Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  Pointillist armadas of rays, photonic eddies all around them. The Hotel Laika is obviously more than a simple assemblage of residential capsules. The Hotel Laika has a history; it possesses a true secret; it belongs to a story from before the Fall—a story that explains it, a story that is the main cause.

  Campbell says: “Do you at least know what you’re going to do if, by some miracle, you get the system working again?”

  Yuri can just barely make out the shrewd smile of the boy with the guitar behind the semiopaque mask of the aqualung. But glimpsing it is enough to etch it on his consciousness in all its luminosity.

  “I won’t have to do anything, Chrysler, because if the system starts up again it will act on its own, for itself. Don’t forget, it’s a World.”

  “And will it act against the Thing? It seems to me that’s what we’re trying to make happen, isn’t it?”

  “It isn’t even a question of will. It is ontological. If I am able to bring it back to life, even partially, according to the creative principle of the Metastructure as it was before the Fall, it will function as a virus for the Thing, or more precisely as a deadly environment, a competitive ecology. Remember what Professor Zarkovsky said.”

  “An ecology against an ecology? One environment against another?”

  “Yes, two worlds that are incompossible but parallel, which will fight a merciless war against each other—and probably kill each other without pity.”

  “And you hope, evidently, that if these two ‘correlated’ worlds enter into total war with each other, they’ll leave us in peace.”

  “Exactly, Chrysler.”

  “Then I hope you’ve thought of the somewhat important fact that their battlefield will be our world itself, and the men who live in it.”

  “It’s a risk we have to take. The only risk.”

  Yuri closes his eyes. Welcome to the Territory. Welcome to the Black Box, baby.

  “There aren’t many risks we haven’t faced yet,” concludes Campbell, gesturing to the young man to go ahead.

  The test of truth must begin without delay. Each face of the specious dialectic must be shown its own reflection; each false world must be delivered up to its false brother. The devolutionary Post-Humanity must be given back to the Machine.

  Yuri has a vague premonition—nothing specific, nothing localizable, nothing identifiable as such. A malaise, an impression, a kernel of intuition.

  In the Territory, nothing ever goes as planned.

  Welcome to the Territory, baby. …

  Nothing in the Territory ever goes as planned. And nothing ever lets you see what is coming. The unplanned is the fundamental rule; what appears to be happening is never what is actually happening, and what is actually happening often hides a trap.

  Yuri sees the aqualung, the exoplasm inside which Link de Nova is moving, heading for the neural interface set in the wall.

  He wants to make contact, physical contact. Electricity is not visible in itself; they can see only the radiation, the light. Light that is the visible manifestation of the Word, light that is the visible form of Electricity.

  Yuri shudders in the face of the implications he is understanding, little by little. This is a “revelation” in the photochemical sense of the word; the film must be plunged into an acid bath and the complete transposition of the positive image awaited. On a human scale that could take days, weeks, entire books, numerous murders, the end of a world.

  At his side, Campbell, a fluorescent specter, doesn’t move. He is waiting. Waiting in the black light that illuminates all secrets.

  Yuri is waiting, too.

  The whole world is waiting, though it does not know it yet.

  True events, those that happen under the reign of the ontological break, are by definition infinitely divisive.

  They divide everything. Every reality. Every possibility. Every actual narration and every potential plot.

  In the first place, they fundamentally divide the field of the experiment itself. And in the first place, in the field of the experiment, they completely divide the observer’s point of view and that of the subject being observed.

  Everything divides. And everything reverses. What was the interior becomes the surface. What was external becomes endogenous. What was biological becomes mechanical. What was mechanical becomes alive. What was natural becomes artificial. What was artificial becomes new nature.

  Later, Yuri will wonder how to tell, in as analogous a way as possible, what happened that night in the Hotel Laika.

  How to tell the simultaneous story of what they saw and what Link de Nova experienced? How to correlate, within the plot, the absolute correlation that took place? How to describe the experience they lived through, and what Link de Nova saw in the Ultraworld of Post-Humanity?

