Cosmos Incorporated

by Maurice G. Dantec

  Because the beautiful Lady of Osaka wants to be fucked. Right here, right now. Immediately.

  Under the stars and the purple night sky, at the summit of Olympus.

  And she wants to be fucked, right here, right now, immediately, under the stars and the purple night sky, at the summit of an electric Olympus, because Plotkin—without even knowing it—has brought with him the explosive element that is creating these hormonal fireworks.

  They have both come to screw the beautiful Lady of the Tower.

  He has come here with his closest friend. He has come with Death.

  As the soldiers back from the Second Gulf War said, these veterans he met from time to time when his career as a private killer was just beginning, death is the million-dollar question. It is worth at least that much. It is the question every woman accosted in a bar, every wanker you meet during a dinner in the city, every journalist who has never traveled farther than his own suburb, will ask upon learning that, one way or another, death is your business. If your job is to bring death, or, more precisely, to know how to sell death to the highest bidder, they will ask that question even if they can’t lay the cash out on the table; they will ask to see, but they won’t have more than a handful of coins. They will ask you without saying anything, but they will ask in such a way as to make equivocation impossible: Have you already killed? Have you already sold death?

  And paradoxically, you will be able to hear the scream that sticks in their throats, no matter how drunk they are. “Shit, HAVE YOU ALREADY KILLED SOMEONE?”

  Plotkin knows a guy in the Order, a Serbian, who always says that “Death is our whore.”

  It is the question no one asks, because it will not be asked. It hides. Its presence is only indicated by its apophatic revelation. There are a million ways to talk about death without ever mentioning it. There are at least a million ways to die. And the question, really, is worth its million dollars. Death is surely worth at least the price of a haute couture gown.

  The dream has illuminated two time frames, two landscapes that reflect off each other, each reciprocating and intensifying the other. A vast ice palace might result from such a meeting, such feedback, such a Larsen effect.

  Especially in a dream that holds such memories of experiences lived, whether falsely or not—which is of little importance now. The dream is there to incorporate those memories into his existence and his memory, and into what is called his identity.

  There is, now, a third sequence that brings together all the points that emerged during the two original-terminal sequences. It is a long chain of violent images, murders, voyages in the night, men and women who scream or simply stare at him, paralyzed, at the crucial moment. Of cars that explode, personal planes plunging into the sea, cargo ships and tankers that are driven off course and then sunk. Political men killed by a long-range assault rifle with a telescopic lens mounted on its muzzle. Discussions like the one with Van Halen, or with other Order killers. Other solitary missions carried out as he climbed the ranks of the organization. Other landscapes, other lands, other plans to kill men. Or women.

  Milan. The European Civil War has been frozen by the Peace of Sarajevo. In areas devastated by local outbreaks of the Grand Jihad, which would soon be heard again during these few years of false tranquility, this postwar that is never anything more than a preparation for the next war to come, an economy typical of this type of situation springs up rapidly, like weeds in a poorly cared for garden.

  In Milan, during the various phases of the French civil war and the interminable European conflict that followed it, Italian nationalist factions stood in opposition to the regionalist militia of the Lombard Republic as well as Islamist troops from southern France and the Balkans.

  There is a guy who wants to control one of the territories the Lombards have managed to retain: a big drug trafficker, Italian, but from Naples. For the Lombards, that means he is an Arab. When Plotkin kills him in the men’s room of a very chic restaurant that just reopened its doors, tarnishing the fragile reputation of the establishment as well as the immaculate faience of the cubicle in which his target has just sat down—what was his name? Calvecchio, wasn’t it?—he does so with the precision of a robot, the precision required to enter the world of the HTS, these authentic human supermachines.

  He is hunkered down in one of the stalls when the target comes into the bathroom accompanied by his bodyguard. Plotkin could, of course, act as Van Halen does: fire first and think later—for example, wait for the target to sit down on his shitbowl while the bodyguard cools his heels in front of the entry door, which will have been locked to ensure the master’s privacy. He leaves his own stall, kills the bodyguard—a high-performance silencer is less noisy than the fart of a new post-Italian-economy rich man—then kicks in the door and plugs the gentleman in question with the rest of the bullets in a gun that will be melted down within twenty-four hours.

