Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  Yuri, like Chrysler Campbell, was immunized at the time of his first meeting with Gabriel Link de Nova.

  That was how they came into contact with him. Chrysler knew one of Sheriff Langlois’ assistants, a Frenchman, and he had managed to pinpoint the precise epicenter of the rumor. At the time, Chrysler had been suffering from the degeneration of his main antiviral neuro-implant, and he was in a great deal of danger. As for Yuri, he had been facing a multitude of problems related to the breakdown of the software in the nanocomponents that regulated his motor functions. The two men had known each other since childhood, when they lived in the thirteenth district of Omega Blocks; their parents had known one another well, trafficking in technology of all types even before the Metastructure disappeared.

  Gabriel Link de Nova had healed them, and as with everything that benefited from the young man’s therapeutic acts, it was for good. Not only were their infected artificial organs immune to what they called the “virus” from that point onward, the virus was rendered harmless to all their other natural and manmade parts—the difference had long ceased to matter for the inhabitants of UniWorld—as well. No biointegrated implant, no group of amplified cells, no transgenic center, no proteinic program, no bodily nanocomputer could ever be affected. Ever.

  They were immunized.

  It was a virtually priceless acquisition, and the two men realized right away that they had gained a huge advantage from the situation. Not only could they sell the healing of a particular bionic system but, even better, they could sell life itself; they could sell insurance to the men of Grand Junction, insurance as good as gold, real insurance that the metavirus could never attack them again, or any of their implants, or any of the parts they might wish in future to transplant.

  Chrysler had managed to arrange a meeting with Sheriff Langlois, and made him understand that it was better to manage the chaos than to implement a sort of ostrich policy. The rumor was all over the Territory; they could of course continue trying to quash it, but that would only make things worse. The best thing to do was to gather a small group of trustworthy men, specialists in medicine and operative bionics who would be capable of making selections from among the requests flowing in from everywhere.

  Yuri still believes it was on that day that HMV’s sheriff had had the idea of spreading his own rumors as a smoke screen.

  It was on that day, in any case, that Langlois had said, between clenched teeth: “And I imagine that the ‘trustworthy men’ you have in mind to carry out this mission are yourselves?”

  Yuri can still remember Campbell’s face, his smile, at that moment. An irresistible smile.

  “I have a degree from MIT in nanorobotics, one of the last ones awarded, and this young man here has a certain talent for neurobiology. We have been immunized by Gabriel Link de Nova himself. By the time you find someone better, if such a person exists, it will probably be too late, Sheriff.”

  And Yuri had known Chrysler Campbell was right. It was obvious that the sheriff knew it, too.

  “You’ve got my okay,” was all he had said.

  And now, welcome to Junkville.

  En route to the hill of Midnight Oil. A township specializing in the recycling of oil of all kinds, particularly engine drainage.

  Welcome to Junkville.

  Around seventy square kilometers of artificial hills made of clinkers or putrefied hodgepodges of garbage. The luckiest people live here, atop piles of trash, where there is still a chance to get hold of some object, something mechanical still in working order.

  The city sprang up at the same time as the cosmodrome and the adjacent city of Grand Junction were built, about forty-five kilometers to the north of the metropolis. It rose on the outskirts of an abandoned mining site that was already being used as an industrial dump, and for decades it received all the human waste of the city cosmodrome, all the losers, the errant souls, anyone who had not managed to obtain his or her passage to the stars, the so-desired ticket to the Orbital Ring.

  When the cosmodrome ceased its activities for good, though the metavirus was exterminating almost half a billion human beings each year, groups of refugees from the United States and Canada trekked for months across the territory, long lines of half-dead people wandering without destination or hope.

  The survivors had ended by remaining where they were, eking out encampments on whatever somewhat-hospitable patches of ground they could find.

  Many Canadian refugees had come to live in Deadlink this way, halfway between Junkville and the cosmodrome. Convoys from the American Midwest had taken possession of part of Omega Blocks and its environs, and had enlarged the perimeter of Junkville with their own colonies of particleboard houses. A new economic demographic was born, the fruit of incessant migration, that rendered any notion of borders, even continental ones, literally absurd. The provenance of those that died or left became an unsolvable puzzle; the identities and destinies of those that arrived in Mohawk Territory to replace them more or less temporarily were equally shrouded in mystery.

  Junkville was truly created in the image of this world where nothing now had its own space, where no one had any true roots or the possibility of exploring and discovering new territories.

  The Earth was strangely sealed off, closed at both ends, marked by the universal presence of man, and yet at the same time oddly open, as if it had been disemboweled, spread open like a whore’s legs, and utterly lacking in any shelter for the dying masses of humanity.

  It made no sense—not that anything ever really had.

  It makes no sense, and yet it is all the world has left.

  * * *

  The main problem that Yuri is rapidly sensing concerns the systemic differences between the two mutations.

