Cosmos Incorporated (26 page)

Everything electric has life.

That creates a new diagram.

A line of conjunction appears to link Neon Park and the artificial humans at the Hotel Laika. Here, the renegade androids must surely benefit from local complicity—more than they would with the Christian rebels, in any case. The residents of Neon Park seem disposed to see in an artificial humanoid being, imbued with electromagnetic energy, a vestige of their “living god.”

A new diagram. A very interesting new diagram.

But Plotkin is facing a serious problem. He doesn’t know anyone here. The place itself wasn’t even on the map a few hours ago. Not only doesn’t he know anyone, but no one seems to want to know him—him or anyone else, for that matter.

The streets are all but deserted, as if everyone lives behind walls or in shelters
under
those walls twenty-four hours a day, or almost. When people do walk in the streets, alone, their faces are generally in shadow, conferring on them the impersonal anonymity of worker ants in an ant farm. A very desolate ant farm.

There are no restaurants, but there are several dozen home-delivery companies. Plotkin counts two bars in the city; these are vast spaces of clinical whiteness, where an immense tiled counter stretches from one end of the room to the other. They sell mostly survival drinks, highly oxygenated and crammed with vitamins. People stay in the bars for only a few minutes, drink alone, and then leave. Alone. He decides to get back in his car and drive through and all around the city.

Alone.

Alone.

And it is precisely because he is alone that he is able to meet the other, become the other, become himself through and in the other, and then outside it, with it and against it.

He isn’t exactly a living being; he was not created through generation. He was created by an angel. An angel that writes and rewrites worlds, and who has decided to speak through the mouth of Vivian McNellis. He is the human counter-face of the neurodigital guardian angel Vivian provided for him during the first narrative. He is the Man from the Camp, the Counter-Man from this Anti-World that is covering the World little by little, as it extinguishes and depopulates it. A Counter-Man from the Camp, because in and
through
the camp he found the means to get out—or, rather, he
was
the means to get out—and to let the light of freedom in. From the camp, he has counter-produced what will give a human face to the World once more.

He knows he must use his freedom, use it in the same creative way as he did during the seven days of his neo-Genesis.

Because he is also and still, and always, something that was created in the Created World. He is also this physical structure of blood and bones and nerves and muscles and cartilage. He is this creature of flesh and
living electricity.

And he understands, in a flash of light, what differentiates the religious simulacrum of the atom worshippers from the terrible, absolute light born by the narrative of Vivian McNellis. The paradigm of Neon Park is the inverted paradigm of truth. In that, this undercity is truly a topological condensation of the Technical World.

Because the paradigm on which universal reality is based is
Everything that is alive is electric.

Because everything that is alive is light.

He is the master spy who came in from the cold, growing hot under the dioxin sky. He is still acting within the narrative-world. He is still tracking the narrative black hole that observes them from a singular time machine. He must save Vivian McNellis now. The narrative black hole is active. Anti-active. It seems to intensify the dangerous process by which Vivian McNellis’s chronic identity crisis leads into her
genetic transcendence.
Plotkin understands that, in itself, the phenomenon is not
evil.
It does not seem like the product of an intentionally harmful desire; rather, it seems like the consequence of an extremely singular act. He has the overwhelming sense that this “thing” is the direct effect of his own creation by the
corpus scripti
of Vivian McNellis. It doesn’t come from him; it comes, rather, from his shadow.

Plotkin is on a road in the southern part of the area. In the distance, he can see the gray masses of the insalubrious projects of Junkville and Omega Blocks, at the farthest point of the Independent Territory. They waver like dim mirages behind a wall of heat. The road was paved for the last time before the Second American War of Secession, the dashboard computer informs him. It is hardly navigable. But he drives. He sees a pale gray line snaking above the horizon.

