Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  There is another nod, more forceful this time, indicating the desire to know more. A recurring pattern.

  “I am not going to tell you anything about the treatment we will give you, for a simple reason: once the operation begins, I will inject you with a dose of synthetic scopolamine. You will not be asleep, but within a few minutes, the five or six hours preceding the operation will be erased from your memory. You must formally accept this if you want to be treated by our secret medicine. Nod yes or shake your head no.”

  The man nods yes, of course. Like they always do.

  “With some patients, my synthetic scopolamine works only partially. If memories of bribes ever come back to you, and if you tell anyone about them, we will know where to find you, and I will kill you with my own hands. Is that clear? Nod yes or shake your head no.”

  Yuri knows this last bit is a lie; Campbell’s programmable drug always works precisely and perfectly. But Chrysler is a man whose prudence takes the form of cold audacity. You never know. And some of the information from this afternoon, including this preliminary conversation, will not be completely erased—and this is deliberate—by the scopolamine. The man won’t remember anything except the fact that he must not, under any circumstances, remember anything at all.

  The man nods, tries to speak a few words, abandons the attempt.

  Beneath the noise of their conversation, Yuri can hear the muted sound of the numeric monologue of the young woman from X-15, like a mantra repeated without end. A mantra composed of two simple words. Two numbers. The mantra of the digital body.

  “For security reasons we operate at night. In the meantime, this afternoon we’ll complete our tests, scans, and biopsies. We will also inject you with various tracers—neuronal nanomodules, of course. Nod yes if you understand.”

  This time the affirmative response comes quickly, as usual.

  “Don’t worry. Everything will go fine. Just trust us.”

  The nod is automatic, like always. Like every time a person realizes that his survival is no longer in his own hands.

  Chrysler begins rummaging in his steel armoires for the various biological analysis equipment, while Yuri busies himself opening one of the heavy locked boxes and extracting tubes and probes of all kinds.

  Camp Doctors, he thinks, suddenly struck by the revelation.

  The day passes slowly for the guinea pigs and the researchers alike. Tests. Biopsies. Neuroprobes. Nanomodules. Injections. Scans. Tomography. Radioactive tracers. Magnetic mapping. Recording of data. Compilation of data. Processing of data.

  This is all man is now, Yuri thinks. This is what the unknown entity has brought us to.

  Even before it begins killing, the thing acts to transform you into a catalogue of numbered data. It has eradicated nearly all the technology on the planet, but it still acts as a sort of hypertechnology itself. It acts like a Metastructure for which humans are not “hardware platforms,” but rather software and programming languages. It acts like a God, seeking to uncreate Man.

  The world order has been totally, absolutely, infinitely reversed.

  The Lebois-Davenport girl is resplendently beautiful as the numeric death takes her away, hour by hour. Her amber skin, marbled by the fluorescent tracks of the radioactive tracers, glows softly silver under the beams of their examining lights.

  Her blue eyes are fixed on the ceiling as if it is a heaven she has never seen before. Her black hair lies in long curls and arabesques against the whiteness of the helium bed. Her trembling, slightly parted lips issue faster and faster streams of binary numbers.

  Her body is the subject of both men’s undivided attention.

  Nothing sexual could ever cross through the invisible membrane that separates them from her.

  She is a woman of the Camp-World. And she is probably going to die.

  They are the Doctors of the Camp-World. And it has never been more certain that they will end by selling her back to some necro Triad.

  One evening during the previous summer, Gabriel Link de Nova went to the cosmodrome again. As always, he had carefully prepared for his nocturnal expedition, hiding from his parents and the sheriff’s men who patrolled the area. It was almost fifteen kilometers round-trip, on foot. Not just a little stroll on the Ridge.

  On that night, the moon had been full and round and a little reddish, hanging low on the horizon as he came into view of the cosmodrome. The stars were just above his head; a hot, dry wind was blowing from central Canada, propelling wandering clusters of tumbleweeds among the stone blocks and caressing his skin with the gentleness of a passing lover. The sky was deep and pure and dark, and in the midst of the star-dotted blackness he could see the metallic points, in bunches linked by long shining cords, of the Orbital Ring, which had been spinning silently in space for twelve years.

