Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  Someone has died right here in Omega 2, even as they were visiting the apartment of a man who died the previous night in the adjoining district.

  Chrysler knows everyone in Omega, and Yuri is beginning to make a name for himself in Junkville; the guys in yellow won’t do anything to prevent either of them from entering the work site.

  Yuri can just make out a stretcher holding a shiny blue body bag. The bag hasn’t yet been closed. As he gets closer to the circle of human scavengers, he can see the upper body of a young woman in her twenties, about his own age. Pretty, blond, extremely pale, wide-open eyes red with burst blood vessels staring unseeingly at the sky, which is greenish blue and spotted with brown, a camouflage pattern from the foundries of some Nazi Vulcan. It was the last sky of this unknown young woman’s life, the last before she was suddenly stricken down, and now it is under this sky that she will be taken to one or another of the several biological laboratories operating in Junkville.

  The men of the necro Triads go about their work like true professionals; they have years of experience in this sort of task. Later, they will conduct a complete examination of the body, then deliver it to the doctors at some clandestine biolaboratory, who will cut it up into its various parts and place it immediately on the market. The labs are often headed by Neon Park survivors, specialists in human anatomy who share the profits with the Triad vultures.

  The necros, busy with postmortem biopsies and various microbiological tests, look like misplaced cosmodrome astronauts in their protective suits.

  Now they have moved on to loading the body into the bag, pushing the stretcher over to a gasoline-powered pickup and hoisting it carefully into the back of the truck. Their preliminary tests must have convinced them that nearly all of the victim’s biological organs are functional, and thus salable, despite her premature death.

  Campbell is talking to the guy who called the Triad; he lives in Block 13, like them. His name is Slim Dubois. Campbell is obviously inquiring about the transaction that has just taken place; he doesn’t even try to be covert about it as he speaks to this negotiator with the necros.

  Yuri catches up to them as the old, converted Dodge pickup takes off in the direction of Autostrada; he can just catch the gist of their conversation.

  “Did you know her?”

  “Just barely,” replies Slim Dubois. “She was a refugee from the Midwest; she moved into Block 2 less than six months ago. I think she came from Indiana originally.”

  “You were the one who saw her first?”

  “Not exactly. It was an old dingo from Omega 15. But I was passing by and heard her shouting and sort of praying, you know; she’s still holding on to her personal god from the UHU days, so …”

  “All right, but you’re the one who called the necros in from Vortex.”

  “Yeah. Because of her I’ll be able to survive for a good month. Maybe even two. She was in perfect condition.”

  “Do you know what she died of?”

  “I managed to get a few intelligible words out of the crazy old woman from Block 15. She saw the girl fall like a ton of bricks on the tarmac in Block 2 and took her back to her flat. They had just passed each other when the girl went right down. A textbook case, Chrysler. A vital system failed in one second. You know as well as I do how often that’s happening these days.”

  “Have you heard about other cases in Omega?”

  “Like this girl? What rock have you been hiding under, Campbell? It’s been going on for more than ten years now.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean really bizarre cases, like the guy from Block 1 who died tonight, or the one from Omega 17, who only speaks in binary numbers now. Or the one from Block 10, who’s been missing since yesterday.”

  “Oh, right, I get it. That started about a month ago. It’s still pretty marginal; nobody knows much at all about it.”

  “But you were also the one who called the Triads for the guy from Block 1, or am I wrong?”

  “Yeah, I knew him. Desmond Dorval. When I came by to see him this morning, just before you got here, he had been dead for hours. I just did my job. The Triads pay me to recover bodies in Omega Blocks and all the way to Deadlink.”

  “Oh, really? I didn’t know you’d become a paid employee, Slim. Hope business is good. Now I’ll tell you what I think, if you don’t mind. You’ve chosen a career with a busy future; you’ll see. Except that, like all of us, you never know when you’ll be on the wrong side of the body bag.”

  The man doesn’t reply; his face is set and his mouth clamped shut.

