Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Becoming co-mechanized and then de-mechanizing without having developed as a human being will kill a man, but he will die like a machine. It’s the ultimate trap of technology.”

  “I understand all that, Yuri. Tell me why you came to see me.”

  “The man I saw in Junkville could only talk in sequences of binary numbers, at crazily high speed and without stopping, day and night. He didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, and was barely able to drink a few rations of water each day. And when I saw him again two days ago … God, when I saw him again! He wasn’t a man anymore.”

  “What was he, then?”

  “A modem. He was reeling off numeric binary code at the speed of a turn-of-the-century modem. My God, he would open his mouth and this noise came out, you know, like digital white noise, the sound of 128 kilo-octets of information per second, coming directly from his larynx. Tomorrow, maybe the day after tomorrow, he’ll be dead.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I took all kinds of samples and did some in vivo tests. When people go into this numeric phase, all the cells in their nervous systems become empty. The cellular information is ejected vocally just before the destruction of the nerve cell.”

  The gray-eyed gaze of the young man with the guitar wanders over the machines arranged and stacked in the hangar.

  They are the result of years of research, of bartering, of work, of contribution.

  He has traded the use of his Healing Hand—on a defective pacemaker, a contaminated neurocomputer, a malfunctioning robotic lung, an antiviral-protein nanogenerator, a vision amplifier, an artificial sex organ, a tomographic scanner, a MemoCard implant, a simple shortwave radio—for a few specialized Rickenbacker transistors or the instruction manual of a last-century digital synthesizer.

  But even as he began to offer his gifts to what remained of humanity down here in the Territory of Grand Junction, men were dropping like flies all over the planet.

  At the time, there were still a few working television sets in Heavy Metal Valley; he had seen images dating from the first year after the End of the Machine: men and women, brought down in a single stroke in the streets of the last surviving metropolises, like during the siege of Leningrad.

  SMACK! A vaguely humanoid sack of rags topples abruptly to the ground. A body falls onto the sidewalk—in the middle of the street—against the wall of a bank or a metro station—against a basement window—onto the hood of a car—against the steering wheel of a bus or a train—at a restaurant table—at a store’s checkout counter—in the midst of a crowd that automatically steps over and around it, collectively intelligent but knowing that nothing can be done for the man or woman who has just fallen.

  In Grand Junction alone, it was estimated that 40 percent of individuals with biocontained systems were contaminated and as a result would either die or be severely and permanently handicapped. The body tuner city of Neon Park was practically erased from the map, more deftly than if the neighboring nuclear plant had exploded.

  Very quickly, the city cosmodrome had been emptied of half its population, either by mass death or “voluntary” emigration. The strongly protected launch facilities had remained in operation a few months at most before they broke down in their turn.

  As the years passed, this postmechanical biocide had grown. Calmly. Like a production schedule, with its quotas, balance sheets, accounting, methodology. The religious wars and various politico-ethnic conflicts that had erupted, without any police or humanitarian order capable of controlling them, into a bloody profusion of abominations of every type, sputtered out one after the other like the last bonfires of the end of the world, for lack of combatants, operating materials, weapons, ammunition, fuel, and, in the end, desire.

  The Mohawk municipal authorities had managed to scavenge some new devices—never connected to the Metastructure—and had then tried to relaunch the space activities on which the Territory’s entire economy depended.

  There was a slight shiver of hope during the year marking the centennial of Yuri Gagarin’s flight, but two years later, under the absolutely unforeseen impact of the first postmortem mutation, all electronic machines had broken down irreparably. This time, the cosmodrome had closed its doors for good.

  Six years old at the time, he had watched on the last few remaining television screens in operation as entire cities were wiped from the map, enormous migrant populations following them into the abyss like errant colonies of lemmings annihilating themselves in silence. Every day, everywhere, millions of human beings died, felled by the abrupt malfunction of a nanocomponent or a vital implant. Everywhere. All the time. Without even the smallest pause.

