It looks like a scene from an antique postcard from the previous century, whose image changes according to the viewing angle.
It is as if light is body, just as much as body is light.
Later—but is it really later in this hotel room at the end of the world, in the solaresque radiation that envelops the body of Vivian McNellis? Let’s say a little later, for time seems to have been annihilated, Plotkin approaches the bed where the girl fallen from the sky floats a few centimeters above the helium mattress. She seems made of helium herself; terrestrial gravity is losing its effect on her. She is returning to Heaven, the last sky, he tells himself. He stretches a hand toward her.
Vivian McNellis looks at him, a weak smile on her lips.
Very slowly, almost in slow motion, she opens her hand to welcome the touch of his fingers. “You are a man now.”
“I know,” Plotkin replies, his throat choked with emotion. “I…I don’t know how to thank you.”
“I would have loved you in the Created World, you know. I loved you when I invented you, in the camp.”
Plotkin is confronted with a physical phenomenon that is troubling and a bit annoying—his throat is unable to make any sound. Nothing comes out but an incomprehensible, barely audible murmur.
Vivian McNellis gazes at him with all her fiery beauty, and Plotkin feels himself being consumed on the spot, as if bound to the post of a pyre. His fingers brush the half-open palm of the angel-girl. Vivian McNellis’s fingers brush his in return, her fingers tender and gentle like silk, or a baby’s skin.
“I love you too,” he finally whispers.
He can’t see very well. A strange liquid is welling in his eyes and flowing gently down his cheeks. “I love you so much I would die for you without a qualm.” His voice quivers slightly, so highly charged that it could send vibrations through a steel cable strong enough to keep the world from turning.
What he just said is true, so true, so terribly true. Except the last bit of it, perhaps, which contradicted the first bit a little. But he knows what the syllogism means—Love kills Death; Love can make you dead, not to it but to its antiworld, to what is not real but creates the reality of the world. Only Love is real, he thinks, and it doesn’t matter if it is possible or not; it doesn’t matter if you have fallen in love with a girl from the sky; it doesn’t matter if you have fallen in love with someone about to leave you forever, as she is about to leave all this incarcerating humanity.
It doesn’t matter, because now you are.
You are alive.
You are born.
That afternoon—is it really afternoon?—Plotkin begins to sense pulsations coming from the city, below Monolith Hills and the Leonov Alley strip, south of the hotel. A long procession of floats is making its way up the strip from Voskhod Boulevard and beyond Nova Express, which will become the intersection point for parades coming from all over the city. The Sonos Volantes are cruising overhead like oblong-shaped birds, scattering music, advertisements, and flyers announcing the J.T. Lagrange blastoff tonight.
The party is beginning.
On the wall-mounted television screen in Capsule 081-A, Plotkin and Jordan silently watch the images coming from right outside their hotel. A low-altitude camera drone buzzes directly past the Laika on its way to Nova Express, aiming its lens for a moment at the tubular, metallic building.
“We could have seen ourselves on TV,” remarks Jordan, pointlessly.
“Do you know that not too long ago, people were ready to die or kill to see themselves on TV for three seconds?”
Jordan McNellis turns to him with the facetious, incredulous expression of the delayed adolescent he is.
“Are you serious?”
You live in your world. You come from the Ring. You lived in parts of the Earth isolated from virtually everything else, first in Patagonia with your grandfather and then in UHU research centers and health camps. You know nothing of the world I come from. You know nothing of the world of the camp, even. You, too, are just passing through. Soon you’ll be in the Ring again. For you, in a very short time Earth will be no more than a distant, unpleasant memory. “Of course not,” Plotkin replies without even the shadow of a smile. “I’m kidding.”
