Cosmos Incorporated (15 page)

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MAPS AND DIAGRAMS

If such a thing as chance existed, Plotkin would never have come to Grand Junction.

If such a thing as chance existed, he would not be staying at the Hotel Laika.

If such a thing as chance existed, the conversation wouldn’t have ended at the same time as the blizzard.

If such a thing as chance existed, he wouldn’t have taken the elevator back to his floor at precisely twelve o’clock noon.

If such a thing as chance existed, he wouldn’t have met the manager as he left the nacelle, while the fat man was carefully closing the magnetic door of the service staircase leading to the loft in the antiradiation protection dome.

If such a thing as chance existed, he wouldn’t be questioning the manager about his presence here now, in such a deliberately casual way:

“Have you been fixing the cracks in the dome?”

The man gives him a measuring look and slings a cloned-leather bag over his shoulder with a curt movement. “What cracks? You should mind your own business. If there were cracks, the security systems would raise the alarm about it soon enough.”

Nearly nauseated by such blatant dishonesty, Plotkin gazes back at the bloated toad.
Sure,
he says to himself,
unless you regularly fuck with the sensors, which is exactly what you were just doing here.
“Ah—excuse me,” he says almost humbly. “It’s just that I have a pocket scanner that detected a few anomalies in your dome.”

The man stares him down, a very unpleasant look in his baleful eyes.

“Is that so? Well, I’ve done a little research of my own, and that insurance company of yours is a piece of shit. Don’t try to stick your nose in my business. You’ve got no right.”

“I just wanted to help, that’s all. Don’t get excited,” Plotkin retorts, shouldering his way past the man and going toward his room.

The manager smirks in a way that completely lacks mirth. “Don’t try to help—it’s a good way to get yourself in trouble. I came to repair the satellite antenna; the fucking blizzard damaged it. That’s all. Have a good day, Mr. Plotkin.”

The man is swallowed up by the nacelle as Plotkin slides his magnetic keycard in the lock of his capsule door.

Liar.

Cheat.

Snitch.

Squealer.

Informer.

Bastard.

Prick.

Nothing you say is true. Nothing about you is real. You are just you, in all your horror. You make me want to puke,
Plotkin thinks, as he goes into his room.

Seated at his desk, he orders green tea and vitamin-enhanced medibiscuits to be delivered by the room-service robots. He is beginning to get a sense of the overall plan, an outline of the plot of this play, in which the final act will end with the Death of the Mayor of This City.

El señor Metatron chooses that moment to make his appearance, blaring with light like an ultraviolet flame smack in the center of the room. “There are anomalies under the dome. A lot more of them than we thought,” he says.

“What kind of anomalies?”

“I’ll show the sequences registered on the hotel’s central disk—and what I’ve been able to see in the internal surveillance camera network. Or maybe I should say what I
haven’t
been able to see.”

“Okay. What do you mean?”

“It’s very repetitive and boring, actually. Before I explain, I should tell you a couple of things. One, the manager sometimes goes inside the dome, often at night. He uses the secure service staircase. Two, the local network of cameras and sensors that are supposed to be monitoring this part of the hotel has been fucked with, to the point that whole parts of the dome and its loft are no longer visible.”

Plotkin nods. That prick of a manager, that dirty snitch, is regularly sabotaging the sensors and cameras using some pirated technology so he isn’t detected by the hotel’s AI.

“But why?” asks his guardian angel. “For what reason?”

Plotkin chuckles at the candor that even these highly sophisticated neuroquantum machines use on occasion. “For the only reason anyone does anything here. Capital. Scratch. Bones. Scrilla. Money.”

Now it is el señor Metatron’s turn to laugh at such typically human shortsightedness.

“No, you’re wrong. First of all, in Grand Junction, money, as you call it, is only an accessory. What counts is the Golden Track. Error number two: no one would risk getting caught by the Laika’s owner and being fired by UManHome just to save a couple of measly dollars. Especially in a hotel where, remember, he’s just a lowly manager.”

Plotkin is ready to argue. “He wants to scam the insurance company. He must have something shady up his sleeve.”

It is nearly impossible to describe the laugh of a digital guardian angel. Something like the whirring of radiation nearing critical mass, maybe.

“He’s scheming at something, Plotkin, but it has nothing to do with insurance.”

“Then what?”

“I have no idea. That’s why he sabotaged the entire internal surveillance network of the dome. So nobody can figure out what he’s up to. At least I can’t do it with the electro-optic resources I have.”

