shower cylinder itself, which is hardly more than a meter in diameter and whose floor has a partially transparent bubbled surface behind which he can see pressurized water condensing in reservoir tubes before being projected out of the minuscule holes dotted all over the cylinder and into a hemispherical head placed just above his own. The soap is yellow biodegradable cleansing foam that is poured over him by the showerhead after fifteen seconds of water spray. A small rotating brush detaches itself from the ceiling and lowers itself on a thick steel tube; a green light goes on in front of him in the middle of the diaphragm, glowing LED letters informing him that he will be able to use the brush for the next sixty seconds before being rinsed by vaporization and then sprayed by antiviral eau de toilette.

  Later, stretched out on the capsule’s retractable bed, waiting for sleep that will not come, he contemplates the night sky of Grand Junction. His attention is caught by an abrupt flash of light that glances off the porthole window. He gets up and stands in front of the large circular pane of glass—it takes up almost the entire wall from floor to ceiling—just in time to witness the takeoff of the shuttle he noticed earlier on one of the astroport’s launching platforms.

  The fire is white streaked with dazzling molten gold. It forms a sphere as bright as a bit of the sun fallen to Earth and returning now to its birthplace. The shuttle itself is barely visible in the midst of the glowing gases; it is merely a tiny gleam at the top of the ball of sun-fire, trailing flame as it shoots toward the high atmosphere. Then it is lost, somewhere in the direction of Ursa Major.

  Suddenly, he understands why so many people are irrevocably drawn to this city, so many lost souls from all four corners of the Earth. He understands that even a slight chance to share your life with this dancing, meteoric dream could keep you here forever.

  Nothing happens over the next few days. At night, his metacortical nanocomputer furtively organizes the networks within his nervous system. Bioprocessors self-replicate on ribbons of protein. The genetic instruction program scrolls its lists of invisible codes. His dreams are absolutely black.

  He is content to stay in his room, eating trans-G sushi and nutrimedical pizza delivered by the hotel’s room-service robots. The active vitamins, trace elements, and minerals are accompanied by several types of specialized antiviral GMOs (genetically modified organisms) that the console menu lists relentlessly every time he places an order.

  The bathroom is programmable; it can serve as a shower, a water closet, even an emergency room if necessary. Twelve layers of intelligent poly-alloys are able to take on any of these three forms on command. It is an old system, one of the first of its kind, produced by General Electric in one of its last acts of brilliance before being purchased by a Sino-Japanese cartel. It takes almost twenty seconds for the programming to be finished and the facility configured for the desired use; the latest Fujitsu models open ten times faster, nearly instantaneously.

  The cliché, it turns out, was true: a stay in a capsule motel like this one really was the best preparation imaginable for life in a pressurized box orbiting the Earth at an altitude of 450 kilometers, or en route to an agglomeration in circumlunar orbit.

  It is also true that the power of UHU is obvious, even here on the margins—especially on the margins. The correlation between the presence of capsule motels and that of a crowd of lost souls longing to leave for the new frontier is purely economic. And yet, it is also as if the economy has created a mysterious link between these areas of temporary residence and the groups that gather there before departing for the moon, or perhaps Mars. Some of them do not stay, and come back to Earth. They resell their claims, their Golden Tracks, to the highest bidder, and thus the black market grows, the market of fake, real-fake, fake-real documents on which so much of Grand Junction’s underground economy depends.

  An interesting detail: in Grand Junction, the economy is underground by nature. Elsewhere, it is the opposite.

  CATALOGUE OF NEUROPORTABLE WEAPONS

  Cortical control metabolic nanoviruses, targeted cellular destroyers

  Rapid-intrusion neurotoxic nanoviruses

  Pathogenic metabolic nanoviruses, contagious pseudoviruses

  Any of the following specialized neurovectors: neuroblocking neurovectors, prionic investigation and neuronal targeting agents, neuronic countermeasure and antiviral security systems, synapt
ic propagation retroviruses

  Memory-controlling neuroprocessors

  Neuroconnections with orbital telemetry and GPS surveillance systems

  Integrated neuro-optic displays

  Global language neuroencryption software

  Programmable sensorial amplification

  Plotkin vaguely understands that in this world where the rockets blasting into orbit are twentieth-century antiques, where cosmodromes are erected on rebuilt offshore oil-drilling platforms; in this world, which seems frozen in a sort of post-technical stasis, it is as if progress has reached its limit, as if it has buckled under the socially programmed repetition of its prodromes and has become monumentally inefficient. Yes, he realizes that the only real scientific progress here is the work of mafia organizations, or corporations of killers like the one to which he belongs.

