Cosmos Incorporated (36 page)

>
MACHINE-HEAD

Death must come in one blow to strike the configuration that has now been created. The world must be made to understand, this world over which death reigns without ever quite being able to extinguish it completely. It is time, now, to see the dark shadow of the grim reaper coming. It is time for Plotkin to sacrifice what has been saved of him. It is time for him to become what he is.

And this must happen even though, once more, Plotkin is only one. Because in him, bit by bit, another is coming to life.

Plotkin the Killer, Plotkin the professional assassin of the Red Star Order, Plotkin the Man from the Camp, Plotkin the fictional man made flesh, the man of the Word secretly hidden in the isolation cell, faces Clovis Drummond, and he already knows what is about to happen.

He knows it completely, because it is now being directly written in him.

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE?” screams the fat pig in his disgusting suit, lips bluish with dope, as he comes up the stairs, furious, glassy eyes shooting darts of ice.

Just behind him, Plotkin sees Cheyenne Hawkwind open his black eyes wide in unfeigned shock and then shrug his shoulders and, with a slight gesture of his big hands, send him a message:
I didn’t know you were here, and I can’t do anything to stop him.

“No matter,” Plotkin says in reply to the American Indian killer’s silent words.

“WHAT?” shouts Clovis Drummond, thinking the answer was directed at him. “YOU LITTLE PRICK! I’LL TEACH YOU TO TRESPASS IN A RED ZONE! WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU DOING UP THERE, YOU DAMNED BASTARD?”

Plotkin looks at him with a strange feeling, almost sadness. A sort of melancholy. Pity, one might even say.
Yes,
he tells himself,
that’s what it is. Pity.

He pities this poor human, this last of men, for devolving virtually onto all fours. He pities his flabby flesh and his baleful eyes, his face swollen from metadrugs and irregular sleep, from sadosexual neurogames and orgasmatron systems. He pities the face eaten up from the inside by death, the fat, sausagelike fingers coated with flab, playing with the string of the old leather pouch that is no doubt crammed with sexual gadgets adapted for the “body” of the Machine-Child, his living inflatable doll. He pities this poor fucker, this snitch, this pedophile. He pities his ugliness, his monstrosity, his morbid perversity. He pities poor Clovis Drummond.

Poor Clovis Drummond, who he is about to kill.

With one of the simplest yet most complex portable weapons any Order killer carries. His hands.

There are a thousand ways to kill someone with just your hands. They have been learned for centuries in all the martial arts on the planet, a nearly inexhaustible source of knowledge that orders of killers have systematically used, gathering endless resources in the huge library-bunkers in their command centers.

There are a thousand ways to kill a man with your hands. Among them are those that require just a small additional accessory—a razor, a needle, a cord, a chain, brass knuckles…

And there is a way that the Red Star Order particularly favors and uses brilliantly, thanks to its renegade biotechnicians.

It is the thousand-and-first way to kill with the hands.

The nail of Plotkin’s index finger, like the nails of all his ten fingers, was modified during the reconstruction of his body, during the first few days after his arrival at the hotel. In accordance with the genetic plan at the time he passed through the Control Arch at the Windsor astroport, it is now made of metamorphic carbo-metal with high-speed rememorization. All Plotkin has to do is mentally command the
RUN BLADE
program to initiate. It takes barely a thousandth of a second for the ensemble of nanocomponents built into his fingernail at the atomic level to register information. It takes barely one more thousandth of a second for the metamorphic program’s
bootstrap
to be triggered. Then two or three hundredths of a second more for the rest of the process to take place. All in all, an infinitesimal moment of time.

Barely visible, only just readable, nearly outside the limits of transcription.

Flash. His index finger has become a slashing weapon, very simple and very complex: an organic haft jointed at its three phalanxes and tipped with a carbon-carbon blade hybridized with a high-density crystalline structure and a polymetallic alloy mesh, around twenty centimeters long. It could slice a steel beam in half with ease.

