Cosmos Incorporated

by Maurice G. Dantec

  Fear is a quantum field. On one side, the radar operator observes the quantum field and the possible disturbances that indicate the presence of an enemy object—a quivering of the face, a twitch, an involuntary movement, an avoidance of eye contact; on the other side of the quantum field, really the other side of the radar or sonar screen, you know you are a shining point that can hide from the searching waves only by being as furtive as you possibly can. You know you have to disappear. That is why fear is a language. It is the language of control of language.

  “On one hand, I’m not sure your operation is legal—but on the other hand, it’s clear that your affiliation with prohibited religions puts you at risk for overall memory reprogramming,” Plotkin says.

  “You have no proof of what you’re saying.”

  “I’m sure the proof exists. You must have left comprising traces all around you. Even here in your room.” He moves instinctively toward the panel of the retractable bathroom and taps on its keypad. When the bathroom extends outward from the wall, but in the form of a panic room, Catholic relics—crucifixes, statues of the Virgin Mary, a Greek Orthodox icon—appear, hidden in places invisible to the ceiling-mounted panoramic security camera.

  In the depths of the night that has taken possession of Plotkin’s unchanging smile, there is a fire.

  The fire flows from his mouth, inflaming each of his actions, lighting up his slightest thoughts. Little by little, it is consuming his existence. And the existences of others.

  “I am a free man,” he tells her. “I am now the mercenary defending my lives to come, and I am protecting an angel just as it is protecting me. I need to know how you operate.”

  A sudden flash of blinding, pale yellow light illuminates the window. Jason Texas Lagrange’s rocket is leaving the cosmodrome launch site. Its long, fiery tail lights up the space around it; the fireball is soon nothing more than a source of radiation streaking farther and farther away in the sky. Soon it will be lost in the electric zenith of Grand Junction. Soon it will be indistinguishable from the stars. Soon it will disappear into the orbital night.

  “How I operate what?”

  “I can’t tell you everything. My questions would be a lot more informative than your answers. I’m sure you’ve been able to observe us through your connections with the HMV Christian rebels. I want to know how you’re doing it.”

  “I assure you, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “But it’s obvious.”

  “I’m not watching you. Who do you mean by ‘us,’ anyway? Yes, I have dealings with members of the HMV community. But that’s all.”

  Finally, Plotkin has gotten a bit of information. But he knows there is more—that this information is only leading to the real question, the one that seems to follow the diagrams he drew in his chamber during the seven days of his neo-Genesis. “How are you communicating with them? I mean, who exactly do you have ‘dealings’ with?”

  Because there must be a who. An autonomous being. Maybe even another machine, just hovering on the brink of being a person. The other android, for example, would fit the bill perfectly.

  This artificial girl in her white dress, this artificial girl with her velvety eyes; could this artificial girl really dream of Catholic saints? Could she really have faith? Could an android really be permanently converted to a religion?

  The artificial girl looks at him now, having watched the ascension of the rocket into the violet Grand Junction night. She looks at him as if to say: Slightly overwhelmed by the questions you’ve brought up, eh? A slight smile curls the corners of her mouth. She knows she has lost the game, but she has just scored a point for honor.

  “It’s the dog,” she says. “The hotel dog, Balthazar. He’s been acting as a messenger for me, a go-between. We hit it off as soon as I arrived at the hotel. He often runs around on the upper floors, especially when his master goes under the dome.”

  Plotkin hides, as well as he can, his reaction to the deathblow he has just received. The artificial girl is working with the dog. The dog sometimes goes to the upper floors of the hotel as if following his master, without having the right to enter the Holy of Holies. The artificial girl knows that the hotel manager regularly goes under the dome, but she probably doesn’t know why. He needs to evade the question, and fast. She must not make the connection between Clovis Drummond and the secret Christians, or anything else.

  “Is the dog trying to get you to be accepted by the human refugees in HMV?”

