And yet the camp and its specific topology—its non-topology, since each “containee” only knows a tiny portion of this concentration/humanitarian camp he or she is stuck in for one reason or another—the camp, as a “real” antiworld, is also a potential counterworld for her cosmogonic narrative project.
Plotkin is the man of the UHU world—but his Counter-Self, his shadow self. He is the Man from the Camp. He is the intensified inversion of the incarcerator/terrorist. He is the master spy who manufactures his own personality out of multiple ones. The killer whose rebellion is extreme solitude. The shadow cast by the World of the Camp. And, in a most enigmatic way, he shows her more than a direction. He shows her a horizon.
Like two parallel lines joining in infinity, she and he, he and she, will collide in the outerworld that will short-circuit the fatalism of destinies, in the elsewhere of her own narrative, in this newborn city that is already dying, called—with the secret irony of prehistory—Grand Junction, when soon it will connect nothing at all.
Plotkin is the man of the End. Not a Last-of-Mankind man like Major Wu-Lei; he is even worse, more dangerous. He is his shadow, his secret, the absolute secret of the World of the Camp, the World Major Wu-Lei believes he knows, though he is only a servant, acting on behalf of a few shadows on the wall of a cavern he has been left to guard.
She knows.
She knows what is waiting for her.
“Massive DNA retrotranscription phenomena, with illumination and corporeal transformation, are described in numerous apocryphal writings such as the Gospels of Thomas and Philip and some esoteric passages from the Acts of John, as well as in the agrapha,” Dr. Slavik, one of the brilliant biosemanticians of the Anderson-Dreisenberg team, had remarked once. “I have reports dating from around a century ago that are no longer tolerated by the UHU, but that clearly mention analogous phenomena being experienced by great saints and mystic visionaries.”
She learned that in the Ring, by experience, when she was almost five years old, when the first manifestations of the Invisible appeared. What the New Zealand doctors called general neuroquantum retrotransposition. If the next anti-attack didn’t follow the usual routine and ease up on the Third Day as it habitually did, but instead deepened the chasm of Infinite Division at the heart of the Darkest Night, then an angel would appear to her. She has known this angel, a creature of firelight, since her final days in Cosmograd. During her entire childhood a procession of these fantastic entities had revealed themselves to her one by one. She had learned their names. When she was almost sixteen years old, shortly before the Ring’s UHU humanitarian center had decided to repatriate the two orphans with their closest living relatives on Earth, she had been confronted with this unknowable, metamorphic creature, this plasmic hyperlight that alone was capable, according to the others, of absorbing the glow emanating from the Face of the Real God, and thus hiding it from our eyes while at the same time making it perceptible in such a way as not to kill us. This creature, this angel of angels, called itself Metatron. They called it the Prince of the Face, because it was the face taken by the unknowable God in the Created World.
The “angels” are no brotherhood of picturesque characters with individual psychological qualities; they are each fields of metaliving frequencies of the Primordial Light, of which Metatron was basically the First Name produced, along with the Cosmos.
If each of them is a “person,” it is in the hypostatic sense Christian doctors of the ancient Church gave to the world. A single, yet triune God. A Multitude of frequencies for a Single Light. A cohort of Fire Names, Intelligence Fields, for a single original radiance.
“We come from the third world,” they had explained to her. “Or, more precisely, the Third Time. There is a ‘time’ for God; it is His own Eternity. It was not created; it has neither a beginning nor an ending. There is a ‘time’ for Man too; this is the time of the World. Time, World, Life…they have a beginning, and they have an ending. We, the agents of the Name of Names; we, the angels of Metatron, Lord of all Powers; our time is that of the Aevum. A few Doctors of the Church, like Saint Bonaventure, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Denys the Areopagite, spoke of this in writings that the rest of mankind preferred to throw away in oubliettes for the sake of a few sociology books! We have been created. We have a beginning, but for us there is no end. We are like cognitive cones, closed at one end but infinitely open to the Eternal at the other end.”
“And me?” she had asked, with all the hauteur her eleven years could muster.
“You,” replied Uriel, one of the great archangels, who had announced the news of his Assumption to Enoch, “you herald the beginning of the Fourth Time, which is opening laterally, from its internal dimension. The Time of the ten energy plans of the Tree of Sephirot. You close the Trinitarian square: Enoch-Eli, Mary-Vivian. You are the matrix, inverted and intensified, a New Zealand doctor will say about you one day!”
Even the archangel’s laugh was a Logos spermatikos. His fire, like a laser beam, wrote directly on her entire being, the ecstatic phase of her existence, this orbital hypercenter that cut and folded over memory, world, recollection, reality.
She had always been a cognitive process laid bare. When the first hints of her power manifested themselves, the first books she “incorporated,” besides the scientific literature available in the Cosmograd network, were those of the circumterrestrial Catholic mission, just barely tolerated by the UHU in the Ring, and those of the private library owned by the aged non-Orthodox rabbi who lived in one of the community’s co-orbiting stations.