  Chrysler Campbell’s smile is forced and frozen. He hisses a cold “So long, Slim” and turns to Yuri, indicating the almost-palpable sea of work in front of them.

  So much work.

  So much work to fight this living death.

  Chrysler lives around fifteen kilometers northwest of Omega Blocks on what he calls his “hunting ground,” in a desolate area known as Aircrash Circle. It is more or less equidistant from Junkville to the south, Deadlink to the east, and Surveyor Plateau on the Ontario border, as he often boasts. “I’m smack in the middle of the canvas,” he says. “If anything at all moves in the southern part of the Territory, the whole canvas vibrates and I’m there in a flash.”

  Aircrash Circle was the site of a plane crash during the Fall of the Metastructure. A few migrant pioneers, most of them from Junkville, had built shantytown encampments there using the plentiful debris of the antique Airbus A380, which had suffered the failure of all its navigation systems over the Territory en route to Montreal. Chrysler’s parents had joined the population shortly after the birth of the township. His father worked intermittently at the cosmodrome and they lived for a while in Heavy Metal Valley, where Chrysler had been born, and it was to this circumstance that he probably owed his first name; his mother had been involved in various types of trafficking in Monolith Hills and Junkville, on the western border of Autostrada, which was then in full expansion. The family then moved to Omega, where Campbell met Yuri in Block 13; finally, his parents decided to settle on the site of the plane crash. All their lives they had helped their child to grow up the hard way, in the southern part of the Independent Territory. And the boy had learned his lessons well.

  His parents only survived for a few months after the End of the Metastructure. They disappeared, along with a third of Grand Junction’s population, when the town was wiped from the map—and so had Yuri’s parents, and so many of the others they had known in Omega Blocks and elsewhere. Then, during the Second Fall six years later, and in the time since, a good half of the remaining survivors died in their turn, just as others were dying all over the rest of the planet.

  Chrysler had somehow, miraculously, slipped through the invisible net of death.

  Chrysler and a few other lucky ones, like his young friend Yuri, had come out alive and well.

  And thanks to the youth from Heavy Metal Valley, thanks to Gabriel Link de Nova, thanks to the boy who can heal machines, things just keep getting better and better for Chrysler.

  It even occurred to him recently that he might still have a chance to become an old man. A chance not to die young. A chance not to die before his time. A chance to die before the World does.

  A chance to die like men have died for millions of years.

  The western sky is indigo. The sun has set behind the purplish humps of the Ontarian hills. Like the light from a fluorescent bulb about to flicker out, a vast, wavering bronze shadow extends into the heart of the stagnant mid-cirrus clouds at the zenith, where the first pale stars are appearing, where the cosmos is the color of tempered steel, where no one can go any longer.

  To the south, Yuri can see the nocturnal vibration—like a black swarm gathering on the dark horizon—of the sandstorm now crossing the southern border of the former state of New York. Chrysler Campbell, behind the wheel of the antique hybrid-motor pickup, whistles a tuneless, nameless melody; he seems reflective, as usual. A calm smile hovers about his
lips, and his every move is made with the relaxed precision of a machine, his thoughts hidden from the outside world, and even from himself.

  Chrysler has always played the role of the older brother Yuri never had. For him, thinking is, by its very nature, an intrinsically dangerous act. If what you think doesn’t lead you to take a risk, even a small one, than better to abstain, he has often said from Yuri’s earliest youth. Always think against yourself. Always think that the true danger is not to confront it.

  After years of acquaintance, Yuri has eventually come to realize that thought, according to Chrysler, is a form of silent war, and is utterly without mercy.