  How to summarize infinite division in action?

  Open out the matrix, and expose it in the updated simultaneity of all its successive unities:

  LINK DE NOVA—experiment and experimenter YURI AND CAMPBELL—observers and subjects of observation

  In the exoplasm, Link de Nova learns how to carefully arrange his body according to the specific form and substance of which the aqualung is made. He checks his balance, rapidly finds the necessary gestures. The exoplasm seems as if it were designed for him. He takes a few steps and, unfaltering, moves toward the inactive neural interface. Yuri himself is a luminescent humanoid. He sees himself through the fire of the night, through the binoculars of the secret war. He and Campbell exchange a wan smile. Things have changed indeed since the last time they were here. And they will most likely change again. Even more.

  The interface is a hole. An endless tunnel, a tunnel of pure darkness in which the traces of the entire store of the digitized information of humanity from Before the Fall have been fossilized in a strange form of darker-than-black light, perfectly static. He is at the entrance to the world of dead numbers. He is in a sanctuary. He is in a necropolis. He is face-to-face with the hieroglyphs of disappeared Humanity. In his exoplasm, Link faces the wall, a sodium yellow and ultraviolet blue statue; he remains frozen in front of the interface to which his aqualung is connected. Then, imperceptibly, as if in a state of pure reflex, unconsciously, his hand lifts slowly, the metal glove rises to the level of his face and presses against the small titanium-composite plaque gleaming on the wall.

  He cannot remember exactly how it happened—oh yes, he put his hand on the interface. That’s all. He feels strange changes happening inside him at lightning speed, transmutations he cannot name, or localize, or identify. It seems to him that he is absorbing something. And at the same time, he realizes, something is absorbing him. And the thing absorbing him is the very same thing he is absorbing. Autophagy by division. He is becoming the body of what is devouring him, eating him up. And he is providing corporality to what has never managed to obtain it. At first, nothing happens—nothing notable, anyway. Link de Nova’s hand remains pressed to the neural interface, holding tightly to the neurospinal cord of the aqualung, which is connected to it. A loop, thinks Yuri. He is trying to create a loop. Link must have a strategy. He has been studying all of this for too long simply to improvise. But what strategy can you adopt against what is unknown by nature? How to foresee what is unforeseeable? The Hotel Laika is a perfect replica of the Territory; this black box under the dome is its Law, this exoplasmic aqualung its Convoy, its secret Library cast into the night.

  LINK DE NOVA YURI AND CAMPBELL

  There is a black body. A black body of matter. This black body is the projected shadow of the Uncreated Light, he realizes, the Infinite Light that contains all infinities, all realities, all possibilities. Something is happening here, something connected to this light, to this black body; that much is obvious. Some force has been able to reverse the process inside the Metamachine, from this aqualung, and from this small, standard interface. Something, or someone, has successfully looped the Metastructure’s thanatic program in on itself, obliging it to incorporate the princ
iple that will bring about its destruction. Something, someone, has been in the aqualung before him; worse, it seems to have been two different people—one of them not yet alive, the other already dead, and this before the Fall, and so before his own birth, and yet it seems that both of them were him. Still this apparent immobility. The hand pressed against the wall interface, the unmoving aqualung. The black light all around them, through which they see the spectral apparitions that distinguish them from the shadows. Still this physical inertia. Is it happening inside his brain? Has his cortex established an invisible neuroconnection, or some other type of phenomenon entirely? Yuri realizes that Campbell, this phantom of astral light, is very likely asking himself the same questions. Their semitelepathy of almost-brothers. A twinning beyond anything genetic. On the lookout for the slightest abnormal phenomenon from the exoform, attentive to sudden variations in light intensity or transmutations of matter; like Yuri, his brain is ceaselessly imagining what is happening on the inside—that is, inside the machine called Link de Nova.