  Grand Junction was petrified forever in the silica and the hot southern wind, like a riparian forest made of metallic alloy and carbon-carbon.

  A dozen rockets stood ready for launch in the hangars, without a chance of ever leaving the soil of Earth.

  The cosmodrome and the city around it slowly crumbled into the dunes pushing coastward from the Midwest and central Canada.

  Yuri McCoy has departed into the night on his antique, gasoline-powered Kawasaki.

  The young man with the guitar watches as he vanishes toward the south, then stands another long moment in the warehouse doorway, eyes raised toward the Milky Way.

  Something terrible is going to happen.

  Again, here, in Grand Junction.

  A thing, both invisible and hypervisible; paradoxically a non-being and a superexistent one, located everywhere and nowhere. The Post-Machine, as Yuri called it, is trying to take what remains of humanity along with it in its implacable postmortem metamorphosis.

  And he is the only man that has had the power to fight against this force in years, this force born of the destruction of the human world, and pursuing further destruction with all its might. Now, he imagines, it is seeking not just the destruction of the human world but the destruction of everything. It seems to prefer keeping mankind as an infinitely destructible entity to simply destroying it. Death is only a means, a medium, a simple, uncontrollable accident. It is the erasure of all creative thought that it seeks.

  He is alone. Alone against the Post-Machine, which annihilates machines to better incorporate them into men.

  Alone. Like a lone man facing an army of wild bulldozers.

  And he isn’t even a man.

  2 > STATION TO STATION

  He isn’t even a man.

  He is hardly more than a child.

  He was born the very day of the Cataclysm. He had been found in a place called Deadlink, an abandoned highway interchange, after a group of Canadian refugees passed through. Then he had been taken to Heavy Metal Valley, to the home of the people who would become his adoptive parents.

  He is twelve years old. And this twelve-year-old boy is looking at himself in the long exterior rearview mirror from a construction vehicle. He sees his organic structure, suspended in the dim light of the trailer, reflected in two pieces in front of a window with the shades drawn.

  This young man is twelve years old, and he already knows he is ancient, with at least two millennia behind him. He knows his birth is hiding a secret, a probably unknowable one, and that this secret can shed light on the demonic mystery that is taking possession of the world and now using the brains of men as its language-machine.

  He knows that the crushing weight of a stellar destiny is lying on his fragile shoulders; the weight of a future that is passing him by, a life he will not live, but that will consume him.

  He is twelve years old. He is the Healing Hand for electric bodies. He is also the eye that sees in the dark.

  He knows.

  In the mirror he sees a rather puny boy with skin so translucent that the veins can be seen underneath it like delicate blue lace and a shining crown of platinum blond hair, and gray eyes that observe everything, eyes whose pupils are shot through with tawny streaks, like the enigmatic fingerprint of some fire from before his birth. This is
probably also the signature of the secret optic system that allows him to see even in total blackness.

  He is the young man with the guitar. He touched his first electric instrument at around three years old. To the utter astonishment of his parents and the friends present on that day, he had been able from first contact with the thing to coax harmonic sounds from it, even a simple series of tunes.

  More surprising still: “Good Lord,” one of the guests had exclaimed. “I thought this old Telecaster stopped working twenty years ago!”

  At the time, neither he nor anyone else had understood what was happening. It was only later that he realized the full import of the strange power he seemed to be able to conduct. He had just turned six years old when he began secretly experimenting with the neuroinductive repair of contaminated electronic systems, tucked away in some hidden spot in Heavy Metal Valley. The next year, after months and months of practice, he had calmly announced the news to his parents, and had given them a demonstration of his talents.

  His father had immediately sworn him to absolute secrecy about the nature of his powers.

  Like any secret, it had required men to keep it.

  And men are fallible.

  About two years ago, the rumor permeated the entire Mohawk Territory, even Junkville.

  And very quickly, the requests had begun to pour in.

