Cosmos Incorporated

by Maurice G. Dantec

  “But what will such reciprocity lead to?” The German thinker who wrote this had asked, via two public letters addressed to the son of Adolf Eichmann—indeed, to all the sons of Eichmann of the era, not only his contemporaries, but future generations as well. “To something extraordinarily surprising,” he had answered himself. Since everything will be functioning like a well-oiled machine, as it were, some specimens will no longer be machines.

  What will they be, then?

  Pieces of machines. That is, mechanical parts of a single, gigantic “total machine” in which they will all be united.

  And what will that lead to? What will this “total machine” be, exactly?

  Vivian knows that here Günther Anders posed, in just a few lines, the most important questions of an entire century.

  “What will this ‘total machine’ be,” he asked.

  When Vivian read these lines for the first time, she felt as if she had been struck by a bolt of lightning, a tornado of fire, because she sensed what was coming next.

  “Think about it again. The parts that are not integrated will cease to exist. Nothing will survive in the outside. Thus this ‘total machine’ will be the WORLD.

  “And here we are, on the brink,” Anders had continued. “We need take only one more step to get there. All we have to do is reverse the phrase, ‘machines are becoming the world.’ And then we get, ‘the world is becoming a machine.’”

  “Your idea is a good one,” Jordan said to her in a telepathic communication. “You need to expand on it. You need to respect—as much as you can—the sacrosanct rule of tragedy and psychological drama: unity of time, place, and action. We can’t spend all our time running after him. Despite this economy, you have to cleverly organize a collision between us and the creature. You need to make an accident happen in the program.”

  “We can use fire,” she said. “I’ve heard about the intelligent neurodigital agents UniPol uses. Apparently, clandestine spy corporations use a lot of them too. I incorporated them. This way I can be with him without making him suspicious, and I can write to him and bring him continuously into my world right up until the meeting point.”

  “And then?” her brother asked.

  “Then—well, then I don’t know. If I script it, the collision won’t happen. If I prewrite it, the man won’t be free, or able to consider the sacrifice calmly.”

  Now, imagine the following scene: He/You/I/She/Other, what you are, what we are; we are now an eye. An infrared eye. The eye of a panoramic camera placed in the center of the cell’s ceiling. The camera detects violent fluctuations of heat in the body of the person it is programmed to watch twenty-four hours a day. According to the data transmitted by the local microprocessor, there was even a sort of photonic “illumination” that lasted several minutes, something completely atypical in animal—especially human—biology. The biophoton frequency range is close to ultraviolet. The camera’s multifrequency sensors swallow and regurgitate entire lists of codes that come up with a single answer: absolutely abnormal phenomenon.

  Major Wu-Lei is not happy. His dead-moon face fills her entire field of vision. The eye is no longer a camera; it is the camera that has become the eye. Major Wu-Lei isn’t happy, she thinks. Not happy at all.

  “YOU HAVE TRIED TO SABOTAGE OUR SECURITY SYSTEMS! YOU HAVE TRIED TO CAUSE A SOFTWARE MALFUNCTION IN OUR SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM! YOU HAVE TRIED TO CHEAT THE CONTROL SYSTEM!”

  Not happy at all, Major Wu-Lei. Quite bothered, actually.

  “But you cannot do anything against us. Plenty of others have tried,” Major Wu-Lei adds in a voice of forced calm, coldly menacing after the frenzied guard-dog barks of a moment ago.

  “There might have been others, you poor bastard. But none like us.”

  Her impulse is always to resist. It is a loop of fire, a flash that whirls between Heaven and Earth, an antiworld. An antiworld whose enemy is this world, the world of Major Wu-Lei and his fellows. The last world. The world of the last men.

  She has no hope, she knows, of being left alone by the world of Major Wu-Lei and the others of his stripe. This is a war, without mercy, and there will be no quarter given or received. No prisoners.

