Grand Junction

by Maurice G. Dantec

  Like he will do.

  The immense structure of light can be seen for dozens of kilometers in all directions. The rumor has spread throughout the Territory with the speed of a virus. Very quickly, the frontier patrols have multiplied. Reports are piling up endlessly on the desks of the bishops and the ethical vigilance officers.

  On the second day, the globe of light is racked with indescribable internal movements, variations in intensity, wavelength, and density.

  The reports continue to pile up. Patrols are now outnumbered by larger and larger groups of gawkers who have come from all over the Territory to stare at the phenomenon.

  The “phenomenon” shines like a sun, day and night.

  And things keep happening behind the crown of light.

  “When everything is finished, I will enter the Ark and we will join the forming Vessel. I will become the Vessel. And I will also be the point of singularity that remains on the Ridge, the secret signal that will allow it to come back. I will be at the two ends of Infinity simultaneously; I am a quantum singularity, a supercord whose every elementary particle is detectable only in the world of created Matter, though it is a dynamic extension, endless, in all other dimensions. I am the Ariadne’s thread that passes through all worlds, the human luminous station; in me, all light, created and uncreated, comes together infinitely. I am what sees and hears the universe exploding on itself; I am, in fact, a sort of machine, too. But my trap is called ‘poiesis.’”

  Wilbur Langlois has already made his provisions. The Law of the Territory will be vigilant to the end—that is, to his own death, to its last etching in his body. The Law will become a martyr. Sacrifice, testimony, illumination. And he has already established it as an iron-clad rule that the members of the local militia, as well as his deputies who have families, will be part of the voyage.

  He will not. Like all the single men and women in the Territory who have chosen to guard HMV and Link de Nova to the death.

  No obligation. No order. No prescription. Volunteers only. But the Law of the Territory does not only watch over them, it lives in them. The sheriff is barely surprised to realize that all the single men and women are opting for the most unreasonable, the most unthinkable choice—the freest choice, the only real one. Old Lady van Harpel, for example, volunteered immediately, armed with an antique Colt .45 automatic and a Marlin .44 double-barreled rifle topped with a Schmidt & Bender telescopic lens. Lady van Harpel is not the type to change her mind in this type of situation. She made her decision days earlier, and Sheriff Langlois considers this the decisive factor in her freedom, as it is in everyone’s. The Law of the Territory is the shadow of Freedom. It will illuminate the whole Territory. Yuri McCoy and Chrysler Campbell have already become part of his armed force of deputies. Territory Men, thinks Langlois. They will stay. They will all stay to the end.

  “Tonight, the first elements of transfinite hypermatter will be in place. I will assemble everything in the city of Humvee; that’s where the Travelers of Infinity should gather. The other structures will come later. The process will take six days in total. Those people that cannot leave should stay on the Ridge, as close to the Ark as possible. Then I will be without the slightest protection. If I die at that moment, the Transmigration will not be able to take place. But after that I can die, in order to finally be born.”

  So the chasm has opened, like a traumatic seal to their solidarity, like the inscription of the initial-initiator-igniting act into flesh. The Territory-within-the-Territory is, in its entirety, the prismatic crystal of the experience; it is condensing all the speeds of light now; it is a star that has settled to Earth and will soon depart again.

  It is from this primordial separation that the Third Humanity is being born—the Humanity of after the Third Fall—because it is made up not only of those who will travel through Infinity but also of all those who will die so that this can take place.

  All civilizations are born from the sacrifice of their greatest members.

  * * *

  Link is the productive diagram of their life, he who was written; he is the transfinite engine of the narrative, the weakest link of the chain and what guarantees the chain’s invincibility. Nothing can be weaker than its weakest link.

  Link is the productive diagram; he is what makes the Law of the Territory a gift of the Living, a unique and infinite flux that yet fragments at each singularity as at its point of origin. He is what frames choices and impossibilities, absolute necessities and freedoms that are no less vital. He is the wave that surges from every inference of Beauty, from everything outside of the false natural world, from everything the true world contains of artifice, from everything that gives meaning to the most secret of traps. He is the chemistry of impossible materials, the formal logic of Post-Matter, the biophysics of the metaorganisms assimilating into the transfinite Light. He is the eye that sees and the mouth that speaks, the guitar that sings and the body that dances; he is the machine that captures and records, and the antimachine that emits-illuminates. He is himself the incarnation of a quantum theory of gravitation; his own origin coincides with the moment of the Big Bang, those 10–43 seconds that followed him and in which everything was absolutely unified; he is the science of light, the science of cognition in action. He is the initial point of the invention of time, space, energy. He is what is happening, what has happened, what will happen.

  The Travelers are waiting in what will be the heart of the Vessel; they are waiting to disconnect from the real World created by the overall Simulation it is in the process of becoming; they are awaiting the Cosmos in their metal microcity, which is turning, little by little, into a monad of light.

  On the Ridge, a line of armed men is backlit all around the Ark. The last line. They are the Guardians of the Territory-within-the-Territory, the last soldiers, the last true humans. They are the ones who will die so that life can take place again, the ones who will die in order for death to die, too.

