Cosmos Incorporated (22 page)

“Because my narrative is cosmogonic. It is the hallmark of light of the angel Metatron, the scribe of God. It is what wrote you, and what has unwritten part of the world to do it. The camp gave birth to you; you are its child, its counter-child, because I am carrying it inside me. Now you must understand that nothing will ever be like it was before.

“Now that the ontological collision has taken place, now that the two mutually exclusive worlds have folded into each other,
into the space of a narrative,
now that a story has taken form in you,
now that you know,
now, you are no longer a non-man. You are no longer only the
Counter-Man from the Camp.
Now you are a free man. And you will quickly understand that there is no more dangerous condition on Earth than that.

“Because now we are there, all three of us, in Capsule 108 of the Hotel Laika.”

>
GHOST IN THE MACHINE

“We, the angels, are the
technology
of God. Created but infinite, our time is that of the Monad. We are the black box of God, cognitive induction cones, intellects-agents neither separate nor simple extensions of the Unique, but still synthetically disconnected from Him. We are closed/open. We are quantum fields whose individuation emerges only at the severance of all severances, like at the pivotal point of our time machine, where everything is numbers, everything is code; everything, paradoxically, becomes manifest presence.”

This is what he is hearing, this voice that seems to be present in everything and nothing, part of every subject in Being. The voice is inside him, singing inside him, resonating to the other end of the universe. They are at the Hotel Laika, Grand Junction; Capsule 108, in
her
room. They have translated themselves here, and everything is surrounded by a halo of light, like the distant echo of a furnace, and he hears the voice. The voice—the voices—the multiplex of the Single—divine technology. And yet, here the most absolute silence reigns. Even ambient noise has been erased from the spectrum.

It is night. Through the vast window the three of them stand facing, Plotkin can contemplate the absolute darkness of the sky, pricked with stars
that do not sparkle.

The stars are turning. No. It is the sky that is turning.

No. It is the entire hotel, pivoting on its axis.

No. The entire hotel is floating in space, somewhere in the Ring. And he, and Vivian McNellis and her brother, are floating weightless in the capsule. They are in orbit; they are at the junction of multiple worlds. They are in the Third Time.

“How are you doing this?” Plotkin asks, trying stupidly to gain his footing in the transmuted reality of the capsule.

“It is what I am. It is what I do. I am a living narrative,” replies the young woman.

“So, you invented me. I’m not really a flesh-and-blood being, then? I’m…a simulacrum, like my own digital angel?”

The sparkling laugh makes his heart beat faster, and he does not really know why.

In this capsule shimmering with gentle starlight, the face of Vivian McNellis is almost indescribably beautiful. It literally makes him tremble. It seems easier to imagine killing a man—a German tourist, an Islamist agent, a Mexican mafioso—than to float gently halfway between floor and ceiling and face this otherworldly beauty. This beauty that comes from the Other World.

“Yes and no. You are a neuroquantum being, but not like your software agent. Because that ‘angel’ is only a mechanical, Earthly manifestation of some powers that Metatron, the true Metatron, has given me. I have been your guardian angel. I created it at the same time as I created you, modeled on the ones that exist in the World Below. I admit that, in a way, you are correlated, like the true Enoch and Metatron. You are both permanently located in the interface that joins the two mutually exclusive worlds. But you—you are the Counter-Man from the Camp; you are my fiction, and the golem of my own narrative. So I have incorporated you into this world. You are a line that continuously connects the real to the infinite. You are a paradox, an impossible truth, but you are compatible with all others. You have a real physical existence, yet you have never existed. Your body is real, and even your thoughts are…well, let us say relatively independent…at least right now. You are there in files, digital networks, databases; you are even there in the memory of people who you have actually never really known. Yet it is also true that they know you.”

“Why have you done this?” Plotkin asks.

“Why? To get out of the camp. Your creation was an indispensable part of the process. I had to create a fiction-world capable of letting us break away in the black box where everything is being permanently recoded and rewritten. And here we are, now, and we are going to need you.”

Things become clear again, just for a few moments. Clear like the mind of a hired killer. He is free, but he remains an instrument. An instrument in the service of angels.