  “We have done nothing illegal, and you know it,” she says. “Your cameras are malfunctioning. Your computers must come from France, which means California. Your so-called mysterious phenomena of bodily illumination are just system-interpretive errors. We have attempted nothing that might threaten the security of the camp. It seems to me that you are breaking UniPol’s police ethics code.”

  The dead man, king of this dead world, observes them with his burnt-coal eyes, eyes that seem to have been mined in Hades itself. He is the man of the moment. He is in the right place at the right time.

  “You lie as easily as breathing,” he tells her. “I think both of you are extremely dangerous pathological cases, and you will not leave here for a very long time, believe me.”

  We’ll be out of here before you learn to believe in anything, he/she thinks amid the fiery vapor that has taken possession of his/her body, soul, and spirit both here and beyond. We’ll be out of here and you have no idea. Even if you knew, you wouldn’t understand. We’ll be out of here because we don’t exist, not according to the plan of your existence. And that’s why you don’t exist for us anymore, either.

  She smiles widely at Major Wu-Lei, who is no longer looking at them, his hand mechanically pulling the next file from the stack.

  > INVASION—EVASION—DELUSION

  I really am a neurobiological combat organism, she thinks, managing with difficulty to keep from laughing into the globular eye of the surveillance camera. But not in your pathetic understanding of the world, you bunch of pigs. Especially your understanding of the word combat, you ridiculous toy soldiers. You’re fighting in the Hundred Years’ War, the Battle of Thermopylae, only now there are cyberplanes, drones, nucleotactical missles, neutron rockets, ionizers; and, shall we say, a single megaton bomb.

  The camera is built into the wall, which is built into the “code orange” sector, which is built into the camp, which is built into the world. The world of UHU. And in this World, men exist like the ones she is going to create. It will be enough to create him. And since the World is now part of her own spirit-world…

  Now it is time to make the Names appear. Time to Name. The Name is the first thing that makes a being exist. The name of her maternal uncle, the one that lived in Argentina, on the pampas near Cordillera—where, he said, an English writer from the late twentieth century had once come on the trail of the legendary American West bandit-heroes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and where they had filmed a western in 1969. Yes, the family name Dimitrievitch Plotkin would do nicely. She comes up with a few references…the writer-explorer Bruce Chatwin for his maternal family name, with images of the Patagonian pampas, a few sparse bits of memory, boys from the neighboring village, and her own memories of her uncle and her young cousin Sergei from Novosibirsk, on whom she would model the synthetic personality of her golem.

  Obviously, the code-orange sector doesn’t have any Internet access to the Control Metastructure. There is no connection in her cell, or in any of the cells at that security level—especially the wing reserved for her and her brother. But the camera is part of the camp, and the camp is part of the world. And the world is part of her.

  They need to choose a place ahead of time. They need a cosmodrome, a private one. There are only a few of them left. UHU astroports are out. There aren’t many viable options. They will need to flee very fast and get very far away from China, and then leave for the Ring as fast as they can. They need to get off Earth and back to Cosmograd, try to find whatever friends are still up there twelve years later, and then, most likely, flee again. Get as far away as possible from Human UniWorld, probably to the independent Mars colonies. If possible, even farther than that.

  “It is especially important that you don’t preplan too much of the world your golem will be coming from; yo
u’re absolutely right about that,” her brother says to her one day via telepathic connection. “But you do need to be familiar with the microlocal universe where we’re all going to meet. You need a plan, but the plan has to appear to necessitate his own destruction. The plan should only be the starting point for the story as it comes to life.”

