Cosmos Incorporated

by Maurice G. Dantec

  They wait. It is past one o’clock in the morning. They wait. Drummond still does not emerge from the protective dome; the cameras show virtually nothing: closed angles, blank walls, shadows, vague reflections. The sensors are paralyzed by the nanovirus. No sound, no infrared, no X-rays, no volume detection, no spectrography, no recognition of motion.

  Nothing.

  They wait.

  Suddenly, the pyrotechnic angel dances beside the window, then all over the room. “I’m sensing something,” it announces.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know exactly. It’s almost normal, but not quite. It’s a sort of…a sort of vibration.”

  “What frequency?” Plotkin asks.

  “Low, but not inaudible at the source. It’s far away, stifled by ambient noise, but it’s coming from the dome, I’m sure. I’ve set up a few trigs.”

  “An abnormal vibration, you said?”

  “Yes—periodic but not linear. It stops for a long moment sometimes, then starts again. It started around twenty minutes after he went in. That’s almost two hours ago now.”

  “By the sainted A-bomb, what the fuck is the bastard up to?”

  “I don’t know, Plotkin,” the angel Metatron replies somewhat pathetically, hanging from the ceiling in a circle of flame. “I really don’t know.”

  Drummond went up beneath the dome a little after midnight. It is now almost three o’clock in the morning. El señor Metatron copies the two codes—entry and exit—from his magnetic key and transfers them to the memory cell in Plotkin’s. Then he suggests they wait a little, and pursue their initial investigation before going up into the dome themselves.

  In the confusion of low definition and semidarkness, el señor Metatron has detected the presence, via the chance aiming of a camera lens at a mirrored surface, of two or three prohibited religious emblems.

  “Like the ones in Heavy Metal Valley?” Plotkin demands.

  His guardian angel’s spectrometric analyzers show him the characteristic shapes of the symbols in question.

  Yes. Like the ones in Heavy Metal Valley.

  Christian symbols: a crucifix, maybe two, and a statuette of the Virgin Mary. He can also make out a small shelf of books, but the total absence of light makes it impossible to read the titles in the vague reflection on a metal surface.

  Religious symbols. Books. Prohibited books. It could not be a more surprising find.

  Drummond, an apostolic convert?

  Was it the sound of his prayers that Metatron had detected under the humming ambient noise of the hotel?

  The consequence is clear: maximum security. No going under the dome without taking every imaginable precaution. Drummond had been able to place countermeasures, traps, genetic tracers. He is probably the one behind the malfunctions in the instruction program. Maybe he is trafficking in clandestine technology beneath the dome. El señor Metatron will have to investigate. El señor Metatron will have to comb every disk in the hotel, including the ones archived in the databases rented from the Philippines and Paraguay. They need to nail this guy.

  Then, Plotkin turns out the lights and goes to bed.

  He sleeps dreamlessly, a sleep as gray as the color of the sky when he awakes, feeling as if he closed his eyes only a second earlier.

  ON/OFF. He turns off and back on, like a computer. Between the moment of turning out the lights and the moment of the morning awakening, there is nothing. A simple digital skip. A blank page.

  The day has the cold paleness of a Nordic dawn: the sky is leaden, metallic gray, ashy, with clouds pressing against the horizon. He gets up, eats, showers, dresses.

  Then he leaves Capsule 108, goes down to the lobby, and waits for his usual rental car.

  Why go back to Heavy MetalValley? his guardian angel had asked him.

  He hadn’t known how to answer at first. Instinct, intuition, his killer’s training. Something like that, anyway. Well, no. He just wants to; that’s all.

  Let’s roll, el señor Metatron had replied, using the now-famous phrase. He wants to go back to the city of demolished cars, the city of lost metal, the oxidized Jerusalem of the last Christians.

