Cosmos Incorporated (17 page)

“Listen, Schutzberg is a guy who generally does his job pretty well. He was only six when his entire family was massacred at Colmar, in France. He might be a little too zealous sometimes, but he protects his community.”

“And the dog?” Plotkin had asked then.

“What dog?”

“The dog,” Plotkin had sighed. “The cyberdog. The one from the Hotel Laika. I’m sure you’ve seen him lurking in some corner—around here, probably.”

Langlois’ face had lit up with comprehension. “Oh—right, the dog.”

“Balthazar.”

“Yes, Balthazar.” The sheriff’s smile grew distant. “Yes, he comes here sometimes. He likes to hunt in the hills around here.”

“Don’t patronize me,” Plotkin had responded. “He comes here several times a week. To see someone. I’d like you to give me a little more of an answer about him. You owe me that.”

The man had rocked back and forth a little in his chair, hesitating, then stopped suddenly, obviously making a decision. “The dog usually goes to see the Sommervilles and the Sevignys. I don’t know why, but he’s close to those two families.”

“Are they Catholics?”

“Catholics and Protestants. I’ll tell you again, this is a peaceful community. We don’t tolerate armed guerrillas here.”

“But they’re still rebelling against UniWorld regulations.”

Langlois’ silence stretched for long moments as he pondered the question. Plotkin carefully recorded what he had just learned in his memory. Sommerville. Sevigny. Protestants. Catholics.

“Okay,” Plotkin said at last. “One more question. Clovis Drummond, the manager of the hotel. How is he mixed up in all this? With Humvee and the Christian rebels?”

The cop’s big face darkened. He fixed his cold eyes on Plotkin’s and said coolly, “I can assure you that I don’t know this Drummond. He has no relationship of any kind with our community, except that he is, I believe, the legal owner of the hotel cyberdog we were just discussing. Monolith Hills isn’t part of my jurisdiction.”

Plotkin had decided to let his maleficent killer’s instinct decide, later, whether the sheriff was telling the truth or not. He certainly seemed sincere. That could mean that he was lying even more than he had been before, with even more sincerity.

He knew better than to push his shaky luck. He accepted the three twice-daily doses for his medical treatment probe and the tube of transcutaneous gel, and left Heavy Metal Valley with a brief handshake for the sheriff and a “Good-bye, gentlemen” for the guards who opened the door for him silently. He had hardly seen their faces; he had not heard their voices at all.

Now, as he drives along Nexus Road, he has to admit that everything seems to be going pretty well—right in tune with the plan, in fact. The plan that the instruction program had, in spite of being overwhelmed by his emerging personality, undoubtedly implemented without his knowledge.

The android conspiracy might very well have some connection to a clan of rebel Catholics.

And the fact that an entire “marginal” city on the outskirts of Grand Junction—the margin of the margin—and its police force had been infiltrated by this “conspiracy” gives a terrible appearance of reality to this theater of shadows: nothing like good old-fashioned territorial competition, a myriad of mystic financial conflicts, and a little gangsterism to give a highly political secret the appearance of an authentic frame-up.

True conspiracies are the coming together of interests that are often surprising.

At least for others.

> HOMO TENEBROSUM

Some incidents are bottomless pits, completely without sense or any hope of one’s conscience ever enlightening what is lost in the void, like a handful of photons in a black hole. Some men are sinkholes, deep abysses like open trenches at the bottom of a deep ocean. They say that there is life there, but it is the life of sinkholes, of lightless chasms. The life of shadows.

It hadn’t taken el señor Metatron long to run up against a wall of absolute blackness around—or, even worse,
inside—
Mr. John Cheyenne Hawkwind, alias Harris Nakashima.

There is plenty of information to which even an intelligent software agent cannot gain access. Even an elite “angel” like el señor Metatron. These are the darkest thoughts of men, who most likely do not even know them themselves—and if they do, it is a safe bet that they have done everything they possibly can to forget them.

