Cosmos Incorporated (25 page)

“It’s the dog,” she says. “The hotel dog, Balthazar. He’s been acting as a messenger for me, a go-between. We hit it off as soon as I arrived at the hotel. He often runs around on the upper floors, especially when his master goes under the dome.”

Plotkin hides, as well as he can, his reaction to the deathblow he has just received. The artificial girl is working with the dog. The dog sometimes goes to the upper floors of the hotel as if following his master, without having the right to enter the Holy of Holies. The artificial girl knows that the hotel manager regularly goes under the dome, but she probably doesn’t know why. He needs to evade the question, and fast. She must not make the connection between Clovis Drummond and the secret Christians, or anything else.

“Is the dog trying to get you to be accepted by the human refugees in HMV?”

“Yes. They want me to stay at the Hotel Laika for now. They told me UniPol is on their heels.”

The dog,
Plotkin thinks.
This dog has a soul. Much more of one than his human master.

>
NEXUS ROAD

The sun rises over the Hotel Laika.

A man, alone in his chamber, Capsule 108-West; a free man, through his window, watches the sky turn from night black to indigo blue, then lighten bit by bit to emerald green, signaling the presence of the yellow rays of the sun just below the horizon.

Before him, the world wakes up; the day is newborn. It is the dawn of his new childhood.

Before him, life is a book to be written. Free. Free of any instruction program. Of any plan to kill this or that man. Of any contingency.

He will write it, this life. Of course, his narrative will be transcribed in the brain of Vivian McNellis, but he will be the author. And he intends to let the plot diverge as widely as possible from the matrixes that want to enclose him in the appearance of false freedom, the false freedom of the initial plans, of mafia contracts, of pacts with a human devil, of non-lives replicated in the non-places of the United Human Universe.

The contract with his employers across the Atlantic, though, is real. Vivian McNellis was clear on that point. The Novosibirsk mafia is not likely to appreciate any noncompliance with the terms of their agreement. It might look like a betrayal to them.

Freedom does have a price, he realizes, and the price
is
betrayal. The betrayal of everything that permanently disintegrates freedom in the wide-open space of the Control Metastructure and all its rhizomes, mafiosi, cops, do-gooders, cultures, and technology.

When you are in the service of an angel fallen to Earth, it is only natural to reflect for at least a moment on the wisdom of this new allegiance. You must now live, and fight, from your cell of freedom.

He is her bodyguard. He is her firewall in the World Below. He is the Man from the Camp.

His real life is in these few pages of aphorisms and diagrams, the pages of the seven days of his Genesis, retrowritten in the solitude of Capsule 108. His real life is in having become the ally of the girl fallen from the sky, against all the ravages of the world. His real life is being in the service of divine narration; he is no longer subject to the rules of any employer—even one of the most feared and respected in the business.

It is so striking, the beauty of this world—the particles of infrared light bouncing off the mirrored surfaces of the high glass towers downtown, sparks of fire irradiating the mercury of morning windows—that he feels as if he could dance, like an electron nudged out of its orbit, or fall to his knees, and weep, and pray. It is so striking, the perfect match between this beauty with that of Vivian McNellis, the golden-haired angel fallen to Earth, this Earth teetering on the edge of global night.

It’s idiotic, really, but everything he does from now on—everything he has already begun to do, everything that he might be, this whole divergent narrative he is now writing for himself—he is doing for love. Love for her. And without any real hope that she might love him back.

The absence of hope only inflames the blinding incandescence of the feeling even further. It is a feeling so completely unexpected that he has no way of fighting it; it seems as if something is hollowing out his insides—a light is filling him, but only to make him emptier.

It has utterly overwhelmed him, as if he has plummeted out a window of infinite dimensions—the dimensions of his conscience—into a pool of splendor. Love and the betrayal of the world go hand in hand. Love and the rewriting of himself go hand in hand. Love and the transvaluation of his own life go hand in hand. He understands better now why Vivian McNellis is so closely intertwined with an image of fire. Love is a greater danger even than freedom, which yet contains all dangers. Because freedom can consume itself entirely for the sake of love. And it can easily take the rest of the world with it.

First operation: follow the dog.

Second operation: try to make direct contact with the rebel families the dog is visiting.