  The fact that Drummond is undoubtedly one of them, that he has probably installed a small altar and an illicit prayer room under his protective dome—which gives sense to some of his actions, but makes others even more confusing: the contraband cigarettes and undeclared marijuana, the trafficking of untaxed toys made in India, his lamentable hygiene…

  Plotkin ends by concluding that perhaps—and that perhaps puts a lid on some troubling possibilities—if there is a cover-up, then the man’s semilegal activities, as well as his official status as a capsule-hotel manager and a part-time informer are a perfect way of deflecting any suspicion that he might be a secret Catholic.

  He drives, thinking that it probably wasn’t Drummond after all that lured him to the northeast part of the territory, and Quebec, and Heavy Metal Valley.

  Something in him, something that is him, but seems like it might be someone else at any moment—some part of him wants to return to Xenon Ridge. Something alive in him wants to live; something alive wants to act; something alive wants to break into ordinary language with blistering words. The impression that absolutely everything is real, especially him, simply because he seems to be able to think in parallel and cut through the world of illusory reality, is incredible.

  This infinite tension between him and the world is pure, noisy like water fallen from the stars. It is as if the beauty of a ray of light has become like a perfume, or a needle lodged in his heart. His fingers seem to act of their own accord in choosing a playlist of rock and pop songs from the Great Century on the navigation console.

  Why is it that the view of a few gray-purple clouds above an old abandoned Texaco gas station opens such gaping holes within his entire being, false, true, true-false, and false-true identities all together, while the pale yellow disk of the sun plays with the slivers of blue sky that let oblique columns of light pass through them—high glimmers, fixed and ephemeral, above the hilly land of southern Quebec?

  Why—how—does he feel so free?

  Because an instruction program is malfunctioning?

  Or because something wants the fire to spout from his mouth?

  He cannot compare this sense of freedom to any other concept or sensation, any known or transmissible abstraction or experience. Why does he feel such a profound upheaval of his entire being when, very simply, the humming of guitars in an old song by The The fills the cabin and seems to fall from heaven like radioactive rain, like a larger-than-life reenactment of the London zenith? It dates from 1983, from the great album Soul Mining. This is the day, your life will surely change, this is the day, when things fall into place…

  Then there are “Slow Train to Dawn” and “Infected,” from the 1986 album Infected. Like a vision of an apocalypse with cold and delicate veins from some rainy island. The almost-rockabilly beat-up-beat seems to come from a bunker where the planes of Armageddon are lined up side by side, like beach huts in rows on the edge of an endless desert. The characteristic harmonies—Celtic-bluesy guitars, accordions, Irish fiddles, and harmonicas of groups from northern England, but with the addition of the electronics and violence of Cockney London—are superimposed on angular, hard rhythmic bases, with bridges that cut like glass blades. He has chosen these songs along with another audio file containing “Blue Monday” by New Order, dating from about the same time—the British mid-eighties—as well as “The Big Heat” from the album of the same name by Stan Ridgway. He is in a dark, strange area, somewhere beyond his own identity, a hollow space that does not belong to this century, or to this world, or to any of his false memories, but to which he belongs, with all his being.

  He feels that he has been standing at the gates of something that his false English identity was created precisely to cover up. There are bagpipes whispering of the Irish Sea in the Simple Minds song “Belfast Child.” There are the celestial gui
tar riffs of the Edge in U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name,” and in The Silencers’ “Northern Blues.” There is the icy scansion of the totalitarian machine in Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and the views of the postatomic, sublunar world—so close to Plotkin’s own—in “Rocket USA” by Suicide, which throbs with the contradictory colors of the end of civilization and the magnificence of sunset; black and gold, silver and red, like music written for meteors.

  Why does it seem as if everything is on the brink of harmonizing even as it remains magnificently different, like a supreme collision by fire of the elements, the music, the car he is driving, and the words that are taking possession of his soul little by little? He becomes aware of—his consciousness is assaulted by—unknown diagrams that map out dazzling encounters between a violet cloud hovering low beneath the leaded dome and the guitar riffs of Johnny Marr, clear as glacial lakes and high as mirrors suspended between the sky and the Earth; by the image of oblique columns of light filtering through the clouds. There is the improbable shock of PJ Harvey’s voice on “Rope Bridge Crossing” as if it is hanging on a barbed-wire horizon, with country guitar twanging in a postatomic desert, and the opening of a vast stretch of blue sky to the west as he turns onto Nexus Road. Yes…he feels as if he is touching with a fingertip something essential concerning his own identity, whatever its origins or method of creation: flashes of words, forming short phrases that cut into the emotional landscape of his mind, jarring in his brain, directly describing the experience he is living through now. Phrases like Freedom is the point of being where it is consumed.

