Grand Junction (62 page)

Two or three days later, while the sheriff’s men and several groups of HMV volunteers are distributing the last newly repaired radios throughout the Territory, Link goes to the home—still under construction—of the two bounty hunters, these men who have watched over both him and the Library unfailingly, two big brothers living constantly at the edge of the abyss to keep him from falling into it.

He walks quickly toward their cabin, where Campbell is working and Yuri is absorbed in reading a thick volume that can only have come from the Italian cargo.

He says hello, makes some small talk, asks Yuri what he is reading. “The Prologue to the
Ordinatio
—an English translation. John Duns Scotus, you know …”

He asks Campbell how the work is going. “Everything should be finished in three or four days at the most. It would have been finished a week
ago if your father hadn’t made the mistake of lending Yuri those fucking books!”

Link laughs.

Then he looks at each of them in turn, with the fire of the night in his eyes.

They both understand, instantly, that something is going to happen. The three of them know one another too well. Yuri and Campbell look back at him silently, ready for anything.

Except that.

Link explains his plan to them.

His plan to fight the devolution of humanity
from the inside
.

“The Hotel Laika again? But we went there with you two months ago and—”

“The situation has changed since then, Chrysler. I couldn’t control all the elements; I didn’t have the entire gift yet. Now I know, and I’m ready.”

“Ready? Ready for what? We saw the coded trace of the Metastructure in the local interface, just like you. It’s very interesting, because it shows that the alphanumeric mutation was ‘contained’ in the other phases of the devolution; it seems to be the departure point and the arrival point, both at the same time. We’ve already talked about all this, including with your father.”

“You don’t understand, Chrysler. It isn’t just about connecting a mass spectrograph to the exoplasm in order to look inside; not anymore. And that trace doesn’t show only the specific dynamic of the Thing; it proves, once and for all, that it really was from here, from this local microsystem, that everything took off. I don’t understand why—none of us do.”

“In other words, we’re no farther along than we were at the beginning of the year.”

“Possibly. That’s why we need to go there. Not just to observe a fossil trace through an exterior device, however sophisticated it might be.”

“Yeah? So? What do you want to plug in?”

And Link smiles, a luminous smile full of solar joy, and Yuri understands immediately, even before the boy opens his mouth. Oh no …

“Me, Chrysler. I want to plug myself into the interface. I’ll go inside the aqualung and restore all the systems to working order.”

“All of them?”

“Yes, first the exoform and then the interface, the local network, and why not the MegaNetwork itself?”

“I’m following you. With a shortwave radio and ten or twelve thousand radios, we’re confined to the Territory. And I understand your strategy—attack the whole entity from its original point of singularity.”

“Exactly, Chrysler.”

“I know. But the network never really had any real existence; that’s what permits the Thing to keep progressing. There’s nothing material to repair, because the Metastructure was the integrative form of Humanity.”

And once again, Yuri anticipates the boy’s response:

“The Thing is the antiform of an entity that did not exist in itself; neither can exist except via ‘hardware platforms’ represented by humans themselves. I want to reactivate the anterior program so it will interfere with the devolutionary mutation.”

“There was no program in the strict sense, according to the Professor, just chaos governing itself after the primordial ‘ignition.’”

“There you go. I want to play the role of that ‘bootstrap.’ I don’t quite want to reproduce the initial ‘autopoiesis,’ exactly, of course, because that was incontrovertibly singular. But I can try to start the
process
over again.”

Yuri closes his eyes. Link does not even need to read the books in the Library; he alone
is
all the books it contains, every one of them.

Living man/dead network conjunction. Input/output. Mechanical/ organic connection in an extinct monad, open to infinity within its own enclosure.

The aqualung, that strange exoplasm, sized for a child and able to contain a whole world.

The black box, its interior strewn with a few computer devices, none of them connected to one another, none of which have functioned in years. The local network interface in the wall, inactive for just as many years, if not more. The coded trace, the “signature” of the Metastructure, or rather of its disappearance, crystallized here in a single microsystem.

Yuri draws rapid diagrams. It was at the moment of its annihilation that the immaterial, “Metamechanical” entity was able to take form, to individuate into a singularity. But it did so at the instant of its own fossilization. It individuated according to the same principle as it was annihilated. It was truly born at the very moment of its extinction.

In view of the Metamachine, electric and neural devolution are a phenomenon correlated to the ontological unity of the flux affecting machines and brains. Electricity should be seen as the divine network of the Created World.

For the Metastructure, the only conceivable singularity was Humanity as a species, or, more exactly, as a numerical catalogue of individuals. For it, everything was reversed from the outset, and the inversion of the inversion of the Post-Machine, of devolving Post-Humanity, in no way led to the restoration of some ancient form of order, or to the invention of a new one; it led only to a simple variation in intensity of the initial chaos, which never stopped being chaos
or
initial.

