With no need of anyone.
With no need of anyone…visible.
OUTPUT
METATRON
Thus the words that come from my mouth will not return to me without effect.
ISAIAH 55:11
> BLACK LIGHT, BLACK HEAT
Why is he driving now, in a rented robotic car, somewhere on Route 299, in the direction of Nexus Road? Why?
There was no transition between the baptism and his reincorporation into this car, speeding through the night of the independent territory.
Everything is synchronic in the Third Time, he thinks to himself. I am here and elsewhere, today and tomorrow, yesterday. I am on the path of the Created World through the intermediation of Vivian McNellis’s cortex, and it is simply that this World coincides perfectly with the “real world.”
In a few hours, she will rejoin the Primordial Light; in a few hours, Lady van Harpel and Sydia Nova will stand witness to the Assumption of the girl fallen from the sky, and yet, at the same moment, as paradoxical as it may appear, her brother, Jordan, will take off on October 23, more than two weeks from now, for the Ring.
And he—he knows with a prescience so sharp that it could rip the very fabric of the Universe—he is driving toward his infinity. He is ready to drive forever along this end of the world, if there is even a chance to see Vivian again. The world suddenly seems full of absolute truth, of intrinsic beauty that the abominations of man have not managed to sully.
The night and its powdering of stars scattered on the black sheet of the sky; the trees standing like gray and mauve totems on either side of the road; the road itself, this dusty road above which the blue-white rays of the xenon streetlamps glare.
Then, the angel appears to him.
The foremost angel, the Prince of the Face, the Celestial Scribe. It is as if Vivian McNellis’s words from the Book of Enoch have come to life in front of him, both everywhere and nowhere. Everything is fire. The whole Universe bears the face of a man with four faces, each of them brighter than the sun.
“From the moment the Saint, blessed be he, took me into his service to serve the Throne of Glory, the chariot wheels, and the Shekhina, my flesh became flame. My nerves became burning fire. My bones turned to bundles of embers, the light of my pupils into the splendor of light, the sockets of my eyes into torches of fire. The hair of my head became sparkling flame. All my limbs became wings of burning fire. My entire body became roaring fire. To my right were those that had sculpted the flames of fire; to my left, a burning torch. All around me was the wind of storm and torment; before me and behind me were the groaning of earthquakes.”
This time, he falls. He falls with his face to the ground. His mouth is full of moss and wet, iron-tasting sand. The trees cast their almost-human silhouettes against the great cosmos of Luna Park.
Plotkin is in the forest that borders Route 299. He can see the unmoving robocar a few meters away, haloed with dancing sunlight. He stands, walks to the gleaming vehicle, opens the door, sits down at the controls, and starts the car.
He is no longer in the rental car—or if he is, it has been transformed into some sort of eight-wheeled chariot, riding a cloud of fire. His form is human, but glowing with radiance. Vivian McNellis is beside him, in full angelic metamorphosis as well; her skin, flesh, nerves, bones, her entire body is becoming a star. Their gazes, meeting, give birth to a thousand galaxies. Everything is fire—eyes, hands, mouths, breasts, chests, abdomens, thighs…
All is fire. I am being consumed in you, Vivian McNellis, he thinks.
And he hears the voice of the girl fallen from the sky, the girl who is becoming an angel of fire to return there. He hears the voice of Vivian McNellis, or, rather, her voice writes itself directly in his mind.
“Make love to me, Plotkin. Make love to me before it is too late.”
Plotkin knows that the words really mean: It is too late, but that does not matter.
He touches his index finger, radiant with light, to her lips, and then kisses her, flame on flame.
Yes, he understands. He knows. He understands everything about her narrative-world. He finally knows everything about love.
It has taken only a single, crashing instant for him to be illuminated with such knowledge.
Fire you were, fire you will be, fire you are.
Now the narrative-world ends, and you are born at the same instant.
At the very instant when you will die.
Men are waiting for Plotkin, where he did not think they would be—at the junction. The unfinished junction between the strip and the North Junction road.
He sees a large silver-gray train car parked on the side of the road. Four men emerge from it.
A well-directed MPE-impulse ray causes a complete short circuit in the rented robocar. It stops almost instantly. Plotkin gets out of the vehicle calmly, his hands spread slightly away from his body.
He is not a normal man anymore.
He doesn’t have a chance.
He doesn’t recognize three of the men, but he knows immediately that they are professional killers.
The fourth man he does know, but he has not, until now, recognized him for who he is: the fourth musketeer.
Cheyenne Hawkwind/Harris Nakashima.
“I’m sorry,” the man says, in a voice as cold as liquid nitrogen.
Plotkin can almost see bluish smoke coming out of his mouth.
“I work for the Order that employs you, as an operations controller. I presume you know what that means?”
Plotkin knows what it means. It means he is going to die, there at the side of the road, at the side of the North Junction road, at the side of the end of the world.
