Cosmos Incorporated (32 page)

“What makes you think I’m capable of doing something like that?”

Your eyes,
thinks Plotkin.
The eyes I saw that day in the hotel cafeteria, the eyes of a cold-blooded killer.
And without even the shadow of a smile except perhaps the one that habitually hovers around the mouths of calm men, completely sure of himself, Plotkin lays his cards on the table.

“Twenty-five thousand Pan-Am dollars. That’s what makes me think you’re capable of doing something like that.”

In Cheyenne Hawkwind’s eyes, he sees the lively gleam of the human world’s cruelty. In the American Indian killer’s eyes is everything capable of making a life evaporate for even less than that.

Clovis Drummond is already dead.

Seated at his desk in Capsule 108, Plotkin lives/writes the small piece of the world in which he, a flesh-and-blood being, is yet himself and the other at the same time, the two connected by the invisible light of the narrative fire. For example, he writes:
Textual matrix number two: go beyond the Machine, beyond the hidden traps it contains, beyond all the humanity it bears within it.

He walks down the hallway on the top floor, toward the service staircase, toward the dome, toward the realm of the Machine-Child.

Sydia Sexydoll is at his side, holding herself very straight, visibly racked by near-total anguish, as if walking through a corridor of death toward an open doorway to the unknowable.

“You don’t need to be afraid,” he tells her. “He won’t see us. He can’t read you. But you will help me make contact with him.”

The artificial girl doesn’t reply. She accepted Plotkin’s offered deal barely ten minutes earlier: a meeting with the HMV Christians in the company of Balthazar, and undoubtedly a temporary exile with the old clairvoyant at the interchange. Anything rather than remain on the strip, Plotkin had thought. She is ready to do anything in order to join the rebel community. Ready to do anything to receive the unction of baptism, to finally begin her new life.

Ready to accompany him under the dome, up to the Machine-Box of the Machine-Child. Ready to confront the nothingness, if she must.

The Machine-Child is nothing to her but a vulgar mechanism. For Sydia Sexydoll, android-whore manufactured in orbit, this scrap of humanity enclosed in his iron lung and his network of machines is far less human than she herself.

He sends out the image of the Devolution the world has undergone in the last thirty years: he is no longer human; he is not even an artificial humanoid; he is less than a machine. He is the
nihil.

“What must I do?” she asks in a low voice.

“Nothing for now. I need to establish a few…er,
literary
procedures. First I have to be sure I have correctly figured out how his ontology works. Then I’ll tell you.”

In Capsule 108, at the other end of the “supercord,” Plotkin, in his globe of fire, retrowrites the narration of which his I-other has become the engine. He, himself, is the fuel. The fuel and the combustion, like in the old propellant engines used by Grand Junction’s pioneers to launch themselves toward the stars. Oxygen, hydrogen. Fire.

If they are to proceed with their game of disconnections against a being made up specifically of a metastable and infinite ensemble of mechanical disconnections, they will have to reckon with the dangers of reversibility. In the case of the Machine-Child, a game of disconnections, capable of disrupting the ontogonic process folded back on itself, would truly be a
suit of armor.

A body.

Not his, not the body of the Man from the Camp, because he is mind, fire, ether, capable of reading and surely also of writing in the exconscious of the autistic youth, but he cannot really be the body of the text. He will be the narrative, but he will need support. A medium. A book.

And this book, this material assemblage on which his transcription of the Machine-Child can take place, this book-machine, of course, is she.

She, the android.

The second game of disconnections, in this case the metastable structure that will open like a suit of armor, refracts in the sort of ontological Larsen effect between the different “sexualities” in play.

Sydia Sexydoll is a living machine endowed with feminine sexuality. Plotkin is the Man from the Imaginary Camp; he is a man, but he is fictional. The Machine-Child is neither a man nor a woman, neither male nor female, and not because he is like the finished form of an androgynous hermaphrodite from Neon Park. Rather, because he is
neither one nor the other.

Scanning the expansive brain of the Machine-Child in his active transnarration, Plotkin follows the invisible thread linking the identity boxes and reads in them the specific psychic makeup of the dome-child. Deprived of all sexuality by the general devolution dis(incarnate) in his own existence, which is limbic, he feels no effect—no desire—so that even the concept is completely alien to him. Drummond’s pedophilic acts merely strike him as a bit strange.

But the android former prostitute has had her sexual desire nanocenters deprogrammed with the obvious aim of adopting a monastic life after being baptized by the rebel Christians, if they accept her.

There is a diagram there, but one united by inversion. In it lies how to extend the invisible filament linking the boxes all the way to a suit of armor he will incarnate like writing, like truth.

He has no idea what effect this will have on the brain of the Machine-Child, on his exconscience that mimes and reproduces the Control Metastructure. Will it kill him, one way or another?

Yes, it will undoubtedly kill him, one way or another.

