Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  The horizon is choked with a thick screen of black smoke above a fire-colored line like the Devil’s smile. The Eternal City has fallen. Man has been delivered into the hands of the worst possible foe: himself.

  The Abomination is spreading.

  The state-of-the-art optics of the flying microcameras have recorded and then diffused these images all over the Ring. The anonymous eyes of the machines have observed the horror unblinking and transmitted it to the collective anonymity of the orbital nation. They have seen. They have memorized. They are the witnesses of the Great Testimony, the witnesses of the Last Martyrdom. They are the last witnesses.

  There are images it would be better not to see. There are images that are worth more unseen. There are images officially prohibited from being seen, even for a fraction of a second.

  Link knows it, just as he knows all the rest. During the three days and three nights he has spent shut away in the hangar, he has, more than anything else, been listening to the Light. Listening to the Voice, the Voice rising from his own electric body, his metaorganism dancing with quarks and neutrinos, and he can now see what will succeed the Radio of the Territory.

  It is so simple. A Led Zeppelin that will turn the sedentary Grand Dynamite Audio into a squadron of electro-aerial migratory birds, a fleet of high-altitude sonic bombardiers, the air force of exiles rooted everywhere, everywhere the terrestrial magnetic field is present—that is, everywhere on Earth.

  No one can see—for now, in any case—how the Light and he are going to proceed, in concert, to create the Neomachine. I’m in control of the secrets now, he thinks. In less than twenty-four hours the Territory will be hit by the double storm; it will probably last two or three days, maybe more. There is enough time to finish building the Neomachine—or the Hypermachine, as he calls it sometimes—while remaining hidden within the hybrid shadows of ice and sand. No eye can penetrate the mystery that is already at work, beginning to draw new plans, new diagrams, new codes, a whole new language, and channeling energy through them—channeling Most Holy Electricity.

  No eye can capture the Light; nobody can see the face of the Machine before its completion. In a week at most, he will unveil it to the community of HMV. His Neomachine will be able to fight the Thing on its own territory; it will unleash its implacable D-day, its “Overlord” plan. It will storm the beaches and destroy its Capital, wherever that might be, because that is how he has designed it, with the help of the Cognitive Light: the Hypermachine will be attracted by the superprinciple of the Thing just like a missile is irresistibly drawn to a heat source, like a carnivore tracks its prey, like a needle caught by a magnet.

  I am the Black Box of the World to be restored, the World to be reinvented, the World to be transfigured.

  I am a process based on true infinity; now I must simultaneously encompass all its successive units.

  Never again will anything be imprisoned in the dungeon of the indefinite, uninterrupted numeric series, that eternal recurrence that is neither eternal nor a recurrence—a resumption—of anything. Only the concreteness of matter, the very relative elasticity of time and space, the finiteness of earthly substances will produce the illusion of a series of discontinuous actions, but it will be nothing; there may be specific phases of the process, but they will be on the surface.

  It will all be genetic.

  40 > ELECTRIC LADYLAND

  True wars sometimes happen out of the sight of those who are fighting them. Some wars are so secret that the people fighting them are unaware of their existence. Some wars are so obvious that they assault the eyes, blinding you with their realness.

  There are twelve thousand functioning radios spread across the Territory. They say the necessary length of exposure varies according to the individual, so the sheriff’s men distributing the radios are giving clear, simple instructions that carry the weight of law: for some people, just listening to a snippet of music is enough; others might need to listen to the same piece several times, and still others might require one or more hearings of different pieces. It is up to you to find your best use of 1001 MHz. When you are immunized, you will know it. It is like a program being restarted; you will feel a sort of spark inside you and all your symptoms of breakdown—alphanumeric or biosystemic—will have disappeared. When that happens, give or trade your radio to anyone you like, as long as it is to another resident of the Territory.

  They say that more than twenty-five thousand people have been immunized in the first month. But the HMV radios are becoming the most costly merchandise in the history of business. The Territory’s own economy is slowing down the decontamination; the Territory’s own economy is slowing down the plan; it is slowing down the war against the Thing. The Territory’s own economy is threatening itself. As Campbell remarked recently to Yuri: “I’m surprised that someone like Sheriff Langlois believed for even a minute that the majority of the people in Grand Junction would follow his order to distribute the ‘savior radios’ for free. It won’t take long for that to become the business to end all businesses.”

  Twenty-five thousand, maybe thirty thousand—between 8 and 10 percent of the Territory’s population. That’s not so bad, thinks Yuri. It’s a beginning; it gives us an idea, at least, that we can fight the Thing. Of course there’s still a lot to do, and Link is undoubtedly doing it in his hangar.