  It is incredibly pathetic, almost tragic. The sensation is one of absolute disaster and terrible beauty all at once.

  The morning after the cortical computer finishes downloading the complete catalogue of neuroprograms into his brain, a list of them appears in transparent suspension in the corner of his field of vision, only a few seconds after he awakes. He now knows, definitively, what he is: a living condensation of this black science, this science of assassins, this science of what remains of humanity.

  He does not know the cause of the instruction program’s blockages, but he has the feeling that this black science, dark as it may be, contains a point of light. He cannot explain the feeling, but if this point of light is not him, it is in him that it shines weakly.

  For twenty-four hours, the entire third day, he remains connected to the NeuroNet console in his room. He had located an intelligent agent with the help of the nanocomputer, residing somewhere in the anodyne peripheral memory of the Metanetwork. It is a neuroencrypted software agent; after a long and careful series of verification procedures, it is activated in the digital world of the NeuroNet and can appear within Plotkin’s field of vision while remaining invisible to outside eyes. It is a state-of-the-art neurodigital projection; its World is the binary virtual world of the Metanetwork, which has become the regulator of the real World as well.

  Its name is el señor Metatron.

  In just a few seconds, it gathers for Plotkin the equivalent of an encyclopedia on Grand Junction; the Municipal Consortium; Cosmos, Inc., the managing firm of the cosmodrome; the Enterprise aeroport facilities; and the local history, geography, law, politics, and media. Who hated whom and why; who dealt with whom and why; who was fucking whom—and who was letting themselves be fucked by whom—and why.

  El señor Metatron can take an infinite number of forms. It says it was designed for Plotkin years before, by a yakuza firm in the Republic of California. It says that Plotkin uses it for every mission. It says he told it everything, before his cortical surgery in Siberia. Plotkin sees in it an opportunity to find out more about his past; the neurodigital agent should have the memories of his previous missions.

  But el señor Metatron, who has chosen this time to appear in the form of a pure gold flame with a dancing blue-violet base and every shade of red and orange flickering in its ephemeral body, tells him that since it is a projection of his own mind, he cannot hope for too much in that area.

  Plotkin tells himself that he cannot stay in his room any longer. He must act. He must begin to spy on this world.

  He begins to take an interest in the life of the hotel.

  > CATEGORY-FOUR ENCOUNTER

  The Hotel Laika is typical of Grand Junction’s capsule hotels. These residential buildings were introduced at the beginning of the century in Japan, taking their inspiration from the modules under construction for the International Space Station. From the beginning, a mysterious affinity existed between the boxes men built for themselves on Earth and the ones they sent into space. They allowed people to reside cheaply in seminomadic tribes formed of millions of middle managers commuting within the conurbation each day. The astronomical rents in Tokyo and the rest of Japan’s megalopolises provided capsule hotels with the opportunity to expand across the entire archipelago. Later on, the introduction of nanocomposite materials, then Recyclo™ multiuse particleboard resulted in the mass production of folding suitcase-houses, and several million Japanese workers used these to live in the streets even as the first thousand-floor mega-towers were sprouting up like mushrooms.

  In North America, the concept was taken up and adapted to fit local conditions. In Grand Junction, smaller-scale capsule hotels are the norm, as they are in most of Canada and the neighboring American states. Simply put, they are the motel of the twenty-first century.

  This particular hotel was a quadrilateral-shaped building around sixty meters long on each side, with 110 capsules on each of its four walls; it was ten floors high, with a double-elevator nacelle and service, security, and maintenance capsules on each floor—the minimum legal standard for establishments of UManHome’s ilk. The building has a central patio covered with a pale pink resin roof six meters high, at the four corners of which are wide columns in the neoclassical style typical of this area. These columns rise to support the antiradiation dome that covers the structure and is meant to protect those within it from falling particles. A cement-composite and cheap polymetallic alloy cubbyhole separates the antiradiation dome from the rest of the building. There is a service staircase accessible via magnetic key; it is near the door to this staircase that Plotkin had been able to detect the substandard holes and cracks in the ceiling, with radiation levels slightly above the norm.