But isn’t that what he is? A killer?

That is certainly what the divided scribe in his room in the Hotel Laika believes, in any case, because that is how the plot has put him into the world.

Plotkin is a free man; he was written and then retrowritten by himself. He is in the service of the girl fallen from the sky, but the indelible core of his identity, which was only transfigured by his seven-day neo-Genesis, has always been the Red Star Order’s man. He is now an assassin-turned-renegade, a traitor to his employers and perhaps to everything on which the secret world of assassins is based, the entire narrative system organized so that his life and activities will obey his distant—so very distant—bosses.

But he is now in the Third Time. He is using a tiny spark of the creative powers of his own creator. He will be able to write a little sense, with a little blood, into this world where death itself is invisible, immaculate, and technically assisted.

He is a free man, and that means he is a man most likely at the point of death. He knows this, and the thought is calm, comfortable, natural.

“It has started,” Plotkin says to the artificial girl. “I’m in the process of retrotranscribing the Machine-Child’s data into my narrative. Don’t be afraid. Your presence will allow me to…”

For a moment, he is lost for words.

“Will allow you to what?” the girl asks.

He hesitates a moment more before launching the idea like a jet of fire into the sky. “You will act as my word processor; I mean, my integrated writing system. With just your presence alongside the Machine-Child’s, I’ll be able to integrate his method of sensory perception, his specific ‘principle of individuation,’ to be precise, and I will be able to try to understand how to destroy his anticreative energy, his metastatic expansion in the form of UniWorld, which is in the process of killing the person I work for.”

The artificial girl seems utterly uninterested in the identity of his employer, or by all these narrative subtleties; she looks at him with her violet-flecked black eyes, the eyes of a human machine wishing to receive a soul and to be saved; she looks at him with the intensity of those who know very well what they are doing, and her gaze says:
I will do everything you ask, but you must keep your promises.

> SCRIPTURA IN CORPORE

Later,
Plotkin writes in his chamber,
a quantum leap, a sliding of time on Earth, passage toward the next action, pursuit of the Procession, return to Capsule 081: the Fire is there. It is everything that is.

“Who is this android?” Vivian McNellis demands.

The artificial girl is standing next to the girl-angel. Both fallen from the sky; they stand with their backs to the window of Capsule 081-A, backlit, their silhouettes outlined with a delicate tracing of silver light. The two women look at each other with the magnificent calm of stars just before they explode. The surveillance camera records the scene without the slightest understanding of what is happening under its globular eye.

“Yes,” Plotkin says, full of the fire of writing in action. “She is a Venux. A bionic prostitute. She had all her sexual centers deprogrammed—by a Neon Park underbrain, I imagine.”

Vivian McNellis turns to face the artificial girl. “Why did you do that?” Her voice holds total incomprehension, but at the same time it is horribly clear that she understands the reasons all too well.

There is a long silence. Plotkin gazes out the window at the monochromatic blue of the sky. The day is calm, without snow, extreme heat, or rain. A blue day, very pure, very beautiful, and deadly full of ultraviolet radiation. WorldWeather does what it can.

“A lot of Christians practiced voluntary castration during the time of the Church Fathers. Origen and Tertullian, I think, among others,” Jordan McNellis says.

Vivian does not drop the android’s gaze.

“That’s it? That’s what Plotkin is talking about? You want to join the rebel Christians in HMV? Is that why you had yourself deprogrammed?”

This time, the voice manufactured by Venux Corp comes out in a quivering whisper, just barely audible. “I have no choice. I have to rub out all traces of their scum.”

Plotkin feels as if he has been sliced open from the inside. The writing is truly creating itself if it proves capable of retrotranscribing the world in someone’s head. If the artificial girl is going to serve as a textual suit of armor for him in order to undo the antinarrative of the Machine-Child, it will be precisely because she acts in that arena as an intensified inversion of this child without age, birth, or sexuality. The Machine-Child has no sexuality because he has all of them, and they destroy one another. The artificial girl was bioprogrammed as a sexual female capable of satisfying human desire of all the planet’s inhabitants.

She had herself deprogrammed. The Machine-Child has no need to do so.

He is a pure program.

In Capsule 108, Plotkin the Scribe uses a laser to trace the filament of light that guides Plotkin the Killer in this world where humans have become instruments of calculation for others.

In the double Capsule 081, little by little Plotkin the Killer brings together the elements of critical mass, and he does it with all the terrifying, childlike naïveté of the man inventing his own life; he does it with all the innocence of a human who knows what it is to self-destruct.

“How will she be useful to us? What will we use her for?”

For Vivian McNellis, the android is just another means to an end.

“She will allow me to rewrite the Machine-Child’s narrative. I will be able to dialogue with him, and thus to break his self-enclosure. I will use Sydia like you are using me. I will retrowrite everything, and—”

The artificial girl’s voice trembles in the silence of the room. “Yes, and that way I too will have a soul.”

