Cosmos Incorporated (11 page)

Then, he decides to visit the cosmodrome.

He plays the tourist—green zones, blue zones, no controls; just a few temporary traces in the tollbooths’ files. He takes a robotaxi and pays cash. Grand Junction is one of the last places in North America where cash of any type is still in circulation. He pays with a mixture of yen and Philippine pesos, and receives change in rubles and various Eastern European pounds and crowns.

Apollo Drive marks the northern boundary of the city. To the east is Von Braun Heights, a simple rocky spine dotted with a few scraggly conifers, at the summit of which stands a tall bronze statue representing the German engineer, head inclined toward the stars, in the neo-Soviet style of the 2010s. Then there are the hills of Monolith Hills and their famous black monolith; then, farther still, the mysterious Heavy Metal Valley. To the west are two sprawling, posh neighborhoods where the bigwigs and local haute bourgeoisie live: Centaur City to the north and Novapolis just below it, separated by a small river with an Indian name. To the south of the city is first the aerostation and then, toward the water, several industrial and business areas, a handful of progressively shabbier residential blocks, and finally, at the southeastern tip of the county, the slum. The barrio. The favela. The human junkyard. Junkville. A line of eroded hills whose slopes are covered with clinkers stands over thousands of collapsible Recyclo™ particleboard houses and a few plastic bungalows and dilapidated mobile homes set on blocks for the more fortunate residents.

At the other end of the city, north of Apollo Drive, the restricted zone of the Municipal Consortium begins—only orange and red zones there.

Here the cosmodrome site begins. Here is the Holy of Holies, Cape Gagarin.

But it has never really been a cape; at least, not in recorded history. The last sea known to have existed in this region had receded by the beginning of the Cenozoic era. There aren’t even any decent-size lakes except for Lake Champlain, to the southeast, toward Plattsburgh and Burlington, in what remains of American federal territory. Someone came up with the name, but no one can remember who it was. It goes back to the birth of private space activities in the area, some forty years ago at least. There are thousands of stories on the subject to be heard around Grand Junction; almost everyone has his own version.

From Junkville to the southeast, all the way to the vast natural plain of Cape Gagarin at the northern end of the county, is the secret dynamic that lies behind the entire economy of this territory. On one side is the Mud, the asshole of the World; there, outside the city, even before the aerostation and its connected industrial areas were there, is an indication that you would do better to leave, if that is even still possible, because you are already on the way to ejection—you are hardly more than a piece of garbage that cannot be recycled by local industry, or by a more base form of disposal, or even by the worst slut. On the other side is Cape Gagarin, the light of the stars, a vast plain bordered by hills to the east and west; an immense blue hole between two blue masses that press toward Montreal and above which, especially on particularly dark nights, halos of light appear like electric aurora borealises beyond the horizon, around sixty kilometers away. There, the launch center sends its blue and yellow pulsars into daylight that has become semiartificial, while its metal towers and the concrete pedestals of its launchpads, lit up by dozens of bunches of tightly packed spotlights emitting their blue and orange rays, serve as decoration for the nearly simultaneous takeoffs of the three different rockets on the tarmac.

Plotkin finds himself in the only “green” zone provisionally open to the public. It isn’t even a blue zone; it is completely unrestricted. He is face-to-face with the Grand Junction Dream. To enter, you must punch in a red or orange code; then you will have a few hours to watch from a fenced walkway built for this purpose and called Stardust Alley. It is only a large, dusty alleyway several kilometers long, stretching alongside a high electrified metal wall that overlooks other perimeters of grids, some more dangerous than others.

It is at this moment that he realizes, with shock, that this area is populated by human beings just like him, at least in appearance. But since the beginning of his visit to the city of Grand Junction, it has been as if his perception program relegated people to the category of decoration, whatever their gender, race, or uniform.

He sees them, perhaps, all these humans, but he does not really
notice
them. Their presence fades in that of the terrible and manifest power of the city itself, its machines, its dreams.

