Cosmos Incorporated (24 page)

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DAY NINE

On this morning, he wakes without a single word in his memory.

Pale sunlight. Yellow rays lancing through the room. The faintly ominous sound of the hotel’s organ-machines. Something terrible will be born of this sublime innocence. He knows it, with the calm of a suicide commando. His mind flows from intuition to intuition, a machine forever evolving in its network of cuts. The McNellis girl used his mind and his body to create this exegetic business of Genesis. But in spite of it all, it was he who, now an independent human being, had created this genetic exegesis during seven full days in the Hotel Laika capsule. Quite simply, he realizes with alarm, it means that she and he are correlated in an unimaginable way: this whole operation was transcribed by and in the mind of Vivian McNellis, beyond the borders of space and human time.

This must be why one of the last aphorisms he wrote, on the night of the Sixth Day, said:
It is because I have two brains that I am one.

He is in a strange world, a specific “time,” this angelic induction cone whose terrible and luminous opening he senses in every particle of his newborn being. It is what lets him understand, instantaneously, that now she and he will evolve more or less simultaneously in this Third Time, the
Aevum.

How far away it seems now, the time when his neuroencrypted software agent seemed ne plus ultra in the transfinite process of simulation! He was nothing but code in a mechanical machine; he was not code in a metamachine of light. Just like his fictive/real existence as a killer, the digital angel represented the plan of the initial narration—it had been the fictive/simulated replica of Vivian McNellis’s powers in the digital world of angels below. It had been the mechanical/human face of the Celestial Scribe—but, unlike the Scribe, it communicated with men in the language of men. The real Metatron, on the other hand, spoke
in
men by communicating
with
their language.

And now, Vivian McNellis is here.

Here.

In Capsule 108.

He knows she was also there at his origination, in her own chamber, but that means nothing. They are in the world of magnetic chants and the rock ’n’ roll of quarks, in the canticle of quantum bodies. They are two cortexes falling toward each other like two galaxies in perdition, and that is what saves them.

So she is here, physically present. It is no digital phantom, no angel, no dreamlike projection made of fire.

The fire is her.

“Do you know the exegesis of Saint Thomas Aquinas on the subject of the
Aevum
?”

He does not know how to answer.

“Hmm. Obviously I didn’t incorporate everything into your memory. During a famous academic dispute at the end of the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas had to explain the Third Time. Was it unique or multiple? If he admitted that angels, however purely ethereal, still formed a multiplicity, and not a unique Being—which only God is—he would have to agree that each of them lived in a form separated from temporality. Each angel had its own singular time. But because they were a product of divine creation, and divine narration, they also formed an ‘all’ they were linked to one another by the intermediary of a specific time that Saint Thomas, in his luminous genius, called ‘circumspect time.’ It is a
noncontinuous
time, he said, because it is the line of
disjunction
among all the continuums. Without knowing it, he had allowed Leibniz to conceive his own Theodicy, his Monad. Are you following me?”

“Circumspect time. Yes. Time that operates in discontinuity. I almost feel like the incarnation of this story.”

“This time is the time of the Machine. The ‘logical’ Machine. It is the circumspect machine-time of electronic calculators. I mean, in this World. The World Below. You were a machine, a narrative machine. You were an operator of ontological division.”

“And now?”

“Now we come to what will happen—the event. Now what was
retained,
but could not be
contained,
will happen. It is the circumspect time in which we can be copresent without being in the same place.”

There is a deep silence. A silence between two temporalities that are asynchronous yet intermingled, linked by an invisible thread of light. The invisible made visible in the form of fire made flesh and named Vivian McNellis, whose very beauty seems to emerge from the chasm of silence.

He crosses the first part of the chasm. “How do you need me to act so we can get you back to the Ring?”

“I have a plan—a sort of appendix to the initial plan. On the Monolith Hills strip, there are all the sorts of traffickers that you might expect to find near a cosmodrome. We need a black-market claim—but a real one, an authentic one, just resold, not passed by the spatial governance bureau and its taxes. But we can’t buy it ourselves—too much danger of being refused or noticed. We need someone safe, someone familiar with this sort of thing.”

“There’s one of these dealers living in the hotel.”

“Yes, I found that out when I was your digital angel. Harris Nakashima, right? Do you think we can trust him?”

Plotkin’s laugh is like an old, sarcastic memory. “You can never trust a dealer. In general, you should never trust anyone.”

“My brother suggested something yesterday.”

Plotkin’s laugh trails off. He looks at the McNellis girl. He senses that something is careening toward the gaping maw of the induction cone and the infinity beyond. “I’m listening.”