  Like a mutual Most Holy Absorption—that is what is happening in him, he guesses—that is, he knows. His hand is no longer this anodized glove pressed against the wall interface. His hand is inside something, the something that is inside him. Osmosis? A strange disjunctive synthesis, really: he remains what he is, but at the same time he is this entity he is becoming, and the entity is becoming what it is while yet remaining unchanged in its nature. There is a sort of exchange happening, and yet this communication leaves each source unmingled with the other, and just as paradoxically they are only one; they remain a single, indivisible entity. It takes him only an instant to understand that he is experiencing a simulation of the principle of Incarnation. A terribly authentic simulation. A simulation that can only be—his whole consciousness is ablaze with it—a specific manifestation of reality. It takes him only an instant to understand that since the beginning, since the initial point of singularity of the experiment, an absolutely unforeseen phenomenon has been taking place. It is very indistinct. The binoculars show emissions of very low-intensity energy from the aqualung. An optical illusion? Yuri’s gaze meets Campbell’s: obviously not. Energy emissions. Low intensity. A prelude. A process is beginning. Is the system being restored to working order? Is Link de Nova’s plan going to work? Is there a chance to counteract the postmechanical devolution by waking the ancient model of the Metastructure? Is there even really a possibility of reawakening what systematically self-destructed, as only this Machine-World could do? But the energy emissions do not seem to be gaining in power. He looks at Campbell. The phenomenon has not escaped his attention. And now, what is happening, exactly? One might say that the exoform is transforming, that the interface is transforming, that the hand and the wall are one, that the shadows and the light are one, that matter and infinity are one. That the aqualung and the infraworld of the dead network are one.

  LINK DE NOVA YURI AND CAMPBELL

  There is an infinite tension between himself and the other, all the others, any other, all the “himselves,” all the unknowns he contains; the world is for him a machine-organ barely distinct from his body-mind, and other senses than the ones usually responsible for perception have immediately and simultaneously mobilized. He sees in the tunnel of black light like he is seeing the inside of his own body, on another plane of reality he sees himself in the black box of the Hotel Laika; he can distinguish the organisms of his two friends; he can detect all the presences that lived here at one time or another, like a sort of metastable identity, at once unitary and multiple. He can see the phantoms of the past; he can see numbers; he can see Yuri and Campbell as holographic specters. And he can see the names. All the names. What can be happening in this body that is turning into light, this body itself enclosed by another body, a biological body/machine-body, input/output, bootstrap process? Light, thinks Yuri, light, the visible face of Electricity—it is light that is being configured in the form of a third term, synthetic, permitting two corporalities to be only one. One? One with the local network interface, and thus one with the whole fossilized MegaNetwork, one with what is hidden beneath the desert of the world, one with all beings, all places, all forms of energy. Yuri realizes that light, thus composed, makes Link de Nova the true observer of the experimental transformations at work. He is the one seeing. They are the ones seen. He is the experience, but they are the phenomena.

  But the question remains: If an entity is incarnating in him, individuating totally in him, is it this fossilized Metastructure, as if frozen forever in a photograph of itself taken at the moment of its death? And if it is the Metastructure as a thanatological principle of the highest order, why is he not dead? Why does he sense, instead, that a completely different phenomenon is at work? Has his hand not become a luminous torch, like the extremity of the exoform’s neurospinal cord? Is this light not being incorporated into the tunnel of black light? Is not the black body, the “dark energy” of the universe, via this secret World, this vanished Metaworld, being incorporated into him? He is, himself, the Radio of the Territory. He understands better now to what extent he is an antenna. What is being incorporated into him is reemitted, transmuted, toward its source, and the light created by this transfer of energy is incorporated into the Quantum leap. The emissions of rays are localizable now, and their intensity is increasing with every instant. A phenomenon is occurring—no need to look at Campbell to know that they are on the same wavelength. Link de Nova’s hand now resembles a flaming torch. The neurospinal cord is a tube of pure light. The interface itself is shining with a mercurial light, as if halogen blocks were blazing on the other side of the wall. Electricity, thinks Yuri. Something is happening with Electricity. Something is happening with Light. The entire surface of the aqualung is glowing now; behind the translucent face mask they can clearly see the emission of light analogous to what is emanating from the interface. A loop, thinks Yuri; he has created a loop. What has he done? Turn a loop into a loop? But he quickly realizes his error. The transmutations are happening in a series. The light from the aqualung is the same as the light from

