They cross the seventy kilometers between HMV and the city of Grand Funk Railroad practically in a straight shot. For Link de Nova, it is a first. For the sheriff and his men, it is the extreme limit of their known domain. For Yuri and Campbell, it is just a township like all the others.
Except that the Antichrist has chosen it as a temporary residence.
They see packs of stray dogs, foxes, lynxes, deer, some caribou, and hordes of wolves and Canadian wildcats that have come down from the north; it is as if the last animals in the Territory are accompanying them on their mission. They also notice a flock of large purple crows soaring in the tarnished chrome-colored sky, veiling the alabaster-glazed sun. Yuri senses the incident several minutes before it happens. His intuition. Animals from the north. The group they form. The bonds that exist. The invisible networks of the Territory.
It is Link, in the backseat, who suddenly points a finger at a four-footed animal silhouette trotting rapidly along the road.
Balthazar. The Hotel Laika’s bionic dog. The sheriff’s dog. The dog who can speak, who does not follow the pure animal instinct of the Territory’s other canines. Yuri realizes that he is simply going where they are going, by his own means, asking nothing of anyone.
Balthazar has a very particular relationship with the Halo-Child. The Hotel Laika is their junction point. They share the secret of Link’s birth. They belong to an earlier story.
Campbell stops the pickup on the side of the road and invites the dog to jump into the truck bed.
A Halo-Boy and his guitar, seven armed men, and a cyborg dog. A new diagram has been drawn; it seems complete now. Seven killers, a child-supermachine, and a nearly human dog. There are not even ten of them. They are not even all human. They are going to face an army. Worse—a mob. The Legend is about to be born.
The world is collapsing in on itself; they are facing the black hole it has become. In the distance, Campbell sees the city born of the junction of a storage depot and the old Canadian National line with the elevated structure of the magnetic aerotrain.
A township of around ten thousand souls, branching out from the railroad intersection, at the southern edge of the Ontarian part of the Territory.
WELCOME TO GRAND FUNK RAILROAD, proclaims a rusted sign.
Welcome to the black hole, he corrects silently.
This black hole is what Humanity desires to become, what it is becoming thanks to the Anome, that incarnation of specic mutation via the mediation of an android born at the moment of the Metamachine-World’s death, which is now in a position to substitute itself completely as both a neohumanity and a neoecology.
The collision with Link will be that of two totally incompatible universes—incompossible, to use the words of Leibniz, several of whose works Yuri is currently reading and about which he talks endlessly. And yet there are only two vehicles, a luminous child, an old genetically modified dog, and seven men armed to the teeth. Almost nothing, compared to Nothingness made real.
This weakness might be our biggest strength, thinks Campbell.
They may not have brought two hundred men, but the Law of the Territory has come with them.
The mob is visible from afar. It is concentrated in the city of Grand Funk Railroad, but people are arriving in giant crowds from all the neighboring townships and even from Junkville—that is, from Deadlink. Thousands and thousands of men. Women. Children. The mass is condensing in Bullet Train Plaza, where the headquarters of the local Anomian episcopate have been established in an old administrative building dating from the twentieth century and recently restored. This is where Bishop Edgar Dorset has his offices. Just across from these are the central offices of the Evangelization Commission and, a few buildings away, the headquarters of the secret police, headed up by Belfond and his men.
The mob is everywhere.
And, facing the mob, on the top steps leading to the great doors of the bishopric, there are men. Men they know; men they recognize—or will soon.
Men and women.
Johnson Belfond is there with his two deputies, the old gladiatrix from the strip and the Korean American from New Arizona, and twenty or so professional killers of both sexes, all of them heavily armed.
Jade Silverskin is there, now the bishop of Junkville, accompanied by a guard of men from the Triads of Clockwork Orange and Vortex Townships, recognizable by their uniforms.
There is a large man with a black beard tied up with cord, wearing the same luxurious vestments as his colleague. This is the local bishop, Edgar Dorset.
And there is the man standing in front of all of them, dressed very simply in a gray suit and bronze shirt. He is speaking to the mob. He seems almost human.
It’s him, Yuri realizes immediately.
* * *
“Through me, humans become free and equal like androids, the latest-generation androids, the immortal androids. The Anome asks for nothing but your absolute faith in her/him and the opening of your mind and body to its Presence. You will perceive it as an absence, of course, but you have no need to worry. This emptiness is the emptiness that lies at the center of all things, all worlds. It is by accepting this emptiness into yourself that you will allow the Anome to save you from death, guaranteeing you, through my reign, immortality on this Earth.”
At first the mob remains silent. Yuri and Chrysler Campbell part the compact mass like a double-sterned boat, while the others surround Link like a pentagonal shield, with Balthazar covering them. They are the Law of the Territory, the Law in arms, the Law in action.
They are the Witnesses. This is what they see and hear. This is what they do, what they say, and what remains in memory. This is what will become the Legend.
“What I am promising you is nothing less than Eternal Life. By paying homage to the Anome you will diminish its divine anger, and it will allow you to become part of the great collective whole that will succeed the defunct humanity.”