The point of the fingernail is as sharp as a needle, its two cutting edges honed like razors.

A very simple, very complex weapon.

One that has just cleanly cut Mr. Clovis Drummond’s throat.

Later, but actually just afterward, Plotkin is under the shower in his capsule’s retractable bathroom. He far exceeds the standard allowance, emptying his bank account as he orders the tank to rain a continual stream of hot water down on his body. It seems like a strange, condensed duplication of the world’s voodoo economy: empty the bank account/empty the tank, money/water, water/blood, blood/money.
IF YOU EXCEED
30
LITERS OF WATER, YOU WILL EXCEED THE STANDARD DAILY AMOUNT INCLUDED IN THE ROOM RATE, AND YOUR ACCOUNT WILL AUTOMATICALLY BE DEBITED. IF YOU EXCEED
50
LITERS OF WATER, YOU MUST PAY DOUBLE-PRICE. IF YOU EXCEED
100
LITERS, YOU MUST PAY TEN TIMES THE PRICE. AND IF YOU EX
CEED
150
LITERS, EXPRESS AUTHORIZATION OF THE CONSORTIUM WILL BE REQUIRED.
The water pummels his body, the body that is both physical and fictive, the body in which a third narrative, that of the finally reincorporated Machine-Child, is beginning.

Eighth Day.

The child of the Eighth Day.

Plotkin senses with his whole being that Vivian McNellis is retrowriting this experience in the Created World somewhere.

Somewhere.

Something.

Someone.

Images of Clovis Drummond’s murder float in his consciousness like sparkling clouds, full of a storm of blood.

The metamorphic blade sketches a majestic semicircle in the close confines of the stairway, and it is as if it opens the abyss of a world.

It slices the flesh like a high-intensity laser beam. The veins and arteries bisect cleanly—jugular, carotid, fat open under the icy slash of the hand-that-kills. The muscles retract at the blade’s passage through their fibers—the nerves, bones, spinal cord, vertebrae, cartilage—all give way in the same demonic fraction of a second.

Clovis Drummond’s head stays fixed on his shoulders for a moment, an indescribable grimace on the lips, wobbling slightly on the base of his neck where a red line appears, a very red line, a line that gushes first drops, then streams of blood down the man’s chest. Then, like a 110-floor tower falling after the core infrastructure has been destroyed, leaving it to the mercy of earthly gravity, Clovis Drummond falls apart. His head falls strangely, rolling away off to the side, while his stubby legs bend as if the kneecaps have turned to spheres of vaporous jelly. The arms make a few sporadic movements, like the wings of a sick bird trying feebly to fly. Finally the body falls backward, landing with a thump like a sack of rags against the stairway wall.

Clovis Drummond’s head has rolled down a dozen steps like a spongy balloon emitting red-violet spray before knocking into the bottom of the escape-hatch door, precisely between Cheyenne Hawkwind’s feet. The man automatically kicks away the head with its fixed rictus, its eyes hardly more dead now than when Drummond was alive—glassy, immobile, cold as those of a dead fish—toward the corner of the wall and the first tread of the staircase. The head seems to fix a blind eye on the surveillance camera. There are drops of blood everywhere in the access cage. On the steps, the walls, the doors. On Cheyenne Hawkwind’s shoes. And on Plotkin’s too.

Plotkin hears himself tell the American Indian killer: “There’s a responsibility you don’t have to worry about anymore. Consider your contract null and void.”

“Right, except that I’m your accomplice. I think you should reconsider about the contract.”

“Half, no more. Twenty thousand Pan-Am.”

“Half will be just fine.”

“Perfect,” Plotkin says. “The escape hatch and the dome are cut off from the hotel’s AI, thanks to the careful work of Mr. Drummond himself. We can work in peace.”

“What do you mean?”

“Clean. And put what’s left of Mr. Clovis Drummond somewhere.”