Something has to happen, something unplanned, something outside the normal scope of life in the big city, for humanity to become visible even for a few moments.

For example, that bum over there—one of the aerostation untouchables that came to be here who knows how, facing his fenced-off, inaccessible dream, facing his forever-lost dream, facing the image of his ruined life.

Arms crossed, he shouts countless curse words in several languages and long roars that hang in the clear blue air, startling groups of fellow visitors who scatter, murmuring their shock and disgruntlement around him as he stands like a fulcrum, indifferent to their chaotic, fear-induced ballet.

He screams all his hatred, and all his admiration. Plotkin can’t tell exactly what types of drugs he is on, but from the way his legs wobble, barely holding him up, he guesses that a lot of alcohol, probably legal, has gotten the best of his remaining synapses.

He belches; he shouts; he spits all his venom, the poor man, at the very face of the cosmodrome. He vomits out all his hatred of the city, of life, of mankind, of the stars…of God, who is not even there. Mixed in with his incoherent ramblings is a sort of barely audible poetry, an ode to what has destroyed him. An ode to the Holy of Holies. An ode to the cosmodrome.

A mobile Metropolitan Police unit is already arriving on the premises: two fairly old-model androids and a human chief. As they try a bit awkwardly to approach this big fellow dressed in rags, who continues shouting imprecations with his back turned to them, Plotkin sees him become aware of their presence via a sort of sixth sense and pivot slowly to face them and their old hydrogen MG. He offers them a smile so big he seems capable of swallowing them whole, as well as their old car and the whole fucking city they serve. Then he screams, but it is also like laughing. It is a laugh that holds no mirth, a laugh so disturbing that it transforms him into a caricature, one that is frozen with terror.

“WHY DO YOU REFUSE TO SEE THAT WE ARE ALL DEAD?”

The untouchable’s scream is only the vibratory prelude to his mechanical movement. He charges at the three cops and rams violently into one of the androids, who falls heavily on the hood of the MG. Immediately, the cop’s robotic comrade and his human sergeant draw their nonlethal weapons from their holsters. Two small blue discharges shoot into the body of the big lug, who is turning on them, shifting from one foot to the other.

The dance stops abruptly, as the man falls unconscious. The human sergeant brings his GPS-radio bracelet to his lips and barks out a series of codes and instructions to the Central Police Bureau.

The crowd is already re-forming in small groups up and down the length of the fence. The problem is resolved. In five minutes, a municipal ambulance will come to erase all traces of the untouchable’s presence. The cries and alcoholic odes to the cosmodrome are nothing more than an unpleasant memory, tempered by the icy presence of the police and the sound of radio voices in air ionized by the security grids.

Six hundred meters behind Plotkin, the Apollo Drive highway whirs with traffic; some of the cars, he knows, are defying UHU law with their combustion engines, whose noise and exhaust are poorly camouflaged by various homemade systems.

In the other direction, in front of him on the wide concrete expanse, the rovers advance with their mechanical, unrelenting, crushingly slow steps. Moving at barely two kilometers an hour, they seem almost to be standing still. The access runways leading from the storage and preparation hangars to the launchpads are between 2,500 and 3,000 meters long; it will take the rovers more than a hundred minutes to reach their destinations.

Plotkin sees the lights of the operations center, three control towers, and several long buildings that form a west-facing half circle against Centaur City, which has a clear view of the cosmodrome.

He stays where he is for a full hour, all the time allotted to him in the Stardust Alley blue zone. El señor Metatron sidles casually up to him; the security systems here are much more advanced than they are elsewhere in the city.

They are truly face-to-face with the Holy of Holies.

They are truly face-to-face with something like the image of the face of God fallen to Earth.

He summons a robotaxi and goes back to the hotel, filled with terrible, inexplicable doubt.

>
THE MAN WITH THE DISGUISED LIFE

Thanks to el señor Metatron’s GPS locators, Plotkin makes it back to the hotel without being noticed by anyone—except the manager, Balthazar the dog, and two tipsy Quebecois tourists hanging out on the patio in front of an antique video-game machine.

