As far as he knows, the Leonov Alley strip stops short at the southern extremity, toward the 1400 block, just after it intersects Voskhod Boulevard. Part of the avenue and its environs had been replaced in the bygone days of the area’s development twenty-five years earlier by a huge hydraulic basin that collects rainwater from the hills and directs it, in potable form, to other collection, processing, conservation, and distribution systems in the city. This blue gold, so necessary to the lives of Grand Junction’s residents, is part of the primitive ecology of this corner of Canada, where the dryness of the American Midwest and the immense plains of Manitoba and Alberta is now infecting the north and east of the Great Lakes region, whose water table—despite the efforts of climatic agencies—has dropped almost 25 percent in the last fifty years, while more than a million of their glacial counterparts covering the surface of the country are already half evaporated and, like the Aral Sea in the previous century, are on the brink of vanishing from the map for good.
This war between man and water brought out the worst in each of them. Man not only needs water for himself, he needs exponentially greater amounts of it to proliferate, or just to survive under proper conditions—which are never anything more than a temporary plateau in the permanent struggle against entropy. At the same time, the more men and productive negentropic factors there are to consume energy, the rarer water becomes. Its rarity rapidly destroys the most basic growth and development factors. If that isn’t a war… Plotkin thinks to himself. Only hydrogen engines, they say, are able to do the impossible—accumulate reserves of water while simultaneously increasing its consumption. It is said that the UHU is working ferociously to develop technologies that will result in actual water-manufacturing factories before the end of this century. It is said that certain branches of the Governance Bureau are looking to the private orbital colonies and their nascent savoir faire in matters of terraforming and astrochemistry. The lunar pioneers and Ring colonists have acquired, in barely thirty years, a great deal of expertise in the transformation of lunar rocks and circumterrestrial asteroids into reserves of oxygen and hydrogen, the two elements most important to extraterrestrial life. In the meantime, the war between men and water is not only continuing, it is intensifying, destroying ever more resources and individuals, just like the forty-five-year-long Grand Jihad, with its endless catalogue of abominations committed by men against men.
The Monolith South hydraulic reservoir is 1,200 meters long, 600 meters wide, and an average of 40 meters deep, half buried in the earth and divided into four equal sections. It is one of the best artificial hydrobasins in the Northeast for filtering and storage; it lets rainwater pass into the water table without any sort of artificial filtration. It is part of a Consortium eco-agreement: all new companies in Grand Junction, such as Hydro-Québec Waterplans, which manages the basin, are obliged to comply with it. The vast rhombus of concrete-composite, hemmed in by fences and security posts, cost a fortune at the time of its construction—but then, at that time, the Consortium was rolling in gold. The Mohawk and Russo-American mafias, as well as gangs of Canadian motorcyclists, had divided up the land. A few newer communities—like Junkville—had established their microniches in very specific areas and markets already abandoned by the huge local mafias. Business in the 2020s and 2030s was still booming, like it did in the heavenly Las Vegas of the American Golden Age. It is obvious, really, that the beginning, peak, and slow decline of the Grand Jihad have cemented the wealth of the city, the county, and the entire Mohawk territory. It is less and less certain that universal peace, only barely enforced by the UHU for the last ten or twelve years, will ever be as profitable.
While the battle against terrorism and expenditures for security and biogenetic research have taken up most of the public’s money and energy over the last forty years—not without reason—private cosmodromes have been able to concentrate their efforts on the journey spaceward with the support of many countries and international agencies. The United States persevered a bit longer than the others in the space race, but the dream of a return to the moon was quickly extinguished by the double threat of terrorists wishing to destroy humanity at all costs and others just as rabidly desirous to preserve it.
Between the Second Civil War, the disunity that followed it, and the moral injunctions of all the lobbyists determined that taxpayers’ money “would not be swallowed up by the infinity of space,” it had only taken a few years for virtually the entire program to be frozen, as it had been in 1972. The moon was left to a few military companies and given up for the price of clumsy negotiations conducted among the various parties who had so recently come together.
