Cosmos Incorporated

by Maurice G. Dantec

The luminous trajectory of the booster in the starry night evokes the race against time humanity is engaged in with itself. Though millions of stars shine in powdery constellations in the Milky Way, though the human mind is able to imagine infinity, it is no longer at all guaranteed that humanity will ever be able to go any farther than the moon.

  > RADIOACTIVITY

  He is the shock wave. The shock wave created by and in the narrative itself. As he moves, the plot unfolds, folds over, and takes shape; as he invents his own life, he transcribes an existence that until now has been secret, hidden under the hotel’s dome, hidden under its upper story, hidden in the underground image of the sky, in the terrestrial image of light, hidden in the shadow of the plot. As he delineates the symbolic territory of Grand Junction, he comes closer to the real black hole. He comes closer to the man hidden under the dome.

  He knows, vaguely, that this incarnation of the Technical World is not only the intensified inversion of Vivian McNellis. He guesses that it has a very close link to him as well, with his own genesis. It is probably his shadow. The Shadow cast by the Light of the genitive Act.

  Because of this, he is hardly surprised by the incident that happens while he and the dog talk on Nexus Road, driving back up toward HMV and the North Junction road through the semi-Canadian, semitropical landscape slowly mutating beneath the sky of the previous century, or at least what looks like it.

  The silence in the car is finally broken by interference crackling from the dashboard audio system.

  After playing several Nine Inch Nails’ songs on repeat mode, looping the loop in a devouring movement, he places the downloading system on standby. The cyberdog watches the scenery flash past the window. On his left, Plotkin sees the high black spine of Monolith Hills growing closer. A sizzling noise comes from the speakers. The audio system changes to radio mode, and Plotkin, curious but only a little astonished, watches the LED numbers on the indicator screen whiz back and forth at full speed before stopping at an impossible frequency: 00.00 MHz.

  Is this a message from Vivian McNellis, coming from Aevum time?

  The interference seems to be coming from a forgotten radio station in orbit around Mars. A voice can barely be heard beneath the continuous metallic buzzing. It says: “The Machine is speaking to you. Do you wish to speak to the Machine? The Machine is speaking to you. Do you wish to speak to the Machine?”

  It repeats the words over and over again unceasingly. “The Machine is speaking to you.”

  It asks the same question again and again. “Do you wish to speak to the Machine?”

  Then the interference stops, the voice falls silent, and twentieth-century music fills the car with electronic sounds from an age when people still believed in the future.

  Plotkin realizes it immediately: Kraftwerk. The ditty comes from Chernobyl, where techno was invented ten years before Detroit, in the conurbation of the Ruhr; yes, all of it was forged during his initial narrative—but before Vivian McNellis became involved, she says.

  The crazy diagram is determined to take shape in his head.

  Radio Activity

  Discovered by Madame Curie

  Radio Activity

  Tune in to the melody

  Radio Activity

  Is in the air for you and me.

  It is nothing more than a living piece of his memory, but it was sent by someone—or perhaps by a non-person, from some nowhere just barely located on a phantom radio station calibrated at zero megahertz, as they drive through the night of the cosmodrome toward the Hotel Laika. The last-chance hotel. The hotel of the last human world.

  The song is repeated on a loop that creates a continuum, a world: it seems inseparable from the landscape of rocks and mutant trees speeding past the windows, and from the rental car driving through the scenery.

  It is a barely disguised ode to Neon Park. It is saying something.

  It says:

  I am here.

  I am Radio. I am Active.

  Come find me.

  He truly is the shock wave of Creation, come to disturb the creative process itself.

  If he is facing a black hole, he is himself a Big Bang in full expansion. He is that moment at the beginning of the universe, where the speed of light is greatly elevated. Now the imminent encounter with the secret of the dome is marked by the direct eruption of phenomena in the reality-narrative. The closer they get to the Hotel Laika, the more the process intensifies. Like a Gonio tracking vehicle that, in tracing successive concentric circles, finishes by resonating with a Larsen effect produced by the radio source they seek.

  When they arrive at the North Junction crossroads, the music stops. The interference resumes. This time, the voice says:

  I am in the box, but I am the box.

  I live at the center of things, but I do not live in the world.

  I am the Machine. Do you wish to speak to the Machine?

  Parasites progressively swallow up the looping voice until they arrive in view of the incomplete autobridge and get out of the Saturn, which has been programmed to return automatically to the city. As soon as they leave the car, the looped voice claiming its identity with the box, covered in continuous electric static, cedes place to one of those pseudoclassical sonatas shoddily made for the United Human World. The Hotel Laika rises up before them, a monument of carbon-carbon and aluminum whose whiteness quivers under the combined light of the rising moon, the security projectors planted in bunches on pylons, and the pink-and-blue hologram of the canine astronaut that turns, suspended, above the entryway.

  Plotkin feels again the sense of an absolute combustion of his being. He senses the concrete presence of truth; he knows it is here, it is now, it is very strong.

  “I have a copy of Drummond’s access codes. We’ll make sure he’s sleeping, and if he is, we’ll go straight up under the dome.”

