Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  Link smiles at him and says: It’s rolling.

  And the light is. It is, with all its being. Infinite.

  He is disintegrated by this Light, but instantly reborn in another form.

  He too is surrounded by a halo within an entire cosmos made of various forms of light, more or less dense, more or less rapid, of all chromatic variations, all wavelengths.

  Link is facing him, surrounded by his own globe of light.

  “Your individuation is rejoining its principle. Don’t worry.”

  “Where are we?”

  “From one point of view we’re in the Ark. From another, we’re at the other end of the universe. And from a third, the one that matters, we are in the process of integrating the hidden face of Utopia.”

  “What will happen?”

  “The infinite globe will disappear. We will have only our halos to protect us.”

  “Protect us from what?”

  “Protect us from that.”

  And that really is that. The Thing. The creationary Thing. The numeric reification of the individual. It is not quite the Nothingness, but it is far from being any kind of world. It is an intermediate, limbic state that resembles a virtual version of the neoecology that the Thing is inflicting on the World.

  Yuri realizes that they are in the heart of the metaphysical machine of the new humanity. The one wishing to become an organic network. He realizes that the Ark, with its infinite speeds, is a machine permitting access to all successive worlds—including the world of concepts, of ideas. Including the world of thought in act.

  “We are not in any particular brain, Yuri; we are inside the act of human thought itself. We are face-to-face with the principle that is going to disindividuate Humanity for the benefit of its successor, Anomanity. What we called Unimanity in the era of the Metastructure was only a poor thumbnail sketch. This is the Thing, life-size.”

  They are floating, motionless, inside an immense black box made of millions of identical boxes stacked into four walls as high as mountains. This ghostly cube is a world, Yuri realizes. But it barely exists; it is not really concrete, not really alive, not really a world. It is hardly real, but it is as big as a universe. It is as big as a man. It is as big as Man.

  “Before the Fall—I mean before my creation—I produced a similar neurouniverse. It was incorporated by the Metastructure at the moment of its death, and the Post-Machine, the devolutionary mutation that succeeded it, enlarged it to the size of a world. Our world.”

  “Before your creation?”

  “I was before being; that is why I was not born. That must be part of the narrative my father has to write in order to stop the destruction of the Library. Before the Fall, I was created from the intensified inversion of a spectral being that lived in the aqualung under the hotel dome. A series of phenomena allowed me to leave this neurouniverse I was living enclosed in, and to appear in the world; but at the same time, the Metastructure collapsed, and my birth counterproduced this—and, consequently, humanity wishes to connect to it permanently; that is, to itself, but without any more real mechanical or organic singularity. My hypersingularity is causing the destruction of human singularities by humanity itself.”

  Yuri contemplates the dizzying heights above them, and the bottomless cubic abyss under their feet. The four walls of the immense box in which they are floating, quivering gently, reveal nothing but the endless repetition of the same motif.

  Boxes. Black boxes all the way to infinity.

  “The Thing is trying to copy God down to the smallest detail, Yuri. Never successfully, of course. It has created this black megabox in an attempt to imitate God’s principal tool of actualization, an angel called Metatron. When I was the Child-in-the-Box under the dome in the Hotel Laika, I didn’t really know what I was doing; I had not yet been created. It knows what it is doing, but it lies. It is only a simulation; never forget that.”

  “But what can we do, Link?”

  “Can’t you see?”

  “No; I’m sorry, all I see is a ghostly universe without any substantial reality, formed of an infinite fractal repetition.”

  “That’s true, Yuri, all true; the Anome can only achieve existence through the humans who become what it is, and, in fact, who are what they become—their own devolution. But for them to become it, they have to want it. And for them to want it, they can’t have even the tiniest bit of desire left in them.”

  “What can we do against that?”

  “Reinitialize a source of true desire. Reinitialize a Voice. Reinitialize a singular form of music. Understand?”

  “Here? The Territory Radio?”

  “Yes, Yuri. I have my own antenna with me—the good old Gibson. And that might have only limited reach, but I am going to disturb this organization with the Supreme Office itself.”