  Her brother, whose phases had been stabilized at “epsilon” (as the New Zealand doctors called it) when he was a baby, does not have his sister’s cosmogonic narrative powers. He cares little for religion or science; he is, rather, a connoisseur of European and American romantic literature dating from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century. In this age of books written by ethically controlled artificial intelligence, Jordan’s library, inherited from their father, is worth millions of dollars. It is still up in the Ring, integrated into the library of Cosmograd’s aged rabbi. Jordan spent their final year in orbit using the mental techniques of the theater of memory, a repertoire of mnemonic mechanisms based on Greco-Latin rhetoric that permits a person to retain thousands and thousands of citations, strophes, and verses and mentally register hundreds of books; Western universities pushed the art to the highest degree of composition, until the terrible twentieth century and its campaign to systematically destroy all true human power.

  She, in fact, is the body-mind who directly integrated them into the theater of her memory, who made a neurodigital copy of all the libraries she had incorporated, sometimes without even desiring to. The models and techniques she uses to produce her world-fictions come from her brother’s literary knowledge. The alchemical models and techniques of the Great Work come from her incorporation of the Ring’s forbidden libraries. The power comes from this fire that combines all these characteristics and an infinite multitude of others besides.

  “I know; I think I understand,” she says to her brother, in this dream so identical to reality. They sit in their separate padded cells, but the beige-colored wall separating them has disappeared in a quantum, paradoxical manner, like a Schrödinger cat who doesn’t know which box to choose; the wall is invisible yet concrete. “I think I know how to structure the narrative on Metatron’s time—the open/closed time of angels. But now I just want to wait for the next attack; it should be coming soon,” she adds. “I need to get it over with before I can do any more work. You know they always come in two waves. Hey, now that I think of it—are you still entitled to your legal Novatrix rations?”

  “What for?”

  “Well, you know our symptom is genetically similar to retinitis pigmentosa. Remember Dr. Dreisenberg—and Dr. Slavik and Dr. Anderson—said that if we didn’t have any of their damned Trans-Epsilon vaccine, Novatrix would help a little with the symptoms.”

  “And you know that our little attacks are nothing compared to what you go through during your Dual Days of infinite division. There’s no antidote for that. Besides, I don’t think there’s any point in drawing their attention to a neurojamming disease they’ve already classified anyway. As far as our supercoding gene, they’re already snooping around down to our smallest mitochondria, our tiniest RNA strand.”

  “They won’t find anything. The World Below is regressing even faster than we thought. I connected to the Net in my dreams, and found out that three-quarters of the libraries in Europe, digital copies included, were destroyed during their fucking Grand Jihad. In North America, the War of Secession completely broke up the research laboratory network. There are five confederations sharing that territory now, and that’s not counting Canada and its independent territories. There are only a few centers still operational in Massachusetts, Texas, and the western states. The governance bureaus were betting on the Chinese, but they have the same problems as the rest of the world. So the UHU never stops having to fix things. Its metastructure of agencies and cybernetic machines is stuck in the twentieth century. They no longer have the technical, human, or mental means to keep conquering the world. The UHU isn’t just an omnipotent police force that has the whole world in its claws. It’s also what they don’t know how to do—what they never knew how to do and never will know how to do. They don’t even know what they’re doing now, if you know what I mean.”

  “Are you sure about what you’re saying?”

  “This is confidential information resistance groups are circulating against UniPol’s cyberbranch. Whatever the UHU governance bureaus’ communications and public relations agencies might be saying, technology—science—hasn’t progressed at all since 2030. Meaning, since the invention of controlled nuclear fusion, and since we were born in the Ring. It’s like that technology started a complete shutdown of all scientific progress, and it happened to coincide catastrophically with the Grand Jihad and the global depopulation that went along with it. The UHU’s military-humanitarians are dealing with the effects of more than fifty years of global chaos, and almost twenty-five years of real devolution. As for their so-called Ethical and Health Control Department, well, I’m figuring that one out. My mind-world is incorporating it, believe me. Every day I know a little more about them than they’ve ever known. They’re only socialized atoms; never forget it, brother. We are extraterrestrial.”

