Cosmos Incorporated (6 page)

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STARS IN FREEFALL

Back in his room, Plotkin orders the NeuroNet console to open an operating window for him in one of the walls. A UniScreen portal appears, a square of midnight blue in the midst of the computer network mesh that covers the walls of his capsule.

The console is a bit archaic. He has to juggle a few symbols just to open the pages of the various files, and more than once he encounters old 3-D routines that were in vogue thirty years before, in which he has to move virtually in a false universe inspired by this or that fashionable neurogame. Finally he approaches the core, the immense global neuroconnection tube, a gigantic ring coiling infinitely upon itself, a spiral of ultraviolet light whose gyrations are all linked to microimpulses in your cortex.

He wants to know everything about everyone who lives in this hotel. He wants a usable database, now. The dog may have a relationship with certain clients of the establishment. He also wants to know exactly what Heavy Metal Valley is. He wants el señor Metatron to get to work. Now.

So the neuroencrypted flame flickers into life. A pure digital translation of his soul, it erupts like a virtual rocket among the myriad optic cables interconnected with his own independent pseudo-conscience. It is an illusion of digital voodoo—but the highest form of illusion.

Like a shooting star cutting through the intangible subterfuge saturating the world, this metabrain, built of digital copies of all the human brains that pass through it, has in a sense become the world itself. El señor Metatron is not much in comparison to it. It can, if it wishes, appear to him in any form. In this sense, it is a devilish representation of the mind, and Plotkin knows this to the core of his being without knowing why, or how. It is a certainty that shines as brightly as the torch Lucifer himself uses when he descends into the darkness.

First: Heavy Metal Valley. Located around twelve kilometers northeast of the hotel in the Quebecois part of the independent Mohawk territory, it covers the equivalent of a county. It is a vast plain, faintly watered by a wadi, a small river that dries up almost completely in summer. In the space of a decade, during which hydrogen motors definitively entered the global market in the context of the Grand Jihad, which would soon reach the height of its raging fury, hundreds of millions of gasoline-powered vehicles had been declared illegal and restricted to use only on closed and private roads. Enormous lots of cars, junkyards several kilometers long and wide, had accumulated on this plain, along the ancient bed of the little river. More than a million gasoline-powered vehicles had ended up there; the local residents themselves had built a vast network of roads on which one could, within the territorial boundaries of the HMV corporate authority, drive cars from the twentieth century or the early twenty-first.

It was a community of greasers, stalwart devotees of the combustion engine, stubbornly resistant to hydrogen-fed electric turbines. The dog must have a sweetheart there, simple as that. The greasers and all groups of their ilk often lived with hordes of animals, including dogs. Perhaps Balthazar had come from there? Or had passed a few years there before being hired by the hotel?

Heavy Metal Valley. So that’s settled, for now.

Plotkin does almost nothing for the next few hours. The private filtering security camera observing him from the center of the ceiling watches him as he sits at the capsule’s little desk, the lighted NeuroNet console scrolling images from a legal Russian pornographic site while he scribbles a series of rough sketches on a digital notepad. In his falsified life there is still the indelible kernel that makes him the Man Who Has Come to Kill the Mayor of This City, and it is this kernel, barely possessed of a memory—only a few sparse recollections, more holes than real memories, and even those might not be real—it is this dark kernel that allows him to think about the various ways in which he might Kill the Mayor of This City.

Obviously, the instruction program knows how to keep the Project alive in his memory. The instruction program has made that the most vital part of his existence.

The strange thing is that he is acting exactly as this program has instructed him to, and he
knows it.
It is as if that fact has no real importance.

He knows enough about Orville Blackburn and the other Mohawks of the Municipal Consortium to avoid going anywhere that isn’t useful. A small reconnaissance tour of the heart of the city—it should only take a few days—and perhaps a second one in a few weeks, should be more than enough. Thanks to el señor Metatron, he has a real-time view of the invisible city hidden beneath the visible one—the digital network and its security systems.

