Cosmos Incorporated

by Maurice G. Dantec

  “Maybe so, but I need information.”

  “What kind of information? And to do what?”

  “What exactly do you know about this World you created? Rewrote, I should say.”

  “I know everything you know, and everything your software agent could collect as data.”

  “What do you know about the Hotel Laika, for example?”

  Vivian McNellis looks disconcerted. “I know everything you do. I told you.”

  “About the hotel manager?”

  “The man—you mean Clovis Drummond and his little business?”

  “Yes. And other things. And I want to talk about Heavy Metal Valley too.”

  The girl looks out at the cosmodrome. “Yes…the rebel Catholics. You were already slated for an independent existence, but I could dictate your activities thanks to the digital angel that was constantly observing you. This world is real, don’t forget. I didn’t create it; I just incorporated you into it.”

  “I know. I think I understand. But I’m the one who saw it. There is a connection between the hotel and that place. Humvee, as they call it. There is a connection between the Hotel Laika and that place, and you.”

  The girl stares at him, dumbstruck. “Be more specific.”

  “I can’t. This is pure intuition. There’s the Christian connection, obviously, but that is just an image, like a reflection. Something is telling me that there’s a link even you didn’t see. That’s why I’m asking what you know about this world.”

  The silence stretches for long minutes. They watch the ballet of the workers on Platform 2. A crawler carrying a Russian Proton is on its way to the launchpad. Then, Plotkin hears words that she pronounces softly, as if speaking to the human ants milling around the last Titans on the other side of the window glass.

  “I produced you. I wrote you, and then I incorporated you into the World of the black box. That’s true. But all I do is reproduce the act of divine creation on a human scale. That is why I’m dying.”

  “Dying?”

  “Death is the way to eternal life, as the great Novalis said. Yes, I am dying. The neuroquantum modifications to my body have affected its life span, which is now quite limited. I must get back to the Ring as soon as possible. And I created you to help me do that.”

  Plotkin can find nothing to say. He looks at the young woman fallen from the sky.

  “And that is why I don’t have the power to predict your death,” she continues. “I transcribed you into the World, don’t forget, with the help of the powers that the angel of the Face granted to me. You are physical and nonphysical at the same time. You are a fiction incarnate. You are, like the angels, created but infinite.”

  “I am immortal?”

  “Not in the way you understand it. I want to be clear about that. You are immortal through the conjunction I was able to create between you and the infinite, in your fictional dimension—that is, in my imagination. Because you have been written, you are alive. You are still mortal—that is a possibility and a certain risk—but in you, I was able to make your destiny as a hired killer swerve toward its own resumption. Until our ontological meeting, I was the master—the countermaster, really—of your creation. But now, neither you nor I are really in charge of anything. I have annihilated the determinisms of destiny; I have destroyed what you were, such as it was; I have cut you off from a past that never existed and thrown you toward a future that you will have to create for yourself.”

  “In other words, I’m free.”

  “Yes, you’re free in terms of the matrix. Free in comparison with the world I bore to create you.”

  “Does that mean freedom monitored by something else?”

  “No—or in any case, that isn’t the problem. The problem is that all freedom involves an inevitable element of sacrifice. That’s why you are at risk of dying too. As a gambit, as a man-sacrifice, the Man from the Camp.”

  “Why?” he asks, with a shiver he has never before experienced.

  “Because I think the fire of narration wants it that way.”

  “You aren’t sure?”

  “I’m only its instrument. I too am only an agent. I’m just one of Metatron’s sparks. I told you, I conceived you in the imagined camp, but you were really created in the divine black box as a being of flesh and blood, and one with a spirit. I am the temporary human form of the angel of the Face. Angels don’t create anything themselves; they are also just instruments. Only God creates. That can only be what the poet Charles Baudelaire meant when he said ‘the critic is the translator of a translation.’ I am only a translator, really. It is through me that you were transcribed into this world, but you need to understand that I am not your Creator.”

  “Okay. But whoever it is…why would he want it?”

  “I think…it’s possible that this world I incorporated so you could come into the world, this world I wrote in my cell at Camp 77…yes, it’s quite possible that this world is continuing to act according to its own laws. There is a secret contingency at work behind everything that happens to us. A contingency operating according to perspectives I can’t talk to you about right now.”

  “Why not?”

  “You don’t know enough yet.”

  And the discussion ends.

  There is another night, and another morning.

  The World has just been born.

  In Genesis, the Fourth Day is unquestionably the most mysterious of all. God seems to repeat His first action: And the sky was filled with light, in order to separate day from night.

  But this separation of day from night already took place on the First Day. God separated Light from shadow, and called the Light day and the shadows night.

  What does it mean, this identical reiteration, when the trine day has permitted such a loop to happen?

  The question haunts him until night falls.

  In the cobalt postdusk light, the cosmodrome is empty. There is a bit of commotion on Platform 1, and all the hangars are lit up, but the launch sites are illuminated only by a few sodium projectors spaced along the access ramps. The calm of postindustrial desolation reigns. With the exception of a few purple shadows on the northern horizon, the night is black. The stars are out.

