Cosmos Incorporated

by Maurice G. Dantec

  “You think that if I destroy the Machine-Child, I will destroy the Metastructure too?”

  Vivian McNellis’s laugh is like sunrise crystal. “You are still confusing the singular and the universal. The Machine-Child is a living metaphor. It is because I produced him without knowing it that he is destroying me, without knowing it either. In comparison, the Metastructure itself is only a minor obstacle. But its time is limited. That much is certain.”

  “Maybe it is the opposite…maybe the best way to destroy the Metastructure would be to endow the Machine-Child with a real life, and—”

  Vivian cuts him off. “The fate of the Metastructure doesn’t interest me at all. What is important is that my transmutation does not lead to the pure chaos of entropy, and that I get back to the Ring in time, even if it means the destruction of this…this thing.”

  Plotkin doesn’t answer.

  Angels have power over life and death. Angels fall to Earth sometimes, and take human form.

  The form of a woman, for example.

  Vivian McNellis smiles. “I’m sure you will succeed.”

  New quantum leap.

  New passage. New unitary separation, I-he-other.

  New chapter.

  > IN CAPSULE 108, PLOTKIN WRITES: CRYPTIC ZONES

  He knows he is heading into something virtually unknowable. That he will have to break through the wall of light, and that it will be harder and more concrete than the thick concrete wall of a universe.

  Plotkin writes: I can be “I” while being “he” I can be another while being myself. I can enter into you now, Machine-Child, because I am the agent of Metatron’s black box, his soldier of fortune, his mercenary, his servant. I am his pawn. The pawn of a gambit of the stars.

  What is about to happen will almost certainly be utterly terrible, and yet I can barely conceive of what form it will take. What is about to happen will be an ontological cataclysm of which I can know nothing before it comes to change me, to finally make me become what I am. What is about to happen is: Plotkin in the service stairway again with Sydia Sexydoll. Plotkin who knows that, at that moment, Cheyenne Hawkwind is discussing “business” with Clovis Drummond, in a bar somewhere on the strip, to find a black-market Golden Track. Plotkin, now ready to work on the body armor of the text, ready to make the android girl into a biological book via which he will dialogue with the organ-machines of the Box-Child.

  “I am ready,” the artificial girl said.

  You will never be ready enough, thinks Plotkin.

  For he is already beginning to imagine-produce the sequence of events; he is beginning to sense the specific form these events will take; he is beginning to draw the diagrams of their reciprocal surges.

  And it is hardly within the capabilities of a human brain to describe it.

  Well it’s 1969 okay

  All across the USA

  It’s another year for me and you

  Another year with nothing to do

  Plotkin does not know why he has chosen this box, rather than one of the other ones forming the 1970s-1980s electric rock configuration, in the extrojected brain of the Machine-Child. A vague intuition: 1969 was just before the beginning of this double decade; it was the year when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, and the Iggy Pop box is connected to the astronaut’s by this simple chronological relationship. But they are in Grand Junction. With the other boxes that form the “electric rock” subidentity, the Iggy Pop box has a fundamental reference value, but as with everything that concerns the mind-world, the anti-mind anti-world of the Machine-Child, it is integrated as a simple part of the machine, a bit of circuit; all the boxes function that way, whatever their specific diagrams: among them, all, everything forms an infinitely repeated circle, without beginning or end, without singularity or difference.

  His choice of the song “1969,” off the first Stooges album, might well prove as meaningless as everything else.

  But it doesn’t. It works.

  It is the voice of the female android that sings the song. Plotkin has wrought his textual body armor; the voice is emitted directly in the neural centers of the child. Plotkin watches the artificial girl beside him begin to come apart. Eyes closed, she murmurs the words of the song while, bit by bit, her body seems to flatten like a clinical diagram, a visual catalogue of separate organs.

  The miracle is taking place.

  The event rises out of the exconscious annihilism of the Box-Child, and like any true event it comes in the form of a phrase.

  Through words.

