Grand Junction (81 page)

“One day you will come to me, little prophet. You will understand what I say when I tell the last humans to become androids, so that they may be their own creatures. What greater freedom can there be, tell me, than to be an integral part of the human Totality—and more, to be constantly adaptable, as the new humanity, to these new conditions of life—to endure, to
start over from zero
, like in the Garden of Eden.”

*   *   *

And the Android who has come to bring immortality to humanity sketches a vast globe in the air with his hands.

“The Anome is a purely spiritual improvement, purely abstract from the Metastructure—an improvement that is not brought on by the ‘updates’ that the humans then in charge of its development conceived for it. The Anome has risen up from the Nothingness that reverberated within the Metastructure—or, rather, It used the Nothingness as a pivotal point from which to resume the principles of the Metastructure, like an original matrix, but pushing them to another level of grandeur entirely. It is both the devolving Mutation of the old condemned humanity and the forging principle of neohumanity—
Anomanity.”

“The Metastructure was based on a false perception of Infinity. The Anome will, in the end, be just as limited,” answers Link de Nova.

“Maybe, little prophet. But when will ‘the end’ be? I am bringing at least a thousand years of perfect peace and stability. If I dared, I would promise a million years of my universal Peace.”

“Your peace is death. Your World is a Camp. The life you offer is a simulation.”

“A simulation that far surpasses the original, electric lightbulb. Man is certainly not God; his creatures are bypassing him easily. I am proof … living proof, if I may say so.”

“You are not God, either. You just made a mistake. I announced your coming—I announced your coming as the Antichrist.”

“Little prophet, take a good look at what is happening in Junkville, or in Deadlink: not only have humans stopped dying, they are becoming immortal by integrating themselves into the network, because they have placed themselves under my protection—that is, the Anome’s protection. In the north of your Territory, on the other hand, in Grand Junction and its environs, you are only managing to effect remissions that are leading humanity back to the time when one could barely hope to live more than a century. It’s as simple as that, little prophet. Which do you think humanity will chose: vain promises of miracles, of a Second Coming, or concrete, tangible, visible results that can be understood by everyone?”

“The Anome wants to individuate itself in each man to ensure its demultiplication, while Christ will come so that each man, dead or alive, can be
reindividuated by him, sublimating his uniqueness. That is what separates us forever—what separates you from the Truth.”

“The Anome is total freedom, humanity with no more superior authority; the Metastructure was a dictatorship, just like your antiquated religions. I offer anarchy realized through humanity as a species.”

“The only possible individuation is achieved through the ontological intervention of the Infinite.”

“So, Man would be individuated by your God? How do you explain that, little prophet?”

“God is both Unique and Triune. The Trinity and the mystery of individuation are inextricably linked. Christ is a person—the Name we give to the Son as the incarnation of the Word, and thus one of three divine persons in one human person. But you are not a person. First, because you are not one, except under false pretenses, and second, because you are not triune. The conclusion is that you are a uniquely double being, and thus constantly trapped by your own division, which cannot lead you to any creative process. So you de-create the world. You do not even destroy it, because it has destroyed itself. You seek to maintain it as a simulacrum.”

“Do you know why tens of thousands of men and women have already joined my church? Because I don’t content myself with idle chitchat. I act. I have made a pact with the Anome to save humanity, and it is true that in order to be saved, humanity must make a pact with the Anome and help it to build our New World on an entirely new foundation. The Anome wants its Utopia; it wants its metaworld, where all men are equal, and where eternal life is promised to everyone.”

“You aren’t dominating anything anymore except your own desert, Android. I’ll explain it to you: the Hotel Laika watches over the cosmodrome now; for you it is an area that will be forbidden forever, and now the people you have not yet corrupted will be able to join the communities of the Ring.”

“I’ve succeeded in destroying your Library, and I have eradicated the last representatives of the race of artificial humans on this Earth.”

