Cosmos Incorporated (28 page)

“Which room?”

“Capsule 014, facing east. On the ground floor. Not far from Drummond’s room.”

“Did you go there?”

“Yes, but it was too late. The room had already been disinfected and a new guest had moved in the night before. I’ve tried to follow or surprise Drummond many times, but he is very clever; he knows the hotel well, and he has a magnetic passkey and a GPS telecontroller. He’s always managed to avoid me. As often as he can, he sends me on ‘surveillance missions’ around the hotel.”

“And it was during one of your visits to the upper floors that you met the android female?”

“Yes, I met her once or twice when she went out to get sodas from the machine in the hallway. We became acquainted that way.”

“But Drummond got away from you.”

“Yes. Well, no. A few days ago, I had a lucky break. I surprised him as he was coming out of the nacelle and heading for his counter. I had been spying on him for almost two weeks, and I had taken careful note of his habits. It was four o’clock in the morning.”

“And?”

“He flew into an awful rage and ordered me to go make a security check of the parking lot and the woods around the hotel, but it was too late.”

“Too late?”

“Yes, too late. There were foreign molecules on his body. He was carrying an odor other than his own. Another human odor. One that wasn’t logged in my olfactory list of hotel residents.”

So there is a man hidden in the dome, a human being who has remained secret, obscure, invisible, even to her who incorporated Plotkin into the Created World. Even to her who is transcribing the narrative of the universe in her own brain.

“How do you know he is from Neon Park?” Plotkin asks. He wants to know how far his intuition coincides with actual fact.

“Because of the radioactivity level from the dome. It’s very low, but either the man’s clothing must be slightly irradiated, or else he has some object in his possession that gives off radioactivity just higher enough than the normal hotel rate for my sensors to detect it. There are detectable leaks in the corners of the hallways where emergency doors lead to the service stairways.”

Plotkin smiles. Radioactive objects; objects from Neon Park. He thinks of the Christian relics the digital angel located. The dome-man might very well be a Christian renegade from Neon Park. Maybe he was expelled from the community of the atomic god. Sometimes, paradoxically, intuition precedes fact. “And what about the fire in Capsule 081?”

Now he needs to assess the extent to which dreamlike reality and real narrative can be brought together.

“That night,” says the dog, “after everything was back to normal, there was a lot of activity under the dome.”

“Activity? What type of activity? Drummond?”

“No; Drummond was sleeping in his room, doped up on who knows what. I went up and hid in a corner, and my sensors detected very powerful electromagnetic disturbances. They seemed to be affecting the whole top floor, but I also detected an identical field on that floor to the one in the capsule that had burned. The local AI saw nothing but a fire this time as well. Naturally.”

Plotkin is silent.

“I think the short circuit in Capsule 081 was caused by the accidental manipulation of some local nanocomputer system or another, by the man in the dome.”

Still Plotkin says nothing. A mad schema is beginning to take shape in his head.

Ideas are black boxes that unleash reality hidden under reality. The real dome hidden under the real hotel.

Inductions and deductions form a network whose struts have invaded the entire universe, the totality of his mind: a human, undoubtedly born in Neon Park, is now under the dome of the Hotel Laika creating, one way or another, illicit sexual programs that Clovis Drummond intends to sell at very high prices to the colonists in the Ring.

Drummond had the local network of sensors sabotaged, probably by the human from Neon Park, in order to do this. He lodged the man secretly while the work was carried out, then hid him under the dome.

Plotkin knows now what he is looking for.

Certainty exceeds reason. And even madness. It is the order of faith.

“Do you know who he is?” he asks the dog.

Balthazar shakes his head. “Who, the dome-person? No idea, obviously. How could I?”

“Do you know how Drummond is getting what he wants? How is he making the dome-person
voluntarily
traffic in
neurogames
?”

“Lady van Harpel and I have a theory.”

“I’m listening.”

“It’s worth what it’s worth. He does drugs.”

“Drugs?”