  Words the child cannot express by mouth, at least not solely. The words write themselves simultaneously on all his machine-organs, his holoplasmic screens, the visioptics incorporated into his iron lung, and even, for a moment, shine for a brief instant amid the shadows into which the vast network of his boxes was thrown at the moment of his arrival in this world.

  For the first time, the words do not indicate only the action of a program on a group of nanocomponents. They make sense—in any case, they try to say something to a human interlocutor. The words say: You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend: those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.

  It’s from the Clint Eastwood box. The artificial girl repeats the phrase like a living sampler. The Clint Eastwood box glows. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, a Sergio Leone Western, is the source of the famous quote. The box plunges into darkness. ON/OFF.

  Plotkin persists.

  Dialogue without dialogy, monologues interlaced on the disconnected body of the android.

  New quantum leap. New passage into the very interior of the narrative.

  New paragraph.

  New disconnection.

  Here, now, nothing exists but names and words that circulate in every sense of the word. It is as if Plotkin is entering the heart of an asemantic, atopic vortex, filled with nothing but cold shadows closing in on the still colder light that illuminates the boxes in which the Machine-Child endlessly reconfigures the world via the Control Metastructure. It is like a monstrous beast made of pure nothingness, a space impossible to describe with Euclidean terminology. The Metastructure looms in his field of vision like a gigantic nominal list of machine-organs designating each part of the world it controls, and Plotkin knows that this also has everything to do with the mind-machine of the child with ninety-nine names.

  At his side, the artificial girl is now prostrate against one of the walls of the Box-House; her body has become a visual and denominative catalogue of organs that seem to live separately from one another; the body itself is now no more than a useless concept.

  Plotkin knows he is on a forced march in a sort of antinarrative, in the Ante-World of Vivian McNellis’s plot. He knows the Machine-Child is everything against which his own existence can do nothing but fight against, forever.

  At the center of the vortex are the ninety-nine names of the Machine-Child, and it is with them that Plotkin is trying to establish a “dialogue” without speaking. Among the ninety-nine names, there are those through which he has been able to penetrate deeply into the child’s brain-machine, and there are those through which he has been able to traverse the ontological rhizome that seems forever looping back upon itself: Clint Eastwood, Iggy Pop, Alan Vega, Kraftwerk…

  At each opening-closing of a box, the android girl undergoes another metaorganic disconnection. She is nothing more now than a vague, ghostly form pulsating with codes and numbers, a biometry of artificial flesh prone on the Recyclo™ particleboard of the Box-House, mouth open to the unknowable, entire body become the site of the experiment Plotkin is conducting on the Machine-Child’s mind.

  Something is there.

  Something that seems to want to live.

  Something that sings through the girl’s body, and that comes from somewhere else, that does not come from him, Plotkin, but that does not seem to be coming from any one particular box, or from the totality the boxes form. The thing is singing.

  It is like fossil radia
nce.

  Plotkin realizes he is touching the very membrane of the truth. He realizes, stupefied, that there is a sort of black box within the black box itself; there is a secret device, so secret that not even the Machine-Child knows of it—at least, not anymore. There is something there that seems to contain the space-time of an entire life. This thing—it is like the occult link that connects all the boxes, but it is also a box, and not the filament of light that Plotkin’s narration is in the process of tracing toward it. It is the mega-Box, the megaMachine. It is the monopsychic entity itself.

  Sydia Sexydoll, a catalogue of disembodied organs slumped against the wall, the Box-Child in his iron lung surrounded by machines, and Plotkin, the Free Man from the Camp, who is decoding the exconscience of the youth who has no age, no existence—the nothing-child. That is what is happening here, what is being written. Plotkin the Writer in Capsule 108, as if in a state of solar combustion; Plotkin the Killer under the dome, connecting his brain to the Machine-Child’s, and retrowriting the experience in the symbolic body of the android.

  He is now inside the black box of the Machine-Child’s antibrain.