Directly in front of him, floating in the ionized air of the hotel room, now permanently become a space capsule, this apparition of fire and beauty created by some unknowable miracle represents the truth for him, in a combination so absolute that it defies the impossible; it touches on the potential destruction of the Universe.

It is good that he is her creature, this girl fallen to Earth. No state—no other state—could compare to this raw, clean, incredible feeling. All the tiny flashes, each furtive intuition, the spectral apparitions of this sensation, an interior music in harmony with what hides in the presence of everything else, like when he drove toward Heavy Metal Valley in the early hours of the morning—all of it has become a concrete ontology, a mysterious presence manifesting itself down to the very depths of his being, all of him, flesh and light, fiction and reality, world and simulation.

It is clear that his freedom will consume him, and that it may claim his sacrificial existence if he puts himself completely at its mercy.

It is because he will be her instrument that he will become free.

Now everything in him has been incorporated. He is written. He is in the service of an angel. He will be free, and he will become what he is, no matter the cost. He will fight all the power of the reunited world, if he must.

“Take us back down,” he says. “We will have to concentrate our strength against the World Below.”

The young woman smiles. The sparkle in her eyes is lodged within him like the hard point of a volcanic rock newly ejected from the furnace. He knows that this point has been planted within him like the flaming sword in the Garden of Eden. It will only be extinguished with his life.

And probably not even then.

>
SEVEN DAYS

On the First Day of Creation, God created the heavens and the Earth. In the same movement He separated light from the shadows. Spirit breathed over the Abyss opened by this single act, an act of initiation, of
fiat lux,
of the generating Word-Act-Light of everything.

It is a beautiful morning; the sun shines its golden rays on a childhood lost forever, filling the parallepiped room with amber light, full of joy generously dispersed by a whirl of pollen. The phrase is clean and precise in his memory:
The first act of any creation is to separate from oneself that which does not yet exist.

No dreams. His habitual sensation of infinitesimal digital discontinuity. And the sentence about the First Day, written on the blank page of his morning memory.

He does not remember when or how Vivian McNellis and her brother left his room. He had simply fallen asleep at some point; he had lost consciousness; he had left the world to awake immediately in the morning, with a phrase from Genesis written on his memory. It wasn’t simply an inscription on his mental screen; it seemed like the harbinger of more phrases to come. The words seem to reproduce not only Creation as a product, but the Creative Act as a production. A voice wishes to speak; it produces phrases in his mind without his even desiring it. For example, this one:
Man is the indivisible, infinitely divided.
Or, even simpler:
I am not; therefore I think.

Even stranger is the fact that these Latin interjections and biblical phrases in his cortex, and on the room’s digital notepads, have now been more or less explained to him by Vivian McNellis: when their two quantum-narrative fields “collided,” since Plotkin’s arrival at the Hotel Laika, moments of supertension have jumped from his brain to hers, and she has not been able to control certain neuroconnections between her own brain, the software agent, and Plotkin. On the day of the fire and the ontological crash, an
accident
had actually taken place, a brutal feedback effect. The software agent’s flame had taken shape in his room, but in the form of a
real
fire. It had taken him several minutes to get this incendiary creature born of his own mind under control.

But, thanks to this paradoxical materialization of the false digital angel and his destruction, the meeting had happened—the overall swing of the narrative was in progress—and the destruction of the initial plan had happened as efficiently as if it were part of the only true initial plan.

Plotkin is stretched out on his helium bed. The model of the city, where the repeated beam of the rocket illuminates the dim room with rhythmical bursts of digital light, is set up in the neuroencrypted part of the chamber invisible to the hotel’s security camera; it hovers very slightly above the bureau-terminal. It shines with a slight old-steel gleam, as if covered by a strange temporary patina, eroded by winds blowing from nowhere.

Everything seems to float. Him, especially; freed from a corporal envelope left four hundred kilometers below, but also objects that have completely lost their meaning as
objects,
like the persistent flame of the neuroencrypted agent hovering somewhere in the upper northwest corner of the room, and the replica of this city whose mayor he has come to kill, the replica of this city silently repeating, in the pure photonic scan of disaster, the crime he is preparing to commit.