  On the Fourth Day, God created the lights of the sky. All the lights; all the heavenly bodies—the stars, including our sun.

  The Fourth Day was the first point of emergence of the divine operation into the physical world, he realizes suddenly. With the preceding day, the Third Day, it constituted an invisible quantum leap—a double interface between the visible and the invisible, the physical and the superphysical, and thus between microcosm and macrocosm. Plotkin’s mind formulates a surprising hypothesis: all the Days of Creation were layered atop one another. Each had a relationship with all the others and a singular one with each of them individually as well. The Seven Days of the Creation are not exactly synchronous, and yet they do not simply form a banal succession. They form a diagram, and even, one might say, a program. They form a code. A metacode.

  In Genesis, it seems to be a foregone conclusion that the sun is a star like the others; it is the great star, the one that lights us or burns us. When night falls, the shadows do not reign uncontested. The heavenly bodies—the stars, the moon—are there. Light continues to shine in the shadows. As plant life developed on Earth, an elementally identical process was taking place in the sky, filled with heavenly bodies, macroscopic robots for which the cellular robots of prebiotic life were like the rhizomic biological counter-form, nine-tenths submerged, microscopic. Now algae, plankton, and moss, whose horizontal proteic structures flowed in the primitive earth-water, regrouped, focused, and moved toward the light their heads, which in all plants is also the sex. The ontological process of infinite division is outlined here with the cleanliness of a physical form: a first ontic “bridge” is extended between the World Below and the one above, between created matter and uncreated Light, by the intermediary of this sensitive celestial light, by photosynthesis, the
photaïsmos of baptism, the animated biophysics of life.

  With the Fourth Day and the cutting of the Trinitarian division that began it, God takes the risk of life as a process. He takes the incredible risk of giving physical form to a Universe that has heretofore been in a state of pure genetic codex. And thus, on the Fifth Day, all animal, terrestrial, marine, and aerial life takes shape. And this risk leads, of course, to the greatest one of all—for on the Sixth Day, God creates man in His own image.

  > THE EIGHTH DAY

  On the morning of the Eighth Day, it seems, God invented writing.

  Or rather, He caused His divine gift of narration to come together with the freedom of Man, in an infinitesimal quantity of time and energy. This freedom could not simply be a reflection; the poisonous propagator of the Fall, but its counterworld. Now the ontic bridge would be double: it would come from the light down toward Earth, matter, and flesh, but it would also draw up into itself, from its own light, its own flesh-spirit, toward the light.

  Doing this required a very risky bet. To do this, the narrative codex of the light must be transcribed onto a material support by a human hand and mind. Men must be given the power to name and thus, on their scale, to create or destroy worlds.

  The danger was extraordinary. There was absolutely no guarantee that Homo sapiens, only just barely capable of controlling physical fire, would be able to bear this torch and make it grow so as to light up their own fleshy and spiritual existence—to make from it a fire capable of saying something.

  The Celestial Scribe, through whom God had narrated this universe, now had the delicate mission of entrusting men with a tiny parcel of colossal power—the gifts of supercoding and narration with which he had been provided—the Prince of the Face, the one through whom He showed himself in this world. In this spark was contained, like an active image of the Tree of Knowledge, Good and Evil. In this spark was contained the terrible effects of Judgment, for those who used language without respecting its sacred character, and this shadowy/punishing effect would prove, via a powerful paradox effect, the surest way to attain light through writing.

  On the Eighth Day, God invented writing, and also its corollary. Prison. And God understood that it was neither good, nor bad, nor well, nor ill, that the Tree of Knowledge was contained, in an inverted form, in everything Man produced, above all his language.

  A phrase emerges from this apparent paradox. A phrase that lodges in his mind like an executioner’s bullet.

  In the same instant, he awakes from his dreamless sleep, the sleep of a human computer.

  And the phrase is this: One can only write freely from the depths of a cell.

  Near him are stacks of paper, voluminous notes written in one week on Recyclo™ cellulo-paper with an old laser transcription pen from his nightstand. The pages are filled with phrases like aphorisms, the product of a brain in a state of incandescence. There are paragraphs on the nature of fire and of angels, as well as fragments of exegesis on Genesis. There are also plans, diagrams, maps, and strange codes pertaining to the Hotel Laika, the city of Grand Junction, the community of Heavy Metal Valley, and the characters he has encountered during this fiction-cum-world, some linked to others by lines of multiple conjunction. It looks like the design of a machine, where phrases, spurts of narrative, and aphorisms are the directions for use.

  His intuition, which he shares with Vivian McNellis, concerning underground reports she may not have seen; his intuition, during the narration of his fiction-world; his intuition has taken, in seven days, the form of a vast piece of machinery made of signs, of words and pieces of forgotten dreams. It is much more mysterious than all these digital replicas of a city whose mayor he has come to kill; it is more dangerous. It hides, it seems, an even more terrible secret.

  Aside from the extremely opportune visit of the girl fallen from the sky, he has been living entirely alone, cloistered in Capsule 108, for the past seven days. And in those days he has felt a sense of freedom he can hardly believe.