  “The Supreme Office?”

  “Electricity-Logos. The machine become performer, become poetry, become thought. Welcome to the Territory, Yuri, Part II. I told you your version would be useful.”

  So the electricity is. Logos, voice, word, song. The riff is a chain of solid waves in the spectral field of stacked black boxes. It is light-matter-energy; it is sense-form-beauty; it is an oscillatory field flashing in the false infinity of the Metaphysics of posthumanity.

  Right into the head, thinks Yuri. Empty the gun right into the head.

  But the Thing has no head, as it is seeking a form of general acephalization. All the electricity in action can do is pursue, but on a much larger scale, a cosmopolitical scale, which the Ark has been able to do from the moment of its creation. It illuminates the millions and millions of black boxes from the inside, so many personalities enslaved by one or another of the Anome’s Devolutions. On each of these “coffins,” where the principle of singular individuation of the human beings touched by the mutation is withering away, Yuri can see a funerary plaque where long series of binary numbers are etched. Lines of ones and zeros that summarize the organism in numeric functions, that transform the life into numbers, that identify the individual as the ensemble of its numbers. Yuri realizes in a blinding flash of light that each plaque is connected to all the others via the infinite numeric series they form altogether. The boxes bring together all the numbers of the Aristotelian series, down to the last whole number, which gives the whole its false unity, its false infinity. The Great Number of Humanity is there. One can interpolate all the numbers, all the ones and zeros that make it up, the form, the sense; but the actuality of its existence will not change an iota. The Great Number is the Great Number, however its digits are arranged. The Great Number is neohumanity in action.

  It is now that the Camp Orchestra becomes absolutely necessary.

  Yuri sings in unison with Link de Nova: Welcome to the Territory, you enter the zone of the final floor. … Welcome to the Territory, I am the great division without any rest. And the light zigzags across the false infinity of boxes, it zigzags from one box to the next; light rises up in its path. It reindividuates language with each burst of light; it defies the Anome on its own turf. They are metasonic pirates; they are the Camp Orchestra; they are the rock ’n’ roll of infinities in action; they are electricians of the divine machine. They are not angels, but Yuri knows they are working for them; they are their Territory experts. They are the ones that must stop the Thing; they are the ones that must stop the terminal synthesis of the apocalyptic Beasts; they are the ones that must stop Humanity itself.

  Welcome to the Territory, fuckin’ bitch.

  Their work as electricians of the divine light does not stop there. At one point Link winks at him and says: “You’re really going to be a member of the Camp Orchestra now. Play the organ.”

  And Yuri sees a large plane of light materialize under his fingers, a plane on which three keyboards of varying length are superimposed. Raising his eyes, he can see somewhere above the Halo the tubular, silvery presence of the Great Organ, built of sonic rockets en route to the beyond of the Box-World, a part-mineral, pa
rt-vegetable harrow deploying its aerial seeds to infinity.

  He does not know where the knowledge comes from; it is truly strange. His hands play on the keyboards, his fingers arranging themselves on the keys to form chords, accompanying Link in tonality changes, strengthening the sonorous density and the percussive intensity, and all of it serves to transmute Electricity itself. The organ becomes the source of an efflorescence with ramifications as infinite as the metacube within which they oscillate, elementary particles agglomerated in their light.

  It is the entire rhizomic, poisoned jungle of the Territory that is deploying all its weaponry here—the one that has been totally destroyed in the “real” world. The one that is being reborn in the slipstream of light.

  “See your role, Yuri? You are the Man of the Territory. The Man of Traps. The Man of the Floral Machine. You are the one needed here to fight the neoecology of the Anome.”

  “Welcome to the Territory, Link.”

  And Link smiles as widely as Yuri has ever seen him smile, as he clutches his Gibson again, and the chords of the riff burst forth in all directions in the very heart of humanity, the very heart of the thought it creates, the very heart of its own metaphorical representation.

  The very heart of the Nothingness.