Everything floats, even the crime, as if it is in a zero gravity chamber. Everything seems to corroborate it decisively; the link that joins Grand Junction and the Orbital Ring is indeed that of a secret, invisible economy necessarily lodged deep within the visible, official one. This secret economy has been revealed to him by what formed the “course of his life”: his own birth, his entire existence makes no sense except as an organic support for this revelation. There is no longer any doubt that he is acting within the counter-economy of absolute freedom.

The light is probably there at his door. The Great Light the McNellis girl talked to him about in her speech—the speech within which he exists. But the light can shine only dimly without burning. The girl cited an ancient Christian writer, Denys the Areopagite:
Fire that does not bring light is not fire. Light that does not burn is not light.

On this first day after Vivian McNellis’s speech, on this first day after his transnarrative experience in the body of two other people in one, twenty thousand kilometers away, months before today, in Health Containment Camp 77 in the district of Hong Kong; on this first day after the re-creation of himself via the experience of another—his unitary re-creation via the experience of a multiplicity other than his own—yes, on this day everything is light, and it is all telling him that he must let it consume him entirely.

Fire, undeniably, is a recurring symbol. No need to consult a card reader in Leonov Alley to know that this is a sign.

A sign of great danger, and of very great freedom.

He decides to let the day break and pass, then fall into shadow. He does not sleep. He waits for the next day.

On the Second Day, God separated the waters from the sky. As it had been on the First Day, the Earth was unformed and empty. Spirit breathed over the Abyss. But already, just after the division of shadows from light, it was clear how the infinite division of God separated and unified at the same time.

At dawn, a phrase emerged from his half-sleep:
Any act of creation that does not divide its own divider can create nothing but itself.

To create something different from himself; for a motor of repetition and difference to produce a world of simultaneities and asynchronisms, a world of events and variations, the creative act must divide its own division, its own disjunctive synthesis.

Vivian McNellis has transcribed Plotkin into the World via the narrative black box of Metatron, there where the network of disconnections reconvenes in the One. She has separated him from the Abyss to reunite him with the World. In him, she has separated light from shadow—but now, so that the process may act as Grace, as Freedom, what has been divided must be divided again, and so must
that which has done the dividing.
The gestating world must be separated once more from what it is, so that it will become what it can be. In the World, it is the World itself that initiates infinite division. It is the World itself that must divide in order to reproduce.

That is why the second divine process of infinite division consists of cutting the operator off from its own operation—of folding the World back in on itself—of causing the process itself to divide and the processor to become its own divider. Then, and only then, anything can happen. Cut off on the second day, infinite division can happen only according to the theological plan of Creation: the co-invention of Man by God, and of God in Man. It does not loop back on itself in infinity; rather, it creates a circumvolution that returns it from Infinity to Nothingness, to zero. It creates the possibility of life as an origin endlessly resumed and projected, as if
overstitched.

The world of Unimanity resembles, feature for feature, this process of infinite division looped back upon its own false infinity. Human UniWorld has not been cut off by anything, even itself, because it is nothing more than the ghostly atomization of a world reduced to a horizontal, underground rhizome, its opening barred by its systematic opening, its total transparency a paradigm of new lies.

Plotkin understands that this knowledge comes as a result of his own genesis, of the destruction of the genetic operative program that served as the initial phase of Vivian McNellis’s plan. It is the shadow cast by the knowledge that the girl fallen from the sky assimilated during her childhood in the Ring.

He is not the residue of experience; he has a crystalline form of his own.

He is free, because he comes from the camp.

He is alive because he cannot content himself with simply being a ghost, a golem with no language but that of Death. He is the
revival
of an ontological crash. He is the second coming of himself within another’s experimental limitations.

The first sign of this freedom is an event that seems catastrophic at first: the ebbing flame of his software agent reaches the extinguishing point. It disappears from his neuroencryption field and he can do nothing to prevent it. But, after an initial period of anxiety, he realizes that there is nothing mysterious about it. The creature was a fiction even more fictional than him. It was the projection of Vivian McNellis’s spirit into his consciousness.