  There is, of course, a network of interior and exterior multifrequency surveillance cameras, standard-model, Ukrainian-made but of good quality. Their small, globular, black-violet eyes are dotted along the hallways and service stairways, in the elevators and corridors of the first floor, in the entryway and on the patio, in the reception office, and all the way out to the sidewalks, where an archway of simple metal tubes tries feebly to replicate a Soviet flight tower.

  The hotel is at almost the very end of Leonov Alley; the other motels are farther to the south, where the city’s population is more concentrated. After the numbers 30–32000—as Plotkin noted during his taxi ride—the strip changes little by little into a simple street lined with conifer woods and groups of houses, several dance clubs, and two or three more motels like his own, spaced farther and farther apart.

  At the northern end of the road, Plotkin can make out an autobridge. It was from that direction that the cyberdog had come, when he saw it for the first time.

  A dense and black wooded abyss caps the street and fills the horizon. The autobridge spans it and joins, via an unfinished access road, an old, unused municipal road. A billboard there reads, in yellow letters against a verdigris background: NORTH JUNCTION.

  This dilapidated municipal road leads east between two long, upward-sloping concrete ramps, then disappears among the emerald fronds of a hill lit sporadically by ghostly bluish streetlamps.

  To the west, the North Junction road descends Monolith Hills toward Gemini Drive and the downtown area, whose many lights create a glittering dome of brilliance that arches over the city and touches the cosmodrome to the north, spreading luminescence and various types of electromagnetic interference that render it not uncommon to see a missile transformed via malfunction into an exploding firework visible for a hundred kilometers.

  Crossing the autobridge, Plotkin finds a staircase carved into the concrete ramp that allows him to access the North Junction road. Another sign at the bottom of the stairs bears an arrow pointing east toward the hills and the words: TO HEAVY METAL VALLEY, NEXUS ROAD, 6 MILES.

  He briefly explores the area around the autobridge. There is only a peripheral surveillance system, a half-century-old panoramic camera set up by the Grand Junction Transportation Board; it has obviously been repaired twenty times and is still miraculously in operation, and sits atop an antique telephone pole whose wires were cut long ago. It emits an unpleasant metallic screeching no
ise audible for kilometers.

  Plotkin heads back toward the hotel.

  A rebuilt Proton rocket with its four passengers in a small Japanese-built capsule is just taking off into the dry, pure, monochromatic blue afternoon sky. He stops to watch the fireball follow a slightly oblique trajectory south, toward an equatorial orbit, a line of white fire as pure as a painter’s sure stroke on the canvas of the world. He sits down on the side of the road in the grass, whose vivid green contains a multitude of subtle variations, and raises his eyes toward the zenith where this cloud of powder and fire has dwindled to an invisible point, its image now no more than an imprint on his retinal memory.

  It is only then that he sees that he is being watched by someone beside and slightly behind him. That someone is the dog.

  Plotkin watches the dog calmly, as it watches him.

  The traces of several surgical operations and a number of biomechanical prostheses are visible on the surface of the dog’s cranium. It is a Labrador-shepherd mix, or something like that; its coat is black, with a few tawny and gray spots on its belly and feet. Its hazel eyes are large and deep, with distant violet stars hidden in the irises.

  He immediately feels a profound sense of empathy with the animal. Cyberdogs were invented in the 2020s, after all the necessary technology had been developed during nearly two decades of conflict.

  Cyberdogs served as both scouts and patrollers, and thanks to transgenic manipulations of their cortices, the American and then Chinese armies had been able to turn them into very efficient bionic animal soldiers. As far as Plotkin can tell, this is an old Typhoon-class cyberdog, the highest class of them. It has a neurolinguistic center cloned from bonobo cells, with a vocabulary of around four hundred words—greatly superior to the current human average. Its surgically enhanced vision is greater than that of other canines—this area is not always so well provided for—and it can remotely control, via a GPS transmitter, certain security circuits in the hotel.