Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  Which makes it worse, of course.

  “That’s just it; I don’t know yet. Movement, a lot of movement. Stations that were isolated before are coming together; others are forming bigger clusters. Do you want to see?”

  He does.

  He presses his eye to the telescope’s eyepiece and watches the slow ballet of metallic, luminous spheres approximately 450 kilometers above the Earth. Spacecraft co-orbit, form pairs, triads, quartets, complete orchestras. They turn around one another, come together, then break off toward other clusters. He must admit that in the three years Judith has been letting him into her observatory, he has never seen so much activity up there.

  The Ring is transforming. And it has something to do with what is happening here, below, on Earth.

  “Have you been able to send anything over the shortwave radio? And more importantly, have you received any more messages?” Link points a finger at a large military-green box atop a concrete pilaster not far from the telescope.

  “Communications are terribly poor, and it isn’t getting any better with time. I lose contact more and more often, and for longer and longer at a stretch. It’s been three days since the machine sent a looped message, and nothing has come from up there. At least I’m not picking anything up. Anything at all.”

  Link is silent. In the space of a few months, with this small military shortwave radio equipped with a GPS module, they had been able to prove to the community of HMV that there were still ways to communicate, even if only briefly, with the Ring. It was excellent news, and brought new hope to many hearts. But the poor quality and rarity of the transmissions quickly cooled people’s enthusiasm. It still seems inconceivable, at any rate, that a space exploration program toward the Ring might be relaunched. It is probably unthinkable that people living in orbit, sheltered from the Fall, would suddenly want to come bury themselves in one of the vast deserts overtaking the Earth, among dead or dying machines.

  Rescue expeditions only work if you take someone away from where he was.

  They had managed to transmit for ten or fifteen minutes per month on average, with the same amount of time for receiving, and, as Judith had remarked, it tended to be less than that.

  The thing is not unaware of the transmissions, Link tells himself. Just as it is not unaware of what has been happening in the Ring for the last few days.

  Just as, indeed, it is not unaware of anything.

  The next morning, Link de Nova is awakened by a noise coming from his parents’ mobile home. Voices. Exclamations of joy and surprise. Laughter. He sits up in bed and recognizes the voice of his father, who must be talking from the metal steps outside the mobile home’s front door to someone still inside. “It leaves tomorrow, or in two days at the most. Sydia, have you thought of a place where we can store all of it?”

  Link cannot hear the response clearly, but he recognizes his mother’s voice, her crystalline laugh.

  His mother. The android.

  She has told him many times how she found him, a baby, under the Deadlink interchange, during the passage through the area of a group of refugees from Canada. It was the day after October 4th, in the early morning.

  State-of-the-art androids of that time possessed practically all the biological necessities for reproduction, but a Metastructure directive had suspended the final decryption of the pseudogenetic code. Fourth-generation androids, though endowed with all the necessary genitalia, had thus remained ontologically sterile, and now that the Metastructure is dead there is no longer even the slightest hope that sophisticated technology might “decipher” their bioblocking nanoprocessors. And not a chance that new androids will ever be designed and manufactured on Earth.

  The android species, these semiartificial, seminatural creatures made of carbon and silicon, will probably be extinct by the end of this century or the beginning of the next, at the very latest. It will be the most rapid mass biological disappearance ever seen in the entire history of the planet, his mother told him once.

  Since then, he has never been able to stop thinking about that terrible factoring: the androids, directly and totally connected to the Metastructure, died very fast and in great numbers during the First Fall. Most of the survivors were eradicated six years later by the Second.

  They say there are still a few groups and individual survivors here and there, but everyone knows—even in this place where knowledge has all but disappeared—that there is something worse than the fate of the last humans on this Earth of the Post-Machine. There is the fate of the first posthumanity, created by the previous one. There is the fate of the Creature of the Creature.

  “Just before the First Fall,” his mother had told him, “there must have been more than a million androids of all generations functioning. I believe around one-hundredth of them lived permanently in orbit; they must have survived the Cataclysm. As for the others, down here, the ratio is the same—around ten thousand of us survived. One thousand, maybe. One percent of the global population, at the most.”

  “You survived too, Mama,” he had said at the time. “You’re part of the one percent.”

  His mother had not replied; she had merely gazed at him, her eyes full of tenderness. Even though he knew she wasn’t his biological mother any more than his father was his father, through this kind of simple thing—a regard, a gesture, not even a word—the reality, more strange than painful, had eventually been erased, or had at least become nothing more than a bit of mechanical information among the other basic mechanisms in his mind.

  This woman is his mother. And she is one of the few androids still living.

  This man is his father. And he is one of the last men to possess a library.

  The rest doesn’t matter.

  Or so he believes.

  Zarkovsky looks at Djordjevic’s young son with undisguised interest. Gabriel Link de Nova, adopted son of a doctor of theology and a fourth-generation female android. Discovered in a box on the morning after the Cataclysm, aged eight days even though he had been born the night before, at the exact time of the Fall. A living paradox.

