The dome-child lives in a box, and that is no metaphor. Plotkin sees that he lives in a series of nesting boxes, one inside the other like the Russian matryoshka dolls of his own falsified childhood. Plotkin stares at the child and knows the child is staring at them as well, him and Balthazar, but in his own way—meaning he does not really see them. He sees them only as more or less virtual objects in a universe peopled with objects of varying degrees of virtuality—like himself.
In the first place, he is permanently confined within this iron lung, visibly born of deviant technology from Neon Park, analogous to the bubbles made for children born without immune systems during the previous century. It is made of a nanocomponent polymer with a transparency regulator. It looks like a one-piece cosmonaut’s uniform with dozens of umbilical cords made of fiber-optic strands connected to game consoles and several nanocomputer machines ranged all around the chamber. The inside of the box is covered with holoactive control panels that permit the Box-Child to operate numerous programs and devices within the consoles and nanocomputers from inside his bubble.
For Plotkin and Balthazar, it resembles a number of ideograms covering a translucent surface, but seen from the other side of the mirror. Letters, numbers, and codes, wavering in reverse like luminous, esoteric sparkles, while the child enclosed in his bubble uses his fingers, his eyes, his mouth, his brain to manipulate the thousands of bioelectronic components grouped around him.
The hotel contains the dome. The dome contains a wall. The gray wall enclosing the black box. And in the black box is this Box-Child, this bubble child, linked like an incarnate software agent to the Control Metastructure. His own body is nothing more to him than the last of the series of boxes protecting his interior space from outside intrusions. And as for the outside, it seems, his body dedicates its energy to placing the world and its parts in boxes of their own.
At the same time, with the insolence common to paradoxes, the Box-Child, separated from the outside world by this series of walls boxing one another in, lives permanently connected to the world of machines. He is like the aphid, an accomplished symbiotic parasite. His “immunity,” his “separation” from the world is doubled, but reversed by the total opening of his body and mind to the ongoing flux of the machines.
He is connected to the world only by this network of machine disconnections, Plotkin muses to himself. He is connected only in the very place of separation.
He is truly the paradoxical incarnation of the Technical World.
He is what I have been looking for.
He is the antiworld of the impossible come to interfere with Vivian McNellis’s narrative. He is the antiprocess cleaved to the genitive process that created Plotkin, the killer-spy come from the Shadow of the Camp, the Shadow of the Shadow. The Box-Child is the activation of nothingness as ontological operator; he is, himself, the shadow in the shadow. He is the overexposed light of technology; he is the blinding terminus and terminator—the moment when it is blinded by itself. He is the moment of greatest danger.
For technology itself, just as for the world it has conquered and that it now threatens with total servitude.
The Machine-Child does not speak; he communicates.
A laryngeal implant permits him to send vocal orders to his machines. The digital voice that comes from the small loudspeaker in the child’s “second body” seems hardly more human than the one used by Balthazar the bionic dog. The machines, neuroconsoles, nanocomputers, and peripheral systems obey the child like the wizard Merlin’s household objects in the Walt Disney cartoon. The machines communicate endlessly among themselves, exchanging information unceasingly and, Plotkin realizes suddenly, terrifyingly, that the Box-Child is not the center of a network of machines with which he communicates in every possible manner, and which provides him with a voice—rather, the Machine-Child is the organic link between his machines and the Control Metastructure. The Machine-Child is not at the center; he is on the periphery. He is the interface, the hyperlink; he is a concave space. He is the media used by the machines of this world he has built in a box to communicate among themselves.
Almost simultaneously, he understands the eminent paradox that marks this strange relationship of domination and subjugation between the Box-Child and his machines. In the reign of machines, the reign of horizontal logic, of the monad broken up and doubled over on the full body of the world, the natural hierarchy is not completely gone; rather, it is totally reversed. To dominate, it must submit. To conquer, it must retrench. To grow, it must conserve. And to reign, it must give up its own sovereignty. To be central, it must lose its singularity.