  As was his habit, he had wandered between the launchpads, standing like sand-covered pyramids hiding secrets in the process of being forgotten. He walked through the vast hangars, closed for more than six years, inside which are the hulks, invisible to the eyes of the world, of the last twelve rockets assembled in the Territory. He crossed the cosmodrome in the other direction, to the west, filled with a profound sense of melancholy, watching his feet raise puffs of dust at each step on the enormous, deserted tarmac. Then, hearing the distant approach of one of the sheriff’s foot patrols, he took refuge in Monolith Hills, taking an abandoned road whose name—North Junction Road—was by some miracle still readable on its old sign.

  He had never been in this particular part of the county. He decided to explore it.

  The slopes of Monolith Hills dominated the northern arc of the city’s peripheral boulevard here, known as Apollo Drive where the old road connects to it. When he reached the summit of the hills he could see the huge crater of the cosmodrome, lit by the moon like a quicksilver lake with the protruding ruins of a drowned civilization.

  It was the summer of 2069. July. If the world had still existed, there would have been an immense carnival going on in honor of the Apollo 11 mission. His father had told him that the Cataclysm took place a few hours after the great festivities commemorating the Russian Sputnik on October 4, 2057. He had also described how, in 2061, the Mohawk Consortium of the cosmodrome had struggled to organize a grand fair for the centennial of Gagarin’s flight. Its success was mixed, but they had all put forth their best efforts, his father had told him. “We put our whole hearts into it.” The cosmodrome had managed to launch a small three-passenger rocket toward the Ring. Everyone had wanted so badly to be hopeful about it. Gabriel, barely four years old, had been at that orbital launch. He remembers it vaguely now; it is his very first memory of the launch of a space vehicle. And this very first memory of the launch of a space vehicle corresponded with the very last event of the kind to take place at the cosmodrome. Or in the world.

  Now the cosmodrome will never see another festival dedicated to the space adventures of the twentieth century. The cosmodrome will never see another rocket take off for the Ring. The cosmodrome is awaiting the desert.

  Where is he, now?

  Oh yes—isn’t that Nexus Road over there in the distance, below the vast, echoing space that still serves as the entry to HMV County?

  He climbs toward the northern end of the Monolith Hills strip, a place he rarely goes. He has never come here by this particular route, via the cosmodrome and Apollo Drive. These rows that mount the sides of the deforested hills, glowing opalescent in the moonlight. These clusters of dwellings that get denser as one approaches the strip. These capsule motels whose still-bright colors catch the eye from far away.

  Like this one. There, not far from an autobridge that straddles North Junction Road. Orange-colored residence capsules, stripped down by successive bands of looters, now just so many rectangular holes in the structure. A large building; at least a hundred monoblocs gleaming in the moonlight, honeycombing the vast gridded cube. He explores it, venturing into the strip itself.

  HOTEL LAIKA, he reads on
the enormous sign over the entrance.

  The hotel seems deserted; the interior, unlike the exterior, is utterly dark; not even a brazier or a cobbled-together gas lamp is burning. No refugees have sought shelter here. It’s a little bizarre.

  He stands facing the hotel’s main door, oddly hesitant to penetrate this vast capsule-skeleton drowning in darkness. A strange atmosphere, like an insistent feeling of déjà vu, and then the dull sensation that something is waiting for him there, inside. Something he knows. And something that knows him.

  He must be getting paranoid, he tells himself firmly. The sheriff and his father have always officially forbidden him from going to the strip—a dangerous place, especially for a lone teenager, and especially at night, as Wilbur Langlois explained firmly. “If I ever find you there, believe me, it will be worse than if you had breached a cosmodrome red zone.”

  At that instant, he sees the dog. Balthazar, the HMV guard dog. Wilbur Langlois’ dog. The bionic dog. The dog-sheriff. The dog who saw him before he saw it—or, rather, the dog that felt him before he saw it, even in total darkness.