“You should know that damned android from Flandro fucked you over royally,” Cheyenne Hawkwind says. “He’s been spying on you almost the whole time you’ve been here. He didn’t really understand what was happening, but he knew he too was invisible to the child in the dome. When he learned of his existence from the android girl—don’t forget that androids of the same generation are interconnected in some ways—Ultra-Vector Vega guessed that something strange was going on under the dome, and also with you, the female android, and Capsule 081. He plotted to make you his Lee Harvey Oswald. Every police officer in the territory is on your heels.”
Plotkin understands. It is like the final ironic reversion of destiny. The terrorist android had used against Plotkin the same plan Plotkin had intended during his first “incorporation” as the Man Come to Kill the Mayor of This City.
Plotkin looks at Cheyenne Hawkwind and the three men with him. One of them, a tall, gangly fellow with a head of woolly blond hair, fiddles with a small handheld satellite-emission camera, probably sending direct proof that the execution is carried out correctly to those who have commanded his assassinations—his bosses, his old bosses, his bosses from the time when he was paid for spilling blood. The two other men wait, impassive, just in front of the radiator grille of their big Chinese hydrogen-powered train car.
Of course. It’s all so obvious. He blatantly overstepped his bounds; he didn’t meet the deadline of his contract with the Order. And, especially, the fateful day of October 4 didn’t result in the assassination of the mayor of Grand Junction, but instead in a terrorist attack against one of J.T. Lagrange’s rockets, and thus against the economic interests of the entire cosmodrome of the Mohawk Consortium.
The fact that the Flandro android used him and managed somehow to penetrate his room to launch, at the fatal moment, a hypersonic rocket, shows that he really has been working for the “radical” faction that refused orbital compromise with the UHU space agency. He is cold, determined, cunning, implacable. He’s probably already at least two thousand kilometers away from Grand Junction. He’s probably in the Southern Hemisphere by now.
The two killers have stepped away from the train car. The third man continues filming, imperturbably. Cheyenne Hawkwind/Harris Nakashima, or whatever his real name is, observes the scene with a g
leam of real pity in his eyes, which, Plotkin thinks, makes the whole situation even more inhuman.
“You have not respected your contract. You have betrayed the Order. You know what that means.”
Plotkin looks into the faces of his own end, the double face of his death. A young man, very young, Asian, smooth-faced, violet-eyed, with wavy black hair, sweating under the orange light of the strip’s sodium streetlamps. The hangars of the cosmodrome, vast metallic whales disemboweled on the concrete tarmac, rise sparkling behind the autobridge. The blue lights of police cars flash from the Hotel Laika, a little more than a kilometer away. The second man is hardly older than the first, a half-blood African American of at least four different ethnicities, his head shaved, dressed in an unassuming pearl-gray suit and a vermillion shirt, eyes covered with two high-resolution optical implants. He has moved a few more steps in Plotkin’s direction. He is the one with the weapon. The Asian man holds the MPE emitter that fried the rented robocar’s engine. He seems to be there for the coup de grâce, or as an additional measure of security, or maybe even as the controller’s personal bodyguard. He stands with his arms crossed, watching Plotkin with his black eyes, his gaze boring like a nail into flesh.
They’re starting younger and younger, Plotkin thinks to himself mechanically.
He came here to kill a man, and he did not comply with the terms of his contract.
He came to kill a man he had never seen, and now he is facing the man who is going to kill him, and who he is seeing for the first and last time, just as he is being seen for the first and last time; except for the “operations controller,” everyone here is seeing him for the first and last time.
“I understand,” Plotkin says.
The African American killer levels a high-powered, magnetic-propulsion, perfectly silent, rotating-barrel, titanium-carbon alloy Sig Sauer revolver at him. It will fire four thousand 0.55 mm bullets a minute, its multiwinding loader good for thirty seconds of continuous fire. There will be nothing left of him but a piece of meat sliced in two, in the midst of a stew of scattered, bloody guts splattered all over the road.
“If I ever really committed as many crimes as my falsified identity remembers, this will be a relief.”
The young killer looks at him without comprehension. “Relief?” He mechanically arms the weapon, starting up the magnetodynamic propulsion turbine.
“I will be purified when I enter the fires of Hell.”
The young man’s puzzlement visibly takes on cosmic proportions. Stupor, fascination, and a shadow—just a shadow—of hesitation.
“It’s true, then, what the controller told us?”
“What did the controller tell you?”
The young man seems uncomfortable at bringing up the subject, as if it is some sort of scatological taboo. Behind him, the American Indian killer is utterly silent.
“You…did you become a Christian?”
Plotkin lets the truth light up his face, the face that is not even his.
He raises his eyes skyward. Soon, in a few days or a handful of seconds—they are, paradoxically, the same thing—Jordan McNellis will return to the Orbital Ring. In a few hours, at the zero moment of his incorporation of the invisible, his sister will leave this world, following an infinite filament of light.
He hears the sinusoidal sputtering of the carrier wave. He looks up into the black depths of the night, scattered with the last stars of his life.
He directs one last enigmatic phrase to the young Order killer: “I wonder which one of my lives will be replayed—”
More than four hundred carbon-carbon microbullets cause his head, his rib cage, and the left-hand part of his pelvis, including his femur bone, to explode; they then smash into a few electric lightbulbs on the pylon of a streetlamp behind him.