  Yuri can feel the change. He can feel that the era of secrets is changing—but not because they are disappearing.

  They are simply changing hands.

  To fight a war, you need a battlefield. The Territory is that battlefield. Neonature is moving on to the final phase of acceleration.

  When the two storms finally collide over the former American-Quebecois border, everything else the Territory’s inhabitants have ever experienced in terms of the fury of the elements dwindles away to nothing. This, this is an assault straight out of Hell.

  The shock is indescribable. Without Campbell’s science, their cabin would never have resisted this attack from the sky. Despite numerous security measures, Sheriff Langlois cannot prevent the deaths of a couple of elderly residents, or of two children from the same family, or the complete disappearance of a third.

  “Two hundred and twenty kilometers an hour,” says Campbell, looking at his anemometer at the storm’s height, on the second day. “Two hundred and twenty-two, to be precise. I’ve never seen anything like it, even in the Territory.”

  The Great Blizzard in a head-on collision with the Gale of Sand. Silica against ice, silica with ice, silica in the ice, and vice versa. The snow is black, the sand is gold, the sky is white, the sky is invisible. Atmospheric machines in massive convulsion, a fourth-type encounter: ecology against ecology, world against world, contact made to form a single reality—cold shadows of Arctic air, hot shadows of desert wind. The whirling whiteness from the north, the cyclonic darkness from the south.

  And in the middle, the Territory. The battlefield of the last world.

  In a place like Grand Junction, you have to remember that everything—absolutely everything—is a trap, a developing machine.

  In the Territory, the Territory itself is the trap. And now it is also a battlefield for climatic elements clashing in the domain of the visible, even though sometimes nothing at all can be seen. And it is the theater of a much more secret clash—a war waged in the subterranean depths of the invisible, there where men cannot go. Neither men nor animals. No one. Not even blizzards and sandstorms.

  This war is being fought underneath the Territory, like the rhizomic structure of one of its many poisonous plants.

  It is being fought out of human—and even mechanical—sight. It is being fought out of the reach of the living beings huddled in their shelters as neonature transforms the world, in apparent chaos that is actually very controlled.

  Silica and ice.

  Welcome to the Territory, welcome to the land that came from nowhere, welcome to the Territory; you will see, the sand is everywhere, welcome to the Territory, welco
me to the new ice age, welcome to the Territory, the world is an old machine, Man is his own garbage.

  The words will come more and more easily now, Yuri knows. The retreat forced on them by the neoworld has allowed him to continue his reading. Several volumes of theology and philosophy from the Library are stacked at the foot of his bed.

  The double storm is pummeling the Territory; ice and sand have come to copulate here, to experiment here with the Post-World, the one in which Post-Humanity will live. But now the words are being etched within him, wherever he is, whatever he is experiencing, under any conditions. Even a huge double storm.

  Snow and sand, ice and fire, cold and heat. The Thing is trying to annihilate opposites, Yuri suddenly realizes. To do that, it is forcing them to confront one another ecologically, to exhaust their energy reserves and cause them to die, leaving behind them this neoworld—median, flat, totally equalized, monometeorological—for us to live in.

  Climatic chaos is only one phase of the process, like boiling water, and its Brownian movement will end in a state of equilibrium, once all the liquid has evaporated.

  Climatic chaos is a stage; it is not the goal or even a means of exterminating the human species more quickly. It is just the period preliminary to the establishment of a total ecological and climatic order, perfectly harmonized, pacified, homogenized.

  A sort of Paradise.

  It took God seven days to create the World. It takes the double storm only half that time to recreate the Territory in its image.

  Paradise: it reveals itself to them in the early morning of the fourth day, after the silica-ice storm gradually dies away during the third night. This is the neoworld the Thing is planning for the whole planet.

  Paradise: the neoworld in its terminal phase. Sand and ice have blended into a sort of grayish mud that covers almost all the vegetation in the Territory. Even the hardiest weeds, the most poisonous plants have not survived. The predatory flora, too, was only a stage. A stage of the Fall—but now, we are in the Post-Fall. Only the trees that weren’t uprooted by the winds, large bushes, plants with aerial rhizomes, and a few particularly stout perennials are visible. All the rest have disappeared, replaced by this thick layer of icy sand that, under the rays of the spring sun, quickly melts into dull chrome-colored mud streaked with rusty brown. This is the new ecology planned for the devolving Post-Humanity. The equalization of hot and cold by overall, tempered lukewarmness; the equalization of the tropics and the Arctic via their mutually draining encounter; the equalization of desert and ice field through their systemic hybridization.