On the tenth floor, he barely has time to enter his room before the neighboring door slides open. According to the polymimetic flame, this capsule’s inhabitant is a recently fired orbital cargo pilot. He works under the table on construction sites around the cosmodrome. He keeps a staggered schedule; they must have mistimed Plotkin’s return to the hotel.

In his room, Plotkin changes and orders a breakfast of cereal and vitamin-enhanced yogurt—not too much nutrimedicine—with a diet soda full of Global Health Bureau–approved amphetamines. Then he asks el señor Metatron to show him a complete plan of the city’s security systems and a general report on all operating procedures.

It takes more than an hour.

Plotkin takes a shower and is reminded once again that the image of his own face in the bathroom mirror tells him nothing, that the identities swirling around vaguely in his head do not seem the smallest bit consistent. Yes, he is a killer—that is the one thing he is entirely certain of—but for the rest, he has no doubt that the Order possesses genetic-and memory-reforming techniques that surpass human understanding, and that they have been used on him. What is all the more remarkable for being a rarity is the fact that the Order’s techniques also appear to be incomprehensible to the highly sophisticated machines that have taken over the world.

Total amnesia would have been better; things would have been clearer—or a bit clearer, at least. One identity lost; one identity to rediscover. But his identity wasn’t lost; it was falsified. One identity lost, ten to rediscover—all of them partially. His only oneness comes from this primitive duplicity between his identity as a killer with barely known origins and the many variables of his synthetic personality. His partial amnesia reveals only things that let him establish links among the false, the true, and the perhaps, like declassified files where anything important is blotted out in black ink. He is a man whose definition is chaotic, full of holes, a man who has too much memory. A fragmented man of the past.

He gets out of the shower. The rich afternoon light pours through the window; he stands nude in front of the large disk of glass. He can see that the first rover is now returning empty to its hangar; a Long March V rocket with a “handcrafted” capsule made in Alberta will probably take off within the next twenty-four hours. The second rover is nearing its platform, carrying a patched-up Atlas Centaur rocket. The third, with a French Ariane V from the 2000s, is only halfway to its launchpad.

Business was still good, despite the recession.

Could there be an intermediate state, or a synthetic one, between the two primitive qualities of Oneness and Multiplicity? He feels a strange yet “ordinary” sensation of single existence—of being part of a singular body in a singular place, in a specific era. He does not feel any of the side effects often associated with traumatic amnesia: no schizophrenia, no splitting of his personality.
He is terribly normal.

His only excuse for a memory is a handful of half-false memories implanted in his cortex and a few shreds of true recollection stolen from the machine that controls his reality.

He is nothing. Or,
almost
nothing.

Maybe that is the “solution”—if, in him, the many can be one, and the one echoes throughout the many “hims,” it is because he is nothing more than
potential.
He lets his mind explore a series of possibilities that go far beyond the few experiences he remembers. He envisions a line of infinite tension between the world and all the worlds within him.

He is undoubtedly a killer.

He has undoubtedly come here to Kill the Mayor of This City.

The instruction program is unequivocal on this point.

But though the past is dark, the future resembles a vast, luminous window onto an unknown more mysterious and sinister even than his own shadowy memory.

That night, he decides—against the most basic security instructions—to venture farther down the strip, down Leonov Alley, toward the plaza where a replica of the monolith from
2001: A Space Odyssey
stands. Urban legend claims that it is
the
monolith that was used during filming; everyone also knows that every private cosmodrome on the planet has its own monolith and that each one of them claims theirs to be the authentic one.

The Hotel Laika is situated at the northern end of the hills, almost right up against the cosmodrome. It has become a virtual northern suburb of the sort of long, linear city that snakes along the wooded plateau, a little more than twelve kilometers in length.