After that, he knows, things will move very quickly.

When an assassination is well planned, it is the preparation that takes time. The execution itself takes only an instant.

When amateurs get involved, the paradigm is reversed, and rushed preparation leads to a sloppy, slow execution—as unpleasant for the victim as for the assassin, and likely to leave traces leading straight to you and any possible accomplices.

One of his remaining bits of knowledge gleaned from the Order is that, when an assassin arrives at the scene of the crime, everything—or nearly everything—must already have been carefully prepared, organized, and planned. The killer may be left to choose certain operational or tactical details, but the general plot, and all the information and procedures relating to it, will have been determined long before. Of course, the assassin often knows nothing of his employer, and hardly anything of his victim—or, these days, of himself.

Plotkin wonders how many times he has woken up in this body, with false memories implanted in his head and a human target on his agenda.

Even that knowledge has been erased.

The instruction program is unable to give him any information about possible avatars under which el señor Metatron might already have been active in the NeuroNet. He is hardly aware that the base program even exists anymore. Plotkin had hoped to find out some information about his past identities, and perhaps find out which was the true one. But there, too, everything has been erased; the databanks are empty. There is nothing, other than a few snippets of information so vague that he is forced to admit that he will find out no more about himself until his return to Russia twenty-eight days from now.

He may not be able to learn anything about himself, but he now knows almost everything about the 135 current residents of the Hotel Laika. 135 residents, 440 rooms: the hotel is not functioning at even a third of its maximum profitability. In relaying this information along with the latest economic data on the region, el señor Metatron makes it clear that even here, in the best possible world, that of Grand Junction and its cosmodrome, things are far from perfect.

The data that el señor Metatron collects about the network makes it utterly clear that, in the euphemistic language of the communication firms, “We are beginning to see signs of a serious slowdown of business.” Translation: there is a recession on the horizon.

As for the 135 current residents (not counting Plotkin), el señor Metatron is able to sketch general profiles of them thanks to pirated access to the hotel’s poorly encrypted personal information banks and guest registry. Seventy-nine are there for express transits of only a few days; twenty-seven of these will already be gone within the next twenty-four hours. This seems to be the norm; thirty-one arrive tomorrow for stays of twenty-four to forty-eight hours, paid for in cash; only seventeen people are registered for relatively long stays like Plotkin’s of at least several weeks.

That means that during the remaining twenty-eight days he will spend at the hotel, only 17 of the 135 current residents will be there for longer than two weeks. This is important information. It will allow him to refine his methods of monitoring comings and goings and, especially, to be virtually sure that at least 118 people will not remember his presence in the hotel during the week of his arrival.

If the current turnover rate isn’t an anomaly, and the hotel makes its profit from express stays, only the seventeen long-stay residents might pose a problem for him. These are the people he will have to monitor; he must know everything about them, and as quickly as possible, before any of them are even aware of his existence, of the fact that he is there with them in the hotel.

He has not seen the manager, Clovis Drummond, or the dog, Balthazar, in forty-eight hours.

He must do everything he can to avoid these seventeen residents during his stay. He must do all he can to find out everything about them, down to the most intimate details of their bodies.

El señor Metatron has already gone to work. A few seconds later, the console hums and a tiny beep tells him that the complete listing of data is now in the memory banks. Plotkin commands the console to close the operating window on the capsule wall. He stretches out on the bed and falls tranquilly to sleep.

He is awakened by light and vibration coming from the direction of the cosmodrome. He springs out of bed half-naked and goes to the window, requesting maximum transparency.

It is the takeoff of the second big turn-of-the-century American shuttle, owned by one of the cosmodrome firms. To his knowledge,
Discovery
was bought cheap from the NASA museum by the Grand Junction Consortium twenty years ago; almost seventy years after it first became operational, it is still in good working order. Professionally speaking, because it is supposed to belong to this branch of the industry, each flight of the shuttle, in view of the repairs it must undergo each time it returns to Earth, results in an increase of at least 10 percent in insurance costs. However, falling numbers of clients are causing the Grand Junction Consortium to try to lower prices. This may mean several things:

That they still have a wide enough profit margin to absorb this type of financial shock.

