Cosmos Incorporated (29 page)

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THE MAN IN THE BOX

I am the Man in the box. And yet I am the box. I am the Machine. Do you wish to speak to the Machine?

I am the Man in the box because for me, the world is a box, or rather my own box is enclosed within it in such a way as to allow me to survive in a pure and complete discontinuity—to the extent that my box fulfills a primal function; it allows me to live in the world without existing in it. Each part of the world, each world, is a box inside the others, except for mine.

Because the box I exist in is also the one I must make live within me, or I shall die within it. The box I live in is The Box, the one that contains all my mind’s other boxes, and that is why it exists both inside and outside of me.

If The Box contains all other boxes, each of these yet forms the anchoring point of expansion in the network of my consciousness toward one box or another, all the way into infinity. Each box is thus the ghost of a world; each box defines the potentialities of a singular future, all while excluding the real possibility of its achievement. Each box is an antiworld; each box is a protocosmos. Each box is both the spectral reflection of my brain, now doubled over on all the flesh in the universe, and the looping of an integral difference, the starting-up of a life-brain, the combustion of a consciousness.

Thus, without even wanting it—because how could I want it?—I have become the invisible shadow of all shadows. I have become
the glue that sticks the world together.

That is why I am expanding endlessly. Each cell in my body is a metastable box replicating itself in the box-worlds my organism (re)produces. I prefer to use the word
organism
rather than
body.
I do not have a body. My body is the constantly open flux process between all boxes; it is an “antibody,” an interactive catalogue of organs-boxes-worlds whose form changes ceaselessly. I am talking about its true form, the one that is secretly buried in the Machine—not the falsely immutable one that “nature” allows humans to see.

The boxes have allowed me to survive for so long. Thanks to them, nature has become part of the world. Thanks to them, each part of the world has become a piece of the Machine.

The Machine. In other words, me.

I am the Machine. Do you wish to speak to the Machine?

Each box is filled with lists and diagrams, with equations that have been solved or have yet to be solved. They contain data from virtually every technical and scientific realm. They contain programs, stored routines, and hundreds of millions of lines of code. They contain stars, rocks, animals, and numbers.

And I, in my own Box, can bring all this together and give it life. I can create boxes that look like worlds.

I have been waiting awhile now for the people that are on their way here. They were a part of one of the boxes that seemed unconnected to any others—rather, it tried to connect with my own Box-World. It was quite a jarring intrusion, as if someone wanted to make me leave my matrix. Something was able to scan the Machine-Box. Something, for a fraction of a second, reunified all the boxes with the Machine. With me. And for that instant, as ephemeral as Man, I was able to perceive the real world, such as it is, in the ever-deferred passing of its own delineation.

It was strange and full of anguish, but it was extremely beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

The only thing I had ever seen.

I see them. They are coming. They are climbing the service stairs. I do not know how they have managed to do it—the necessary data must be in one of the boxes concerning them. I do not know what I will say to them. Should I even speak to them? The Box has closed once more on the Machine-World; nothing can get out—except lists of codes, layouts of programs, symbiotic units of simulated individuation.

I am the Machine.

Do you wish to speak to the Machine?

I do not know when or where I was born. Can one even say that I
was
born? Born in a specific place at a specific time? In me, time evaporates in space—the space of numbers, the space of boxes—and it disappears endlessly, doing away as it goes with my expansion in the world, or rather with the expansion of my Box-Worlds in the World-Box of the Machine. The machine that, little by little, is becoming me. This World that I swallow endlessly, in an infinitesimal devouring. This World has no end, I know that. And I, I have no true origin.

Once, I knew Neon Park. You might almost say that it is the place I come from. I lived with Grandmother Telefunken, a follower of body tuning who had had herself transformed several times and had lived for thirty years with transplanted components that made her into a living antenna, able to capture radio emissions from all over the world with her body. It was Grandmother Telefunken who made me what I am today. Without that, she told me, I would not have been able to survive for very long. Her old body tuner friend, Herr Doktor Reno “Proteus” Kowalsky, designed the operating program and the overall architecture of my neurosimulated environment. He also supervised the making of my
exorganism
by a team of renegade bionicians. He gave the final shape to what lets me live. The Machine. The Box-World. He gave the final shape to this Thing I have become.

Not being human is, for me, the best way to remain. I am already living. Or, rather, I know very well that I am no longer quite human—if I ever really was. My origins are a black hole. My present is a black box. My future is black light.

