Cosmos Incorporated (34 page)

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CELLULAR AUTOMATONS

Subatomic narration. Neuromancer on a forced forward march, inside the world that is creating itself.

Plotkin Capsule-108. Plotkin-under-the-dome. Supercord. Quantum correlation of the two plotlines.

After leaving the rhizomic exconscience of “John Smith,” Plotkin looks at the iron lung in which the barely human form moves feebly. The nanocomputers and their peripheral devices seem to be on standby mode; the iron lung itself emits only a weak gleam now and Plotkin knows he has released a sort of viral bomb, a semantic bomb, inside the child. He does not know when or how the bomb will explode, but he knows the detonation will be enormous.

The artificial girl is now back to her original organic/symbolic form, but she is not in the best shape. Plotkin finds her prostrate, pale, eyes half-closed, nearly unconscious. She is extremely weak.

He takes her back to her room; she sinks without a word into her helium bed. Out the window, the sun is sinking slowly beneath the horizon.

“Thank you,” he says, not really expecting a response.

But the bionic girl murmurs, in a trembling voice: “No problem.”

And Plotkin the Killer, thanks to the subtext Plotkin the Writer has provided him with, understands the meaning hidden beneath the words. “I have experienced life and death, good and evil, body and mind, the organic and the symbolic. I have experienced destruction and creation, and the risks inherent in both. I am ready now.”

“Yes,” he replies to the unuttered words. “You’re ready.”

Then, in Capsule 108, Plotkin brings the narrative-world forward twenty-four hours. Fast-forward. Light speed. Metatronic Black Box. He is on the strip now, near the hotel, with Cheyenne Hawkwind. They head south, toward the big intersection of Nova Express. They cross the metallic structure of Telstar Bridge.

“Clovis Drummond wants twenty-five thousand Pan-Am dollars for the Golden Track. Twenty thousand for the document itself, five thousand for him and me, to be split equally.”

Plotkin sees in the Indian’s eyes that the amount doesn’t hold a candle to even a small bonus, equivalent to 10 percent, of the price of a murder.

“How long?”

“Fast. We’re meeting our middleman tomorrow, but we’ll have to have the money.”

“You’ll have it. How do you want it?”

The Indian smiles. In his black eyes, gleaming like a hot brazier only a moment before, Plotkin discerns the spark of true humanity that is the basis of the inhumanity that has taken possession of this world.

“As you know, there are…let’s say, two separate amendments to our contract.”

Plotkin smiles too, and looks at Hawkwind with the pale blue eyes of the Man from the Camp. “Fine; first let’s look at the official affair. The Golden Track for the people in Capsule 081.”

There is little traffic in this part of the strip, but in the distance Plotkin can see the Nova Express intersection and the crowd already gathering on the street, a local replica of the flood of human damned plunged into the fiery river of damnation.

“I have a Centurion Trust account somewhere in Montana,” Cheyenne Hawkwind says. “Deposit the entire amount in there. It’s agreed with Clovis Drummond; he has access to the account as well.” The subtext is clear:
I’m screwing that bastard over but good.
“So then, for the…let’s call it the unofficial part of the contract. I’ve decided that twenty-five thousand Pan-Am dollars isn’t enough.”

Plotkin walks a few steps before replying. He and Hawkwind pass a group of transsexual partner-swappers, affiliated with an approved tantric rite, heading to a well-known club a little farther up the strip. In all the lateral streets he sees individuals and small groups converging: men, women, hermaphrodites, legal and illegal monsters. The number of electric cars increases; the ambient noise, the smell of ozone, the feeling of internal trepidation—all of it is beginning to create a very singular space-time, with its capsule hotels similar to the Laika, its motel-brothels, its dance clubs, its gladiatorial arenas, its neurogame arcades, its nightclubs. Night falls. Night begins.

“And just how much would you consider
enough
?”

“Double,” the Indian replies. “Clovis Drummond has a lot of connections in the city and he works for the Municipal Consortium—which means, Orville Blackburn and his cronies.”