This is what the Box-Child, subject to the Darwinian pressure of adaptation from the moment of his entry into this world, has known how to expand on to the point of outrageousness—to the point of no return, a point located beyond humanity. A point beyond good and evil.
For example, and to start, when Plotkin has asked the first question of what will never truly be a dialogue, this is the response:
“At this instant of my configuration, my name is:
1) John Smith
2) Lucas Ford Guadalupe
3) Karl Marx
4) Vic St. Val
5) Tiger Lily
6) Annie Lennox
7) Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont
8) John le Carré
9) Steve Cooper Cumberland
10) Edward Teller
11) Edgar Allan Poe
12) Luigi von Saxenhagen
13) Pietro Romanesco
14) Peter Argentine
15) Samantha Fox
16) Gilbert Gosseyn
17) Ezekiel
18) Silver Slade and His Human BlackBox
19) Henry Ford
20) Lloyd Hopkins
21) Jeffrey Alhambra Carpenter
22) Saint Teresa of Avila
23) Debbie Harris
24) Yuri Gagarin
25) Ian Curtis
26) Modesty Blaise
27) Frankie Machine
28) Ennio Morricone
29) Sam Spade
30) Donna Haraway
31) Sergei Diego Plotkin
32) William S. Burroughs
33) Trent Reznor
34) Wernher von Braun
35) Stan Ridgway
36) Francis Crick and James Watson
37) John Sladek
38) Philip K. Dick
39) Marie Curie
40) Genesis P-Orridge
41) Martin Heidegger
42) Brigitte Bardot
43) Bernhard Riemann
44) Benito Mussolini
45) Jules Verne
46) Ted Bundy
47) Miss Blandish
48) Walt Disney
49) Mr. K
50) Howard Hughes
51) Marilyn Manson
52) Averroës
53) Eva Perón
54) James Osterberg aka Iggy Pop
55) Saint Thomas Aquinas
56) Cheyenne Hawkwind
57) Coplan FX 18
58) Claudia Schiffer
59) Balthazar
60) Clovis Drummond
61) Alan Vega
62) Alice Kristensen
63) James Hadley Chase
64) Robert Smith
65) Arnold Schwarzenegger
66) General Custer
67) Johnny Mnemonic
68) Isaac Newton
69) HAL 9000
70) Vivian McNellis and Jordan McNellis
71) Aleister Crowley
72) James Ellroy
73) Stephen Hawking
74) Popeye
75) Gilles Deleuze
76) Scott Davis de la Vega
77) Saul de Sorgimède
78) Jason Texas Lagrange III
79) Salvador Dalí
80) Joe Millionaire
81) Gary Numan
82) Karl Lagerfeld
83) Doctor Strange
84) Clint Eastwood
&
nbsp; 85) Eric Ambler
86) Iron Man
87) Emma Peel
88) Orville Blackburn
89) Johnny Ramone
90) Neil Armstrong
91) John Morrissey
92) Martin Bormann
93) His Serene Highness Malko Linge
94) Paul Atreides
95) Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
96) Gustave Le Rouge
97) Carter Brown
98) U2
99) Mister M
Check the valid choice.”
The list of the Box-Child’s ninety-nine names floats before their eyes in the holoplasmic square sitting atop one of the nanocomputers, a ghost screen suspended in the air at the limits of the visible and invisible. Plotkin’s own name is on the list, and the names of the McNellises and Cheyenne Hawkwind, amid the myriad names from fiction, myth, reality, invention, and reinvention. There are even collective names—rock groups, for example…
The Box-Child knows him, Plotkin tells himself, just as he knows of the existence of Vivian and Jordan McNellis.