“Where?”

Later Plotkin will remember his own smile, the regal smile he offers Cheyenne Hawkwind now, a very gentle, radiant smile, like the sun, capable of consuming an entire world.

“Guess.”

Later, as the last legally permitted liters of water stream over his body, sending up a mist that dissipates in a cabin too small for such extravagant consumption—later, as he tries to wash his body clean of invisible blood—he thinks about the grotesque tomb provided for Clovis Drummond: the black box of the dome, just where the fat man had previously shut the Machine-Child away.

For even greater safety, with Cheyenne Hawkwind’s help Plotkin had stuffed the decapitated corpse of the Hotel Laika’s manager into the nanoprogrammable suit that had once been used to hold the ghostly creature from Deadlink born of Vivian McNellis’s narrative. He had used a few carbon-carbon staples he found in a box in a corner of the Box-House along with their magnetic projection gun to reattach the head to the body. Drummond the tinkerer, the attacher of crucifixes on demand, king of the aphroditech pump.

He had reprogrammed the iron lung to contain Clovis Drummond’s great recapitated bulk, setting it to maximum opacity. Then he had started the system back up.

The nanocomputers, the optic peripheral machines, the holoplasmic machines, all hummed back into life, hooked up to the dead body of Clovis Drummond, scanning the organism—already breaking down in the seething entropy of a cadaver—with the silent avidity of a fisherman for the entry-exit modules, the access portals to a mind that no longer existed. “Yes,” Plotkin had said. “There’s a treat for the Metastructure.”

He knows with absolute certainty that, with this action, he condemned the Metastructure to death. That he has just initiated a Larsen effect that will prove deadly to death itself. As for what else he has accomplished, he really has no idea.

Later still, as the night envelops the universe in a blue box and the cosmodrome lights form a cold, crystalline arc, something happens inside him.

Something violent. Something that he feels is his price to pay. He understands that he is going to die. That the share of sacrifice he has dared to accept will perfectly balance the killing of Clovis Drummond. He will die, that is certain, but will he die until he is dead? Or will he die into another life?

Then something, a voice that seems to come from a hole brighter than the sun and whose ardent Face resembles that of a man; a voice speaks—writes itself on his consciousness. It is like a laugh, silvery and soft. “We will find a way to preserve the part of you that is pure, the part you knew to foster within yourself.”

“Who are you?” he asks via his neural typewriter, the neuro–word processor that is now turning him into his own book. “My guardian angel?”

There is no formal response, no voice, but the silence that answers him shines with a light that fills him with joy.

Thus he senses the “presence” of other “beings.” Other angels.

The disappearance of the false Metatron, that simulacrum of a simulacrum, that fiction of a fiction, that termination of the agent of the World, has opened the door to another form of reality. There isn’t only the Celestial Scribe, the real one; there are a multitude of beings. They don’t all have the same power over you, but some of them seek to deprive you, while others try to ensure that this effort will fail.

The angels make war with one another over Man. And for each individual man, a specific combination of forces comes into play.

He asks for a miracle. Words, impressions, even voices are no longer enough. “What do you want,” they ask in unison. “What do you want of us? Do you want to see
images
?”

He senses all the menace contained in this interrogative injunction. He understands that the face of the angel can be glimpsed through the filter of machine-disconnections of the Imaginary, especially those of the neurogenerative writing with an unknown, mutant, constantly mutating form of which Vivian Velvet McNellis contaminated her brain. But to be confronted with “the image of a Universe whose face is that of a man,” as Chesterton said, “is to fall with one’s face pressed against the earth.”

>
SPUTNIK CENTENNIAL

It is the morning of October 4.

October 4, the day of the Sputnik Centennial. The day on which, according to the initial plans of his own consciousness, he was to Kill the Mayor of This City.

It is October 4, and he should have been ready for that first mission.