The subtext all but screams:
I won’t be able to stay here long after the job. I need cash to get as far away from Grand Junction as I can, as fast as possible.

“Fifty thousand Pan-Am for a common store manager. You must admit that’s asking for a bit much,” Plotkin says. “Not to mention that you’re going to get a pretty little commission on the Golden Track.”

Cheyenne Hawkwind smiles. “Twenty-five hundred dollars? You must be joking.”

“And I’m telling you that you’ll do it for forty thousand, including your commission. Otherwise the deal’s off.”

“Don’t be like that; come on. Forty thousand is a deal.”

Plotkin gauges the effect he has produced. Cheyenne Hawkwind is a buyer; he would probably have come down to less, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he is ready, without the slightest qualm of conscience, to kill Clovis Drummond. To kill the only human witness to Plotkin’s stay at the Hotel Laika, to their passage through Grand Junction, all of them. The McNellises, Sydia Sexydoll, and even the Machine-Child. “Fine. Let’s not discuss it again. How should we proceed with this…amendment to the contract?”

“We’ll have to tread carefully. I want half in Grand Junction cash, and the other half deposited into a CitiWorld account in Micronesia.”

Plotkin walks a few more meters. Nova Express is growing closer; the lights of the strip glitter like a fiery serpent winding through the night.

“Okay. Just give me the necessary coordinates. And don’t forget that I’ll take your twenty-five-hundred-dollar commission out of the cash.”

Plotkin knows the money has no importance in itself; the important thing is not to drop the ball, to send a very clear message to the Indian killer. “I might also need the cash, because I have connections too, and if I can pay you forty thousand dollars I would have been able to pay the fifty thousand as well—your double—which means that I only negotiate on principle, and I have reserves.”
Don’t try to double-cross me, you prick,
warns the subtext. “You told me you’re meeting with your middleman tomorrow?”

“Yes, around noon.”

“One of Clovis Drummond’s friends?”

Cheyenne Hawkwind’s mouth twists into an enigmatic smile.

“Not exactly, but I’m sure you’ll understand that I can’t tell you any more.”

They are in front of a bar called The Ticket That Exploded, at an angle of the strip with Nova Express, that half-abandoned urban highway that connects the city center with the desolate areas of the frontier.

“Want a drink?” Cheyenne Hawkwind asks.

In Capsule 108 of the Hotel Laika, Plotkin the Scribe writes:

“I think we can drink to that.”

Disconnection-acceleration: the hours fly by in a new disconnection of the plot. Now Plotkin is walking toward the McNellises’ double room. But when he places his hand on the door’s identity scanner, reunification: Plotkin in Capsule 108/Plotkin moving in the world. They are reunified once more in the
Aevum,
in the circumspect time of the angels, in the discontinuous time of Metatron.

He is no longer in the Hotel Laika. He is under the interchange at the border of the Independent Territory, the incomplete interchange that leads nowhere. He is under the highway to nothingness, and, facing him, Vivian McNellis stands entirely surrounded by a globe of fire.

“Welcome to Deadlink. This place will be the theater for extraordinary events.”

“Deadlink?”

“That is the name the nomads of the Northeast have given it, the highway and its unfinished interchange that lead nowhere, like a ‘dead link’ in the network.”

Plotkin stares at the angelic creature, wavering endlessly between the visible and the invisible in the light of the Third Time.

“My God, you’re beautiful.” The words escape his lips in spite of himself.

At this moment, yes, at this moment he could fall to his knees; his legs quiver, his joints have turned to unstable jelly, and inside him a firebrand scorches its way from the pit of his stomach to the top of his head, incinerating his heart as it goes.

“Soon the Third Time will be totally incorporated in me. I will bear the image of the entire cosmos, like a process of infinite creation. For me, there will be no more difference between the
Aevum
and Earthly time.”