  Vivian McNellis has the power to give a body to a being of pure spirit. She can make the life of a fictional character concrete, a character whose invention now comes from himself. Plotkin needed to be real, so she incorporated his fictive existence into the World Below. And she gave him freedom.

  Nothing he had believed to exist, this Human Termination System with dozens of assassinations under his belt, was false—but neither was it real. And this apparent contradiction has nothing to do with any mafia “modification” of his memory. It all depends on the choices he makes now, the choices he has begun to make, and the choices he will make in the future.

  Vivian McNellis spoke to him of a possible sacrifice, and has he not felt the mortal, anticipatory burning of this gambit, played among the stars?

  She has gambled on his talents as a killer, master spy, and Man from the Camp.

  She will have to throw in her lot, now, with the supreme chaos that reigns within a free man. She will have to throw in her lot with the man in Capsule 108.

  > DAY NINE

  On this morning, he wakes without a single word in his memory.

  Pale sunlight. Yellow rays lancing through the room. The faintly ominous sound of the hotel’s organ-machines. Something terrible will be born of this sublime innocence. He knows it, with the calm of a suicide commando. His mind flows from intuition to intuition, a machine forever evolving in its network of cuts. The McNellis girl used his mind and his body to create this exegetic business of Genesis. But in spite of it all, it was he who, now an independent human being, had created this genetic exegesis during seven full days in the Hotel Laika capsule. Quite simply, he realizes with alarm, it means that she and he are correlated in an unimaginable way: this whole operation was transcribed by and in the mind of Vivian McNellis, beyond the borders of space and human time.

  This must be why one of the last aphorisms he wrote, on the night of the Sixth Day, said: It is because I have two brains that I am one.

  He is in a strange world, a specific “time,” this angelic induction cone whose terrible and luminous opening he senses in every particle of his newborn being. It is what lets him understand, instantaneously, that now she and he will evolve more or less simultaneously in this Third Time, the Aevum.

  How far away it seems now, the time when his neuroencrypted software agent seemed ne plus ultra in the transfinite process of simulation! He was nothing but code in a mechanical machine; he was not code in a metamachine of light. Just like his fictive/real existence as a killer, the digital angel represented the plan of the initial narration—it had been the fictive/simulated replica of Vivian McNellis’s powers in the digital world of angels below. It had been the mechanical/human face of the Celestial Scribe—but, unlike the Scribe, it communicated with men in the language of men. The real Metatron, on the other hand, spoke in men by communicating with their language.

  And now, Vivian McNellis is here.

  Here.

  In Capsule 108.

  He knows she was also there at his origination, in her own chamber, but that means nothing. They are in the world of magnetic chants and the rock ’n’ roll of quarks, in the canticle of quantum bodies. They are two cortexes falling toward each other like two galaxies in perdition, and that is what saves them.

  So she is here, physically present. It is no digital phantom, no angel, no dreamlike projection made of fire.

  The fire is her.

  “Do you know the exegesis of Saint Thomas Aquinas on the subject of the Aevum?”

  He does not know how to answer.

  “Hmm. Obviously I didn’t incorporate everything into your memory. During a famous academic dispute at the end of the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas had to explain the Third Time. Was it unique or multiple? If he admitted that angels, however purely ethereal, still formed a multiplicity, and not a unique Being—which only God is—he would have to agree that each of them lived in a form separated from temporality. Each angel had its own singular time. But because the
y were a product of divine creation, and divine narration, they also formed an ‘all’ they were linked to one another by the intermediary of a specific time that Saint Thomas, in his luminous genius, called ‘circumspect time.’ It is a noncontinuous time, he said, because it is the line of disjunction among all the continuums. Without knowing it, he had allowed Leibniz to conceive his own Theodicy, his Monad. Are you following me?”

  “Circumspect time. Yes. Time that operates in discontinuity. I almost feel like the incarnation of this story.”

  “This time is the time of the Machine. The ‘logical’ Machine. It is the circumspect machine-time of electronic calculators. I mean, in this World. The World Below. You were a machine, a narrative machine. You were an operator of ontological division.”

  “And now?”

  “Now we come to what will happen—the event. Now what was retained, but could not be contained, will happen. It is the circumspect time in which we can be copresent without being in the same place.”

  There is a deep silence. A silence between two temporalities that are asynchronous yet intermingled, linked by an invisible thread of light. The invisible made visible in the form of fire made flesh and named Vivian McNellis, whose very beauty seems to emerge from the chasm of silence.

  He crosses the first part of the chasm. “How do you need me to act so we can get you back to the Ring?”

  “I have a plan—a sort of appendix to the initial plan. On the Monolith Hills strip, there are all the sorts of traffickers that you might expect to find near a cosmodrome. We need a black-market claim—but a real one, an authentic one, just resold, not passed by the spatial governance bureau and its taxes. But we can’t buy it ourselves—too much danger of being refused or noticed. We need someone safe, someone familiar with this sort of thing.”

  “There’s one of these dealers living in the hotel.”

  “Yes, I found that out when I was your digital angel. Harris Nakashima, right? Do you think we can trust him?”