To follow the dog, Plotkin has only to wait until he leaves the hotel and takes the autobridge to the North Junction road.

To follow the dog, Plotkin has only to wait.

To wait, Plotkin has only to be free.

That is why he is now at the Nexus Road intersection, at its junction point.

This time the dog doesn’t go north toward Heavy Metal Valley, but south, where there is nothing except
the end of the line.
Junkville.

A new train of thought takes off.

The first time in the dynamic: infinite contraction of the infinite.

The second time: infinite expansion of the infinite.

The third time, counterdivided: multiplexification of existing worlds.

The fourth time, counterdivided in turn: poetic reunification of the being.

His rented orange Saturn is parked on the shoulder of Grand Junction Road. All around it are massive trees, botanical mixes of ancient Canadian flora and subtropical species that were imported. The sun is high; it is almost noon. The light is straight and pure, the heat suffocating.

There is no need to investigate. No need to track the female android or the mail to know where the black hole in the narration is coming from. It is enough to follow the dog. No need to stockpile tons of information, to process the data, to identify maps and territories. The narrative is his own.

He is content to think about the beauty of the girl fallen to Earth.

It isn’t the kind of beauty that hits you right away. It is mysterious and true. It does not hide within itself, but in the “Other,” the chasm of “I.” When it tries to guide you toward itself, it becomes selective—it is disguised, perhaps as a Cinderella covered with ashes—so that it can determine if you are worthy of seeking the hand of the princess, a glass slipper in your hand. In truth, he has begun to hide himself as well. Not just in the outward ugliness of the World, but also behind what there is in
him
of pure, wild beauty. And he is beginning to do both at the same time.

For example, this eyesore of a rust-covered orange sign, swaying on its worn, oxidized metal post, barely kept upright by a bit of earth and money and by the crowded rows of vividly colored shrubs that keep it from being seen from the road.

It is a large billboard from the Metropolitan Consortium itself, solidly planted on its concrete base, seemingly there to overextend the optical illusion.

Plotkin goes toward the upside-down sign. It is an orange rectangle bearing the international symbol for radioactivity-contaminated zones:
NEON PARK.
And in smaller letters:
ROUTE
299
,
7
MILES.

The sign seems to indicate a direction opposite that of Heavy Metal Valley. He hasn’t noticed it the other times he was here—but then he was in a car at the intersection.

It is the direction the dog went.

He doesn’t remember anything specific about this area of the Independent Territory, visibly outside Grand Junction. It is a pure moment of rock ’n’ roll in the midst of data processing. It is the eruption of life in the inanimate schema, the surge of intuition that the cone already senses; he is taking it toward terra incognita; toward a gray area on the map. And this intuition tells him that it is exactly what he is looking for, or at least the beginning of it: a black hole.

The same instinct that pushed him toward the Christian rebels is now leading him to drive his rented Saturn south on Nexus Road, into the sun soaring toward its boreal zenith, down unfinished stretches of road and through clouds of ochre dust that fill the car and in which the sun’s rays seem to crystallize, like oxidized diamonds suspended in the air.

Soundtrack: “Ruiner,” Nine Inch Nails, 1994.

It is the cobalt blue, black, silver, and red—dark, dark red—of the twilight of civilizations. The rhythm advances imperturbably, like a metronome in step with the heartbeat of cybernetic cities. The monotonous chant of the synthesizers and artificial strings evokes the threat of a world plunged into deepest night, and yet it also indicates the ghostly presence of a spark of light, cold like a distant sun, just barely a star. The enormous walls of electric guitars that cut off the ends of measures seem like terminator-meteorites, while a harmonic wave, where the theme is taken up and accompanied by a myriad of distorted voices played in reverse, rises little by little, ready to engulf everything within its reach. The world of Scarlatti is very far away now. This is the soundtrack of the Man from the Camp, the Man driving on Nexus Road toward a radioactive zone called Neon Park that is barely on the map.

The Saturn’s primitive dashboard computer can’t tell him much about the place’s history. Its GPS location blinks in red on the farthest eastern point of the Independent Territory map. For the rest, an old American nuclear plant is known to have undergone an incident similar to a smaller version of Chernobyl twenty years earlier—a direct consequence of the War of Secession—and brought chaos and regression along with it, he learns thanks to a hyperlink provided by the Metropolitan Initiative Union. Access to the defunct plant is prohibited, but there is a sort of small city that has sprung up on the periphery of the highly contaminated area.