  When the Metastructure contaminated itself so bizarrely in 2057, via some still-unknown process, it destroyed almost 90 percent of computer networks and more than half of bionic systems. The vast majority of machines and their electronic interfaces were directly connected to the MegaNetwork. Bionic systems, with the exception of NeuroNet modules, were usually autonomous, but certain components connected on occasion to the Metamachine. In short, after the annihilation of the Metastructure, the quasi-totality of machines and a good half of bionic systems began to self-destruct, causing the deaths of more than a third of what was then called Human UniWorld, the planetary park the Metastructure had controlled for decades.

  But it appears that all that destruction and death wasn’t enough. A few groups of unconnected neurocomputers had survived; some biosystems had remained intact, as well as pirate devices and numerous lots of new machines, newly rolled off the robotized factory conveyer belts just before these broke down.

  For a few years, it seemed that humanity had earned a bit of a reprieve. At the cosmodrome, activities had timidly resumed, a few rockets taking off each year from launchpad number one.

  Then, though the Metastructure was dead, and though the NeuroNet MegaNetwork had collapsed six years before, a “thing” had begun attacking the last surviving machines, the ones whose bionic systems had escaped the first wave of destruction.

  Now six more years had elapsed—and the postmechanical entity was striking again.

  But something has changed.

  Something important.

  This “second mutation” isn’t attacking machines or organisms, but language. It is attacking the very substance of being.

  There is still work to do. A lot of work.

  For the “thing.”

  And for them.

  Midnight Oil is south of Junkville, a scrap-metal butte populated by a ghetto of around two thousand people. It is one of the last hills fronting the encampments of particleboard houses improvised by the refugees from the American Midwest, still farther south.

  Yuri will have to cross the entire city, as usual, to find Pluto Saint-Clair, Chrysler Campbell’s local contact and one of the best sources of information they have.

  He stands before the scavenged mirror hanging a
cross from his bed, beside the small hatchway leading to his bathroom cubicle. The room’s exit door is at his back; he can see its metallic armature and dull-gray surface just behind his reflection.

  Yuri does not live in a particleboard house or one cobbled together from various scraps, like nine-tenths of the population of Junkville, but in what is known as a Combi-Cube, a mobile cabin with a photovoltaic sensor on the roof. It consists of one room containing a hospital bed, a small workspace with a few tools, his video reader, a television screen connected to the reader, and a crate filled with memory cards, disks in various formats, and a half dozen boxes filled with at least a hundred kilograms of scientific literature. To this room is attached a multifunction bathroom cubicle and a service module, all meant for a single tenant. Thanks to business, to Chrysler and his connections, and also to his daily work—an unrelenting process of gorging himself on tons of books and videodiscs about medicine, biology, and neurosurgery—he has grown up faster than any member of his generation. He has grown up even faster than Gabriel Link de Nova, about whom one wonders if he will ever grow up, if he will ever be more than a child.

  He is barely twenty-two years old, but he already possesses the experience of a man twice his age. Chrysler Campbell, who isn’t the type to be careful of anyone’s feelings, nor to be overly polite to anyone, even complimented him one evening as they were returning from HMV, where they had concluded an important deal with Gabriel.

  “You know, I’m almost ten years older than you—but I almost feel like it’s the other way around. You think incredibly fast. Your analytical faculties are amazing, and it’s as if you possess by intuition what takes most people years of experience in the field. You act like a predator instinctively. I saw it even when you were a kid in Omega 13.”

  Chrysler had let a few seconds pass, then sighed: “I hope you’ll never have to kill anyone. They wouldn’t have a chance.”

  He remembers what he said to Chrysler Campbell that night, as he drove them in the Ford F-350 pickup toward the southern part of the Territory. “If that does happen, I’m counting on not giving them a chance.”

  Chrysler had smiled, shaking his head. He had turned to look out the truck window at Monolith Hills in the distance. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  The moon is at its zenith, round and slightly reddish. It slants rays of starry silver across the vast desert plains, the bare rocks, the scrubby brush barely surviving around the few isolated shrubs and the dead trees fossilizing in the sand.

  It is almost unbelievably beautiful, Yuri thinks to himself. The world is still beautiful. It’s dying, but it is still beautiful. The desert is taking over. Men are disappearing. Civilization is being snuffed out. But it is still beautiful.

  It is all utterly incomprehensible.

  In Junkville, the streets are ramps of packed dirt or gravel covered with pounded scrap metal and errant drifts of sand caught in contrary winds from the Canadian heat shield or what remains of the Great Lakes, now giant Midwestern deserts.

  The roads wind among the artificial hills covered with collapsible houses, makeshift shelters of various types, and sometimes the characteristic silhouettes of mobile homes—a true bit of luxury—or the more common, capsule-shaped Combi-Cubes.

  Like any city, any urba, Junkville has formed according to the force and hierarchy of the powers that be.

  To the north, on the border with Omega Blocks, or to the east, toward Vermont, is where the people who have managed to rise slightly above the general squalor live. For example there is Little Congo, five hills grouped together where Junkville’s aristocracy dwells, those cosmopolitan procurers who sell, to the even richer denizens of the old Monolith Hills strip, all the new flesh that ends up here in search of refuge.