Only a few human beings, very rare ones, know the secret, dark, wild, and terrible dimension that stretches infinitely within them. These men know and recognize each other immediately, even blind, even in a crowd. They know one another as well as they know themselves, but this takes more than a diagram of data, or a list of police information, or a bit of intelligent software.

Or, perhaps, it takes less.

All it takes is for them to meet each other.

It is enough for them to cross paths—then each one knows, in perfect synchronicity with the other, that they are both part of the same race. The race of shadow men
—Homo tenebrosum—
who know that conscience illuminates only a tiny corner of a labyrinth as vast as a planet plunged into darkness.

They are a highly dangerous race of men.

Plotkin meets Nakashima/Hawkwind, finally, upon his return to the hotel, as the incident in Humvee is just beginning to take shape in his reemerging memory. This time there is hardly anyone in the lobby; two or three new arrivals, lost souls from the strip, come to sleep off their cheap-wine hangovers or meta-amphetamine trips. Plotkin, desiring to avoid them, moves quickly toward the lateral corridor leading to the central patio.

The patio is not empty. There is a junkie there, staring vacantly at his empty glass; also two seedy middle managers sitting at a table face-to-face and, from the looks of it, discussing business. There is also someone who has obviously come to Grand Junction looking for a Golden Track, wearing a Hawaiian floral shirt and memory-form Ray-Bans—the “California look” from the beginning of the century—seated in front of a plate of trans-G tofu. And there is an old crone who looks to be in her seventies, apparently unable to afford any rejuvenation cures, shuffling a pack of tarot cards. A man wearing the uniform of a Municipal Consortium electronic repair company drinks a beer in complete, tangibly anguished solitude. A trio composed of two men and a woman—a whore from the strip—look as if they are only moments away from heading up to a room together; all that is left is to negotiate the final details of the “contract.” Finally, two middle-aged women, visibly Latin American, gaze up at the wall-mounted television set to some neuroencrypted channel. The other two or three people in the room are dark, indistinguishable figures by the far wall. One of them detaches itself immediately as Plotkin enters the room. A silhouette. A face. Eyes.

A soul.

It is as powerful as a telepathic wave. It
is
a telepathic wave. A shock wave. It is the truth of one man exposed to the gaze of another, but also that of a man viewed through the filter of his identical other. Cheyenne Hawkwind looks at him. And at the other end of the room, Plotkin looks at Cheyenne Hawkwind. Each recognizes himself in the other. Despite the distance, the dimness, and the various distractions, the truth is there with such clarity and obviousness that both men know they are the only ones in the room who can see it.

For the first time since checking into the hotel, Plotkin feels something very like fear. Cheyenne Hawkwind is not a dealer like the others, or a trafficker taking advantage of local small-potatoes connections with the Consortium’s Mohawk cops.

They have read each other easily despite the twenty meters’ distance between them, like two decoding machines linked in a closed circuit. Hawkwind is a killer, as cold and organized as Plotkin himself. And Plotkin knows it, because he can see it in Hawkwind’s eyes. He sees himself mirrored in the dark gaze, twin to his own, and the other man’s message is crystal clear.
You’re just like me, you son of a bitch.

>
DARK FIRE

It is well after dark, and Plotkin sleeps dreamlessly. A few sparse shreds of vague memory try to take shape in his slumbering mind—some of his past crimes, the only parts of his memory that form any sort of coherent whole, do their best to emerge, to be perceived by him as an image of a huge global neuroconnectional tube, an infinite spiral whose circular convolutions, woven in ultraviolet DNA biophotons, wrap simultaneously around his cortex and those of hundreds of millions of individuals and machines. He has the strange impression of dreaming, for a brief instant, of this same hotel room with the operations portal affixed to the wall, but it is so ephemeral that it is like something he might just barely remember, someday.