  He had heard the story from the mouth of Djordjevic himself. He had had a hard time believing it at first, but the boy’s father had shown him indubitable proof.

  The young man returns the Professor’s gaze unblinkingly. A bit of hardness in his soul, thinks Zarkovsky. So much the better. The Post-Metastructure won’t exactly be a party.

  Since the evening before, when Gabriel Link de Nova’s parents explained to him exactly what he would be finding here in this “sanctuary,” a question has not stopped tormenting him, like a red-hot iron plunged into flesh grown soft with certainty.

  Right now the boy undoubtedly has certain predispositions, but couldn’t one try to implement a specific training program, one that would make his powers even more efficient?

  Can he imagine a way to optimize his gifts—for example, by extending their topological reach? For the moment, Gabriel represents only a microlocal response to the Thing-World. What can they do so that he might act on if not a global scale—which is of course out of the question—at least a regional one, or something of that size?

  Zarkovsky has no idea whether he might one day be able to provide replies to these questions, but in the meantime there is no doubt that the young man holds his fair share of both mystery and discovery. He illuminates at the same time as he obscures; he has many responses at the same time as he raises problematic, unfathomable uncertainties.

  For example, the brief exchange that just took place between them:

  “If you can stimulate general remission in machines and modified humans, it’s clear that you cannot continue to act as if this were a simple small business, you and your friends. We talked about it with your father yesterday, and he is in agreement with me on this point.”

  “I know,” Link responded dryly. “And you … there are so many things you don’t know. As for my father, whom I would hate to offend and in spite of all the respect I have for him, he is
still unaware of many things as well.”

  “Your father is having a library sent from Italy that will help us to complete our knowledge and to—”

  “You don’t understand—either that, or you aren’t listening to me.” Link de Nova cut him off abruptly. “I know about the library. I said, you and my father don’t know very much. And, as it happens, my friends do.”

  “What do you want to say, my boy?”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Link saw his father turn pale. He knew Gabriel was never wrong—and, moreover, that he never lied. Except in the case of his nocturnal wanderings, his visits to the beautiful Judith. But not in this type of discussion. Not about anything having to do with his two friends from Junkville. Not where the entity that threatened them all was concerned.

  “I don’t want to say anything to you, but I think you would do well to have a serious talk with my two friends. Very serious. A series of incidents is happening in the Territory. Things only they are qualified to talk to you about.”

  He had the impression that he had already said too much. But he added: “Things are also happening in the Ring, and I think it’s all connected.”

  But neither Yuri nor Campbell was aware of this last bit of information. He had better wait, he thought, and talk to them in person.

  Fixing the Professor’s gaze with his own, he fell silent.

  The man stared at him like a scientist who had just discovered a new species of beetle, or orchid, or meteoritic quartz.

  Zarkovsky knows, now, how very right he was to come here, to cross the entire mid-American desert to reach this “sanctuary.”

  Here, it seems as if they are in the eye of the hurricane. He can’t explain why, but he is beginning to think that this place, this Territory, this cosmodrome, has a particular relationship, not with the Metastructure, which he already knows, but with its end, with what people call the “Fall.”

  He is beginning to realize that close ties will bind—do bind—already bind—the library that is about to leave Europe and the singular existence of Link de Nova in the very place it will arrive.

  The bonds are not immediately apparent. What, in this world, can pride itself on being apparent as well as so important? What is apparent in this world is not even nothingness, like black holes, which are visible as “hollows” via the destruction they wreak on all matter, all light. What is apparent is only appearance.

  What is apparent bears such a close resemblance to what it is supposed to hide! It is a perfect copy, in fact. The desert, for example. One might say that it was created “in the image of the Post-Metastructure,” just as Man was made in the image of God.

  Djordjevic’s library contains many secrets—but secrets that are not sealed in some forgotten dungeon or behind the smoke and mirrors of a Da Vinci Code, or concealed by some other perfumed mystic catering to the tastes of people who read cultural supplements, the ones responsible for the glory days of this vanished art that used to be called “literature.” The secrets are contained in books that are neither prohibited nor lost, even if some of them might, in a pinch, be considered rarities.

  They are secret books because it has been more than a century since anyone read them.

  There was no need for a directive from the Metastructure; no public prohibition was ever issued, except maybe in the Islamic emirates, where, after all, even a blank cassette tape would be burned in the streets.

  Djordjevic’s books simply did not interest twenty-first-century society. And they probably held very little fascination in previous years either.

  When he had been obligated to leave Trieste, a hunted man in extremis, a few months before the Fall, as the neo-Islamist assault on the city reached its zenith, his library was already nearly to Rome.

  He had put his twelve thousand books before his own life.

  The only problem is that he also put them before the lives of his wife and daughter.