“He said he has noticed the carefully choreographed ballet of our friend the manager of these premises. I mean, his comings and goings under the dome.”

“I’m still listening.”

“Jordan thinks the manager is a dealer too. Not just in cigarettes and psychotropics and black-market neurogames—also in something that’s right under the dome.”

“Under the dome?” Plotkin remembers his night of spying with the digital angel, when Clovis Drummond spent more than three hours under the hotel’s antiradiation dome. Something is going on up there, at the other end of the service stairways, where the sensors and cameras don’t work.

“Yes, under the dome. Jordan thinks Drummond is trafficking in technological information. With the satellite antenna and a pirated device of some sort, he is regularly sending lists of codes to a firm in competition with someone here in Grand Junction.”

“You’ve detected this?”

“Well, we only just talked about it yesterday. The next time he goes under the dome, I’ll know more.”

“You and I both know that the angel Metatron—I mean you—detected prohibited religious symbols under the dome.”

“That doesn’t contradict my brother’s theory. He might very well be trafficking in religious relics too.”

“Yes, and that’s something we should talk about.”

“What? What do you want to say?”

Plotkin does not hesitate. He is well versed in verbal combat. Something in him wants him to remain what he is. “The rebel Catholics and the Evangelicals, and the Jews in HMV. You didn’t choose Grand Junction by chance, did you?”

McNellis laughs, and it is like crystal in the light. Something will keep her like this, always. “You don’t get it. I learned about it while I was incorporating the Created World, in my cell at Camp 77. For me, it was even a sort of handicap at first. We cannot get ourselves mixed up with Christian rebels—we would be putting them in danger, because we would get them noticed fast, and vice versa. We need to keep our distance, and not have any contact.”

Plotkin’s mind goes back to his writings of the past seven days. He thinks of the plans, the maps, the diagrams—the still-secret semantic machinery. “Distances are already a thing of the past. Contact has already been made.”

“I know. That wasn’t part of the initial plan at all. It was the first real divergence.”

“The first and the last, you see. The alpha and the omega.”

“I don’t think it’s the best way for us to get to the Ring. I’m sure you can understand why.”

“Actually, I think it would be much less risky than doing something with Drummond.”

“You’re awfully obstinate. Too bad I can’t rewrite you anymore.”

“Listen. I don’t trust his type. I’d even rather go the Nakashima/Cheyenne Hawkwind route. He, at least, is a killer.”

“I have no other choice than to consider every possibility.”

“Clovis Drummond isn’t a possibility. He’s an impossibility. And he’s a louse. I think he’s an eight-handed snitch. He cheats and lies like he breathes. He doesn’t just double-deal or triple-deal. With the market around here, his exploits must be absolutely astronomical.”

“Don’t think about it so much. Try to see how we can corner him, force him to work for us and find us a usable Golden Track for sale, that we can buy and he can get a little commission out of.”

“Drummond would do anything for a little commission. He’d let you shit in his mouth.”

Vivian McNellis gives a sigh of resignation. “You’re vulgar.”

“No; I’m sorry, it’s that snitch who’s vulgar. Am I supposed to use elegant metaphors for that piece of shit on legs?”

“I’ll talk to you again later.” She vanishes.

Day Nine. A completely untapped life stretches before him. He is giddy with it. For the first time in his “existence,” he feels his heart beating in his rib cage. Beating as if it would burst out of his chest.

In the afternoon, he writes. For hours, he fills page after page of Recyclo™ paper. Then he goes to the window.

Slanting orange light. Angular rays spread geometric banners across the buildings of downtown and the towers of the cosmodrome. Platform 1 is topped by a long and beautiful white object dappled with red light. A modified Titan V with an updated Russian capsule from the 2010s, made to carry ten passengers, is set to be launched by one of the big space-industry tycoons, a brilliant young man called Jason Texas Lagrange III, whose family lineage of NASA engineers stretches back one hundred years. His face and name appear regularly on the advertising screens that float throughout the city. The hotel’s NeuroNet console is frequently bombarded with infomercials vaunting the resumption of activities by the firm Argonautics; thanks to a new agreement with the Grand Junction Cosmodrome, the hourly headlines scream, Lagrange’s company will go ahead with three hundred orbital launches over the next five years—a “large-scale colonization project.” Around 2,500 settlers, plus two hundred capsules atop various types of launchers, and half a dozen reusable cargo clusters manufactured by one of his Texas subsidiaries. Each cargo will be capable at each launch of carrying four second-generation UHU-approved Alpha modules into orbit.
“I chose to return to Grand Junction because I came to know this cosmodrome very well for almost ten years, and I know the improvements made under the direction of the new Metropolitan presidency have been quite effective,”
the head of Argonautics tells our virtual reporters—Metro-X-Networks newsflash.
“We are very proud to have won this market; Jason Texas Lagrange has always been considered a friend and a demanding and visionary entrepreneur by the Blackburn city administration.”