Even with peace “restored,” the UHU still does not seem ready to take a renewed interest in space exploration; there is always some urgent geopolitical program still to resolve, or a major ecosystemic crisis at hand, or a stuffy bureaucracy paralyzed under the eyes of ethical police and artificial legal intelligence. In a bar on the strip where Plotkin stops to drink a beer with an alcohol content that would be illegally high elsewhere in America (an imitation-British pale ale, outlawed since the application of the Shari’a in Great Britain; copies of English beers are all the rage in independent Amerindian territories, he is informed by a recollection that emerges from some unknown, dusty corner of his falsified memory) followed by an energizing cocktail typical of Grand Junction, he overhears a quartet of old gentlemen, all of them half-blood and speaking the local French—the details of which were imparted long ago by his instruction program. They explain, as they play cards in a corner of the smoky room, where a century-old jukebox blares twentieth-century country-and-western songs, that in a few years, when the Islamic emirates of Western Europe are more or less entrenched in the new Great Middle East, or in federalist Slavo-Russian Europe, when their fucking Odessa Treaty is finally signed, free cosmodromes will be regulated by “these damned bureaucrats and fucking big-ass maggots in the global government.”
The artificial water table serves mainly Monolith South, a research center on Von Braun Heights, and Freedom-7, the only more or less “middle-class” neighborhood in the area, as well as the wealthy areas west of the city. It also provides a natural border with the southern part of the county, where the insalubrious Omega quarter and then the asshole of Grand Junction, Junkville, sprawl offensively. The entire perimeter of the basin is closely guarded: the border is, in fact, a high-security wall. Plotkin had the history and geography of the place inscribed in his memory in real time before he began his visit.
He is, in fact, terribly normal, like a supertourist.
Upon leaving the hotel, he walks through a galaxy of airtight whorehouses, a host of third-rate bars, small flea-bitten motels, capsule hotels like his own, deserted parking lots and shopping centers, numbered police stations, barely maintained parks (really just hilltops left in their natural state), and a few apartment buildings grouped in tight blocks, typical of the residential structures in Quebec and Ontario, Anglo-Scottish cottages in red and white brick, divided into two or three floors of flats and separated by long numbered streets with no names. These “rows” extend through the woods up to Gemini Drive. Back now below the 30000 block, he begins to feel the city become denser. There is more electric light. It pulses.
He walks past android-whorehouses whose neon signs blare the merits of their “girls from the sky.” Indian casinos with names culled from Mohawk culture or the space race—or both—in this Franco-English mélange that is the official language of the whole territory, try unsuccessfully to imitate the giant Las Vegas establishments. Actually, this is a “freer” state than Nevada itself now, which had seceded during the first days of the Second American Civil War. Here, anything is still possible—even winning money at a casino.
Again, Plotkin is impressed by the incredibly fluid manner in which the instruction program can work—when it functions. It is like a living word processor implanted in his brain. As soon as any general, historic, or “academic” information become
s necessary, the neurosoftware and its linguistic nanocenter impart the desired knowledge so quickly that you feel you’ve always known it.
It is a residual morsel of the program, accomplishing its tasks without a hitch.
Continuing on, he sees a few exoskeleton-pedestrian shops, for people who want to walk faster. This phenomenon was a by-product of turn-of-the-century medical innovations in biomechanical prostheses for those who had been wounded, paralyzed, or had a limb amputated, and of military research conducted during the Grand Jihad. He notices that a large number of people are using these exoskeletons, sometimes mounted on wheels like Rollerblades, sometimes simply molded to fit their feet like orthopedic shoes from which several cables stretch up to the hollows behind their knees. The older models, which look like ski boots with shin guards attached to them, had never really gotten beyond the medical, military, or experimental phase. Now, nothing kept reengineering techniques from cobbling together for you—in less than an hour—a state-of-the-art biomechanical system and, if you had the money to pay for it, a portable system that could be incorporated into your own body and unincorporated from it just as easily—and, consequently, able to be sold or rented for a lot of money.