He is awakened abruptly by a voice audible only inside his head, via his auditory circuit, accompanied by a theta-stimulation neuroencoded order:
EVERYBODY UP
!

It is el señor Metatron, and he has information.

Information about the two residents of Capsule 081.

“What is it?” Plotkin demands.

The genetic file on Jordan and Vivian McNellis floats before his eyes, but this time the artificial combat intelligence does not say “Fuck if I know.” Instead, he glows orange with nearly palpable contentment. “I’ve got it.”

“Well?”

“The defective gene registered on their card is actually not the right one. I noticed the falsification when I saw an algorithm that seemed to correlate two sequences in their chromosome 4. They were able to do it thanks to a very simple mathematical translation; they just moved the error from the correct DNA strand to the one next to it.”

“Which means?”

“Which means that they don’t have a little degenerative retrovirus that can be controlled by transgenic transfusion; they don’t have retinitis pigmentosa—the version 2.0 machinitis I was talking about the other day—at all.”

“Well, that’s good news, isn’t it? What’s the big deal?”

“Don’t be stupid. You know very well what the big deal is. The gene next to the one with the degenerative disease initiates a noncoding DNA sequence, but it’s the one that is really structurally modified; it’s the one that shows serious anomalies.”

“If it’s a noncoding structure, then so fucking what?”

“That’s exactly the problem, Plotkin. Why did they do it? I read on their registration card that they’re trying to get a flight. They’re on the official waiting list for Platform 2. A disease, even a relatively benign one like R.P. 2.0, drastically lowers their chances of passing the UHU-approved examination. Now do you understand?” The crypto-visible brazier seems impatient.

“Hold on,” Plotkin says quietly, his brain still a bit sleep-addled. “Are you saying that the falsification is a decoy?”

“Well, not exactly. It’s a bit random. They just did what they could, with what they had at hand, to be able to come here. With the help of a very clever little pirated translator, they moved the numeric data of their defective gene to the next gene over, which then became 95-percent-and-change susceptible to produce retinitis pigmentosa between now and the next fifteen to twenty-five years. They lost points and gained an insurance tax. Why, do you think?”

Obviously, the decoy itself is hiding another mystery. “Which gene opens the noncoding structure?” Plotkin asks.

“That’s where it gets interesting. That’s what the Global Biosecurity and Health Control Center inspectors in Helensville, New Zealand—that’s north of Auckland—said. They spent almost two years there.”

“What exactly did the inspectors say?”

“I was able to get a few bits of information from their optic disks—old machines, but in combination with the public reports and analyses I could legally get, it added up to a portrait that will let us understand why the McNellises are ready to lose points on the travel examination and pay more insurance tax to register.”

“So what fucking disease do they have?”

“Nobody knows. Dr. Anderson, the head of their special unit, talks about ‘neuroretrotranscriptase.’ I wasn’t able to find out exactly how that works, but what is certain, Plotkin, is that we’re talking about some sort of neurovirus. And both of them are carriers. The man has the ‘epsilon’ type—it’s regressive; he’s a clean carrier. But the woman is ‘alpha-omega’—a critical metamorphic carrier. They don’t know if she’s contagious or not.”

“And they were able to leave the center in New Zealand legally?”

“That’s what I don’t understand. There’s no mention of their departure anywhere in the center’s records. It’s like they didn’t leave. It’s really not clear at all.”

“This is a damned catastrophe, is what you’re trying to say,” growls Plotkin.

“Not good news, that’s for sure,” agrees the guardian angel calmly, before disappearing in a tiny burst of sparkles.

Plotkin closes his eyes again, but he tosses and turns and doesn’t fall back to sleep until dawn. Around five o’clock he notices gold-hued sparks refracting in the window, which is in seminocturnal mode; the Chinese rocket and its Albertan booster are taking off for the High Frontier. He watches the play of light in the glass, polychromatic glimmers of gray and dark violet filling the small, circular window. The sight finally lulls him to sleep, and he does sleep for a few hours before awaking in a hotel that seems to be dancing to and fro.