Not only is he not ready, it is as if he never would be, as if he never could have been. He is in the double Capsule 081, Capsule A, with Jordan McNellis. The light-body of his sister floats behind the cellulose partition, illuminating the two rooms with no need for additional artificial light. Dawn is breaking. Pressing his nose against the eastern-facing window, he can see the final preparations at the cosmodrome for the nocturnal launch of J.T. Lagrange’s rocket, the high point of the spectacle.

Grand Junction has transformed itself during these early hours into a vast Starnival—festive, parodic, terminal. There are parade floats with effigies of great space equipment, lunar and Martian robots, replicas of the Apollo, Mercury, Gemini, Skylab, Soyuz, Vostok, Voskhod, and Salyut capsules, and of course Sputnik itself, in a leitmotif repeated thousands of times in every conceivable form. The jubilant crowd resembles one of the old
Star Trek
fan conventions, where “Trekkies” adopted the costumes, masks, attitudes, and language of the characters from the 1960s televised series. Here there are astronauts, extraterrestrials, mutants, superheroes and heroines, and creatures of every imaginable and imagined species.
Institutional and festival science fiction, for a fiction of science that is firing its last rounds,
Plotkin thinks.

“We can’t leave with my sister in this condition,” Jordan McNellis says.

“No, of course not,” Plotkin replies.

“We can watch the blastoff and the fireworks on television,” says the young man, apologizing for the failure.

“No matter, really. This anniversary is a masquerade; it’s just a blastoff like any other. Have you registered the claim with the local UHU office?”

“Yes. The launch on a Delta rocket is confirmed for October 22. Less than three weeks from now.” The youth casts a sad glance toward the suite’s other cabin. Obviously, it will be too late.

Plotkin stares at him, saying nothing.

The young man seems almost too naïve. Doesn’t he understand that his sister never really belonged to this world, that she was returning to her own? Wasn’t it Denys the Areopagite who described divine unity as a processive movement of the Good toward the Good via its own Creation?

In a few weeks, Jordan June McNellis will fly away from Grand Junction to return to the Ring.

But in a few hours, his sister will rejoin the Celestial Scribe. She will be well out of this damned Earth, and its orbital survival arches too.

He is a human being now, a living being like the others. He bears the Machine-Child within him, but it is like a transcription. The operation is probably on its way to success in the Created World; it will be the last legacy of Vivian McNellis, the last legacy of the agent of Metatron to these last humans. He asks Jordan for permission to visit his sister in the other capsule.

“She told me to warn you—this is the final phase before her incorporation into the cosmos, the final phase before the Glorious Body. Her…her death is imminent now.”

“You know there is no such thing as death.”

Jordan does not reply. He leans on the small lever that causes the separating partition to slide aside on its rails. The light strikes Plotkin’s irises like the red light of the laser at the Windsor astroport a million years ago, but it is a globe of pure gold, and inside this sphere of solar light that seems both to come from the sun and to return to it, the body of Vivian McNellis seems as if it is subject to strange and continual transformations, like another state of being.

Optical effects?

She is close and far away at the same time; she seems larger but also much smaller; and—most of all
—it is impossible to tell exactly where she is.

It looks like a scene from an antique postcard from the previous century, whose image changes according to the viewing angle.

It is as if light is body, just as much as body is light.

Later—but is it really later in this hotel room at the end of the world, in the solaresque radiation that envelops the body of Vivian McNellis? Let’s say
a little
later, for time seems to have been annihilated, Plotkin approaches the bed where the girl fallen from the sky floats a few centimeters above the helium mattress. She seems made of helium herself; terrestrial gravity is losing its effect on her.
She is returning to Heaven, the last sky,
he tells himself. He stretches a hand toward her.

Vivian McNellis looks at him, a weak smile on her lips.

Very slowly, almost in slow motion, she opens her hand to welcome the touch of his fingers. “You are a man now.”

“I know,” Plotkin replies, his throat choked with emotion. “I…I don’t know how to thank you.”