  LINK DE NOVA YURI AND CAMPBELL

  shadows of the Metastructure, to illuminate it little by little. It is linked to the dynamic of the process. To make an inanimate substance live, the Power of the Word is absolutely necessary. And the Word is not satisfied by the indefinite, by the repeating loop of sameness; it requires infinity. It requires the divine helix. the interface, which is the same as the light from Link de Nova. And quantum leaps are happening one after another; they are no longer variations in intensity, but rather ontological breaks combining in perfect simultaneity. Remember, all machines are networks of disconnections.

  The dark tunnel has turned back on itself; it has translated its visible surface with its invisible subworld. And this secret world is total light, infinite, containing all infinities. Megamillions and megamillions of numbers, stored in the cold-storage chamber of false infinity, even blacker than the darkness of the dead network, because they are a trace of the nothingness as such. The numbers themselves are rearranging themselves in a photonic dance of flaming firebrands and rays whirling in solar hurricanes. Stupefied, he realizes that the numbers are transforming, that an overall commutation is happening little by little in their new configurations, and through the infinite light they are becoming names. He understands why he is a cosmobiological antenna; he understands that the double helix is connected by a third entity—light. He understands why the hidden structure of DNA is Trinitarian. No. This is impossible. The transformation is physical, and this time all the actions are synchronous, or nearly. The light has again increased tenfold, maybe a hundredfold in intensity in each specific “machine;” at the same time, it seems that the aqualung is undergoing a mysterious metamorphosis—it is turning back on itself, like a glove, yet simultaneously, and more than ever, the hand and the neurospinal cord are one, outlined in fire against the wall interface. But that is not all; it seems that a sort of depressurizatio
n is breathing in the contents of the interface toward the exoform; it is not light that seems to trace a vortex moving from quantum leap to quantum leap; it is not the dead network, extinguished and inactive; it is not the ghost of the Metastructure. It is a force of unknown origin, come from the shadows of the world that are now being illuminated.

  Names, People, Books. Code, Flesh, Meaning. Where is he, now that he has crossed this globe of light? A beach? A desert, rather. The immense desert that is swallowing up the world. He is walking in the desert, and yet the desert is coming to him. Concrete rising above the sand. A bunker. A buried bunker. A bunker in the middle of the desert-world. And now the aqualung is not only illuminated from the interior, not just showing the world its internal surface; it is becoming entirely luminous, like a paradoxically “solid” assemblage of simple photons. It is becoming a visible “metastructure,” an entity situated beyond the mechanical and the biological. It is becoming what it

  LINK DE NOVA YURI AND CAMPBELL

  Like the resilient crystal of a resistance? He goes inside the bunker, crawling through the sand. He realizes immediately that it is a huge underground library; he is walking among shelves filled with books of all sorts. The subterranean bunker is like a giant version of the Library of the Territory. Very rapidly, in the library/blockhouse, he comes across Names, People, and the Book. He is going to confront the truth at the speed of light. contains, and what it contains is becoming what it is: a translucent, metastable, protean structure showing its own interior space—that is, Link de Nova. And Link de Nova is not the same anymore. Or, rather, of course he is the same, except that he is also engulfed in this matter/light and all his biological organs are visible, exposed to their view like a schema of general anatomy. His body is the light. This is physical, thinks Yuri. It is happening in the body.