“When do you go back up under the dome?” Vivian McNellis asks.

“As soon as possible. At the same time, I have to draw all the diagrams of the narrative. Everything is falling into place, I think. Yes, it’s all falling into place.”

“You need to act fast now, Plotkin. Time is short, especially for me.”

Plotkin notes the presence of a solar gleam in the eyes of the girl fallen from the sky. In the backlighting, he seems to perceive filaments of light running beneath her skin, like visible nerves. The natural light of this beautiful autumn day can undoubtedly, for a while at least, mask these physical transformations from strangers’ eyes. He knows the local cameras don’t have the ability to read anything of this nature, but the simple effect of the backlighting has allowed him to see the manifest presence of this light hidden in the depths of shadow, this secret cerebrospinal system hidden in the depths of her body.

Once more, the necessity appears to define existence as an ontological experience whose goal is to allow the being to emerge from its gangue, its “existential” box, its dead mechanism that opens only onto the emptiness of monopsychism, this shadow of the world that claims to think us.

He needs a meeting in the
Aevum,
the length of discontinued time, a new walk in the midnight of unknowable light with the girl fallen from the sky. He needs Vivian McNellis to come to him here in Capsule 108. He needs this end of the Plotkin supercord to recognize, like enemy terrain, what will now happen. It is an exhortation, a prayer.

New quantum leap.

New disorbit.

New paragraph.

He is reunified once again. The quantum-field Plotkin is an I-other-he in a single person.

“In the
Aevum,
the operation of infinite division is suspended—for ‘humans,’ at least. Here, you can never be more than one, because the basis of Metatron’s narrative trinity is the ‘notional action’ Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas spoke of, and it is what the nominalists ravaged until something as horrible as the Metastructure was finally able to exist.”

“What do you mean? Again, I don’t—”

“The trinity. The three divine entities cannot be understood as separate concepts. And to do this, you must grasp their ontology as a
Procession that becomes a Relationship.
All three of them shine forth together, not separately, but because of the relationships between them. Love, in the first place. That is how the Holy Spirit is God, and the Son is God, and the Father is God. That is why you are a man.”

“What exactly is happening in you?”

“I am dying. Or, rather, I am preparing to be reborn. It is the final phase of the retrotranspositional burst. Understand the process: Junk DNA is in fact, to give you a modern image, a sort of quantum meta-computer connected to all the information in the Universe. DNA is mutable; many genes are mobile. They are called ‘transposons.’ In junk DNA, many transposons come from an RNA retrotranscriptase, meaning from the introjection of genetic information from the outside. Only the mechanist dimwits in the Metastructure believe DNA is some sort of ‘fixed’ program that ‘codes’ proteins. The true thinkers are running scared these days, but they know what they are talking about. When the retrotranspositions happen on a massive scale, and in my ‘supercritical’ case, then what happens is what’s happening to me now. I am incorporating all the information in the Universe. And soon I will incorporate not only the visible World, but the invisible World as well.”

“I’m not sure I completely understand. What do you mean by ‘invisible World’?”

“More than 96 percent of the mass of the Universe is made of
dark matter,
which plays a central role in the very configuration of our continuum, and 98 percent of our genetic code is made of a ‘metacode,’ a ‘genetic dark matter,’ if you like. During the final process, my junk DNA will have digitally incorporated this 96 percent of the invisible universe. But the Box-World of the Machine-Child is the greatest danger to this process. It may make it so that instead of the light incorporating itself into me, it will unincorporate itself entirely within the Metastructure. You must understand that it is both
because of
it and
thanks to
it that I could, that I had to do all this. It is from it that I gained the narrative powers of Metatron; it is in it that the divine black box took shape. But if the Machine-Child’s brain succeeds in assimilating the statistic totality of the Metastructure, I will be fucked.”

“I understand,” Plotkin says. “Finally, I think. It won’t happen.”

Small pause in the solar fire, new quantum leap, new paragraph.

“The Control Metastructure is a sort of social materialization of the monopsychic entity of Averroës and his nominalist successors like Siger of Brabant and William of Ockham,” Vivian McNellis tells him. “It was here that what Friedrich Nietzsche called the specific nihilism of Christian religion was born, and it was here that History really began. And it is here, in the world of the mid-twenty-first century, that it will end. That is why the Machine-Child has no real name, because for him the word is the thing, the map is the land, the world is a concept. It is the absolute negation of the Created World, not like God made it, by its absolute constriction, its Tzimtzum, but rather by the infinite expansion of the separate concepts of things, and thus things separated from their names, and therefore from what they are.”

“All right,” Plotkin says after a moment. “There is something fundamentally dead in this ‘zoon,’ but it’s strange—he seems to have something
…living…
about him, something foreign to himself.”