“Yes, the dome-man must be a junkie—or, since he is probably an underbrain from Neon Park, he suffers from a genetic disease and Drummond is providing him with some illegal dope or a rare and expensive antidote. The man himself must be in violation of UHU laws, to the point that he isn’t safe in Neon Park anymore. Some spotter from the strip must have taken him to Drummond.”

The car has just turned onto Route 299 toward Nexus Road. The sky lights up abruptly to the west, behind Monolith Hills. Then a streak as brilliant as a star surges upward out of the shadows into the sky. One of Jason Texas Lagrange III’s huge rockets has taken off toward a slightly inclined equatorial orbit. It is the first cargo clipper on its way to place state-of-the-art habitation modules in orbit for his space-city program. The rocket’s four boosters belch a fusion of gold light and white smoke, the whole illuminated by the fire spewing from its tailpipe.

The beauty of the spectacle grows more painful for Plotkin every time.

The latest models of space modules are already a quarter of a century old. He thinks they are probably the last ones.

The luminous trajectory of the booster in the starry night evokes the race against time humanity is engaged in with itself. Though millions of stars shine in powdery constellations in the Milky Way, though the human mind is able to imagine infinity, it is no longer at all guaranteed that humanity will ever be able to go any farther than the moon.

>
RADIOACTIVITY

He is the shock wave. The shock wave created by and in the narrative itself. As he moves, the plot unfolds, folds over, and takes shape; as he invents his own life, he transcribes an existence that until now has been secret, hidden under the hotel’s dome, hidden under its upper story, hidden in the underground image of the sky, in the terrestrial image of light, hidden in the shadow of the plot. As he delineates the symbolic territory of Grand Junction, he comes closer to the real black hole. He comes closer to the man hidden under the dome.

He knows, vaguely, that this incarnation of the Technical World is not only the intensified inversion of Vivian McNellis. He guesses that it has a very close link to him as well, with his own genesis. It is probably his shadow. The Shadow cast by the Light of the genitive Act.

Because of this, he is hardly surprised by the incident that happens while he and the dog talk on Nexus Road, driving back up toward HMV and the North Junction road through the semi-Canadian, semitropical landscape slowly mutating beneath the sky of the previous century, or at least what looks like it.

The silence in the car is finally broken by interference crackling from the dashboard audio system.

After playing several Nine Inch Nails’ songs on repeat mode, looping the loop in a devouring movement, he places the downloading system on standby. The cyberdog watches the scenery flash past the window. On his left, Plotkin sees the high black spine of Monolith Hills growing closer. A sizzling noise comes from the speakers. The audio system changes to radio mode, and Plotkin, curious but only a little astonished, watches the LED numbers on the indicator screen whiz back and forth at full speed before stopping at an impossible frequency: 00.00 MHz.

Is this a message from Vivian McNellis, coming from
Aevum
time?

The interference seems to be coming from a forgotten radio station in orbit around Mars. A voice can barely be heard beneath the continuous metallic buzzing. It says: “The Machine is speaking to you. Do you wish to speak to the Machine? The Machine is speaking to you. Do you wish to speak to the Machine?”

It repeats the words over and over again unceasingly. “The Machine is speaking to you.”

It asks the same question again and again. “Do you wish to speak to the Machine?”

Then the interference stops, the voice falls silent, and twentieth-century music fills the car with electronic sounds from an age when people still believed in the future.

Plotkin realizes it immediately: Kraftwerk. The ditty comes from Chernobyl, where techno was invented ten years before Detroit, in the conurbation of the Ruhr; yes, all of it was forged during his initial narrative—but before Vivian McNellis became involved, she says.

The crazy diagram is determined to take shape in his head.

Radio Activity

Discovered by Madame Curie

Radio Activity

Tune in to the melody

Radio Activity

Is in the air for you and me.