As far as he knows, the Leonov Alley strip stops short at the southern extremity, toward the 1400 block, just after it intersects Voskhod Boulevard. Part of the avenue and its environs had been replaced in the bygone days of the area’s development twenty-five years earlier by a huge hydraulic basin that collects rainwater from the hills and directs it, in potable form, to other collection, processing, conservation, and distribution systems in the city. This blue gold, so necessary to the lives of Grand Junction’s residents, is part of the primitive ecology of this corner of Canada, where the dryness of the American Midwest and the immense plains of Manitoba and Alberta is now infecting the north and east of the Great Lakes region, whose water table—despite the efforts of climatic agencies—has dropped almost 25 percent in the last fifty years, while more than a million of their glacial counterparts covering the surface of the country are already half evaporated and, like the Aral Sea in the previous century, are on the brink of vanishing from the map for good.

This war between man and water brought out the worst in each of them. Man not only needs water for himself, he needs exponentially greater amounts of it to proliferate, or just to survive under proper conditions—which are never anything more than a temporary plateau in the permanent struggle against entropy. At the same time, the more men and productive negentropic factors there are to consume energy, the rarer water becomes. Its rarity rapidly destroys the most basic growth and development factors.
If that isn’t a war…
Plotkin thinks to himself. Only hydrogen engines, they say, are able to do the impossible—accumulate reserves of water while simultaneously increasing its consumption. It is said that the UHU is working ferociously to develop technologies that will result in actual water-manufacturing factories before the end of this century. It is said that certain branches of the Governance Bureau are looking to the private orbital colonies and their nascent savoir faire in matters of terraforming and astrochemistry. The lunar pioneers and Ring colonists have acquired, in barely thirty years, a great deal of expertise in the transformation of lunar rocks and circumterrestrial asteroids into reserves of oxygen and hydrogen, the two elements most important to extraterrestrial life. In the meantime, the war between men and water is not only continuing, it is intensifying, destroying ever more resources and individuals, just like the forty-five-year-long Grand Jihad, with its endless catalogue of abominations committed by men against men.

The Monolith South hydraulic reservoir is 1,200 meters long, 600 meters wide, and an average of 40 meters deep, half buried in the earth and divided into four equal sections. It is one of the best artificial hydrobasins in the Northeast for filtering and storage; it lets rainwater pass into the water table without any sort of artificial filtration. It is part of a Consortium eco-agreement: all new companies in Grand Junction, such as Hydro-Québec Waterplans, which manages the basin, are obliged to comply with it. The vast rhombus of concrete-composite, hemmed in by fences and security posts, cost a fortune at the time of its construction—but then, at that time, the Consortium was rolling in gold. The Mohawk and Russo-American mafias, as well as gangs of Canadian motorcyclists, had divided up the land. A few newer communities—like Junkville—had established their microniches in very specific areas and markets already abandoned by the huge local mafias. Business in the 2020s and 2030s was still booming, like it did in the heavenly Las Vegas of the American Golden Age. It is obvious, really, that the beginning, peak, and slow decline of the Grand Jihad have cemented the wealth of the city, the county, and the entire Mohawk territory. It is less and less certain that universal peace, only barely enforced by the UHU for the last ten or twelve years, will ever be as profitable.

While the battle against terrorism and expenditures for security and biogenetic research have taken up most of the public’s money and energy over the last forty years—not without reason
—private
cosmodromes have been able to concentrate their efforts on the journey spaceward with the support of many countries and international agencies. The United States persevered a bit longer than the others in the space race, but the dream of a return to the moon was quickly extinguished by the double threat of terrorists wishing to destroy humanity at all costs and others just as rabidly desirous to preserve it.

Between the Second Civil War, the disunity that followed it, and the moral injunctions of all the lobbyists determined that taxpayers’ money “would not be swallowed up by the infinity of space,” it had only taken a few years for virtually the entire program to be frozen, as it had been in 1972. The moon was left to a few military companies and given up for the price of clumsy negotiations conducted among the various parties who had so recently come together.

