“At the end of the 2040s, on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, the Metastructure put out an international call for bids for an overall ‘update.’ Of course, it would be supervising the work, the prehiring selections, the final selections, et cetera. But the system engineers worked in cooperation with it in real time. They modified entire sections of the Metaorganism in simulation processors and the Metastructure chose, oriented, decided—”
“It updated itself using the humans in its service?”
“Yes, exactly. But by 2050, the first team hadn’t made much real progress, so the Metastructure dissolved it and put out a new call for bids, for a second project. I was hired at the beginning of ’51. I had just come back from spending a long time in orbit working for an Australian biotech firm. The new team slaved away like a band of the damned. In two years we made more progress than the previous guys, but—I don’t know—the Metastructure wasn’t really satisfied. Still just quantitative changes, it said. It wanted a qualitative leap. It wanted to be better, it said. During the holiday season at the end of ’52, the idea came to me little by little, and in the spring of the following year I proposed a new line of study. It was accepted by the Metastructure.”
“That was the qualitative leap it had been waiting for.”
“Yes. For once, I hadn’t relied on my pure scientific knowledge. Genetics, biochemistry, neurocybernetics, et cetera.”
“On what, then?”
“You won’t believe me.”
“You have no idea how many fairy tales I’ve ended up believing in the last twelve years.”
“I didn’t rely on fairy tales, my dear sir, but on old philosophical works. Leibniz, especially, but also on some ancient patristic texts.”
“Patristic?”
“The Church Fathers. ‘Christian’ philosophy, if you will, dating from before the Renaissance.”
“Ah—and what did this provide?”
“The final version of the Metastructure. The qualitative leap it was seeking. And that motivated it to nominate us—the whole laboratory team—for the Nobel Prize. We carried out many experiments in 2055; then, on April 4, 2056, the Metastructure’s twenty-ninth anniversary, we set the entire updating process in motion in a single night. It was a real success.”
“In view of what came later, the word success seems a little euphemistic to me,” says Chrysler dryly.
“On that night, Mr. Campbell, the operation was a total success. It was around two months later, as the laboratory was being dismantled, that we received an urgent message from the Global Governance Bureau. The Metastructure wanted to renew our contract, for at least a year. But no one knew why.”
“Except you, I imagine.”
“We were brought into the loop very quickly, as a matter of fact. The Metastructure was starting to have problems. Phenomena unknown up to that point were developing inside it. It didn’t understand, and it needed us. We got to work. Nonstop. Day and night, for months and months.”
“And?”
“And we didn’t find anything. Around October ’56, the phenomena increased. We were seeing them several times a week, but we still didn’t understand what was happening; at least, we couldn’t determine the cause.”
“What kinds of problems were they?”
“Many kinds. First, the Metastructure alerted us that an unknown force was attacking it, or preparing to attack it. We tested its pseudocortical circuits; there were no paranoid tendencies. Then we determined that the parasitic phenomena affecting it were coming from the uncontrolled emission of photons in its own genetic structure. The emissions kept increasing in intensity and we were still unable to locate their source. Finally we realized that the update carried out according to my design might very probably be at the origin of our problems. It was a catastrophe.”
“Why? I don’t mean to ask why it was a catastrophe, but why was your update the source of the problems?”
“We weren’t sure. We didn’t have any formal proof, just suppositions. It had to do with my basic idea. An idea that utterly completed the Metastructure’s mission—really, all I had done was to finalize the Megamachine’s ontological project. I gave it the means to be truly, 100 percent, what it was. I assured its destiny, in a way, and that’s exactly what happened.”
“What was this update, Professor?”
“It was what the Metastructure wanted to be but didn’t know how. I gave it the solution. But the solution led to an even larger problem.”
“What did it want to be?”
“It wanted to be itself. I told you. It wanted a body, and it wanted a World. But since the World was its ‘body,’ if it really desired to be incarnated in a real, individuated body, it would have to lose the World, and thus ‘de-create’ it. And if it wanted a World, it would have to ‘de-create’ bodies. That’s what I told it. It was part of the fundamental makeup of its double constraint. What the ‘Language-World’ metaprogram was aiming to transcend.”
“You might say it did both.”
“Exactly. All it could do was vacillate constantly between the two poles of de-creation, without ever physically managing to start a process of individuation.”
“But the bizarre thing is that its failure meant our loss.”
“That is the real paradox of this entity. The Metastructure enslaved mankind, yet its disappearance is leading to ultimate slavery. In self-destructing, it was able to create the world it wanted.”
“A desert?”
“Worse than the desert itself. The desert is only a form of the thing.”
“Then what?”
“A Camp, Mr. Campbell. A Camp-World. A global concentration camp.”
Stretched out near the Airbus emergency-exit hatch that serves as the entry door in Chrysler’s Combi-Cube, Yuri listens to the sandstorm scour the world outside, the Territory, the little cabin in Aircrash Circle. He remembers the night-desert that fell over them with Professor Zarkovsky’s last words, and the anguish that had turned to calm serenity as he accepted the terrible intrusion of the truth. A Camp-World. A planetary concentration camp. A world where life has no more value than sand, and death no more than the value of a number.