Plotkin watches the photos and videos, in which handshakes follow smiles mechanically, in the deadly plastic of the perfectly conducted simulacrum. Jason Texas Lagrange shaking Blackburn’s hand—Blackburn, the mayor of the city; the mayor that Plotkin, in a previous life, had been assigned to kill. Blackburn smiling as widely as possible for the cameras.

The October 4 launch, less than three weeks away, will be carried out under the aegis of Jason T. Lagrange III’s company. The nighttime launch of the Sputnik Centennial, the date on which Plotkin, during the initial ontic narration, chose to kill the mayor of the city. The mayor now shaking the hand of the Houston tycoon.

All of that is true.

But none of it matters at all now.

Something springs up deep in the night, a gleam the shadows contain without being able to hold. This something, of course, appears in the form of Vivian McNellis. She is here. The Ninth Day is over; it is midnight. The room’s LED wall clock stops at four zeros, which shine in blue photon lines in the darkness.

“There is something—you know, this secret narrative plan you talked to me about during your passage from the Third to the Fourth Day. Something is interfering—something I didn’t foresee.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know, obviously. It is producing a quantum disturbance that has kept growing since our meeting. It’s as if we’re being watched even from inside our own counterworld. It isn’t local AI; it’s totally incapable of reading Third Time—that’s a code it doesn’t understand, or even see.”

Plotkin cannot think of a response. An idea comes to him after a moment of silence.

“Am I the source?”

“No; I thought of that, but I don’t think it’s you.”

“The Christian rebels?”

“No. It’s someone who is still hidden within the secret of the narrative, its dark side, for now. I couldn’t access it. It is extremely troubling, but I know that he—or she—exists. The problem is that it seems to be amplifying the neurogenetic modifications of my body. The mutations are speeding up, though they aren’t yet visible. I feel it. I’m losing enormous amounts of nerve cells.”

A he/she, Plotkin thinks. Another he/she. “Is it something that could have the same power as you?”

Vivian McNellis’s face reflects pure anguish. It reflects fear. She knows the extent of this power. “Yes. That’s the only plausible explanation. But the more I think about it, the more impossible it seems. Our two spirits would destroy each other; it would be like bringing together two parts of a critical mass. Matter meeting antimatter.”

“So…what, then?”

“I don’t know…something like the intensified inversion of myself, to borrow a phrase from my doctor friend in New Zealand.”

“And what would this strange creature be like?”

“I have no idea. But—it could very well be a machine.”

>
DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF CATHOLIC SAINTS?

Though the
Aevum
of angels is the divine equivalent of machine-time, it is very probable that the Universal Metanetwork uses circumspect time for the artificial beings of the World Below.

Time Machine,
Plotkin thinks.
Welcome to the Time Machine.

If Vivian McNellis is sensing a quantum disturbance indicating the copresence of a time machine analogous, or rather
parallel,
to her own, that implies the existence of an
invariable discontinuity—
a hole in her narration. A black hole. Something visible only as a negative.

Vivian is wrong—the disturbance comes from someone the plot has already made visible as a character.
Persona:
mask, in Latin. Living in its own time machine, it becomes visible only as a disturber phenomenon in the eyes of the girl fallen from the sky. A pseudomachine would, in this way, be able to fool the transmuted brain of Vivian McNellis.

But would it be capable of fooling the transfictional metabrain of Plotkin? Would it be capable of fooling the Man from the Camp, the Counter-Man of UniWorld? Would it be able to play games with the man in Capsule 108?

In the hotel, with the exception of local artificial intelligence, there are not forty thousand humanoid machines, bearers of a singular time machine, capable of appearing in the narrative without causing the mutual disintegration of the world of McNellis and their own.

There are Ultra-Vector Vega 2501 and SS-Nova 280. There is the possible Flandro terrorist. There is the reprogrammed former whore. The two are excellent suspects.

He will need to use fear, the supreme instrument of control.

Fear and artifice, the supreme control of the instrument.

The weak link is the female, the former cyberwhore whose neural pleasure centers were reprogrammed. The very act of having been partially decoded indicates a deliberate wish to have nothing more to do with
desire.
It shows manifest existential weakness—the weakness led to the act, and not vice versa. As a transfictional master spy, fiction become reality while yet remaining fiction, he can imagine pushing this weak point without the slightest qualm.