“Did it work?” Plotkin asks, almost feverishly. “Did I succeed in stopping the proliferation of your antiworld, the Machine-Child?”

“Yes, for now. My genetic retrotranspositions were able to begin. But the monopsychic Metastructure is still not destroyed; it is just sleeping…for a moment.”

Plotkin gazes at the fiery angel dancing before him a few meters above the ground. The solar aura glimmers on the concrete walls of the abandoned interchange. “I’m seeing one of the branches of the future, is that it? The one that shows me succeeding?”

“Yes, because if you do succeed, you will also be definitely reunited. Plotkin the Writer and Plotkin the Action will be reunited, and you will not only be free, you will be truly alive.”

“I assume that means I might die?”

“You already know that,” responds the young woman, haloed with light.

Divided once more, Plotkin is back in the Hotel Laika, his hand pressed to the screen of the door’s identity verifier, in front of Capsule 081. He is no longer in the
Aevum.
Barely a microsecond passed during the conversation under the interchange.

When the door opens, Plotkin is face-to-face with Jordan McNellis. His wan face, drawn features, the blue-gray shadows under his eyes—all indicate that he hasn’t slept in days. Plotkin is seized with a presentiment—no, a certainty, one as sure as the absolute faith of a convert.

The partition with 081-B is closed, but through the thin Recyclo™ cellulose wall he can see the presence of a light.

A light in the shape of a body.

A body in the form of light.

He knows the overall transmutation of Vivian McNellis has begun.

He knows that for her, now, it is too late, even as the details of the operation that will permit her to return to the Orbital Ring, the “land” of her birth, are falling into place.

Plotkin looks at Jordan McNellis. The young man’s eyes are filled with tears that sparkle faintly in the dim light of the room, like candle flames seen through a veil of fog. He too understands. He knows.

He too is a free man now.

“It really started yesterday, in the early evening.”

“I know,” Plotkin says.

It was just when he went back up under the dome with the android girl. Just as he succeeded in stopping the Machine-Child’s process of proliferation. A form of energy too great for the human mind to understand had been retained in her body for too long. She was retrowritten, in an explosion of light, in a quantum burst that illuminated in a single stroke all the metacoding information of her DNA.

The whole secret of the body-mind narrative.

“I want to see her,” Plotkin says.

“I think she wants to see you too,” Jordan McNellis replies.

“She can see me already.”

It is true. The body-mind of Vivian McNellis has incorporated the entire Created World now, not as a narration but as a physical singularity, and, in return, a solar light has broken free from her body in a sphere of pure splendor. She is already living in the
Aevum;
her entire existence is spiraling, ecstatic and suffering, toward the highest glory.

Beyond the partition separating the two capsules, Plotkin gazes for a long time at the body of Vivian McNellis, stretched out on the helium bed, floating about two centimeters above its surface, and surrounded by the same globe of fire as it was under the Deadlink interchange.

He studies her features beneath the light; she is pale as a moonbeam, her large opalescent eyes fixed on the ceiling. Plotkin knows that now there are only a few days remaining—perhaps less than twenty-four hours.

The Celestial Scribe is guiding her toward Him, higher, infinitely higher than the Orbital Ring.

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DEADLINK

Now: bright sunlight. A day so blue it seems to threaten everything. The morning is already hotter than a woman’s body pressed full length against yours. Not a breath of wind. WorldWeather forecast: a heat wave in western Canada for the next ten days; storms and tornadoes possible in southern Quebec and Ontario; average temperature around noon local time in the Grand Junction area, a little less than 40 degrees Celsius in the shade—well above seasonal norms for the first day of October. It’s going to be brutal.

Plotkin looks at Balthazar; the dog is waiting for him at the agreed-upon rendezvous point, on the North Junction road autobridge. The dog is all right. The dog is his ally.

“You went back up under the dome with the android girl?”

“Yes,” Plotkin replies. “And I’ll probably have to go again, alone.”

“You mean without the girl?”

“As for the girl, now it’s up to you to keep your promises.”