Night is falling now. The first stars appear in the light-saturated sky shading into the purple of the intrauterine night. The cosmodrome looks like an immense constellar animal fallen to Earth, its fires illuminating the space around it all the way to the Hotel Laika overlooking it. And the festival has grown to indescribable proportions. The Monolith Hills strip—indeed, all of Grand Junction—is an uninterrupted series of rave parties, where every imaginable drug and neurosoftware, legal or illegal, circulate from hand to hand, mouth to mouth, spinal cord to spinal cord. The parade floats have invaded the wide streets and mounted toward Nova Express. Everywhere, crowds gather under the beat of neodisco music, gyrating and oscillating stroboscopically in a mechanical simulation of desire. Everywhere there are lights, cries, chants, noise, music, sounds of every type; everywhere are images in the sky, reflected in the clouds sculpted by the Starnival sponsors, images of the UHU itself and its planetary federation slogan repeated a thousand times. Everywhere is the grinning, deathly face of false hopes, the wide mouths of the masks twistedly mocking any vision of true hope. Everywhere sex, drugs, music, cash. Fuck me, shoot me, move me, buy me.
Everywhere death in action.
Except here, in this double capsule in the Hotel Laika, where death shows itself as the simple zero operator of an ontic process, as pure nothingness, as nothing, hardly an entry-exit interface, just a channel. Except here, where the light-body of Vivian McNellis holds a refuted secret, terrible, secretly terrible, terribly secret, about everything the false world of the UHU is built on.
Here, where life reigns eternal.
The depths of night. Facing Vivian McNellis, Plotkin is quiet, holding himself as straight as if he has a steel rod for a spinal cord.
He is quiet.
He is quiet because Vivian McNellis is speaking.
And what she has to tell him is extremely important.
“This is the moment when everything will be decided.”
He knows it. The knowledge is a field, burning under a surprise enemy attack. The knowledge correlates with the words spoken by Vivian McNellis, this woman he will love for the rest of her life. For eternity.
The knowledge shows itself in this form:
Vivian McNellis: You will go to Deadlink. I will be there waiting for you. For your baptism.
Plotkin: The silence before the bomb is dropped. The big bomb. The Bomb.
Vivian McNellis: The incorporation of the worlds is happening. I am rewriting in you what was, is, and will be the Machine-Child, what he can no longer be.
Plotkin: Continuing, sidereal silence.
Vivian McNellis: There is a very old patriarchal text by Saint Ambrose, which says: “When Christ brought fire to the Earth so that it would consume the faults of the flesh, where the broadsword that signified the cutting of power that wields and penetrates the spirit and the marrow deeply, then flesh and soul, renewed through the mysteries of regeneration, forgetting what they were, begin to be what they were not, separate from the company of former vice, and break all bonds with prodigal posterity.”
Plotkin: The space that is growing between the Andromeda galaxy and our own is no longer silent.
Vivian McNellis: You understand, don’t you? We are father and genitor of our actions and our works, which are thus our children.
Plotkin’s mouth opens but nothing comes out—a loose piece of the silent asteroid traveling to the very end of the Milky Way, of the Voice without Words.
Vivian McNellis: You must convert to the faith of Christ before it is too late. In a few minutes, you will have no choice but to flee the hotel.
Plotkin: The question “Why?” burns his lips, but nothing comes from his throat. All he can think is: I love this woman so much that I am ready to wait a whole lifetime
to be with her again.
He feels ready. Barely, but it is still better than nothing, he tells himself.
He is at a much lower rung than the former android-whore who, for reasons he cannot understand, found faith, broke her bonds of neuroprogrammed sexual slavery, and dared to admit that she had a soul.
Yes, he says to himself; after all, I have a soul too, don’t I?
In any case, he knows he is capable of love. And of killing for that love.
He feels capable of anything.
That is probably enough.
“Yes, I’m ready,” he manages to say.
It is at that very moment that Jason Texas Lagrange’s rocket takes off majestically from Platform 1.
It is at that moment that the fire from the rocket’s tailpipes creates an artificial sun that moves backward from the horizon toward the sky, from the west toward the southwest, leaving behind a cloud of brilliant gas that illuminates the interior of the room.
