Cosmos Incorporated (27 page)

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CYBERDOG BLUES

“We, the dogs, have lived with men for fifteen thousand years. We were among the very first domesticated animals, and from the moment humans emerged from the Paleolithic maternal womb, we have watched over them and their herds.

“We have been at your side since the time of the Flood. We perished en masse with you, and one of you saved us with the other surviving species on the globe. In return, dogs decided to become your protectors, your ‘guardian animals’ in the terrestrial world. But now that men have all become criminals, we are being asked to protect their crimes. What we really should do, though, is protect them
from
their crimes.

“This is what made me decide to act.”

“Your canine mythology fascinates me deeply, but as I’m sure you know, you haven’t answered my question,” Plotkin says. “What exactly is going on under the dome? And why is an old Catholic clairvoyant, lost in the middle of nowhere, so interested in it? Why are you so interested in it, for that matter? And what exactly does it have to do with me?”

They are a half kilometer away from the interchange, seated side by side on the western slope of the hill. The incomplete knot of highway is just a spidery shadow amid shadows. The conjunction is taking place under a sky studded with stars so bright that he feels as if he could stretch out his hand and gather handfuls of them like beach sand. The conjunction with the anthropotechnical manifestation of Nature, the cyborg dog.

The conjunction with what he senses to be the object of his search:
under the dome?

He has become the master of his own discontinuities. Now, in the life that is being written, what counts is what will be consumed and saved by the narrative—what transcribes itself from his brain into that of Vivian McNellis—and that is because he is an I-other, a he/she, and because the transtemporal fire courses through his veins, through the tiniest of his molecules, the most infinitesimal of his electrochemical connections, but especially in the infinite tension between
him and this other in him
that is in the process of writing him. It is in this light that makes time into something other than a simple, artificial continuity of moments, in this light that makes a singularity of each moment, that finally he has an extraordinary chance, almost an absolute one, to attain
existence—
an existence unbound by the discontinuity of human/mechanical time, because it has itself become the general chant of discontinuities—of
dis
junctions—their solar unity, the initial point, the ignition point, the point toward which the fire is ever reaching, and from which writing becomes life.

“I am employed by the Grand Junction Consortium to ensure application of the security regulations and local jurisdiction within the hotel,” the dog says. “Drummond’s trafficking is tolerated by the Consortium. He gives them a small kickback from it. But I doubt they will appreciate what’s going on under the dome once I’ve gathered all the proof I’m looking for.”

The dog had ceded with relative good grace to Plotkin’s initial questioning. Surprised at encountering the man in the bend of the road, he had quickly bowed in the face of the high-definition recordings of his conversation with the old woman, a few extracts of which Plotkin had shown him on a pocket holoplasma screen. The dog is probably the only true support he can count on. The challenge consists of showing the cyberdog that he, Plotkin, would be a necessary and dependable ally.

He must demonstrate to the dog that he is the dominant figure.

Plotkin has already had the time to realize, by analyzing the conversation between the dog and the old prophetess while waiting on the side of the road, that the “something” he has spent days searching for outside the hotel and even outside Grand Junction, this “something” is
inside
the hotel. Moreover, it is just above his head.

It is under the dome.

It comes from Neon Park.

Drummond is using it to traffic in prohibited sexual software destined for the Ring colonists, behind the backs of the Municipal Consortium and the Mohawk mafia.

And—the most crucial piece of information—it is probably a “human being.”

Everything points to the incarnate figure of the Technical World he is searching for in the dark part of the narrative.

“I’m going to ask you not to do anything before I’ve made a few provisions,” Plotkin says.

The dog looks at him for a moment, then barks dryly, in his digitalized voice: “And just how do you plan to do that? And by what authority?”

So Plotkin’s identity comes apart once more in order to revert to his first nature, that of a Red Star Order killer. This identity is certainly real, as real as the one he is in the process of creating from his neo-Genesis as a Free Man. This identity, the one of a Human Termination System, is the figure at the core of his new freedom; it does its work, it continues to labor in silence, it throws a shadow blacker than all the shadows around it.