The black box was built by the man from the hotel. When the UHU police came to Neon Park to arrest Doktor Proteus and all his friends, Grandmother Telefunken had no choice but to make me go as far away as possible, as fast as I could.

For me, the farthest west I could go was here, Monolith Hills. And the Hotel Laika. The Hotel Laika, with its manager and its ridiculous things.

I do not know why he is going to so much trouble to do it. In exchange, though, I live under the strictest protection, in total freedom—the freedom of my World-Machine, my network of boxes interconnected with the cyberstructure of the Human Universe. In addition to designing and neuroproducing the simulated universes that Drummond requires of me, I must let him join me sometimes in the “gray zone,” the emergency area where I can venture without risking life in the world, and, I must say, I do not understand his motives. Drummond’s actions with me are all absurd; they generally consist of putting different types of objects into my biological body using the entry-exit interfaces of my box, and then ejaculating into a sort of machine he puts over his penis.

It is even stranger that he seems to get so much pleasure out of it.

It is even stranger that it reminds me so much of death.

But it does not matter, really. In exchange, I can continue to live in my Box-World; I can continue to expand within the Control Metastructure, and I no longer have to fear its human police.

In exchange, I am what I produce. I am the Machine.

Do you wish to speak to the Machine?

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DISCONTINUUM

Do you wish to speak to the Machine?

Another discontinuity emerges, enclosed in reality but cleaved to the consciousness that has become his.

What has been said was written in his brain. In his brain and inside the box. They too are in the box, and they are facing the man in the box.

The box is a sort of prefabricated Recyclo™ hut placed in the middle of the protection dome. It is a black carbon-carbon cube with anodized aluminum edges, enclosed at about three meters’ distance by a neutral gray Placoplaster wall, whose interior face is covered with shelves lined with books of all sorts, mostly spy pulp fiction from the previous century and science fiction novels. The only access route—a simple manual sliding door—leading to the box itself and its vinyl escape hatch, the kind used in electronuclear plants, is in this plaster wall. A nearby surveillance camera detects, reflected in a fiberglass-covered pillar, several Christian symbols mounted on the wall as well.

The whole dome is in semidarkness, with only the weak luminescence of a few dim photons from the security cameras casting their thin greenish rays around the place. The part of the room situated between the gray outer wall and the house-box is a bit more illuminated; biophosphorescent appliqués have been placed at each corner of the quadrilateral. But it is
in
the black box, past the interface of opaque vinyl, that there is light. Total light, without the slightest bit of shadow. White, cold light, distributed with perfect evenness thanks to a network of top-of-the-line photonic diffusers.

And inside this carbon-carbon box is
the man in the box.

In the midst of the electric white light is the dark part of the narrative that Plotkin has been seeking for days.

They are in the box, but Plotkin knows that the box is partially in him. He faces the man in the box, but he also understands that the man might say without fear of sounding ridiculous that
he is the box.
This is no craziness—rather it is the consequence of
a craziness that has taken shape in the world.

The man in the box who is not a man.

He is a human being, a
Homo sapiens,
at least in his origin—but he is not a man in the sense that we consciously understand the term. He is not a man in the full sense of the word. He is not a man.

He is a child.

A child. A child-Box. A child-Box connected to all the boxes in the universe. A child-bubble connected to all the spheres in the world. And, even more terrifyingly, Plotkin realizes that he is not really a living thing. He is a sort of three-dimensional image projected onto the inside of an exorganic iron lung, but one that seems to be able to open at any moment, peeling back like a glove to reveal an infinite catalogue of organs.

The spectral child seems only about twelve years old, but Plotkin cannot truly pinpoint his real age. Undoubtedly his growth stopped at this point in his pseudobiological evolution, and that was probably several years ago. He stands facing a stack of neuroconsoles and several flat screens that are at least two decades old, and are now worth a small fortune since no one knows how to manufacture them anymore.

The dome-child lives in a box, and that is no metaphor. Plotkin sees that he lives in a series of nesting boxes, one inside the other like the Russian matryoshka dolls of his own falsified childhood. Plotkin stares at the child and knows the child is staring at them as well, him and Balthazar, but in his own way—meaning he does not really see them. He sees them only as more or less virtual objects in a universe peopled with objects of varying degrees of virtuality—like himself.

