Cosmos Incorporated (39 page)

“I am a continuity that causes rupture. I am certainly not the feminine form of Christ, who is himself a rupture that causes continuity, and those who dare to speak such rubbish should be considered anathema. I am probably analogous to Saint John the Baptist, even though I myself would fall at his feet if I had the honor to be in his presence. I explained it to Plotkin one day, my purely fictional lover, the man I could not but love when I invented him in my cell, the man who had time to love me only in a dream. I have come to close the Trinitarian square, the metaform of the tetragram that structures everything in the Created World. But I am above all else this moment that appears in the silence of God; my light is apophatic. I am not the Creator, but the translator—that which translates. I am the tree of Creation, because I am the tree of Life and Death. Remember the Writings that teach that ‘the Cross bears Fruit.’ I am the moment when the invisible becomes visible, the moment when humanity will reveal itself to itself. Understand well, that this is the meaning of the word
apocalypse.

“No new religion, no sect, no schismatic branch can prevail over my passage. I am that which announces what has already been announced; I am what causes that which must happen to happen.
I am what will put an end to the possible,
to make of it an Act. I am that which says, predicts,
pre-
knows the unknowable transfiguration that will be imposed on what remains of the human beings on this planet: I put an end to the possible, but it is in order to better concentrate its fire in the beauty of the Created World. I am what will permit man to, perhaps, have a future. I am thus the pursuit of the divine program of infinite creation. I am what will divide humanity, but I am also the rest of this terrible operation—neither divider nor divided. I will resist any attempt at corruption. I will escape their box-selling labels, but because I have come, you must not let Technology destroy itself in destroying the World it will have swallowed with it. I call you to a new science, a science after science. I speak to you here and now of the Counter-World you must create.

“Unlike John the Baptist, if I speak to you of Christ, it is to warn you of the presence, already proven, of his antithesis.

“Now, without even the slightest hint of a Leviathan to dominate its instincts, crush its pretensions, maintain a semblance of order, mankind will deliver itself with terrible speed up to the abominations we now know it is capable of. Humanity will self-destruct, and you must escape from this destiny programmed by the machine but fully happening only now that it is disappearing itself.

“Though the light contained in my DNA is freeing itself and illuminating my body, my brain, each of my cells, the Light of the Created World, or rather the Light of the Creation of the World, is incorporating itself in my DNA. It is because everything given to each of us is given back to all of us, and everything given to anyone is made free itself, because the Divine Act is above all else the bringing forth of His Good to shine on His creations, and that of His creations on Him, even inside that which, in the creation, is the spark of the Act in question.

“We are worlds in ourselves, though often we lose sight of the fact that we are worlds within a Megaworld, and so we let ourselves become machines in a demiurgic Megamachine that has replaced the Created World.

“Yes, the Metastructure is dying, and thanks to this victory over death come alive I can incorporate the world without risk, and ‘die’ in my turn, but what will succeed this Global Machine, you may be assured, what will succeed it will be incomparably worse, because everything that remains of the World will have been destroyed, and Man will have no choice but to submit himself to its will in order to survive. The UHU itself was really only a prototype, a temporary stage, as the United Nations was before it. It served as a test for the next platform for general enslavement. This is already preparing itself in this world newly delivered from the chaos of the Grand Jihad; it will have learned the great lesson from the previous Metastructure: to succeed as a Megamachine, it must become a World; to enslave bodies, men must become products; to govern their consciousnesses, it must make them into thought beings, not thinking ones.

“They must reach the absolute limits of self-loathing.

“Thus the success of the Machine resides in its dissolution, but its dissolution is the beginning of its success.

“I am not the Fire cast down on Earth Jesus spoke to his apostles about. I am, rather, the Light that is withdrawing from the World in order to better fight against its darkening. I am the Fire cast into the sky, in the guise of a final incantation.

“I am the ultimate living being, sent among living beings.

“I am the final sign.

“The final sign before the Word.”

>
BLACK BOX BABY

It is Sydia Nova, the android girl, who discovers it.

To be exact, it is better to say that it is Balthazar, the cyborg dog, who discovers the box.

The black box.

Closed.

He finds the strange, small monolith just under the Deadlink interchange. A human odor led him to it from fairly close by. The great mass of refugees from southern Quebec is moving east; there are more than a hundred thousand people now. It is said that they will try to force their way across the Vermont border. He is patrolling the area, scattered with isolated groups of faithless, lawless men who might break through the rear guards of the human colony. Lady van Harpel has been living permanently armed for weeks.

And now there is this odd little box under the Deadlink interchange.

Balthazar returns to Lady van Harpel’s mobile home and finds the android girl alone there. The old clairvoyant left for HMV this morning. He tells Sydia Nova of his discovery, and leads her to the abandoned interchange.

The sky is distilled into a monochrome blue that seems reflected in the milky silver of the low cumulus clouds, rising like giant pipe organs toward the zenith. The whiteness of the high-altitude clouds vibrates with this iridescence from the higher layers of the atmosphere; they throw their value into oxygenless space in ribbons that sparkle on the puffy edges of the jet streams.

