Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  “Little prophet, take a good look at what is happening in Junkville, or in Deadlink: not only have humans stopped dying, they are becoming immortal by integrating themselves into the network, because they have placed themselves under my protection—that is, the Anome’s protection. In the north of your Territory, on the other hand, in Grand Junction and its environs, you are only managing to effect remissions that are leading humanity back to the time when one could barely hope to live more than a century. It’s as simple as that, little prophet. Which do you think humanity will chose: vain promises of miracles, of a Second Coming, or concrete, tangible, visible results that can be understood by everyone?”

  “The Anome wants to individuate itself in each man to ensure its demultiplication, while Christ will come so that each man, dead or alive, can be reindividuated by him, sublimating his uniqueness. That is what separates us forever—what separates you from the Truth.”

  “The Anome is total freedom, humanity with no more superior authority; the Metastructure was a dictatorship, just like your antiquated religions. I offer anarchy realized through humanity as a species.”

  “The only possible individuation is achieved through the ontological intervention of the Infinite.”

  “So, Man would be individuated by your God? How do you explain that, little prophet?”

  “God is both Unique and Triune. The Trinity and the mystery of individuation are inextricably linked. Christ is a person—the Name we give to the Son as the incarnation of the Word, and thus one of three divine persons in one human person. But you are not a person. First, because you are not one, except under false pretenses, and second, because you are not triune. The conclusion is that you are a uniquely double being, and thus constantly trapped by your own division, which cannot lead you to any creative process. So you de-create the world. You do not even destroy it, because it has destroyed itself. You seek to maintain it as a simulacrum.”

  “Do you know why tens of thousands of men and women have already joined my church? Because I don’t content myself with idle chitchat. I act. I have made a pact with the Anome to save humanity, and it is true that in order to be saved, humanity must make a pact with the Anome and help it to build our New World on an entirely new foundation. The Anome wants its Utopia; it wants its metaworld, where all men are equal, and where eternal life is promised to everyone.”

  “You aren’t dominating anything anymore except your own desert, Android. I’ll explain it to you: the Hotel Laika watches over the cosmodrome now; for you it is an area that will be forbidden forever, and now the people you have not yet corrupted will be able to join the communities of the Ring.”

  “I’ve succeeded in destroying your Library, and I have eradicated the last representatives of the race of artificial humans on this Earth.”

  “You’re wrong, Androidus Rex. You only partially destroyed the Library, and you only partially destroyed the android species. You cannot change; it is ontologically written in you. Your infinite division is half-assed, that’s all. You see, the Library had exactly 13,201 books, and you destroyed 666 of them—quite a curious number. There are more than 12,000 books surviving, and they will soon depart for the Ring. Because the Book is complete.”

  “Your flight is proof of your defeat. I won’t waste any energy trying to stop you from leaving.”

  “You couldn’t. You may dominate the Earth; your reign has been pronounced, but you are nothing but the inverted principle of what will happen. You are nothing, because your world is nothing in your image. Some immortality you’re offering this neohumanity! A huge desert of mud and ice, hardly any idea of how to make sure, no way to write a line or invent an alphabet—oh yes, I foresee ten thousand years of rejoicing!”

  “So you admit the strength of the Anome, little prophet. It has already destroyed half the written symbols and languages on the planet. It is only a matter of days now. We will return to the era of before the Fall. We will live in total unison with a nature made in our image.”

  “You haven’t destroyed the Library,” answers Link de Nova. “And your so-called nature is just a prosthetic extension of your network.”

  “You’re right that it will be an extension of us, because that is how we will guarantee man’s constant adaptation to his environment, and an ongoing reconfiguration of the environment according to the microvariations of the network.”

  “That’s what I’m saying, Android. A pure simulacrum, nothing else.”

  “And you say you came to talk to me about Christ, and His Second Coming! But where is He, this Christ, hmm? Where is He, then?”

  “You cannot, you will never be able, to understand the Scriptures. I mean, to allow them to be written inside you. You are the Antichrist; you come before him, as his inverted precursor. But nothing in the Testaments tells us how much time separates your coming from His; that is, from the coming of the Kingdom. For God, a million years is just the blink of an eye.”

  “Kingdom? I am offering the total democracy of shared salvation and immortality. The World, little prophet, will belong to us. It belongs to us already.”

  “I know,” answers Link de Nova. “It is exactly what you are going to lose.”

  There is an instant of suspense, during which the two groups of men, one at the top of the stairs and the other at the bottom, size each other up. Then the seven mercenaries, the electric boy, and the war dog make an about-face, as the Android resumes his harangue.

  They will say the Guardians of the Territory cause the mob to part before them like God parted the Red Sea for Moses and his people.

  They will say they depart in a single line toward the north.

  They will say the Android manages to regain control of the mob, and that he talks for hours of the dangers of desiring to go against the Will of the Anome, and the immense benefits of joining its Humanity-Network. He speaks of the “Enemies of Truth,” describing the men who have just come among them as bringing contradiction and confusion as the partisans of a regression that would prevent the Anome from coming to save and immortalize neohumanity.

