In the mobile home is a doctor of genetic biology from Neon Park, Professor Anton Solnychkin, wanted by the UHU for daring to claim that DNA is a quantum metacalculator connected to God. Father Newman is also there, as well as one Milan Djordjevic, the writer whose work, under his many pseudonyms, was read by the Machine-Child: Jeffrey Alhambra Carpenter. Djordjevic recently arrived in HMV; he fled his native Slovenia when Islamist forces from southern France cut northern Italy off from its borders with Austria and the western Balkans during the summer.
He has known Lady van Harpel since her very first visit to combustion-engine territory. Sometimes, under the icy sky of the northern autumn, they had exchanged a few opinions in the presence of Father Newman, who usually remained silent.
“The Grand Jihad has begun again,” she had said to him one day. “The UHU’s peace lasted only fifteen years. The Metastructure will die, but planetary war will ravage everything in its path, and this time it will pave the way for the coming of the Antichrist, the incarnation of the Prince of This World.”
Djordjevic had looked deeply into the old woman’s eyes. This wasn’t the sort of thing to speak of lightly. “Yes. You are right. But you know that in fact he has already come; his reign is as implacable as it is invisible and painless. ‘Hitler was only a precursor,’ the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said a century ago. His thousand-year reign has begun, that is all, and his various temporary representatives will follow one after the other, but in fact, it is the whole world, all of humanity—or what is left of it—just as much as the nameless thing we speak of, that is being targeted. Because once we are co-mechanized by the Thing, we become the Thing. Every part of a megamachine is itself, must be, a machine as well. A megamachine is, by definition, composed of machines. Because the megamechanical world is the world of the infinite expansion of mechanization, a world where everything is co-mechanical, a world where everything is thought and nothing thinks. It’s strange; this is the root of a book I’m writing….”
“For the angels, everything always goes back to the root.”
“Yes. And that is what Vivian McNellis came to tell us. The end of Man is now a phenomenon of the past; it is no longer facing us, according to a more or less long-term temporal perspective. We have fully entered the era of the disappearance of Man, and that is part of the plan of what you call the ‘Antichrist,’ taking it for a ‘person,’ though really it is the opposite; it is a ‘principle’ that, paradoxically, becomes incarnate in disincarnation, which loves to project itself in antiform. Its success lies in the Universal and Technical Thing, its individuation in the annihilation of the subject, its language in the deconstruction of all Logos.”
“Are you saying that there will be a successor—or even a resumption—of the UHU after the Second Jihad?”
“Yes, in a certain sense,” said Djordjevic. “You see how they are co-evolutionary and thus co-devolutionary. Their decline and death are correlated in every way. The end of the Metastructure opens the door to the chaos of total planetary civil war, but at the same time it produces two contradictory events: it frees up the space needed for an even greater mechanization, which the Jihad will have done everything to make possible. At the end of this century, probably, with an even more perfect and implacable Metastructure than that of the UHU. And—”
“And?”
At the time, Djordjevic had been unable to find the words. Now, ten days later, in front of the baby sleeping in his cradle inside Lady van Harpel’s mobile home, as the autumnal rainstorms pour down on the American northeast, he looks at the old woman.
“This,” he says, “is the and I was talking to you about the other night.”
He wrote that it would be you, thinks Lady van Harpel. Yes, you will likely be the father of this child, but can you marry an android, a former “sexydoll,” a bionic ex-prostitute?
Later, in the face of her mostly silent insistence, the man refuses. “It isn’t that I find it impossible to marry an artificial woman on principle. It is—don’t you see—the fact that I am already married, my dear lady. My wife disappeared near Trieste when the French Islamists attacked the eastern Alps. No one knows what has become of her, and now it is impossible for me to go back there. They say fighting has begun again in northern Italy.”
“Then you don’t know if she is alive or dead,” remarks the old clairvoyant of the interchange. “That, I know, is worse than anything.”
“Yes,” agrees Djordjevic. “Especially when you know what the Islamists do to women.”
Lady van Harpel does not respond. Djordjevic notices that she seems to be having some difficulty swallowing. Finally, she puffs somewhat desperately on the psychotropic smoke of her marijuana pipe.
As for Djordjevic, he stands paralyzed with horror at the consequences of what he has just said.
