Under the sodium streetlamps that do not leave even the slightest bit of the concrete in shadow, lighting the horizon with a constellation of orange stars, he sees, at the summit of the wall, a tangle of barbed wire regularly dotted with small turrets, which are likely crammed with sensors. Approximately every six hundred meters, a high watchtower breaks the horizontal line of the wall with the mechanical transcendence eerily reminiscent of the camp. According to the information provided by the Saturn’s dashboard computer, the nuclear plant is located around fifteen miles behind the wall. Already they—he and the girl fallen from the sky—are beginning to enter an area, as they climb the hills, where radiation levels are high enough to warrant the wearing of special gear, or to limit visiting time to a few hours.
Per year.
“Do you know this area?” he asks Vivian McNellis.
“No.”
“But it’s part of the Created World you incorporated, since I’m here, and I’m compatible with it.”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean, ‘yes’?”
“I mean yes, I know. It’s a paradox. What can I do? It isn’t rational, but it is rational things that are false. It’s a paradox, but the paradox is true. An English author called Chesterton said that, a hundred and fifty years ago.”
“Great. This place stayed hidden for the entire initial narration—hidden, if you ask me, by the attractiveness of Heavy Metal Valley and a series of other small contingencies. In fact, I think these contingencies are hiding the ‘machine’ you spoke to me of. The intensified inversion of you.”
“Here?”
“These are the dingoes of silicium and prohibited biological sciences. The statute of the Independent Territory keeps them fairly safe from the local government and even the UHU. But it’s not a very safe environment for the Christian rebels. UniPol carried out a raid on forbidden laboratories here, with the Grand Junction cops, a couple of years ago. But then again, it isn’t the Christian rebels we’re looking for.”
“Do you know what we’re looking for, at least?”
“Yes,” he says. “I’m looking for the inverted and intensified version of you. I’m looking for a nexus.”
Neon Park condenses all the characteristics of a mid-twenty-first-century neocity. It rose up in the middle of nowhere, grafted into a bit of existing but nearly abandoned suburban and postindustrial tissue. It rose up just as global devolution was beginning—because global devolution was beginning.
Mundo depopulato. It has been thirty years now since the worldwide birthrate began dropping, and each decade the phenomenon intensifies. The end of the Grand Jihad coincided with the explosion of global depopulation right under the noses of the governance bureaus. Even the Islamic states, exhausted by successive wars and now en route to peace under the aegis of the UHU, saw their birthrates founder. Pandemics, planetary civil wars, metalocal terrorism, technological accidents, ecological catastrophes, and societal depopulation combined in the space of a generation and accelerated even further in the years after Plotkin’s “birth.” His first birth, the fictional one, in Moscow in 2001. His first birth, had it been real, on the very edge of the chasm.
“If we stay in the Third Time,” he asks, “will we be safe from the radiation?”
“No, I can’t keep up this kind of conjunction for very long. It takes up a lot of energy, and exhausts me. As I told you, the neuroquantum modifications are getting worse.”
“I think there is survival equipment for sale or rental in the city; don’t worry.”
“I have no reason to worry.”
“Before you leave, I need to be clearer about a few details.”
“Details?”
“Yes, especially about my first narrative, my prenatal narrative.”
“What do you want to know?”
“You said you incorporated me into the World using various documents about spy agencies.”
“Right.”
“Did you only use factual documents, or did you use fictional ones too?”
The girl fixes her eyes on him; they are like pools of mercury. She looks dreamy.
“A mixture of both, actually. Why?”
“You told me you used your maternal Russian lineage for my last name and Argentina, where you spent time living, for my memories. But you had intended to use your uncle’s Russia, which caused these ‘interferences.’ Was that real?”
“Yes, just a mixture of different points of view.”
“Fine, but then where did the other memories come from?”
This time, a shadow crosses her quicksilver eyes. The silence that fills the car is palpable.
“What other memories?”
“England, for example.”
“England? I don’t understand.”
“You don’t?”
“No, unless it has something to do with what I read once about the life of the writer Bruce Chatwin.”
That’s just barely plausible, Plotkin thinks. Just barely acceptable as an answer. He might be able to make sense of it. But—“What about the music?”
“The music?”
This time, Plotkin thinks he has found the flaw that will open the black hole. “The twentieth-century electronic music. The electro-industrial music and British rock from the 1980s and ’90s, especially.”
Vivian McNellis’s expression is of the purest, most sincere incomprehension. She can only whisper: “I’m sorry.”
But she could very well have said nothing at all.
With perfect calm, Plotkin begins to imagine the worst.
Circumspect time discontinued; independent narration resumed. Vivian McNellis has disappeared; the eternal midnight of the Aevum has been replaced by the terrible, endless noon of the human world.
He has just left a survival-suit rental shop. He walks toward his car. He doesn’t know exactly what he is looking for, but he is sure he’ll know it when he sees it. The day survival kit resembles a neoprene diving suit, but it is only as thick as a condom. It fits the body like a second skin. The face is protected by a transparent mask that filters and lets ambient air through, mixed with pure oxygen that comes from small capsules worn on a belt. The suit comes with a specialized Medikit that holds various emergency injections and pills, some to be taken every hour. On the right wrist, a Geiger counter–wristwatch combination shows the ambient radiation level. On the left wrist, another wristwatch shows the level of millirems you have been exposed to, as well as your daily (or monthly, or yearly) maximum limit.