That, of course, is Neon Park.

You get there via Route 299, a barely maintained trail marked by a copy of the orange sign at the North Junction crossroads.

NEON PARK

Warning: radioactive restricted area in 20 miles

So Plotkin drives. He drives on the gravel-littered road, Route 299, that leads to the former nuclear plant, now abandoned and enclosed in a giant sarcophagus of concrete-composite. He drives toward this western Chernobyl; toward Neon Park. He drives, a local hyperlink that appears suddenly on the dashboard screen informs him, toward a territory populated by
underbrains.

Underbrains: network pirates, hackers, but also renegade or unemployed biotechnicians, specialists in old silicium binary programs, or geneticists who are not in compliance with UHU ethical regulations. Electronics or life-size games amateurs at odds with the bionized world of nanocomponents. Aficionados of the atomic age, resistant to the new universal ecological standards. Neon Park’s underbrains represent the high-tech face of the archaeo-futuristic resistance of the HMV greasers to hydrogen-powered vehicles.

Yes. That’s it. This is
the
place. This is
the
link. It’s here.

Why has this area remained a non-place invisible to the narrative? Because a sign fell to the ground? Because of a standard, incomplete service map of the territory? Because of a false trail that might be that of the rebel Christians?

From the looks of it, no. The atopic place from which Vivian McNellis feels herself to be observed—this place, he knows as sharply as if a blade is slicing through his brain—is truly a space, a space-time.
This place is a place.

And not necessarily a
person.

They may be dealing with a group,
a community of people.

They may be dealing with a city.

>
NEON PARK

The first thing he notices about the city is light.

The second thing he sees in the world is night.

It is night.

The city is shining. And it is night.

That isn’t normal. It was noon just a few minutes ago…

He is not in human time.

He is in the time of the
Aevum,
the angelic time he shares with Vivian McNellis. The LED numbers on the dashboard clock are stuck at four zeros made of monochromatic blue lines. And Vivian McNellis is there, in the passenger seat, observing with interest the moonscape out the windows, while Route 299 cuts roughly through the wooded buttes around them.

Neon Park is a tiny city, made up of a few hundred three-story buildings and individual houses. There are a few mobile homes and cabins as well. As with any tiny North American city, its heart is the service station and main street, cobbled together by a recent graft of scrounged materials from all over—including the neighboring contaminated zones.

A hyperlink to a local site informs him that the city visible on the surface of the ground is really only a
simulacrum.
In fact, the residents have constructed antiradiation shelters in caves belowground, and the entire underground level of the city is connected by tunnels that link the dwellings, forming a subterranean metropolis. Most of the time, the upper floors of the inhabited buildings serve only as temporary residences, when they aren’t filled with concrete or blocked on all sides by lead walls.

There is a city beneath the city here, and that is no metaphor.

Plotkin soon realizes that here there are no metaphors—or, more precisely, that metaphors have become reality here.

Because this is the world of Neon Park.

On the other side of the vast natural amphitheater that stretches out before them, there is a hole in a mass of low mountains, quicksilver-shadowy in the moonlight. They overlook this enormous, desolate valley lit by the fires of Neon Park. The city lies at their feet. And it shines, but it is not only because of the twentieth-century neon signs that decorate even the smallest of the city’s dwellings and from which it probably takes its name. Something in the walls, the roofs, the pavement, is shining. The building materials were scrounged from contaminated zones. Mirrors of phosphorous in the night.

At the other end of the natural amphitheater, just in front of the mass of mountains on the horizon, there is a concrete wall. From this distance, Plotkin estimates that it is around thirty meters high and more than five kilometers long. The wall seems to mark out a perimeter—it slants, then continues off into the distance toward the peak of a mountain with a collapsed center.

