The Community of Heavy Metal, thinks Yuri, this community taking shape, superimposing itself onto old toponymies. The Territory, the county of Grand Junction, HMV.
For a very long time, Heavy Metal Valley has been a sanctuary absolutely free from any unsanctioned intrusion. But for an equally long time, the sheriff has used that freedom to his advantage in every negotiation, every policy. In exchange for ammunition, for raw materials, for machinery and fuel, the sheriff has organized a carefully planned trade in vehicles of all kinds, particularly with Junkville. Periodically, a squadron of police cars takes Nexus Road down to Autostrada, where the exchange takes place with the various techno Triads of Vortex Townships, Neo Pepsico, and Snake Zone.
The Territory has its own laws; those governing commerce are re-doubtably simple: nothing can be bought in the true sense because monetary standards no longer exist, but everything is still for sale—and more expensive than ever. The Law of the Territory is outrageously easy to uphold. What was a market before the Fall is now a hunting ground. The Territory itself is proof that war is the pursuit of economy by the exact same means.
“I don’t see how I can agree to your request, Campbell—it doesn’t seem fail-safe to me at all. I’ve already been very understanding with your friend Yuri about his Combi-Cube.”
A barely controlled sigh from Chrysler. The sheriff has made the superhuman effort to agree to transfer Yuri’s small house using a county patrol car.
“Will you authorize me to carry a weapon?”
A very controlled smile from the sheriff. “That isn’t the question.”
“Then what is the fucking question, Sheriff?”
“You’re going to go, you told me, to an isolated region in the south of the Territory, a region with no police force and already ravaged by this ‘mutation.’ You even said yourself that looters are probably active there already. I have to think of the safety of our guests from the Ring.”
He gestures with his chin at the two creatures who are standing together a short distance away, having already pushed their luck with the sheriff.
Yuri thinks: Campbell has proved surprisingly naïve in thinking for a single moment that Langlois would let himself be wheedled into anything by two humanoids from space. But Chrysler isn’t the type to be deterred by such details; now he has taken the situation in hand. He knows Sheriff Langlois—but the sheriff knows him, too. It is by no means an even match: the Fortress against the Trojan Horse; the Law of Bronze against the Secret Order.
“You can’t force everyone to take up residence here, Sheriff. The two androids have a mission to fulfill; they need to understand the hidden nature of the Territory—and, with all due respect, Yuri and I are much more competent in that area than your men.”
“Oh yes? Permit me to tell you a little story. Bob Chamberlain just came back from Monolith Hills, and he passed through Junkville early this morning.”
“I know. A veritable exploit indeed,” says Campbell sarcastically.
“Save your irony for a few years from now. Chamberlain was very clear, and several eyewitnesses are backing him up: Men are looking for you all over the Territory. Men from everywhere. A certain Johnson Belfond was mentioned—a nasty hired killer who was a cop in Grand Junction before the Fall. You can’t watch out for yourselves and the Ring androids, too. It’s as simple as that.”
“What do you propose?”
“I’m being very generous with you, Campbell. I’m assigning you an escort. What would you say to Slade Vernier and Erwin Slovak? They’ll be in a second pickup, so you’ll be sure of only having to make one trip.”
“The androids want me to show them the hidden side of the Territory. And you know very well that at the slightest glimpse of a uniform …”
The sheriff bursts out laughing.
“Campbell! Didn’t you hear what I just said? These men are nipping at your heels. You’re the one at risk of seeing the hidden side of the Territory, from very, very close range.”
“So you’ll authorize us to cross Junkville as far as New Arizona, and then come back up through Deadlink and Neon Park?”
“You won’t do a damned thing except play tour guide, Campbell. The androids have gone all over Grand Junction with our patrols; they’ve even gone to some of the little Ontarian townships like Surveyor Plateau. Listen, I’ll give you permission to go wherever you want, but you will not leave your escort, and you will not do anything stupid trying to lose them. Am I clear?”