Plotkin doesn’t say anything. He retrieves the orange plate room service has just deposited in the wall slot, pours himself a cup of tea, and nibbles a biscuit reflectively.

Then he asks his guardian angel to show him the images contained on the hotel’s disk.

“If I understand correctly, only a human with the magnetic key to the service staircase can really know what’s going on up there.”

El señor Metatron doesn’t answer. He hovers like a shimmering fountain of light above the center of the bed. His silence is enough to swallow up the whole world.

Undoubtedly, Clovis Drummond is hiding tons of illegal products in the gables of the dome. He takes delivery of them at night, stores them temporarily in his private office, then hides them in the most inaccessible part of the hotel.

No…that can’t be it. According to the images on the hotel disk, he always goes upstairs with very little in his hands, sometimes nothing at all, and rarely even the small faux-leather backpack. Usually he takes the elevator to the tenth floor and goes directly to the highest section of the service staircase.

Watching the sequences from beyond the secure service staircase proves difficult; the images are blurry, since the cameras up there are only in use half of the time—often they are pointed aimlessly or mechanically blocked by some procedure or another. El señor Metatron detects the presence of a nanovirus in the sensor system, which has prevented the anomaly from being reported to the AI.

If the manager isn’t hiding marijuana, or illegal cigarettes, or black-market neurotoys, what is he doing under the dome two or three times every week? Apparently there is now a sixth name to add to the list of “suspicious” residents in the hotel.

The next forty-eight hours are filled with intense planning.

First, they need to create a neuroencrypted zone that will continuously fool the private surveillance camera. El señor Metatron will execute a simulation routine each time Plotkin works on his plan.

The latter is taking form, in all senses of the world. Plotkin has food containing legal amphetamines delivered to his room and spends two days and nights at the console, configuring a three-dimensional model of the city: each of its neighborhoods, particularly Korolev Plaza, the Municipal Metropolitan Consortium building on Korolev-1, and all the surrounding buildings, each one corresponding to one of the specialized branches of the organization that manages the county and its resources. Thanks to the data secretly gathered by el señor Metatron, he is able to create an animated statistical reconstruction in real time of human movement in the city—in particular, the specific movements of the members of the Consortium.

Including those of Mr. Blackburn, the mayor of the city.

The mayor he has come to kill.

Any time, any day, any type of meeting or movement or security procedure—he now knows the real city well enough to be able to duplicate them easily in the false one. He knows the territory well enough to make a map of it.

And destroy it.

Only kill when it’s a sure shot,
says an Order maxim that comes out of nowhere to mingle with the curious mixture of English, Russian, and Argentine memories that are whirling at any given time in his brain.

Only kill when it’s a sure shot.
That means that a true professional assassin does not have the right to make a mistake. To kill properly, you must succeed with the first blow. The
only
blow.

It must be conducted like the launch of an orbital rocket. There is a takeoff window, a plan A, a plan B, and a plan C. There are hundreds of security measures to implement. Everything must be studied to the tiniest detail, like the bolts in a shuttle. No right to error. No glitches.

A priori, there are very few holes in the security system surrounding Mr. Blackburn. He has to admit it. There really aren’t any at all—certainly none he can exploit. On this point, el señor Metatron and he are in complete agreement.

That is why they pick October 4, the date of the Sputnik Centennial and Grand Junction’s huge Starnival.

On that day, there will be a hole.

On that day, Blackburn and all the members of the Consortium will be present on a code-red-protected panoramic dais to watch the takeoff of a large Brazilian rocket and a fairly new jumbo Chinese capsule carrying twelve occupants. They will be just above the control center buildings, and just below Centaur City.

But to get to this high-security area, they must cross a
yellow
zone alongside Stardust Alley. It will take them a few minutes.

For those few minutes, they will be vulnerable.

Those few minutes will be his takeoff window.

It appears that his assassin’s intuition, despite his faulty memory, is to be trusted. The instruction neuroprogram, it seems, is useless except for maintaining a few basic routines.

It seems to him that everything is pointing to this decision; everything is in perfect alignment toward this plan: the Hotel Laika, from where he overlooks the eastern part of the cosmodrome, the access path to Platform 3 and the fallow lands that lie below Monolith North. The area is unobstructed enough that he can see to the western hills, to Centaur City and the control center, and all the way to the observation gallery the Consortium bigwigs are having built. He can see the bustle of construction-site activity already.