Pushing until the truth comes out.

Seventh-floor hallway, north face. Plotkin walks past numbered doors.

The hotel itself is also a non-place. It is a face of the camp, the camp that has spread across the World. The hotel did not emerge by chance in Vivian McNellis’s narrative. She chose it for a reason—in it is concentrated most of the machines of the Technical World. It is a snapshot of overall regression and survival as the anthropological limit of the planetary lifestyle.

Door 704-N.

He places his hand on the identity verification plate. The little black eye of the electronic Judas watches him. Text appears on the control screen.
PLEASE STATE YOUR NAME AND THE REASON FOR YOUR VISIT
, squawks the hotel’s artificial intelligence.

“My name is Sergei Plotkin. I’m staying in Capsule 108. My reasons for coming here are strictly private. We have already met.”

A pause. A hum. A red diode turns green. A small click. The chamber door opens. Text scrolls across the controller at the same time as the androgynous voice of the AI speaks the words:
IDENTIFICATION AND REASON ACCEPTED
.

He enters Capsule 704, the android-whore’s capsule.

He is there to conduct an interrogation.

He is not armed; he has no official mandate. He does not even exist.

He knows that makes it even more dangerous.

Everything happens in fluid sequences, like a mutated film-noir narrative. Capsule 704 is identical to his own in every way: Generalized robotics, international design, urbanization of overpopulation reassigned to global demographic recession. The night sky purple above the city. The amber light of bioluminescent fixtures distributed throughout the room. A few scattered personal effects, hardly enough to create the idea that any difference is still possible among all these non-places in the United Human World.

Sydia Sexydoll 280 is a creature hardly less fictive than himself, born of desire-fevered imagination through the coalescent strength of the Technical World. She is before him in a simple white dress, her back to the window, through which he can see the road that connects to the autobridge, there under the arctic, blue-white light of the streetlamps.

He knows.

He has known for days.

The diagrams have been saying it for days. The narrative has been happening within him for days. Genesis has been revealed for days.

Artificial life? Is there any life in this world anymore that isn’t artificial?

The Hotel Laika is both a condensed face of the camp and the threat of its infinite anthropological expansion. Here, all life is falsified. All life is artificial. All lives are even more false than the false world that has taken the place of all substance.

Here, the truth is not human.

Shock. A sampling of continuums in collision: two artificial beings face-to-face in an experimental
white box,
the universal non-place of the human world, this capsule hotel, and a cosmodrome in decline.

A bionic woman, a fictional man. A woman of the World, a Counter-Man from the Camp. A woman created by an organization of socioprogrammatic brains in the service of the Universal Metastructure. A man created by the overall disorganization that is part of an ontological black box.

Matter. Antimatter.

“Why did you have yourself sexually deprogrammed?”

The silence is painful with exposed secrets.

“How do you know?”

“I’m an expert in technological risks. My second job is to eliminate them.”

Fear, more than anything else, is a language.

“Are you a UniPol cop, or from some other government office?”

“I work for a private company.”

“You’re a bounty hunter? No one’s looking for me.”

“Not
yet.
”

Fear comes from the anticipation of a threat. Fear comes from the emotional confusion of different times. It comes from the possibility that you are dealing with a terrorist, that the past will affect the future, that the future is a danger to the present, and that the present is a danger to itself. Fear is the shadow of all secrets. It illuminates only itself.

“Do you listen to music?” The artificial girl’s voice is soft, breathy. A beautiful bit of programming.

“Music?”

“Yes. Real music, I mean.”

“From before the twenty-first century, you mean.”

Sydia Sexydoll 280’s laugh was also beautifully programmed.

“Yes, and even before! There was a world before the twentieth century, you know.”

His smile seems to him like a product of the preworld night. “It seems that someone has been ingenious at erasing every trace of it.”

The music the android has chosen filters gracefully through Capsule 704. Scarlatti, she says. It is one of his pieces for harpsichord, from the Kirkpatrick catalogue.

The music takes form in the space like sparks of light that attract and repulse one another, endlessly creating and destroying astonishing harmonic constellations. It is like a choral voice, the echo of reflected sunlight, floating from the corroded metal of the old Baroque instrument. Celestial harpsichords are probably made of pure gold. Nebulous angels glide amid the hard corners of neon and steel, rising up in luminous choirs toward the glassed-in sky of the posturban night. Two worlds, one of them vanished, the other on the point of vanishing, collide under the electric sky. Cherubs of sodium and neon, archangels of the atomic midnight rise above the impact point.