“If I tell you the source of my authority, I would have to kill you immediately afterward. And as for the ‘how,’ you can’t imagine the number of solutions I have at my disposal.”

“Even if you’re up against a cyberdog?” the dog growls, showing his teeth, trying to impress to hide his fear.

Plotkin smiles widely and frankly at the animal. “My dear Balthazar, if you command your cortical wave sensor to reset its parameters according to the data I am going to send you, you will quickly realize that I am armed with a full range of state-of-the-art neuroweapons—for example, a viral macroroutine that could infect your entire nervous system, both the artificial and natural parts of it, in an irreparable and fatal manner, in a matter of two or three minutes. Understand?”

In short order, both of them are in the rented Saturn. From the stretch of the abandoned interchange, from the western slope of the night-cloaked hill, from the rolling landscape where the prairie gives way to the steppe, from the stars that observe everything high in the sky, the car is a mobile invisible point preceded by two beams of light.

An invisible point that pierces the shadows, lighting them up with its gaze.

A man, a dog, a car, the night, the double beam of the headlights.

A man writing his own life in and through the brain of another. A female other.

A dog that speaks the language of men, a chimera-dog, an antique fiction become reality in the Technical World.

A simple rental automobile driving through the shadows, the luminous double track that precedes it representing the simultaneous progress, the synchronicity, of two consciousnesses.

The lunar landscape dotted with rocks and the grassy prairie, barely surviving between the stretches of dried-out conifer woods, is lit only by the night stars and the two xenon strokes that scan the universe ahead of them. Plotkin breaks the silence by programming the dashboard radio.

He realizes that he has just punched up the same Nine Inch Nails song, “Ruiner,” that he listened to during the trip out. He didn’t even mean to do it—at least, not consciously. As the first notes sound, drums harmonizing over a layer of ghostly voices reverberating around the rhythm of the beat box, an empty cybernetic train that speeds between unfinished interchanges, he knows that this is a sign that he has managed to create a loop in the topological plan. He has circumscribed the territory of Grand Junction up to its ultimate anti-place, this unfinished
—in-finite—
interchange, this nexus of unpredicted,
unpredictable
conjunctions. Yes, he has circumscribed the symbolic dimension; all the zodiacal points are reunited. There is nothing left to do but trace incomplete diagrams.

But the search program has not finished with this ultimate emulsion of what once, at the end of the twentieth century, was called “rock.” The next song that comes up is “Happiness in Slavery,” from the 1992 album
Broken,
with its postnuclear strophes planted in the middle of the central bridge as in the surrounding decor they are passing through at this very moment, with the ecstatic feeling of being there entirely, in the infinite distance that results in true contact with things, at the heart of the present moment:
I don’t know what I am, I don’t know where I’ve been, human junk just words and so much skin, stick my hands thru the cage of this endless routine, just some flesh caught in this big broken machine.

“How do you know the old woman?”

“Lady van Harpel? She is indeed an old lady, and it is an old story.”

“We’re more than thirty kilometers away from Monolith Hills as the crow flies, and given the condition of these roads, we have plenty of time for long, old stories, Balthazar.”

“She is descended from a very old New England family, former Canadian Loyalists who became Americans during the War of 1812. She was born in the 1980s. She studied at Princeton—orphic religions, I believe. Around 2022 or 2023, the family started to have serious financial difficulties related to the first shocks of the Great Recession, and then during the North American War of Secession twenty years ago, her house was bombed and the ancestral land taken away several times by various warring forces. She took refuge in an aunt’s house, and then when the Islamists moved into their corner of Massachusetts she fled here, and stayed here even after the Islamists retreated to the District of Columbia.”

Obviously, the dog hadn’t spent more than ten years in the Marines for nothing. He knows how to give a clear, clean, concise report.

“What is her connection to you?”

There is a silence, made radioactive by the implacable sequencers that pound into the darkness.

