It is in this heterogeneous mass of notes that the mystery of his own identity lies, just as the Machine-Child hides in the relationships among the various nominative boxes of his “personality.” He, like Plotkin, was created but possesses no proper existence. Neither of them was ever born.
Plotkin realizes that this is true of most fictional characters.
They are the opposite of angels, whose cognitive and vital cone is closed at the source but open to infinity at the other end. For fictional characters, it is the original opening that is infinite.
When the plot begins, a man is already born without his birth having necessarily been written in the Created World of the Fiction. As the first words of the story unfold, he has no real identity, no parents, barely even a present. He is a new being that develops in a series of white pages that his action and life turn black with ink. Death does not come to him, even though he remains a mortal like other men.
Now that Vivian McNellis’s metanarrative power seems to have been at least partially given to him, Plotkin can see more sense in these scattered notes that run from interpersonal diagrams and plans of the Independent Territory to mysterious usage directions for purely abstract machines.
It is the very plan of his own narration. It is his own life there, like the outline of a yet-to-be-written novel; its base documentation, its first limner notes.
Dazed, he realizes that many of the improvised diagrams appear to sketch the figure of the Box-Child himself, like the luminous shadow of the Metastructure.
There is a flash of light in him, a sort of pyrolexical energy that zigzags in the pure sky of his mind. He gathers up his notes in a manner that seems frenzied even to him and, seated at his desk, begins to write. He feels the burning vibrations of a halo of fire around him. He feels the combustive power of the verb. He feels so strong that he wishes for nothing more—except to be this fire, cast down upon the Earth.
First, the matrixes. The interplay between characters, and their relationships.
He must convince one of the androids to go with him up under the dome, to make “first contact” with the Machine-Child. He must get Cheyenne Hawkwind on his side. And at the same time, he must try to make Clovis Drummond into a sort of temporary ally in his search for a Golden Track. He will undoubtedly have to use the cyberdog again. It will probably be necessary to go back to HMV and meet with the Christian rebels there. And almost definitely, he will have to go see the old seer at the abandoned interchange. Each character must be placed end to end, like forces whose meetings will create the narrative-world itself.
But the matrixes make no sense unless they are opened to give birth to the life they contain. They must be destroyed if there is to be any hope of producing something.
So he must manage to create a retrovirus capable of rewriting, in a minuscule amount of space and time, this hotel at the end of the world and the effecting of his identity as a flesh-and-blood man. The Fire must take substance in his own body. The metamorphosis must take place. He must be able to observe, or rather to hide from himself, the secret vinculum of the narration, and he must produce a discontinuity capable of short-circuiting the Box-World of the Machine-Child.
And I must not place the World in the boxes-cum-thoughts, the ones thinking us, he muses. I must place the boxes in the narrative of the Created World, so that we can think them.
I must dare to take the step. The step toward the abyss.
Vivian McNellis’s metatronic black box will permit him to do it.
He will be the invisible cord, the ray of light that will release all the boxes from their self-enslavement and that will read them, at the same time, in the bright light of freedom. He will write his own life; he will live what he is writing as he writes it. He will not only be free; he will not only be full of this absolute sensation—he will be in a position to propagate it, like a fire cast down on the Earth.
It is already happening.
At first it is there like the strange return of a past that never really existed, like the unexpected backwash of ancient information from an even more ancient world.
Using a microjack interface, he connects a block of nanocellulose sheets to the room’s console, to which he has downloaded word-processing software. He grasps the laser pen and begins to inscribe the first tangible symbols of his new freedom on the untouched page. Just then, a message appears on the small holoplasmic screen of the machine and on the electronic sheet attached to it. It is a simple e-mail sent from an anonymous redialer, a solidly encrypted text that says, briefly and concisely:
Sputnik Centennial, October 4
Orange zone downgraded to yellow for 300 meters on Cassini Avenue, Novapolis North, between 6:35 P.M. and 6:45 P.M. Insufficient protection for official vehicles against hyperkinetic munition. No countermeasures capable of deactivating remote magnetic cannon triggers. No active GPS for ten minutes. Your “launch window.”
It is truly a message from another world, another narrative. It is very strange, the sensation that this text was written by himself in a preceding life, while he was thinking of his plan to Kill the Mayor of This City. The e-mail from Order agents, infiltrating the municipality of Grand Junction at the highest level, says nothing other than what he added himself, like the fatal conclusion of his analysis of the future “crime scene.”
This e-mail, which, during the first time of his plot, his “existence,” would have brought him strategic information concerning enemy security systems, now proves to be the simple lexical summary of the assassination he planned. It is as if his first brain has sent him, through a window open to time and space, his own thoughts of the time. It is as if this second brain is able to capture it. Almost as if a third brain is at work.
This third brain, he realizes without knowing where this blinding intuition is coming from; he is in the process of activating this third brain. The DNA black box of Vivian McNellis is starting to take effect. He feels it with his whole being, a little more strongly every second, like a column of fire that is creeping through him bit by bit, straight as an I in its chair and enveloping his organs from feet to head, from his penis to his brain.