The cyberdog’s gaze seems filled with total empathy for the man he is speaking with, and especially for the artificial girl they are discussing. “Lady van Harpel gave her word. She’d never go back on it. We’ll take the girl to Deadlink.”

“Yes. The sooner the better. What do you know about the Christian rebels’ decision?”

“About her baptism? The discussion is still raging.”

Plotkin lets out a sigh. “They’re wasting their time in pointless debate, if you ask me. This girl is sexed and she has a conscience.”

“I am also sexed, and I also have a conscience,” says the dog. “That doesn’t mean I can receive the sacrament.”

Plotkin sighs again, annoyed. “This girl is artificial, but she is human. She’s one of God’s creatures.”

“We are all God’s creatures, and in this case she is first and foremost Venux Corp’s creature.”

Plotkin is silent for a long moment. He stares in the direction of the cosmodrome, where preparations for the Sputnik Centennial are in full swing. The hangars hum with activity; Platform 3 is full of people, miniature dolls, ants in blue, green, yellow, and orange uniforms. The first inhabited module rocket in Jason Texas Lagrange’s program is already on its launchpad; Plotkin can see the long white nose cone in the giant enclosure of the hangar.

To the east, North Junction burns in the high midday sun, tracing a reddish line through the hills, disappearing little by little into the amaranth-tinted tropical vegetation.

“A representative of the HMV rebels will be at the meeting point,” says Balthazar. “Whether they baptize her or not, Lady van Harpel will take care of her. She’s a very good woman.”

“The android girl is capable of giving of herself. She accepted the share of sacrifice inherent in all humanity. She opened her body up to terrible manipulations so I could get close to the Machine-Child.”

“I know,” replies Balthazar. “Don’t worry. They’ll take that into account.”

Plotkin looks at the cosmodrome to the northwest, against the backdrop of Monolith Hills. The cosmodrome Vivian McNellis will not leave from. The cosmodrome where everything happens, not only the history of men, but that of their dreams as well.

“Relax. Lady van Harpel is a very kind woman.”

The dog turns to the side for an instant, offering the android girl his best canine attempt at a kindly expression. The rented autocar approaches the zone, Plotkin in the driver’s seat, the position of total control; the cyberdog sits next to him, and the artificial girl is in the backseat.

Plotkin recognizes the scenery, less green and luxuriant than in the area around Nexus Road; here, at the border with the state of Vermont, the peaks are eroding and growing denuded faster for some unknown reason. Farther away, to the southeast, he can make out the very end point of the Independent Territory, with the large, dirty blocs of Omega and the scrap-iron hills of Junkville, behind a high curtain of hot air that makes the sky, the earth, and even the sun, with its killer rays, waver. Then he sees the elevated highway, the stump of concrete that winds between the hills and stops abruptly in the middle of nowhere, in a cruciform star pulled down to the Earth, a bit of the nexus become matter, cast off at the end of a small road and a drying riverbed.

Deadlink.

As Plotkin turns off the engine of the little rented Honda-GM, he glances at the dashboard clock and sees that it is noon. Exactly noon, 12:00
P.M.,
laid out in cobalt blue LED letters. At that very time, probably in a bar somewhere on the strip, Cheyenne Hawkwind and Clovis Drummond are buying the illegal Golden Track from their middleman, a Golden Track that will be of no use to Vivian McNellis. For her, Metatron has reserved a Golden Track of another sort.

It is noon. The anti-midnight, like the opposite pole of the
Aevum
she incorporated. It is midnight, and it is beastly hot.

Plotkin the Killer thinks all of this as he gets out of the car, because Plotkin the Writer—in Capsule 108, in this metaliving network that engulfs him now, a little like the halo of angelic light around Vivian McNellis—Plotkin the Writer is writing it.