“As always, Sheriff.”
“And I’m going to keep your friend Yuri with me, as usual, just to help you avoid temptation.”
“I never expected anything else, Sheriff.”
“So do what you have to do, and try to get back here before nightfall.”
A generous but severe mother, giving her teenage son permission to go out on a Saturday night. Wilbur Langlois, the Mother of HMV, the Mother of the little surviving primates, the hidden Mother of the Territory.
Yuri watches as Campbell rejoins the android couple and the sheriff heads for his police trailer to fetch his two deputies.
A bit later, as the pickups, with small two-wheeled trailers attached, take off toward the Ridge on the crushed metal–paved road, raising a cloud of blackish dust, Yuri muses that this particular configuration—Campbell, the two HMV cops, and the two androids from the Ring—would not have been conceivable only a few days ago.
A sense of general order is overtaking all forms, all situations, all consciousnesses, all bodies, all places.
It is not this Third Fall they are trying to combat with all their combined strength. No—it is more like the signaling of a new ontological framework, a new nature. A new person?
He walks instinctively down Cadillac Avenue and then cuts through a small transversal alley to Link de Nova’s hangar.
He can already feel the electric vibrations of the music, faint as a distant echo of war.
35 > METAL MACHINE MUSIC
When they arrive at Aircrash Circle, Campbell immediately becomes aware of several distinct facts:
1) The whole zone has been affected, like all the other townships.
2) Three necro Triads, including one of the local, ephemeral micro-bands, are milling around various cabins.
3) Some scattered looting seems to have taken place.
4) His cabin was visibly spared.
All things considered, this is excellent news. The Triads’ activities will help disguise their own. And the androids from the Ring can begin to have an idea of what he means by the dark side of the Earth. A real township. The crater of a plane crash. Aircrash Circle.
There are a few corpses scattered in plain sight, but on the whole it is clear that the township is about to be clean. The necro Triads are entering and leaving cabins; stretchers and body bags are filled with clockwork regularity.
Grand Junction, my friends, is nothing compared to what you will see in Junkville. This is just an appetizer.
They park the trucks on either side of the cabin. Campbell is particularly keen to save his form-retaining titanium-composite hangar; he programs it to collapse and fold up, and while they are waiting for the operation to be completed he enlists Slade Vernier and Erwin Slovak to help him disassemble the main parts of the shelter. The two androids ask if they can look around the township. “Stay in sight, that’s all I ask,” replies Campbell.
Then, he and the two cops stack the parts of the Airbus and the Combi-Cube’s panels on the platform and in the trailer of the first pickup, his Ford Super Duty.
They pause and then move on to the second pickup, the midnight blue Silverado that became so familiar to Chrysler during their exploit in the Notre Dame Mountains. The titanium hangar is almost completely folded now, its mechanism buzzing like a giant insect. They turn their attention to a section of fuselage and the Combi-Cube panels soldered to it.
At that moment, Chrysler notices two new facts, separate in space but parallel in time:
1) There are two Hyun
dai Tucson SUVs from the 2010s parked side by side at the edge of the woods south of the vast crater. One of the vehicles is painted in the colors of the Clockwork Orange necro Triads, the other an anonymous metallic beige. Men are sitting in the cars; they are not working like the others. They are watching.
2) Slade Vernier and Erwin Slovak are also looking at the SUVs, their eyes lit by a very particular fire, a fire Campbell knows by heart. Hunters’ fire.
They’ve been waiting for me, the fuckers. That Silverskin has enough money to hire people who can spend weeks watching my cabin—which also means that he can pay enough to hire people clever enough to track me all the way here. If that is what happened, they’re the ones who kept my house from being looted.
“They’re going to try and follow us,” says Campbell. “I don’t think we have a lot of options here.”
“Should we lock them up?” Erwin Slovak asks.