The angel of her sixteen years, this metaform called Metatron, was her human and transtemporal counter-face, or so it had been explained to her. The first human transfiguration had been Enoch, a biblical patriarch, the grandfather of Noah. Just before the Flood began and Noah built his ark atop Mount Ararat, Enoch had been “taken up” by a ray of light and, under the incredulous eyes of several dozen witnesses, had been drawn toward the sky and disappeared. An Ethiopian book, of which there were also Hebrew and Slavonic versions, specifically recounted, in the epic, physical, and supernatural language of very early antiquity, Enoch’s exploratory and missionary travels throughout the World of First Humanity, the one between the Fertile Crescent and the Pillars of Hercules, the one between Adam and the wrath of the Flood, until his sanctity led Metatron to choose him for all time as his human face.
The angel of the Face had repeated the Sainted Act for the Prophet Eli, who lived during the Second Humanity, the one after the Giants and Demons born of the hybrid fusion of fallen angels and human women, the age that followed the terminating Flood.
Then, of course, an analogous phenomenon, albeit absolutely unknowable, had accompanied the resurrection of Christ in the true Year Zero, the central, absolute, transcendent fulcrum of human history.
Metatron had then served as the ladder of Assumption for the dormition of the Virgin Mary at her “death” during the first century of Christianity, which opened the age of Third Humanity.
The Assumption, like all metaliving phenomena created by the Grace of the Metacosmic God, is not simply “levitation” animated by an ingenious system of magnetic traction! The men of your century have such small minds! The Assumption is a metamorphic elevation of the body-spirit, which itself becomes Light little by little; not pure “spirit,” but superphysical body-spirit, like the Heavenly Body, where Flesh and Light are simultaneously united and disjointed, like the divine and human natures of Christ.
In this process, Metatron was the highest and most powerful manifestation of the Unknowable God in the World Created by Him. He was, so to speak, the cosmic energy plan closest to the Singularity.
The angel Metatron had only appeared to her once, but the cohort of cherubim, sovereignties, thrones, archangels, and powers she had learned to see came to her shortly afterward, while a UHU transorbital shuttle carried her and her brother toward a Chilean transit center. It was then that the Celestial Scribe had turned her brain into
the biological platform for the illumination of her body-spirit. She would soon possess one of the miraculous powers that only Metatron, Scribe of all the Worlds, alone among all the other angels, held as well.
The power of writing directly on the World, and thus on the spirits of men, those worlds that contain worlds.
The power to draw a line of conjunction connecting several mutually exclusive, absolutely noncoincidable worlds.
She had the first seven Days of Creation inside her. She had the power of Most Holy narration.
Of course, she didn’t possess them in the same way the angel Metatron did—his were infinite, encompassing all the dimensions of time and space ever created. But in her, there was now a spark of fire that burned without ever dying; a light that illuminated even the blackest darkness; an atom, a tiny morsel of the divine code. And because of this, sacrifice was, and is, never a choice. Whatever phase she is enduring—normal life, anti-attack, metamorphic crisis—each time she loses millions and millions of neurons. The fire that illuminates her, the nothingness that engulfs her, all of it takes a toll on her body.
So the Dual Day of infinite division occurs as planned. The world and its chasm of pain come together in her, and she assimilates them into herself. She is only a shell of nothingness. In her, time itself no longer has any meaning. It is suspended; it is no longer active; it does not exist.
In her, the world is an infinitesimal point, a quantum singularity that contains all the energy of a Big Bang, and yet though this world has been incorporated, it is also still there outside her biological envelope, outside of her, and thus outside of itself.
Inside her, everything is frozen. Icier than the worst fires of Hell, which is cold.
The phenomenon will take place just before dawn, the true realm of shadows, where in fact these shadows are contained in the Light that is to come.
Like during the discovery of the Exit at the bottom of the black hole with the creation of Plotkin, she now envisions the whole of the narrative as an antiworld in movement, an antiworld not only housed inside her head but also placed at the interface of all others. Men live surrounded by machines in their image and they are now cloning themselves in this image, yet they resemble men less and less, and machines more and more. There is a gradual loss of quality in each generation of copies. But this world of General Devolution, this world of machines and biopolitical falsehoods, this world of the global sanitary police, also points toward the horizon of its passing.
For Vivian now, a critical whole—or counter-critical—has been reached and will permit the disengagement of the Light buried in deepest shadow.
The Third Day has dawned above the chasm; the division looped onto its false infinity has resynchronized with the Created World, the Real Truth.
And Camp 77 is nothing more than a fiction now. And the consciousnesses of the men who populate it, or believe they lead it, are hardly anything more now than a handful of blank pages on which she can rewrite anything, everything.
“You only leave camp through the inside,” she had said to her brother, paraphrasing a visionary Catholic saint. She could have said, like that saint, You only leave the World through the inside.
You only leave the World through the world inside it.
“I walked for a long time,” she says, “on the chalk-white clouds covering the city lights. The Earth was a star, and the sky my cradle. I was the future echo of a very ancient dream. I was like a bush, burning in the bottommost depths of the abyss. I had fallen like a meteorite to the planet of men, and if the Light woke me I would have the gift of the Word; I would create the asymptote of our parallel lives. I would write on the world like fire on flesh. I would live by spirit, in a point of light.
