Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

Sometimes, series of consonants or vowels, repeated identically, are heard in the semantic bric-a-brac, harbingers of the next phase that is now soon to come. Tomorrow, or in two days at the most, the man will recite only alphabetical sequences, like the case Yuri saw with Chrysler in Omega 17. Calmly, Yuri checks the well-ordered contents of his special Medikit, made by Gabriel Link de Nova into a specialized, handheld weapon against the “thing” born of the Metastructure’s death. Everything is ready for biological sampling. Nothing remains but to obtain the sick man’s consent.

  Yuri can see real distress on the man’s face; everything—his eyes, the expression on his face, the extreme tension in his muscles—indicates despair even deeper than what he has seen in other people whose biosystems have broken down.

  Yuri does not really feel like he is in a position to do anything at all. How will he talk to this man? A deaf-mute, at least, can communicate with sign language, according to a stable and coherent system.

  Since his visit to Omega Blocks, and now while observing this poor fellow in his collapsible house, Yuri has come to understand fully, aghast, that there is really no coherence, no stability, no dynamic in what the men touched by the “second mutation” are suffering.

  Not only is the man crushing each word into distinct phonemes to form something that vaguely resembles sentences but no rule—no system in existence—is emerging from this linguistic malfunction.

  No law. None.

  The brain seems to be functioning in a state of constant improvisation, working in a purely stochastic process.

  The sentences are never repeated in the same way, exhausting all possible combinations.

  It is astonishingly like a game.

  The surest way—not the shortest, but the simplest—is to leave Midnight Oil and go west, taking Road 5 straight to the huge slag heaps of Carbon City, and then turn north on Road 8. He will pass BlackSky Ridge, maybe glimpsing the small group of UManHome capsules where Pluto claims his friend is living at the moment.

  He needs information, fast, and he is in a city where everything is constantly changing. Especially information.

  Maybe this professor from Texas will be useful to him, but while he waits he’d better find the guy in Ultrabox, the one in the numeric phase, take samples, and then investigate Autostrada, where according to Pluto Saint-Clair there are other cases in various degrees of contamination. The Post-Machine is spreading, quietly, like a secret invasion force sent by the world to spy on itself.

  Soon it will widen its scope; it will engulf all humanity, which will feel the brunt of its true strength. The World can only wait for it.

  Carbon City is composed of a large assembly of slag heaps grouped in concentric half-circles around the old mining complex. It is the largest concentration of carbon on the site and was one of the first encampments to organize itself as a veritable township during the birth of Junkville forty years earlier.

  Beyond their carbonic heights, now square in the middle of the desert steppe, stretches the vast concrete-paved quadrilateral of Reservoir Can: sixteen gasoline-and kerosene-storage tanks, immense white tubular structures marked with the seal of Petro-Canada, an old gasoline company from the time when the world still existed.

  Reservoir Can belongs to the entire community of Junkville; it is the residents’ only collective property, guarded day and night by armed men selected from all the townships.

  Continuing along Road 8, he crosses the high black buttes bordering the slums of Big Bag Recyclo to the east; this is one of the city’s biggest dumps, its round hills rising across from the slag heaps. Then he sees the rocky spine of BlackSky Ridge. It is one of Junkville’s rare natural hills, a mesa around six hundred meters long and three hundred wide, already surrounded by the sands driven there by the southern winds in their relentless quest to infiltrate the city’s interior. The communities of Black-Sky Ridge have been able to take advantage of their natural environment; overhanging the city by a hundred meters, the hill is also situated right in the middle of a wind tunnel. Several dozen scavenged windmills whirl there, providing enough electricity for this whole portion of the city. BlackSky Ridge’s windmill park is dwarfed, though, in comparison with the vast expanses of Windtalker Alley at the eastern end of the city, which boasts more than a hundred helixes facing the Vermont border.

