Cosmos Incorporated

by Maurice G. Dantec

  This part of the city is almost the oldest, if you don’t count prehistory; it dates from the twentieth century, before private space exploration and before the Grand Jihad, when Grand Junction was still just a small town nestled alongside a Canadian National railway line in a Mohawk reserve partly located in Quebecois territory and partly in American—in the state of NewYork, within the borders of Vermont, and less than fifty kilometers from Ontario. Later, the “leopard spots” of the Mohawk reservations were partially united. The autonomous territory developed a triple border. Grand Junction itself was a bilingual city, and a large percentage of the inhabitants still speak French.

  Well, Grand Junction French.

  Here, humans are prosthetic extensions of urbanization. Each quarter, each street has its own dress code, which is more or less a life code. Clothing brands are only the signs that point to urbanization as the utopian-atopian achievement of the human beings who circulate within it. They are signs. They are urbanization. They are indistinguishable from the structure, the forms, even the topology of the city. Born as the world began a steep decline, Grand Junction had the time during its golden age to condense everything of the city and posthumanity into a single matrix. Thanks to their off-center location, the autonomous territory and the zone of Grand Junction escaped the various waves of attacks that brought down North America’s metropolises during the Grand Jihad. Grand Junction was even able to stay out of the conflict during the War of Secession; it had the time to carry the urban phenomenon to the peak of success, just before everything came tumbling down.

  Men live here in a dream of total integration among machines and society. Here and there are UHU-approved religious shops and even legal interactive fetishes leaning against the walls of buildings, in plain view on the sidewalks. Men or women can be seen plugged into them, heads inclined toward the bluish haloes of the neuroconnections. Plotkin notes the presence of numerous Amerindian divinities, pre-Columbian ones from Central America, as well as those from Siberian shamanic rites and primitive slave and Nordic religions, and even a few syncretisms that have risen from the mass of transcendences supported by the magic of the UHU, whose federative slogan appears each day at sunrise, written in clean white clouds disturbed only by the dark oblong fuselage of an occasional passing zeppelin. This is the source of the UHU’s power, Plotkin muses to himself, again without really understanding where the thought is coming from. It can swallow up complex singularities and unforeseen new innovations. It can even admit differences, just like indifferences. This world-machine is much more intelligent than it appears to him—worse still, it is more intelligent than he can imagine. With the exception of terrorist groups and “intolerant” religions—especially Catholic, Orthodox, and Evangelical Christians, officially banned since the brief armistice of the Grand Jihad and the “interim” concord with the circum-Mediterranean Islamic states and the American ones in Michigan, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C.—absolutely every possible and imaginable divinity existed in this new cosmopolitan Rome, the Rome of the End Time. Grand Junction, he knows (thanks to data acquired in Siberia—or had he acquired it somewhere else?), is regarded as a model of city living among the states federated under the aegis of the UHU.

  He goes to 1044 Korolev-6 and asks to see Mr. Samuel Gerald M231, the deputy subcomptroller for the cosmodrome’s general insurance department. They exchange banal small talk; Plotkin explains “why he has come” and is given two or three sheets of digital cellulose and a small disk, then advised to make an appointment. He insists a little, as planned, and obtains an express visit to the office of another peon named Jaggi S127, with whom the circus starts all over again. Plotkin acts like a complete automaton; he doesn’t need to have anything to do with Mr. Samuel Gerald M231 or Mr. Jaggi S127 or their damn numerical prospectuses, strictly speaking, but it is part of the plan. On that point, at least, what remains of the instruction program was clear.

  For three hours he acts like a robot, leaving dozens of traces in temporary and permanent files. False traces. Traces that won’t be traces of anyone.

  Traces that won’t even be traces.

  Then, he decides to visit the cosmodrome.

  He plays the tourist—green zones, blue zones, no controls; just a few temporary traces in the tollbooths’ files. He takes a robotaxi and pays cash. Grand Junction is one of the last places in North America where cash of any type is still in circulation. He pays with a mixture of yen and Philippine pesos, and receives change in rubles and various Eastern European pounds and crowns.

  Apollo Drive marks the northern boundary of the city. To the east is Von Braun Heights, a simple rocky spine dotted with a few scraggly conifers, at the summit of which stands a tall bronze statue representing the German engineer, head inclined toward the stars, in the neo-Soviet style of the 2010s. Then there are the hills of Monolith Hills and their famous black monolith; then, farther still, the mysterious Heavy Metal Valley. To the west are two sprawling, posh neighborhoods where the bigwigs and local haute bourgeoisie live: Centaur City to the north and Novapolis just below it, separated by a small river with an Indian name. To the south of the city is first the aerostation and then, toward the water, several industrial and business areas, a handful of progressively shabbier residential blocks, and finally, at the southeastern tip of the county, the slum. The barrio. The favela. The human junkyard. Junkville. A line of eroded hills whose slopes are covered with clinkers stands over thousands of collapsible Recyclo™ particleboard houses and a few plastic bungalows and dilapidated mobile homes set on blocks for the more fortunate residents.

  At the other end of the city, north of Apollo Drive, the restricted zone of the Municipal Consortium begins—only orange and red zones there.