  Young women and men come to Junkville strung out, ready to do anything for a chance to get near the cosmodrome again, to touch a fingertip to the fire of their dreams. They are ready for anything. Absolutely anything. Their sex, their age, their physical condition—those things don’t matter much at all.

  They were ready for anything before the Fall.

  And now they will be ready for even worse, if they survive.

  * * *

  Yuri takes the gasoline-powered Kawasaki from its parking compartment adjoining the service module and pulls it carefully away from his Combi-Cube.

  He drives east toward the quarter of the old kings, and then turns full south. Road 34, running evenly north-south, takes him—floating a few centimeters above the ground—across a long expanse of stone and silicon. The sun is already high in a steel-gray sky streaked with gold light.

  Pluto Saint-Clair’s house is on the northern face of the butte. The interior streets of the hill villages are often unnamed, even unnumbered—you have to have a precise description of the place where you want to go and, if possible, a plan of the city or, even better, the hill in question to have a chance of finding your way in this labyrinth of collapsible Recyclo carton houses, these makeshift shelters built of abandoned mining facilities or scrap metal, these ruins of who knows what.

  Pluto Saint-Clair’s house is recognizable among all the others on Midnight Oil; it is the only Combi-Cube on the hill and one of the last models made by Honda, much more spacious than the old Chinese model Yuri lives in. In addition to the standard photovoltaic sensor, it has its own working windmill.

  Pluto Saint-Clair is one of those people seriously beginning to climb the rungs of Junkville’s hierarchical ladder. He stays here at the southern extremity of the city more out of habit than any feeling of belonging, apparently. No one ever gets too attached to anything in Junkville. The city is constantly in a state of transition; overall mobility is a condition of survival, even for the rich. Little Congo will probably be gone in a year or two, other hills becoming home to the current residents and their former home resettled by another branch of activity in the city where everything, always, is recycled.

  If Pluto Saint-Clair has been able to obtain such a Combi-Cube, there are certainly reasons for it.

  He is also a longtime resident of the area. He is even older than Chrysler; he knows everything that happens, every plan, and he knows them before anyone else. He is their best source of information, and that doesn’t come free.

  He, of course, traffics, too.

  Not that he knows anything about the secret of the young man with the guitar. He just collects his money—and not a small amount of it—as compensation. But he is the one that tells them where, how, and who to look for, who possesses what, what condition it is in, and who might interest their mysterious “client.” He is the one who tells them about specific breakdowns people suffer, clients of his they might be able to help. He is often the one that enables them to put the two “clients” in contact, he who acts as the “invisible hand” linking the supply and demand. He likes to think of himself that way. The Invisible Hand.

  He is a man who loves secrets. Not because of paranoia or fear but because of taste. The taste for what is reserved only for a few; the taste for a trap, constantly redeveloped to keep anyone from discovering it. The taste for the risk inherent in every lie, any defense of the truth. Yuri is beginning to know him very well. He shares so many things with this man, and he knows there are so many things this man can teach him.

  He traffics, too, like half the population of Junkville—at least.

  But unlike Chrysler Campbell and Yuri, he does not deal in technology. To be more specific, the technology he deals in was not considered as such before the fall of the Metastructure; it had already almost disappeared at the time of the Cataclysm.

  But now that all the machines are dead or dying, what was not considered technology before is appearing suddenly under the implacable projector of history, in all its terrifying nudity, its magnificent armor.

  Not only is it technology, it is the source of all possible Technology, and one might even say that it was the very first technology invented by man.

  Pluto Saint-Clair deals in books.


  He traffics in literature.

  4 > ACHTUNG BABY

  The stomach contracts violently, like a muscle subjected to an electric discharge, a spasmodic cramp followed by the ejection from the esophagus of gastric juices and bits of food half devoured by body acids. It drips with the slowness of a dribble of spittle; it explodes out of him in jets inside the retractable bathrooms, and outside of them.

  He cannot prevent the attack. He cannot do anything. There is nothing to be done. He has been vomiting for fifteen minutes already, in an average cycle of ten to fifteen minutes for every hour or two, and it has been going like that for more than a week.

  And it is getting worse; every day, every hour. Every time the constrictions are more explosive, more painful, more infernal.

  He knows very well that if nothing is done he will die. And worse still, he knows equally well that nothing can be done.

  His Sony-Motorola implant is failing. His central nanogenerator.

  It is a marvel of transgenic technology. And if it breaks down, the retroviral nervous-degenerative illness will rapidly recur at full strength. This is a disease that doesn’t waste any time. He would only have had a brief reprieve anyway, perhaps a few years.

  The implant functioned for five years. It’s almost a miracle.

  But now it’s over. He has been infected in his turn, just like all those billions of other human beings who thought they were safe and then died during the past six years.

  He has often prayed to some cybernetic god to protect his new implant from falling prey to the mutant strain of the virus. This outbreak seems slower than the original one, the one in ’57. There are still some people with bionic implants around who survived after the death of the Metastructure.

  Maybe a little slower. But just as merciless. And now, voilà—it’s his turn. His day. The first of his last days.