He parks the Saturn in Neon Park’s town square, Oppenheimer Plaza. It is nothing more than a median filled with bizarre vegetation poking out between its concrete slabs, leading to a large Victorian edifice from the 1900s. All around are rutted lanes and alleyways, twentieth-century houses, more recent cabins, and a few buildings evoking colonial New England. Most of the city’s residential buildings, if not all of them, have twentieth-century neon signs attached to their roofs or walls. The simulacrum, he understands, must be hypervisible. The surface city is false—everything has to be false, more false than false; it is all a concretized metaphor for electric technology. Everything must shine, at all times. Around the periphery of the city, in the wooded wildlands that separate it from the huge rock amphitheater, there are lighted signs by the hundreds, the thousands, creating a jungle of electric glass in the midst of the high bluish flora and mutant pines. It looks ritualistic. And where there is ritual, there is religion.
To survive, sometimes one must find a post-technological “niche,” like an abandoned radioactive nuclear plant where there are plentiful building materials to be had. But that makes it necessary to live—to survive—according to the rules dictated by the Geiger counter’s needle. And this is why there is an official religion in Neon Park: the religion of the atom. It is no worse than any of the others in practice throughout the United Human World, this world for all with one God for each. And in this specific case, Plotkin has to admit, it makes some sense.
The at
omic religion has its temple, an unused former Lutheran church topped with an atom with four orbital ellipses, made in neon glass through which the seven colors of the spectrum sparkle in fantastic polychromy on the aged stone.
Here, everyone wears a survival suit.
Here, the equality that exists through both necessity and desire has produced a sort of religious society. It is completely contrary to the edicts of the UHU, but Plotkin guesses that Human UniWorld can live quite contentedly with a few eccentricities confined to this restricted area. Here, the birthrate is zero—with the exception of a few “monsters” who are said to serve as guinea pigs for the town’s renegade doctors. But old age is rare, survival suit or no.
Plotkin walks through the city of atoms and electricity.
This neocity, this undercity, is closer to the nexus than Heavy Metal Valley could ever be, with its vertical piles of junked automobiles, its Christian rebels, and its old-school cops. The face of electricity itself is reified here, in the form of forests of signs that not only surround the buildings, taking possession of nature, but that take possession of the city by incorporating this neonature into it, this anthropotechnical jungle. Electricity has become a visible God here, or at the very least it is participating in His staging of the scene.
In the church of the atomic god, everything is illuminated by neon light; holograms representing the founding fathers of electric and nuclear energy are resplendent in their phosphorescent green haloes. The silence is punctuated by a regular metronomic beat, the low pulsation of a human heart overlaid with the dissonant and discontinuous harmonies created by various machines in operation. The tabernacle consists of an ancient tomographic scanner in which the small cobalt-60 capsule has been made visible. The tomographic machine is surrounded by four-orbit atoms sculpted in radioactive aluminum, probably taken from the neighboring plant. A Geiger counter, placed before the cobalt-60 box, hums softly, its red needle permanently quivering in the strange light-dark polychromic radiance. Neon signs are clustered behind the altar. They bear the slogans of the local religion: IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS HYDROGEN. MOST HOLY RADIOACTIVITY, PRAY FOR US. EVERYTHING ELECTRIC HAS LIFE.
Everything electric has life.
That creates a new diagram.
A line of conjunction appears to link Neon Park and the artificial humans at the Hotel Laika. Here, the renegade androids must surely benefit from local complicity—more than they would with the Christian rebels, in any case. The residents of Neon Park seem disposed to see in an artificial humanoid being, imbued with electromagnetic energy, a vestige of their “living god.”
A new diagram. A very interesting new diagram.
But Plotkin is facing a serious problem. He doesn’t know anyone here. The place itself wasn’t even on the map a few hours ago. Not only doesn’t he know anyone, but no one seems to want to know him—him or anyone else, for that matter.
The streets are all but deserted, as if everyone lives behind walls or in shelters under those walls twenty-four hours a day, or almost. When people do walk in the streets, alone, their faces are generally in shadow, conferring on them the impersonal anonymity of worker ants in an ant farm. A very desolate ant farm.
There are no restaurants, but there are several dozen home-delivery companies. Plotkin counts two bars in the city; these are vast spaces of clinical whiteness, where an immense tiled counter stretches from one end of the room to the other. They sell mostly survival drinks, highly oxygenated and crammed with vitamins. People stay in the bars for only a few minutes, drink alone, and then leave. Alone. He decides to get back in his car and drive through and all around the city.
Alone.
Alone.
And it is precisely because he is alone that he is able to meet the other, become the other, become himself through and in the other, and then outside it, with it and against it.