  And now, who can really describe what is going to happen?

  Who will be able to give an idea of what will be the final, blinding act in the completed history of Humanity? And how?

  Who knows how to tell the story of the destruction—and, what is more, the Genesis—of a World?

  * * *

  They meet at Bulldozer Park. Yuri walks toward her. He holds out to her one of the antique military kraft-paper envelopes Campbell inherited from his father. Chrysler waits for him a short distance away, his face turned in the direction of the Ridge where the last Guardians of the Territory are gathering.

  “I wrote something. For you. Don’t open this letter until you’ve gone. Don’t tell anyone about it—ever. It’s called Grand Junction. It’s like one of the songs Link and I have been writing. When you come back here, thousands of years will have passed. But the Territory will still be here. It will be here to serve as the new aleph point for Humanity, the place where you can build New Jerusalem, the place that will be ready to welcome Him.”

  Light is the song of Electricity. Light is the language of all machines. Light has become the Territory. And Light is the boy with the guitar who is the individuation of it. He has become the instrument, the organum. He has become what he is.

  “Why not come with us?”

  Yuri cannot speak, though his eyes are eloquent. “Because you have to go.”

  Link is the event that arises from infinity in action. All the stacked automobiles of Humvee are now simply light forms in movement-vibration-flux; they have become waves, their mass converting into energy that will soon be moving faster than the speed of light. All the heavy metal heaped here has become lighter than helium, but it has never been as visible; mutating toward a state of beyond-matter, it has come infinitely close to every process of human cognition that can observe it.

  “If I stay here with the others, you and the Travelers can leave. That’s the way it is. Anomanity will want to prevent what is happening. And we will hold it off long enough for the Vessel to be finis
hed. It’s the Law, Judith. The Law of the Territory. This will be its final intervention.”

  She says simply: “Come with me, Yuri. Please. If you don’t, I’ll stay, too.”

  Yuri answers without thinking for even a fraction of a second. She does not understand.

  “Not only would Sheriff Langlois formally prohibit you from doing that, he would have my total support. And the support of everyone else, too, I’m sure. It’s the Law of the Territory, Judith, don’t you understand? This Law that is about to be extinguished, but which has to shine one last time. You have to leave. Now.”

  And Yuri looks at her, hypnotized by her beauty, this beauty he is seeing for the very last time, but that will stay with him until his last breath. Maybe he has the right to a second burst, a final spark, after all.

  He takes her face between his hands and lets the glittering energy that flowed between their lips the last time they met happen one more time. His fingers tangle for the second and last time in the night-black mass of her hair. Twice is a lot; usually we have the right to only one life. It is as simple as the formation of a star, as simple as the creation of a man, as simple as the destruction of a world.

  Love will tear us apart, he thinks a bit later, as he watches her move slowly toward her family’s mobile home. The Joy Division song inspired the pages written in the envelope he gave her. Only Judith will read it; she will be back here in three thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand years, maybe more. It will be their secret, shared by them alone, between the two ends of infinity.

  Yuri half turns and faces the Ridge and the line of the last Guardians of the Territory. Faces his destiny, faces his origins, faces what he is, for once and for all. What he has always been.

  Campbell turns to him, his eyes gleaming like one of the Territory’s poisonous plants. The moment has come.

  It is their moment. Theirs alone. The moment they were born to live.

  49 > FINAL SOLUTION

  The large purple crow flies over Nexus Road from the direction of the strip. Something is coming; something is happening. More importantly, something has already happened.

  The thing it knew would happen sooner or later. The one that will complete the transformation of this world.

  Its separation from itself. The end of nature artificialized by Man. The end of all true ecology. The end of the animal species, as well as the human one.

  The light has come to take a piece of this world away with it. It is part of the archetypal dream of all crows, all nocturnal and diurnal birds of prey, all the psychoconducive beings that serve as interfaces between the world of the dead and the world of the living—those animals that, like it, serve as a bridge between the different modalities of the narrative, the various articulations of a plot.

  This bird, which knows nothing of the affairs of men, but which knows everything about them.

  A few hours ago, in a powerful armored car that took them from Grand Funk Railroad to Junkville, two men had a long conversation. The purple crow could neither hear nor understand it, but it was the cause of the human migrations the bird has been watching from the rusted-steel-colored sky.

  “Are you absolutely sure about this information? You’re aware, I imagine, of its import.”

  “I asked Belfond to send some of our Junkville slaves inside the Halo in order to see what’s really happening. The patroller who came through the dome of light on the border has been interrogated by the Ethical Vigilance Mission; his testimony seems consistent, but we’ll know more in a few hours when Belfond’s men have gotten their human guinea pigs into the area.”

  “This opportunity must be seized immediately. They are becoming too powerful; I didn’t anticipate it. We have to eliminate them before it’s too late.”