Slovak the hunter, talking to Campbell the hunter. Two trap setters. Both men unpredictable because they predict everything.
“No,” says Campbell, “we’ll have to kill them. They already know way too much.”
Slade Vernier cracks a wide smile.
“That’s becoming a reflex with you, Campbell. A habit coming back, eh?”
“Do you see any other way? You can tell they’ve been watching my cabin for days, maybe even a month. The place is rigged; I should have known it. Now they won’t let us go. They’ve seen your uniforms and the HMV emblem on your car; they know we’re working together. And we can’t let them tell anyone about it.”
If I have to, thinks Campbell, I’ll kill them myself.
“After all, we’d just be getting to them before the Thing does,” says Slade Vernier thoughtfully.
“Exactly, Mr. Deputy. We’ll just look at it as an act of euthanasia.”
I am a Camp Doctor, and these men are the last cops in the Territory, men of the Law of Bronze.
Who did you think you were, you poor bastards, to believe you could scare us?
A wall of sound, pure electrical density raised to the level of incandescence, fills the hangar in the middle of which the boy sits, holding a black Gibson Les Paul connected to a citadel of amplifiers of all types.
The sound is millions of kilometers wide, as large as worlds, as bright as a sun gone supernova.
Yuri has never heard anything like it.
A low thumping, like the heartbeat of a pulsar, serves as the main rhythmic structure. Sparkling metallic flashes sheathe the beat—cymbals, remastered by a producer at a cosmic console.
The riff. God, this riff. Like an archetypal condensation of every “Blitzkrieg Bop,” every “Interstellar Overdrive,” all “Raw Power,” every “Bullet the Blue Sky,” every huge power source, capable by its very nature of being a supermultiplied metaphor for itself.
It is properly supported by an eighth-note bass line, playing on inverted chords and keynotes, offering the subterranean foundations necessary for its celestial trajectory.
A World, thinks Yuri.
An electroacoustic World.
It isn’t a song that he knows. After the final chord has slowly faded away with a growl like that of an airplane engine, he asks Link the question.
The boy smiles at him, his cheeks flushing scarlet.
“This is the first time it’s happened to me. It came in a dream, as usual.”
“What do you mean? What’s different this time?”
“It didn’t come from anyone, Yuri.”
“From anyone? That’s impossible, Link. …”
Does he mean the Thing? That it is the Thing that …
“I mean—excuse me, but I mean it came from me. I composed it. And I’m going to ask Judith to write the words.”
“Shit, Link; that’s really great, you know? A little like Primal Scream, from the Screamadelica era.”
“There’s more, Yuri. Another piece, from two or three days ago. But I have a second one that came together tonight. I’ve just started decoding it. You want to hear it?”
Later, sitting in a corner of the hangar, Yuri watches Link de Nova put away instruments and power down the main controls on his mixing console.
The second piece was even better than the first, with a rhythm based on a sampling of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, on top of which Link laid down a riff broken down into arpeggios and remixed voices from Ligeti’s Atmospheres, the synthetic bass adding regular punctuation in a funky syncope, a bass-drum “kick” like the echo of a war drum. A digital synthesizer fluttered toward the stars, illuminated with minor chords. It was like something never heard before, and yet full of the quintessence of electronic music. Singularity/generic form.
He’s progressing, thinks Yuri. He’s assimilating everything he has decoded over the past few years. He’s making it his own. He is individuating generic rock.
The scope of this realization hits Yuri like a ton of bricks.
“Yuri, there is something else. … Yuri, are you listening to me?” The voice pierces the depressurized air locks of his thoughts with difficulty.
“What? Something else? Again? I’m listening, Link. Of course.”
Of course he is listening. But does Link realize what he is doing?
“I think … listen, Yuri, I think I’m in the process of finding a way to fight the numeric devolution on a wide scale.”
Yuri remains frozen in place, in the liquid helium of the unveiling truth.
Link is individuating the generic form of Machine Language, the Language of Electricity.