El señor Metatron soon appears to tell him that a hurricane warning has just been issued by WorldWeather Corp; it was urgently necessary, apparently, in order to counterbalance the effects of a violent hailstorm in North Carolina. WW has decided that a small tornado over Monolith Hills is worth the trouble; it is well-paid for, after all, and will not risk the peace of mind of the ten or twenty megacartels ready to swoop down at any moment on one of the most lucrative markets on the planet.

He spends the rest of the day being tossed around like a boat on a stormy sea, watching the hurricane’s progression toward Montreal. Rain pours from the black-and-blue sky in whirling torrents, lashing the skyscrapers of downtown Grand Junction, the buildings lining Apollo Drive and Stardust Alley, and finally the cosmodrome, which disappears in its turn into the gray murk, a wall of water that hammers inexorably on the Hotel Laika like a tropical storm. Then, with a soft drumming like the sound of maracas, the rain tapers off.

This time, the dream is more vivid. Truth be told, Plotkin doesn’t know anymore if it is even a dream.

His own body floats before his eyes, dismembered. A catalogue of organs, his biomedical file, opens on a wall like the one in his hotel room. It is his body—rebuilt, reengineered, on the midnight-blue background of the
spaceless space
of the Metanetwork. In this dream, el señor Metatron takes the form of a young woman. She is only a silhouette, but she is fiery. It is she who projects the catalogue of his organs on the midnight-blue wall of his dream. She smiles at him, and her lips part as if to blow him a kiss—but instead a spinning ball of fire shoots from her mouth to orbit around him, trailing a meteorite’s blazing tail.

“Ha ha ha!” she laughs. Her voice becomes an exploding cloud of crystal shards. “You are completely free and you don’t know it! You are the author of your own life, but you don’t want to see it!”

“What do you mean?” he asks her, in this dream that seems so much like reality.

“It is time for the fire to be cast down to Earth.”

At that moment, the entire hotel bursts into flames. His room is filled with fire. A stream of it runs up the wall near the door to the ceiling, clinging there like the rotten luck of an earthly sinner. The inferno spreads rapidly; the young woman laughs; constellations of rainbow crystal drops glitter in the flames. He runs through the hotel. Smoke snakes down the corridors, rises up to fill the elevator shafts, floats to the ceiling. Fireballs explode one by one in the capsule rooms; it is as if the entire hotel is being attacked by an overzealous terrorist or a crazy pyromaniac. Alarm bells ring, ring, ring.

They ring.

He wakes up.

The alarm bells are still ringing.

El señor Metatron hovers in front of him, a fireball escaped from his dream. “There is a fire in the hotel.”

Plotkin sits up. So real events
had
directly provoked his violent, disturbing dream. “Where is it?”

The little flame seems to dance, oscillating like a candle in the wind. “You’ll never guess.”

Plotkin rolls his eyes. El señor Metatron displays the now-familiar signs of self-satisfaction—he shines as brightly as he can, in all his varied shades of red and orange. “In Capsule 081, idiot!”

His deepest instinct, what he considers the remaining kernel of his original personality, convinces him to take a risk. Armed with the small fire extinguisher from his room, Plotkin defies the security program’s instructions and makes his way toward the McNellises’ room, where, according to the little faux fireblob at his heels, the fire has now been contained by the capsule’s automatic sprinklers. The blaring alarm fades to the softer alert mode, then stops altogether. The neutral, androgynous voice of the hotel’s artificial intelligence instructs residents to return to their rooms or to remain in them. He wonders for an instant if the order is meant for him personally.

Capsule 081 is located on the eighth floor, facing east and overlooking the street. As he walks down the access corridor, there is still a little smoke floating in the air at waist level. At the end of the hall where the double Capsule 081 is situated, he can make out an open door and sense movement within the room. He hears indistinct voices.

Beside him, el señor Metatron relays real-time information as it becomes available from the hotel disk concerning the damage to the capsule; it is displayed on a semitransparent screen suspended in front of him, where lists of figures unscroll on a vectorial plan of this part of the hotel.

Plotkin is already in view of the room when he sees the squat figure of the manager profiled in the yellowish dimness of the security lights that are illuminating the entire floor. The man seems furious. He shouts:

“This goddamned fucking junkie shit will cost you plenty, believe me! I’m going to make sure you get kicked out, you nut job!”

Another voice replies, telling him to fuck off, that it was an accident, and they will pay for the damages if they have to.

It is at this exact moment that Plotkin arrives on the scene, little red tube in hand.

Drummond swings to face him, his expression a mixture of incredulity, fury, and pure nastiness. “What the hell are
you
doing here?”

“I heard the alarm and the security system told me where the source of the problem was. I thought I might be useful.”

The man gives him and the small aerosol-powder fire extinguisher a measuring, disdainful look.

“You’re of absolutely no use here, and you’re in violation of security regulations.”

“Remember,” Plotkin says, “I’m an insurance expert.” The list of damages scrolls along on the room’s open door; Drummond is keeping an eye on it without seeming to see it at all. He can’t see the sparkling fireball whirling around him and absorbing the data being compiled in real time by the artificial intelligence managing the hotel. This cohabitation of two fires—one in the visible world, one in the invisible—causes all kinds of strange conjectures in Plotkin’s mind. The barely tangible signs he has been receiving since his arrival in Grand Junction, which are visibly interfering with his initial instruction program, are now happening at a higher level.

“Would you mind if I took a look?” Plotkin says calmly, planting himself in front of the door frame with its list of damages.
The listing really has no idea of what has happened here,
he says to himself.
The real damage has only just begun.

There hadn’t really been any truly localized fire situated somewhere in the double room (two capsules joined but separated by Japanese-style partitions of composite alloy and synthetic cellulose). Yet there had not been a generalized fire either, as usually happens when a blaze begins at a single ignition point and ends by consuming everything it can reach.

Plotkin investigates the part of the room where the electric current seems to have been cut. Only a few biofluorescent lights at the level of the baseboards glow dimly with yellowish-green light. There are two people in the room: one is standing in front of him; the other is stretched out on a sort of sofa at the far end of the room near the window. He is face-to-face with a man—young, barely thirty years old, with black curls worn long in a neo-Musketeer style. This must be the brother; so it was the sister sleeping by the semitranslucent window. Black eyes are gazing at him, and in the low light they seem to shine with enough energy for an entire city.

Plotkin senses the manager’s presence behind him. He turns around. “I’ve got things under control here, Drummond,” he says politely. “I’ll come and see you in your office.”

“These young assholes are going to have to pay for this, I’m telling you,” the fat man grumbles, then leaves through the open door.

At the same moment, Plotkin sees the dog Balthazar coming out of the bathroom, which is unfolded from the wall. He is apparently conducting a professional survey of the room, all his natural and artificial senses in action. Their eyes meet as the modified animal passes in front of him to leave the chamber; Plotkin hears Clovis Drummond calling the dog from the hallway. Then he turns to face his destiny.

“My name is Plotkin,” he lies while simultaneously telling the truth.

The young man doesn’t move, nor does he respond to the hand Plotkin extends.

“I’m an insurance agent. Don’t let that fat bastard Clovis Drummond worry you too much.”

Now the hand moves forward and shakes his, a bit limply, without real conviction. “I’m Jordan June McNellis.” The silhouette steps to one side and indicates the unmoving form on the sofa. “This is my sister, Vivian Velvet.” The supine shape does not move. Plotkin studies the room’s decor more attentively; now he can relate it to the data provided in el señor Metatron’s listing. No, there hadn’t been
a
localized fire.
There had been several.