  “I know, Master. The spontaneous remissions are happening insanely fast; seditions like Williamson’s are multiplying, and all our evangelists throughout North America confirm that this is a global phenomenon, not confined to the Territory. Their fucking glowing Machine has gotten way ahead of our plan.”

  “Don’t worry about that. It’s just a procedural detail for the Anome, you’ll see. Do you know why I was chosen by the principle of neohumanity? I was the last android ever built, and I was born as the Metastructure died. I am its principle, inverted but intensified. More importantly, the Anome, this nonprinciple, can only achieve existence by incarnating, which is impossible for it by definition—so it chose a biological simulation of a human being to produce its simulation of individuation. Once that was done, nothing was left but to configurate my biochemistry so that my body would produce small capsules containing its simulated principle, a microworld become as perfect as a box. Soon the Anome will find a new way, a much more universal one, to allow everyone access to it. It needed a laboratory; I am that laboratory. Soon I will be a veritable factory. You’ll see, Silverskin; their Machine will eventually reach its limits against the power of neohumanity. Understand this: very soon, we will all anomize one another.”

  “Master, forgive me—but a number of our informers have told us about a net regain of the Territory’s old ecology there, to the north.”

  “How can they fight the neoecology? How have they been able to cause the Territory’s poisonous vegetation to be reborn? And, more importantly, why?”

  “They do not want the Peace-World. They’re militarists of a sort, I think.”

  “The icesand and its Desert-Planet will allow a general calming down; the climate will be tempered from one side of the world to the other. Men will live in a vast, organically linked community, in unity like they have never known. Why do they hate us so much? Why do they want to prevent the coming of posthumanity?”

  “I told you, Master; they belong to the World of Before; they are counterrevolutionaries. We should be treating them as such; all we need are the guillotines.”

  Cybion I does not answer at first. He is calculating. He is establishing the parameters of the destruction to come.

  “We can probably still raise an army of at least ten thousand men, don’t you think? Above all, we can’t repeat the mistake of going at it scattershot like the bishops did. We need a true operational command.”

  “All right … if we bring together all the diocese militia and the local surveillance committees, the Episcopal Guards, the men from the Vigilance Mission … let me think … yes, and even more if we go through all the townships, all the way to the city of Grand Junction. The colonies of the Enterprise aerostation and Monolith South are under our control now. We can issue a quick mobilization order.”

  “How much time?”

  “This kind of logistical problem is beyond me. We’ll put Belfond and his men on it. I think they are the operational command you mentioned.”

  “Right. Do it as soon as possible. Immediately.”

  Silverskin understands.

  They have to destroy them. All of them.

  Now.

  This is how, the Legend will say, more than fifteen thousand men and women are assembled on the vast stretches of universal mud that separate Junkville from the buildings of Omega Blocks. Messengers roam the Territory in all directions, announcing the general conscription order against Enemies of Anomanity.

  An entire army is on the march. It stretches the entire length of Nexus Road, a long central artery that goes all the way to HMV County.

  It is during this march, they say, that the thousands and thousands of men witness a phenomenon that fills them with such holy terror that their officers can control them only through the use of execution squads.

  According to their positions in the long column or in the flanks climbing the slopes through the surviving woods, the men armed for the very last war notice varying details—but from the eyewitness accounts the Legend will be pieced together, a summary of what happens on this day and the days that follow it.

  The star resting on the Earth has never shone so brightly.

  It has never emitted so many visible and invisible wavelengths of light. Th
ey say it even transmits on acoustic frequencies never before heard.

  The globe of light has never seemed as dangerous as it does at this moment when it has become utterly harmless.

  But harmlessness is perhaps the very last ruse of the Territory and its Law.

  Because everything is disrupted around the Halo. The visible and invisible universes come together to produce an extraordinary event, one that the Legend will call the Construction of the Vessel.

  The first day, in the nomenclature of the Legend, is called the Day of the Halo. The second is the Day of Diagrams. They say that during these Last Days of the World, the Halo emits a whole spectrum of incredible sounds; they say that no single individual hears the same thing. As for the Anomians, no one knows. They are unknowable. They are no longer singular.

  Now the Construction of the Vessel will become part of the great battle of which it is the cause. Some witnesses will say that it is like a sort of permanent entanglement of The Iliad with The Odyssey, and vice versa. The Legend will make no attempt to follow the unanswerable logic that prevails during these days, these last days of the human world. The final story can only be the interpolation of all the stories told before it, before its final, amphibolic crystallization of the two founding fictions of the World of Before the Fall of the Machine. And it all happens before the hallucinating eyes of the entire Anomian army.

  It happens like an event that cannot be described, because it is all of space, and time, and energy—and so it is all representation—that is affected by this “anti–black hole,” this vortex connected to infinity, this “white fountain” conceived by the turn-of-the-century astrophysicists, who already knew that if a black hole swallows absolutely everything in the subcontinuum of hidden dimensions, the opposite phenomenon will inevitably happen somewhere else in space and time.

  And it happens here.

  The Construction of the Light-Vessel.

  The anomized men are forced to believe their senses, though what they are seeing defies all possible understanding.