  Yuri knows that Chrysler killed a man one day during the First Fall, shortly after the deaths of his parents—of their parents—when the guy, an old pedophile suddenly liberated from neurochemical control, had tried to molest him in a dried-out field north of Omega Blocks. Yuri even saw the body; Chrysler had shown it to him, stretched out prone in a dead, thorny bush uprooted from soil ravaged by the summer storm that had just rampaged through the Territory. The glassy eyes, bulging toward the gray sky of that rainy day, were forever fixed in Yuri’s memory as if by a photochemical developing bath. The body showed the marks of several hematomas around the face; one of the eyes was nothing more than a purplish blue mass; the other was filled with blood. The nose appeared to have been broken and the dislocated jaw hung at a bizarre angle toward the base of the neck, where several bloody teeth lay scattered. Other than that, though, nothing. No trace of a mortal knife wound or a hole made by a bullet or other projectile, or of trauma caused by a blunt object. Not even the characteristic signs of strangulation.

  Yuri saw only Chrysler’s hands, puffy and stained with reddish fluid gleaming like oil in the rain.

  On that day, Yuri had just turned eleven years old. He understood then, for the first time, that to kill a man, brutal strength, vice, and the experience of age are not unequivocal conditions.

  Against the organic prudence of age stands the mechanical madness of youth.

  Against the ignominy of vice and human perversion stands the cold violence of true inhumanity.

  Against brute force stand combat techniques.

  Chrysler Campbell had been initiated into the mixed martial arts by an old master of Pride, a free-combat organization that had peaked in popularity at the very beginning of the century.

  Brazilian jujitsu, Thai boxing, Okinawan karate, Russian sambo, drop-boxing, and several techniques derived from Korean tae kwon do form the basic ingredients of this ultraviolent fighting, where every type of blow and hold are permitted, even recommended.

  His instructor was a former Russian army lieutenant who had risen to prominence around 2015 via a meteoric career in the great arenas of Tokyo under the strict eye of his own master, Fedor Emilianenko, the former heavyweight champion of the discipline and a former Soviet military officer himself, and more recently an elite wrestling instructor. When the Metastructure fell, the old Russian instructor had for more than thirty years been running a small mixed-martial-arts school on Surveyor Plateau, training many of the gladiators who fought in the arenas of Monolith Hills. Chrysler had already become one of his top students. Then the man died, as did almost all of his pupils.

  Chrysler Campbell remained.

  He retained what he had learned.

  The art of killing a man with a single punch.

  9 > MIDNIGHT OIL

  Night has fallen on the coal black peak of Midnight Oil. It seems to descend on the township as if seeking its primordial niche. It is a moonless, heavy night, very black, with only a few stars. It is a perfect night for the Post-World.

  A desert night, mirroring the desert night that is engulfing the Earth.

  Pluto Saint-Clair looks closely at the man sitting across from him as he lights a long joint of homegrown tobacco.

  Professor Paul Zarkovsky. Twenty-two years have passed since Saint-Clair earned his degree at MIT under the man’s doctoral supervision. He hasn’t changed, this Russian-American specializing in transfinite numbers who conceived the final version of the Metastructure—the final one in a real sense, the one that led to the death of the Machine-World—or, rather, to the strange state of postmortem survival in which it continues to annihilate humanity.

  This man, Pluto knows, is of vital importance, much more vital even than he can imagine. He hasn’t come here by chance. The End of the Metastructure is closely tied to the Territory of Grand Junction. Rumors to that effect are constantly swirling around the entire American Northeast.

  And Pluto knows a crucial fact: one of the many rumors is true—or, at least, it comes closest to touching the vast coldness of the truth. Pluto knows a secret. An old, educated, former prostitute from Deadlink, Canadian by birth, who used to work in Monolith Hills, had told him the secret one day, shortly before her death during the Second Fall. He is the only one who knows it now, and, more importantly, the only one who has grasped what it implies.

  This is why he has done everything in his power to ensure that the Professor’s journey across North America will go as smoothly as possible. This is why he has sent messages of every kind. This is why he has chartered a taxi and driver from Clockwork Orange, one specializing in desert crossings, to bring him all the way here to Ohio.

  The man is even taller than Pluto, with astonishingly steady pale blue eyes and thinning blond hair. His wispy beard is steel gray. He must be sixty years old now. He is the Professor.

  He has crossed more than four thousand kilometers of desert to get here. He walked more than five hundred miles through the Great Lakes region.