His third brain has been born from the disjunctive synthesis of the first two. He is going from written character to writing being. He is going from thought non-man to thinking Counter-Man.
The ball of fire concentrates in that part of him that is not him yet not anyone else; the ball of fire surrounds it, yet does not stop shining inside his being.
The ball of fire envelops his nerves now, like a several-million-volt electric current.
Now the ball of fire is what he is writing.
Now the ball of fire is what he is living.
The paradox is obvious, but the pyrotechnics occurring in his brain now seem to be of little importance. He is an elementary particle, double in nature. He is a “supercord.” He is a quantum field become a man.
He is writing at his desk in Capsule 108 of the Hotel Laika, but at the same time his other “I,” now become an “I-other,” is simultaneously updating the narrative in the Created World.
He knows it. He is fully aware of it. It is a sensation as strong as being confronted with his own death, or his own birth.
Scoring of the subject, parturition of the narration, reunification of the world.
On one side, an objective vision: the free man in Capsule 108, the man who is writing, surrounded by a trembling halo. On the other side: subjective life, activation of the being in the real world, activation of the real in the concrete being. And in the middle: shadows, amid which the box-world of the Machine-Child expands endlessly.
And the counter-light that emerges from it all is Plotkin, who bears it, who holds a laser pen, a Celestial Pencil, in his hand. It is he who is writing it, bringing it out of nothingness, bringing it to its point of ultimate incandescence, there where everything that is within us reaches its point of sublimation.
The plot that begins now is being issued from his mouth like a fila
ment of light connected to his hand, to the pen, to the artificial paper, to the electrons that carry it, to the bits of information that move at the speed of light to the word processor. The world processor. The plot that begins, in the fireball of his existence–cum–ecstatic spiral, is not the story of his life, the story of his present endlessly reiterated; it is the very narrative of his transfiguration, the impact zone of freedom at the heart of necessary immune defenses; it is the absolute tension between the being and the nonbeing. It is the retroviral intrusion of the black box into itself, the apoplectic moment when everything must disconnect in order to make sense, where everything must combine in order to better divide, where everything will at last take life. Even into death.
It is the moment when his freedom will have the ability to destroy not only what he was but everything he could have been.
So now the lived narration is in parallel with the living writing: two fields, correlated to each other like the two ends of the “supercord.”
Let us observe the placing of the narrative-world into the multiplex, he writes. Let all the light contained in shadow escape—this light that is blacker even than night.
Plotkin in the halls of the Hotel Laika. Plotkin in the elevator. Plotkin in the southern corridor on the sixth floor, heading toward Capsule 066, where Cheyenne Hawkwind is staying.
His hand clamps like an octopus to the screen of the door’s scanner. Identification. Mechanical respiration of the door. Impersonal voice of the artificial intelligence. Dialogue between machines with varying degrees of humanity. Opening of the capsule door with a hiss of ionized air.
Plotkin in Capsule 066, face-to-face with Cheyenne Hawkwind, the man in black, the man from the heart of night, the wolf-man for man, the man he knows is like a brother to him, a blood brother, the blood of all men killed by their hands.
“Your e-mail on the hotel intranet said you wanted to see me. That you had some extremely important things to tell me.”
Plotkin faces the American Indian, body-tuned into a Japanese American. Plotkin, like a human computer, calculating all the possibilities within his reach, and further. Plotkin, in Capsule 108, writing as fast as he can, as if driven by an internal, infernal rocket. Plotkin, who must now bring together all the critical parts of the narrative.
“Yes,” he says. “I have some very important things to tell you. It may take a while.”
Cheyenne Hawkwind observes him with night-black eyes. He scrutinizes him down to the deepest parts of his soul. Cheyenne Hawkwind, the killer he might have been, the killer he was. Worst of all, the killer that looks at him now like a brother.
“Should we sit down, so we can talk?”
“Yes, I think it would be better if we did.”
Plotkin ensconces himself in the depths of his armchair, facing Cheyenne Hawkwind. He observes for a moment the intense light that illuminates the capsule window; the small private Australian rocket is taking off, a conical jet of yellow fire cutting through the blue morning sky. The standard rumbling that marks the rhythm of life in Grand Junction sounds all around them before fading away softly, like a world being slowly swallowed up by the ocean of the sky.
“So,” the Indian killer says. “What do you have to tell me that is so important?”
Plotkin’s quick smile, like a harbinger. The rocket disappearing toward the boreal zenith. The Hotel Laika, where everything will play out. Where everything is already playing out. The light, so beautiful, in the window.
“The first thing I have to tell you,” Plotkin murmurs as if through a cloud of liquid nitrogen, “is that your trafficking in prohibited sex programs toward the Ring with Clovis Drummond isn’t secret any longer. The second thing is that I don’t give a flying fuck. The third thing is that I want you to come and work for us.”
Cheyenne Hawkwind’s face is like a waxen bronze-colored mask. His features are absolutely still. Nothing in him indicates the slightest trace of emotion. He is much more than a blood brother; he is blood itself, the blood of all the brothers he has killed. He is beautiful, Plotkin says to himself. As beautiful as a bull about to disembowel its victim.
“Work for you? Who is this ‘you’?”