They walk alongside the river, passing underneath the wide concrete nave with its routes leading in the four cardinal directions and going nowhere. They skirt the high graveled butte, and, like the first time, as they enter the valley, the hill cedes the terrain to a place he recognizes right away: an arid plain dotted with clumps of cedars and pine groves, small rocky hillocks scattered like natural cairns, their slowly eroding tops sparsely wooded with mutant evergreens, and, in the midst of them, the windmill, the old Dodge Ram 2500 truck rusting gradually on its axles, and the big plastic-and-aluminum mobile home, settled on its blocks by the riverside.

“Is this it?” asks the artificial girl, more curious than fearful.

Plotkin sees two motorcycles parked side by side in front of the mobile home. Gasoline-powered vehicles. Combustion engines. HMV. There is a sidecar attached to one of the motorcycles.

The sun beats down mercilessly; even the strongest UV protectants seem at their limits. The heat feels strong enough to melt everything.

“They’re waiting for us,” the dog says. “Don’t be afraid.”

In Capsule 108, Plotkin the Quantum Scribe lives the experience as he retrowrites it: He is not creating the story he is narrating; it is the story, he realizes, that is re-creating him. He is not projecting simple imagination-machinery; he is superprojecting his entire being into this imaginary plan that, in return, gives him access to the black box of the Created World. That is how he
sees:
his writing life is synchronized with the narrative life of his correlated double.

And his double, right now, is observing the scene before his eyes, coldly detailing the action from which he will partially withdraw himself in a moment.

There are seven “people” in the mobile home: Lady van Harpel, the dog, the android girl, Plotkin, and three other human beings, two men and a woman he does not recognize. He identifies the men in black as priests or reverend pastors. Lady van Harpel stands erect in the very center of the camper. She radiates the power of a sybil of the lost world.

And she holds Plotkin’s gaze unflinchingly.

“Here is the man,” Balthazar says, “the man I told you about. The man from Capsule 108.”

“I know,” the old woman replies simply, rolling a ball of tobacco between her fingers and chewing the stem of her pipe, without dropping Plotkin’s gaze for even a microsecond.

“And here is the android, Sydia…er, Sexydoll Nova 280,” continues the dog, slanting a sideways glance at the humans from HMV.

“Hello, miss. I hope you had a pleasant trip out here?” Lady van Harpel asks the question without even looking at the girl. Her turquoise blue eyes are still fixed on Plotkin’s pale blue ones, the Man from the Camp, the Fiction Man who feels as if he is being passed through a scanner, every inch of him scrutinized, a scanner much more sophisticated than the ones in the Metastructure’s aerostations.

“Yes, ma’am,” replies the android girl. “It’s just that it’s very hot today.”

Plotkin loses the staring contest. He lets his gaze roam around the room, which seems to serve as a trigger. Lady van Harpel comes out of her visual trance and addresses Balthazar directly: “This man, as you know, seems to be a double agent. He is on the side of both good and evil, which I cannot understand, but I am certain of it.”

The dog looks taken aback. “But—I told you—and we agreed—”

“I will not go back on our agreement,” says the old woman, “but I am quite suspicious that he might be a secret agent from the Council for Ethical Vigilance. If he is present at the baptism, we all might end up in prison for life. He knows enough to threaten our very existence. I hope you realize that.”

Balthazar looks downcast.

The old woman’s face brightens a little. “But, I conducted an important geomancy session last night, a hexagram. A very strange figure appeared, one that indicated both great hope and great sacrifice. And that is exactly what is in play, here and now, isn’t it?”

Balthazar doesn’t seem to know what to say. He is silent. No one speaks.

Finally, Plotkin says: “You’re mistaken; I am not a UHU agent. If I were, you would all be behind bars already.”

“You might be waiting to seize the whole network, catch us in the act…”

“I know all about your network. And as for catching you in the act, it’s already done. Do you want me to read you your rights?”

The old woman frowns and lights her pipe. Automatically, the air-conditioning system, already on high, turns on an antitoxic aeration vent placed in the very center of the ceiling, which sucks up the smoke in a whirl like a miniature bluish tornado. “Well, what are you, then?”