El señor Metatron provides him with detailed plans of the gallery, with its Securimax™ windows that can deflect 20 mm light-uranium bullets and its firebrick roof that can resist temperatures up to 1,000 degrees centigrade.

The gallery itself will be untouchable. Besides, he is only supposed to kill Blackburn. Maybe his escorts, but not
all
the members of the Consortium. It is even probable that one of them actually ordered the assassination.

The gallery will be untouchable, but there is the small “yellow” portion of the route, below Centaur City.

There is also the fact that Blackburn will cross it in an armored presidential Lincoln that belonged to the White House in the 1970s.

The 1970s!

This is the ransom for glory; the ransom for being king of Grand Junction—Grand Junction, where the entire twentieth century is trying to exist in a condensed form, postmortem, to avoid being lost altogether. Blackburn will be riding in an armored Lincoln from the 1970s. With a few modifications, no doubt, but in the yellow zone it will not be enough.

Plotkin asks the console to display a few scenarios in the model city. The virtual human masses obligingly move in their various chaotic ways among the replicated towers. Black cars whose doors bear the official emblem of the independent Mohawk territory drive along the electronic streets, while el señor Metatron reproduces, thanks to information gleaned from the local initiative union, the various spectacles and street parades planned for October 4.

The cars come together every time toward the yellow zone.

There is an error in their security system.

There is, it turns out, a very good-size takeoff window.

He will have at least thirty seconds to Kill the Mayor of This City.

He will need something like an Oerlikon electromag rocket launcher, with its high-speed missiles that fly at five thousand meters per second.

The projectile should not be detected by the city’s urban surveillance systems as it rockets toward the reduced-security zone, not at five kilometers per second. At that speed, and thanks to the special chemical components contained in its polymetallic alloys, the 13 mm minirocket will be in a state of superfusion and will be literally enveloped in plasma. Upon impact, a fireball equivalent to the explosion of a propane tank will erupt instantaneously. According to the initiative union’s data, the yellow zone in question, bordering the cosmodrome’s west fences, will be less populated than the city’s large arteries or Stardust Alley, but there will be people there who have come from Centaur City and Novapolis.

Some collateral damage, though, will only reinforce the terrorist-attack theory.

He will blow up Blackburn’s presidential Lincoln, and it will take part of his city with it.

He falls asleep in the morning just after dawn, while the model endlessly replays the trajectory of the digital rocket above the city’s towers, until the moment when the ball of fire caps off the smoky line it traces for a brief instant in the replica’s simulated sky. Then, during the night that follows, when he finally awakes from his long diurnal sleep and unfolds the collapsible bathroom to take a shower with an expensive extra ration of water, el señor Metatron appears in a corner of the room.

“Mr. Drummond has just graced us with his little nocturnal visit under the dome,” he says.

>
UNDER THE CARBON SKY

There, too, they have only one takeoff window. For just a second or two, Drummond’s personal magnetic key will be inserted into the reader in the service staircase door. In that brief span of time, the data will be read, sent to an AI microcircuit, verified by an iterative component, then retransmitted with a positive access code to its sender. It will be el señor Metatron’s opportunity to connect to the circuit, steal the card’s code, and copy it onto Plotkin’s keycard.

They wait. It is past one o’clock in the morning. They wait. Drummond still does not emerge from the protective dome; the cameras show virtually nothing: closed angles, blank walls, shadows, vague reflections. The sensors are paralyzed by the nanovirus. No sound, no infrared, no X-rays, no volume detection, no spectrography, no recognition of motion.

Nothing.

They wait.

Suddenly, the pyrotechnic angel dances beside the window, then all over the room. “I’m sensing something,” it announces.

“What?”

“I don’t know exactly. It’s almost normal, but not quite. It’s a sort of…a sort of vibration.”

“What frequency?” Plotkin asks.

“Low, but not inaudible at the source. It’s far away, stifled by ambient noise, but it’s coming from the dome, I’m sure. I’ve set up a few trigs.”

“An abnormal vibration, you said?”

“Yes—periodic but not linear. It stops for a long moment sometimes, then starts again. It started around twenty minutes after he went in. That’s almost two hours ago now.”

“By the sainted A-bomb, what the fuck is the bastard up to?”

“I don’t know, Plotkin,” the angel Metatron replies somewhat pathetically, hanging from the ceiling in a circle of flame. “I really don’t know.”