He isn’t exactly a living being; he was not created through generation. He was created by an angel. An angel that writes and rewrites worlds, and who has decided to speak through the mouth of Vivian McNellis. He is the human counter-face of the neurodigital guardian angel Vivian provided for him during the first narrative. He is the Man from the Camp, the Counter-Man from this Anti-World that is covering the World little by little, as it extinguishes and depopulates it. A Counter-Man from the Camp, because in and through the camp he found the means to get out—or, rather, he was the means to get out—and to let the light of freedom in. From the camp, he has counter-produced what will give a human face to the World once more.
He knows he must use his freedom, use it in the same creative way as he did during the seven days of his neo-Genesis.
Because he is also and still, and always, something that was created in the Created World. He is also this physical structure of blood and bones and nerves and muscles and cartilage. He is this creature of flesh and living electricity.
And he understands, in a flash of light, what differentiates the religious simulacrum of the atom worshippers from the terrible, absolute light born by the narrative of Vivian McNellis. The paradigm of Neon Park is the inverted paradigm of truth. In that, this undercity is truly a topological condensation of the Technical World.
Because the paradigm on which universal reality is based is Everything that is alive is electric.
Because everything that is alive is light.
He is the master spy who came in from the cold, growing hot under the dioxin sky. He is still acting within the narrative-world. He is still tracking the narrative black hole that observes them from a singular time machine. He must save Vivian McNellis now. The narrative black hole is active. Anti-active. It seems to intensify the dangerous process by which Vivian McNellis’s chronic identity crisis leads into her genetic transcendence. Plotkin understands that, in itself, the phenomenon is not evil. It does not seem like the product of an intentionally harmful desire; rather, it seems like the consequence of an extremely singular act. He has the overwhelming sense that this “thing” is the direct effect of his own creation by the corpus scripti of Vivian McNellis. It doesn’t come from him; it comes, rather, from his shadow.
Plotkin is on a road in the southern part of the area. In the distance, he can see the gray masses of the insalubrious projects of Junkville and Omega Blocks, at the farthest point of the Independent Territory. They waver like dim mirages behind a wall of heat. The road was paved for the last time before the Second American War of Secession, the dashboard computer informs him. It is hardly navigable. But he drives. He sees a pale gray line snaking above the horizon.
It is a highway. It begins in the middle of nowhere, on top of a long series of concrete columns. The road he is driving on runs parallel to the highway for a half dozen kilometers amid a landscape studded with small, rounded buttes on which large shrubs and tropical trees flourish. Abruptly, in the crook of a sharp curve, the interchange appears. It is suspended in the air atop an imposing H-shaped arrangement of pillars. It is a knot of streets in a star shape that go nowhere. One section perpendicularly crosses the main road about a half mile down to create a vast gray crucifix; three or four incomplete bits of road crown the hard angles of the structure for several dozen meters.
Nothing here leads anywhere. Everything leads to nothing.
It serves no purpose, but its purposeless was not deliberate. It is no work of art. Still, in the ruddy light bathing the horizon and painting the landscape with an amaranthine glow, this eruption of incomplete architecture in the middle of nature, between two grassy buttes scattered with a few hardy maple trees, is astonishingly beautiful.
It is a part of the Cosmos.
It is a piece of the World. It is one of Nature’s narratives.
The rutted road he is driving on passes just below the incomplete interchange, following the course of a lazy river that winds sinuously through a landscape of stones and evergreen shrubs. It stops cleanly a bit farther down, suddenly replaced by the unbroken line of nature, leaving only the tiniest ochre trace of a road. He
re, everything stops.
Plotkin parks the car in the shadow of the huge highway interchange that leads nowhere, already being overrun by Nature’s floral recitation.
What counts is that someone, a long time ago, wanted to build this type of interchange here—to create this physical conjunction in this exact place. What does the map have to say about this bit of land? It says: “To the west is the county of Grand Junction. To the south are the vagrant areas of Junkville and Omega Blocks. To the north is Neon Park, once the staff residence of an active nuclear plant. Past Heavy Metal Valley is the Canadian border and Montreal. To the east is the border of the Independent Territory, the border shared with the state of Vermont, and the cities of Plattsburgh and Burlington.” The computer drones on. It says: “There are service stations and shopping centers. It is a nexus virtually equidistant from the four cardinal points of the territory. Economic development, investments, profitability, dividends.” It says—it screams: “BIG MONEY.” But at the same moment as the Grand Junction highway was born in the imagination of some local planner, general devolution was already beginning.
There was no longer enough of a workforce available to keep up the pension and social security systems inherited from the twentieth century, with a planetary birthrate then barely above 1.5 percent and kept there artificially using all the in vitro techniques imaginable at the time, though technoscience itself had struck an invisible ceiling twenty-five years earlier. The world of economics, the world of subjects and objects, was closing in on itself—subjects and objects mixed crazily in the chaos of perversion, the demented order of the un-world, which unmade itself using the same forces that had kept it alive for so long, but completely reversed. This highway knot indicates the paradoxical presence of a black hole. It ties nothing to nothing; it is suspended in the stasis of the posteconomy, the world of the UHU. It shows potential that was never exploited; it shows that the only true beauty of the Technical World is contained in its accidents—in what signals its end.
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