He and Campbell had exchanged a brief glance during that moment, as Pluto faded into silence, a glance of shared new awareness of this unknowable truth they had yet guessed. Then Chrysler resumed his interrogation as if nothing had happened.
“Other than the fact that your friend lives in the Territory, why Grand Junction, Professor?”
Yuri had instantly understood that Chrysler had detected the existence of a secret, as he often did. He was like a human computer, with digitally precise intuition; he fit right into the Territory’s singularly Darwinist system.
“The Metastructure has had … particular relations with the Territory of Grand Junction for a long time,” Zarkovsky had replied.
Yuri had immediately seized on two salient facts.
One: neither he nor Campbell had expressed the slightest emotion after Professor Zarkovsky’s astonishing assertion, as professional discipline demanded.
Two: Pluto Saint-Clair had blinked. He had even given a reflexive shudder, as he often did when hit with a sudden surge of adrenaline.
“Explain,” Chrysler said simply.
“First, remember the historical conditions under which the Metastructure came into being: it was anxious to stop the Second War of American Secession, like all the other conflicts born of the Grand Jihad.”
“So?”
“So, the Mohawk Territory of Grand Junction was spared by this conflict, just as it avoided the civil problems in Canada. Because of its aerospace business, the Territory was financially independent, but it profited greatly from UHU subsidies it received for the services it provided.”
“Frankly, Professor, this isn’t any big news to us. We were born in Grand Junction.”
“I’m just trying to give you some context. I was getting to the important part. Details that I only learned about later�
��too late, maybe. Here they are: in return for its loyalty, the Territory became one of the Metastructure’s ‘favorites,’ along with other places of the same type around the globe. So during the April ’56 update, Grand Junction, like the other favorites, was placed in the first line, the first wave, if you will, with each wave following another and getting larger and larger, after triple verifications. It was only when this guy from Corpus Christi said the words Grand Junction that it came to me, and that I understood I had to get there as soon as possible.”
Yuri saw that Pluto Saint-Clair’s face had gone dead white, and he was shuffling his feet nervously.
That’s called fear, Yuri had thought.
“What happened just before the Fall? How did the Metastructure’s last moments play out?”
“Starting in ’57, the problems sort of leveled out. Nothing we tried worked. The photonic emissions continued to increase, and the Metastructure talked constantly about this danger that was hanging over its head—and our heads. One day, I remember, it said to us: ‘I think the problem of these uncontrolled photonic emissions shows that it is by light that I will be destroyed.’
“So we programmed millions of antiviral routines capable of protecting the Metastructure from any photoelectric, laser, maser, ultraviolet, gamma-ray, or neutron emission attack. Around September ’57, one month before the Fall, the Metastructure warned us that the Final Cycle had just begun. Forces coalesced, the forces of the ‘Uncreated Light’—those were the very words it used—arrived on Earth to destroy it. The photonic emissions, which were sporadic, had now become virtually continuous. Then, on October 4 …”
“How did the Fall manifest itself for you in the laboratory?”
“It might surprise you, but we were plunged into a darkness blacker than most other humans experienced. Since the machine had no real material existence to speak of, well, the laboratory wasn’t really based anywhere. It brought together groups of researchers in all disciplines and from all the governance bureaus working in a network at the very heart of the Metastructure. When its death happened on that same day, we were the first ones affected. All our machines broke down instantly. Some of our researchers died during the first few hours. We have never been able to understand what happened. Only one of us, one of my assistants, using a metaprogram of his own design, was able to wrench a few pieces of information out of the nothingness.”
“What information?”
“Some ‘hot points,’ if you will. Localized points where the photonic emissions completely overwhelmed the Metastructure in the first instants, or nearly. We were able to register the phenomenon for an hour or two; then the last systems gave out.”
“What hot points?”
“Many of them. Dozens. All over the world. They didn’t stop multiplying. It was like a global epizootic. There were some in North America, obviously.”
“Here in the Northeast?”
“The American Northeast, actually. New York and your Territory, but also Canada. And in Chile, Argentina, East Africa, central Asia, southern Russia, eastern Asia, China, New Zealand … I could go on and on.”
“Did it correspond to your successive waves during the update?”
“No. Not at all. It seemed completely random to us at the time, though we hadn’t been able to record the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the phenomenon, the time it took for my young assistant’s metaprogram to initialize.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Yuri had perceived a tiny movement from Pluto Saint-Clair. A tensing. The repression of a shudder. A minute shock. Almost nothing.
A small nothing that the Professor had said without realizing its importance. A small nothing that Pluto was hiding from all of them. Just as they were keeping an essential fact from him. Just as the Professor had undoubtedly not told them everything he knew.
Four men. Four secrets. A shelter on the brink of an abyss. A storm serving as the advance guard for the desert. Four men still disunited against a terribly monolithic World.