  But Plotkin has his own way of doing things. Something has already emerged in him that will set him apart from the others in his field.

  He hides in the last stall, the one farthest from the door and the place where the guard will be. It doesn’t matter much which stall the Neapolitan chooses. Thanks to a pocket scanner with neutrino tomography, Plotkin can discern—through three partitions and with the digital exactitude of a computer—the position of Mr. Calvecchio, the Neapolitan, or whatever his name is, who the Lombards want eliminated for one sick reason or another. On the scanner’s screen, he sees the white, blue, and gold silhouette of the man sitting on a block that is vaguely cubical in shape and dark in color, like a negative of reality. The contours are very clean. The man is around eight meters away from him, separated by the climate-controlled air and something like three times two centimeters of Recyclo™ particleboard—in other words, nothing, for the high-velocity microam-munition that the Sig Sauer magnetic unit will fire at four or five times the speed of sound.

  He presses the gun barrel with its mounted nanocomputer against the partition wall to his right. Linked to the scanner, the pistol emits a tiny beam of telemetric light that points to the precise place where the mouth of the gun must be, and the exact angle it must have to be aimed directly at the unmoving head of the man who is currently emptying his bowels for the last time.

  The high-speed projectile, the sound of which is absorbed by a long carbon-carbon tube made of several thousand kilometers of fibers rolled around themselves in a spiral, passes through the three partition walls without making the tiniest noise—sort of like a fiery fart—and causes a lightly smoking hole at the end of the gun barrel that is so geometrically perfect it might have been cut by a laser. The pocket scanner shows the man now sagging gently to one side, toward the opposite partition wall. His sitting position will keep him relatively stable for a few more minutes.

  Plotkin dismantles his paraphernalia and stows it in a backpack made of antiradiation material (very useful against the optic-sensor glasses often worn by bodyguards) that hangs from the hook on the door, shining with the silvery sheen of Mylar. He flushes the toilet and leaves the cubicle calmly. He walks toward the sinks under the watchful eye of the big redheaded man who, dressed in a secondhand Armani-Apple suit, leans against the vast mirror next to the door and awaits his master’s emergence.

  Plotkin washes his hands—not too fast or too slowly—but with the eager speed of a man who has a pretty girl waiting at his table. He nods politely as he passes the big brute, who, sure of himself, unlocks the door for him. He is already on a plane that will take him to Finland.

  Finland is only a transit hub that will take him in a myriad of directions, all leading to the murders he has committed on behalf of an Order of Siberian mercenaries.

  Asunción, Paraguay, March 2028. Kraków, Poland, September 2030. Minsk, Belarus, January 2031. Cape Town, South Africa, June–July 2032. Tanzania, Senegal, Ireland, Panama, Singapore, Burma, Madagascar, Moscow, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk. Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Portland, Oregon; Kam
chatka, Estonia, Slovenia, the two Georgias (Caucasian and American), Morocco, Libya, Sweden, New Zealand. Southern China: Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong.

  His life is a carousel of images, like an average tourist’s photo album. Except that each postcard is written in human blood.

  There is the local chief of the Global Unified Animal Liberation Front and Warriors of Gaia, whom a former member of the Ulster Freedom Fighters—Northern Irish Protestant loyalists—wanted dead for reasons known to himself alone, and he would never have used an Order mercenary for the job if his own organization hadn’t refused to participate in the operation. Plotkin had only needed to follow the animalist guru for a week to precisely map out his habits. The man’s security precautions are pathetically weak in the eyes of one who had been educated by the war schools of the Red Star. Boom. As the target comes out of the elevator in the apartment building of one of his mistress-groupies in his Dublin fief, Plotkin jumps out with a simple twelve-caliber Remington whose double barrel is conveniently sawed off. He opens fire two meters away, showering the man’s upper body with buckshot. His head is instantly pulverized by an explosion of barbed-wire sand; his body distends under the impact, bucks, and begins to topple slowly toward the still-open elevator door. The second volley of double-aught buck, fired at the chest, paints the cabin floor with a spray of scarlet even before the corpse falls heavily to the ground. Mechanically, Plotkin sends the elevator back to the penthouse before leaving the building, singing an old Billy Idol song, “Dancing with Myself,” the still-hot gun stowed neatly in his rucksack.