  The man hasn’t changed, really. A specialist in transfinite numbers and the genetic codes of retroviruses. A mountain climber. An experimental hiker. A lover of Polish vodka, French literature, and English football.

  A man who could, back in the day, beat a computer at chess.

  A man who has crossed North America to meet up with another man—another man who is awaiting a delivery of books. Thousands of books.

  Pluto Saint-Clair looks at the Professor, who looks back at him calmly, without blinking. It is undoubtedly time to bring a little humanity back to this world filled with darkness and desert. To begin the conversation with the pleasantries of a warm welcome. To refuse to allow the night-desert falling on Earth to dictate the conditions of that welcome. To create the semblance of an impression that they are still living in a World.

  “I hope the BlackSky Ridge capsules are to your liking, Professor.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself about that, Pluto. What counts for me, as you know, is to find Djordjevic as fast as possible.”

  Pluto Saint-Clair frowns; his search has produced nothing. He is thinking more and more about putting Yuri McCoy and Chrysler Campbell on the case. “I’ll track him down, Professor; don’t worry. He must have changed his identity.”

  “No, the last time I heard anything about him was when I had just come back from all those years in Europe, and they told me he was still living under that name. He didn’t have any reason to change it, especially after the End of the Metastructure.”

  “Where is the last place you heard he was living?”

  “I met one of his friends in Mexico, an academician who spent a lot of time with him during his years in Italy. He told me Djordjevic was in Texas—Corpus Christi, specifically—already half flooded by the rise of sea level after the automatic dikes broke down. I went there and searched the city and the areas around it with a fine-tooth comb for months; then I decided to follow a very vague trail that led me to Canada, and you. That’s how I managed to contact you, later, with the help of the Missouri refugees.”

  “We’ll find him,” says Pluto, in an unintentionally sinister tone.

  “How big is it here, Pluto?”

  “Here? Where do you mean? Junkville, or the whole Mohawk Territory?”

  “The Territory. What’s the area?”

  “Around seventy kilometers north to south, from Quebec to N
ew York; a little more from east to west, from Ontario to the Vermont border. Not that any of those names mean anything anymore.”

  “Population?”

  “As you know, Professor, we don’t have statistics anymore.”

  “Give me an approximate figure—how big? Just so I can have an idea.”

  “Well … just before the Fall, at its peak, the Territory had around a million people, half of them in Grand Junction alone. Today I’d estimate the total number at a little more than two hundred and fifty thousand, including the refugees from the Midwest. A third of them live in Grand Junction itself, in Monolith Hills—in the old technological areas or the Enterprise aerostation.”

  “And here, in Junkville?”

  “Junkville? Well, in its boom days in the 2050s, there were about a hundred and fifty thousand. Today, I’d say maybe fifty thousand. Including the waves of refugees.”

  “I see. Perfect isotopy of phenomenon, whatever its location.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “It’s a little complicated to sum up. Let’s say that the Metastructure, since its death, has been acting … shall we say … according to a process of infinite division. Some of us think it is actually imitating … God.”

  “Imitating God?”

  “Yes. Basically, the procedure consists of constantly dividing in half whatever is left after the previous operation. Except that in the case of the Metastructure, there is a small problem. It always has something left over; its series of divisions can’t be perfect, ever. And that’s logical. Ontologically logical.”

  “Ontologically. What does that mean?”

  “The Metastructure, or rather the entity that succeeded it, is caught in what we call a system of double constraint. On one hand, it must destroy humanity. On the other hand, it must destroy humanity. Are you following me?”

  “Not at all—but I remember you were already playing around with paradoxes at MIT.”

  “This isn’t a paradox in itself. It is the ‘double bind’ of the post-Metastructure: it must destroy humanity, but it must do so indefinitely. It must erase all traces of Man, but its own survival depends on this erasure. So it has to act in such a way that there are always enough humans to perpetuate its efforts at annihilation, all the while dividing this human population in two. So it needs these humans just as it must destroy them; they are indestructible in a way, but they serve the thing as indefinitely recyclable base materials.”