  They will say that the Fortress of Heavy Metal Valley closes itself off permanently on that day. On the sheriff’s orders, barricades of stacked cars are erected to block all access routes.

  State of Emergency.

  State of Siege.

  Nothing is left but to declare a state of war.

  And in the Territory, war is its own declaration.

  48 > HERE COME THE WARM JETS

  They will say that in the following weeks, several raids are attempted by the Anome’s militia on the Territory-within-the-Territory. But the Fortress keeps its promises; it is the Sanctuary, the armor of the Prophecy: the Ark has created an impassable, invisible, and perfectly ontological barrier. No “neohuman” who has traded his individuation for participation in the immortal network can cross the border the Ark has drawn in the extreme north of the Territory.

  They die. All of them. Instantaneously. The Ark breaks their intersubjective connection to the Anome. Their bodies collapse on the ground in a strange semighostly, semiorganic mass, a collection of digitized organs, before melting into the overall neoecology. Very quickly, the Anome’s Pope chooses to block off, in his turn, his area of influence, contenting himself with sending out patrols to monitor what is happening in the enemy camp. It is like medieval times again: competitive feudalism, rival city-states. It is like the moment of the very first battle.

  Summer arrives. Waves of heat come to melt the last islands of icesand scattered across the Territory; the translucent, formless mud covers every nook of the landscape. The sun remains veiled behind a layer of metallic lacquer suspended in the sky. The neoecology is expanding into the atmosphere; the homogenous lukewarmness is spreading over the entire surface of the globe. The future is taking form. The form of the Anome. Men are reconfigurating themselves into a community that is erasing all real singularity little by little, giving way to overall communication in the form of constant traffic, the
permanent recycling of all the fluxes of life. Believe in the Anome, because the Anome believes in you. Such are the platitudes spreading throughout what is left of humanity.

  In the Territory-within-the-Territory, where this story was born and where it will end, extraordinary events are happening endlessly.

  In the New Human World of the Anome, which now surrounds the Territory completely, men are either dying or choosing the collective immortality of the biological network. Fewer and fewer men are dying. More and more men are becoming immortal.

  Hovering above Xenon Ridge, the infinite Ark continues to sparkle on all its visible and invisible frequencies emitted by all light, created or not. The Ark continues to watch over the cosmodrome, the north of the strip, and the city of Grand Junction—and, of course, the county of Heavy Metal Valley. The Ark is maintaining its invisible and impassible ontological barrier around the Territory-within-the-Territory; it is protecting the last men with its shield of bronze, providing the microspace so vital to the Law, and granting a few more days’ reprieve to those who have, until now, resisted all the successive mutations of posthumanity.

  Soon, though, it will have to leave them without the slightest protection.

  Soon it will have to do what must be done.

  It, too, is only an instrument, after all.

  “Link de Nova heals machines by individuating them through the active, conatural recognition of their internal infinities, and thus their poetic metalanguages. He can invent new machines whose programs are related to the mechanical poetry that singularizes them; the Ark is the first prototype. His ‘machines of light’ are powered by the mind—by Logos. They will allow the surviving humanity to travel to the limits of the Cosmos. That’s what he told me, Sheriff Langlois.”

  Yuri and Chrysler have called an urgent meeting. The sheriff, Milan Djordjevic, and Paul Zarkovsky have asked to know as soon as possible why the boy in the Halo has shut himself away in his hangar again, why he is letting no one but Yuri enter, why the Ark seems to be transmuting, emitting even more light on wavelengths that become even more countless every day. The meeting is a makeshift one, held in the trailer-library where Link’s father spent entire weeks at a portable microcomputer from the turn of the century, writing the final version of the manuscript he carried with him for years. He has summarized the three previous versions, written and rewritten everything, day and night, kept awake by various drugs and synthetic caffeine. He has finally succeeded in obtaining permanent immunity for the thousands of surviving books. The attack destroyed barely a twentieth of the library. Here, the underground war was won. Here, a simple story was able to block the progression of the active nothingness. Here, Anti-Thought came up against the Meta-Cortex. The explosion destroyed and recreated the Cosmos in its entirety—several times.

  Since that day, Yuri has considered some of the books as authentic weapons of mass destruction. He has also realized that, like all the others, he has a specific duty to accomplish in this war against Anomanity. And his duty will be to remain a Man of the Territory until the end.

  “The last time Link locked himself up in his hangar, things didn’t exactly happen as planned,” observes the sheriff.

  “You and I both know it’s the Law of the Territory. What counts isn’t what you have planned, it’s what has been planned for you,” Yuri says.

  “What will happen? How will it go; what will it be like?” asks Milan Djordjevic, his anxiety obvious.

  “I’m not sure even Link knows that exactly. There are internal mutations affecting him, and consequently the whole he forms with the Ark, and through it with the entire Territory-within-the-Territory, what we call the Sanctuary. If the Ark transforms, Link transforms. If Link transforms, the World—the real one, what remains of it—will transform in its turn. It will transform in order to stay real, whereas the planet of the Anome is only a simulation-cum-nature that will end by constantly mutating without ever changing, ensuring the permanence of its pseudoecology.”