“In any case,” he says one day, trying to convince the old woman once and for all, “the child is an unnatural orphan, as you well know. One might even say that he is the first orphan to be born after the death of his parents. He is the Orphan of the World. Do you understand? He is the incarnate parabola of the Act of which we are the genitors: he is the Orphan of the Godless World. He has no real genealogy to speak of, since the Human World is disappearing, other than that of a metanarrative that was created between Vivian McNellis and Sergei Plotkin, between Creator and Creation and, even more certainly, of an internal relationship inside Creation itself, a relationship of Creation toward Creation, like the combustive center of the Created World. He is, in a sense, the first man of a whole new World, the post-UHU and even the post-Jihad world, you might say, since it seems definite that the Jihad will follow the monopsychic Metastructure in its devolutionary spasm, and finish by destroying itself.
“He is the first man of the world following the invisible catastrophe, the first man following depopulation, the first man following the destruction of Nations, the first man following Man, the first man following the end of the world. He is the Orphan of Enoch, the Noah of a World where man himself is the Flood. Gabriel Link de Nova.
“What he will do exactly, no one knows. If anyone did know, it would undoubtedly fall to that person to destroy the Universe.
“What will his life be? For now, the infinite space of freedom.
“And if one takes my meaning, he has created this Universe.”
It is thus that Djordjevic conceives his “mission” where the baby is concerned: to follow him even while leading him; to guide him while knowing what he will learn from him; to be the Master who will teach his own Pupil to surpass him.
To hide nothing from him, except the unknowable. To tell him everything, except what is useless.
He is an orphan. He was found at Deadlink. His parents were probably killed during the resumption of combat between the North American Islamic Caliphate and pockets of Canadian nationalist resistance fighters. He was found after the departure of a band of refugees bound for Vermont, perhaps abandoned by a group of survivors, undoubtedly lost in the chaos by the last active Red Cross unit in the area. There; the story is taking shape.
“It is out of the question,” he tells Lady van Harpel, “to educate this child in the belief that he is the son of a female angel and a half-fictional, half-real man, especially since we have no real certainty about Plotkin’s true status. Even if that is the ‘truth.’ We will decide when the truth is real. The truth will set us free, said the Old Testament. Yes, unless it kills us. Take it or leave it” is the Balkan writer’s final word.
“I am for it,” says Sydia Nova.
Lady van Harpel nods.
The man takes the android girl and the baby to his home in HMV.
Another story has thus begun. A new disconnection in the world.
Or, rather, in the Post-World.
> WORLD PROCESSOR
So now what is talking, what is talking now, is no longer anyone in particular. If it is a “person,” with any luck, it is present in each of us. It is what wrote this world, this world of dy
ing cosmodromes, that is talking, and it is talking with a voice trying to transcribe the experience as best it can.
This voice too is coming from an isolation cell, one of the cells from which only a free word can come to life and take flight in search of minds. It comes from a brain that does not yet know it has just entered a war, a total war. It comes from a brain that barely suspects its own multiplicity, or more precisely a tension in this Multiplicity between the Unique and the Infinite; for example, this voice is already active in the brain of the man who, in this world, is—was—will be—named Milan Djordjevic, and who is writing—wrote—will probably write—the adventure that has unfolded here. But it was also present inside Plotkin, the man of the “plot,” the man of action, the man divided and then reunified, the man of sacrifice, the man of crime and punishment, the Man from the Camp.
It is present, at the same time, inside a female android who leans over the baby she has just adopted, in an old mobile home lost somewhere among the borders of several North American territories; and also in the head of a very young girl, an adolescent girl scampering with her father near the chassis of an old Cadillac in an area reserved for combustion engines not far from here, but several years distant, outside this particular story. And it is present in a radiant fireball, on the lips of a man who, somewhere in a ruined city, is preparing himself to kill another man.
There are millions of men like that.
This voice is our own, except that we have lost it. This voice is the one that makes each of us something other than a routine in the program, something other than a box in an infinite network of boxes, something other than a machine in the megamachine. This voice is everything that humanity does not dare to tell itself, everything men do not want to hear spoken of—that is, themselves and their atrocious failures, their terrible dysfunctions, their unborne responsibilities.
This voice, though it probably exists in each one of us, can only be expressed by some. The weakest ones of all. Paradoxically, though, it is their very weakness that keeps them from speaking; they open their mouths and nothing comes out. But it is this terrifying silence that comes to cover, with its luminous shadow, the insipid tumult of small talk, the awful clamor of carnage, and the thundering din of crowds delivered up to themselves.
This voice—which is now nothing more than a gasp uttered by a few mouths silently screaming their ineffable cry to the stars, under the celestial northern and southern vaults that will crown the extinction of man by man—this voice is a very strong thread of light that seems to rise from the Van Halen belt toward the Orbital Ring, like a single filament of golden vapor. This voice—this voice that is already returning to what truly possesses it, well beyond this Earth and this Universe—this voice is what permits the world to exist. It is through this voice that this world transcribes itself in Creation.