  Freedom takes up residence in a place of being where encounters can take place—collisions, accidents, implosions—outside the internal instruction program and outside the numerous routines shaped by the neotenic parameters of the totalitarian social structure in which he lives along with seven billion other human beings.

  TOTAL COMBUSTION.

  This place within him seems impossible to pinpoint, or describe, or define. It doesn’t even seem possible to confirm its existence. If it is fire, its flame—its ethereal envelope—is barely visible. It is really as if, each time he tries to go back to the world of external and internal instruction programs that form “reality,” this place vanishes abruptly from the maps, the diagrams, the land, the world—and even from himself.

  This place, where liberty is burgeoning inside him, is, more than anything else, the place where the terrible possibility exists of encountering another freedom. For that, he must pay the price—put himself in danger—be confronted with his own nothingness. He must let this freedom be subsumed into the other, in order to establish his paradoxical, but vital, existence.

  He arrives within view of Xenon Ridge and follows Xenon Road to the top of the mesa. He parks at the foot of a mutant cedar covered with fuchsia-pink blooms and retraces his steps to find the same observation point he occupied before: a small, rocky ridge running parallel to the hill that, crowded with spiny bushes, hides him from the view of anyone below.

  Well, almost. It was a wise precaution.

  But not wise enough.

  He has just sat down when he uses the special program in his optic lenses and neuroconnects to a small digidisk reader-recorder. He concentrates on the activity in the little city within a city below, on the life happening in the city of lost metal. There is a lot going on. There is a lot of life. There are many things to see and to note.

  He is so absorbed that he hears almost nothing until a voice orders him to remain seated and raise his hands high in the air.

  The characteristic sound of a .12 caliber rifle cocking gives a certain weight to this suggestion.

  > HMV

  The small, dark room is warm. The man sitting across from him is a Canadian half blood called Wilbur Langlois. He has blue eyes and a short, natural gray beard, and weighs about two hundred pounds. He stares unblinkingly at Plotkin. A scavenged butane lamp illuminates his face and casts trembling flares of light here and there in the breeze that rattles the metal roof of the mobile home, where the little gas cylinder is hanging from a denuded cable.

  Wilbur Langlois wears a silver badge shaped like a six-pointed star on the lapel of his midnight-blue uniform. He is flanked by four men who do not introduce themselves. The mobile home is a sort of tinkered-with bus—one of those, undoubtedly, that he saw during his first investigation. It serves as the official police station of Heavy Metal Valley. Wilbur Langlois is the sheriff of the community. The four men are his assistants.

  Two of the men are the patrol officers that surprised him at his lookout point on Xenon Ridge and brought him here in handcuffs. The two others remain at the far end of the room; he cannot see much of them besides their impressively tall shadows, arms crossed, standing on each side of the gray steel rectangle of an escape hatch with its handle right in the center.

  How had he made so many blunders in so short a time?

  Going to the same place twice, only two days apart, only fifty meters the second time from where he had been the first!

  Apparently all the poetic brilliance dancing like fire in his soul had led him—in this bloody world, at least—to the worst kind of danger. An error in calculation. “What are you doing in Humvee?” the man asks. He has already asked the question two or three times. This time, his tone hardens.

  “HoomVey?” Plotkin asks. He heard “Hum-Vee” perfectly well, but decides to play the fool for a few precious moments, which he knows will really be worth very little.

  “Humvee,” repeats the Amerindian. “That is what we call it. Heavy Metal Valley: HMV. Humvee, like the American neo-jeep from the turn of the century. Okay?”