  “What do we have to do?” asks the Professor.

  “Nothing, now. Mr. Djordjevic has succeeded in stopping the antiscriptural attack by writing the story of the origins of what we have lived through. This shows that the Anome has its limits, even against simple humans. Link is a very special case; never forget that he was written, never born, and that now, in his unique way, he will be able to be born in this world.”

  “I want you to keep me informed—especially about this birth into the world,” says the sheriff coldly, by way of ending the conversation.

  Link has become the very diagram of the event; he is what is actualizing through the infinite process of his own individuation. He is what is; he is pure Logos. He is the experience of light as the singular psychic state of the Cosmos. He is this singularity that extends into infinity, and he is the infinity born of this singularity. He is ready now. He is the process of cognition of light; he is the science of light—the science of light that knows itself, through itself, through all the infinities it contains within it.

  The hangar itself is part of the plan. It is his epidermis—or, rather, his exoskeleton. And the Sanctuary, all of it, will become his Body. The Ark will become his metabrain. The cosmodrome, the Hotel Laika, and the city of HMV will come together into a vast single structure, a metastructure of light.

  The Vessel of the Infinite.

  But for that to happen as planned, the Ark is going to have to engulf the whole Territory-within-the-Territory within its Halo. And as a consequence of that, the invisible ontological border protecting them from Anomanity will disappear.

  It is here that the gulf will widen. It is this differential that will open the chasm, the chasm necessary for any real unity, the sacrifice necessary for all salvation, the wound that cannot be scarred over until the End Time, the very meaning of Beauty becoming Truth arching against the aworld.

  And Link is the productive diagram of all of this. The End Time is here. It is now, and sudden, and yet it has been happening, and will continue to happen, for a long time.

  Link will open the stars to the song of the Third Humanity, to all those who commit to adventuring through the Infinite in the Vessel, those who will leave with the Territory-within-the-Territory, with the cosmodrome, with the Hotel Laika, with Humvee. With the Library.

  And he will open the doors of Eternity to those who choose to defend the county during the time of the Great Transmigration.

  Link knows that the creation of the Vessel will take exactly six days, just like the creation of any World. On the seventh day it will rise passively into orbit, following the lines of force of the magnetosphere, and it will join the vast conglomerate of the migrating Ring, integrating this into its luminous metastructure, and the Ark will fuse to it upon this collision to become the operative brain capable of piloting the whole thing throughout Infinity, leaving on the Ridge nothing but a micropoint of singularity that will one day be recognizable only to the Vessel.

  The Territory-within-the-Territory will attach itself to the former Orbital Ring; the land of the Canadian Shield, as old as the creation of the Earth, will join with the very last machines Humanity knew how to build. The gasoline-powered automobiles and trucks, the cosmodrome facilities, the tubular structures of the Hotel Laika, the Library, the rockets, the capsules, the space stations, the orbiting asteroids, the rocks, the flowers and plants of the Territory—all will be unified by the infinite light.

  All this will become a world.

  Link knows it. It is the Plan. It is what will be written.

  He is the diagram of it. He is what will be part of it until extinction, a hyperluminous extinction, an extinction through which he will be born, finally, as a completely different form of life without the slightest memory of his present “existence,” as if he never existed at all.

  He has never existed.

  He will be born.

  Everything will come together.

  The globe of light appeared during the night. Yuri watched it form,
slowly, bit by bit. He knows this is the signal. The creation of the Vessel has begun. Maps are being drawn on the Territory; plans are being born in the substance of the World; the infinite light will soon pass into an active phase. Words will finally produce things.

  The men of the Territory-within-the-Territory must be warned. The Law must be alerted. Sheriff Langlois must be informed. He wanted to be kept informed.

  He does not know yet that this won’t accomplish a thing. He does not know yet that nothing can be changed anymore. You cannot change what has already happened.

  For everything is being written in the brain of Link de Nova, the emitter of the globe of light. Everything is being written there; everything, or almost everything, has already been written there.

  He is the narrative of what they are living, the narration in act, the invisible narration, the secret machine. Link himself was written in an earlier story, and yet it is also the story Milan Djordjevic completed just in time, during these past few weeks, under unimaginable pressure. Yuri knows that Link is a living metaphor for the paradox of the Word made Flesh; he is its signaling image. He was produced by the narration of Angels. He is a simultaneity in act. He was created by that earlier narrative from before the Fall of the Metastructure, but it is his adoptive father who managed to write, twelve years later, the story that led to his being put in the world. The Anome probably does not know this. The Anome could never have anticipated this. Neohumanity cannot even imagine this.

  Thanks to absolute freedom of narration paired with the no-less-absolute necessity of writing, the Library will be able to travel to the Ring almost totally intact, and then toward Infinity; it will become one with the other metamachines of the Vessel.

  The manuscript will remain. The Story. The written Singularity.

  A single book will remain.

  Along with the corpses of all the men who will choose sacrifice.