Cosmos Incorporated

by Maurice G. Dantec

  Balthazar doesn’t seem to know what to say. He is silent. No one speaks.

  Finally, Plotkin says: “You’re mistaken; I am not a UHU agent. If I were, you would all be behind bars already.”

  “You might be waiting to seize the whole network, catch us in the act…”

  “I know all about your network. And as for catching you in the act, it’s already done. Do you want me to read you your rights?”

  The old woman frowns and lights her pipe. Automatically, the air-conditioning system, already on high, turns on an antitoxic aeration vent placed in the very center of the ceiling, which sucks up the smoke in a whirl like a miniature bluish tornado. “Well, what are you, then?”

  Plotkin looks again into her scanner gaze. “What do you mean?”

  The woman does not blink as she says, “You are not human. Not quite.”

  Plotkin exhales. Détente. Stall for time. A second or two. What a demonstration. This woman is no fraud, swindling people for a few Philippine pesos like so many of the so-called clairvoyants on the strip. She is powerful, and dangerous. He can see with absolute clarity that she was a stunning beauty in her youth.

  “I am human,” he lies, “but I am an ‘amplified human.’ I work for a special organization—not UHU. Nothing to do with UHU.”

  His first personality, that of the Man Who Has Come to Kill the Mayor of This City.

  “What organization?”

  “If I told you, I’d have to kill all of you immediately afterward.”

  His words drop like stones into the pool of silence in the room, cold as a marble tomb.

  “He works for a company of assassins,” says Balthazar, trying to help, “but I know he is a renegade. Why else would he be doing this, especially for free?”

  “Exactly,” snaps Lady van Harpel. “That’s what I don’t like. No one does anything for free these days. It doesn’t fit.”

  “Priests conduct baptisms for free, as far as I know,” barks the dog.

  Plotkin realizes that Balthazar has truly become his ally, his friend, that he is defending him, like a devil’s advocate, to the terrible judge of Deadlink, just as he will defend him, fangs bared, against any physical danger.

  “Do not compare the living vectors of the Holy Sacrament with this…man, as he claims to be.”

  “You are impossible,” growls the dog, annoyed.

  “Why do you not tell me the truth?” demands the old woman through a cloud of marijuana smoke. “You are hiding something. You are not what you claim to be.”

  “What I will say,” Plotkin states dryly, “is that the only thing that counts for me is the word you just said.”

  “What word?”

  “‘Baptism.’ You said ‘baptism,’ and there are at least two priests here, as far as I can tell.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Are you planning to baptize her?”

  The woman stares at him in silence, then at the dog, and then at the artificial girl who remains standing wordlessly, head slightly bent forward, eyes on the ground. Then she looks at Plotkin again.

  She is scanning him with all her mystic senses. He does not drop her gaze; instead, he makes the most important decision of his life. He opens himself completely, like a flower, like a peeled-back glove. He projects the entire truth into the clear blueness of her eyes, and he sees her recoil, as if stricken with a lash. The fiftyish woman accompanying the priest takes her by the shoulders. “Do you feel all right, Lady van Harpel?”

  “Lord…” the old clairvoyant murmurs, sinking heavily into one of the worn old armchairs scattered about the room. “All-powerful God…please proceed with the baptism of this young woman, Father.”

  “I’m Father Matthew Rowe Newman,” the older man says, approaching the android girl. “I am Anglo-Catholic. This is Mrs. Mary Jane Kirkpatrick, who will assist me.”

  The fiftyish woman steps forward and shakes the girl’s limp hand. Plotkin can already see how the android is transfigured. Something shines weakly in her eyes, and there are traces of tears on her lashes. He sees—yes, he sees that she is ready. She has a soul, he says to himself. They’ve realized that she has a soul. And for the first time in his “life,” he feels as if a heavy weight is crushing his rib cage. And in his eyes, too, salty moisture wells.

  “Do you have witnesses?”