  Junkville’s roads are not streets. They mainly accommodate traffic composed of electric cars and gasoline-, battery-, or gas-powered motorcycles, whose speeds do not exceed twenty or thirty kilometers an hour. In addition, when two automobiles or, worse, two small trucks have to pass each other, one of them is usually obliged to pull over to the road’s shoulder, whatever its size or state of disrepair.

  Yuri sees some orange spots glinting weakly on the gray surface of BlackSky Ridge.

  The UManHome capsules Pluto talked about.

  BlackSky Ridge. At its summit, the windmills’ blades seem to be stirring the starry sands of the Milky Way. Turning west, he can see the high masses of Carbon City and, farther still, beyond the forming desert, the shrouded bluish forms of the high buttes forming the border with Ontario; to the north, in the city of Grand Junction itself, the peaks of Monolith Hills stand like wooded buttresses against them.

  From BlackSky Ridge, like from Big Bag Recyclo, the horizon can only be seen as a charcoal gray bar. Yuri muses to himself that twilight must look like a black hole here, and that if the sky were pure monochrome blue, clear of the waxy dust forever blown into it by the wind, it would be even more depressing.

  It is as he is heading toward the group of capsules, his eye attracted by the bright orange splotches standing out against the gray-blue mass of the Ridge, that he notices the sparkling Buick LeSabre; it must be sixty years old at least.

  It is a bright red luxury car, gasoline-powered; he instantly recognizes the trademark of the local pimp. He turns his motorcycle promptly toward the roadside to avoid this metal monster making not the slightest effort to leave him even a tiny bit of maneuvering room.

  As the vehicles brush in a grating of metal against metal, Yuri has time to see the other driver’s face.

  Typical of Grand Junction. A pimp, obviously; his dress and attitude all but scream it. He seems in a great hurry and even in pain, judging by the convulsive shudder that wracks him as he drives, a tic characteristic of the distinctive troubles caused by the systemic breakdown of an antiviral nanogenerator.

  There are still plenty of artificial organs and some bionic implants to be destroyed. Soon this pimp will be dead, thinks Yuri. He’s lucky that he won’t experience the fate of the “men” affected by the “second mutation.”

  He is lucky that he will not experience the fate of this man, for example:

  “11001101010111000110101101110001000001101010001100001 100011100011000000111110010101010111100011000110010101010 111000010101011000010101011000010101011010110010101100010 1010111010110101010110101010101010000101001110101111101.”

  The man from Ultrabox lives in a collapsible house in a part of the township that has specialized in boxes and containers of all kinds since its origin. He is around thirty years old and in a lamentable state, covered in a thick layer of sulfurous scum. The bed where he lies resembles one a street dog would use; traces of urine mark his pants with large dark spots and drips. The smell of excrement in the small convertible shelter is overpowering. Yuri concludes right away that the automatic-recycling toilet module is not functioning. He can also see immediately that he has absolutely no chance of having any kind of conversation with this fellow. Even less chance than he had with the man he just left on Midnight Oil.

  “11100010001010111000111000110110000011101011101100011 000111110001010101100001010100011100010101000001111010101 011010101011111010110110110001000011110110101101010000011 101010001110011010101011011101000110111011101100101001010 000111.”

  The man sits up suddenly in the bed and looks at Yuri with an unreadable expression on his face. Eyes bulging, he opens his mouth to spew forth yet another series of bin
ary numbers at incredible speed. Tomorrow you’ll be a modem, Yuri thinks. But no one will be able to connect you to anything.

  The man is now standing on his two quivering legs, like some vulgar sort of robot in the process of rebooting, just barely hanging on to the last traces of his motor skills and balance. He points at Yuri with his finger and continues to jabber his long series of zeros and ones.

  Yuri decides to risk a try. You never know. “I need to take neurobiological samples. I want to help you. We might have a chance of better understanding what we’re dealing with.”

  The man doesn’t hear, or doesn’t understand, or doesn’t seem to, or doesn’t give a damn.

  His eyes bulge uncontrollably from their sockets. The blood rises to his face in a wave of scarlet ire. He staggers toward Yuri, his trembling index finger still pointed directly at the young man.

