Cosmos Incorporated

by Maurice G. Dantec

  “Hold on,” Plotkin says quietly, his brain still a bit sleep-addled. “Are you saying that the falsification is a decoy?”

  “Well, not exactly. It’s a bit random. They just did what they could, with what they had at hand, to be able to come here. With the help of a very clever little pirated translator, they moved the numeric data of their defective gene to the next gene over, which then became 95-percent-and-change susceptible to produce retinitis pigmentosa between now and the next fifteen to twenty-five years. They lost points and gained an insurance tax. Why, do you think?”

  Obviously, the decoy itself is hiding another mystery. “Which gene opens the noncoding structure?” Plotkin asks.

  “That’s where it gets interesting. That’s what the Global Biosecurity and Health Control Center inspectors in Helensville, New Zealand—that’s north of Auckland—said. They spent almost two years there.”

  “What exactly did the inspectors say?”

  “I was able to get a few bits of information from their optic disks—old machines, but in combination with the public reports and analyses I could legally get, it added up to a portrait that will let us understand why the McNellises are ready to lose points on the travel examination and pay more insurance tax to register.”

  “So what fucking disease do they have?”

  “Nobody knows. Dr. Anderson, the head of their special unit, talks about ‘neuroretrotranscriptase.’ I wasn’t able to find out exactly how that works, but what is certain, Plotkin, is that we’re talking about some sort of neurovirus. And both of them are carriers. The man has the ‘epsilon’ type—it’s regressive; he’s a clean carrier. But the woman is ‘alpha-omega’—a critical metamorphic carrier. They don’t know if she’s contagious or not.”

  “And they were able to leave the center in New Zealand legally?”

  “That’s what I don’t understand. There’s no mention of their departure anywhere in the center’s records. It’s like they didn’t leave. It’s really not clear at all.”

  “This is a damned catastrophe, is what you’re trying to say,” growls Plotkin.

  “Not good news, that’s for sure,” agrees the guardian angel calmly, before disappearing in a tiny burst of sparkles.

  Plotkin closes his eyes again, but he tosses and turns and doesn’t fall back to sleep until dawn. Around five o’clock he notices gold-hued sparks refracting in the window, which is in seminocturnal mode; the Chinese rocket and its Albertan booster are taking off for the High Frontier. He watches the play of light in the glass, polychromatic glimmers of gray and dark violet filling the small, circular window. The sight finally lulls him to sleep, and he does sleep for a few hours before awaking in a hotel that seems to be dancing to and fro.

  El señor Metatron soon appears to tell him that a hurricane warning has just been issued by WorldWeather Corp; it was urgently necessary, apparently, in order to counterbalance the effects of a violent hailstorm in North Carolina. WW has decided that a small tornado over Monolith Hills is worth the trouble; it is well-paid for, after all, and will not risk the peace of mind of the ten or twenty megacartels ready to swoop down at any moment on one of the most lucrative markets on the planet.

  He spends the rest of the day being tossed around like a boat on a stormy sea, watching the hurricane’s progression toward Montreal. Rain pours from the black-and-blue sky in whirling torrents, lashing the skyscrapers of downtown Grand Junction, the buildings lining Apollo Drive and Stardust Alley, and finally the cosmodrome, which disappears in its turn into the gray murk, a wall of water that hammers inexorably on the Hotel Laika like a tropical storm. Then, with a soft drumming like the sound of maracas, the rain tapers off.

  This time, the dream is more vivid. Truth be told, Plotkin doesn’t know anymore if it is even a dream.

  His own body floats before his eyes, dismembered. A catalogue of organs, his biomedical file, opens on a wall like the one in his hotel room. It is his body—rebuilt, reengineered, on the midnight-blue background of the spaceless space of the Metanetwork. In this dream, el señor Metatron takes the form of a young woman. She is only a silhouette, but she is fiery. It is she who projects the catalogue of his organs on the midnight-blue wall of his dream. She smiles at him, and her lips part as if to blow him a kiss—but instead a spinning ball of fire shoots from her mouth to orbit around him, trailing a meteorite’s blazing tail.