  He knows it, because words are no longer separate from things here—concepts are the same as worlds—there are no more boxes repeating the statistic matrix of the Metastructure here. No. Now, here, there is a human being.

  Or rather, his ghost.

  This ghost of a human being is the black box of the child’s exconscience; it is the Machine within the Machine. It is the infinitely divided indivisible. The Machine-Box in its wholeness, not as a universal concept, even one materialized by the Metastructure, but as an initial point of individuation.

  It is here, Plotkin realizes, that the creation of the World by Vivian McNellis took root. He is standing at its point of absolute contraction. It is also from here that the creation of the antiworld began, the one that is concurrent to him. He is at the very origins of the plot. He is face-to-face with the zero point of the writing, face-to-face with the antithesis of the Celestial Scribe, with its general reversal in the World Below. He is face-to-face with the genetic code of the Metastructure itself. He is face-to-face with what has no name.

  He is face-to-face with the child’s hundredth name. The name-hundred. The name-without. The name-sense.

  One hundred, Plotkin thinks. Yes, it is also the number four in binary, in an eight-bit system. The fourth day, the day when the operation of division doubles over into the physical world. He is truly in the presence of infinite division itself, the extensive inversion of Creation, this indestructible bloc of nonwriting that resists all writing. It is hardly human; it has virtually no shape. It is a child, an adult, an old man, a machine, a man, a woman, an alphabet, a numeric matrix—but when it comes down to it, it most resembles a man.

  “I think you are causing me to die,” says the Box-Machine. “Yes, I do think I am dying.”

  In the limbic space-time of the antinarrative, where Plotkin has succeeded against all odds at initiating this nonsensical dialogue with the identity of the Machine-Child, the universe is lighting up, bit by bit, while the incarcerating lights that reign in each of the boxes are extinguished, one by one, like children’s rooms being plunged into darkness, at nightfall, when bedtime has come.

  “I am dying; yes, I think you are making me die,” says the Box-Machine, this terrible incarnation of the Control Metastructure in the body-brain of the fiction-child.

  “No,” Plotkin says, “you are not dying. I mean—yes, you are, but it is because you are beginning to live.”

  “Why are you doing this? I don’t feel well at all. My boxes are not opening into one another anymore, and they are no longer closing on the world. Why?”

  “I have to stop your metastatic proliferation. I have to prevent you from copying the entire Control Metastructure in your brain, and it and the copy from changing places. If you succeed, the client I work for will die.”

  “No one has ever been able to open my black box before, the one that contains all the others while being contained by them. How did you do it?”

  “I used a body. A system of machine-organs, if you prefer. A body you cannot see, because it is like the inverted parallel of your own existence—or nonexistence.”

  “I existed once. I remember. I think—”

  “No. You only exist here, at the disconnection of all your boxes, in this invisible part of yourself, the one you have hidden from the eyes of the very world you are digesting, the eyes of this fucking Metastructure.”

  “The Metastructure is my ally. It helps me to survive. It gives me all the data I need to—”

  “I told you it is threatening the life—the survival—of my client. I don’t care about the rest.”

  “Who is this famous client?”

  “Her name is part of your identity boxes. I don’t actually know how that’s possible.”

  “Oh yes, I see. The strange double box that came from I don’t know where, and which has been trying to incorporate all the others. I thought it was some sort of virus, but it didn’t work.”

  “Because I hadn’t been created yet. Not as a free man. Now I am, and I can act.”

  “I see,” says the child-adult. “You are a direct threat to my existence.”

  “It’s your own existence that is threatening you. When you are completely extrojected into the Metastructure and it is incorporated into you, you will be nothing. Even your black box will be dissolved.”

  “I—that is impossible. The Metastructure keeps me safe.”

  Plotkin, via the body of the artificial girl, bursts into laughter. “It protects you like a herdsman protects his cattle—to fatten them for slaughter when the time comes.”

  “What are you planning to do?” demands the ghost-child, from his secret box.