“I am the atopic place of development. I am the place of the voice. I am what takes form in your mouth, in the name of everything that burns beyond its own combustion, of everything that illuminates you by allowing you sight of it and not blinding you. I am you, you are me; we are two, we are only one, and thus we are three. See how simple it is, Plotkin. You are in the process of being conceived, and you will soon appear, at the precise moment when we will disappear. We will leave the Camp-World through the antiworld contained in it—that is, by you, its Counter-Man. It is through your own genesis, your own production, that I will deterritorialize all these ‘morsels’ of reality and send them away to the infiniteness of my own imagination, and take form again in the world, elsewhere in the narrative.
“For me, the world is a machine to program. And the camp is only a chapter of the text I will transmute.
“Time has now become an appendage of the malleable hyperlight. It is modeled by her; its true form is that of a surplice covering our chromosomes. It can be manipulated by the hyperlight, which is the metaform of life. And the hyperlight is my friend. Better, it is my ally.
“You must first understand that my appearance on this Earth at this precise moment in man’s history has nothing to do with chance, which is a very shadowy concept in itself. I have come at the defining moment of the fourth type of machine, the genetic machine, the chromosomic capital. But the mutations of the body-spirit come from metacodal DNA plan, the one we all call, in nice little mechanistic words, ‘noncoding,’ or ‘junk DNA,’ which might as well be the evolutionary garbage of their ape-savant biopolitics!
“‘Junk DNA is the “dark matter” of the ontology of the fourth-type machine,’ said one Terry Bardine at the beginning of the century. The metacode is the limit of the mechanistic vision of the living; it is beyond the machine, and beyond the living. So watch what happens, in your own head as well as in the ‘real’ world, this world in which we pretend to live, and which we endlessly escape by invading, by incorporating it into our own nothingness and separating us from its false unity. What happens is that your existence resembles that of an elemental particle, or the two quantum extremities of a ‘supercord,’ the rest of whose structure is located in other dimensions in the continuum. You are born like the imaginary Counter-Man in my brain, in the camp, and in the Camp in My Brain. You are born at the other extremity of the supercord, in the UHU astroport in Windsor, where we cannot appear, but according to a synoptic plan that links this place, this ‘non-place,’ to the city of Grand Junction, which seems almost to have been specially created for beings like us. You are being born at the mutually exclusive conjunction between two worlds. You are being born in the place of development of their disjunctive synthesis. You are being born like the Third Day of Creation incarnate in a non-man, a ‘fiction.’ You are being born between a world that is now inside me, and its replica that remains outside it. You are a line of convergence that stretches ever closer to its point of infinity as it gets farther away from its point of origin, and yet one and the other coincide.
“Because my narrative is cosmogonic. It is the hallmark of light of the angel Metatron, the scribe of God. It is what wrote you, and what has unwritten part of the world to do it. The camp gave birth to you; you are its child, its counter-child, because I am carrying it inside me. Now you must understand that nothing will ever be like it was before.
“Now that the ontological collision has taken place, now that the two mutually exclusive worlds have folded into each other, into the space of a narrative, now that a story has taken form in you, now that you know, now, you are no longer a non-man. You are no longer only the Counter-Man from the Camp. Now you are a free man. And you will quickly understand that there is no more dangerous condition on Earth than that.
“Because now we are there, all three of us, in Capsule 108 of the Hotel Laika.”
> GHOST IN THE MACHINE
“We, the angels, are the technology of God. Created but infinite, our time is that of the Monad. We are the black box of God, cognitive induction cones, intellects-agents neither separate nor simple extensions of the Unique, but still synthetically disconnected from Him. We are closed/open. We are quantum fields whose individuation emerges only at the severance of all severances, like at th
e pivotal point of our time machine, where everything is numbers, everything is code; everything, paradoxically, becomes manifest presence.”
This is what he is hearing, this voice that seems to be present in everything and nothing, part of every subject in Being. The voice is inside him, singing inside him, resonating to the other end of the universe. They are at the Hotel Laika, Grand Junction; Capsule 108, in her room. They have translated themselves here, and everything is surrounded by a halo of light, like the distant echo of a furnace, and he hears the voice. The voice—the voices—the multiplex of the Single—divine technology. And yet, here the most absolute silence reigns. Even ambient noise has been erased from the spectrum.
It is night. Through the vast window the three of them stand facing, Plotkin can contemplate the absolute darkness of the sky, pricked with stars that do not sparkle.
The stars are turning. No. It is the sky that is turning.
No. It is the entire hotel, pivoting on its axis.
No. The entire hotel is floating in space, somewhere in the Ring. And he, and Vivian McNellis and her brother, are floating weightless in the capsule. They are in orbit; they are at the junction of multiple worlds. They are in the Third Time.
“How are you doing this?” Plotkin asks, trying stupidly to gain his footing in the transmuted reality of the capsule.
“It is what I am. It is what I do. I am a living narrative,” replies the young woman.
“So, you invented me. I’m not really a flesh-and-blood being, then? I’m…a simulacrum, like my own digital angel?”
The sparkling laugh makes his heart beat faster, and he does not really know why.
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