  Unable to sleep, he leaves the trailer—his parents’ mobile home, now plunged into the dark of night like all of HMV with its thousands of twentieth-century vehicle carcasses, all its makeshift shelters built of scavenged parts from cars, buses, trucks, bulldozers, and caravans, metal and Plexiglas sparkling silver in the moonlight, the photovoltaic cells mounted on every roof hoisting protective rectangular cobalt shields against the fires in the sky.

  And yet the greatest threat to humanity is just about to descend.

  Here, upon Grand Junction, the place everything has abandoned.

  Yuri was very clear: This time, your powers probably won’t be of any use. This isn’t a virus, as we so often use the term. It is something, a force, born of the Metastructure—or, rather, of its destruction. It is an inverted emanation of it. It doesn’t attack the biological or the mechanical.

  Neither the biological nor the mechanical, but what is in between them, he says to himself.

  The thing, this “metavirus” born of the Metastructure’s self-contamination, now has only one target. Human language. And, more precisely, language in any form.

  What can anyone do against a force that transforms logos into numbered communication, into pure machine language?

  What can anyone do to fight an unknown power that attacks not the biological or the mechanical but the symbolic?

  What can he do against this Post-Machine, for which the myth of Babel would be a pleasant farce?

  What can he do? He, all alone, twelve years and two millennia old, against an entity that knows neither future nor past nor even any form of present? Without Presence, without Memory, without Destiny; it is everything and nothing all at once; it has destroyed the machines, and in so doing has exterminated almost four billion human beings. But death is only an accidental by-product for it, a transitory problem through which it must pass, that’s all. Fatum.

  For now it seems to have completed its metamorphosis, like a chrysalis in the last phase of its transformation.

  He realizes, suddenly chilled with fear that not even the soft starlight can ease, that everything that happened before the End of the Machine and its current consequences—the whole century and the one preceding it—formed the invisible matrix of what will soon be unleashed on the rest of humanity, like the most terrifying apocalyptic Flood of all.

  He walks. He passes the high columns of stacked, smashed steel-and-plastic carcasses. He passes the lines of antique but still-operating gasoline-powered cars, the piles of engines and mechanical parts, the rows of buses and pickup trucks. He crosses Bulldozer Park, then the wide span of Jeep Avenue, where, in the distance, he can see the imposing bulk of an enormous cosmodrome rover that HMV’s sheriff and his men scavenged shortly after the facility’s spatial activities had been shut down. Just beyond it, the great helixes of windmills whirl on the summits of the surrounding mesas, vast moon-white quadrants whose blades sketch high, rotating crosses as they swish through the night air.

  Farther away to his left, beyond the city limits, the massive silhouette of the local Catholic church towers skyward. Its immense aluminum cross, built from the remnants of a luxury autocar cruiser, has withstood more than one group of Islamists come to practice its razzias in the Independent Territory. There is still religion, and there is still war.

  After the fall of the Metastructure, all the beliefs, rites, and divinities of Human UniWorld disappeared. From the Death of God, the world had moved on to the industrial superproduction of idols and religious kits—for everything, the “unified everything” that controlled the Machine-World, had crumbled; even the last Islamic emirates scattered across the globe had finally fallen apart. There is nothing left now but a world deserted by its machines, of which man is the last representation, on the point of giving way itself to something else yet unknown.

  There is nothing left but a world that is becoming a desert, where the Post-Machine waits like a scorpion hidden beneath the sand, ready to inject its venom into every man within reach.

  He walks alone, like a being just emerged from a meteorite fallen to Earth. He walks under the ghostly reverberation of the moon and the stars. Here, for him, the night is as bright as a summer afternoon; he doesn’t see as well during the daytime. For a long time now, he has seen much better at night.

  The night seems like his natural domain, yet nothing in his constitution warns him against sun exposure either; despite his luminously pale skin he is much more resistant to the pernicious effects of the ultraviolet light than most of the humans he knows.