  There is the wealthy Mexican businessman who begs tearfully for his life, promising untold fortune and pleasure, harems of women and entire federal reserves, brothel-cities and Olympic-size swimming pools filled with gold ingots. The man has himself ordered almost thirty assassinations, but he cries for his mother and seems ready to sign over the deed to Paradise rather than accept that his time has come, that the justice of the dark world has turned upon him. Plotkin and his men of the moment drag him out of the trunk of a big Chevrolet sedan and far into the southern California desert and the ravine that will be his tomb.

  There is the private plane filled with an entire familial clan of Islamist guerrillas fighting the Catholics in the southern Philippines. There is the mobile firing station, an Israeli antiaircraft system, one of the technologies that proved so critical during the long siege of Jerusalem. There is the double-engine super-rapid speedboat used by members of the Catholic militia. There is the long flash of silvery powder that cuts across the night sky in search of a target he himself cannot see, then a sudden, enormous orange star—the explosion of General Santos’s plane just off the coast, in the dense, tropical Pacific night over the pit of the Philippines.

  Now dawn is breaking in an Asian city. Bangkok. It is suffocatingly hot, and Plotkin lolls on the banks of Chao Phraya, in front of the stylish, ultramodern, made in Hollywood Asian skyscrapers: extraterrestrial Burmese palaces; gigantic pagodas, tall crenellated towers curved inward in graceful convex lines, surrounded by huge billboards whose messages blink from Thai to Chinese to English to “International English.”

  The sky is a particularly intense turquoise blue all around the pale aura that rises slowly to the east of the East. The tourist-boat Noria operates twenty-four hours a day. He walks toward the quay at the end of a narrow street whose sidewalks are lined with houses made of Recyclo™ particleboard, displaying again and again the motif of survival in all its cruel nakedness—a filthy mattress, a case of local beer, and a cheap Indian television set. By the pier, the blue of the sky is even more vivid, the eastern aura whiter and more luminous. He boards a ferry and waits patiently for its departure on the pearlescent gray water of the river.

  At the same time, at the other end of the city, a man starts up his big turbo-hydrogen 4x4, simultaneously detonating a powerful bomb lodged in the van parked in the neighboring spot. The luxury Range Rover and its occupant are blown apart in a fraction of a second, analogous to that nearly indiscernible instant of time when night is no longer night and day not yet quite day. That fragile and sublime instant he is living as the sun begins to rise over Bangkok and the waters of Chao Phraya glimmer with the pink-veined blue iridescence of dawn.

  There is, in this dream, the entire catalogue of his crimes.

  Even the ones that hold a moment of pure beauty in the terrible story of his life.

  The moral of the killer Van Halen, and the ethic of Mrs. Kuziwaki, are stretched to infinity.

  There is everything that can produce a world, then destroy it.

  There is everything that makes him him.

  The terminal dream affects his body like an endless series of white nights. A few minutes after waking, Plotkin finds himself as exhausted as if he has lived an entire lifetime in one night, and he knows that is, in fact, exactly what has happened.

  That is why he does not ask the console for some legal amphetamine or another neural accelerator. He takes the time to swallow a bit of breakfast, then goes back to bed and sleeps for almost twenty-four hours.

  > THE CARTOGRAPHY OF NOTABLE INDIVIDUALS

  In the morning, the window lets through only a faintly pink gleam of light. The resin/cheap alloy furniture glows gently in the streams of pale sunlight. The list streams past in the air just within his reach as he lies on the helium bed, waiting for the automatic room-service waiter to bring him his breakfast.