  Over the course of the following days, the Ark becomes a cosmogenesis in Action, and Link begins to draw up his plans for the Vessel. It is the work of an engineer of Light, an astronaut of Infinity—the work of an electric boy, a machinist of the Monad, a semantician of the living. It is his work.

  The Vessel will be powered by the energy of infinity in action. Like the Ark, it will travel inside the infinity it contains. But unlike the Ark, it will also physically move at the speed of light in order to bypass, simultaneously, all the speeds infinitely superior to it.

  “The Ark is an antenna,” Link tells Yuri. “It is anchored at a precise point on the magnetosphere. The Vessel is based on the same metatechnology as the Ark, but their uses and finalities will be different. And their sizes, too, of course.”

  For an entire piece of the Territory will be contained within the halo of the Vessel.

  All of Humvee, to start. And the cosmodrome premises. And finally the Hotel Laika. This will be the base trinomial.

  It will be as big as a football stadium.

  It will be brighter than a supernova.

  It will be darker than a black hole.

  It will be just barely visible, and yet it will be all one can see.

  47 > THIS TOWN AIN’T BIG ENOUGH FOR BOTH OF US

  One morning, Milan Djordjevic emerges from the trailer-library. The air is pure. The sun is rising in a white cloud. Djordjevic fills his lungs with morning oxygen, stretches his muscles, lets his skin shiver in the cool early-morning light.

  He has done it. He has finished the book. He has put a period at the end of the last sentence in the manuscript, structured it correctly, ensured that the narrative begins on itself, with the historiography of the Metastructure and the men who still know how to slip through its cracks, the terminal geopolitics of the last men, and the placement of the Territory of Grand Junction as a metaphorical composite of all the plots it contains.

  For the first time in weeks, Djordjevic sensed a sudden ceasing of the antiscriptural invasion during the night. After a few corrections, shortly before dawn, he had confirmation of it.

  The narration of the genesis of their own existence—all of them: himself, Link, Link’s adoptive mother, the dog Balthazar, Sheriff Langlois—permitted the central emergence of Yuri McCoy and Chrysler Campbell; it cut off the active principle that ordered the attack against the Library, and made possible new freedoms and new necessities. It caused the literary/ imaginary continuation of the human brain against the immortal disindividuation promised by the Anome.

  The morning is clear. The sun gilds the Plexiglas surfaces with crystal.

  The Library is safe.

  The book exists.

  There is still hope.

  * * *

  That same day, they learn that he is going to Grand Funk Railroad. Him. “The Processor of the Anome,” as he insists on calling himself. The brutal repression carried out by Belfond and his death squad did not solve anything in Grand Funk Railroad; quite the opposite. Now the Anome’s local bishop seems to be having more and more difficulty “selling his merchandise,” as the sheriff says. Yuri realizes that their voyage to Utopia was not without effect. For the first time they have taken back the initiative, the control of operations; for the first time, an authentic counterattack has taken place.

  The sheriff doesn’t know this, but that doesn’t matter. The sheriff knows the rest. He knows the essential part.

  Now he says: “We are going to organize an expedition to maintain order in Grand Funk Railroad. Half of the deputies and a quarter of the militia. I’m declaring the county in a state of siege.”

  Yuri thinks: In the secret Language of the Territory, that means the sheriff is going to bring the Law of Bronze with him. He won’t let anyone get in the way. He won’t let anyone try to change the Law of the Territory. He won’t let anyone get close without permission. He is its Guardian. He won’t let anyone chip away even a fragment of it. He is its Image. He won’t let anyone invade its Sanctuary. He is the Law itself.

  He will not give anyone the right to determine life and death for the Territory’s inhabitants, the subjects under his jurisdiction, the people he has sworn to serve and protect.

  He will not allow this right to anyone but himself.

  That is, to It. The Law. The Law, which is everything he is, everything he has always been, everything he ever will be.

  “You are all authorized to open fire at the slightest indication of a threat. And you are required to open fire if this threat becomes manifest, or if there is even the shadow of a doubt. Don’t forget that a knife is a weapon—even a simple fork is a weapon. Don’t forget that a man can kill with his bare hands. And don’t forget that only a dead man can be considered truly removed from combat. And even then he can’t be trusted.”