Under the sodium streetlamps that do not leave even the slightest bit of the concrete in shadow, lighting the horizon with a constellation of orange stars, he sees, at the summit of the wall, a tangle of barbed wire regularly dotted with small turrets, which are likely crammed with sensors. Approximately every six hundred meters, a high watchtower breaks the horizontal line of the wall with the mechanical transcendence eerily reminiscent of the camp. According to the information provided by the Saturn’s dashboard computer, the nuclear plant is located around fifteen miles behind the wall. Already they—he and the girl fallen from the sky—are beginning to enter an area, as they climb the hills, where radiation levels are high enough to warrant the wearing of special gear, or to limit visiting time to a few hours.

Per year.

“Do you know this area?” he asks Vivian McNellis.

“No.”

“But it’s part of the Created World you incorporated, since I’m here, and I’m compatible with it.”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean, ‘yes’?”

“I mean yes, I know. It’s a paradox. What can I do? It isn’t rational, but it is rational things that are false. It’s a paradox, but the paradox is true. An English author called Chesterton said that, a hundred and fifty years ago.”

“Great. This place stayed hidden for the entire initial narration—hidden, if you ask me, by the attractiveness of Heavy Metal Valley and a series of other small contingencies. In fact, I think these contingencies are hiding the ‘machine’ you spoke to me of. The intensified inversion of you.”

“Here?”

“These are the dingoes of silicium and prohibited biological sciences. The statute of the Independent Territory keeps them fairly safe from the local government and even the UHU. But it’s not a very safe environment for the Christian rebels. UniPol carried out a raid on forbidden laboratories here, with the Grand Junction cops, a couple of years ago. But then again, it isn’t the Christian rebels we’re looking for.”

“Do you know what we’re looking for, at least?”

“Yes,” he says. “I’m looking for the inverted and intensified version of you. I’m looking for a nexus.”

Neon Park condenses all the characteristics of a mid-twenty-first-century neocity. It rose up in the middle of nowhere, grafted into a bit of existing but nearly abandoned suburban and postindustrial tissue. It rose up just as global devolution was beginning
—because
global devolution was beginning.

Mundo depopulato.
It has been thirty years now since the worldwide birthrate began dropping, and each decade the phenomenon intensifies. The end of the Grand Jihad coincided with the explosion of global depopulation right under the noses of the governance bureaus. Even the Islamic states, exhausted by successive wars and now en route to peace under the aegis of the UHU, saw their birthrates founder. Pandemics, planetary civil wars, metalocal terrorism, technological accidents, ecological catastrophes, and societal depopulation combined in the space of a generation and accelerated even further in the years after Plotkin’s “birth.” His first birth, the fictional one, in Moscow in 2001. His first birth, had it been real, on the very edge of the chasm.

“If we stay in the Third Time,” he asks, “will we be safe from the radiation?”

“No, I can’t keep up this kind of conjunction for very long. It takes up a lot of energy, and exhausts me. As I told you, the neuroquantum modifications are getting worse.”

“I think there is survival equipment for sale or rental in the city; don’t worry.”

“I have no reason to worry.”

“Before you leave, I need to be clearer about a few details.”

“Details?”

“Yes, especially about my first narrative, my prenatal narrative.”

“What do you want to know?”

“You said you incorporated me into the World using various documents about spy agencies.”

“Right.”

“Did you only use factual documents, or did you use fictional ones too?”

The girl fixes her eyes on him; they are like pools of mercury. She looks dreamy.

“A mixture of both, actually. Why?”

“You told me you used your maternal Russian lineage for my last name and Argentina, where you spent time living, for my memories. But you had intended to use your uncle’s Russia, which caused these ‘interferences.’ Was that real?”

“Yes, just a mixture of different points of view.”

“Fine, but then where did the other memories come from?”

This time, a shadow crosses her quicksilver eyes. The silence that fills the car is palpable.

“What other memories?”

“England, for example.”

“England? I don’t understand.”

“You don’t?”

“No, unless it has something to do with what I read once about the life of the writer Bruce Chatwin.”

That’s just barely plausible,
Plotkin thinks. Just barely acceptable as an answer. He might be able to make sense of it. But—“What about the music?”

“The music?”

This time, Plotkin thinks he has found the flaw that will open the black hole. “The twentieth-century electronic music. The electro-industrial music and British rock from the 1980s and ’90s, especially.”

Vivian McNellis’s expression is of the purest, most sincere incomprehension. She can only whisper: “I’m sorry.”