It is a highway. It begins in the middle of nowhere, on top of a long series of concrete columns. The road he is driving on runs parallel to the highway for a half dozen kilometers amid a landscape studded with small, rounded buttes on which large shrubs and tropical trees flourish. Abruptly, in the crook of a sharp curve, the interchange appears. It is suspended in the air atop an imposing H-shaped arrangement of pillars. It is a knot of streets in a star shape that go nowhere. One section perpendicularly crosses the main road about a half mile down to create a vast gray crucifix; three or four incomplete bits of road crown the hard angles of the structure for several dozen meters.

Nothing here leads anywhere. Everything leads to nothing.

It serves no purpose, but its purposeless was not deliberate. It is no work of art. Still, in the ruddy light bathing the horizon and painting the landscape with an amaranthine glow, this eruption of incomplete architecture in the middle of nature, between two grassy buttes scattered with a few hardy maple trees, is astonishingly beautiful.

It is a part of the Cosmos.

It is a piece of the World. It is one of Nature’s narratives.

The rutted road he is driving on passes just below the incomplete interchange, following the course of a lazy river that winds sinuously through a landscape of stones and evergreen shrubs. It stops cleanly a bit farther down, suddenly replaced by the unbroken line of nature, leaving only the tiniest ochre trace of a road. Here,
everything stops.

Plotkin parks the car in the shadow of the huge highway interchange that leads nowhere, already being overrun by Nature’s floral recitation.

What counts is that someone, a long time ago, wanted to build this type of interchange here—to create this physical conjunction in this exact place. What does the map have to say about this bit of land? It says:
“To the west is the county of Grand Junction. To the south are the vagrant areas of Junkville and Omega Blocks. To the north is Neon Park, once the staff residence of an active nuclear plant. Past Heavy Metal Valley is the Canadian border and Montreal. To the east is the border of the Independent Territory, the border shared with the state of Vermont, and the cities of Plattsburgh and Burlington.”
The computer drones on. It says:
“There are service stations and shopping centers. It is a nexus virtually equidistant from the four cardinal points of the territory. Economic development, investments, profitability, dividends.”
It says—it screams:
“BIG MONEY.”
But at the same moment as the Grand Junction highway was born in the imagination of some local planner, general devolution was already beginning.

There was no longer enough of a workforce available to keep up the pension and social security systems inherited from the twentieth century, with a planetary birthrate then barely above 1.5 percent and kept there artificially using all the in vitro techniques imaginable at the time, though technoscience itself had struck an invisible ceiling twenty-five years earlier. The world of economics, the world of subjects and objects, was closing in on itself—subjects and objects mixed crazily in the chaos of perversion, the demented order of the
un-world,
which unmade itself using the same forces that had kept it alive for so long, but completely reversed. This highway knot indicates the paradoxical presence of a black hole. It ties nothing to nothing; it is suspended in the stasis of the posteconomy, the world of the UHU. It shows potential that was never exploited; it shows that the only true beauty of the Technical World is contained in its accidents—in what signals its end.

He must trust the narrative, keep his trust in the angel. This aimless nexus of the physical world has a specific role to play: first, in a purely cognitive sense, Plotkin has reached a critical stage under the unfinished interchange. This stage would prepare him for the next one.

He remains for a long time under the huge concrete structure, watching the sun set in the west behind the buttes of Monolith Hills, standing in low layers on the horizon.

He is looking for the singular time machine observing them while they cannot observe it, this “nexus” made in the inverted and intensified image of Vivian McNellis, but undoubtedly counter-produced by Plotkin’s own creation. This time machine should resemble the highway knot linking nothing to nothing, this “Grand Junction” that has remained stuck in a limbic world, not completely finished, not entirely fictive, connecting only emptiness.

Like the English images and the rock music from the 1980s. This interfering narration is a parasite that has managed to infiltrate him. Thus he is her—he was, though partially, written by her. This narration is the discontinuous and chaotic shadow of the primal narration, Vivian McNellis’s narration. She has become a part of him, enough so that he can locate her at work in the symbolic recitation of territories, in the fairy tale of the real, the fiction of maps.