  Yuri allows himself a thin smile. Under his breath he is humming Link’s song, which is now an integral part of his spirit; all his crucial experiences are condensed in it: Welcome to the Territory, there’s a law you can’t deny, there’s a hole inside your head, the trap is called booby body, Welcome to the Territory, if you don’t know its name, it will be pleased to try you as a new game.

  * * *

  “I know you’re going to think I’m a nuisance as usual, Sheriff, but I don’t think this is the way to go.”

  Silence crashes like an Airbus onto the steppes of the Territory. Yuri thinks: Campbell has been able to gain the respect of the sheriff and all his deputies; he is almost considered one of them now.

  “I’m listening, General.”

  Campbell ignores the irony. Yuri doesn’t even see him blink; his face betrays nothing. It is even less expressive than an android’s. The human computer is following its program, oblivious to outside accidents.

  “Sending sixty men to Grand Funk Railroad won’t accomplish a thing. I have my informers, too, Sheriff. My radio works. For example, I know that Belfond’s special squad is made up of thirty men, but those thirty head up a shock militia of more than six hundred sturdy men in the service of the bishop of Grand Funk—not to mention all the armed forces of the Territory’s neohumanity. The Powder Station Triads have gone over to their side; they are, as they say, armed and dangerous.”

  “What do you suggest? A tactical response? Should we have a little bowling party?”

  “No. A real chess game. We have to bear down on them with all we’ve got. Two hundred men at the very least, and we leave fifty or sixty to guard the county and serve as backup if needed. Basically, I’m suggesting that we reverse the terms of your equation, Sheriff.”

  Langlois measures him up calmly, silently, a faint smile on his lips. “That’s not an order-maintaining operation, it’s a military intervention.” />
  “I thought you understood that this is war, Sheriff.”

  Even as he says the words, Campbell reads in Wilbur Langlois’ eyes that he understands it perfectly; he is the Man of the Law of Bronze, the man who decides death.

  And the Law of Bronze is the spinal column of the ruse; it is the visible face of the trap; it is a machine, and thus it absorbs everything that can serve its expansion. It adapts very fast. So fast that one might say it is adaptation itself.

  So the sheriff adapts.

  “Fine. All squad chiefs, rendezvous in the bus for a new briefing immediately. Overall change of procedure. We’re going to look at another expedition.”

  There is perhaps a gleam of signaling light, just a furtive flicker on objects and shadows.

  Perhaps a bit of gold and quicksilver vaporizing in the air, in an intangible powder made of ephemeral glimmers.

  Perhaps the Halo is there after all, just before the voice. The voice that says:

  “You are right to want to change plans, Sheriff Langlois, but neither yours nor Chrysler Campbell’s has a chance of working. There is only one force capable of measuring up to the Anome and its agents, and you know it.”

  Everyone turns in a single movement toward the source of the voice, the source of the Halo, the source of the truth.

  Link is creating reality, thinks Campbell.

  He is reality.

  That, they say, is how the Legend is born. Just two vehicles will descend from Heavy Metal Valley toward the extreme southwest of the Territory, to the limits of Ontario and the state of New York.

  Two vehicles and eight men, including an adolescent boy living in a globe of light that contains all possible infinities. Two vehicles: Campbell’s Ford Super Duty pickup—which he is driving—and an enormous Dodge Ram 3500 driven by the sheriff himself. Eight men: the Halo-Child and his seven mercenaries. Two vehicles, a transfinite child, seven men, and seven guns.

  A Halo-Child and the seven black angels who are his human barricade, his shield of Bronze, the armed Law, the Law of the Territory. Yuri McCoy; Chrysler Campbell; Sheriff Langlois; Frank Lecerf, the young French sharpshooter; Erwin Slovak, the man who always knows where things are happening; Scot Montrose, the former Canadian intelligence officer from southern Ontario, who knows this part of the Territory very well; and Francisco Alpini, the soldier-monk from the Vatican who had absolutely insisted on joining the expedition. These are the men who will be remembered in the Legend.