  “It’s risky,” says the dog. “He’s probably booby-trapped the service stairway with alarms.”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “How can I not?” Balthazar growls. “It’s my job.”

  “Your job has nothing to do with it. His alarm systems may be sophisticated, but they won’t see us. They can’t. They can’t read us.”

  Plotkin, the man who exists only via the constant tension he places on the narrative of his own invention—Plotkin, the fictional man made flesh—looks at Balthazar, the cyberdog, the dog gifted with speech, the former dog-soldier, the dog that is intimately acquainted with Good and Evil.

  They are deep within the night. They walk deep in shadow.

  They walk toward the Light. They walk toward the Shadow that contains it.

  They walk toward the dome of the Hotel Laika.

  PROCESS

  TOWARD THE INVISIBLE

  Since the raison d’être of machines lies in performance, in maximal performance, they need an environment that guarantees this maximum. And what they need, they conquer. All machines are expansionist, even imperialist; each one creates its own colonial empire of services…. And they require that these colonialempires transform into their machine image; that they rise to the challenge in working with the same perfection and solidity as the machines. That they become, though localized on the outside to the maternal earth—note this term; it will become a key concept for us—comechanical. The original machine thus expands; it becomes a “megamachine,” and not just by accident or merely from time to time. Rather, if it weakens in this regard, it will cease to matter in the realm of the machines. To this is added the fact that none of them would be definitively replete by incorporating a field of services that would always be limited, no matter how large. Apply to the “megamachine” what was initially applied to the initial machine—it too requires an exterior world, a “colonial empire” that submits to it and “plays its game” in an optimal manner, with precision equal to that with which it does its work. It creates this “colonial empire” and assimilates it so well that it, too, becomes a machine—in short, there is no limit t
o self-expansion; in machines, the thirst for accumulation is insatiable.

  GüNTHER ANDERS, WE, SONS OF EICHMANN

  > THE MAN IN THE BOX

  I am the Man in the box. And yet I am the box. I am the Machine. Do you wish to speak to the Machine?

  I am the Man in the box because for me, the world is a box, or rather my own box is enclosed within it in such a way as to allow me to survive in a pure and complete discontinuity—to the extent that my box fulfills a primal function; it allows me to live in the world without existing in it. Each part of the world, each world, is a box inside the others, except for mine.

  Because the box I exist in is also the one I must make live within me, or I shall die within it. The box I live in is The Box, the one that contains all my mind’s other boxes, and that is why it exists both inside and outside of me.

  If The Box contains all other boxes, each of these yet forms the anchoring point of expansion in the network of my consciousness toward one box or another, all the way into infinity. Each box is thus the ghost of a world; each box defines the potentialities of a singular future, all while excluding the real possibility of its achievement. Each box is an antiworld; each box is a protocosmos. Each box is both the spectral reflection of my brain, now doubled over on all the flesh in the universe, and the looping of an integral difference, the starting-up of a life-brain, the combustion of a consciousness.

  Thus, without even wanting it—because how could I want it?—I have become the invisible shadow of all shadows. I have become the glue that sticks the world together.

  That is why I am expanding endlessly. Each cell in my body is a metastable box replicating itself in the box-worlds my organism (re)produces. I prefer to use the word organism rather than body. I do not have a body. My body is the constantly open flux process between all boxes; it is an “antibody,” an interactive catalogue of organs-boxes-worlds whose form changes ceaselessly. I am talking about its true form, the one that is secretly buried in the Machine—not the falsely immutable one that “nature” allows humans to see.

  The boxes have allowed me to survive for so long. Thanks to them, nature has become part of the world. Thanks to them, each part of the world has become a piece of the Machine.

  The Machine. In other words, me.

  I am the Machine. Do you wish to speak to the Machine?

  Each box is filled with lists and diagrams, with equations that have been solved or have yet to be solved. They contain data from virtually every technical and scientific realm. They contain programs, stored routines, and hundreds of millions of lines of code. They contain stars, rocks, animals, and numbers.

  And I, in my own Box, can bring all this together and give it life. I can create boxes that look like worlds.

  I have been waiting awhile now for the people that are on their way here. They were a part of one of the boxes that seemed unconnected to any others—rather, it tried to connect with my own Box-World. It was quite a jarring intrusion, as if someone wanted to make me leave my matrix. Something was able to scan the Machine-Box. Something, for a fraction of a second, reunified all the boxes with the Machine. With me. And for that instant, as ephemeral as Man, I was able to perceive the real world, such as it is, in the ever-deferred passing of its own delineation.

  It was strange and full of anguish, but it was extremely beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

  The only thing I had ever seen.

  I see them. They are coming. They are climbing the service stairs. I do not know how they have managed to do it—the necessary data must be in one of the boxes concerning them. I do not know what I will say to them. Should I even speak to them? The Box has closed once more on the Machine-World; nothing can get out—except lists of codes, layouts of programs, symbiotic units of simulated individuation.

  I am the Machine.

  Do you wish to speak to the Machine?