  Here the cosmodrome site begins. Here is the Holy of Holies, Cape Gagarin.

  But it has never really been a cape; at least, not in recorded history. The last sea known to have existed in this region had receded by the beginning of the Cenozoic era. There aren’t even any decent-size lakes except for Lake Champlain, to the southeast, toward Plattsburgh and Burlington, in what remains of American federal territory. Someone came up with the name, but no one can remember who it was. It goes back to the birth of private space activities in the area, some forty years ago at least. There are thousands of stories on the subject to be heard around Grand Junction; almost everyone has his own version.

  From Junkville to the southeast, all the way to the vast natural plain of Cape Gagarin at the northern end of the county, is the secret dynamic that lies behind the entire economy of this territory. On one side is the Mud, the asshole of the World; there, outside the city, even before the aerostation and its connected industrial areas were there, is an indication that you would do better to leave, if that is even still possible, because you are already on the way to ejection—you are hardly more than a piece of garbage that cannot be recycled by local industry, or by a more base form of disposal, or even by the worst slut. On the other side is Cape Gagarin, the light of the stars, a vast plain bordered by hills to the east and west; an immense blue hole between two blue masses that press toward Montreal and above which, especially on particularly dark nights, halos of light appear like electric aurora borealises beyond the horizon, around sixty kilometers away. There, the launch center sends its blue and yellow pulsars into daylight that has become semiartificial, while its metal towers and the concrete pedestals of its launchpads, lit up by dozens of bunches of tightly packed spotlights emitting their blue and orange rays, serve as decoration for the nearly simultaneous takeoffs of the three different rockets on the tarmac.

  Plotkin finds himself in the only “green” zone provisionally open to the public. It isn’t even a blue zone; it is completely unrestricted. He is face-to-face with the Grand Junction Dream. To enter, you must punch in a red or orange code; then you will have a few hours to watch from a fenced walkway built for this purpose and called Stardust Alley. It is only a large, dusty alleyway several kilometers long, stretching along
side a high electrified metal wall that overlooks other perimeters of grids, some more dangerous than others.

  It is at this moment that he realizes, with shock, that this area is populated by human beings just like him, at least in appearance. But since the beginning of his visit to the city of Grand Junction, it has been as if his perception program relegated people to the category of decoration, whatever their gender, race, or uniform.

  He sees them, perhaps, all these humans, but he does not really notice them. Their presence fades in that of the terrible and manifest power of the city itself, its machines, its dreams.

  Something has to happen, something unplanned, something outside the normal scope of life in the big city, for humanity to become visible even for a few moments.

  For example, that bum over there—one of the aerostation untouchables that came to be here who knows how, facing his fenced-off, inaccessible dream, facing his forever-lost dream, facing the image of his ruined life.

  Arms crossed, he shouts countless curse words in several languages and long roars that hang in the clear blue air, startling groups of fellow visitors who scatter, murmuring their shock and disgruntlement around him as he stands like a fulcrum, indifferent to their chaotic, fear-induced ballet.

  He screams all his hatred, and all his admiration. Plotkin can’t tell exactly what types of drugs he is on, but from the way his legs wobble, barely holding him up, he guesses that a lot of alcohol, probably legal, has gotten the best of his remaining synapses.

  He belches; he shouts; he spits all his venom, the poor man, at the very face of the cosmodrome. He vomits out all his hatred of the city, of life, of mankind, of the stars…of God, who is not even there. Mixed in with his incoherent ramblings is a sort of barely audible poetry, an ode to what has destroyed him. An ode to the Holy of Holies. An ode to the cosmodrome.

  A mobile Metropolitan Police unit is already arriving on the premises: two fairly old-model androids and a human chief. As they try a bit awkwardly to approach this big fellow dressed in rags, who continues shouting imprecations with his back turned to them, Plotkin sees him become aware of their presence via a sort of sixth sense and pivot slowly to face them and their old hydrogen MG. He offers them a smile so big he seems capable of swallowing them whole, as well as their old car and the whole fucking city they serve. Then he screams, but it is also like laughing. It is a laugh that holds no mirth, a laugh so disturbing that it transforms him into a caricature, one that is frozen with terror.

  “WHY DO YOU REFUSE TO SEE THAT WE ARE ALL DEAD?”

  The untouchable’s scream is only the vibratory prelude to his mechanical movement. He charges at the three cops and rams violently into one of the androids, who falls heavily on the hood of the MG. Immediately, the cop’s robotic comrade and his human sergeant draw their nonlethal weapons from their holsters. Two small blue discharges shoot into the body of the big lug, who is turning on them, shifting from one foot to the other.

  The dance stops abruptly, as the man falls unconscious. The human sergeant brings his GPS-radio bracelet to his lips and barks out a series of codes and instructions to the Central Police Bureau.

  The crowd is already re-forming in small groups up and down the length of the fence. The problem is resolved. In five minutes, a municipal ambulance will come to erase all traces of the untouchable’s presence. The cries and alcoholic odes to the cosmodrome are nothing more than an unpleasant memory, tempered by the icy presence of the police and the sound of radio voices in air ionized by the security grids.