The process was fossilized. And the interface contains the fossil trace of the phenomenon.

Link de Nova knows exactly what he is doing.

And he is doing exactly what he knows.

Exoplasm/more-than-human conjunction. The ontological Grand Junction within the urban Grand Junction: surviving body-mind/cataleptic machine-network. A new synthesis. An asymmetrical synthesis. A synthesis setting the stage for the division of the singularity.

Link has managed to slide into the aqualung without difficulty. He has connected the neurospinal cord to the local interface. He is now plugged into nothingness, emptiness, shadows.

The black box is plunged into its own black light, the light they can perceive with their night vision, natural or artificial; the light cast by the fire of the ultraviolet sky. They appear as phosphorescent ghosts to one another; they are just-barely physical apparitions in a world trapped between existence and nonexistence.

Pointillist armadas of rays, photonic eddies all around them. The Hotel Laika is obviously more than a simple assemblage of residential capsules. The Hotel Laika has a history; it possesses a true secret; it belongs to a story from before the Fall—a story that explains it, a story that is the main cause.

Campbell says: “Do you at least know what you’re going to do if, by some miracle, you get the system working again?”

Yuri can just barely make out the shrewd smile of the boy with the guitar behind the semiopaque mask of the aqualung. But glimpsing it is enough to etch it on his consciousness in all its luminosity.

“I won’t have to do anything, Chrysler, because if the system starts up again it will act on its own, for itself. Don’t forget, it’s a World.”

“And will it act against the Thing? It seems to me that’s what we’re trying to make happen, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t even a question of will. It is ontological. If I am able to bring it back to life, even partially, according to the creative principle of the Metastructure as it was before the Fall, it will function as a virus for the Thing, or more precisely as a deadly environment, a competitive ecology. Remember what Professor Zarkovsky said.”

“An ecology against an ecology? One environment against another?”

“Yes, two worlds that are
incompossible
but parallel, which will fight a merciless war against each other—and probably kill each other without pity.”

“And you hope, evidently, that if these two ‘correlated’ worlds enter into total war with each other, they’ll leave us in peace.”

“Exactly, Chrysler.”

“Then I hope you’ve thought of the somewhat important fact that their battlefield will be our world itself, and the men who live in it.”

“It’s a risk we have to take. The only risk.”

Yuri closes his eyes. Welcome to the Territory. Welcome to the Black Box, baby.

“There aren’t many risks we haven’t faced yet,” concludes Campbell, gesturing to the young man to go ahead.

The test of truth must begin without delay. Each face of the specious dialectic must be shown its own reflection; each false world must be delivered up to its false brother. The devolutionary Post-Humanity must be given back to the Machine.

Yuri has a vague premonition—nothing specific, nothing localizable, nothing identifiable as such. A malaise, an impression, a kernel of intuition.

In the Territory, nothing ever goes as planned.

Welcome to the Territory, baby. …

Nothing in the Territory ever goes as planned. And nothing ever lets you see what is coming. The unplanned is the fundamental rule; what appears to be happening is never what is actually happening, and what is actually happening often hides a trap.

Yuri sees the aqualung, the exoplasm inside which Link de Nova is moving, heading for the neural interface set in the wall.

He wants to make contact, physical contact. Electricity is not visible in itself; they can see only the radiation, the light. Light that is the visible manifestation of the Word, light that is the visible form of Electricity.

Yuri shudders in the face of the implications he is understanding, little by little. This is a “revelation” in the photochemical sense of the word; the film must be plunged into an acid bath and the complete transposition of the positive image awaited. On a human scale that could take days, weeks, entire books, numerous murders, the end of a world.

At his side, Campbell, a fluorescent specter, doesn’t move. He is waiting. Waiting in the black light that illuminates all secrets.

Yuri is waiting, too.

The whole world is waiting, though it does not know it yet.

True events, those that happen under the reign of the ontological break, are by definition infinitely divisive.

They divide everything. Every reality. Every possibility. Every actual narration and every potential plot.

In the first place, they fundamentally divide the field of the experiment itself. And in the first place, in the field of the experiment, they completely divide the observer’s point of view and that of the subject being observed.

Everything divides. And everything reverses. What was the interior becomes the surface. What was external becomes endogenous. What was biological becomes mechanical. What was mechanical becomes alive. What was natural becomes artificial. What was artificial becomes new nature.

Later, Yuri will wonder how to tell, in as analogous a way as possible, what happened that night in the Hotel Laika.

How to tell the simultaneous story of what they saw and what Link de Nova experienced? How to correlate, within the plot, the absolute correlation that took place? How to describe the experience they lived through, and what Link de Nova saw in the Ultraworld of Post-Humanity?

How to summarize infinite division in action?

Open out the matrix, and expose it in the updated simultaneity of all its successive unities: