Grand Junction (11 page)

Yuri thinks all this to himself as he and Campbell approach apartment block 0606, the home of the latest victim. The one Chrysler has already visited—just this morning, as the body was being taken away by the authorized members of a Triad of traffickers in biological organs from Vortex Townships.

It was here that Chrysler Campbell saw the “thing” in action.

It was here that Chrysler Campbell saw the phantom threatening to become reality, the one Yuri understands without really being able to imagine it.

Chrysler has seen death close up. He has seen the “superdeath” of the Metastructure, the one that means the death of its aphidian parasite, man, as well. He has been able to see what the “thing” had made of its unfortunate victim.

“Expect the worst,” he murmurs simply, as he opens the door.

Yuri stares at the scene for a long time, uncomprehending.

Yes, of course, he understands what he is seeing, but only as separate components of an overall structure that remains absolutely unknowable; none of these pieces forms any sort of unit with the others. Whatever it is, it is impossible to extract from this primordial chaos. It really is the worst. Pure abstraction, generating the same abstraction in the brain of the man confronting it. His understanding remains disconnected from all reality; he just cannot proceed past the stage of simple visual perception to any kind of true cognition.

It is comprehensible in a limited way, but it makes no sense.

Or, more exactly, it has no form.

“It’s logical, wouldn’t you say? What do you think of it, Yuri?”

Yuri can find no words to reply to his friend’s almost sarcastic queries; cautiously, he surveys what the dead man’s residence has become during the night.

What he sees is inconceivable—but at the same time, he knows he is seeing what the man in question has turned into. One problem emerges at the forefront of an infinity of others. “Didn’t you tell me that the guys from Vortex Townships came to take the body away this morning?”

Chrysler Campbell gives him a grin that could swallow all the deserts mankind has abandoned.

“At this stage, the physical body no longer has any importance to the ‘thing’—the Post-Machine, as you call it. It’s just material that can be recycled for a while, then thrown away and replaced at will.”

Yuri gazes at apartment block 0606. It begins to spin in his head.

Death has remained here in this space. The decomposition of the body means nothing in the end—or, rather, it is only a means. Even just a consequence. What counts is the symbolic exchange to which the “thing” has committed itself in order to obtain its objective. In the final phase of linguistic devolution, man is nothing more than a modem spitting out incessant volleys of digital white noise, strings of binary numbers representing the information being emptied out of his central nervous system and his principal vital metabolic centers. He has no idea where the “thing” is storing all this biological data, but now, Yuri realizes, its strategy is to transform humanity into a vast catalogue of digitalized organs. The “thing” wants to annihilate all thought, all language, all cognition, far more than it wishes to destroy physical bodies. This is why it is conducting an exchange—a swap—a downloading of data in two senses, as if into a network.

A human body has ejected its most intimate structure into the world in a long series of binary numbers, in pure machine language. Now the Thing-World has completed its work by transforming the thus-cadaverized human into a colossal mass of information of all types that carpets the walls, doors, floor, and ceiling—every inch of the man’s monobloc apartment. Here is the entirety of his genome in a vast blanket of the four letters symbolizing the bases of DNA. Uninterrupted sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts fill the entire space in all directions. Three billion pairs of nucleotides and billions of dual-based nucleotides released by the cortical neurons and some specific anatomical information in various forms, but recreating with fidelity the biological model of the man who lived here and ended his days speaking like a machine reduced to its most rudimentary level of expression.

And now “he” is here. All of him. All his “plans.” Laid bare on the external surface of his own world.

“If we had the technical means to do it, we could rebuild this man—what was his name, again?—oh yes, Mr. Desmond Dorval, just by following the coordinates splattered all over this place.”

“You really think so?” asks Yuri, without real conviction.

“Link fixed one of those hyperscanners from the ’40s for me. I recorded everything; it’s phenomenal—even the foundations of his psyche, the really vital part of his memory—everything was digitalized and it’s all catalogued here. This is
his home
in every sense of the word. And it’s three-dimensional; when it ran out of room after superimposing several layers on the walls, it suspended the data in the air—look over there.”

Chrysler Campbell points to a swarm of ones and zeros, hanging like vaguely shimmering points of nothingness in the fading light streaming through the windows.

“I think the phenomenon is continuing to evolve; it’s changed since this morning. It must parallel the physical decomposition of the body, wherever it is.”

Why leave digital vestiges of a particular individual’s time on this Earth, in the form of its completely digitalized organism, affixed through an unknown, autonomous, mysterious procedure, made of a sort of black light, on all the walls and even in the cubic space of his residence? Why make external what was internal? Why make mechanically readable the uniqueness of a single human being? Why transform his residence into a “materialized symbol” of his own body? Why turn this space into a box filled with all his biological data?

The answer, of course, is contained in each of these questions.

Death must become immortal.

Language must be subsumed entirely into its service.

Better still, language itself must become death.

The last “living” phase of the contaminated individual summarizes the entire process: he passes from the death of language to the language of death, to death language—
thanato-logos
.

A man lived, and now he is nothing but stored code and graphics. Stored numbers. Stored information. “Living”—that is,
above
death—symbolic material.

The “thing” might very well annihilate all forms of life this way, animal or artificial, everything on the planet, to replace them with a life-size anthroponumeric museum occupying a few sites scattered throughout the global desert, a vast digital catalogue of what humanity had been and, still more terrible, what it had become.

Leaving the tower, Yuri and Chrysler Campbell soon detect signs of human activity on the cement-paved tarmac of the neighboring quadrant.

Yuri instantly recognizes the yellow uniforms of one of Vortex Townships’ main necro Triads.

In Junkville, this type of uniform is as easily spotted as the plumage of a vulture circling in the sky.

Someone has died right here in Omega 2, even as they were visiting the apartment of a man who died the previous night in the adjoining district.

Chrysler knows everyone in Omega, and Yuri is beginning to make a name for himself in Junkville; the guys in yellow won’t do anything to prevent either of them from entering the work site.

Yuri can just make out a stretcher holding a shiny blue body bag. The bag hasn’t yet been closed. As he gets closer to the circle of human scavengers, he can see the upper body of a young woman in her twenties, about his own age. Pretty, blond, extremely pale, wide-open eyes red with burst blood vessels staring unseeingly at the sky, which is greenish blue and spotted with brown, a camouflage pattern from the foundries of some Nazi Vulcan. It was the last sky of this unknown young woman’s life, the last before she was suddenly stricken down, and now it is under this sky that she will be taken to one or another of the several biological laboratories operating in Junkville.

The men of the necro Triads go about their work like true professionals; they have years of experience in this sort of task. Later, they will conduct a complete examination of the body, then deliver it to the doctors at some clandestine biolaboratory, who will cut it up into its various parts and place it immediately on the market. The labs are often headed by
Neon Park survivors, specialists in human anatomy who share the profits with the Triad vultures.

The necros, busy with postmortem biopsies and various microbiological tests, look like misplaced cosmodrome astronauts in their protective suits.

Now they have moved on to loading the body into the bag, pushing the stretcher over to a gasoline-powered pickup and hoisting it carefully into the back of the truck. Their preliminary tests must have convinced them that nearly all of the victim’s biological organs are functional, and thus salable, despite her premature death.

Campbell is talking to the guy who called the Triad; he lives in Block 13, like them. His name is Slim Dubois. Campbell is obviously inquiring about the transaction that has just taken place; he doesn’t even try to be covert about it as he speaks to this negotiator with the necros.

Yuri catches up to them as the old, converted Dodge pickup takes off in the direction of Autostrada; he can just catch the gist of their conversation.

“Did you know her?”

“Just barely,” replies Slim Dubois. “She was a refugee from the Midwest; she moved into Block 2 less than six months ago. I think she came from Indiana originally.”