Drummond went up beneath the dome a little after midnight. It is now almost three o’clock in the morning. El señor Metatron copies the two codes—entry and exit—from his magnetic key and transfers them to the memory cell in Plotkin’s. Then he suggests they wait a little, and pursue their initial investigation before going up into the dome themselves.

In the confusion of low definition and semidarkness, el señor Metatron has detected the presence, via the chance aiming of a camera lens at a mirrored surface, of two or three prohibited religious emblems.

“Like the ones in Heavy Metal Valley?” Plotkin demands.

His guardian angel’s spectrometric analyzers show him the characteristic shapes of the symbols in question.

Yes. Like the ones in Heavy Metal Valley.

Christian symbols: a crucifix, maybe two, and a statuette of the Virgin Mary. He can also make out a small shelf of books, but the total absence of light makes it impossible to read the titles in the vague reflection on a metal surface.

Religious symbols. Books. Prohibited books. It could not be a more surprising find.

Drummond, an apostolic convert?

Was it the sound of his prayers that Metatron had detected under the humming ambient noise of the hotel?

The consequence is clear: maximum security. No going under the dome without taking every imaginable precaution. Drummond had been able to place countermeasures, traps, genetic tracers. He is probably the one behind the malfunctions in the instruction program. Maybe he is trafficking in clandestine technology beneath the dome. El señor Metatron will have to investigate. El señor Metatron will have to comb every disk in the hotel, including the ones archived in the databases rented from the Philippines and Paraguay. They need to nail this guy.

Then, Plotkin turns out the lights and goes to bed.

He sleeps dreamlessly, a sleep as gray as the color of the sky when he awakes, feeling as if he closed his eyes only a second earlier.

ON/OFF. He turns off and back on, like a computer. Between the moment of turning out the lights and the moment of the morning awakening, there is nothing. A simple digital skip. A blank page.

The day has the cold paleness of a Nordic dawn: the sky is leaden, metallic gray, ashy, with clouds pressing against the horizon. He gets up, eats, showers, dresses.

Then he leaves Capsule 108, goes down to the lobby, and waits for his usual rental car.

Why go back to Heavy MetalValley?
his guardian angel had asked him.

He hadn’t known how to answer at first. Instinct, intuition, his killer’s training. Something like that, anyway. Well, no.
He just wants to; that’s all.

Let’s roll,
el señor Metatron had replied, using the now-famous phrase. He wants to go back to the city of demolished cars, the city of lost metal, the oxidized Jerusalem of the last Christians.

The fact that Drummond is undoubtedly one of them, that he has probably installed a small altar and an illicit prayer room under his protective dome—which gives sense to some of his actions, but makes others even more confusing: the contraband cigarettes and undeclared marijuana, the trafficking of untaxed toys made in India, his lamentable hygiene…

Plotkin ends by concluding that perhaps—and that perhaps puts a lid on some troubling possibilities—if there is a cover-up, then the man’s semilegal activities, as well as his official status as a capsule-hotel manager and a part-time informer are a perfect way of deflecting any suspicion that he might be a secret Catholic.

He drives, thinking that it probably wasn’t Drummond after all that lured him to the northeast part of the territory, and Quebec, and Heavy Metal Valley.

Something in him, something that
is
him, but seems like it might be someone else at any moment
—some part of him
wants to return to Xenon Ridge. Something alive in him wants to live; something alive wants to act; something alive wants to break into ordinary language with blistering words. The impression that absolutely everything is
real,
especially
him,
simply because he seems to be able to think in parallel and cut through the world of illusory reality, is incredible.

This infinite tension between him and the world is pure, noisy like water fallen from the stars. It is as if the beauty of a ray of light has become like a perfume, or a needle lodged in his heart. His fingers seem to act of their own accord in choosing a playlist of rock and pop songs from the Great Century on the navigation console.

Why is it that the view of a few gray-purple clouds above an old abandoned Texaco gas station opens such gaping holes within his entire being, false, true, true-false, and false-true identities all together, while the pale yellow disk of the sun plays with the slivers of blue sky that let oblique columns of light pass through them—high glimmers, fixed and ephemeral, above the hilly land of southern Quebec?

Why
—how—
does he feel so
free
?

Because an instruction program is malfunctioning?

Or because something wants the fire to spout from his mouth?