“It was around the end of ’56 that I began to look at the problem from another angle. Until then, since June, we’d been looking for what didn’t work in our update, and we hadn’t found anything. I told myself that maybe we should look in what had worked. Maybe the cause of the phenomenon would be there, in something that had worked too well, with consequences we didn’t expect. So I searched for weeks and weeks—three months, at least—reprofiling and refiguring all my data. One day it became as plain as the nose on my face. I had had the solution in front of my eyes since the beginning, because I was the one that had supervised that entire part of the operation.”
“Your World program, was that it?”
“Yes. But understand this: the Metamachine wasn’t conscious in the common sense of the word, and yet it was more than just a computer program. It was alive, in its own way. Like all living organisms, it needed a real world in order to evolve, even just to survive. That is what I created for it. Or, more exactly, my ‘Language-World’ metaprogram acted so as to make it understand the fact that it is language that creates worlds—that creates them and destroys them at the same time. It was at that moment—around April ’57—one year after the general swing toward the new operating system, that I began to think I might have made a mistake. I didn’t know what the mistake was exactly, but I sensed something. I tried to do very specific research, but a lot of databases had been shut down for years or even decades. That’s when I noticed that the majority of scientific innovation had ceased shortly after the Metastructure came into being, in the 2030s. It wasn’t really a secret anymore for anyone in our field, but we chalked it up as another of the many problems the Machine-World had to handle simultaneously—getting huge climatic changes and depopulation issues under control; the general reorganization of global society, health safety, pacification or freezing of most of the major conflicts in North America, central Asia, and the Indian Ocean; restarting world economic activity, et cetera. For us, the implementation of the update at the end of the 2040s—when the first version had fully proven its capabilities despite a few pockets of resistance in some geopolitical areas, particularly in southern Europe—the update, I realized, proved that the Machine-World was functioning perfectly, and that after it was restored to working order it would be able to complete the unification of the globe and to relaunch a vast program of multidisciplinary scientific research of worldwide importance. On that day, I remember, I began to ask myself questions. I tried, unsuccessfully, to establish pertinent axes of research—especially in genetics, when, a little later, during the summer, I inquired about the problem directly to the Metastructure. Why did you, I asked, slow down—even stop—so much promising research in strategic areas like quantum physics, speculative genetics, neuropsychiatry, non-Aristotelian mathematics, anthropology, and cosmogony? Do you know what it said to me in return? ‘I alone will now be the judge of what research axes are pertinent for the survival of Humanity, meaning myself.’ Why, I asked, have you shut down all these databases from the early part of the century concerning the emission of biophotons by DNA? Its answer was, ‘You’ve figured that out, have you? I’ll tell you; I will never make this data available except to someone whose tenacity, loyalty, and scientific objectivity have led them precisely to it.’ Then I asked it, do you think I will be able to do that? ‘You are already doing it,’ it answered. And it gave me access to all that data.”
“And then?”
“It was too late. By the time I had even a vague idea of what we were confronted with, the Cataclysm of October fourth had arrived.”
A question was burning on Yuri’s lips like pure alcohol. He hoped Chrysler would not lose sight of the tiny bit of essential information contained in Professor Zarkovsky’s tale. And, as always, Chrysler proved that he would never miss such a critical detail.
“You mentioned a ‘Language-World’ update, is that right? You taught the Metastructure that it is language that creates and destroys worlds. Do I understand that correctly?”
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“Exactly, Mr. Campbell. I still don’t know why, but there was a close link between those emissions of light and a multitude of phenomena that appeared at that time. The moment when my colleagues and I began to speak of devolution. Evolution in reverse. But not in the sense of reversed linear chronology. This is a much more complex phenomenon that we might compare to a ‘folding over’; the evolutionary dynamic turns back on itself, passes back by itself again and again, crosses itself, takes itself apart, mingles with its own past, becomes a sort of matter in constant hybridization.”
“Could language become matter?”
“I don’t know yet. One of the strangest things the Metastructure told us before its death was the feeling it had of ‘going backward.’ It said, ‘I think the alarm signals I told you about a year ago came from the future, from my future. From the day of my own disappearance, marking a stopping point, and I think they came back through time to warn me, or perhaps to condemn me. I don’t know what it means, but I know the laboratory’s ‘Language-World’ update made this transmutation possible. And do not ask what my disappearance will be like, because machine, world, and metaconscience, I am meant to be virtually immortal.’”
“Well, we must admit that, in a sense, it is,” Chrysler had said. “Even, and especially, in death.”
13 > THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN
The storm lasts until late in the night, linking the night-desert with the desert-night taking possession of the world. The sand and wind whirl and shriek without stopping for hours. Shortly after dusk, Campbell hears it begin to calm a bit; at regular intervals he reads aloud the number displayed on his anemometer’s counter. It is past midnight when silence finally descends on the Territory.
Utter, deathlike silence. No longer even the slightest whisper of the wind or the tiniest noise of plant or animal. It is a silence like the one that preceded the Great Noise of Creation, Yuri says to himself. And a silence like the one that will follow it.
The four men haven’t changed places for the entire day. The Professor fell asleep in his armchair for a few hours when the storm was at its strongest, waking the moment it ended.
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