Cosmos Incorporated (40 page)

>
WORLD PROCESSOR

So now what is talking, what is talking now, is no longer anyone in particular. If it is a “person,” with any luck, it is present in each of us. It is what wrote this world, this world of dying cosmodromes, that is talking, and it is talking with a voice trying to transcribe the experience as best it can.

This voice too is coming from an isolation cell, one of the cells from which only a free word can come to life and take flight in search of minds. It comes from a brain that does not yet know it has just entered a war, a total war. It comes from a brain that barely suspects its own multiplicity, or more precisely a tension in this Multiplicity between the Unique and the Infinite; for example, this voice is already active in the brain of the man who, in this world, is—was—will be—named Milan Djordjevic, and who is writing—wrote—will probably write—the adventure that has unfolded here. But it was also present inside Plotkin, the man of the “plot,” the man of action, the man divided and then reunified, the man of sacrifice, the man of crime and punishment, the Man from the Camp.

It is present, at the same time, inside a female android who leans over the baby she has just adopted, in an old mobile home lost somewhere among the borders of several North American territories; and also in the head of a very young girl, an adolescent girl scampering with her father near the chassis of an old Cadillac in an area reserved for combustion engines not far from here, but several years distant, outside this particular story. And it is present in a radiant fireball, on the lips of a man who, somewhere in a ruined city, is preparing himself to kill another man.

There are millions of men like that.

This voice is our own, except that we have lost it. This voice is the one that makes each of us something other than a routine in the program, something other than a box in an infinite network of boxes, something other than a machine in the megamachine. This voice is everything that humanity does not dare to tell itself, everything men do not want to hear spoken of—that is, themselves and their atrocious failures, their terrible dysfunctions, their unborne responsibilities.

This voice, though it probably exists in each one of us, can only be expressed by some. The weakest ones of all. Paradoxically, though, it is their very weakness that keeps them from speaking; they open their mouths and nothing comes out. But it is this terrifying silence that comes to cover, with its luminous shadow, the insipid tumult of small talk, the awful clamor of carnage, and the thundering din of crowds delivered up to themselves.

This voice—which is now nothing more than a gasp uttered by a few mouths silently screaming their ineffable cry to the stars, under the celestial northern and southern vaults that will crown the extinction of man by man—this voice is a very strong thread of light that seems to rise from the Van Halen belt toward the Orbital Ring, like a single filament of golden vapor. This voice—this voice that is already returning to what truly possesses it, well beyond this Earth and this Universe—this voice is what permits the world to exist. It is through this voice that this world transcribes itself in Creation.

Not only does no one listen to this voice any longer, no one dares to risk hearing it. Not only does no one speak this language any longer, the entire world has agreed to let it vanish. How, then, can we be surprised that the world is
slipping away;
how can we be surprised that it is crashing in on itself like the heart of a star that will become, that is becoming, a black hole? How can we be surprised that it no longer possesses any force strong enough to be
the glue that sticks things together
?

Look at them, these intelligent monkeys who hide their words behind accounting tautologies, behind cultures of pomp and circumstance, behind circus language—the words they have let become a vulgar mechanism for communication! Look at them, left alone with crude machine-language, with the machine-world in its pitiful nudity, just as it finally reaches its goal to co-mechanize everything, including the nothingness it carries within it.

This voice, if it is that of a human being on this Earth, is the voice of
the last living writer
not yet replaced by artificial intelligence. This voice has taken the world in its own mouth.

It is clear that this voice is about to fall silent.

Jordan McNellis presses his nose against the cold Plexiglas window.

The planet, blue and orange, appears in fragments under an atmospheric cavalcade of huge cloud formations. Where it is night on Earth, myriad unmoving stars cluster in the sky more thickly than the densest of surrounding constellations: they are the cities, burning with all their fires, some lit by the hand of man, raging fires and civil wars. Where it is day there are constant explosions, like flaming, silent laughter erupting across the surface of the globe, and enormous disks of black smoke, drifting from one continent to another, floating beneath his watchful, almost nostalgic gaze. A hurricane, surely programmed by WorldWeather, is brewing in the Indian Ocean just off the coast of Malaysia.

Involuntarily, his hand moves to the window, as if to touch the reality of what he has just left forever.

At the same time he hears Sloppy, a young Australian pioneer, swearing at a machine that is refusing to obey him. He glances around at the cabin’s occupants. Seven other people—three men, four women—with whom he will spend the twelve hours before their arrival at the final destination, the geostationary city of Cosmograd.

He is going back. Back to the High Frontier. Back to the Orbital Ring, the metacity peopled by space colonists. Back to the territory of his childhood. Back toward his own future.

He lets his gaze rest again on the planet that is growing imperceptibly more distant, burning with turbulence of every possible color. Hell might be multicolored like this. Everything that can burn does, on almost every continent, including North America: Los Angeles, several cities in the Great Lakes region, Atlanta, Washington, D.C. Collision zones, metacultural shocks in the mesh of the global network. High human energy: murders, massacres, torture, rapes, tyranny, abominations. Repetition of abominations. Abomination of repetitions. The planetary civil war is expanding: pseudopods, suburban agitation, convergence of micropolitical catastrophes. A multigenocidal hydra refracting at every stage of the great global panopticon now deprived of most of its means. They say the computer problems that began on October 4 in the Metastructure of governance bureaus are the worst ever, and that the Metastructure is only functioning at 50 percent capacity. That the phenomenon, of unknown origin, is getting worse every day. They are talking of the likely end of all aerospace activity. All technological activity.
There,
Jordan McNellis says to himself.
This time we can never go back; it has really started for good now. The general devolution of humanity can’t be stopped.

He left just in time.
In extremis.
He watches the Earth he is leaving forever with the mixed feelings of the survivor of a catastrophe: peace and relief on one hand; guilt and sadness on the other.

Once,
he thinks,
there was a world here.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Thierry Bardini, Pierre Bottura,
Olivier Germain—the trinity of readers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

M
AURICE
G. D
ANTEC
was born in France in 1959. A former advertising executive and songwriter for a French punk-rock group, Dantec is a shameless lover of science fiction, crime novels, and metaphysics. He is the author of
Red Siren,
which won France’s Prix de l’Imaginaire. He is also the author of
Villa Vortex, Babylon Babies
(soon to be a major motion picture from Fox under the title
Babylon A.D.
), and
Theatre of Operations,
a series of journal essays. He lives in Montreal.

ALSO BY MAURICE DANTEC

Babylon Babies

Cosmos Incorporated
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

2008 Del Rey Books Trade Paperback Edition

Translation copyright © 2008 by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

D
EL
R
EY
is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in French by Éditions Albin Michel, Paris, France, in 2006, copyright © 2006 by Éditions Albin Michel.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dantec, Maurice G.

[Cosmos incorporated. English]

Cosmos incorporated / Maurice G. Dantec ; translated from the French by Tina A. Kover.

p.                  cm.

I. Kover, Tina A. II. Title.
PQ2664.A4888C6713 2008
843'.914—dc22                                                      2008003019

www.delreybooks.com

eISBN: 978-0-345-50783-9

v3.0