“Me, for a start. You might say I’m the chief spokesman. The only one.”
Plotkin, face-to-face with his blood brother, face-to-face with the killer from Montana, face-to-face with the bull that tears open stomachs. Plotkin, face-to-face with cold silence, face-to-face with hands calmly folded on knees. Plotkin, face-to-face with professional death.
“What do you want from me?”
Plotkin, suspended in his emotional cloud of liquid nitrogen, knows that he and Cheyenne Hawkwind are now on the same wavelength. They will speak the same language, employ the same codes; they will speak about life, death, and money.
They will speak about what counts.
“The first thing I want from you is for you to find me a valid black-market Golden Track somewhere on the strip. You’ll have to pay an arm and a leg for it.”
“That’s not exactly my specialty.”
“But it might as well be Clovis Drummond’s, and that brings me to the second thing I want you to do.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I want you to double-cross that bastard Drummond. I want him to help you find the Golden Track, then for you to take it from him. I want him to disappear from the globe as completely as if he never existed.”
“What makes you think I’m capable of doing something like that?”
Your eyes, thinks Plotkin. The eyes I saw that day in the hotel cafeteria, the eyes of a cold-blooded killer. And without even the shadow of a smile except perhaps the one that habitually hovers around the mouths of calm men, completely sure of himself, Plotkin lays his cards on the table.
“Twenty-five thousand Pan-Am dollars. That’s what makes me think you’re capable of doing something like that.”
In Cheyenne Hawkwind’s eyes, he sees the lively gleam of the human world’s cruelty. In the American Indian killer’s eyes is everything capable of making a life evaporate for even less than that.
Clovis Drummond is already dead.
Seated at his desk in Capsule 108, Plotkin lives/writes the small piece of the world in which he, a flesh-and-blood being, is yet himself and the other at the same time, the two connected by the invisible light of the narrative fire. For example, he writes: Textual matrix number two: go beyond the Machine, beyond the hidden traps it contains, beyond all the humanity it bears within it.
He walks down the hallway on the top floor, toward the service staircase, toward the dome, toward the realm of the Machine-Child.
Sydia Sexydoll is at his side, holding herself very straight, visibly racked by near-total anguish, as if walking through a corridor of death toward an open doorway to the unknowable.
“You don’t need to be afraid,” he tells her. “He won’t see us. He can’t read you. But you will help me make contact with him.”
The artificial girl doesn’t reply. She accepted Plotkin’s offered deal barely ten minutes earlier: a meeting with the HMV Christians in the company of Balthazar, and undoubtedly a temporary exile with the old clairvoyant at the interchange. Anything rather than remain on the strip, Plotkin had thought. She is ready to do anything in order to join the rebel community. Ready to do anything to receive the unction of baptism, to finally begin her new life.
Ready to accompany him under the dome, up to the Machine-Box of the Machine-Child. Ready to confront the nothingness, if she must.
The Machine-Child is nothing to her but a vulgar mechanism. For Sydia Sexydoll, android-whore manufactured in orbit, this scrap of humanity enclosed in his iron lung and his network of machines is far less human than she herself.
He sends out the image of the Devolution the world has undergone in the last thirty years: he is no longer human; he is not even an artificial humanoid; he is less than a machine. He is the nihil.
“What must I do?” she asks in a low voice.
In Capsule 108, at the other end of the “supercord,” Plotkin, in his globe of fire, retrowrites the narration of which his I-other has become the engine. He, himself, is the fuel. The fuel and the combustion, like in the old propellant engines used by Grand Junction’s pioneers to launch themselves toward the stars. Oxygen, hydrogen. Fire.
If they are to proceed with their game of disconnections against a being made up specifically of a metastable and infinite ensemble of mechanical disconnections, they will have to reckon with the dangers of reversibility. In the case of the Machine-Child, a game of disconnections, capable of disrupting the ontogonic process folded back on itself, would truly be a suit of armor.
A body.
Not his, not the body of the Man from the Camp, because he is mind, fire, ether, capable of reading and surely also of writing in the exconscious of the autistic youth, but he cannot really be the body of the text. He will be the narrative, but he will need support. A medium. A book.
And this book, this material assemblage on which his transcription of the Machine-Child can take place, this book-machine, of course, is she.
She, the android.
The second game of disconnections, in this case the metastable structure that will open like a suit of armor, refracts in the sort of ontological Larsen effect between the different “sexualities” in play.
Sydia Sexydoll is a living machine endowed with feminine sexuality. Plotkin is the Man from the Imaginary Camp; he is a man, but he is fictional. The Machine-Child is neither a man nor a woman, neither male nor female, and not because he is like the finished form of an androgynous hermaphrodite from Neon Park. Rather, because he is neither one nor the other.
Scanning the expansive brain of the Machine-Child in his active transnarration, Plotkin follows the invisible thread linking the identity boxes and reads in them the specific psychic makeup of the dome-child. Deprived of all sexuality by the general devolution dis(incarnate) in his own existence, which is limbic, he feels no effect—no desire—so that even the concept is completely alien to him. Drummond’s pedophilic acts merely strike him as a bit strange.
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