It is a struggle to keep the Orbital Ring in service, and only cosmodromes like the one in Grand Junction are still able to transport people there. Still, machines are constantly being invented that allow man to be less and less tired.
Plotkin walks through open-sky souks where various scavenged high-tech materials are sold. There are people selling cigarettes, which are illegal in 90 percent of the North American territory. He passes two or three neurogame arcades, where men openly sell versions of pedophilic, sadistic virtual-reality pornography that is outlawed almost everywhere else. Toward the north, near the hotel, it is still relatively calm. It is only when he crosses an enormous four-lane boulevard called Nova Express that he really passes beyond the border of the neighborhood responsible for the reputation of Monolith South: Ottawa Village. Here, your security level drops more than a few notches.
According to Grand Junction’s internal ecology plan this Monolith Hills enclave south of the strip is part of the “low society,” as it is referred to by General Statistics. In a way, a very certain way, it is closely connected to Junkville.
The paradigm is there, supervisible, in the form of blinking signs that indicate it like writing on a wall. In the PERMANENT INDEPENDENT ZONE FOR THE LOWER CLASSES—read: the poor—people exploit one another without the slightest qualm. Ottawa Village, fifteen kilometers to the south of Junkville, is like a predator face-to-face with its prey. In Ottawa Village, the cosmodrome pimps act like kings of the city and the Orbital Ring. “Suck my cock, bitch, and I’ll get you a visit to the Cape.”
Here, in this place that has managed to rise minutely above Junkville, throngs of procurers from the strip work the world like a job, feeding copious streams of bribe money into the Municipal Consortium’s various black boxes.
In Junkville, you have only to look around to make a killing. Some people compare it to the intensive overfishing of the twentieth century, when there were still noncloned fish. Rumor has it that there are true open-sky recruitment centers there, and that they are never empty, day or night.
In general, Ottawa Village sits between Nova Express, in the 22000 blocks, and extends south to Pluto Street, 10000 numbers lower. This is the heart of the strip, with Leonov Alley as central Broadway, and dozens and dozens of streets where bars, brothels, nightclubs, arcades, fast-food places, and various cockfighting pits crowd together under the glacial polychromy of neon signs. It is here that one passes through the “solar system” with its nine successive streets bearing the names of our sun’s planets. A veritable concentration camp for whores. All the diseased flesh in Junkville that is still capable of being used is gathered there. Especially the flesh of minors.
Past Pluto Street and the 9900 block of addresses, a vast area of electroneural arcades and gladiatorial arenas, whose flying saucer–shaped hulls seem to have only just landed between V1 Street and V2 Street, things grow progressively calmer. The start of Leonov Alley, at the corner of Voskhod Boulevard, may not exactly be SonyDisneyWorld, but it seems like nothing more than a trendy nightlife hotspot, with a few picturesque antique porno theaters (still working).
It is often said that the Devil loves to disguise himself, and will even dress up as Christ, if he must, in order to attract the damned.
He no longer needs to go to all that trouble.
The Devil’s best camouflage, in this day and age, is the Devil himself.
The black monolith stands, obviously, in Monolith Plaza, at the corner of Mercury Street and—of course—Monolith Street. It serves as the symbolic starting point of the “solar system.” It is only a poor slab of black carbon-carbon, three hundred fifty meters high, standing on a broad pedestal and facing, via Monolith Street, a long slope that goes down toward the valley and the lights of Grand Junction. Its hieratic presence in the middle of this square peopled with whores, pimps, and their motley clients, with crude noises and lights, is totally incongruous; it seems almost as obscene as it is ridiculous. It is as if some deity ended up on the wrong floor, and had never been able to get back on the elevator to Heaven.
Plotkin walks for hours, climbing from the 9900 block back toward the Hotel Laika.