  Plotkin realizes that the artificial girl has turned toward him. He feels his entire being devastated from the inside. He throws a glance at Lady van Harpel, who watches him coldly from her armchair. “I’m sorry,” he replies to the android’s unspoken question. “I can’t be your witness, Sydia. I’m not baptized.”

  Father Newman smiles widely. “If you like, we can easily—”

  “No,” Plotkin cuts him off. “I don’t think I’m quite ready for that.”

  “Very well,” says the priest. “In that case, Lady van Harpel and Sir John Sommerville, our friend from the Presbyterian community, will serve as your official witnesses according to the agreement reached between our two churches. Will you accept them?”

  “Yes,” answers the artificial girl, her eyes filled with fresh tears.

  “Good,” says Father Newman. “Mrs. Kirkpatrick, let us proceed with the installation of the altar and holy reliquaries.”

  Later, much later, Plotkin will remember the event as one of the strangest in his strange “existence,” stranger even than the existence itself. He will remember it as a moment of pure transfiguration, though nothing—nothing, or almost nothing—actually results from it. There, in the initial certitude, in the visible: water, fire, salt, and the word.

  And yet it is enough, seeing the liberated face of the young whore manufactured in orbit for the violent beauty of the act, the magnificent risk it entrained, to bring him almost to his knees, and to make him plead for baptism in his turn.

  Lady van Harpel senses, with all her invisible antennae, that something is happening inside him. She has undoubtedly watched him during the ceremony. She leans slowly toward him, takes him by the arm, and pushes him toward the mobile home’s door. “We need to talk,” she says.

  “Yes,” he agrees grudgingly. “We need to talk.”

  She leads him to the other side of the river, crossing a small ford of polished rocks covered with gleaming algae. She indicates the graveled butte they are facing. “Climb up with me. I want to show you something.”

  They make their way up a tiny road, hardly wide enough for a colony of ants, to the summit. At the top of the butte, on a shallow plateau covered with short, colorless grass, they have an unimpeded view toward the east. Plotkin is aware that Lady van Harpel has not showed the slightest need for assistance during the climb, nor has she uttered a word.

  Very keenly aware.

  After a few seconds, the old woman rolls a ball of herbs and tobacco, tucks it into the bowl of her pipe, and says: “They have been there for a week.”

  There are at least sixty thousand of them. They have come from Quebec, especially from the island of Montreal, where they were embroiled in a tripartite civil war among pro-Canadian federalists, independents allied with Islamists, and pro-American annexationists. They are mostly civilians, but Plotkin notes various military uniforms as well, indicating the probable presence of deserters from surrounding camps.

  This human ganglion moved first toward the southeast, toward the federal territories of what remains of the Union, but it was repulsed by border guards and the Vermont state police. The sixty thousand people then scattered along the border, and ended up on this side of the butte, only a few kilometers from Deadlink, and seem to be making their way northward, somewhere in the direction of the old nuclear plant in Neon Park.

  Sometimes refugees find radical solutions to their search for refuge.

  “I want you to look me straight in the eyes and answer my questions.”

  “You can’t hypnotize me,” Plotkin warns her. “I have an auto-blocking program for that sort of—”

  “It isn’t hypnosis
. I need to know the truth, that’s all.”

  “I just told you the truth in there,” Plotkin replies. “Why did you make me come up here?”

  “Just to see if you could keep up with a nonamplified seventy-two-year-old human woman.”

  Lady van Harpel laughs. The echo of it is lost among the crags of the eroded hilltop.

  “There is something in you that isn’t human,” she says, “and yet you are. I have known it since the beginning. There is something in you that isn’t alive, and yet it is as if you could be, at any time. I have sensed it. There is something linking you to the invisible world, something superphysical, and I saw it in there, but I don’t understand it.”

  “There is nothing to explain,” Plotkin says. “Any attempt at a rational explanation would inevitably miss the essential point and would suffer from the total absence of aesthetic preoccupation.”