“You’re wrong, Androidus Rex. You only
partially
destroyed the Library, and you only
partially
destroyed the android species. You cannot change; it is ontologically written in you. Your infinite division is half-assed, that’s all. You see, the Library had exactly 13,201 books, and you
destroyed 666 of them—quite a curious number. There are more than 12,000 books surviving, and they will soon depart for the Ring. Because
the Book
is complete.”

“Your flight is proof of your defeat. I won’t waste any energy trying to stop you from leaving.”

“You couldn’t. You may dominate the Earth; your reign has been pronounced, but you are nothing but the inverted principle of what will happen. You are nothing, because your world is nothing in your image. Some immortality you’re offering this neohumanity! A huge desert of mud and ice, hardly any idea of how to make sure, no way to write a line or invent an alphabet—oh yes, I foresee ten thousand years of rejoicing!”

“So you admit the strength of the Anome, little prophet. It has already destroyed half the written symbols and languages on the planet. It is only a matter of days now. We will return to the era of before the Fall. We will live in total unison with a nature made in our image.”

“You haven’t destroyed the Library,” answers Link de Nova. “And your so-called nature is just a prosthetic extension of your network.”

“You’re right that it will be an extension of us, because that is how we will guarantee man’s constant adaptation to his environment, and an ongoing reconfiguration of the environment according to the microvariations of the network.”

“That’s what I’m saying, Android. A pure simulacrum, nothing else.”

“And you say you came to talk to me about Christ, and His Second Coming! But where is He, this Christ, hmm? Where is He, then?”

“You cannot, you will never be able, to understand the Scriptures. I mean, to allow them to be written inside you. You are the Antichrist; you come
before
him, as his inverted precursor. But nothing in the Testaments tells us how much time separates your coming from His; that is, from the coming of the Kingdom. For God, a million years is just the blink of an eye.”

“Kingdom? I am offering the total democracy of shared salvation and immortality. The World, little prophet, will belong to us. It belongs to us already.”

“I know,” answers Link de Nova. “It is exactly what you are going to lose.”

There is an instant of suspense, during which the two groups of men, one at the top of the stairs and the other at the bottom, size each other up.
Then the seven mercenaries, the electric boy, and the war dog make an about-face, as the Android resumes his harangue.

They will say the Guardians of the Territory cause the mob to part before them like God parted the Red Sea for Moses and his people.

They will say they depart in a single line toward the north.

They will say the Android manages to regain control of the mob, and that he talks for hours of the dangers of desiring to go against the Will of the Anome, and the immense benefits of joining its Humanity-Network. He speaks of the “Enemies of Truth,” describing the men who have just come among them as bringing contradiction and confusion as the partisans of a regression that would prevent the Anome from coming to save and immortalize neohumanity.

They will say that the Fortress of Heavy Metal Valley closes itself off permanently on that day. On the sheriff’s orders, barricades of stacked cars are erected to block all access routes.

State of Emergency.

State of Siege.

Nothing is left but to declare a state of war.

And in the Territory, war is its own declaration.

They will say that in the following weeks, several raids are attempted by the Anome’s militia on the Territory-within-the-Territory. But the Fortress keeps its promises; it is the Sanctuary, the armor of the Prophecy: the Ark has created an impassable, invisible, and perfectly ontological barrier. No “neohuman” who has traded his individuation for participation in the immortal network can cross the border the Ark has drawn in the extreme north of the Territory.

They die. All of them. Instantaneously. The Ark breaks their intersubjective connection to the Anome. Their bodies collapse on the ground in a strange semighostly, semiorganic mass, a collection of digitized organs, before melting into the overall neoecology. Very quickly, the Anome’s Pope chooses to block off, in his turn, his area of influence, contenting himself with sending out patrols to monitor what is happening in the enemy camp. It is like medieval times again: competitive feudalism, rival city-states. It is like the moment of the very first battle.