Plotkin looks again into her scanner gaze. “What do you mean?”

The woman does not blink as she says, “You are not human. Not quite.”

Plotkin exhales. Détente. Stall for time. A second or two. What a demonstration. This woman is no fraud, swindling people for a few Philippine pesos like so many of the so-called clairvoyants on the strip. She is powerful, and dangerous. He can see with absolute clarity that she was a stunning beauty in her youth.

“I am human,” he lies, “but I am an ‘amplified human.’ I work for a special organization—not UHU. Nothing to do with UHU.”

His first personality, that of the Man Who Has Come to Kill the Mayor of This City.

“What organization?”

“If I told you, I’d have to kill all of you immediately afterward.”

His words drop like stones into the pool of silence in the room, cold as a marble tomb.

“He works for a company of assassins,” says Balthazar, trying to help, “but I know he is a renegade. Why else would he be doing this, especially for free?”

“Exactly,” snaps Lady van Harpel. “That’s what I don’t like. No one does anything for free these days. It doesn’t fit.”

“Priests conduct baptisms for free, as far as I know,” barks the dog.

Plotkin realizes that Balthazar has truly become his ally, his friend, that he is defending him, like a devil’s advocate, to the terrible judge of Deadlink, just as he will defend him, fangs bared, against any physical danger.

“Do not compare the living vectors of the Holy Sacrament with this
…man,
as he claims to be.”

“You are impossible,” growls the dog, annoyed.

“Why do you not tell me the truth?” demands the old woman through a cloud of marijuana smoke. “You are hiding something. You are not what you claim to be.”

“What I will say,” Plotkin states dryly, “is that the only thing that counts for me is the word you just said.”

“What word?”

“‘Baptism.’ You said ‘baptism,’ and there are at least two priests here, as far as I can tell.”

“Something like that.”

“Are you planning to baptize her?”

The woman stares at him in silence, then at the dog, and then at the artificial girl who remains standing wordlessly, head slightly bent forward, eyes on the ground. Then she looks at Plotkin again.

She is scanning him with all her mystic senses. He does not drop her gaze; instead, he makes the most important decision of his life. He opens himself completely, like a flower, like a peeled-back glove. He projects the entire truth into the clear blueness of her eyes, and he sees her recoil, as if stricken with a lash. The fiftyish woman accompanying the priest takes her by the shoulders. “Do you feel all right, Lady van Harpel?”

“Lord…” the old clairvoyant murmurs, sinking heavily into one of the worn old armchairs scattered about the room. “All-powerful God…please proceed with the baptism of this young woman, Father.”

“I’m Father Matthew Rowe Newman,” the older man says, approaching the android girl. “I am Anglo-Catholic. This is Mrs. Mary Jane Kirkpatrick, who will assist me.”

The fiftyish woman steps forward and shakes the girl’s limp hand. Plotkin can already see how the android is transfigured. Something shines weakly in her eyes, and there are traces of tears on her lashes. He sees—yes, he sees that she is
ready. She has a soul,
he says to himself.
They’ve realized that she has a soul.
And for the first time in his “life,” he feels as if a heavy weight is crushing his rib cage. And in his eyes, too, salty moisture wells.

“Do you have witnesses?”

Plotkin realizes that the artificial girl has turned toward him. He feels his entire being devastated from the inside. He throws a glance at Lady van Harpel, who watches him coldly from her armchair. “I’m sorry,” he replies to the android’s unspoken question. “I can’t be your witness, Sydia. I’m not baptized.”

Father Newman smiles widely. “If you like, we can easily—”

“No,” Plotkin cuts him off. “I don’t think I’m quite ready for that.”

“Very well,” says the priest. “In that case, Lady van Harpel and Sir John Sommerville, our friend from the Presbyterian community, will serve as your official witnesses according to the agreement reached between our two churches. Will you accept them?”

“Yes,” answers the artificial girl, her eyes filled with fresh tears.