“Very simple. Before I was hired by the Consortium, I trained for years in the area, around the county of Grand Junction and even in Heavy Metal Valley and Neon Park, on the Vermont border; I even went to Montreal a few times. One day, just after I left the Marines—I was new to the area—I was walking toward the unfinished interchange and I hurt myself slipping on a block of wet concrete several meters off the ground. Lady van Harpel found me and took care of me. She gave me one or two addresses in Neon Park, and in HMV and on the strip. She was one of my first human friends here. And the best one, let me tell you. Don’t try to hurt her, even with your damned neurovirus. Two or three minutes is more than enough for me to tear your throat out with my teeth.”

Plotkin knows the threat is very real. The dog would sacrifice himself without hesitation if it meant saving the sibyl of the abandoned interchange.

“Is she connected to the rebel Christians?” he asks calmly.

The dog scowls, while Trent Reznor attacks the hook.

“I know much more than you think, Balthazar. You’re right to say time is running out, and that the situation can only get worse. That’s why I need to know everything that is really happening under the dome. For starters, have you gone there?”

“No.”

“What exactly do you know?”

“It’s a cross-checking of information, and lately a bit of a joker. You know, it’s bizarre—thanks to that fire…”

“The fire in the double room? Capsule 081?”

“Yes.”

“I want to know everything, Balthazar. Everything.”

After a few moments of mutual silence, filled only with the pulsations of the frozen sequencers from the dead world of machines, the dog shakes himself in the passenger seat. “Where do you want me to start?”

“At the beginning. It’s one of the best solutions. The simplest, in any case, is usually best.”

“There is more than one beginning,” says the dog.

“No, there is only one, if you just follow the classic chronological route.”

“There is no classic chronological route for dogs.”

“Try. You’re more than just a dog.”

“You’re wrong; I’m still a dog. I just try to speak like men so they will understand me.”

“Well, keep going with that. I’m almost a man myself. Or maybe even a little bit more.”

Another discontinuity in the moving car filled with cold music from the “previous future” of humanity, the future that never saw the light, the future that has disappeared in the United World. This time it is “Hurt,” with its dark, lunar desolation, an unknowable prayer to a God we no longer know how to talk to.

“For me,” the dog begins, “everything started around two months ago. First, a nanovirus of unknown origin attacked the AI sensor network under the hotel dome. Then, Clovis Drummond paid out of his own pocket to hire a small company, not a member of the Consortium, to come—after a municipal company claimed to be incapable of working on it. The private company, out of Ontario, made all sorts of repairs under the dome for about three days. The whole area was coded red, and local legislation made it illegal for me to go there, even with my status as a security officer. Later, Drummond started to go under the dome regularly. He was the only one with the legal right to do it, and of course he kept the area in code red. But at the same time he acted like it wasn’t a big deal, that the situation was under control, and the nanovirus had only affected the peripheral surveillance cameras. He was contradicting himself, but of course he fucked up royally.”

“Not bad for a beginning.”

“Then there was the cross-checking of information. First, I discovered while nosing around in the hotel’s electronic archives—thanks to my little remote-GPS system—that Drummond had kept a guest in the hotel for several days who I never saw.”

“How is that possible?”

“I don’t know how he got in, but he never came out of his room in all that time. If he had, I would have detected and logged his olfactory imprint. But since the capsules and hallways are continually disinfected…anyway, the most interesting thing was that this mysterious guest arrived just before the nanovirus corrupted the dome’s surveillance system.”

“How long before?”

“Not long. Two days, maximum.”

“Okay. And then?”

“Then, the so-called John Smith—great name, eh?—completely disappeared from the hotel. The strangest thing was that all eight days of his stay were erased from the AI hard disk. More precisely, the AI images showed an empty room. But the hotel’s little accounting disk definitely recorded a guest named John Smith during the week, and the funniest part is that the chamber had been paid for dimes to dollars by Clovis Drummond himself!”