  The dog’s got me, he thinks.

  At this sort of paper chase, he must admit, the dog is much better than the best human.

  One of the rumors floating around the Territory says that the Cataclysm of the Metastructure was related to an attack that took place on the same day at the cosmodrome. A man, a professional killer whose body was found a little later in the area, had fired a hyperkinetic missile at the inaugural rocket of a great private program aimed at the mass colonization of the Ring. A variant of this rumor talks about a terrorist group with connections to the Android Liberation Front, claiming that activists had somehow managed to interfere with the Metastructure. Other versions tell of an attack that had been “too successful,” to the great surprise of its instigators.

  Link knows of many rumors of the same type swirling around the Territory. All of them have some measure of truth to them.

  One of them in particular was nagging at his memory that night as he watched Wilbur Langlois’ dog coming toward him in the parking lot of the Hotel Laika.

  The rumor in question said that the missile had been launched from a capsule hotel on the strip. A hotel that was guarded at the time by a former Special Forces cyberdog. A dog that often went to Heavy Metal Valley, and to a place called Deadlink. …

  Here, Link de Nova had said to himself. It was here; it was this now-deserted capsule hotel. Balthazar used to work here. From here he had gone to HMV, where Wilbur Langlois had gradually tamed him. It was from here that the missile had been launched against the cosmodrome rocket, on the very day of the First Fall. The dog hadn’t come back here tonight to trap him; he had come here for the place itself. Everything pointed to the fact that he came here often, to remember the time when he was its official guardian.

  Maybe it was here, after all, that the Metastructure died.

  Link rides his hybrid quad bike to the county of Champlain Banks, in the east of the Territory. It is one of Campbell’s habitual rendezvous points. Not far from HMV, in one of the most depopulated areas in the whole region. Maximum security, Campbell says—outside the sheriff’s jurisdiction, and far enough away from all of the townships, even the most isolated ones. It was during the ride to this semiarid strip bordering what remains of Lake Champlain and the Vermont border that Link de Nova’s mind wandered back to that strange night in July, when he figured out that Balthazar, the Hotel Laika, and the death of the Metastructure are connected by some mysterious causality.

  Now, sitting on the quad bike in the middle of the trail, near the big cedar, as usual, he awaits the exact time of the rendezvous.

  Campbell is as punctual as an atomic clock. All Link can do is make sure that he always shows up early. He knows what is at the root of the phenomenon—his permanent, incurable anguish of any uncontrolled passing of time. He could never bear to be even a minute, even a single second, late. That minute, that second, might as well be an eternity when they are located on the other side of what is knowable, controllable, livable. Those bits of time are like open wells in the nothingness, the infinity of chaos.

  He waits calmly, watching the colors change on the lake water under the fiery gold light and the cool glow of the moon.

  Then, finally, at the appointed time, he hears the Ford’s motor and, a moment later, sees its headlights surge out of the blackness like a halogen monster’s two pairs of eyes.

  “Did you tell the sheriff? He isn’t too accommodating lately.”

  Chrysler Campbell is referring, Gabriel thinks, to the latest incident with Yuri. The former Omega Blocks resident, he knows, is anxious not to lose access to HMV.

  Access to Link de Nova.

  “Of course, Chrysler. The only thing I don’t tell him about is my going to the cosmodrome, because he has declared that a ‘red zone,’ officially prohibited. For the rest, don’t worry. There won’t be any problems with him.”

  “What do you mean by that, exactly?”

  If there won’t be any problems from him, then who might they come from? The answer comes to them soon enough.

  “As I’ve told you, my father is becoming more and more reticent. The arrival of his friend the Professor hasn’t solved anything. I assume they’ve discussed it. My father talked to me very seriously tonight before I took off on my bike.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He was a little vague, like he always is. I think he’s also very preoccupied at the moment. The Professor, the library. But in the end it was the same argument he always uses, you know. We don’t have the right to ‘sell’ a gift that was given to me by God. It’s ‘simony,’ he says. He wants to talk to the sheriff about it—Langlois is baptized now.”