  “Yes. They want me to stay at the Hotel Laika for now. They told me UniPol is on their heels.”

  The dog, Plotkin thinks. This dog has a soul. Much more of one than his human master.

  > NEXUS ROAD

  The sun rises over the Hotel Laika.

  A man, alone in his chamber, Capsule 108-West; a free man, through his window, watches the sky turn from night black to indigo blue, then lighten bit by bit to emerald green, signaling the presence of the yellow rays of the sun just below the horizon.

  Before him, the world wakes up; the day is newborn. It is the dawn of his new childhood.

  Before him, life is a book to be written. Free. Free of any instruction program. Of any plan to kill this or that man. Of any contingency.

  He will write it, this life. Of course, his narrative will be transcribed in the brain of Vivian McNellis, but he will be the author. And he intends to let the plot diverge as widely as possible from the matrixes that want to enclose him in the appearance of false freedom, the false freedom of the initial plans, of mafia contracts, of pacts with a human devil, of non-lives replicated in the non-places of the United Human Universe.

  The contract with his employers across the Atlantic, though, is real. Vivian McNellis was clear on that point. The Novosibirsk mafia is not likely to appreciate any noncompliance with the terms of their agreement. It might look like a betrayal to them.

  Freedom does have a price, he realizes, and the price is betrayal. The betrayal of everything that permanently disintegrates freedom in the wide-open space of the Control Metastructure and all its rhizomes, mafiosi, cops, do-gooders, cultures, and technology.

  When you are in the service of an angel fallen to Earth, it is only natural to reflect for at least a moment on the wisdom of this new allegiance. You must now live, and fight, from your cell of freedom.

  He is her bodyguard. He is her firewall in the World Below. He is the Man from the Camp.

  His real life is in these few pages of aphorisms and diagrams, the pages of the seven days of his Genesis, retrowritten in the solitude of Capsule 108. His real life is in having become the ally of the girl fallen from the sky, against all the ravages of the world. His real life is being in the service of divine narration; he is no longer subject to the rules of any employer—even one of the most feared and respected in the business.

  It is so striking, the beauty of this world—the particles of infrared light bouncing off the mirrored surfaces of the high glass towers downtown, sparks of fire irradiating the mercury of morning windows—that he feels as if he could dance, like an electron nudged out of its orbit, or fall to his knees, and weep, and pray. It is so striking, the perfect match between this beauty with that of Vivian McNellis, the golden-haired angel fallen to Earth, this Earth teetering on the edge of global night.

  It’s idiotic, really, but everything he does from now on—everything he has already begun to do, everything that he might be, this whole divergent narrative he is now writing for himself—he is doing for love. Love for her. And without any real hope that she might love him back.

  The absence of hope only inflames the blinding incandescence of the feeling even further. It is a feeling so completely unexpected that he has no way of fighting it; it seems as if something is hollowing out his insides—a light is filling him, but only to make him emptier.

  It has utterly overwhelmed him, as if he has plummeted out a window of infinite dimensions—the dimensions of his conscience—into a pool of splendor. Love and the
betrayal of the world go hand in hand. Love and the rewriting of himself go hand in hand. Love and the transvaluation of his own life go hand in hand. He understands better now why Vivian McNellis is so closely intertwined with an image of fire. Love is a greater danger even than freedom, which yet contains all dangers. Because freedom can consume itself entirely for the sake of love. And it can easily take the rest of the world with it.

  First operation: follow the dog.

  Second operation: try to make direct contact with the rebel families the dog is visiting.

  To follow the dog, Plotkin has only to wait until he leaves the hotel and takes the autobridge to the North Junction road.

  To follow the dog, Plotkin has only to wait.

  To wait, Plotkin has only to be free.

  That is why he is now at the Nexus Road intersection, at its junction point.

  This time the dog doesn’t go north toward Heavy Metal Valley, but south, where there is nothing except the end of the line. Junkville.

  A new train of thought takes off.