  He isn’t a vampire or a werewolf, even though he isn’t completely a man, either. Night, for him, is a sort of hyperday, a special moment when the moonlight, which is actually the light of our single sun, together with that of distant stars, diffused by myriad constellations in the vault of the sky, becomes a source of new impulses, as if some cerebral photosynthesis is taking place in his head every time he absorbs a new dose of photons from the Milky Way.

  This light is a language for him. Better still, it is pure music, a coming together of radio waves in stellar collision, nuclear rhythms of hearts in fusion, brandishing their millions of degrees centigrade, cerebrospinal toward the breath of supernovas, melancholic dispersion of the distant emissions of a quasar, imperturbable leitmotifs of pulsars and neutron stars, whirling in time to the implacable will of some cosmic Karajan. The music of black holes, really, whose presence is indicated by jets of matter and light that fuse in the fraction of a second at the moment of their disruption in the nothingness, like the clash of electromagnetic cymbals signaling the imminent and always recommencing end of the very sonority of the universe.

  He has become aware, in using his hands to heal machines, in saving the electric bodies from their own self-destruction, that it is inside him that this light shines, though timidly yet. He realized it only this summer, in an unprecedented blinding flash: he is an antenna, an antenna connected to the cosmos. He relates to the light from the sky because he is himself a fragment of this light. And if the machines allow themselves to be cared for by him in their agony, though he is not a human being, it is because he shares with them a tiny bit of pure inhumanity, a tiny bit of beauty with nothing at all earthly about it, an instant of life beyond life, somewhere in the quantum chant of elementary particles.

  It must be long past midnight.

  He has passed to the other side of the hyperday. He is now in the Dark Face of the Light.

  And he understands now. Yes, he has realized it as if instantaneously frozen in the liquid helium of truth. It is as blinding as a flash, as deep as an abyss, as hard and precise as the blade of a scalpel. />
  He understands that that which has just entered its ultimate mutation, this postmechanical entity born of the decomposition of the Metastructure, this thing without name, without form, without place, without true existence, is ontologically his enemy.

  It is his enemy. Therefore, he is its enemy as well.

  That means that what has been happening in Junkville for the last month or two is only the prelude to the true offensive. A war is on the point of being declared. A war between him and the thing. A war of total and complete extermination. There will be only one victor, and no mercy.

  He understands that he is far from ready for such a war.

  He doesn’t even know if he will be able to fight.

  He has arrived at the city limits. The city of Heavy Metal. In this region, located in the northernmost part of the Territory, the desert of the continental center gives way to a semiarid steppe where a few plants live on the scant humidity coming from the Saint Lawrence and what remains of Lake Ontario; a few shrubs, evergreen brush, a handful of scrawny cedars. He walks on a sparse carpet of wild grass scattered with reeds, Liatris spicata with its white flowers, wild oats, several species of chickweed, all kinds of wild grasses, chenopods, dock plants, brambles, wild roses, hawthorn, viperina, stinging weeds, bloodwort, cowbane with its oily, highly poisonous sap, night-flowering catchfly, Canadian fleabane, red-rooted amaranth, white lychnis, ranunculus, false cheiranthus, orange hieracium, chicory and wild mustard, passerage densiflore and other crucifers, witchgrass, myrtle spurge, masked pansies and forget-me-nots, epine vinette, poisonous sumac, and various cacti—all these plants; vibrant, spiny, parasitic, often toxic, put down roots wherever they please in rhizomes, bunches, and bouquets; in wildlands, peat bogs, in alkaline, calcareous, acidic, or loamy soil, and in the semiarid savannas of the Territory, where they have already replaced most of the original vegetation. He walks on the world’s last plants, heading toward the rocky mesas that surround the city, on which rest the starlike shapes of the windmills whirling in their slow ballet. Xenon Ridge, for example, which dominates the south and west, from which one can see the dried-out buttes of Monolith Hills, the sand-scoured expanses of the old cosmodrome and the ghost town of Grand Junction outlined in relief against them, swept by clouds of dust and the round tangles of errant tumbleweeds.