Summer arrives. Waves of heat come to melt the last islands of
icesand
scattered across the Territory; the translucent, formless mud covers every nook of the landscape. The sun remains veiled behind a layer of metallic lacquer suspended in the sky. The neoecology is expanding into the atmosphere; the homogenous lukewarmness is spreading over the entire surface of the globe. The future is taking form. The form of the Anome. Men are reconfigurating themselves into a community that is erasing all real singularity little by little, giving way to overall communication in the form of constant traffic, the permanent recycling of all the fluxes of life.
Believe in the Anome, because the Anome believes in you
. Such are the platitudes spreading throughout what is left of humanity.

In the Territory-within-the-Territory, where this story was born and where it will end, extraordinary events are happening endlessly.

In the New Human World of the Anome, which now surrounds the Territory completely, men are either dying or choosing the collective immortality of the biological network. Fewer and fewer men are dying. More and more men are becoming immortal.

Hovering above Xenon Ridge, the infinite Ark continues to sparkle on all its visible and invisible frequencies emitted by all light, created or not. The Ark continues to watch over the cosmodrome, the north of the strip, and the city of Grand Junction—and, of course, the county of Heavy Metal Valley. The Ark is maintaining its invisible and impassible ontological barrier around the Territory-within-the-Territory; it is protecting the last men with its shield of bronze, providing the microspace so vital to the Law, and granting a few more days’ reprieve to those who have, until now, resisted all the successive mutations of posthumanity.

Soon, though, it will have to leave them without the slightest protection.

Soon it will have to do what must be done.

It, too, is only an instrument, after all.

“Link de Nova heals machines by individuating them through the active,
conatural
recognition of their internal infinities, and thus their poetic metalanguages. He can invent new machines whose programs are related to the mechanical poetry that singularizes them; the Ark is the first prototype. His ‘machines of light’ are powered by the mind—by Logos. They will allow the surviving humanity to travel to the limits of the Cosmos. That’s what he told me, Sheriff Langlois.”

Yuri and Chrysler have called an urgent meeting. The sheriff, Milan Djordjevic, and Paul Zarkovsky have asked to know as soon as possible why the boy in the Halo has shut himself away in his hangar again, why he is letting no one but Yuri enter, why the Ark seems to be transmuting, emitting even more light on wavelengths that become even more countless every day. The meeting is a makeshift one, held in the trailer-library where Link’s father spent entire weeks at a portable microcomputer from the turn of the century, writing the final version of the manuscript he carried with him for years. He has summarized the three previous versions, written and rewritten everything, day and night, kept awake by various drugs and synthetic caffeine. He has finally succeeded in obtaining permanent
immunity for the thousands of surviving books. The attack destroyed barely a twentieth of the library. Here, the underground war was won. Here, a simple story was able to block the progression of the active nothingness. Here, Anti-Thought came up against the Meta-Cortex. The explosion destroyed and recreated the Cosmos in its entirety—several times.

Since that day, Yuri has considered some of the books as authentic weapons of mass destruction. He has also realized that, like all the others, he has a specific duty to accomplish in this war against Anomanity. And his duty will be to remain a Man of the Territory until the end.

“The last time Link locked himself up in his hangar, things didn’t exactly happen as planned,” observes the sheriff.

“You and I both know it’s the Law of the Territory. What counts isn’t what you have planned, it’s
what has been planned for you,”
Yuri says.

“What will happen? How will it go; what will it be like?” asks Milan Djordjevic, his anxiety obvious.

“I’m not sure even Link knows that exactly. There are internal mutations affecting him, and consequently the whole he forms with the Ark, and through it with the entire Territory-within-the-Territory, what we call the Sanctuary. If the Ark transforms, Link transforms. If Link transforms, the World—the real one, what remains of it—will transform in its turn. It will transform in order to stay real, whereas the planet of the Anome is only a simulation-cum-nature that will end by constantly mutating without ever changing, ensuring the permanence of its pseudoecology.”