  “Ha ha ha!” she laughs. Her voice becomes an exploding cloud of crystal shards. “You are completely free and you don’t know it! You are the author of your own life, but you don’t want to see it!”

  “What do you mean?” he asks her, in this dream that seems so much like reality.

  “It is time for the fire to be cast down to Earth.”

  At that moment, the entire hotel bursts into flames. His room is filled with fire. A stream of it runs up the wall near the door to the ceiling, clinging there like the rotten luck of an earthly sinner. The inferno spreads rapidly; the young woman laughs; constellations of rainbow crystal drops glitter in the flames. He runs through the hotel. Smoke snakes down the corridors, rises up to fill the elevator shafts, floats to the ceiling. Fireballs explode one by one in the capsule rooms; it is as if the entire hotel is being attacked by an overzealous terrorist or a crazy pyromaniac. Alarm bells ring, ring, ring.

  They ring.

  He wakes up.

  The alarm bells are still ringing.

  El señor Metatron hovers in front of him, a fireball escaped from his dream. “There is a fire in the hotel.”

  Plotkin sits up. So real events had directly provoked his violent, disturbing dream. “Where is it?”

  The little flame seems to dance, oscillating like a candle in the wind. “You’ll never guess.”

  Plotkin rolls his eyes. El señor Metatron displays the now-familiar signs of self-satisfaction—he shines as brightly as he can, in all his varied shades of red and orange. “In Capsule 081, idiot!”

  His deepest instinct, what he considers the remaining kernel of his original personality, convinces him to take a risk. Armed with the small fire extinguisher from his room, Plotkin defies the security program’s instructions and makes his way toward the McNellises’ room, where, according to the little faux fireblob at his heels, the fire has now been contained by the capsule’s automatic sprinklers. The blaring alarm fades to the softer alert mode, then stops altogether. The neutral, androgynous voice of the hotel’s artificial intelligence instructs residents to return to their rooms or to remain in them. He wonders for an instant if the order is meant for him personally.

  Capsule 081 is located on the eighth floor, facing east and overlooking the street. As he walks down the access corridor, there is still a little smoke floating in the air at waist level. At the end of the hall where the double Capsule 081 is situated, he can make out an open door and sense movement within the room. He hears indistinct voices.

  Beside him, el señor Metatron relays real-time information as it becomes available from the hotel disk concerning the damage to the capsule; it is displayed on a semitransparent screen suspended in front of him, where lists of figures unscroll on a vectorial plan of this part of the hotel.

  Plotkin is already in view of the room when he sees the squat figure of the manager profiled in the yellowish dimness of the security lights that are illuminating the entire floor. The man seems furious. He shouts:

  “This goddamned fucking junkie shit will cost you plenty, believe me! I’m going to make sure you get kicked out, you nut job!”

  Another voice replies, telling him to fuck off, that it was an accident, and they will pay for the damages if they have to.

  It is at this exact moment that Plotkin arrives on the scene, little red tube in hand.

  Drummond swings to face him, his expression a mixture of incredulity, fury, and pure nastiness. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I heard the alarm and the security system told me where the source of the problem was. I thought I might be useful.
”

  The man gives him and the small aerosol-powder fire extinguisher a measuring, disdainful look.

  “You’re of absolutely no use here, and you’re in violation of security regulations.”

  “Remember,” Plotkin says, “I’m an insurance expert.” The list of damages scrolls along on the room’s open door; Drummond is keeping an eye on it without seeming to see it at all. He can’t see the sparkling fireball whirling around him and absorbing the data being compiled in real time by the artificial intelligence managing the hotel. This cohabitation of two fires—one in the visible world, one in the invisible—causes all kinds of strange conjectures in Plotkin’s mind. The barely tangible signs he has been receiving since his arrival in Grand Junction, which are visibly interfering with his initial instruction program, are now happening at a higher level.

  “Would you mind if I took a look?” Plotkin says calmly, planting himself in front of the door frame with its list of damages. The listing really has no idea of what has happened here, he says to himself. The real damage has only just begun.

  There hadn’t really been any truly localized fire situated somewhere in the double room (two capsules joined but separated by Japanese-style partitions of composite alloy and synthetic cellulose). Yet there had not been a generalized fire either, as usually happens when a blaze begins at a single ignition point and ends by consuming everything it can reach.

  Plotkin investigates the part of the room where the electric current seems to have been cut. Only a few biofluorescent lights at the level of the baseboards glow dimly with yellowish-green light. There are two people in the room: one is standing in front of him; the other is stretched out on a sort of sofa at the far end of the room near the window. He is face-to-face with a man—young, barely thirty years old, with black curls worn long in a neo-Musketeer style. This must be the brother; so it was the sister sleeping by the semitranslucent window. Black eyes are gazing at him, and in the low light they seem to shine with enough energy for an entire city.

  Plotkin senses the manager’s presence behind him. He turns around. “I’ve got things under control here, Drummond,” he says politely. “I’ll come and see you in your office.”

  “These young assholes are going to have to pay for this, I’m telling you,” the fat man grumbles, then leaves through the open door.

  At the same moment, Plotkin sees the dog Balthazar coming out of the bathroom, which is unfolded from the wall. He is apparently conducting a professional survey of the room, all his natural and artificial senses in action. Their eyes meet as the modified animal passes in front of him to leave the chamber; Plotkin hears Clovis Drummond calling the dog from the hallway. Then he turns to face his destiny.

  “My name is Plotkin,” he lies while simultaneously telling the truth.

  The young man doesn’t move, nor does he respond to the hand Plotkin extends.

  “I’m an insurance agent. Don’t let that fat bastard Clovis Drummond worry you too much.”

  Now the hand moves forward and shakes his, a bit limply, without real conviction. “I’m Jordan June McNellis.” The silhouette steps to one side and indicates the unmoving form on the sofa. “This is my sister, Vivian Velvet.” The supine shape does not move. Plotkin studies the room’s decor more attentively; now he can relate it to the data provided in el señor Metatron’s listing. No, there hadn’t been a localized fire. There had been several.

  More precisely, it is as if an intense heat source had broken up and scattered all over the room—on the floor, walls, and ceiling, setting afire everything in its path. The bed in Capsule 081-A is marred by several brownish and black stripes, including one very deep one at the level of the pillow, which is entirely carbonized; this suggests the use of a welding torch or something like it. Plastic objects are melted; some of the retractable bathroom’s components have been twisted out of shape by the fire and its circuits cracked, though it remains standing in the corner of the room.

  The window itself, at the other end of the room where the unmoving and silent shape still lies gazing at the street and hills beyond, had also been attacked by the strange fire; a rusty line streaks from the center to the rim of the pane.

  Plotkin looks at McNellis and sighs. “What exactly happened here?”

  There is a moment of cold silence. Then:

  “It was a simple accident.” The words are said in an affronted tone.

  In Plotkin’s mind, the differences between an insurance agent specializing in high-risk spaceflights and a professional assassin are small, with or without his memory. The young man is a bad liar. The entire room is filled with contradictions to his statement. Even Drummond wasn’t fooled—and the cyberdog certainly wasn’t either. What would an insurance agent do in circumstances like these? What would a killer sent to eliminate the mayor of this damned city do in circumstances like these? Once more, he would need to let the part of him that didn’t exist—at least not yet—do the talking.

  “Don’t give me the runaround. Something happened in here. And if I understand it correctly, maybe I can help you with Drummond and his insurance company.”

  The young man stares at him unblinkingly. “I said it was an accident. If we have to pay for it, we will.”

  Plotkin estimates the damage at several million Pan-Am dollars. If they have that much cash, why are they staying in a shabby capsule hotel in Grand Junction? If they’ve got so much money, why didn’t they pay for a better forgery of their genetic disk? And if they’re so rich, why haven’t they had their defective gene fixed instead of attempting a shoddy modification of their biomedical file?

  They are on a lambda waiting list for Platform 2 (the most primitive one). If they’ve got so much cash, why not try to get higher? It had taken him only a few seconds in Grand Junction to understand that everything, absolutely everything, is for sale—because it is really the cosmos that is being sold, parcel by parcel.

  Plotkin looks the young man with the long black Louis XIII curls squarely in the eye. His killer’s instinct, surely the only part of him that hasn’t been reprogrammed, directs him to gaze clearly into the dark fire of the other man’s eyes. His education as an assassin and spy, he knows, is traced in every line of his features; his silhouette, his general attitude—his organic structure itself—seems to have been affected by these changes in personality. “It wasn’t an accident. I told you, I’m an insurance expert. Either you tell me what happened and I try to help you, or you deal with Clovis Drummond, in other words the city police of Grand Junction; in other words the bastards at Leonov Alley Station 40.”

  One thing is for sure: whatever happened in this room was not normal. Drummond thought it was some alcohol or drug crisis or a bit of traveler’s insanity, but Plotkin has other ideas. It may have something to do with their genetic manipulation. And he needs to find out what, as soon as possible.

  It would be out of the question for the Grand Junction police to come to this hotel. It would be out of the question to leave these two bizarre postadolescents to play with fire in a hotel like Keith Moon. It would be out of the question to let his mission be threatened by the damned big-mouthed manager of the hotel.

  It would be out of the question to let everything get fucked up.

  He needs to know, and something inside him is certain that he will go a very long way to do so.

  If there is any real danger, Plotkin knows, he will kill this young man without the slightest qualm. The young man and his sister who lies there sleeping on the sofa.

  “You’re being an idiot,” he informs the young man. “If the hotel needs to prove that you are in the wrong, all they have to do is watch the disk from your room’s private camera and they’ll know exactly what happened. You’ll be arrested in the blink of an eye for willfully destroying property or something like it, and then you can kiss your trip to the Ring good-bye.”

  This brother and sister might have plenty of cash, but in Grand Junction they aren’t the only ones. The real competition in this so
rdid world isn’t between rich and poor; they never even cross paths, and the parallel lines of their lives stretch into infinity without intersecting.

  Here, the poor compete with one another.

  And the rich compete with one another too.

  Then there are two other categories, where the competition is even fiercer: the very poor, and the very rich.

  Grand Junction is a fractal of dislocated urbanism from the end of the Age of Cities. It is a crystallized piece of terminal AmeriWorld, a metamorphic condensation of several million lives ruined for the sake of a few more than seven thousand successful orbital flights. In the transborder world of Grand Junction, surrounded by three states, this middle ground between Earth and Space, with no more memory, identity, or stable benchmarks than Plotkin himself possesses, the complete cartography of this ecology of dreams and disasters is etched on every life. Here, however much one might want to, however hard one might try, it is impossible to preserve the invisible, secret, clandestine economy of the city, which feeds off its own darkness.

  “What do you want, exactly?”

  There it is. A beginning. Now they can talk.

  “I want you to tell me what happened before the Grand Junction cops figure out your private access code and watch the disk from tonight.” In Plotkin’s head, he adds: And before I ask my intelligence agent to do it illegally. It is like a well-planned execution; he needs to take his time, and handle his prey carefully. After that, it should be only a matter of minutes. Enough time to draw a bit of inspiration, at least.

  “Why?” asks the young man with the coal black eyes.

  And that why indicates the meaning of the question like a xenon lamp illuminates the face of a prisoner in the interrogation room. That why really means, Why do you want to bring this on yourself? Why do you want to help us?