It is nothing more than a living piece of his memory, but it was sent by someone—or perhaps by a non-person, from some nowhere just barely located on a phantom radio station calibrated at zero megahertz, as they drive through the night of the cosmodrome toward the Hotel Laika. The last-chance hotel. The hotel of the last human world.

The song is repeated on a loop that creates a continuum, a world: it seems inseparable from the landscape of rocks and mutant trees speeding past the windows, and from the rental car driving through the scenery.

It is a barely disguised ode to Neon Park. It is saying something.

It says:

I am here.

I am Radio. I am Active.

Come find me.

He truly is the shock wave of Creation, come to disturb the creative process itself.

If he is facing a black hole, he is himself a Big Bang in full expansion. He is that moment at the beginning of the universe, where the speed of light is greatly elevated. Now the imminent encounter with the secret of the dome is marked by the direct eruption of phenomena in the reality-narrative. The closer they get to the Hotel Laika, the more the process intensifies. Like a Gonio tracking vehicle that, in tracing successive concentric circles, finishes by resonating with a Larsen effect produced by the radio source they seek.

When they arrive at the North Junction crossroads, the music stops. The interference resumes. This time, the voice says:

I am in the box, but I am the box.

I live at the center of things, but I do not live in the world.

I am the Machine. Do you wish to speak to the Machine?

Parasites progressively swallow up the looping voice until they arrive in view of the incomplete autobridge and get out of the Saturn, which has been programmed to return automatically to the city. As soon as they leave the car, the looped voice claiming its identity with the box, covered in continuous electric static, cedes place to one of those pseudoclassical sonatas shoddily made for the United Human World. The Hotel Laika rises up before them, a monument of carbon-carbon and aluminum whose whiteness quivers under the combined light of the rising moon, the security projectors planted in bunches on pylons, and the pink-and-blue hologram of the canine astronaut that turns, suspended, above the entryway.

Plotkin feels again the sense of an absolute combustion of his being. He senses the concrete presence of truth; he knows it is here, it is now, it is very strong.

“I have a copy of Drummond’s access codes. We’ll make sure he’s sleeping, and if he is, we’ll go straight up under the dome.”

“It’s risky,” says the dog. “He’s probably booby-trapped the service stairway with alarms.”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“How can I not?” Balthazar growls. “It’s my job.”

“Your job has nothing to do with it. His alarm systems may be sophisticated, but they won’t see us. They can’t.
They can’t read us.
”

Plotkin, the man who exists only via the constant tension he places on the narrative of his own invention—Plotkin, the fictional man made flesh—looks at Balthazar, the cyberdog, the dog gifted with speech, the former dog-soldier, the dog that is intimately acquainted with Good and Evil.

They are deep within the night. They walk deep in shadow.

They walk toward the Light. They walk toward the Shadow that contains it.

They walk toward the dome of the Hotel Laika.

PROCESS

TOWARD THE INVISIBLE

Since the raison d’être of machines lies in performance, in
maximal performance,
they need an environment that guarantees this maximum. And what they need, they conquer. All machines are expansionist, even imperialist; each one creates its own
colonial empire of services….
And they require that these colonialempires transform into their machine image; that they rise to the challenge in working with the same perfection and solidity as the machines. That they become, though localized on the outside to the maternal earth—note this term; it will become a key concept for us
—comechanical.
The original machine thus expands; it becomes a “megamachine,” and not just by accident or merely from time to time. Rather, if it weakens in this regard, it will cease to matter in the realm of the machines. To this is added the fact that none of them would be definitively replete by incorporating a field of services that would always be limited, no matter how large. Apply to the “megamachine” what was initially applied to the initial machine—it too requires an exterior world, a “colonial empire” that submits to it and “plays its game” in an optimal manner, with precision equal to that with which it does its work. It creates this “colonial empire” and assimilates it so well that it, too, becomes a machine—in short, there is no limit to self-expansion; in machines, the thirst for accumulation is insatiable.

G
üNTHER
A
NDERS,
W
E
, S
ONS OF
E
ICHMANN