  The seventeen “special” residents are on the list, and everything about them is there too, down to the three billion sequenced pairs of nucleotides that form each person’s DNA, down to virtually every hour of their lives, down to the memories that even they have forgotten. A second selection kicks into action now. El señor Metatron isn’t just any intelligence agent. He was designed for an elite criminal order by the technological division of the California yakuza.

  These seventeen people must be specially monitored in order for him to avoid them as much as possible during his stay. More importantly, el señor Metatron indicates, there are five that need to be watched even more closely.

  For starters, two of them are androids.

  The first is a sexed android of the female type, working as a legal prostitute in various autonomous territories analogous to Grand Junction. Like casinos and dope, this is quite a lucrative business in the areas around cosmodromes full of colonists-in-waiting, who knew they won’t have a fuck for months, enclosed in their pressurized cabins, before—maybe—meeting their soul mates in the Ring or on a lunar colony. To put it bluntly, the environs of private cosmodromes are little more than open-air brothels, mass cum repositories, that do as much business or maybe more than the simple space industry. The android-whore is named Sydia Sexydoll Nova 280. Her identification disk is perfectly legal, but two or three details ring false. First, she leaves the hotel only rarely, and el señor Metatron knows of no visits to her room, though he has viewed all the videos recorded on the hotel’s hard drives. Second, her DNA has a bizarre print in addition to the official trademark of her manufacturer—in this case Venux Corp. The strange print indicates the presence of a transgenic operation whose main objective had been to cut all the connections in her nervous system that would stimulate pleasure. It is a legal operation in some cases, but sexed androids do not generally choose total and permanent neurocastration, because their clients can feel it and don’t like it. In this business, more than any other, the client is king. El señor Metatron is formal: the operation profoundly altered the basic bio-nano-cybernetic centers of Sydia Nova 280’s pseudocortex; it is irreversible. Never again will she feel even a poor digital simulation of sexual ecstasy in a body initially programmed to give it.

  The other is an orbital service android who has fulfilled its time of service and who, legally back on Earth, is “looking for work” in Grand Junction. It has a small pension from the cartels that employed it during the first twenty-five years of its artificial existence. New UHU laws regulating the “android proletariat” have
imposed quarter-century limits on “impersonal contract” service by androids to the companies that have bought them. In other words, the legal age of majority for an android is now twenty-five years, and until that point, whether the android is paid for its services or not, it is not considered a legal person. It is no longer a slave, but neither is it a citizen yet. Recent in-orbit attacks by the Android Liberation Front, Flandro, are probably not unrelated to these legal changes in their status promulgated by the Global Governance Bureau.

  El señor Metatron points out two or three strange details about this one as well. In order of importance, they are: Several pirated rewrites are on its identification disk. The identity—only the name—has been changed. The rest of the information seems authentic. It gives its name as Ultra-Vector Vega 1024; its true name is Ultra-Vector Vega 2501. Just the series number was changed. Even before the android’s return to Earth, from the looks of it. Then, even more strangely, el señor Metatron realizes that the android’s departure coincides with the day of the last attack committed by Flandro, on the completely automatized Zero-G Industries freight transit station. The company specializes in the repatriation on Earth of used space materials. The attack took place eight weeks ago. The android traveled through Windsor, like Plotkin, and stayed there three weeks before arriving in Grand Junction around a month ago. Like everyone, or almost everyone, it lodged first near the aerostation, at the Hotel Manitoba on Aphrodite’s Child, the town’s red-light street lined with brothels. It then came up to Monolith, where it rented a furnished room near Nova Express before moving here a few days before Plotkin’s arrival.

  There is nothing positively linking it to the Android Liberation Front or the orbital attacks, but in view of the fact that its identity is false and also that there is no such thing as coincidence, el señor Metatron was certainly right to inform Plotkin of its presence. Best to file it under “potential problems.”