“I would have loved you in the Created World, you know. I loved you when I invented you, in the camp.”

Plotkin is confronted with a physical phenomenon that is troubling and a bit annoying—his throat is unable to make any sound. Nothing comes out but an incomprehensible, barely audible murmur.

Vivian McNellis gazes at him with all her fiery beauty, and Plotkin feels himself being consumed on the spot, as if bound to the post of a pyre. His fingers brush the half-open palm of the angel-girl. Vivian McNellis’s fingers brush his in return, her fingers tender and gentle like silk, or a baby’s skin.

“I love you too,” he finally whispers.

He can’t see very well. A strange liquid is welling in his eyes and flowing gently down his cheeks. “I love you so much I would die for you without a qualm.” His voice quivers slightly, so highly charged that it could send vibrations through a steel cable strong enough to keep the world from turning.

What he just said is true, so true, so terribly true. Except the last bit of it, perhaps, which contradicted the first bit a little. But he knows what the syllogism means—Love kills Death; Love can make you dead, not to it but to its antiworld, to what is not real but creates the reality of the world.
Only Love is real,
he thinks,
and it doesn’t matter if it is possible or not; it doesn’t matter if you have fallen in love with a girl from the sky; it doesn’t matter if you have fallen in love with someone about to leave you forever, as she is about to leave all this incarcerating humanity.

It doesn’t matter, because now you are.

You are alive.

You are born.

That afternoon—is it really afternoon?—Plotkin begins to sense pulsations coming from the city, below Monolith Hills and the Leonov Alley strip, south of the hotel. A long procession of floats is making its way up the strip from Voskhod Boulevard and beyond Nova Express, which will become the intersection point for parades coming from all over the city. The Sonos Volantes are cruising overhead like oblong-shaped birds, scattering music, advertisements, and flyers announcing the J.T. Lagrange blastoff tonight.

The party is beginning.

On the wall-mounted television screen in Capsule 081-A, Plotkin and Jordan silently watch the images coming from right outside their hotel. A low-altitude camera drone buzzes directly past the Laika on its way to Nova Express, aiming its lens for a moment at the tubular, metallic building.

“We could have seen ourselves on TV,” remarks Jordan, pointlessly.

“Do you know that not too long ago, people were ready to die or kill to see themselves on TV for three seconds?”

Jordan McNellis turns to him with the facetious, incredulous expression of the delayed adolescent he is.

“Are you serious?”

You live in your world. You come from the Ring. You lived in parts of the Earth isolated from virtually everything else, first in Patagonia with your grandfather and then in UHU research centers and health camps. You know nothing of the world I come from. You know nothing of the world of the camp, even. You, too, are just passing through. Soon you’ll be in the Ring again. For you, in a very short time Earth will be no more than a distant, unpleasant memory.
“Of course not,” Plotkin replies without even the shadow of a smile. “I’m kidding.”

Night is falling now. The first stars appear in the light-saturated sky shading into the purple of the intrauterine night. The cosmodrome looks like an immense constellar animal fallen to Earth, its fires illuminating the space around it all the way to the Hotel Laika overlooking it. And the festival has grown to indescribable proportions. The Monolith Hills strip—indeed, all of Grand Junction—is an uninterrupted series of rave parties, where every imaginable drug and neurosoftware, legal or illegal, circulate from hand to hand, mouth to mouth, spinal cord to spinal cord. The parade floats have invaded the wide streets and mounted toward Nova Express. Everywhere, crowds gather under the beat of neodisco music, gyrating and oscillating stroboscopically in a mechanical simulation of desire. Everywhere there are lights, cries, chants, noise, music, sounds of every type; everywhere are images in the sky, reflected in the clouds sculpted by the Starnival sponsors, images of the UHU itself and its planetary federation slogan repeated a thousand times. Everywhere is the grinning, deathly face of false hopes, the wide mouths of the masks twistedly mocking any vision of true hope. Everywhere sex, drugs, music, cash. Fuck me, shoot me, move me, buy me.