One of the Order’s teachings, he remembers, went:
To see, you must not be seen.
This maxim came, it seems, from the universe of the Italian American mafia in the 1950s. It is said that the Order took the saying from a twentieth-century American writer named William S. Burroughs. There is nothing connecting the invisible Grand Junction to the visible one, the one that exists to the west. That is why it isn’t even on the maps. Undoubtedly, the nuclear accident at the Neon Park plant put a permanent end to the project.

The incomplete highway and the radioactive undercity form a schema that indicates more and more clearly the presence of this invisible nexus he is seeking traces of in the narrative-world. Neon Park and the abandoned interchange are correlated via their reciprocal impossibilities: Neon Park cannot hope to be linked to the World of uncontaminated Humans in any worthy manner; the interchange, on the other hand, cannot link any of the points in space intended by its planner. The unfinished interchange clearly shows that in order for beauty to emerge, initial plans must be demolished.

True conviction brings with it great serenity. What he is looking for has, or had, a link to Neon Park. It was probably conceived in the city of the atomic god—he is virtually certain of it, though he is going purely on intuition. What he is looking for has taken the form of this highway nexus in the middle of nowhere, open to the sky, connecting nothing but itself. The thought seems like more than intuition; a secret deduction has revealed to him that he is looking for more than an android, or pirated artificial intelligence, or a secret computer network. He is looking for more than a community of Catholic hackers or electronuclear worshippers. He is looking for the incarnate figure—the
human
figure—of the Technical World.

The knowledge is so complete that it cannot lead to anything but accident. Catastrophe.

It will most definitely lead him to what he is searching for.

>
DISASTROUS CONJUNCTION

The cabin rises up in the curve of a rocky butte, the small river winding through the rocky earth at its base, a little less than three kilometers southeast of the abandoned interchange where he left the car. He estimates the distance between himself and the little house at about three hundred meters.

It is one of those mobile homes that isn’t mobile anymore, a sort of long hut made of aluminum and cream-colored plastic, set atop blocks. Behind it, a rusting antique Dodge crumbles slowly in on itself.

There are two people sitting on the bank of the little river, a few feet from the immobile mobile home. Coincidentally, they have their backs turned to Plotkin. And just as coincidentally, the wind is blowing toward him. One of the people seems to be an old woman, smoking a pipe. And the other, the second “person,” is the dog from the Hotel Laika.

Headwinds and pipe smoke—two effective weapons against the cyberdog’s keen sense of smell. He silently thanks nature, both its vesperal breezes and its toxic substances. He switches automatically to HTS mode; his optic system notes each detail with precision, and he orders his combat neurocenter to crank his auditory perception parameters way up.

His eye is a telephoto lens. His eye is a visual espionage system. His eye is the Eye.

This is what the Eye sees and registers:

The woman is of a venerable age; her back is hunched. When she turns her face in profile toward the dog, Plotkin can easily see the wrinkles in her weathered face. She is smoking a mixture of marijuana and tobacco, frequently refilling her Eastern-made pipe with her long fingers, which are as thin and dry as cigarettes, and which seem to work independently like prosthetic creatures, rummaging in an antique leather pouch for more of the psychotropic substance that she then rolls into compact balls in the palm of her hand with her fingertips before placing them into the still-hot bowl of the pipe with a practiced movement.

On the mobile home’s door, Plotkin is able to read the following words, written in azure blue on an old gold-colored plaque, using his high-definition optical zoom function:

LADY VAN HARPEL

DIVINATION—TAROT—ASTRAL THEMES

ORPHIC TRADITION

UHU APPROVED

There is an obviously much-used parabolic antenna perched atop the trailer. Plotkin watches the graceful movements of a slightly more modern windmill’s blades, set on the tubular structure of a derrick wind trap from the preceding century. Various types of wild birds are in residence on the roof of the mobile home, as well as in the battered old pickup nearby, at the summit of a telephone pole whose wires were cut long ago, in the metallic structure that supports the windmill, and at the bottom of a sheet-metal container that rusts gently at the crest of a small, rocky spur that dominates the other side of the river.

The old woman and the dog are talking—discussing something calmly, but with the palpable tension of those who share a secret, a risk, a danger.

Plotkin’s audio implant reconfigures itself into an organic microcannon. Now Plotkin is an Ear. An Ear that hears everything, that registers everything, down to the thermonuclear language of the stars.

This is what the metaorganic Ear hears and registers:

“Have you talked about it with the girl? The android, I mean.”

“No,” yaps the dog in his semidigital language. “Right now I’m trying to piece the puzzle together without everything imploding.”

The woman laughs, stuffs the pipe with her verdant mixture, lights it for the umpteenth time. A thick cloud envelops them.

“Your new linguistic implant is working very well, Balthazar! Is it the work of that Russian bionic engineer in Neon Park I told you about?”

The dog seems to laugh as well, his shoulders rising and falling rhythmically. “Yes. A very talented guy. I don’t have the whole French dictionary yet, or the English one either, but I’m getting there.”

“How many words now?”

“Almost two thousand in each language, I think. French and English, I mean. I’m not counting verb conjugations. I’m reaching the physical limits of my amplified nervous system, unfortunately.”

“Good, very good. You haven’t spoken to the girl, then.”

“No. Right now I’m trying to convince the Christian rebels in HMV to accept her as one of them and to baptize her. Believe me, it involves a lot of theological and…how do I say it
…Christological
discussion for the whole community.”

“I see,” muses the woman dreamily, exhaling a greenish cloud that undulates like ectoplasm in the twilight deepening around them.

The sun has disappeared behind the white-capped anthracite bulk of Monolith Hills, which are just barely tipped with gold. On this side of the hill, blue and slate-gray shadows have settled over the landscape, the graveled slope of the butte, the small river, the mobile home, the smoking woman, the talking dog, and the birds repopulating the heights abandoned by man.

“And the Christian rebels, have you spoken to them about it?”

The dog does not answer. His silence is accompanied by an instinctive settling. He may be a talking dog, but he is a dog. He acts like a dog and speaks like a man, at a time when men act like pigs and speak like machines.

“Have you spoken to them, Balthazar? Yes or no?”

The dog snorts. “No. Well, not exactly. I told them there is a new problem in the hotel.”

“Did you tell them what type of problem?”

“I told them it directly involved Clovis Drummond and that absolutely nothing could be done from the outside. Without taking into account that the Hotel Laika belongs directly to the Consortium and is therefore protected by the cops and the most powerful mafioso on the strip.”

“Did you tell them it involves a
human being,
Balthazar?”

In the silence that follows this forceful question, Plotkin has the time to shiver a bit.

They are talking about him.
He has been detected by the hotel dog, who works more or less directly for, or rather
with,
this woman—this psychic like so many others on the strip, but who lives in the middle of nowhere, exactly where
roads do not lead.

But who does
she
work for?

“I told them it was a possibility, but that I wasn’t sure. Which was true at the time. Now we know.”

“Don’t tell them any more. At least not for the moment.”

The woman’s voice is of Olympian calm, but it holds a note of imperious firmness. She commands respect and imposes her authority without ever raising her voice, employing officious language, or ever letting on what reaction she is trying to provoke.
She uses her voice,
Plotkin thinks.
She uses it like a weapon.

“All right,” the dog yaps weakly.

“Are you absolutely sure of what you’ve said about Drummond’s trafficking in neurogames?”

“Positive. He is having them modified. He is actually playing a double game. He resells most of the stock and makes a nice little profit thanks to tax refunds. With just a few copies of the matrix, he creates a new type of sexual game, prohibited by the UHU, but…how do you say it…supracoded. It’s a safety measure, they say. Each copy is sold for a small fortune. I heard that piece of garbage say that in the Ring, physical transfers of software and hardware from Earth cost an arm and a leg; the poor colonists can only download things approved by the Ethical Control Network. Judging from the quality of the programs, he’s selling them for at least a hundred times what you would pay at a kiosk on the strip.”

“And the man you told me about the other day—that’s why he’s there, do you think?”

Plotkin’s blood runs cold.

“Yes, most likely.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I got some information from a fellow cyberdog working for the Vermont police. One of my best sources.”

“And what does your ‘source’ say, Balthazar?”

“That this guy is dealing in orbital drugs. He brings them down from up there, a hundred kilos at a time. The genius of it is that they then export a huge load of sexual software prohibited in the
other
sense up to the Ring. Understand?”

“Yes, I understand,” the old woman says, exhaling another lungful of smoke. Her fingers roll another ball of tobacco.

Plotkin, though, is having a bit of trouble understanding.
They aren’t talking about him.
They’re talking about Drummond and his trafficking. And they’re talking about the space dealer, Cheyenne Hawkwind. Still, he is confused. Their discussion seems to be orbiting a discursive black hole, something not said. A secret. A secret they won’t share even with the windmills or the birds living in them. A secret not to be shared even with the graveled bed of a river.

“And the other man?” the old clairvoyant asks.

“The other man?” repeats the dog.

This time, the Ear that hears everything feels a blast of freezing air. This time.

“Yes, the man you told me you were suspicious of, without knowing exactly why.”

“Ah yes, the one in Capsule 108. He acts strange for a so-called insurance agent, but I must admit there’s nothing specific there. He hasn’t left his room for an entire week, that’s all.”

“His card came up the other night in the tarot, I’m sure of it. It was with a Major Arcana card representing fire.”

“Strange,” the dog says. “The last time I saw him was during a small fire that broke out in the hotel, almost two weeks ago.”

“A fire?” repeats the old woman sharply.

“Yes, a short circuit in a double room. Nothing big, but I think it is related to the illegal activities going on under the dome. The man appeared on the premises in the speed of light. Remember, though, that that is apparently his job.”

“Don’t lose track of him,” warns the woman. “I think he’s more than a simple insurance agent. The number 108 came up several times the other night, during a double-power eight-bit geomancy session. It was at the center of a matrix of numbers representing the Fall. He is very likely a threat.”

“All right.”

“And whatever you do, don’t talk to him about anything.”

“No, of course not.”

“Do you know when Drummond is going up into the dome next?”

“He’s slowed his visits down a little, but probably in a few days, I would think.”

“Do you think
…he
will put up with this treatment for much longer?”

“Which
he
? Oh, yes—listen, no, I don’t know. It will depend on Drummond’s perversity, which in my mind is boundless. We’ll need to act.”

“The Christian rebels will not willingly help a ‘creature’ from Neon Park,” the old woman says. “Given their reluctance to adopt a renegade android, I don’t think there’s much chance of it.”

“The android isn’t really human, and some people are starting to say that it is possible to baptize an artificial being, if it can be proven that the being has a soul.”

“There’s no guarantee they will think the object of our attention has one.”

“We aren’t in Las Casas anymore. You’re wrong about this. The only real problem is that we can’t count on anyone’s help—outside or inside the hotel,” Balthazar says.

“Las Casas!” snorts the old woman. “Where did you come up with that reference to the Valladolid argument?”

“The rebel Christians talked about it the other day.”

“It’s night,” the woman says. “I need to get back, and so do you. Drummond will have you fired.”

“Drummond can’t do anything to me. I’m paid by the Consortium. Besides, I think he’s afraid of me, the scumbag. He should be.”

“Don’t do anything rash, though. I will ask the Holy Spirit for the help we need, for a great hexagram geomancy session tonight. I will find a way.”

“We must act quickly now. The situation can only get worse.”

The dog snorts, getting to his feet. The woman refills her pipe without saying anything more. The silence that falls indicates that the conversation is finished. Plotkin knows he needs to get away from there as soon as possible. He also knows that he probably won’t have the time to run the three kilometers down the road back to his car before the cyberdog is on his tracks.

There is nothing to do but walk as far as he can toward the interchange and wait for the dog to appear.

There is nothing to do but wait on the edge of the black hole, next to this incomplete and invisible Grand Junction, very near the singular shadow that this bit of land casts on the map. Nothing to do but wait for the much-anticipated conjunction.

The first stars appear, glittering, above his head.