“Stop your meaningless chatter. It won’t work on me.” Plotkin’s voice breaks dryly into the gold-textured tapestry of Scarlatti, cutting cleanly through the flow of words the artificial girl has summoned in a desperate attempt to hide the truth. “Now
I’ll
tell
you
why you had three million nanocomponents in your sexual centers fried.”

“Why, then?” She flings the question at him defiantly.

“Because you converted to Catholicism or some evangelical religion. You’re a Christian rebel.
Even the sharpest knife cannot cut its own haft.
You know that African aphorism, I suppose? That’s why you’re here.”

“I don’t know it, as a matter of fact. What does that have to do with anything right now?”

“It means that all mechanical actions have their limits. All human actions have their limits. Your actions have reached their limit. You won’t be able to hide your real motives much longer.”

The artificial girl looks at him for a long time, breathing with the invariable regularity found in androids.

The night of Plotkin’s smile has fallen permanently on the world. “You are in contact with the Christian rebels in Heavy Metal Valley, and by some kind of subterfuge you are informing them of the development of a secret network in the hotel or on the strip, I believe. At the same time, you are spying on us on behalf of the Humvee police, who are protecting the rebels. I don’t know yet just what information you have given them, but I can tell you that I’ll get it out of you. I promise you that.”

He has never felt closer to his false personality. He has never felt such a wholeness of character. He never thought it could come this close to being true.

Fear is a quantum field. On one side, the radar operator observes the quantum field and the possible disturbances that indicate the presence of an enemy object—a quivering of the face, a twitch, an involuntary movement, an avoidance of eye contact; on the other side of the quantum field, really the other side of the radar or sonar screen, you know you are a shining point that can hide from the searching waves only by being as furtive as you possibly can. You know you have to disappear. That is why fear is a language. It is the language of control of language.

“On one hand, I’m not sure your operation is legal—but on the other hand, it’s clear that your affiliation with prohibited religions puts you at risk for overall memory reprogramming,” Plotkin says.

“You have no proof of what you’re saying.”

“I’m sure the proof exists. You must have left comprising traces all around you. Even here in your room.” He moves instinctively toward the panel of the retractable bathroom and taps on its keypad. When the bathroom extends outward from the wall, but in the form of a panic room, Catholic relics—crucifixes, statues of the Virgin Mary, a Greek Orthodox icon—appear, hidden in places invisible to the ceiling-mounted panoramic security camera.

In the depths of the night that has taken possession of Plotkin’s unchanging smile, there is a fire.

The fire flows from his mouth, inflaming each of his actions, lighting up his slightest thoughts. Little by little, it is consuming his existence. And the existences of others.

“I am a free man,” he tells her. “I am now the mercenary defending my lives to come, and I am protecting an angel just as it is protecting me. I need to know how you operate.”

A sudden flash of blinding, pale yellow light illuminates the window. Jason Texas Lagrange’s rocket is leaving the cosmodrome launch site. Its long, fiery tail lights up the space around it; the fireball is soon nothing more than a source of radiation streaking farther and farther away in the sky. Soon it will be lost in the electric zenith of Grand Junction. Soon it will be indistinguishable from the stars. Soon it will disappear into the orbital night.

“How I operate what?”

“I can’t tell you everything. My questions would be a lot more informative than your answers. I’m sure you’ve been able to observe us through your connections with the HMV Christian rebels. I want to know how you’re doing it.”

“I assure you, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“But it’s obvious.”

“I’m not watching you. Who do you mean by ‘us,’ anyway? Yes, I have dealings with members of the HMV community. But that’s all.”

Finally, Plotkin has gotten a bit of information. But he knows there is more—that this information is only leading to the real question, the one that seems to follow the diagrams he drew in his chamber during the seven days of his neo-Genesis. “How are you communicating with them? I mean, who exactly do you have ‘dealings’ with?”

Because there must be a
who.
An autonomous being. Maybe even another machine, just hovering on the brink of being a
person.
The other android, for example, would fit the bill perfectly.

This artificial girl in her white dress, this artificial girl with her velvety eyes; could this artificial girl really dream of Catholic saints? Could she really have faith? Could an android really be permanently converted to a religion?

The artificial girl looks at him now, having watched the ascension of the rocket into the violet Grand Junction night. She looks at him as if to say:
Slightly overwhelmed by the questions you’ve brought up, eh?
A slight smile curls the corners of her mouth. She knows she has lost the game, but she has just scored a point for honor.