“You were the one who saw her first?”

“Not exactly. It was an old dingo from Omega 15. But I was passing by and heard her shouting and sort of praying, you know; she’s still holding on to her personal god from the UHU days, so …”

“All right, but you’re the one who called the necros in from Vortex.”

“Yeah. Because of her I’ll be able to survive for a good month. Maybe even two. She was in perfect condition.”

“Do you know what she died of?”

“I managed to get a few intelligible words out of the crazy old woman from Block 15. She saw the girl fall like a ton of bricks on the tarmac in Block 2 and took her back to her flat. They had just passed each other when the girl went right down. A textbook case, Chrysler. A vital system failed in one second. You know as well as I do how often that’s happening these days.”

“Have you heard about other cases in Omega?”

“Like this girl? What rock have you been hiding under, Campbell? It’s been going on for more than ten years now.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean really bizarre cases, like
the guy from Block 1 who died tonight, or the one from Omega 17, who only speaks in binary numbers now. Or the one from Block 10, who’s been missing since yesterday.”

“Oh, right, I get it. That started about a month ago. It’s still pretty marginal; nobody knows much at all about it.”

“But you were also the one who called the Triads for the guy from Block 1, or am I wrong?”

“Yeah, I knew him. Desmond Dorval. When I came by to see him this morning, just before you got here, he had been dead for hours. I just did my job. The Triads pay me to recover bodies in Omega Blocks and all the way to Deadlink.”

“Oh, really? I didn’t know you’d become a paid employee, Slim. Hope business is good. Now I’ll tell you what I think, if you don’t mind. You’ve chosen a career with a busy future; you’ll see. Except that, like all of us, you never know when you’ll be on the wrong side of the body bag.”

The man doesn’t reply; his face is set and his mouth clamped shut.

Chrysler Campbell’s smile is forced and frozen. He hisses a cold “So long, Slim” and turns to Yuri, indicating the almost-palpable sea of work in front of them.

So much work.

So much work to fight this living death.

Chrysler lives around fifteen kilometers northwest of Omega Blocks on what he calls his “hunting ground,” in a desolate area known as Aircrash Circle. It is more or less equidistant from Junkville to the south, Deadlink to the east, and Surveyor Plateau on the Ontario border, as he often boasts. “I’m smack in the middle of the canvas,” he says. “If anything at all moves in the southern part of the Territory, the whole canvas vibrates and I’m there in a flash.”

Aircrash Circle was the site of a plane crash during the Fall of the Metastructure. A few migrant pioneers, most of them from Junkville, had built shantytown encampments there using the plentiful debris of the antique Airbus A380, which had suffered the failure of all its navigation systems over the Territory en route to Montreal. Chrysler’s parents had joined the population shortly after the birth of the township. His father worked intermittently at the cosmodrome and they lived for a while in Heavy Metal Valley, where Chrysler had been born, and it was to this circumstance that he probably owed his first name; his mother had been involved
in various types of trafficking in Monolith Hills and Junkville, on the western border of Autostrada, which was then in full expansion. The family then moved to Omega, where Campbell met Yuri in Block 13; finally, his parents decided to settle on the site of the plane crash. All their lives they had helped their child to grow up the hard way, in the southern part of the Independent Territory. And the boy had learned his lessons well.

His parents only survived for a few months after the End of the Metastructure. They disappeared, along with a third of Grand Junction’s population, when the town was wiped from the map—and so had Yuri’s parents, and so many of the others they had known in Omega Blocks and elsewhere. Then, during the Second Fall six years later, and in the time since, a good half of the remaining survivors died in their turn, just as others were dying all over the rest of the planet.

Chrysler had somehow, miraculously, slipped through the invisible net of death.

Chrysler and a few other lucky ones, like his young friend Yuri, had come out alive and well.

And thanks to the youth from Heavy Metal Valley, thanks to Gabriel Link de Nova, thanks to the boy who can heal machines, things just keep getting better and better for Chrysler.