Sydia Nova walks toward Deadlink, thinking that the beauty of this world lasts for only brief instants, during which it is as utterly complete as an absolute presence.

In the meantime, the box has opened. Inside there is a very simple lining of white silk, shining in the morning sun, covering the whole interior.

And in the middle of it is a baby.

A human baby.

Fists clenched. Asleep.

Later, when Lady van Harpel has joined them near the black box, Sydia Nova says: “We don’t know where he came from.”

“The child has no name,” the dog adds.

“We’ll give him one,” Lady van Harpel replies, lighting her pipe.

“But what?” the android girl demands. “We don’t even know where he—”

“Oh, yes we do,” interrupts Lady van Harpel. “We know it very well, you and I both. He is the Act made flesh. He is the product of the Creation of Vivian McNellis, of her union with Plotkin, her creation. He is a real human baby. I don’t know how they managed to do it, in a dimension we will never experience, but you can be sure of it.”

“But…that makes him the hybrid product of an angel and a human, like the terrible devouring giants from the time before the Flood, the ones written about in Genesis and the Book of Enoch—”

“No.” Lady van Harpel cuts her off coldly. “It’s exactly the opposite. Don’t forget what is said in the antique Scriptures—
‘The angels fell to Earth and decided to mate with human women.’
This is an inverted and intensified version of that process. Plotkin was a man, but not really. Really, he was
more
than a man. And Vivian McNellis was an angel that went back
up from
Earth.”

The titanic nimbus clouds in the sky seem to have come just to support her imagery. There is, at this moment, another perfect balance between the Created World and their interior world. In the vault of the present that whirls in a spiral as static as it is fast,
something
is emerging, something incredibly luminous and nearly silent, an immeasurably thin voice, a crystalline voice murmuring that all is splendid. And at that instant, that most precious second, a storm will probably break over the Adirondacks and the furnace of the Appalachians, there to the east, in the pure cobalt blue tension.

“We need to baptize this child as soon as possible,” remarks the android girl.

“Of course,” Lady van Harpel replies almost dryly. “But in the meantime we need to get him out of this box, get him back to the mobile home, and take care of him.”

“And find him a name,” adds Balthazar.

They call him Gabriel Link de Nova. It is Lady van Harpel who comes up with the name, but Sydia Nova who will be his adoptive mother.

The father?

“Ah yes, the father,” says Lady van Harpel. “His father will be here soon. Someone, a man, will come. Maybe he is already here.”

The old woman is thinking of someone. The signs are accumulating. “You found this child. It wasn’t by chance that I wasn’t there at the time, but on the road, coming back as fast as I could from HMV. I had just had a vision of it. And I found you there, where the vision told me you would be. You will be his mother. I will help you. I will be like an aunt, because you are like my sister.
You are my sister.
But you, clearly, will be his mother.”

The storm breaking over the Appalachians has extended its whirling arms toward this part of the Independent Territory. It has begun to rain. It will rain, without stopping, for weeks.

Later, a renegade biologist from Neon Park will be able to pinpoint the child’s age as exactly eight days at the moment the android girl discovered him.

Lady van Harpel says: “He is the child of the Eighth Day. The anticreature is contaminating and killing the monopsychic Metastructure, and Vivian McNellis has left us this baby, whom we must protect from the UHU, from the Jihad, from mankind, and from the Enemy of Man.”

In the mobile home is a doctor of genetic biology from Neon Park, Professor Anton Solnychkin, wanted by the UHU for daring to claim that DNA is a quantum metacalculator connected to God. Father Newman is also there, as well as one Milan Djordjevic, the writer whose work, under his many pseudonyms, was read by the Machine-Child: Jeffrey Alhambra Carpenter. Djordjevic recently arrived in HMV; he fled his native Slovenia when Islamist forces from southern France cut northern Italy off from its borders with Austria and the western Balkans during the summer.

He has known Lady van Harpel since her very first visit to combustion-engine territory. Sometimes, under the icy sky of the northern autumn, they had exchanged a few opinions in the presence of Father Newman, who usually remained silent.

“The Grand Jihad has begun again,” she had said to him one day. “The UHU’s peace lasted only fifteen years. The Metastructure will die, but planetary war will ravage everything in its path, and this time it will pave the way for the coming of the Antichrist, the incarnation of the Prince of This World.”

Djordjevic had looked deeply into the old woman’s eyes. This wasn’t the sort of thing to speak of lightly. “Yes. You are right. But you know that in fact he has already come; his reign is as implacable as it is invisible and painless.
‘Hitler was only a precursor,’
the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said a century ago. His thousand-year reign has begun, that is all, and his various temporary representatives will follow one after the other, but in fact, it is the whole world, all of humanity—or what is left of it—just as much as the nameless thing we speak of, that is being targeted. Because once we are co-mechanized by the Thing, we become the Thing. Every part of a megamachine is itself, must be, a machine as well. A megamachine is, by definition, composed of machines. Because the megamechanical world is the world of the infinite expansion of mechanization, a world where everything is co-mechanical, a world where everything is thought and nothing thinks. It’s strange; this is the root of a book I’m writing….”