  “10101000110100000111101001000101100101001110110001111 110001010110110110001111100010101011000010101110001010101 11000110101010001010110001010101000001100110.”

  The man doesn’t really pose a threat, but Yuri needs those neurobiological samples. And he has no time to lose. Realizing that any discussion is impossible, he looks at the man for an instant. Nothing more now than throwaway parts. Just barely recyclable.

  “11110000111001010111000111011010011101010100011101110 00011101100011100001100100011011000110101010111111.”

  Yuri takes a late-model Taser from his shirt pocket and puts a clean stop to the continuing output of numeric language. High-penetration microdiodes. Target zone: thorax and encephalon. A barrage of neuro-blocking impulses. Myriad tiny flashes of light interwoven into a grid. The man sinks to the floor in a clean, fluid, perfect movement. It is at the moment of losing consciousness that you regain your balance, thinks Yuri as he prepares the bioprobes, the microscanners and tubes. For an added measure of safety, he injects the man with one milligram of a mild narcoleptic.

  The man is no longer shaking; he lies unconscious and silent.

  He seems finally at peace.

  As he conducts the various biotests, Yuri thinks to himself that in this state at least the man isn’t suffering anymore; he isn’t afraid; he isn’t feeling his body emptied of his self.

  He probably deserves these few minutes of happiness, in this sorry world.

  Autostrada. At one time, Chrysler Campbell had told him, it was called South Side—for the south side of the highway then in construction, along which Junkville would hoist its slag heaps and garbage.

  The highway, which was intended to connect a transcity network in Ontario with another important expressway located on the New York–Vermont border, was never completed. Nor was its branch line toward Grand Junction and Quebec around ten kilometers farther north, which had come to be known as Deadlink. Like all the other city renovation projects in the Territory. Like everything that was never finished. That is, like everything. The cosmodrome, heart and soul of the Territory, is nothing more now than a concrete esplanade on which the southwestern winds pile drifts of sand. The entire World has stopped.

  And given what he saw today, and in the few preceding days, there can be hardly any doubt that it is Man himself who has stopped.

  In the middle of nowhere.

  Autostrada has become the principal peripheral quarter located to the north of Junkville, at the end of this large ribbon of Recyclo concrete with eight express lanes, crossed at regular intervals by a covered passageway made of anti-UV Plexiglas and studded every hundred meters with high pylons bearing flower-shaped bunches of sodium streetlamps in anodized aluminum.

  Everything on the highway was carefully stripped to build Autostrada and its neighboring townships, including Snake Zone (Yuri’s home), Neo Pepsico, Clockwork Orange, and even parts of Little Congo, whose distinctive gleam he can see in the distance. The communities involved had shared both the work and the spoils. The small township of Tin Machine, for example, a recent but determined rival of the old oligarchy of Little Congo, was entirely built of steel girders and almost all the metal parts that could be salvaged from the adjacent section of the abandoned highway; its silvery shine had given rise to its name.

  The much larger Autostrada runs parallel to the eight-lane highway from the city’s western limit to its center. It is the biggest township in Junkville after Vortex, located a little farther south; he can see its long cubist cavalcade, built of machines of every type.

  Autostrada had had the right to the lion’s share of the plunder from the defunct highway: Recyclo concrete, composite pillars, searchlights, electric circuitry, kilometers of aluminum piping and guardrails, even part of the foundations—almost all of it is now grouped on the natural plateau that overlooks the highway. And as the township has grown larger the expressway has disappeared, an inexorable sort of urban vampirism; soon nothing will be left but an expanse of ochre dirt yielding the occasional metal scrap not yet recycled by Junkville, this city where nothing new is ever created, and where everything is always transformable at will.

  On the other side of what was once a portion of the highway—the name of which no one remembers now—on the north side, is a large perimeter encompassing the hectares of parched savanna threatened by the further expansion of the desert, empty parking lots periodically invaded by herds of gray-green tumbleweeds, great tarred squares filled with clouds of airborne sand, steppe vegetation, a few old industrial lots recycled long ago by the neighboring city-vampire, and, three or four kilometers away, the concentration-camp architecture of the enormous residential block that has been home to the human proletariat of Grand Junction’s cosmodrome for decades.