Everywhere death in action.

Except here, in this double capsule in the Hotel Laika, where death shows itself as the simple zero operator of an ontic process, as pure nothingness, as nothing, hardly an entry-exit interface, just a channel. Except here, where the light-body of Vivian McNellis holds a refuted secret, terrible, secretly terrible, terribly secret, about everything the false world of the UHU is built on.

Here, where life reigns eternal.

The depths of night. Facing Vivian McNellis, Plotkin is quiet, holding himself as straight as if he has a steel rod for a spinal cord.

He is quiet.

He is quiet because Vivian McNellis is speaking.

And what she has to tell him is extremely important.

“This is the moment when everything will be decided.”

He knows it. The knowledge is a field, burning under a surprise enemy attack. The knowledge correlates with the words spoken by Vivian McNellis, this woman he will love for the rest of her life. For eternity.

The knowledge shows itself in this form:

Vivian McNellis: You will go to Deadlink. I will be there waiting for you. For your baptism.

Plotkin: The silence before the bomb is dropped. The big bomb.
The Bomb.

Vivian McNellis: The incorporation of the worlds is happening. I am rewriting in you what was, is, and will be the Machine-Child, what he can no longer be.

Plotkin: Continuing, sidereal silence.

Vivian McNellis: There is a very old patriarchal text by Saint Ambrose, which says:
“When Christ brought fire to the Earth so that it would consume the faults of the flesh, where the broadsword that signified the cutting of power that wields and penetrates the spirit and the marrow deeply, then flesh and soul, renewed through the mysteries of regeneration, forgetting what they were, begin to be what they were not, separate from the company of former vice, and break all bonds with prodigal posterity.”

Plotkin: The space that is growing between the Andromeda galaxy and our own is no longer silent.

Vivian McNellis: You understand, don’t you? We are father and genitor of our actions and our works, which are thus our children.

Plotkin’s mouth opens but nothing comes out—a loose piece of the silent asteroid traveling to the very end of the Milky Way, of the Voice without Words.

Vivian McNellis: You must convert to the faith of Christ before it is too late. In a few minutes, you will have no choice but to flee the hotel.

Plotkin: The question “Why?” burns his lips, but nothing comes from his throat. All he can think is:
I love this woman so much that I am ready to wait a whole lifetime to be with her again.

He feels ready. Barely, but it is still better than nothing, he tells himself.

He is at a much lower rung than the former android-whore who, for reasons he cannot understand, found faith, broke her bonds of neuroprogrammed sexual slavery, and dared to admit that she had a soul.

Yes,
he says to himself;
after all, I have a soul too, don’t I?

In any case, he knows he is capable of love. And of killing for that love.

He feels capable of anything.

That is probably enough.

“Yes, I’m ready,” he manages to say.

It is at that very moment that Jason Texas Lagrange’s rocket takes off majestically from Platform 1.

It is at that moment that the fire from the rocket’s tailpipes creates an artificial sun that moves backward from the horizon toward the sky, from the west toward the southwest, leaving behind a cloud of brilliant gas that illuminates the interior of the room.

It is at that moment that the crowd and the music, the city and the flesh, the shadows and the fire vibrate in unison, at maximum intensity.

An instant more. The booster accelerates, changing its course southward, toward an equatorial orbit.

Another instant more. Something erupts in the ionized air; something, an object moving at very high speed.

A small object, but an extremely rapid one, an object that resembles a silver arrow flying in pursuit of the rocket. An object that strikes it violently; an object that makes it explode in the fraction of a second, with its twelve passengers: a furious supernova that causes the night sky to churn with oily plumes of light-filled smoke.

An object—and Plotkin knows it with all his being, because he saw it, because he guesses it, because he knows it—an object that came from the Hotel Laika.

And not from just anywhere in the hotel.