He dies, as quickly and mechanically as he was born.
ON/OFF.
Later, his body will be examined by the Grand Junction county police. He will be identified as the “mastermind of the October 4 attack” then he will disappear from the lives and consciousnesses of the men of this city, to whom, after all, he hardly appeared in the first place.
Except for a few who have already left, and an even lesser few who hope to do the same.
> VERBA IGNIS
The Hotel Laika has become the active center of the autodisintegration of the Metastructure.
The police find only empty rooms, artificial intelligence with no memory, and access to the protective dome completely blocked. When they finally use explosives to break into the dome after several hours of unsuccessful trying, the county cops find a sort of exorganic iron lung containing a list of the organs of a certain Clovis Drummond, manager of the Laika and missing for several days, but they do not find any trace of a body. The exorganism is connected to a battery of nanocomputers whose encryption the Mohawk territory police’s decoding experts cannot break.
It seems that there has been no one in the hotel for more than a month. The strange cyborg cast the dome was sheltering has contaminated all of the computer structures in the building and even beyond. It does not stop even after CyberBranch agents seal off the dome and cut the hotel and its AI off from any connection with the exterior. It is obviously too late; a dead body is disincorporating in the Metastructure. Result: the Metastructure is recopying itself in a cadaver that it has literally devoured and is now decomposing along with it.
Another mystery for the territory cops: it is as if the Hotel Laika, in the space of a few hours on the evening of October 4, aged several decades at once. Virtually nothing is still operational; everything is used, broken, worn out. The most perfect desolation reigns there, “as if time were speeded up somehow,” concludes a scientific expert from Alberta without being able to identify the cause of the phenomenon.
Later, he will correct his diagnosis: “Really, it’s more like time went backward there.”
Vivian McNellis is aware of all of this, though she is in the process of becoming an angel. She knows it because she knows Plotkin is dead. The sacrificial man, the gambit man, the Man from the Camp, the man she was only able to love in the Third Time, in a single second of eternity and flame. The man who could only love in order to be destroyed. The man thanks to whom everything will be able to be written; the man thanks to whom everything has been written.
She knows it because she has become the black box itself, and that is why she emits luminous energy, in the paradoxical manner of a black hole that shines with all the radiance and all the matter it swallows.
It had to be this way, because what is going to happen has to happen.
The retroviral, autopoietic contamination of the Metastructure speeds up as the weeks go by. The world’s governance bureaus are hit with more and more serious “technical” problems, the likes of which have never been seen in Human UniWorld or its predecessors: the end of technology, the termination of technology by itself.
First, CyberBranch detectives locate so-called hot points across the surface of the globe. Emergency zones. The Hotel Laika is the first of these. Then a health security center in the Hong Kong region. This is followed by an entire university research compound in New Zealand. Then a transorbital transit camp at Valparaiso; a series of second-class hotels in Laos and Thailand; and other refugee and health-control camps in East Africa and Central Asia. Then, a few weeks later, at the end of the year, there is a change in the system; the hot points begin to fade, but now, and in a synchronic manner, it is the entire Metastructure that is affected. Specialists compare the process to the various stages of the progression of AIDS. During their investigation on behalf of the Metastructure, it disappears little by little, fades away, annihilates itself; and the UniWorld cops can do nothing to stop it.
When the epidemic reaches the Orbital Ring, it quickly becomes clear that every machine connected to Earth is following the entropic path of the Metastructure, but that those connected only to the Inter-polar Network of Geo-Orbital Nations, a sort of counterstructure the pionee
rs developed little by little simultaneously, in the forbidden “basements” of civilization, in the Free Space of a new samizdat—all the machines that have remained unconnected to the Metastructure since their creation, escape the phenomenon. It is noted that, as with AIDS, the number of exposures to the Metastructure, the number of connections to the social control cybermachine, determines the risk factor for a general retrowriting of the machine in question. Because, and this is repeated unsuccessfully by all the governance bureaus, it is enough for your bioportable nanocomputer to have been connected even once, for a few nanoseconds, with the global megamachine, for it to be infected and considered a sort of “benign carrier.” A second connection and then a third, et cetera, increase the risk of your machine being rapidly infected.
The disintegration has come to life in the very body of disintegration. Software evolves backward: at each new start-up or new use of a computer or any other machine connected to the NeuroNet meganetwork—and they all are connected, or almost all—programs, operating systems, routines, every bit of software present in that individual machine grow outdated by one or more generations at a single stroke. Very rapidly, millions, dozens, hundreds of millions of computers and nanoperipherals show and execute nothing but incomprehensible listings written in machine language, the binary base language common to all machines, their universal language, their own pre-Babel language.
Code, in its purest form. Ones and zeros. Nothing more than machine code.
Bioloaded systems do not escape the general deprogramming. Vital functions on artificial support break down one after the other, in great waves of medical-technological disaster. Brains contaminated by NeuroNet become pure chaos by the hundreds of thousands. Cybernetic organisms stop functioning; semiartificial life is frozen, as if entombed in a historical iceberg, in the icy embrace of the Afterworld.
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