But she could very well have said nothing at all.

With perfect calm, Plotkin begins to imagine the worst.

Circumspect time discontinued; independent narration resumed. Vivian McNellis has disappeared; the eternal midnight of the
Aevum
has been replaced by the terrible, endless noon of the human world.

He has just left a survival-suit rental shop. He walks toward his car. He doesn’t know exactly what he is looking for, but he is sure he’ll know it when he sees it. The day survival kit resembles a neoprene diving suit, but it is only as thick as a condom. It fits the body like a second skin. The face is protected by a transparent mask that filters and lets ambient air through, mixed with pure oxygen that comes from small capsules worn on a belt. The suit comes with a specialized Medikit that holds various emergency injections and pills, some to be taken every hour. On the right wrist, a Geiger counter–wristwatch combination shows the ambient radiation level. On the left wrist, another wristwatch shows the level of millirems you have been exposed to, as well as your daily (or monthly, or yearly) maximum limit.

He parks the Saturn in Neon Park’s town square, Oppenheimer Plaza. It is nothing more than a median filled with bizarre vegetation poking out between its concrete slabs, leading to a large Victorian edifice from the 1900s. All around are rutted lanes and alleyways, twentieth-century houses, more recent cabins, and a few buildings evoking colonial New England. Most of the city’s residential buildings, if not all of them, have twentieth-century neon signs attached to their roofs or walls. The simulacrum, he understands, must be hypervisible. The surface city is false—everything has to be false, more false than false; it is all a concretized metaphor for electric technology. Everything must shine, at all times. Around the periphery of the city, in the wooded wildlands that separate it from the huge rock amphitheater, there are lighted signs by the hundreds, the thousands, creating a jungle of electric glass in the midst of the high bluish flora and mutant pines. It looks ritualistic. And where there is ritual, there is religion.

To survive, sometimes one must find a post-technological “niche,” like an abandoned radioactive nuclear plant where there are plentiful building materials to be had. But that makes it necessary to live—to survive—according to the rules dictated by the Geiger counter’s needle. And this is why there
is
an official religion in Neon Park: the religion of the atom. It is no worse than any of the others in practice throughout the United Human World, this world for all with one God for each. And in this specific case, Plotkin has to admit, it makes some sense.

The atomic religion has its temple, an unused former Lutheran church topped with an atom with four orbital ellipses, made in neon glass through which the seven colors of the spectrum sparkle in fantastic polychromy on the aged stone.

Here, everyone wears a survival suit.

Here, the equality that exists through both necessity and desire has produced a sort of religious society. It is completely contrary to the edicts of the UHU, but Plotkin guesses that Human UniWorld can live quite contentedly with a few eccentricities confined to this restricted area. Here, the birthrate is zero—with the exception of a few “monsters” who are said to serve as guinea pigs for the town’s renegade doctors. But old age is rare, survival suit or no.

Plotkin walks through the city of atoms and electricity.

This neocity, this undercity, is closer to the nexus than Heavy Metal Valley could ever be, with its vertical piles of junked automobiles, its Christian rebels, and its old-school cops. The face of electricity itself is reified here, in the form of forests of signs that not only surround the buildings, taking possession of nature, but that take possession of the city by incorporating this neonature into it, this anthropotechnical jungle. Electricity has become a visible God here, or at the very least it is participating in His staging of the scene.

In the church of the atomic god, everything is illuminated by neon light; holograms representing the founding fathers of electric and nuclear energy are resplendent in their phosphorescent green haloes. The silence is punctuated by a regular metronomic beat, the low pulsation of a human heart overlaid with the dissonant and discontinuous harmonies created by various machines in operation. The tabernacle consists of an ancient tomographic scanner in which the small cobalt-60 capsule has been made visible. The tomographic machine is surrounded by four-orbit atoms sculpted in radioactive aluminum, probably taken from the neighboring plant. A Geiger counter, placed before the cobalt-60 box, hums softly, its red needle permanently quivering in the strange light-dark polychromic radiance. Neon signs are clustered behind the altar. They bear the slogans of the local religion:
IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS HYDROGEN. MOST HOLY RADIOACTIVITY, PRAY FOR US. EVERYTHING ELECTRIC HAS LIFE.