That they have made a (no doubt barely legal) deal with the big insurance cartels to pay a kickback out of the profits in exchange for a false stabilization of prices. It seems certain that such insurance would do little to cover the costs of any real emergency.

The fiery spray emitted by the shuttle illuminates Monolith Hills below. The city and its lights look like pale, long-dead stars whenever this conical sun rises into the atmosphere.

I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?

The words of Luke, repeating one of Christ’s most prophetic sayings, spring into his brain fully formed in his own language, and something—something he cannot understand—compels him to write them on a digital notepad affixed to the wall. Strangely, this something—which seems to him almost a some
one—
calls another sentence to his mind now, one that relates to the words of Christ and is cited by his apostle to the aged Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, to whom God said:
Now I have put my words in your mouth like a fire.

Now this fire leaves the Earth each day despairing of its cause.

Discovery
is a pure golden crystal shooting into the skies of the posturban night, while everywhere else on the planet, the cold visage of the Machine, with its sinister smile, obscures all human horizons.

Unimanity is fighting against itself, he thinks. Once this world has produced all the stars it can, and those stars have gone to join their sisters in space, then the worst monster of all will come. He has no idea where this strange intuition is coming from.

According to the General Statistics, the number of departing stars drops a little each year. Between the feudal and neotribal anarchies scattered over the globe and the Islamic emirates of Western Europe on one hand, and the motherly, terminal, and frosty world of the UHU on the other, the Devil had certainly given the choice to Unimanity. The UHU would undoubtedly finish by imposing itself on all humanity. The petroleum era was completely over. The cartels were restructuring themselves en masse in aquaculture, ecosystems, memory components, hydrogen motors, and nuclear fusion. Numerous Gulf and Central Asian states were left now with nothing more than a little blackened sand to sustain them. They, too, wanted a piece of the pie, and they wanted it more and more as they grew weaker.

People
dealt.

The Arab Muslim nations, exhausted by nearly half a century of planetary warfare, now hoped to quietly eliminate the anarchical emirates that had so disrupted Western Europe, especially France, and to hand everything over to a global protectorate, under the control of one or another of the large UHU-approved government agencies.

That had worked fine, people said, for the temporary independent zone of Paris, and for thirty-five years! And they said that the European federal troops that surrounded the Vatican, who had themselves been surrounded for more than three decades by the various Islamic forces of the region, who were themselves at war with European nationalist groups of various allegiances, only pretended to be in agreement with one another until they could reach a “pacific resolution of the crisis.” For more than forty years, the pontifical state had refused to sign the European Constitution from the beginning of the century, and for almost as long the Eurofederal troops, the Islamist organizations in their autonomous zones, and the various paramilitary groups had been fighting over the Western European territory. Everyone had had their turn at the punching bag. Nihilism always ends by exhausting itself.

Soon, the UHU will have all the power. It is the merit of the Grand Jihad that it precipitated its appearance. It is the greatest merit of almost half a century of global civil war to thus offer global peace as a
solution
that would even more certainly destroy humanity. There can be no doubt that the end of the world will come as it twists in on itself, like an old vinyl record scratched to the last groove. Dissolution disguised as the last solution.

Plotkin is surprised to hear himself humming a forgotten old tune by an American rock group from the 1970s and ’80s called Pere Ubu:
I don’t need a cure, don’t need a cure, need a final solution….
Just like his recollection of the Pink Floyd song title in the robotaxi during the trip from the train station to the hotel, this intimate knowledge of a song forgotten for decades, clearly stored in his memory, makes him think that at least a small part of his original personality must have been retained in this body. Yet he feels no particular attraction to music, other than perhaps a bit of Russian classical or jazz, or even a little mainstream rock—the same as everyone else. His fundamental personality itself seems to have been altered.