  The first time in the dynamic: infinite contraction of the infinite.

  The second time: infinite expansion of the infinite.

  The third time, counterdivided: multiplexification of existing worlds.

  The fourth time, counterdivided in turn: poetic reunification of the being.

  His rented orange Saturn is parked on the shoulder of Grand Junction Road. All around it are massive trees, botanical mixes of ancient Canadian flora and subtropical species that were imported. The sun is high; it is almost noon. The light is straight and pure, the heat suffocating.

  There is no need to investigate. No need to track the female android or the mail to know where the black hole in the narration is coming from. It is enough to follow the dog. No need to stockpile tons of information, to process the data, to identify maps and territories. The narrative is his own.

  He is content to think about the beauty of the girl fallen to Earth.

  It isn’t the kind of beauty that hits you right away. It is mysterious and true. It does not hide within itself, but in the “Other,” the chasm of “I.” When it tries to guide you toward itself, it becomes selective—it is disguised, perhaps as a Cinderella covered with ashes—so that it can determine if you are worthy of seeking the hand of the princess, a glass slipper in your hand. In truth, he has begun to hide himself as well. Not just in the outward ugliness of the World, but also behind what there is in him of pure, wild beauty. And he is beginning to do both at the same time.

  For example, this eyesore of a rust-covered orange sign, swaying on its worn, oxidized metal post, barely kept upright by a bit of earth and money and by the crowded rows of vividly colored shrubs that keep it from being seen from the road.

  It is a large billboard from the Metropolitan Consortium itself, solidly planted on its concrete base, seemingly there to overextend the optical illusion.

  Plotkin goes toward the upside-down sign. It is an orange rectangle bearing the international symbol for radioactivity-contaminated zones: NEON PARK. And in smaller letters: ROUTE 299, 7 MILES.

  The sign seems to indicate a direction opposite that of Heavy Metal Valley. He hasn’t noticed it the other times he was here—but then he was in a car at the intersection.

  It is the direction the dog went.

  He doesn’t remember anything specific about this area of the Independent Territory, visibly outside Grand Junction. It is a pure moment of rock ’n’ roll in the midst of data processing. It is the eruption of life in the inanimate schema, the surge of intuition that the cone already senses; he is taking it toward terra incognita; toward a gray area on the map. And this intuition tells him that it is exactly what he is looking for, or at least the beginning of it: a black hole.

  The same instinct that pushed him toward the Christian rebels is now leading him to drive his rented Saturn south on Nexus Road, into the sun soaring toward its boreal zenith, down unfinished stretches of road and through clouds of ochre dust that fill the car and in which the sun’s rays seem to crystallize, like oxidized diamonds suspended in the air.

  Soundtrack: “Ruiner,” Nine Inch Nails, 1994.

  It is the cobalt blue, black, silver, and red—dark, dark red—of the twilight of civilizations. The rhythm advances imperturbably, like a metronome in step with the heartbeat of cybernetic cities. The monotonous chant of the synthesizers and artificial strings evokes the threat of a world plunged into deepest night, and yet it also indicates the ghostly presence of a spark of light, cold like a distant sun, just barely a star. The enormous walls of electric guitars that cut off the ends of measures seem like terminator-meteorites, while a harmonic wave, where the theme is taken up and accompanied by a myriad of distorted voices played in reverse, rises little by little, ready to engulf everything within its reach. The world of Scarlatti is very far away now. This is the soundtrack of the Man from the Camp, the Man driving on Nexus Road toward a radioactive zone called Neon Park that is barely on the map.

  The Saturn’s primitive dashboard computer can’t tell him much about the place’s history. Its GPS location blinks in red on the farthest eastern point of the Independent Territory map. For the rest, an old American nuclear plant is known to have undergone an incident similar to a smaller version of Chernobyl twenty years earlier—a direct consequence of the War of Secession—and brought chaos and regression along with it, he learns thanks to a hyperlink provided by the Metropolitan Initiative Union. Access to the defunct plant is prohibited, but there is a sort of small city that has sprung up on the periphery of the highly contaminated area.