It is at that moment that the crowd and the music, the city and the flesh, the shadows and the fire vibrate in unison, at maximum intensity.
An instant more. The booster accelerates, changing its course southward, toward an equatorial orbit.
Another instant more. Something erupts in the ionized air; something, an object moving at very high speed.
A small object, but an extremely rapid one, an object that resembles a silver arrow flying in pursuit of the rocket. An object that strikes it violently; an object that makes it explode in the fraction of a second, with its twelve passengers: a furious supernova that causes the night sky to churn with oily plumes of light-filled smoke.
An object—and Plotkin knows it with all his being, because he saw it, because he guesses it, because he knows it—an object that came from the Hotel Laika.
And not from just anywhere in the hotel.
A hypersonic rocket. Launched from Capsule 108.
Launched from his own room.
> INCORPORATION OF THE WORLDS
Fire escape.
He has to get away. Fast. Via the fire escape of reality.
As the debris of the rocket falls to the earth of the county in a rain of ashes, blackened metal, powdered refractory resin, carbonized plastic, and fiery polymetallic meteors; as the general alert resounds throughout the city; as the Starnival founders and falls into the glacial silence of half a million mouths open in shock; as the Grand Junction police arrive on the scene, surrounding the Hotel Laika, the narrative-world of Vivian McNellis whisks them abruptly away, him and Jordan, into the Third Time. The Aevum.
Under the interchange.
Deadlink.
Here, it is always midnight. We are deep in the shadows, deep in the invisible light of what is contained there without being retained.
Gaze on this splendor of pure gold, of astral fire, this supernova of royal whiteness and furious red that encircles Vivian McNellis. She is speaking.
She is saying something.
She is telling a story.
“…Metatron, the angel Prince of the Face, the angel Prince of the Torah, the angel Prince of Wisdom, the angel Prince of Intelligence, the angel Prince of royalty, the angel Prince of glory, the angel Prince of the Palace, the angel Prince of kings, the angel Prince of potentates, the angel Prince of high and exalted, imposing and glorious princes both in Heaven and on Earth, says: ‘YHWH the God of Israel is my witness in this: When I revealed this secret to Moses, all the soldiers of the heights of each firmament became angry with me and said to me: “Why are you revealing this secret to the sons of man born of women, susceptible to sin, impurity, blood, venereal flux, putrid gout, this secret through which were created the Heavens and the Earth, the seas and the continents, the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the lakes, Gehenna and the fire, hail, the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Life; by which were formed Adam and Eve, the cattle and the animals of the fields, the birds of the sky and the fish of the sea, Behemoth and Leviathan, the reptiles and the insects, the creatures of the sea and of the desert, the Torah and wisdom, knowledge, and thought, the discerning of things on high and the fear of Heaven; why do you reveal this to a being of flesh and blood?”’”
She is so beautiful in this moment that Plotkin falls to his knees. This time I fell, he thinks; this time, I am completely a human being.
“‘I said to them, because the Heavens have given me permission, and I have received permission from the high and exalted Throne, from where all names that are expressed stem like flashes of fire and with sparkles of splendor and hachmalim of flames…’”
You are so beautiful, Vivian, that I can’t even speak to you anymore, he thinks, with the difficulty of a stone trying to move itself.
“‘…but they were only appeased when the Saint, blessed be he, reprimanded them and excluded them with reproach from his presence, saying to them: “I wanted, I desired, I commanded, and I confided the task solely to my servant Metatron, because he is unique among all the children of Heaven. Metatron brought this secret out of My house and gave it to Moses, and Moses gave it to Joshua, Joshua gave to the Ancients, the Ancients gave it to the prophets, the prophets gave it to the men of the Great Synagogue, the men of the Great Synagogue gave it to Ezra the scribe, Ezra the scribe gave it to Hillel the old, Hillel the old gave it to Rabbi Abahu, Rabbi Abahu gave it to Rabbi Zeira, Rabbi Zeira gave it to the trustworthy men, the trustworthy men gave it to the loyal men, to prevent and fight on their behalf all the diseases that were raining down on the Earth: ‘If you truly listen to the voice of YHWH your God, if you do what is right in His eyes, if you open your ear to His commandments and if you observe all His decrees, I will not inflict any of the diseases I inflicted on the Egyptians, because I am YHWH who heals you,’ as it is said in Exodus 15:26.” ’”
The words taken from the Book of Enoch write themselves in fiery letters on Plotkin’s brain. He realizes that she is giving him something. A secret. “We are alone,” he finally says to the light-body that is much more than a body, and infinitely more than a simple emission of photons.