  They stand face-to-face at the summit of Deadlink hill, the abandoned interchange to their left. On the right, to the west, are the masses of human refugees. And the two of them stand under the sky—blue, luminous, pure, and saturated with ultraviolet light.

  “I see,” she says at last, lighting her marijuana pipe.

  Plotkin allows the silence to stretch between them. There isn’t even the slightest breath of air; they don’t hear insects humming, or the tiniest noise from the teeming mass of refugees. The end of the world will probably be calm like this.

  “The depopulation is just beginning,” she says, her features suddenly twisted with concern. “And nothing can stop it. The UHU is finished, or almost. The Grand Jihad will resume, in an even more terrible form. The reign of the technocrats will begin. And now the Antichrist himself is coming.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I have seen it. I have read it in the future.”

  “When?” Plotkin demands.

  Now Lady van Harpel points in the direction of the hilly plains of Vermont and the mass of humanity with its particleboard shelters and a few UHU-approved medical tents with their white lettering on a khaki background as the only structured motif, though barely readable. As for the rest, it is nothing but sixty thousand pieces of “civilized” human chaos regressing into neolithic savagery.

  “It has only just begun.”

  > MISTER QUARK

  He bridges the next narrative disconnection at the speed of a photon.

  He carries with him the image of the old woman and that of the newly baptized android girl, waving to him in farewell as she stands in front of the mobile home, while the motorcycles of the HMV Catholics roll off in the direction of the access road. He gets back into the rental car, drives to North Junction, and walks toward the Hotel Laika.

  Then he finds himself back in his room.

  He is there, in front of himself, Plotkin the Scribe, the “living” neurosoftware agent, a sort of intensified inversion of the Machine-Child. He is the other and the other is he. He lives the two quantum plans in a manner both separate and correlate. He knows that Plotkin the Scribe, sitting there a few meters away from him, is really on the other side of the universe, at the other end of the supercord. To be close is sometimes to be infinitely distant.

  He knows that his consciousness-“other” is writing his “I” in action in the world. He knows that soon the world will no longer exist. He knows, because Vivian McNellis told him, that the possibility of his own reunification depends on what he is able to do with the Babel-child, the child with ninety-nine names, the child with no childhood.

  The Counter-Man from the Camp and the Machine-Child are not abstract entities “thought” by a pure monotheistic and omniscient spirit; they are superphysical processes folded into each other.

  Something is using them to bring down the Metastructure.

  For Vivian McNellis to pass unencumbered to her High Frontier, it will take more than an official UHU-approved paper. More, even, than one hundred thousand dollars paid into the Grand Junction Cosmos Inc. account for a flight on one of Jason Texas Lagrange’s small, low-cost rockets.

  It will take much more.

  It will take what must be done.

  And he knows now what that will be.

  He knows that his action will probably catalyze—isn’t that the term one uses for a chemical process?—the whole world, the whole plot, the whole of his being.

  Yes, there will be catalysis, in every sense of the word: acceleration, decline, crystallization. There will be catalysis. There will be the completely assumed risk of consciousness.

  Absolute danger.

  New ecstatic disconnection in the plot: Plotkin the Scribe unrolls the filament of light toward Plotkin the Man from the Camp; he walks through the hallway on the top floor of the Hotel Laika, which whirs with every cog in its mechanical organism. Plotkin enters the service stairway and arrives once more under the dome, in front of the gray wall covered with metal crucifixes, then in front of the black wall of the Machine-Child’s black box, in front of the vinyl sphincter, the airlock, the entry-exit interface.

  The Machine-Child is still in standby mode, operating at half speed, moved only by the most limbic pulses and the simplest components. Plotkin knows he can enter the child’s interior black box now without the slightest difficulty. Thanks to the metatronic black box Vivian McNellis made him ingest, he has the ability to incorporate the Box-Child’s world. Thanks to the transcription he made of the child’s internal metastructure onto the organless body of the android girl, he knows all his access codes; he is already inside him, an invading virus. Percussion. Photons. Action. He is already in front of the ghostly entity hidden in the shadows of this bodiless organism. Now, everything will be tied up. Soon, everything will shine forth from their mouths finally open to the fire of the word.