  I do not know when or where I was born. Can one even say that I was born? Born in a specific place at a specific time? In me, time evaporates in space—the space of numbers, the space of boxes—and it disappears endlessly, doing away as it goes with my expansion in the world, or rather with the expansion of my Box-Worlds in the World-Box of the Machine. The machine that, little by little, is becoming me. This World that I swallow endlessly, in an infinitesimal devouring. This World has no end, I know that. And I, I have no true origin.

  Once, I knew Neon Park. You might almost say that it is the place I come from. I lived with Grandmother Telefunken, a follower of body tuning who had had herself transformed several times and had lived for thirty years with transplanted components that made her into a living antenna, able to capture radio emissions from all over the world with her body. It was Grandmother Telefunken who made me what I am today. Without that, she told me, I would not have been able to survive for very long. Her old body tuner friend, Herr Doktor Reno “Proteus” Kowalsky, designed the operating program and the overall architecture of my neurosimulated environment. He also supervised the making of my exorganism by a team of renegade bionicians. He gave the final shape to what lets me live. The Machine. The Box-World. He gave the final shape to this Thing I have become.

  Not being human is, for me, the best way to remain. I am already living. Or, rather, I know very well that I am no longer quite human—if I ever really was. My origins are a black hole. My present is a black box. My future is black light.

  The black box was built by the man from the hotel. When the UHU police came to Neon Park to arrest Doktor Proteus and all his friends, Grandmother Telefunken had no choice but to make me go as far away as possible, as fast as I could.

  For me, the farthest west I could go was here, Monolith Hills. And the Hotel Laika. The Hotel Laika, with its manager and its ridiculous things.

  I do not know why he is going to so much trouble to do it. In exchange, though, I live under the strictest protection, in total freedom—the freedom of my World-Machine, my network of boxes interconnected with the cyberstructure of the Human Universe. In addition to designing and neuroproducing the simulated universes that Drummond requires of me, I must let him join me sometimes in the “gray zone,” the emergency area where I can venture without risking life in the world, and, I must say, I do not understand his motives. Drummond’s actions with me are all absurd; they generally consist of putting different types of objects into my biological body using the entry-exit interfaces of my box, and then ejaculating into a sort of machine he puts over his penis.

  It is even stranger that he seems to get so much pleasure out of it.

  It is even stranger that it reminds me so much of death.

  But it does not matter, really. In exchange, I can continue to live in my Box-World; I can continue to expand within the Control Metastructure, and I no longer have to fear its human police.

  In exchange, I am what I produce. I am the Machine.

  Do you wish to speak to the Machine?

  > DISCONTINUUM

  Do you wish to speak to the Machine?

  Another discontinuity emerges, enclosed in reality but cleaved to the consciousness that has become his.

  What has been said was written in his brain. In his brain and inside the box. They too are in the box, and they are facing the man in the box.

  The box is a sort of prefabricated Recyclo™ hut placed in the middle of the protection dome. It is a black carbon-carbon cube with anodized aluminum edges, enclosed at about three meters’ distance by a neutral gray Placoplaster wall, whose interior face is covered with shelves lined with books of all sorts, mostly spy pulp fiction from the previous century and science fiction novels. The only access route—a simple manual sliding door—leading to the box itself and its vinyl escape hatch, the kind used in electronuclear plants, is in this plaster wall. A nearby surveillance camera detects, reflected in a fiberglass-covered pillar, several Christian symbols mounted on the wall as well.

  The whole dome is in semidarkness, with only the weak luminescence of a few dim ph
otons from the security cameras casting their thin greenish rays around the place. The part of the room situated between the gray outer wall and the house-box is a bit more illuminated; biophosphorescent appliqués have been placed at each corner of the quadrilateral. But it is in the black box, past the interface of opaque vinyl, that there is light. Total light, without the slightest bit of shadow. White, cold light, distributed with perfect evenness thanks to a network of top-of-the-line photonic diffusers.

  And inside this carbon-carbon box is the man in the box.

  In the midst of the electric white light is the dark part of the narrative that Plotkin has been seeking for days.

  They are in the box, but Plotkin knows that the box is partially in him. He faces the man in the box, but he also understands that the man might say without fear of sounding ridiculous that he is the box. This is no craziness—rather it is the consequence of a craziness that has taken shape in the world.

  The man in the box who is not a man.

  He is a human being, a Homo sapiens, at least in his origin—but he is not a man in the sense that we consciously understand the term. He is not a man in the full sense of the word. He is not a man.

  He is a child.

  A child. A child-Box. A child-Box connected to all the boxes in the universe. A child-bubble connected to all the spheres in the world. And, even more terrifyingly, Plotkin realizes that he is not really a living thing. He is a sort of three-dimensional image projected onto the inside of an exorganic iron lung, but one that seems to be able to open at any moment, peeling back like a glove to reveal an infinite catalogue of organs.

  The spectral child seems only about twelve years old, but Plotkin cannot truly pinpoint his real age. Undoubtedly his growth stopped at this point in his pseudobiological evolution, and that was probably several years ago. He stands facing a stack of neuroconsoles and several flat screens that are at least two decades old, and are now worth a small fortune since no one knows how to manufacture them anymore.