“Are you offering us a return to the dead Metastructure?” calls out a voice from the crowd.
A few laughs are heard, then cut off by an authoritative gesture from the Android-King.
“No, I am not suggesting a return to the old order, which is truly dead. What I am offering you is, as I have said, Eternal Life.”
“How?” cries another voice. “How do you plan to do that?”
“Are you God? Or maybe a resurrection of the Metastructure?” someone yells sarcastically.
“Do not be so ready to laugh at what you do not understand. If I speak to you of Eternal Life it is because the Anome is capable of offering it, just as it has shown to what extent it can bring you eternal death, and worse than that, too. But its leniency is boundless; she/he has chosen to spare the humans who pay homage to her/him.”
“Are we supposed to worship your invisible God/Goddess?” a voice calls.
“Worship is the right word, but it will be an exchange. A sacrifice. Eternal Life cannot be bought like a jar of jam in Neo Pepsico. The Anome will come to live inside you. Totally. It will not be a simple bio-connection like it was with the Metastructure of Bygone Times, but rather the creation of a new entity made of each of you and of the totality of the Anome—that is, of you all, neohumanized. I am not your so-called Christ, but I have much more to offer you—because what I can offer is the means for all of you to become like gods. To be God is to be capable of incarnating in a single individual while remaining an infinite Totality. That is what Christ falsely did more than two thousand years ago. But the true Time has come. And I announce to you today that immortality can be created within you by your own desire, your own individuality, which you will sacrifice so that the Anome can be wholly born in you. Then you will be like me, the one who is bringing you Eternal Life, who is pronouncing your transformation into components of the Great Totality.”
It is at this moment, according to the Legend, that the seven Guardians of the Territory, the bionic dog, and the Halo-Child make their appearance at the bottom of the wide colonial-style stai
rcase.
The seven men and their militarized dog surround this adolescent boy in his fiery Halo like a human shield—human and mechanical—their weapons pointed outward like the stingers of a poisonous Territory plant.
The young man interrupts the Anome’s Android-Pope with a speech of his own—clear, solid, and without the slightest concession regarding the nature of the Word incarnate, His Coming, Eternal Life, Sacrifice, Redemption, or Freedom.
He speaks, people will say, with the authority of a centuries-old sage.
And, they will say, he has all the violence within him of a child abandoned by the world.
They will say many things, which is normal; after all, it is only a Legend.
“Do you claim to be Christ?” asks the Android-King of the Territory.
“No, I have only come to proclaim him.”
“Ah ha! Then why didn’t you proclaim my coming? Where were you, little prophet? I must admit, however, that your special effect of being a lightbulb on legs is truly remarkable.”
Laughter erupts from the mob. The artificial man knows how to present himself as the complete synthesis of the pedagogy of the masses, the cabaret comedian, the political leader and the theosophist visionary.
“I was exactly where I needed to be,” replies the child in the Halo. “Because you are not He. You are His absolute opposite, in fact. You are the Antichrist and you know it.”
“I am the Antichrist? I am the Antichrist, even though I save thousands of lives every day? You’re joking, lightbulb.”
“You are only saving them to enslave them to the Thing, of which you are just the agent. And you know there is another force saving them as well, and in much greater numbers than your demiurge.”
“Ha ha! The agent of the ‘thing’? The ‘thing’? What ‘thing’? Are we in a bad twentieth-century science-fiction movie?”
The mob’s laughter is louder this time. Yuri knows that Link de Nova’s spectacularly bizarre appearance isn’t helping his cause. The austere simplicity of the Android, compared to the showiness of his own bishops, makes him look much more like a real prophet than this boy living in a “virtual electric lightbulb” and his seven mercenaries armed to the teeth. Yuri realizes that the Android himself is a trap; he is an incarnate machine—not a human computer, but the opposite: calculation, dehumanization itself. Yuri realizes that everything about the Android is, ontologically, a simulation. And that is what will ensure his domination over what remains of humanity in this world.
But, they will say, none of this impresses the boy with the guitar from the county of Heavy Metal, the boy from the Hotel Laika, the boy from the cosmodrome.
“The ‘Thing’ I mean is what you call the Anome—probably on its orders, because it wants a name, and only a man can give it one; or, rather, a creation of man, which you are. But you won’t accomplish anything.”
“Poor little dismissive jackass. Do you know what I have undertaken, thanks to the Anome, which is the true Demiurge of this world? I have undertaken the reconstruction of Humanity, a new humanity, an entirely collective humanity, in which the Anome in its entirety—”
“Will be individuated, I know. But you won’t succeed. The Holy Scriptures are correct. One principle is escaping you, one you can’t understand, which is connected to what you can’t be, to death and life—because you are just in the middle, neither dead nor alive; you are choice prey for the Anome, you see.”
“You’re wrong, little prophet. The Anome and I are engaged in a process of total collaboration. It needs me as much as I need it.”