The names of the hotel’s dog and its manager are also on the list; only the two androids do not appear there. The androids are machines, Plotkin realizes; something in their ontology has prevented the Machine-Child from absorbing their identities. Just like the child’s own ontology kept him hidden from Vivian McNellis despite the supernatural gifts of the girl fallen from the sky. There is a series of unfathomable discontinuities there, of quantum leaps occurring between each of them—or not occurring. Each of them maintains an equidistant orbit. They may get closer to each other at times, but they can never really share the same space-time, the same world.
But he, Plotkin, the Man from the Hidden Face of the Earth, the Man from the Shadow of the Camp; he, Plotkin, metafiction made flesh, has managed to infiltrate himself into their interworld. He is their interworld, their interface. He is their medium.
The Machine-Child has stayed hidden in the dark part of the narration. Even the metatronic powers of the McNellis girl could not fathom the unfathomable. The Box-Child should, for this reason, be considered as the dissolutive agent of any narration. He is the simultaneousness of cybernetic networks. The McNellis girl is the synchronicity of fictional temporalities. And he, Plotkin, is the only being on Earth able to stand at the impossible intersection of their parallel lives. Just as the Box-Child acts as a medium for his machines, Vivian McNellis serves as a medium for her “characters.” And he, Plotkin, is the Agent that puts all these incompatible worlds in contact. He is what happens, the bearer of the event, and he knows he is even more dangerous than a piece of chaos fallen to Earth.
He is now the very movement of the mind at the heart of his own narration.
> THE MACHINE-CHILD
He needs to be able to establish contact. It seems as simple as devising a method of communication between two species separated by several light-years of space and a few millennia of time.
Plotkin is the intensified inversion of the Man from the Camp. He is the imaginary Anti-Man from the Camp incorporated in the brain of Vivian McNellis. He is the form condensed, inverted, and divided, then reunified, human, vertical, centered, and mobile.
The Machine-Child, the child with no name—or, rather, with a hundred names minus one—the child with multiple pseudonyms and with only imaginary or fictive references, the child-idiot-genius connected to his machine-organs, the autistic dome-child with his comic books and neurogames and science fiction and pulp novels, the Machine-Child is himself the broad figure of the camp. The broad and rhizomic figure that, separated and fused, scattered, horizontal, nomadic and static at the same time, metastatic, is its image made flesh.
He too is creating worlds, but he is their prisoner. He lives in his fortress of numbers, in his network of machines, as if in a projection of his own fundamental autism. For him, the Created World is just a digital universe among millions of others; each snippet of his consciousness forms only one particular combination of the network metaconsciousness; each of his thoughts exists only in the emergence of a thought from the overall cyberstructure.
The fate to which Clovis Drummond regularly forces him to submit, in the guise of “recompense” for his slave work in prohibited neurosoftware trafficking, the fate the dirty snitch of a pedophilic bastard dealer makes him endure, has probably hammered the last nail into the coffin in which the Machine-Child is destined to spend his life, Plotkin thinks. Yet the Machine-Child has not entered into the service of Evil. He has not become wicked like his torturer. Such categorization means nothing to him, because he feels no effect from it. Really, he is already dead. He is already pure entropy. He wanders in his virtual labyrinths, searching, too, for light—but the only light he ever sees is the icy luminescence of the expansion of his network of machine-organs—the creation of a new piece of the labyrinth-world.
Clovis Drummond and his prohibited neurogames and his machinist pedophilia—all of that has simply been placed in one of the boxes of the child with ninety-nine names. And it now holds no more importance than an assembly routine permitting access to one or another of his machine-organs. He is Plotkin’s dark side. That is why he lives in the constant light of the incarcerating world of the nexus. He was counter-produced by the Creation of Plotkin, but outside the terms of Vivian McNellis’s narration—because this incarcerating, subterranean, shadowy light from the Camp is what has remained dark in the eyes of the girl from the sky. It is the moment of ultimate Degradation, the moment of being nailed to the cross. It is the moment of total dismemberment, body-mind made to serve the pedophiles of the planet and elsewhere, body-slave become flesh as fodder for the sexual appetites of the manager of the hotel. Body-Machine. Mind-Machine. Child-Machine.