“For the angels, everything always goes back to the root.”

“Yes. And that is what Vivian McNellis came to tell us. The end of Man is now a phenomenon of the past; it is no longer facing us, according to a more or less long-term temporal perspective. We have fully entered the era of the disappearance of Man, and that is part of the plan of what you call the ‘Antichrist,’ taking it for a ‘person,’ though really it is the opposite; it is a ‘principle’ that, paradoxically, becomes incarnate in disincarnation, which loves to project itself in antiform. Its success lies in the Universal and Technical Thing, its individuation in the annihilation of the subject, its language in the deconstruction of all
Logos.
”

“Are you saying that there will be a successor—or even a
resumption—
of the UHU after the Second Jihad?”

“Yes, in a certain sense,” said Djordjevic. “You see how they are co-evolutionary and thus co-devolutionary. Their decline and death are correlated in every way. The end of the Metastructure opens the door to the chaos of total planetary civil war, but at the same time it produces two contradictory events: it frees up the space needed for an even greater mechanization, which the Jihad will have done everything to make possible. At the end of this century, probably, with an even more perfect and implacable Metastructure than that of the UHU. And—”

“And?”

At the time, Djordjevic had been unable to find the words. Now, ten days later, in front of the baby sleeping in his cradle inside Lady van Harpel’s mobile home, as the autumnal rainstorms pour down on the American northeast, he looks at the old woman.

“This,” he says, “is the
and
I was talking to you about the other night.”

He wrote that it would be you,
thinks Lady van Harpel.
Yes, you will likely be the father of this child, but can you marry an android, a former “sexydoll,” a bionic ex-prostitute?

Later, in the face of her mostly silent insistence, the man refuses. “It isn’t that I find it impossible to marry an artificial woman on principle. It is—don’t you see—the fact that I am already married, my dear lady. My wife disappeared near Trieste when the French Islamists attacked the eastern Alps. No one knows what has become of her, and now it is impossible for me to go back there. They say fighting has begun again in northern Italy.”

“Then you don’t know if she is alive or dead,” remarks the old clairvoyant of the interchange. “That, I know, is worse than anything.”

“Yes,” agrees Djordjevic. “Especially when you know what the Islamists do to women.”

Lady van Harpel does not respond. Djordjevic notices that she seems to be having some difficulty swallowing. Finally, she puffs somewhat desperately on the psychotropic smoke of her marijuana pipe.

As for Djordjevic, he stands paralyzed with horror at the consequences of what he has just said.

“In any case,” he says one day, trying to convince the old woman once and for all, “the child is an unnatural orphan, as you well know. One might even say that he is
the first orphan to be born after the death of his parents.
He is the Orphan of the World. Do you understand? He is the incarnate parabola of the Act of which we are the genitors: he is the Orphan of the Godless World. He has no real genealogy to speak of, since the Human World is disappearing, other than that of a metanarrative that was created between Vivian McNellis and Sergei Plotkin, between Creator and Creation and, even more certainly, of an internal relationship inside Creation itself, a relationship of Creation toward Creation, like the combustive center of the Created World. He is, in a sense, the first man of a whole new World, the post-UHU and even the post-Jihad world, you might say, since it seems definite that the Jihad will follow the monopsychic Metastructure in its devolutionary spasm, and finish by destroying itself.

“He is the first man of the world following the invisible catastrophe, the first man following depopulation, the first man following the destruction of Nations, the first man following Man, the first man following the end of the world. He is the Orphan of Enoch, the Noah of a World where man himself is the Flood. Gabriel Link de Nova.

“What he will do exactly, no one knows. If anyone did know, it would undoubtedly fall to that person to destroy the Universe.

“What will his life be? For now, the infinite space of freedom.

“And if one takes my meaning, he has created this Universe.”

It is thus that Djordjevic conceives his “mission” where the baby is concerned: to follow him even while leading him; to guide him while knowing what he will learn from him; to be the Master who will teach his own Pupil to surpass him.

To hide nothing from him, except the unknowable. To tell him everything, except what is useless.

He is an orphan. He was found at Deadlink. His parents were probably killed during the resumption of combat between the North American Islamic Caliphate and pockets of Canadian nationalist resistance fighters. He was found after the departure of a band of refugees bound for Vermont, perhaps abandoned by a group of survivors, undoubtedly lost in the chaos by the last active Red Cross unit in the area. There; the story is taking shape.

“It is out of the question,” he tells Lady van Harpel, “to educate this child in the belief that he is the son of a female angel and a half-fictional, half-real man, especially since we have no real certainty about Plotkin’s true status. Even if that
is
the ‘truth.’ We will decide when the truth is real. The truth will set us free, said the Old Testament. Yes, unless it kills us. Take it or leave it” is the Balkan writer’s final word.

“I am for it,” says Sydia Nova.

Lady van Harpel nods.

The man takes the android girl and the baby to his home in HMV.

Another story has thus begun. A new disconnection in the world.

Or, rather, in the
Post-World.