  “My client is incorporating the cosmos into herself, as you have done with the Metastructure. The difference is that you are the antiworld of her mind. She created you, but without knowing it. I, though, am her conscious creation, and now I am both the subject and the author of this narrative.”

  “What is going to happen?”

  In the child’s voice, and on his ghostly, otherworldly face, Plotkin sees purest anguish. Involuntarily, he reaches his hand out toward the limbic child-adult in compassion, but the entity recoils, terrified.

  “You shouldn’t be afraid,” Plotkin says to him. “‘Fear is like a small death,’ said—I think—Frank Herbert, one of the authors in your science-fiction library.”

  “I am afraid with good reason,” replies the child. “I am frightened of you, and I know you are killing me.”

  > CELLULAR AUTOMATONS

  Subatomic narration. Neuromancer on a forced forward march, inside the world that is creating itself.

  Plotkin Capsule-108. Plotkin-under-the-dome. Supercord. Quantum correlation of the two plotlines.

  After leaving the rhizomic exconscience of “John Smith,” Plotkin looks at the iron lung in which the barely human form moves feebly. The nanocomputers and their peripheral devices seem to be on standby mode; the iron lung itself emits only a weak gleam now and Plotkin knows he has released a sort of viral bomb, a semantic bomb, inside the child. He does not know when or how the bomb will explode, but he knows the detonation will be enormous.

  The artificial girl is now back to her original organic/symbolic form, but she is not in the best shape. Plotkin finds her prostrate, pale, eyes half-closed, nearly unconscious. She is extremely weak.

  He takes her back to her room; she sinks without a word into her helium bed. Out the window, the sun is sinking slowly beneath the horizon.

  “Thank you,” he says, not really expecting a response.

  But the bionic girl murmurs, in a trembling voice: “No problem.”

  And Plotkin the Killer, thanks to the subtext Plotkin the Writer has provided him with, understands the meaning hidden beneath the words. “I have experienced life and death, good and evil, body and mind, the organic and the symbolic. I
have experienced destruction and creation, and the risks inherent in both. I am ready now.”

  “Yes,” he replies to the unuttered words. “You’re ready.”

  Then, in Capsule 108, Plotkin brings the narrative-world forward twenty-four hours. Fast-forward. Light speed. Metatronic Black Box. He is on the strip now, near the hotel, with Cheyenne Hawkwind. They head south, toward the big intersection of Nova Express. They cross the metallic structure of Telstar Bridge.

  “Clovis Drummond wants twenty-five thousand Pan-Am dollars for the Golden Track. Twenty thousand for the document itself, five thousand for him and me, to be split equally.”

  Plotkin sees in the Indian’s eyes that the amount doesn’t hold a candle to even a small bonus, equivalent to 10 percent, of the price of a murder.

  “How long?”

  “Fast. We’re meeting our middleman tomorrow, but we’ll have to have the money.”

  “You’ll have it. How do you want it?”

  The Indian smiles. In his black eyes, gleaming like a hot brazier only a moment before, Plotkin discerns the spark of true humanity that is the basis of the inhumanity that has taken possession of this world.

  “As you know, there are…let’s say, two separate amendments to our contract.”

  Plotkin smiles too, and looks at Hawkwind with the pale blue eyes of the Man from the Camp. “Fine; first let’s look at the official affair. The Golden Track for the people in Capsule 081.”

  There is little traffic in this part of the strip, but in the distance Plotkin can see the Nova Express intersection and the crowd already gathering on the street, a local replica of the flood of human damned plunged into the fiery river of damnation.

  “I have a Centurion Trust account somewhere in Montana,” Cheyenne Hawkwind says. “Deposit the entire amount in there. It’s agreed with Clovis Drummond; he has access to the account as well.” The subtext is clear: I’m screwing that bastard over but good. “So then, for the…let’s call it the unofficial part of the contract. I’ve decided that twenty-five thousand Pan-Am dollars isn’t enough.”