  “Okay. Heavy Metal Valley: HMV. Humvee.”

  “Correct,” says Wilbur Langlois. “Now, what are you doing here, eh?”

  Plotkin has just realized that the conversation is taking place in French. American French. The base routines of his instruction program are functioning with the detachment of a dream.

  Obviously, he can try to play the tourist lost in the hills, but stupidly, he has done anything but act like a clueless Japanese traveler with his neurodigital Nikon. No, he was surprised in the act of spying on something—he doesn’t even know what. Or even why.

  He will have to improvise, and fast. Let his killer’s instinct talk. Let his professional assassin’s intuition take over. But it is as if this part of his mind is frozen like an internal arctic circle. Instead, his mouth opens to let out a dart of pure flame that comes from who knows where, and manifests itself in the following words:

  “I’m looking for something. Or someone.”

  “You’re looking for someone? Who? And why?”

  Again, the fire blazes from his mouth, and he can do nothing about it. He looks at Wilbur Langlois, the sheriff of Heavy Metal Valley, and is suddenly filled with strength neither inside nor outside himself. He cannot tell where it comes from—it is as if it’s drawn from some entity in the interworld between him and the world. It is a highly magnetic strength that fills every cell in him. He smiles, and it is a smile that could light up the dark side of the moon.

  “I’m looking for a man. Or a woman. Maybe even a child. And I’m looking for him because he, or she, is a Catholic. I mean, a Christian.”

  One of the men that captured him, a Nordic-looking fellow wearing round steel-rimmed glasses, brandishes his .12 caliber gun.

  “This bastard’s a UniPol bounty hunter. Where does he think he is, California?”

  “Shut up, Florian,” Wilbur Langlois growls. He turns back to Plotkin. “So you’re not an insurance agent, as your ID claims?”

  Plotkin uses the strength flowing through him to speak a truth that hides the truth. “My ID isn’t false. I’m also an expert in technological risk.”

  He hopes his bravado is convincing. He does not betray the slightest emotion as he allows his Swiss-cheese memory to speak for him. Wilbur Langlois does not take his eyes off him. This is a true interrogation.

&nbs
p; “Do you have a mandate from one of the American confederations? Or from Canada? Quebec, perhaps?”

  The sheriff is obviously expecting Plotkin to answer in the affirmative to one of these choices so that he can inform him that none of these mandates have much power in independent Mohawk territory—and even less here in Humvee, an autonomous territory within an autonomous territory.

  Plotkin, however, doesn’t feel like playing games. Again, he feels it—the old talent of a human predator is still there within him. He feels it, he knows it, and he acts accordingly. Play straight; tell the truth. Or, more precisely, cover the fundamental truth with a truth of secondary importance. “I’m not a bounty hunter, I’m a journalist,” he says. “I’m passing for an insurance agent. Since I actually am one, it’s very simple.”

  Thirty seconds of silence pass. He can tell the guy with the .12 caliber would happily nail him to a post without further discussion.

  “Ah…we have no resident that corresponds to your profile, Mr. Plotkin. I’m sorry. I don’t know where you are getting your information, but it’s incorrect.”

  Plotkin goes for broke, without even knowing whose table he has been brought to sit at. It is a blind blitz; he has no idea of the rules. He understands that the sheriff is lying through his teeth, a barrage of lies forming a Larsen effect—which explains his attitude, his words, his presence. He is there to cover up problems. He is there to shut up curious mouths. He is there to ensure that the law prevails. The law of Silence. The law of Heavy Metal.

  “I have seen and made note of at least a dozen—probably even twenty—crosses, crucifixes, Virgin Marys, and other Catholic symbols that are forbidden within…Humvee. And you won’t believe me, but I’m sure that at least one of the guests in the hotel where I’m staying on the strip is part of the network. Obviously, everything that happens here is neuroconnected to a machine whose code you couldn’t break without about six trillion years’ worth of calculations by the most powerful computer in existence.”