It takes him only a few hours to create neurosoftware on demand, while it would take a team of programmers working full-time weeks, or even months. As Plotkin understands it, if Vivian McNellis—as the feminine incarnate figure of the Celestial Scribe—speaks to men by communicating with their language, this ageless adolescent in the dome does the same thing to machines, by communicating via their language.
You must be a Machine in order to “dominate” machines.
So the dome-child is a bit more than a man, according to the standards of Neon Park, but he is definitely still less than a machine, because of the singular place—the place of inverted sovereignty—that he occupies in the global rhizome of the Control Metastructure.
Plotkin realizes, as if paralyzed by the appearance of a supernatural truth, that the child represents a totally inverted version of the Christ incarnation. He represents the moment of Degradation in the shadow of the Machine-World.
Christ had to become Incarnate in Man, and to descend to the limits of subhumanity in order to create a world saved by Grace. The dome-child, the child from the human Camp-Universe, must lower himself to be a submachine, the lumpenproletariat of the Great Network of voluntary servitude—or, rather, of subjugated desire, in order to create worlds perverted by and for man, in exchange for a quasi-absolute disincarnation in the horribly immanent horizontality of the world of boxes.
To say he is the Devil would be to say nothing at all.
“The Machine is speaking to you. Do you wish to speak to the Machine?”
Contact. He must make contact.
Plotkin realizes that his own brain is somehow able to read the thoughts of the Machine-Child. It is both strange and fascinating. The thought boxes of the Box-Child emerge sporadically from their machine network and write themselves on the surface of his memory—him, the Man from the Hidden Side of the Earth. But it seems impossible to duplicate the action in reverse, to find any way to print words from the outside on the brain of the young autistic.
Plotkin looks at Balthazar. Balthazar looks at Plotkin.
They understand each other without saying anything.
Yes, contact.
Meaning, for the Box-Child, a disconnection.
Proceed by disconnecti
on. A machine is a game of disconnections. They must find a way to act as a discontinuity in this ontology formed by the ongoing continuum of the machines; they must find a way to divide the zero operator. They must divide what has already been divided, and divide what has done the dividing.
“Is your GPS telecontroller still working?” he asks Balthazar.
The dog nods his head.
“Okay, connect to one of his small peripheral nanomachines,” Plotkin instructs. “And activate an entry-exit driver with a channel that opens onto nothing.”
After a few seconds, the dog sighs. “It’s impossible. In this system, everything that opens closes immediately on one of his boxes.” He seems genuinely disappointed. “As soon as a channel activates with him, he makes a scheme appear that is specific to the cyberstructure. They’re always different. I’ve never seen that before.”
Plotkin understands. The man in the box is the box; his mind is the world, the world of boxes that his mind creates as he goes, from software components of the Control Metastructure.
The man in the box is all of humanity.
Each of the Machine-Child’s ninety-nine identities was taken from a box; each of them is linked to a singular narrative world. For the Box-Child, who dissolves all narrations, all dialogue, all temporality in the digital acid of the Control Metastructure, the only narrative possible comes from this nominative diagram. The diagram draws a line like an escape route between the boxes themselves; the diagram shows the potential for resistance to the enclosure of incarcerating digital worlds; the diagram shows up like a very weak light lost amid the shadows. The diagram, Plotkin senses with his entire being/nonbeing, is the closest thing possible to life for the Box-Child.
This list.
This list of names.
This list of names that winds among their various boxes of origin to give them a new sense—this list is the life of the Machine-Child; it is what neither Clovis Drummond nor the neurosoftware traffickers can exploit. It is what the colonists in the Ring cannot buy, what the renegade programmers cannot program, what the Neon Park bionicians cannot manufacture, what the illegal body tuners cannot conceive.
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