  Six hundred meters behind Plotkin, the Apollo Drive highway whirs with traffic; some of the cars, he knows, are defying UHU law with their combustion engines, whose noise and exhaust are poorly camouflaged by various homemade systems.

  In the other direction, in front of him on the wide concrete expanse, the rovers advance with their mechanical, unrelenting, crushingly slow steps. Moving at barely two kilometers an hour, they seem almost to be standing still. The access runways leading from the storage and preparation hangars to the launchpads are between 2,500 and 3,000 meters long; it will take the rovers more than a hundred minutes to reach their destinations.

  Plotkin sees the lights of the operations center, three control towers, and several long buildings that form a west-facing half circle against Centaur City, which has a clear view of the cosmodrome.

  He stays where he is for a full hour, all the time allotted to him in the Stardust Alley blue zone. El señor Metatron sidles casually up to him; the security systems here are much more advanced than they are elsewhere in the city.

  They are truly face-to-face with the Holy of Holies.

  They are truly face-to-face with something like the image of the face of God fallen to Earth.

  He summons a robotaxi and goes back to the hotel, filled with terrible, inexplicable doubt.

  > THE MAN WITH THE DISGUISED LIFE

  Thanks to el señor Metatron’s GPS locators, Plotkin makes it back to the hotel without being noticed by anyone—except the manager, Balthazar the dog, and two tipsy Quebecois tourists hanging out on the patio in front of an antique video-game machine.

  On the tenth floor, he barely has time to enter his room before the neighboring door slides open. According to the polymimetic flame, this capsule’s inhabitant is a recently fired orbital cargo pilot. He works under the table on construction sites around the cosmodrome. He keeps a staggered schedule; they must have mistimed Plotkin’s return to the hotel.

  In his room, Plotkin changes and orders a breakfast of cereal and vitamin-enhanced yogurt—not too much nutrimedicine—with a diet soda full of Global Health Bureau–approved amphetamines. Then he asks el señor Metatron to show him a complete plan of the city’s security systems and a general report on all operating procedures.

  It takes more than an hour.

  Plotkin takes a shower and is reminded once again that the image of his own face in the bathroom mirror tells him nothing, that the identities swirling around vaguely in his head do not seem the smallest bit consistent. Yes, he is a killer—that is the one thing he is entirely certain of—but for the rest, he has no doubt that the Order possesses genetic-and memory-reforming techniques that surpass human understanding, and that they have been used on him. What is all the more remarkable for being a rarity is the fact that the Order’s techniques also appear to be incomprehensible to the highly sophisticated machines that have taken over the world.

  Total amnesia would have been better; things would have been clearer—or a bit clearer, at least. One identity lost; one identity to rediscover. But his identity wasn’t lost; it was falsified. One identity lost, ten to rediscover—all of them partially. His only oneness comes from this primitive duplicity between his identity as a killer with barely known origins and the many variables of his synthetic personality. His partial amnesia reveals only things that let him establish links among the false, the true, and the perhaps, like declassified files where anything important is blotted out in black ink. He is a man whose definition is chaotic, full of holes, a man who has too much memory. A fragmented man of the past.

  He gets out of the shower. The rich afternoon light pours through the window; he stands nude in front of the large disk of glass. He can see that the first rover is now returning empty to its hangar; a Long March V rocket with a “handcrafted” capsule made in Alberta will probably take off within the next twenty-four hours. The second rover is nearing its platform, carrying a patched-up Atlas Centaur rocket. The third, with a French Ariane V from the 2000s, is only halfway to its launchpad.

  Business was still good, despite the recession.

  Could there be an intermediate state, or a synthetic one, between the two primitive qualities of Oneness and Multiplicity? He feels a strange yet “ordinary” sensation of single existence—of being part of a singular body in a singular place, in a specific era. He does not feel any of the side effects often associated with traumatic amnesia: no schizophrenia, no splitting of his personality. He is terribly
normal.

  His only excuse for a memory is a handful of half-false memories implanted in his cortex and a few shreds of true recollection stolen from the machine that controls his reality.

  He is nothing. Or, almost nothing.

  Maybe that is the “solution”—if, in him, the many can be one, and the one echoes throughout the many “hims,” it is because he is nothing more than potential. He lets his mind explore a series of possibilities that go far beyond the few experiences he remembers. He envisions a line of infinite tension between the world and all the worlds within him.

  He is undoubtedly a killer.

  He has undoubtedly come here to Kill the Mayor of This City.

  The instruction program is unequivocal on this point.

  But though the past is dark, the future resembles a vast, luminous window onto an unknown more mysterious and sinister even than his own shadowy memory.

  That night, he decides—against the most basic security instructions—to venture farther down the strip, down Leonov Alley, toward the plaza where a replica of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey stands. Urban legend claims that it is the monolith that was used during filming; everyone also knows that every private cosmodrome on the planet has its own monolith and that each one of them claims theirs to be the authentic one.

  The Hotel Laika is situated at the northern end of the hills, almost right up against the cosmodrome. It has become a virtual northern suburb of the sort of long, linear city that snakes along the wooded plateau, a little more than twelve kilometers in length.