  Omega Blocks.

  Twenty districts. Each district is made up of two high concrete towers connected by FibroGlass passageways and a transversal slab linking the roofs of the structures and covering the highest floors with translucent composite, each with two one-megawatt micro-windmills and a series of photovoltaic sensors crowning the whole with their pylons and bright surfaces. Two districts facing each other form a “quadrant;” each district connects to the others via the same architectural setup, for a total of four districts, forty towers and as many windmills, five times that number of photovoltaics, ten quadrants, and a total of six hundred and forty floors, four hundred intertower walkways, and forty horizontal overhangs, twelve thousand eight hundred apartment blocs, one hundred and sixty elevator cages, four times that number of service stairways, and almost twenty thousand kilometers of cables of every kind, all of them now useless.

  If not for these few holdover communities—surviving as best they can inside the high twenty-floor buildings, the population concentrated on the lowest, most accessible, most sandstorm-resistant floors—if not for these scattered groups of half-families and half-humans, Omega Blocks would have been slowly devoured, day after day, tower after tower, district after district, quadrant after quadrant, floor after floor, apartment block after apartment block, by the city-vampire that recycles everything and is separated from its possible prey only by what was once an abandoned section of highway and is now just an eviscerated ramp turning gradually into a sometimes-stormy valley and a few square kilometers of wasteland, parking lots covered with wild grasses and rampant ground ivy, and abandoned hangars inhabited only by pieces of metal skeletons.

  Junkville itself is a sort of urban predator. If it had the means to expand over the entire Territory, it would doubtlessly end by absorbing all the other communities and their respective habitats; it would transform all the townships into hills of recyclable garbage. If it had the strength, it would engulf the southwestern part of Quebec, the southeastern part of Ontario, the state of Vermont, and much of New York State as well, and it would finish by imposing its own ecology onto that of the sandy desert from the Midwest and Texas.

  Its own ecology—that of an eternally recommencing desert.

  7 > BEFORE AND AFTER SCIENCE

  Chrysler has agreed to meet him on Omega 13, the district of their childhood. It isn’t routine; nothing is ever systemat
ic with Chrysler, who has broken with a wide range of posturban survival techniques since his earliest youth; a simple, random action, but one that never fails to produce. The double monad rises toward the cobalt dome of the mid-afternoon sky, totalitarian architecture with no more totality, part of a twentieth-century dream lost in the midst of desert-threatened wasteland, two tall columns linked by an umbilicus of translucent fibers through which the light explodes in a volley of golden sparks across the vast concrete surfaces.

  To the west, the sun is sinking on the Ontarian frontier, an enormous orange disk sending its immobile rays in all directions, trapped in the ashy sky as if in a crystal still blackened with carbon.

  “Did you talk to Pluto?”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw the two new cases?”

  “Yes.”

  “You took samples?”

  “Yes, obviously.”

  “How many did you see in all?”

  “The two he told me about: one on the southern face of Midnight Oil, not far from the house of that guy who died the night before, the other in Ultrabox.”

  “Pluto told me there might be other cases. In Autostrada, for example.”

  “I didn’t find anything there, but Autostrada is next to Snake Zone. I’ll put my informants there on the case and tonight I’ll go back for another look. What about you?”

  “I managed to get four samples from the six new cases in Omega. One of them is already dead—no surprise. Another one disappeared; no one knows what happened to him. He just literally vanished into nature.”

  “It isn’t exactly nature.”

  “Well, a very good simulation.”

  “Listen—with the data from the other time I think we can get to work. We should start right away, I think.”

  “No kidding,” says Chrysler thoughtfully. “You think it’s urgent, too?”

  “If Link de Nova can’t counter this second mutation, then I think it’s safe to say we’re all, all fucked. Even you and me, I’m afraid.”