  “I need information about your central operating system, the one that controls your identity boxes.”

  “The ninety-nine names?”

  “Yes. And to start, there are names that I can’t identify. I know Frankie Machine is from The Man with the Golden Arm, the Frank Sinatra movie. But who is Saul de Sorgimède, for example? Or Lucas Ford de Guadalupe? Or Steve Cooper Cumberland?”

  “Steve C. Cumberland is a Canadian author who only wrote one book, a detective novel, using that name as a pseudonym. The main characters in the book are Peter Argentine and Luigi von Saxenhagen, two other boxes. Saul de Sorgimède and Lucas Ford de Guadalupe are key characters in Aletheion, the great time-opera saga by Jeffrey Alhambra Carpenter, one of the last science-fiction writers still alive today who hasn’t been replaced by artificial intelligence.”

  “What exactly do you know about your first identity, the one that you are using as a legal cover?”

  “John Smith? I recognize the name, but I don’t know anything about John Smith. He is probably a direct emanation of the Metastructure, just an anonymous artifact, and—”

  “No.” Plotkin cuts him off. “John Smith exists too. He is a fictional character, the first ‘cyborg’ in the history of literature, from an Edgar Allan Poe story called ‘The Man That Was Used Up,’ the story of an automaton living in a broken-up body. Are you following me now?”

  “Edgar Allan Poe,” repeats the child. “I have one of his books in my library. Extraordinary Tales, you know, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ all that. And he is among my identity boxes. But I don’t know the story you’re talking about.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Plotkin replies. “The Metastructure knows it.”

  There is a long silence, which Plotkin deliberately allows to stretch on. “Where do your books come from? Your library?” he asks after a moment.

  “They are the books I read during my stay with Grandmother Telefunken in Neon Park. She was one of the last people there who knew how to read, one of the last ones to own books. I brought what I could with me.”

  “Okay. Now, what’s the story behind all the ‘1980s electric rock’ boxes?”

  “I have no idea. That is the holdout area; it comes from fart
her away than the narrative-world you say I am the counter-production of. It comes from what wrote you, me, Clovis Drummond, the dog Balthazar, and even Vivian McNellis and the entire world. From what probably even wrote this Metastructure that has become what I am.”

  Plotkin says nothing. The Machine-Child knows. He knows of Metatron’s existence and of what is the transcendent, pivotal, and superphysical principle of the Metastructure—or its counter-principle. The monopsychic Metastructure is the inverted and socialized form of the Prince of the Face.

  It is the Enemy.

  “Why are these Christian symbols on the outside wall of your ‘gray zone’?”

  “I don’t know that either. They come from the Marie de l’Incarnation box. She says she must try to save…my soul, or something like that. I asked Clovis Drummond to put the crucifixes on the outer wall; on the inside they would disturb the order of my library.”

  “Are you afraid of dying?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what death is.”

  “That is normal. ‘Living’ beings don’t know what life is, either.”

  “What will happen to me?”

  “You have a choice. Either you can disincorporate yourself completely in the Metastructure, which I will do everything I can to prevent, even if I have to eliminate you ‘physically,’ if that word means anything to you. Or you can agree to do the opposite thing—in which case I can’t say for sure what will happen to you.”

  “What would that be, exactly?”

  “I believe I would be able to incorporate you, like an antinarrative, and thus make you into something alive.”

  “How?”

  “I still have only a vague idea of it, but the woman I must save will undoubtedly play a role in it.”

  “Incorporate? Are you going to eat me?”

  Plotkin laughs. “Yes, it is something like cannibalism, except that you aren’t flesh and blood. Actually, though, it’s the opposite: I will serve as a writing surface for you; I will give you the chance to become a thinking, living being, gifted with words. And you should seize this chance.”