He cannot compare this sense of freedom to any other concept or sensation, any known or transmissible abstraction or experience. Why does he feel such a profound upheaval of his entire being when, very simply, the humming of guitars in an old song by The The fills the cabin and seems to fall from heaven like radioactive rain, like a larger-than-life reenactment of the London zenith? It dates from 1983, from the great album
Soul Mining. This is the day, your life will surely change, this is the day, when things fall into place…

Then there are “Slow Train to Dawn” and “Infected,” from the 1986 album
Infected.
Like a vision of an apocalypse with cold and delicate veins from some rainy island. The almost-rockabilly beat-up-beat seems to come from a bunker where the planes of Armageddon are lined up side by side, like beach huts in rows on the edge of an endless desert. The characteristic harmonies—Celtic-bluesy guitars, accordions, Irish fiddles, and harmonicas of groups from northern England, but with the addition of the electronics and violence of Cockney London—are superimposed on angular, hard rhythmic bases, with bridges that cut like glass blades. He has chosen these songs along with another audio file containing “Blue Monday” by New Order, dating from about the same time—the British mid-eighties—as well as “The Big Heat” from the album of the same name by Stan Ridgway. He is in a dark, strange area, somewhere beyond his own identity, a hollow space that does not belong to this century, or to this world, or to any of his false memories, but to which
he
belongs, with all his being.

He feels that he has been standing at the gates of something that his false English identity was created precisely to cover up. There are bagpipes whispering of the Irish Sea in the Simple Minds song “Belfast Child.” There are the celestial guitar riffs of the Edge in U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name,” and in The Silencers’ “Northern Blues.” There is the icy scansion of the totalitarian machine in Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and the views of the postatomic, sublunar world—so close to Plotkin’s own—in “Rocket USA” by Suicide, which throbs with the contradictory colors of the end of civilization and the magnificence of sunset; black and gold, silver and red, like music written for meteors.

Why does it seem as if everything is on the brink of harmonizing even as it remains magnificently different, like a supreme collision by fire of the elements, the music, the car he is driving, and the words that are taking possession of his soul little by little? He becomes aware of—his consciousness is
assaulted
by—unknown diagrams that map out dazzling encounters between a violet cloud hovering low beneath the leaded dome and the guitar riffs of Johnny Marr, clear as glacial lakes and high as mirrors suspended between the sky and the Earth; by the image of oblique columns of light filtering through the clouds. There is the improbable shock of PJ Harvey’s voice on “Rope Bridge Crossing” as if it is hanging on a barbed-wire horizon, with country guitar twanging in a postatomic desert, and the opening of a vast stretch of blue sky to the west as he turns onto Nexus Road. Yes…he feels as if he is touching with a fingertip something essential concerning his own identity, whatever its origins or method of creation: flashes of words, forming short phrases that cut into the emotional landscape of his mind, jarring in his brain, directly describing the experience he is living through now. Phrases like
Freedom is the point of being where it is consumed.

Freedom takes up residence in a place of being where
encounters
can take place—collisions, accidents, implosions—outside the internal instruction program and outside the numerous routines shaped by the neotenic parameters of the totalitarian social structure in which he lives along with seven billion other human beings.

TOTAL COMBUSTION.

This place within him seems impossible to pinpoint, or describe, or define. It doesn’t even seem possible to confirm its existence. If it is fire, its flame—its ethereal envelope—is barely visible. It is really as if, each time he tries to go back to the world of external and internal instruction programs that form “reality,” this place vanishes abruptly from the maps, the diagrams, the land, the world—and even from himself.

This place, where liberty is burgeoning inside him, is, more than anything else, the place where the terrible possibility exists of encountering another freedom. For that, he must pay the price—put himself in danger—be confronted with his own nothingness. He must let this freedom be subsumed into the other, in order to establish his paradoxical, but
vital,
existence.

He arrives within view of Xenon Ridge and follows Xenon Road to the top of the mesa. He parks at the foot of a mutant cedar covered with fuchsia-pink blooms and retraces his steps to find the same observation point he occupied before: a small, rocky ridge running parallel to the hill that, crowded with spiny bushes, hides him from the view of anyone below.

Well, almost. It was a wise precaution.

But not wise enough.

He has just sat down when he uses the special program in his optic lenses and neuroconnects to a small digidisk reader-recorder. He concentrates on the activity in the little city within a city below, on the life happening in the city of lost metal. There is a lot going on. There is a lot of life. There are many things to see and to note.

He is so absorbed that he hears almost nothing until a voice orders him to remain seated and raise his hands high in the air.

The characteristic sound of a .12 caliber rifle cocking gives a certain weight to this suggestion.