In the first place, he is permanently confined within this iron lung, visibly born of deviant technology from Neon Park, analogous to the bubbles made for children born without immune systems during the previous century. It is made of a nanocomponent polymer with a transparency regulator. It looks like a one-piece cosmonaut’s uniform with dozens of umbilical cords made of fiber-optic strands connected to game consoles and several nanocomputer machines ranged all around the chamber. The inside of the box is covered with holoactive control panels that permit the Box-Child to operate numerous programs and devices within the consoles and nanocomputers from inside his bubble.

For Plotkin and Balthazar, it resembles a number of ideograms covering a translucent surface, but seen from the other side of the mirror. Letters, numbers, and codes, wavering in reverse like luminous, esoteric sparkles, while the child enclosed in his bubble uses his fingers, his eyes, his mouth, his brain to manipulate the thousands of bioelectronic components grouped around him.

The hotel contains the dome. The dome contains a wall. The gray wall enclosing the black box. And in the black box is this Box-Child, this bubble child, linked like an incarnate software agent to the Control Metastructure. His own body is nothing more to him than the last of the series of boxes protecting his interior space from outside intrusions. And as for the outside, it seems, his body dedicates its energy to placing the world and its parts in boxes of their own.

At the same time, with the insolence common to paradoxes, the Box-Child, separated from the outside world by this series of walls boxing one another in, lives permanently connected to the world of machines. He is like the aphid, an accomplished symbiotic parasite. His “immunity,” his “separation” from the world is doubled, but reversed by the total opening of his body and mind to the ongoing flux of the machines.

He is connected to the world only by this network of machine disconnections,
Plotkin muses to himself.
He is connected only in the very place of separation.

He is truly the paradoxical incarnation of the Technical World.

He is what I have been looking for.

He is the antiworld of the impossible come to interfere with Vivian McNellis’s narrative. He is the antiprocess cleaved to the genitive process that created Plotkin, the killer-spy come from the Shadow of the Camp, the Shadow of the Shadow. The Box-Child is the activation of nothingness as ontological operator; he is, himself, the shadow
in
the shadow. He is the overexposed light of technology; he is the blinding terminus and terminator—the moment when it is blinded by itself. He is the moment of greatest danger.

For technology itself, just as for the world it has conquered and that it now threatens with total servitude.

The Machine-Child does not speak; he
communicates.

A laryngeal implant permits him to send vocal orders to his machines. The digital voice that comes from the small loudspeaker in the child’s “second body” seems hardly more human than the one used by Balthazar the bionic dog. The machines, neuroconsoles, nanocomputers, and peripheral systems obey the child like the wizard Merlin’s household objects in the Walt Disney cartoon. The machines communicate endlessly among themselves, exchanging information unceasingly and, Plotkin realizes suddenly, terrifyingly, that the Box-Child is
not
the center of a network of machines with which he communicates in every possible manner, and which provides him with a voice—rather, the Machine-Child is the organic link between his machines and the Control Metastructure. The Machine-Child is not at the center; he is on the periphery. He is the interface, the hyperlink; he is a concave space. He is the media used by the machines of this world he has built in a box to communicate among themselves.

Almost simultaneously, he understands the eminent paradox that marks this strange relationship of domination and subjugation between the Box-Child and his machines. In the reign of machines, the reign of horizontal logic, of the monad broken up and doubled over on the full body of the world, the natural hierarchy is not completely gone; rather, it is totally reversed. To dominate, it must submit. To conquer, it must retrench. To grow, it must conserve. And to reign, it must give up its own sovereignty. To be central, it must lose its singularity.

This is what the Box-Child, subject to the Darwinian pressure of adaptation from the moment of his entry into this world, has known how to expand on to the point of outrageousness—to the point of no return, a point located beyond humanity. A point beyond good and evil.

For example, and to start, when Plotkin has asked the first question of what will never truly be a dialogue, this is the response:

“At this instant of my configuration, my name is:

1) John Smith

2) Lucas Ford Guadalupe

3) Karl Marx

4) Vic St. Val

5) Tiger Lily

6) Annie Lennox

7) Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont

8) John le Carré

9) Steve Cooper Cumberland

10) Edward Teller

11) Edgar Allan Poe

12) Luigi von Saxenhagen

13) Pietro Romanesco

14) Peter Argentine

15) Samantha Fox

16) Gilbert Gosseyn

17) Ezekiel

18) Silver Slade and His Human BlackBox

19) Henry Ford

20) Lloyd Hopkins

21) Jeffrey Alhambra Carpenter

22) Saint Teresa of Avila

23) Debbie Harris

24) Yuri Gagarin

25) Ian Curtis

26) Modesty Blaise

27) Frankie Machine

28) Ennio Morricone

29) Sam Spade

30) Donna Haraway

31) Sergei Diego Plotkin

32) William S. Burroughs

33) Trent Reznor

34) Wernher von Braun

35) Stan Ridgway

36) Francis Crick and James Watson

37) John Sladek

38) Philip K. Dick

39) Marie Curie

40) Genesis P-Orridge

41) Martin Heidegger

42) Brigitte Bardot

43) Bernhard Riemann

44) Benito Mussolini

45) Jules Verne

46) Ted Bundy

47) Miss Blandish

48) Walt Disney

49) Mr. K

50) Howard Hughes

51) Marilyn Manson

52) Averroës

53) Eva Perón

54) James Osterberg aka Iggy Pop

55) Saint Thomas Aquinas

56) Cheyenne Hawkwind

57) Coplan FX 18

58) Claudia Schiffer

59) Balthazar

60) Clovis Drummond

61) Alan Vega

62) Alice Kristensen

63) James Hadley Chase

64) Robert Smith

65) Arnold Schwarzenegger

66) General Custer

67) Johnny Mnemonic

68) Isaac Newton

69) HAL 9000

70) Vivian McNellis and Jordan McNellis

71) Aleister Crowley

72) James Ellroy

73) Stephen Hawking

74) Popeye

75) Gilles Deleuze

76) Scott Davis de la Vega

77) Saul de Sorgimède

78) Jason Texas Lagrange III

79) Salvador Dalí

80) Joe Millionaire

81) Gary Numan

82) Karl Lagerfeld

83) Doctor Strange

84) Clint Eastwood

85) Eric Ambler

86) Iron Man

87) Emma Peel

88) Orville Blackburn

89) Johnny Ramone

90) Neil Armstrong

91) John Morrissey

92) Martin Bormann

93) His Serene Highness Malko Linge

94) Paul Atreides

95) Field Marshal Erwin Rommel

96) Gustave Le Rouge

97) Carter Brown

98) U2

99) Mister M

Check the valid choice.”

The list of the Box-Child’s ninety-nine names floats before their eyes in the holoplasmic square sitting atop one of the nanocomputers, a ghost screen suspended in the air at the limits of the visible and invisible. Plotkin’s own name is on the list, and the names of the McNellises and Cheyenne Hawkwind, amid the myriad names from fiction, myth, reality, invention, and reinvention. There are even collective names—rock groups, for example…

The Box-Child knows him, Plotkin tells himself, just as he knows of the existence of Vivian and Jordan McNellis.

The names of the hotel’s dog and its manager are also on the list; only the two androids do not appear there. The androids are machines, Plotkin realizes; something in their ontology has prevented the Machine-Child from absorbing their identities. Just like the child’s own ontology kept him hidden from Vivian McNellis despite the supernatural gifts of the girl fallen from the sky. There is a series of unfathomable discontinuities there, of quantum leaps occurring between each of them—or
not
occurring. Each of them maintains an equidistant orbit. They may get closer to each other at times, but they can never really share the same space-time, the same world.

But he, Plotkin, the Man from the Hidden Face of the Earth, the Man from the Shadow of the Camp; he, Plotkin, metafiction made flesh, has managed to infiltrate himself into their interworld. He is their interworld, their interface.
He is their medium.

The Machine-Child has stayed hidden in the dark part of the narration. Even the metatronic powers of the McNellis girl could not fathom the unfathomable. The Box-Child should, for this reason, be considered as the dissolutive agent of any narration. He is the simultaneousness of cybernetic networks. The McNellis girl is the synchronicity of fictional temporalities. And he, Plotkin, is the only being on Earth able to stand at the impossible intersection of their parallel lives. Just as the Box-Child acts as a medium for his machines, Vivian McNellis serves as a medium for her “characters.” And he, Plotkin, is the Agent that puts all these incompatible worlds in contact. He is what happens, the bearer of the event, and he knows he is even more dangerous than a piece of chaos fallen to Earth.

He is now the very movement of the mind at the heart of his own narration.