“Every principle has its opposite principle. That’s an old nondialectical law from the Church Fathers.”

“Its opposite principle? Yes, that must be it.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Something that escapes him; something that will let me enter him. Something he is completely ignorant of.”

“He is completely ignorant of himself, you mean.”

“Yes and no. He knows exactly what he is; that is why he lives in his boxes. Everything there is perfectly arranged, coded, stamped. At the same time, none of his boxes can be called a ‘memory,’ because it is not he who thinks, but the Metastructure that thinks him.”

“So, what are you planning to do?”

“Among his ninety-nine identity boxes, his ‘central multiplicity,’ if I can call it that, I sense the repeated copresence of an element that cannot be considered a simple statistic reproduction of the Metastructure.”

“What is it?”

“Music. Images. The 1970s and 1980s. I don’t know exactly. clint Eastwood, Alan Vega, Kraftwerk…there is something here that makes sense, something that lives, or wants to live.”

“Yes,” Vivian McNellis says after a moment. “In the same way the female android wants to live, to have a soul of her own. Which actually means that she already has one. When will you go back up under the dome?”

Plotkin looks at the body of the girl fallen from the sky, draped in a simple black dress. The light that flows under her skin, this network of biophotonic nerves that is superimposing itself on the physical network, shines through the Recyclo™ linen lace as if the veil of fabric doesn’t even exist. This light says something; it says:
Matter and light are not contrary principles articulated by the negation of the dialectic. They are copresent principles, one within the other….

“They burned Giordano Bruno for thinking the same thing,” Vivian McNellis says, in a slightly tense voice.

“Really? For so little?”

“In 1600. The Reformation. The Counter-Reformation. The Thirty Years’ War wasn’t far off. The invention of modern ideologies, nationalism, socialism, liberalism. Christianity was beginning its long era of decadence, and a man came along and said, magnificently bringing together the secrets of the patristic world that were slowly being forgotten, scorned by the bad side of the famous ‘logic’ razor of William of Ockham:
‘We no longer believe that any body is without a soul, or even, according to the lies of some people, that matter is nothing more than a shithole of chemical substances.’
”

Plotkin is silent for a moment. He gazes at the beautiful blue sky out the window. Then he looks at Vivian, allowing himself to be consumed by the delicate fire of her features.

“Yes,” he says at last. “I understand. I understand why he was burned for so little.”

Around 1600, Giordano Bruno invented infinity. He conceived divine creation as infinity, meaning as a constant process of relations between the three divine entities. He did not believe that the Created World was itself eternal; but the process that had created it
was.
He directly threatened the ultranominalist thought that had already taken possession of minds at the time, and which caused individuals, entire populations, huge masses of humanity to kill one another for the sake of names, “ideas,” political and so-called philosophical concepts. For the sake of words separated from reality, but taken for the things themselves. He threatened the pernicious return of what would one day become the ultimate mechanism of global alienation, the societal monopsychism of the Metastructure. He threatened the world of the future, or rather of the non-future.

So Giordano Bruno was burned.

Four hundred years later, the Metastructure dominated the world.

And half a century after that, the world as such does not exist.

And these “things,” entities like the Hotel Laika and its cyberdog, Grand Junction, HMV, Neon Park, sexed androids, the girl fallen from the sky, the Machine-Child, and he, Plotkin, the Counter-Man from the Camp-World, are able to claim existence.

“We are the end of the fourth great biblical cycle. The first went from Adam to Enoch, the second from Noah to Moses, the third from Elijah to Jesus Christ, and the fourth from Mary and the apostles to today. You might relate the time to one or two human generations.”

“Yes, I remember sharing this knowledge with you when you incorporated me into the world, in you, in the Chinese camp.”

“
‘From nothing,’
said Saint Thomas Aquinas, and I think he was aiming his words directly at Averroës and his Latin scholastic thurifers,
‘from nothing, the angels have extracted the knowledge of specific things.’
He also added:
‘This feeling derogates from the Catholic faith, which teaches that the things of this world are governed by angels, according to the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews 1:14: they are all spirits that administer. If, in fact, they have no knowledge of the specific, they cannot have providence of the things that happen in this world, if events and acts are the area of concrete and specific things.’
Later, to counter yet again this monopsychic theory that deprived the being of its universal character in order to better annihilate its singular, he added:
‘Because administration, and providence, and movement bear on the singular according to how it exists then and there, in its concrete being, with all the conditions that individuate it.’
Don’t you see, Plotkin, it was also obvious for Saint Thomas that
‘God intercedes not only in what touches universal nature, but also in what is the principle of individuation.’
Do you understand now? You, me, the Machine-Child, the androids, this city, we are the experimental battlefield for a war between Metatron, the Celestial Scribe, and the Control Metastructure, that viral supermechanism that has taken possession of this world, this humanity, this particular ‘universe.’”