  PART TWO

  AFTER THE WORLD

  ORGANON

  One of the universal sources of the sublime is the infinite, in as much as it can be distinguished from the vastness. It tends to fill the mind with that sort of delicious horror that is the most authentic effect and the best criteria of the sublime. But as there are many objects of which the eye cannot perceive the borders, they appear infinite and produce the same effects as if they really were so. We are fooled in the same way when an object contains an infinite number of elements, in such a way that the imagination encounters nothing that might prevent it from adding it to its liking.

  —EDMUND BURKE

  Today, though the universal law of the machine is accepted, we must not forget that camps may prefigure the destiny of a world that adopts their structure. Machines that have been updated impose the same law. According to this logic, man must be interpreted as a computer, and that is not possible unless he is translated into numbers. The Devil is a number and transformed into numbers. However, God has a name and calls us by our names. He is the person and seeks the person.

  —JOSEPH RATZINGER

  17 > SIGN OF THE TIMES

  When the sky splits in two that day, splits into vast monochrome sections torn by the storm, metal-clad gray-blue meteors falling in a shower to the Earth, the frigid wind blows in from the northwest, from what remains of the Arctic. What remains is still sufficient, when conditions permit, to create one-hundred-kilometer-per-hour blizzards from Quebec to Nova Scotia.

  Temperatures fell sharply during the night; it is far below zero now. Even in January, this is unusual. The storm turned rapidly into a “powder factory,” a storm of whirling snow that swept the Territory like a polar armada.

  The desert. The blizzard. South, west, north, east. A force seems to be coalescing all its energy against the Territory.

  Yuri, who has been tormented by this thought several times already, thumbs through a book on cellular biochemistry while Chrysler oils his guns.

  Neither books nor guns will be much help to us now, Yuri thinks. The thing is coming from somewhere, even if that somewhere is very close to the Nothingness. It is a sort of copy of it; it exists as such, maybe as a kind of negative form, a place from where the thing is planning its proliferation. It wants a body, certainly; it wants a world, all right—but it comes from somewhere; it possesses a niche. It lives within something, its primordial habitat, temporary though it might be. And, probably because it has left the Nothingness for this primordial habitat, it has developed a taste for it; now it wants something better. Something more. It wants to be a world. It wants to be the very body of Humanity.

  No—neither books, even those that Djordjevic is having sent from Europe, nor guns, even the ones Chrysler takes such meticulous care of—no, none of it can really stand in the way of the thing. The thing that is becoming the World.

  Yuri’s book lies unheeded in his lap for long minutes.

  The conclusion is undeniable. If the thing is becoming the World, if it is transforming the former Earth into a Post-World dedicated to the Post-Machine in ontological principle, only an anti-thing would be capable of stopping it.

  This anti-thing must then, by definition, be human. And at the same time it must, in its absolute entirety, be an Anti-World.

  Even Link de Nova, thinks Yuri, falls short of that mark.

  We all fall very short of the mark.

  We are all grains of sand, and It is the storm. We are snowflakes, and It is the blizzard.

  The thing should not be underestimated. It definitely deserves the initial capital letter that he sees in his mind when he thinks about it.

  It has no name, but It devours all names. It has no substance, and It transforms into numbers what used to be the substance of the human bodies whose language It has digitalized.

  It is as powerful as a whole World.

  They are all as weak as insects in the face of it.

  This kind of blizzard might last for days. The last one he can remember happened during the year following the death of the Metastructur
e.

  Snowdrifts measuring up to two meters in height are massing all over the territory, covering the desert and its sand dunes, piling up on the arid plains and savannas covered with Cornus canadensis, sumac, orange hawkweed, phragmites, viperine and white snakewort, a constellation of frozen drifts and vast snowy tundras leaving only rare clumps frozen in place, the trees that survived the drought suddenly repainted with a layer of frost.

  Even more than last month’s sandstorm, the blizzard will take its share of victims from the Territory. Certainly several dozen homeless, and poorly protected families in their fragile and unsanitary makeshift huts.

  The snow and the sand come together here, in the Territory, in a sooty union. The snow will be quickly blackened by the coal on the hills of southern Junkville, and when it melts it will form lakes of silica in vast expanses of mud. The thing has truly started a process; the events are linking together with the icy causal logic of machinery.

  The blizzard didn’t happen by chance.

  The Professor just arrived.

  And the library is coming, too.

  The “second mutation” that transforms men into numeric data has gained speed exponentially over the past few days, reached proportions that have brought even Chrysler Campbell out of his habitual reserve.

  The blizzard didn’t happen by chance. It didn’t come alone. The Thing is preparing for an attack of enormous magnitude.

  The blizzard is a sign.

  Now they are at war against the World as it is. Their visible enemies are countless, above all in the geological scheme, because it is this World that the Thing wants to transform into its own habitat.

  But the Thing itself will most likely remain invisible. It will act on those pieces of the World that it has directly brought into its own service, for its “personal” use. It will remain out of public view, behind the scenes, under the table, backstage, watching its work play out.