  That, of course, is Neon Park.

  You get there via Route 299, a barely maintained trail marked by a copy of the orange sign at the North Junction crossroads.

  NEON PARK

  Warning: radioactive restricted area in 20 miles

  So Plotkin drives. He drives on the gravel-littered road, Route 299, that leads to the former nuclear plant, now abandoned and enclosed in a giant sarcophagus of concrete-composite. He drives toward this western Chernobyl; toward Neon Park. He drives, a local hyperlink that appears suddenly on the dashboard screen informs him, toward a territory populated by underbrains.

  Underbrains: network pirates, hackers, but also renegade or unemployed biotechnicians, specialists in old silicium binary programs, or geneticists who are not in compliance with UHU ethical regulations. Electronics or life-size games amateurs at odds with the bionized world of nanocomponents. Aficionados of the atomic age, resistant to the new universal ecological standards. Neon Park’s underbrains represent the high-tech face of the archaeo-futuristic resistance of the HMV greasers to hydrogen-powered vehicles.

  Yes. That’s it. This is the place. This is the link. It’s here.

  Why has this area remained a non-place invisible to the narrative? Because a sign fell to the ground? Because of a standard, incomplete service map of the territory? Because of a false trail that might be that of the rebel Christians?

  From the looks of it, no. The atopic place from which Vivian McNellis feels herself to be observed—this place, he knows as sharply as if a blade is slicing through his brain—is truly a space, a space-time. This place is a place.

  And not necessarily a person.

  They may be dealing with a group, a community of people.

  They may be dealing with a city.

  > NEON PARK

  The first thing he notices about the city is light.

  The second thing he sees in the world is night.

  It is night.

  The city is shining. And it is night.

  That isn’t normal. It was noon just a few minutes ago…

  He is not in human time.

  He is in the time of the Aevum, the angelic time he shares with Vivian McNellis. The LED numbers on the dashboard clock are stuck at four zeros made of monochromatic blue lines. And Vivian McNellis is there, in the passenger seat, observing with interest the moonscape out the windows, while Route 299
cuts roughly through the wooded buttes around them.

  Neon Park is a tiny city, made up of a few hundred three-story buildings and individual houses. There are a few mobile homes and cabins as well. As with any tiny North American city, its heart is the service station and main street, cobbled together by a recent graft of scrounged materials from all over—including the neighboring contaminated zones.

  A hyperlink to a local site informs him that the city visible on the surface of the ground is really only a simulacrum. In fact, the residents have constructed antiradiation shelters in caves belowground, and the entire underground level of the city is connected by tunnels that link the dwellings, forming a subterranean metropolis. Most of the time, the upper floors of the inhabited buildings serve only as temporary residences, when they aren’t filled with concrete or blocked on all sides by lead walls.

  There is a city beneath the city here, and that is no metaphor.

  Plotkin soon realizes that here there are no metaphors—or, more precisely, that metaphors have become reality here.

  Because this is the world of Neon Park.

  On the other side of the vast natural amphitheater that stretches out before them, there is a hole in a mass of low mountains, quicksilver-shadowy in the moonlight. They overlook this enormous, desolate valley lit by the fires of Neon Park. The city lies at their feet. And it shines, but it is not only because of the twentieth-century neon signs that decorate even the smallest of the city’s dwellings and from which it probably takes its name. Something in the walls, the roofs, the pavement, is shining. The building materials were scrounged from contaminated zones. Mirrors of phosphorous in the night.

  At the other end of the natural amphitheater, just in front of the mass of mountains on the horizon, there is a concrete wall. From this distance, Plotkin estimates that it is around thirty meters high and more than five kilometers long. The wall seems to mark out a perimeter—it slants, then continues off into the distance toward the peak of a mountain with a collapsed center.