  Campbell sighs. These HMV Christians! “You just have to tell him what I told you. One, we aren’t selling anything at all. We’re conducting an exchange for the good of everyone involved. Two, we’re acting in the best interest of the community. And three, we’re very careful to ensure its safety.”

  “You’re the one that needs to talk to him, Campbell.”

  “I’m thinking more and more about it, Link. In the meantime, time is passing. I need to explain to you what happened tonight.”

  “What’s special about tonight?” asks the young man from Heavy Metal Valley, a little mockingly.

  Chrysler smiles a terrible smile. “Tonight, my boy, we are facing what we call the ‘Third Fall.’ I’ll explain. Because it is possible that tonight we will be confronted for the first time with the limits of your powers.”

  Link has never doubted that there were limits to his powers. He has always known that, sooner or later …

  Has that day come? Tonight?

  This night, after the storm? This night after the night?

  Their first priority, says Chrysler Campbell, is the machines. The electrical objects Nora Network foisted off on them. Yuri had tried earlier to argue with him on this point. “The girl from X-15 is doing worse and worse. She should be our main concern, if you ask me.”

  Chrysler had replied, very calmly, his lips quirking in that hint of a smile that is worth all the hysterical laughter in the world—this world whose laugh is, of course, the color of a necro Triad—“We have to stay rational, Yuri. The two phenomena might be linked, but we don’t know anything for sure. I want to stay on familiar ground as long as we can. It will help Link de Nova get a handle on the problem, and then we can move on to humans.”

  The man sitting in the backseat had said nothing, not even an unintelligible murmur. His fate had not been in his own hands for a long time now.

  So now the electric lightbulb glows very dimly in Link de Nova’s hands, sparking with a thousand silvery glints, wavering and ephemeral.

  He holds it close to his face. The moonlight plays with its transparent glass and the chromed aluminum tubes as he turns it around slowly.

  Then he speaks to it. A low murmur. Some phrases are repeated, others are constantly chang
ing. Yuri has often wondered what kind of language Link de Nova uses, but the young man never gives him a straight answer. “It comes by itself, not from me, really; I don’t think. My father calls it glossolalia.”

  He speaks to the electric lightbulb like he has spoken to so many other machines and so many other human beings; to portable computers, communications systems of all types, medical equipment, electronic navigational systems and processors for cars, television screens and computer monitors, disk readers, bionic implants and clusters of cells modified in various ways and transplanted inside victims’ bodies.

  He touches the electric lightbulb with his hands, as he has touched so many other machines and so many human beings.

  And the lightbulb emits a miniscule but very intense point of orange light at the very tip of its filament.

  And the neon combusts.

  And there is light.

  The battery-operated lightbulbs form a half-circle of large, yellow, oblong fireflies at Link de Nova’s feet.

  Ten of them, thinks Chrysler Campbell. He’s made ten lightbulbs function again. The batteries in their aluminum sleeves emit their unmistakable wavering hum. They work. Probably better than they have ever worked before.

  Link de Nova’s powers can fight this new attack against the machines, the last machines. Campbell has never felt so relieved. Yuri was right; the boy’s powers can adapt to the thing’s changing strategies.

  A few minutes later, the electric grating of the lightbulbs is joined by the insectlike buzzing of the Braun razors as they are repaired one by one. Then the low, continuous sound of hot air projected by the ceramic radiator.

  And finally Chrysler watches, almost amazed, as an antique vinyl record dating from the 1970s—a century ago—a “single” by a group called Led Zeppelin, executes its forty-five rotations per minute on the deck of the old battery-operated turntable. Link knows how to use it; he takes the plastic arm between his fingers and sets the needle into the groove. The strains of “Whole Lotta Love” resonate among the bare rocks and the waters of the lake. The record will probably end up in the boy’s garage, Campbell muses to himself. He’ll just tell Nora Network that you can’t get something for nothing.