“You said the word, Android-King: need. You are bound by reciprocal need; you have enslaved each other. That is your lot. Our God is Love, you poor pawn. You are the Antichrist; you are only a simulation. A perfectly executed simulation, but a simulation. ‘Your name is legion’—you are both the Mass and the Number. You are cut off from being, and thus from true infinity. Paradoxically, you are announcing the coming of Christ but inverting it radically; I am announcing it, too, and yet I am not standing in front of Him. I am standing in front of you. I am your ‘anti’; I am what will pave the way for the Second Coming. I offer not only the cosmos as a temple to what survives of Humanity; on this very Earth there will be a sanctuary you cannot control. I have defined it as the Territory, the very place where you thought you were beginning your career as High Priest of Nothingness!”
“And do you think that will stop me? I have been traveling through places like this Territory for more than twelve years now, all over the continent and the rest of the world. The final mutation is doing its work everywhere; only those who accept the gift of the Anome will be saved. You can never understand the All-Powerfulness of the Anome; it gives death and life with the same generosity.”
“There will be a gap in your network, Anome—Cybion I—Alan Cortek—whatever your name is; you have none, really. I have created this gap. It covers the whole north of the Territory, the cosmodrome, Monolith Hills, the former city of Humvee, and a good part of the city of Grand Junction. It is all contained within a semantic and historic field you will never be able to access.”
“I know about your powers, little Electric Magician; you managed to repair a few rockets and build a sort of giant electromagnet. So what? I know how to deal with you, little prophet; when your ‘Savior’ comes in a few thousand years there won’t be a single member of the human race waiting for him, believe me.”
“Your world will have barely two hundred million inhabitants.”
“More than enough to remake humanity. There were hardly more than that in the time of your ‘Christ.’”
“That is proof that you can never understand what is an absolute singularity. You are only the plural, the infinitely divided indivisible, the additive, the numeric series. You cannot imagine the Hope within me, poor creation of an uncreated creature.”
“Don’t you see, little prophet, that in giving this gift to humanity, the gift of being the individuation of the Anome, I am making men into creatures that are not only new but newly innocent? I am rebuilding the Humanity of before the Fall, in all senses of the word! I am recreating men who will be like men—that is, endowed with all the attributes of men, but cleansed forever of any sin by virtue of being so far removed from any copy of the original. In this case, I believe it is better to be a replica—this state keeps us away from corruption and death.”
“The Fall is the primordial condition of Man—without it, how would Christ have been led to come among us?”
“Little prophet, you cite the Scriptures but you don’t know how to read them—and, worse still, you are turning them into dogmas. But I am the truth—simply because everyone can see what I am doing. Can you say the same, little prophet, except for your pretty, portable special effect?”
“First of all, as an Anglo-Catholic author said in the early twentieth century, ‘Turnips are entirely without dogma.’ Dogma is the spinal column of faith, which you don’t seem to know, False Savior. As for what I am doing, true miracles are not carnival exhibits. The Truth is a secret.”
“Ha ha! The problem is that no one—except those very close to you, obviously—can produce a shred of evidence. Tell me, then, why so many men are still dying, but none of them are those who have given themselves to the Anome?”
“The answer is simple: because the Thing you serve is killing them.”
“Certainly. It is the Flood, the Angel of Death, Sodom and Gomorrah, don’t you see? The Anome has to show its All-Powerfulness so that men understand and come back to their senses.”
“You want to lead them into Slavery—and worse, into that which has no name.”
“I bring universal Peace because I am able to program minds. And I am the Truth because I am the mind of this World.”
They will say the boy in the Halo was silent at this. And some will say that this glacial silence resounded like the most terrible answer possible.
“One day you will come to me, little prophet. You will understand what
I say when I tell the last humans to become androids, so that they may be their own creatures. What greater freedom can there be, tell me, than to be an integral part of the human Totality—and more, to be constantly adaptable, as the new humanity, to these new conditions of life—to endure, to start over from zero, like in the Garden of Eden.”
* * *
And the Android who has come to bring immortality to humanity sketches a vast globe in the air with his hands.
“The Anome is a purely spiritual improvement, purely abstract from the Metastructure—an improvement that is not brought on by the ‘updates’ that the humans then in charge of its development conceived for it. The Anome has risen up from the Nothingness that reverberated within the Metastructure—or, rather, It used the Nothingness as a pivotal point from which to resume the principles of the Metastructure, like an original matrix, but pushing them to another level of grandeur entirely. It is both the devolving Mutation of the old condemned humanity and the forging principle of neohumanity—Anomanity.”
“The Metastructure was based on a false perception of Infinity. The Anome will, in the end, be just as limited,” answers Link de Nova.
“Maybe, little prophet. But when will ‘the end’ be? I am bringing at least a thousand years of perfect peace and stability. If I dared, I would promise a million years of my universal Peace.”
“Your peace is death. Your World is a Camp. The life you offer is a simulation.”
“A simulation that far surpasses the original, electric lightbulb. Man is certainly not God; his creatures are bypassing him easily. I am proof … living proof, if I may say so.”
“You are not God, either. You just made a mistake. I announced your coming—I announced your coming as the Antichrist.”
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