  Paradise: a world of mud, thinks Yuri. The primitive mud of ancestral pagan beliefs and absolute monoatheism. A monochromatic world, monoclimatic and monogeological, where any manifestation of Beauty will, by nature, be impossible. A world of mud. A unidimensional world where all differences will be obliterated. A world of mud. Planet Mud. The gray world. A world without shadows or light; a world of permanent half-light. Neither hot nor cold. Temperate, balanced, tepid. Paradise, undoubtedly.

  The Paradise of Post-Humanity.

  It is beneath the ground of this gray all-encompassing Paradise that the secret war is raging. While the Arctic blizzard and the Midwestern simoon ravaged the Territory in concert, in the fury of unleashed elements, while the gray mud formed, while tumult reigned, while the sand-mud mixture covered the land, in the silence and serenity of numbers It continued to act, patiently pursuing its work of destruction, reaching a new stage of its offensive.

  Its offensive against language.

  The attack is no longer aimed at human “hardware platforms” and their individuation; it is no longer aimed at the language incarnate in man. This phase, the Third Fall, is still in progress, but it is drawing to an end. Now the next one must be planned. The neoworld, where neohumanity will live, must be prepared. There will be the mud of sand and ice. There will be millions of deaths per day. There will be the numeric recycling of bodies.

  And there will be the new communication.

  The new communication between men, the posthumans whose collective immortality will give them quasi-divine status, will be of a radically new type. It will no longer depend on language, which will have been destroyed, but on the direct neuroconnection of each brain via the neohuman biological network; but in order for that to happen, the extermination of verbal transmission alone will not be enough. It will be absolutely necessary—even before having done away with human cortexes and their linguistic systems—to find a way to prevent any written transmission. Because written transmission is memory, and moreover it is a global text in perpetual transformation. Written transmission is a brain in itself. It structures and illuminates thought. It is capable of bridging life and death. It can record names, stories, events. It can destroy all the Anome is doing. In order for the neoworld to have any hope of lasting, it must annihilate all preceding history. It must annihilate every individual, destroy every thought, every possibility of thought. It must abolish even the smallest trace of language.

  The men of PaperPlan who have just emerged from their homes see that their entire stock is now unusable; books, journals, newspapers, brochures—everything has been erased. Everything. Not a letter remains. The pages are as blank as if nothing were ever printed on them. As the day continues, the men of the township will receive disparate information from all over Junkville, telling them that the phenomenon is expanding. In Neo Pepsico the jars of jam, tubes of medication, sacks of grain, and instruction manuals have had all their descriptives erased in the space of a few days. The same thing has happened in Ultrabox and some parts of Vortex Townships.

  The men of Junkville still do not know what is happening. They do not know a war is raging beneath their feet, on the rhizomic face of the world, where light is nothing but a chemical substratum.

  They cannot know, because even if they understood the meaning of this attack against written marks, they would not be able to guess exactly what the attack is in fact aimed at. They would not suspect the presence of an enemy of this Thing that is erasing language.

  This adversary, this Enemy of the Thing the people of Junkville are not even aware exists, this holdout opponent, this final dissident, is fighting its own war in the subterranean depths of the neoworld.

  His Machine is ready. It is a beautiful machine. A war machine. A military device. A trap.

  It is the most beautiful machine ever created since the invention of machines—that is, since the invention of man.

  Light. Every good trap should be able to function in daylight, Campbell often says.

  Thanks to the powers he received from his nongenetic creation, for Link this paradigm is virtually inverted: all light should conceal a good trap.

  He has succeeded.

  Six full days. No randomness in the numerology of creating universes. Six days to recreate a World—or, rather, six days to prevent it from being recreated in the image of neohumanity.

  Yes, he has succeeded.

  The Neomachine. A Machine of the fourth type. Neither biological nor mechanical nor symbolic, but a disjunctive synthesis permanently renewed by Light, by the Most Holy Electricity become a principle of absolute individuation.

  The Hypermachine: at once the antinome of the Metastructure and its inverted principle—the Thing. The Hypermachine, the third party, the projection outside the incarcerating space of the dialectic. The Hypermachine, the cognitive weapon, the absolute enemy of Post-Humanity, the Enola Gay come to atomize its neoworld of universal mud through the performative action of electric music, the Music of Electricity, the Music in which Electricity is the principle of individuation, the Music that will cause the electric body of the whole planet to sing.

  Today is the morning of the Seventh Day; the elements themselves are at rest. I will keep the hangar closed and let the world continue its course. Tomorrow I will show the last humans in the Territory what Logos can do against the Thing; I will show them the Neomachine that has come to fight the neoecology. I wil
l show them the Hypermachine that will completely destroy Post-Humanity.