The Thing, the Post-Man, the devolutionary mutation, can never individuate except through permanent digital recycling—so it can never individuate.
Yes, but where exactly is the interconnection, the interface, the meeting point?
It seems so obvious that Yuri has to keep himself from laughing. The interface, you idiot, he says to himself. The one right in front of you. This human who is not quite human, but who is not an android, either.
And the human interface in question says: “Before, the problem was that I had to find a single piece, one that already existed, that could resonate with the individual substance of each victim. Now I think it’s different. I have a plan.”
Yuri does not try to hold back his smile. Is Link trying to imitate Chrysler Campbell, the human computer?
“My idea, Yuri, is to fix as many radios as possible, as fast as I can. And to distribute them for free, everywhere we can.”
“Radios?”
“Yes. With Judith’s military station we can broadcast regularly all over the Territory. We will broadcast the music I’m producing.”
Yuri sees the machine come together in his head. Radio Free Territory. The secret Camp Station. Survivors talking to Survivors.
“Radios, fine; the radio transmitter, fine; but how can you be sure that your own music will be more efficient than other people’s?”
Even as he asks the question, Yuri realizes that the answer is there like the prerequisite destroyer.
Link’s music is the music of a man who individuates electricity. Devolving Humanity disindividuates through the organic/numeric network it forms itself.
The Shield of Bronze is a wall of sound bursts, and the one holding it is a boy not quite thirteen years old. The child soldier and his electric guitar.
The Community of Heavy Metal is becoming a reality.
How much of one, he can’t guess.
It is dusk when they leave the hangar. Link has induced Yuri to listen to a recording from his store of covers: “Get It On” by T.Rex; “Initials B.B.”by Serge Gainsbourg; “The Seeker” by The Who; “Stupid Girl” by Garbage; “I Am the Walrus” by The Beatles; “Always Crashing in the Same Car” by David Bowie; “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails and/or Johnny Cash; “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” by Bob Dylan; “Interstellar Overdrive” by Pink Floyd; “Final Solution” by Pere Ubu; “Funtime” by Iggy Pop; “Dancing with Myself” by Billy Idol; “2,000 LightYears from Home” by the Rolling Sto
nes; “She Sells Sanctuary” by The Cult; “Warm Leatherette” by The Normal; “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin; “Ladytron” by Roxy Music …
What strikes the ear first is the VOICE. Link de Nova’s voice takes on a tonality that has nothing to do with the adolescent he is. It does not imitate anyone; it is totally singular—but it is not his voice—or, rather, realizes Yuri, it is his voice, but twenty years from now. For Link, even in the biophysical sense, time does not follow the same linear process as it does for us.
Yuri smiles at him. “If I could make an album of covers, if the world still existed, I would choose these songs, and I would probably call the record Discoveries from the Territory.”
Yes, he thinks, Link is the answer to this devolving Post-Humanity, which in the end is only continuing the Metastructure’s work of enslavement, except that it is enslaving itself. Link is the last chance for true humans, because he is neither natural nor artificial; he is beyond either of them. He is the hope for survival of the last true men, because he knows how to cause electricity to be reborn in machines, and in human bodies.
And electronic music—the act of electricity performing as a work of art, as a printing machine of singularities—the electronic music of Link de Nova will be for the Thing what daylight is to vampires, and what the light of a star-filled night is to those who don’t know how to see it.
They are walking along Cadillac Avenue when they hear the noise of engines behind them.
It is Campbell’s expedition, returning to the fold.
Yuri can see that the beds and trailers of the two pickups are full to capacity. Oh no, strange, the Silverado’s is missing. And the two vehicles seem to have been in more than one collision—an accident? The fenders are smashed, outside mirrors shattered, bumpers bent and bashed in.
When Campbell gets out of the car, Yuri can see on his face the dark, singular expression of a man who knows too much.
“What happened?” he demands.
Grand Junction Page 45