Even with peace “restored,” the UHU still does not seem ready to take a renewed interest in space exploration; there is always some urgent geopolitical program still to resolve, or a major ecosystemic crisis at hand, or a stuffy bureaucracy paralyzed under the eyes of ethical police and artificial legal intelligence. In a bar on the strip where Plotkin stops to drink a beer with an alcohol content that would be illegally high elsewhere in America (an imitation-British pale ale, outlawed since the application of the Shari’a in Great Britain; copies of English beers are all the rage in independent Amerindian territories, he is informed by a recollection that emerges from some unknown, dusty corner of his falsified memory) followed by an energizing cocktail typical of Grand Junction, he overhears a quartet of old gentlemen, all of them half-blood and speaking the local French—the details of which were imparted long ago by his instruction program. They explain, as they play cards in a corner of the smoky room, where a century-old jukebox blares twentieth-century country-and-western songs, that in a few years, when the Islamic emirates of Western Europe are more or less entrenched in the new Great Middle East, or in federalist Slavo-Russian Europe, when their fucking Odessa Treaty is finally signed, free cosmodromes will be regulated by “these damned bureaucrats and fucking big-ass maggots in the global government.”

The artificial water table serves mainly Monolith South, a research center on Von Braun Heights, and Freedom-7, the only more or less “middle-class” neighborhood in the area, as well as the wealthy areas west of the city. It also provides a natural border with the southern part of the county, where the insalubrious Omega quarter and then the asshole of Grand Junction, Junkville, sprawl offensively. The entire perimeter of the basin is closely guarded: the border is, in fact, a high-security wall. Plotkin had the history and geography of the place inscribed in his memory in real time before he began his visit.

He is, in fact,
terribly normal,
like a supertourist.

Upon leaving the hotel, he walks through a galaxy of airtight whorehouses, a host of third-rate bars, small flea-bitten motels, capsule hotels like his own, deserted parking lots and shopping centers, numbered police stations, barely maintained parks (really just hilltops left in their natural state), and a few apartment buildings grouped in tight blocks, typical of the residential structures in Quebec and Ontario, Anglo-Scottish cottages in red and white brick, divided into two or three floors of flats and separated by long numbered streets with no names. These “rows” extend through the woods up to Gemini Drive. Back now below the 30000 block, he begins to feel the city become denser. There is more electric light. It pulses.

He walks past android-whorehouses whose neon signs blare the merits of their “girls from the sky.” Indian casinos with names culled from Mohawk culture or the space race—or both—in this Franco-English mélange that is the official language of the whole territory, try unsuccessfully to imitate the giant Las Vegas establishments. Actually, this is a “freer” state than Nevada itself now, which had seceded during the first days of the Second American Civil War. Here, anything is still possible—even winning money at a casino.

Again, Plotkin is impressed by the incredibly fluid manner in which the instruction program can work—when it functions. It is like a living word processor implanted in his brain. As soon as any general, historic, or “academic” information becomes necessary, the neurosoftware and its linguistic nanocenter impart the desired knowledge so quickly that you feel you’ve always known it.

It is a residual morsel of the program, accomplishing its tasks without a hitch.

Continuing on, he sees a few exoskeleton-pedestrian shops, for people who want to walk faster. This phenomenon was a by-product of turn-of-the-century medical innovations in biomechanical prostheses for those who had been wounded, paralyzed, or had a limb amputated, and of military research conducted during the Grand Jihad. He notices that a large number of people are using these exoskeletons, sometimes mounted on wheels like Rollerblades, sometimes simply molded to fit their feet like orthopedic shoes from which several cables stretch up to the hollows behind their knees. The older models, which look like ski boots with shin guards attached to them, had never really gotten beyond the medical, military, or experimental phase. Now, nothing kept reengineering techniques from cobbling together for you—in less than an hour—a state-of-the-art biomechanical system and, if you had the money to pay for it, a portable system that could be incorporated into your own body and unincorporated from it just as easily—and, consequently, able to be sold or rented for a lot of money.