“You’re wrong,” she says. “All of the invisible is with us, even at this very moment.”
All of the invisible, thinks Plotkin. The procession of angels… “I meant…there’s no one here to baptize me.”
“No? What would you say to the angel Metatron himself?”
“I…listen, you…you’re only his temporary incarnation. You’re a woman. Only modernist ch urches accept the ordination of women.”
“In all the UHU-tolerated religions, certainly. But you’re making a small mistake.”
“A mistake?”
“Yes, you are forgetting the central idea of the ‘common priesthood of the faithful,’ which Origen uses deliberately in several of his homilies, including the one on Leviticus, I believe. Each of us is a priest by baptism. In the early Catholic Church, exceptional situations were everywhere, and our circumstances are similar to those long-ago ones: if a priest is absent at the moment you are to be baptized, any believer may replace him.”
“But you—”
“I am no longer a woman in the way you understand it. I am the living vector of the Verba Ignis. Remember what Origen said: ‘Do you not know that to you too, as to all the Church of God and all believers, priesthood is granted?’”
Plotkin doesn’t reply. He gazes at Vivian McNellis, radiant, so close to him and yet already so far away.
“And so, Sergei Diego Plotkin, I baptize you, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
A burning liquid drips down his forehead, penetrating inside him, consuming everything there is to consume, consigning to nothingness everything he should not have been, leaving him naked as a newborn child, in the pure glory of what he has become.
“Now,” she says to her brother, who has been hovering in the background, “I must cause your continuums to split apart. Our paths will diverge forever.”
“What do you mean, Vivian?”
“In
a few hours, the incorporation of the uncreated Light will happen. In me, the dark matter of the Universe will be digitally supercoded, and the globe of light will become a singularity in which I will ascend directly to Heaven. I would like for Lady van Harpel and the young android girl to be witnesses to this. They will be told at that time.”
“And why will that cause our paths to—”
“Time is running short, Jordan. I need you to get out of here as fast as possible. The entire Mohawk territory is in an uproar over this attack, and very soon they will start investigating the area. I am going to translate you directly into the October 22 rocket, whose takeoff will be delayed only twenty-four hours due to climatic reasons. I already know that the Consortium authorities hate to change their plans even one iota. They will strengthen security measures, that’s all. For financial reasons, they have to go ahead with the program as planned. Even as we speak, police from all over the county are invading the Hotel Laika, but they haven’t gotten their last surprise.”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind the details. The main thing is that the overall retrotranscription of the world is happening successfully. The Control Metastructure is going to die. Without knowing it, Plotkin, by substituting the dead body of Clovis Drummond for the semivirtual exorganism of the Machine-Child there in the Box under the dome, caused a phenomenon of entropic devolution the cyberstructure itself cannot control. The first signs are appearing already. The Hotel Laika is one of them. There will be others.”
“And me?” Plotkin asks, after a moment.
Vivian McNellis, in her globe of light, beams upon him with the smile of an escapee who will never be seen again. “You…you are a free man. I can say nothing more to you except that in creating you, I freed myself, and that you, in freeing yourself, are successfully recreating yourself. I mean that you have taken the greatest risk of all. The only one worth taking.”
Plotkin stares at the girl fallen from the sky, the girl who will return there with no need of any claim, any propellant rocket, any cosmodrome, any Jason Texas Lagrange III, any city of Grand Junction.
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