The 9900 block alone contains a good hundred addresses; hence its name. It is home to one of the largest arenas on the strip; there, gladiators of all types face off against one another. Collectively neuroencrypted historical reenactments have been wildly popular for some time with the public, who gathers en masse in the rare places only partially controlled by the UHU to see “authentic” Roman gladiators, battles between superheroes, and famous battles that end occasionally, if not often, with actual deaths. Fractures, wounds, and amputations are the rule. The fights take place in beaten-earth amphitheaters with participants in the uniforms of Roman soldiers, Thracians, and retiarii; and in zero-G cabins where they dress as Superman and the X-Men. It is said that some directors of the UHU Governance Bureau admit that “violent sports, placed under reasonable ethical control, are an excellent substitute for imperialist aggressiveness and war.” Plotkin hears wisecracks on this subject in the streets as he passes by groups of people loaded on some drug or another, legal or illegal—there are many for sale on the Monolith Hills strip. Grand Junction’s a model, did you hear? We’re going to export the 9900! He hears laughs and incredulous exclamations. But the more time that passes on this planet where he has apparently lived for fifty-six years, the more he understands that there is less and less sense in the claims of the UHU directors—the “masters” of the world.
No more frontiers to conquer; no more war to face; no more limits to reach beyond. There are good times ahead for the professional gladiators.
Bread and circuses.
The circuses, especially, are in for a brilliant ride, in these times when they are permissible and welcomed so much that they may well exceed their origins.
Back to the hotel now. Time to waste away in front of his neuroquantum console.
El señor Metatron reappears just as he is crossing Nova Express.
ALERT.
The message blocks his view as he steps up onto the curb of a small street lined with third-rate cybersex shops. The words flash bright orange in front of an android-whore covered in black latex who strikes a series of lascivious poses in the front window of a specialty boutique.
The android Vega 2501 is there too. El señor Metatron recognized his genetic imprint on a cash machine a little further up on Moon River.
He must be avoided at all costs. Plotkin should take a left there, now, at the next corner (Alpha Street), but he does nothing.
He doesn’t know exactly why he is acting this way—why he doesn’t leap to follow the imperious instructions of the invisible light blob that is hovering above the pavement next to him, at the corner of a building, in front of a shop window, und
er a neon sign, a few inches from the aerosol-sculpted hairdo of a whore.
He walks calmly in the direction of Moon River. He walks calmly in the direction of the android. He walks calmly toward one of the possibilities that the instruction program did not anticipate.
> A NIGHT WITH THE MACHINE FROM THE SKY
The android is walking in front of him, heading north. Back to the hotel, no doubt.
The LED display in his right eye informs Plotkin that it is 2:18 in the morning. What has the android been doing in Monolith South, beyond Nova Express? Why here, in this neighborhood full of whores, illegal dope, and crime? Why the hell had he needed to get cash on his way back to the hotel?
Because he spent all his money on the strip between the “solar system” and Nova Express, that’s why. Because he has plenty of cash. Even contracted androids get paid well by certain orbital corporations. And the strip is full of merchandise available for cash, and so is Ottawa Village.
Sexed androids are becoming more and more popular with humans. It seems logical that, in return, sexed androids would be attracted to Homo sapiens. And it is likely that, for an android who worked for almost twenty years in harsh lunar conditions, there is hardly any difference between a biological human structure aged twelve or fourteen years old and one twice that age. Male or female probably doesn’t matter much either.
Something is pushing Plotkin to follow Vega 2501, or whatever his name is. El señor Metatron immediately makes his disapproval known, but the neuroinstruction program seems to be perfectly operational on this point. All the reflexes of a secret police agent are deeply and clearly ingrained in him.
He plunges into the crowd, never taking his eyes off his prey, turning away, bending to reattach a Velcro shoelace, or loitering behind a handy obstacle when, occasionally, the android half turns to look in some clothing or sex shop. He plays with his programmable clothing in an intelligent manner—that is, without overdoing it. He always keeps his distance.
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