And he believed himself to be spying on the other residents of the hotel! He realizes that the powers seemingly possessed by the digital replica of Metatron were really those of the girl fallen from the sky, converted to fit within the world of digital creatures and false angels of the World Below. In the World of Unimanity, Intelligent Software Agents are the mechanical equivalents of angels. They are intellects synthetically disconnected from the Unique—or rather, from its horizontal terminal representation, that of the Control Metastructure, the network of networks, the global cybernetic machine, the one that comanages the planet along with the governance bureaus.

Now, though, everything has changed. He
knows,
with all his newly minted being, that
everything has changed.

The original plan contained the principle of its own annihilation.

In the conversations preceding their departure from the chamber, it seems to him that Vivian McNellis insisted on the real character of his fictive existence. He truly did agree to a contract with the Siberian mafia; his existence, however
created,
however artificial, was made possible in this world thanks to the miracle of Logos, to the infinite Folding, to the inductive cone of the angels, to Metatron’s black box.

But what does it matter now, this mercenary pact with some part of himself he didn’t even create? Who cares about this mayor of the city he came to kill? What does it matter, the initial plan, the plan to Kill the Mayor of This City?

The virtual replica of the city now displays the faded colors of several centuries; it looks like an ancient ruin that spent millennia in the crypts of a Sumerian video game. He stares for long moments at the digital copy of the city that disintegrates slowly now, gradually vanishing beneath coal-colored pixels, falling apart in fractals and polygons under the assault of desert simoons. The launch and explosion of the magnetic rocket are like the collapse of a dead star, a meteorite tracing slow-motion curves of anthracite, causing little more impact now than pale sparks and clouds of digital powder. The plan of the city is dying; the plan of the world, and that of his initial existence, are dead.

The plan of the city, just like the city of the Plan, the plan of the initial narration, the initial narration of the plan, are fading away. The Intelligent Agent has just left its last sparkle in a corner near the ceiling.

The neuroencrypted flame has gone out, because it became completely useless. It no longer had a reason for being, so it has returned to the digital nothingness it came from. Now the angel Metatron, the real one, is incarnate—however temporarily and quite partially—in the body of this young woman living at the Hotel Laika, this body-spirit that created
him.

The only thing that counts is that the world is as new as he is.

He can let the day do its work and wait for the third morning.

On the Third Day, God continued His work of infinite division linked to His word processor. He separated the sky’s lower waters from its upper waters, and in this way created the sky as well as the earth and the water as its by-products—themselves born of the separation-division of their matrix into its lithospheric and aquatic forms. The process was already that of a
cellular automaton—
from the moment of this triune separation of water, sky, and earth, LIFE appeared. Via this single divine enunciation, the first plant species emerged—that is, prebiotic proteins made their appearance on Earth. These
protocreatures
already contained all the information necessary for the creation of biological life: RNA, DNA—they were already programs set in intermediary stasis. An interface awaiting its
bootstrap.

On the Third Day, then, God created life. The ontological operator of infinite division, folded during a third iteration, had obviously made a quantum leap: macromolecules in the form of simple, divine, cellular robots appeared. They did not yet have any specific space or time; they were born, lived, died, and were reborn again, each time being completely different and completely undifferentiated from the preceding lines, because they were not yet being born in generations—they were monoclonal structures. What differentiated them—their only differences—lay in the genetic “destination” of robots by natural selection.

He needs to see Vivian McNellis again. He needs to find her, because he senses something. He gets out of bed, showers, eats breakfast, dresses, and opens the door of his room. The girl is on the other side of it. She looks at him a bit timidly, brow downcast. Her presence seems the most natural thing possible at this moment. Plotkin doesn’t say anything; he merely steps aside to let her enter. She walks to the far end of the room and looks out the window at the cosmodrome. It is his move. What is he sensing?

“You told me yesterday that from here on in, you are no longer directly in charge of the story. Is that right?”

The girl turns toward him, her profile outlined against the window. Her long silhouette is quicksilver in the dawn light, and she doesn’t show the slightest pity for Plotkin. “Yes, that’s what I told you. You’re free. You have been, more and more, as the narrative of your creation unfolded.”

“And am I really the only ‘fictive’ being that you incorporated into this world? I want to be totally clear on that point.”

“Yes; what are you trying to say to me?”

“I’m trying to say that if I’m free, and if the other people living here weren’t created by you, then what will ensure a coherent narrative from now on?”