Not only does no one listen to this voice any longer, no one dares to risk hearing it. Not only does no one speak this language any longer, the entire world has agreed to let it vanish. How, then, can we be surprised that the world is slipping away; how can we be surprised that it is crashing in on itself like the heart of a star that will become, that is becoming, a black hole? How can we be surprised that it no longer possesses any force strong enough to be the glue that sticks things together?
Look at them, these intelligent monkeys who hide their words behind accounting tautologies, behind cultures of pomp and circumstance, behind circus language—the words they have let become a vulgar mechanism for communication! Look at them, left alone with crude machine-language, with the machine-world in its pitiful nudity, just as it finally reaches its goal to co-mechanize everything, including the nothingness it carries within it.
This voice, if it is that of a human being on this Earth, is the voice of the last living writer not yet replaced by artificial intelligence. This voice has taken the world in its own mouth.
It is clear that this voice is about to fall silent.
Jordan McNellis presses his nose against the cold Plexiglas window.
The planet, blue and orange, appears in fragments under an atmospheric cavalcade of huge cloud formations. Where it is night on Earth, myriad unmoving stars cluster in the sky more thickly than the densest of surrounding constellations: they are the cities, burning with all their fires, some lit by the hand of man, raging fires and civil wars. Where it is day there are constant explosions, like flaming, silent laughter erupting across the surface of the globe, and enormous disks of black smoke, drifting from one continent to another, floating beneath his watchful, almost nostalgic gaze. A hurricane, surely programmed by WorldWeather, is brewing in the Indian Ocean just off the coast of Malaysia.
Involuntarily, his hand moves to the window, as if to touch the reality of what he has just left forever.
At the same time he hears Sloppy, a young Australian pioneer, swearing at a machine that is refusing to obey him. He glances around at the cabin’s occupants. Seven other people—three men, four women—with whom he will spend the twelve hours before their arrival at the final destination, the geostationary city of Cosmograd.
He is going back. Back to the High Frontier. Back to the Orbital Ring, the metacity peopled by space colonists. Back to the territory of his childhood. Back toward his own future.
He lets his gaze rest again on the planet that is growing imperceptibly more distant, burning with turbulence of every possible color. Hell might be multicolored like this. Everything that can burn does, on almost every continent, including North America: Los Angeles, several cities in the Great Lakes region, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. Collision zones, metacultural shocks in the mesh of the global network. High human energy: murders, massacres, torture, rapes, tyranny, abominations. Repetition of abominations. Abomination of repetitions. The planetary civil war is expanding: pseudopods, suburban agitation, convergence of micropolitical catastrophes. A multigenocidal hydra refracting at every stage of the great global panopticon now deprived of most of its means. They say the computer problems that began on October 4 in the Metastructure of governance bureaus are the worst ever, and that the Metastructure is only functioning at 50 percent capacity. That the phenomenon, of unknown origin, is getting worse every day. They are talking of the likely end of all aerospace activity. All technological activity. There, Jordan McNellis says to himself. This time we can never go back; it has really started for good now. The general devolution of humanity can’t be stopped.
He left just in time. In extremis. He watches the Earth he is leaving forever with the mixed feelings of the survivor of a catastrophe: peace and relief on one hand; guilt and sadness on the other.
Once, he thinks, there was a world here.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Thierry Bardini, Pierre Bottura,
Olivier Germain—the trinity of readers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MAURICE G. DANTEC was born in France in 1959. A former advertising executive and songwriter for a French punk-rock group, Dantec is a shameless lover of science fiction, crime novels, and metaphysics. He is the author of Red Siren, which won France’s Prix de l’Imaginaire. He is also the author of Villa Vortex, Babylon Babies (soon to be a major motion picture from Fox under the title Babylon A.D.), and Theatre of Operations, a series of journal essays. He lives in Montreal.
ALSO BY MAURICE DANTEC
Babylon Babies
Cosmos Incorporated is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2008 Del Rey Books Trade Paperback Edition
Translation copyright © 2008 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random
House, Inc.
Originally published in French by Éditions Albin Michel, Paris, France, in 2006, copyright © 2006 by Éditions Albin Michel.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dantec, Maurice G.
[Cosmos incorporated. English]
Cosmos incorporated / Maurice G. Dantec ; translated from the French by Tina A. Kover.
p. cm.
I. Kover, Tina A. II. Title.
PQ2664.A4888C6713 2008
843'.914—dc22 2008003019
www.delreybooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-345-50783-9
v3.0
Cosmos Incorporated Page 42