  In the cell, the electronic eye observes the young woman, who seems to be back to normal. In the cell, the young woman observes the electronic eye, smiling as if it were some perfectly inoffensive pet. She could talk to this eye, which hears nothing but sees everything except the invisible. Maybe, like the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it can read her lips? She could tell it: There is a city somewhere in a sort of border interzone in North America, where a private cosmodrome called Grand Junction Cosmos Incorporated is still operating normally. This city was founded at the turn of the century, and it grew when the United States and some parts of Canada fell apart. It kept growing during the Grand Jihad and even for a while afterward. And she has incorporated this city. Grand Junction is a part of her now. And she has incorporated Cosmos along with it.

  Devolution is not a technical phenomenon. To describe it that way is absurd. Devolution is anthropological by definition, because it is a moment of infinite division of anthropogenesis. As long as it is attached to one of the false infinities the philosopher Hegel spoke of at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there will be UHU world and Human UniWorld, and Unimanity in all its splendor. There will be a moment when the false infinity breaks away endlessly from its own ending, and when the limits imposed by its incapability to conceive of creation as an eminently paradoxical phenomenon are reached, that will cause it to start moving backward. This progression, and its diabolical dynamic of infinite division tied to false infinity, when it is no longer in phase with other phases, in the Tri-Unity where each hypostasis is synthetically disconnected from the others—that of the sole Being and that of the trine Creation—continues mechanically during this phase of overall regression. It is its maker’s mark.

  The world does not go backward like a videocassette being rewound. The tape itself is affected. Physical time folds over. History becomes not only regressive, but evolution itself, its specific principle of regulation, is caught up in the overall anthropological reflux. This is devolution. It is something that will always end by becoming truly indescribable.

  In a few years, the World of UHU will probably have sealed off the planet. Private cosmodromes like the one in Grand Junction, the one she has set her heart on, will be all but extinct. In a decade, perhaps fifteen years at the most, international laws will have abolished the last existing human adventure. Territories like Grand Junction will be outlawed, or regulated so severely that they will become UHU astroports serving suborbital flights of intercontinental shuttles.

  The takeoff window is getting smaller every year, every month, every day.

  Plotkin must be designed as soon as possible, and secretly incorporated into the World, and created when the time is right.

  But they also need to get out of Health Containment Camp 77 as fast as they can. They need to get out of their cells, out of th
e code-orange sector, out of China.

  They need to get out of this World.

  “When do you think you’ll be capable of that kind of conjunction?” her brother asks, during a dream connection.

  “During the next anti-attack,” she replies. “It depends on how fast I can integrate my golem into this World, and all of it into the Other World.”

  Her brother looks dreamy, sitting on his shitty beige humanitarian hospital bed in front of the reinforced beige security partition. The wall separating them has never really been anything other than a failed potentiality. Its symbolic simulation is the ultimate form of concretion possible in the quantum field of their two linked consciousnesses.

  “You know I have only the equivalent of a nanosecond to make a connection between these two mutually exclusive worlds, to quote our dear Kabbalist Leibniz. The World Plotkin exists in is possible. The World he does not exist in is also possible. But the two worlds, Leibniz would say, are mutually exclusive. They are possible, but at the same time, their possibilities—like their impossibilities—can never coincide. That is the barrier between fiction and reality that only the power of Logos can cross. I must manage to short-circuit this ‘grid’ when the incorporation is finished. I can at least try.”

  “And what about getting us out of this camp?”

  She smiles, in this dream more real than the image of her body stretched out on its prison bed, watched by the electronic eye of the surveillance camera. “The camp is in me now. Soon we will be completely outside it. The two ‘parts’ of the work are really just one.

  “The camp is a world. An antiworld. Not an active ‘counterworld’ representing the invisible side of the Created World, but a non-place, a non-space, a non-time. It is an ante-World, really, because it is not yet a World. It is the stage that precedes all Creation, and it proves that in Human UniWorld, Chaos takes on a specific form, the form of a dual incarcerator/terrorist. The form of Death at work. Death as a production process.”