Cosmos Incorporated (10 page)

As Plotkin steps into the car, the dog is several meters from the entryway, and pauses to note Plotkin’s choice of destination—“City Hall, please”—before the taxi takes off. Their eyes meet: the bionic animal and the rebuilt human. In that instant, Plotkin realizes that neither of them is being deceived by the other’s maneuvers.

Of all the hotel’s residents, the dirty informer Clovis Drummond included, Plotkin tells himself, the one he needs to be most careful of is this dog.

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STARDUST ALLEY

KOROLEV PLAZA—MUNICIPAL TERRITORIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION—YOU HAVE JUST ENTERED A YELLOW ZONE IN THE GRAND JUNCTION CITY HALL’S SECURITY PERIMETER—PLEASE GO IMMEDIATELY TO THE CLOSEST METROPOLITAN CONTROL OFFICE—FOLLOW THE YELLOW NEURO-ARROWS ON THE SIDEWALK.

This is what happens when you pass the first security perimeter that encircles Grand Junction’s City Hall. Up to that point, you have done nothing illegal. You can go into a “yellow” zone under the strict condition that you must follow the neuroencrypted arrows transmitted by the city’s UHU-approved system to the closest registration office, which will verify your ID and ask why and for how long you are here.

If you stray from the yellow neuro-arrows for more than thirty seconds, an imperious inscription will order you to return immediately to the “correct route” if you persist for fifteen more seconds, a final warning message will appear on your retina for five seconds. Then there will be a numeric countdown from 10 to the ominous 0, at which point the alarm will sound and the surveillance networks will pinpoint your location down to the centimeter within a microsecond, and dozens of territory or city police officers, human and android, will rush in to pounce on you.

El señor Metatron knows all this down to the smallest procedural detail; all it has to do is enter the yellow zone and its organic backer, Plotkin, receives a neuro-HTML page from the municipal department; the
yakuza
software agent detects it in an instant, this funny living flame, gamboling joyously in the air, invisible to everyone but Plotkin. It hovers above the city’s gray asphalt pavement, penetrating all obstacles that cross its path, human or otherwise, like a mass of neutrinos; playing with the neuroencrypted yellow line that marks—for the man named Plotkin, and for the crowd of thousands of humans that pass by the protected sector around City Hall—the shortest route to the closest metropolitan registration office.

For el señor Metatron, toreador of nanocomponents, sparkling keeper of the secret language of the pirate metacoders of the Unterbahn; for el señor Metatron, as powerful and invisible—or practically, at least—as the Word of God himself; for el señor Metatron, almost nothing is impossible when it comes to manipulating data, or the uninterrupted production of simulacrums meant to fool the simulacrum cops of the UHU network. All the immoderate pride of this clandestine intelligence agent passes through Plotkin’s brain in a sort of flamboyant spray of pure ego, while words written in blue on a yellow background appear in front of him, floating above the sidewalk at the next street corner:
TAKE KOROLEV-
5
, THEN VIKING ALLEY. NUMBER
456
NORTH, METROPOLITAN CONTROL OFFICE, STATION
14
.

At station 14, he gets in line at window 3 and is welcomed by Jennifer CK2564.

It is law in all territories managed by UniWorld—about four-fifths of the planet—that any civil officer of a UHU-approved corporation must be identifiable by any UniWorld citizen. At the same time, an individual’s right to his own “privacy” has led to a long legal battle that the Global Governance Bureau cut off by instigating the system of “registered first names.” You have the right to lodge a complaint against agent John XX2000, but his anonymity will be preserved and you will have no way of bringing his “private life” into the fray. Jennifer CK2564 is a fat Mohawk woman, surely half-blood, who looks fairly agreeable in her brown Metropolitan Control Office uniform. Her muddy yellow badge indicates that her operational jurisdiction includes all the yellow perimeters in the territory of Grand Junction.

After a few minutes of discussion, Plotkin has learned next to nothing; the same is true for Jennifer CK2564; but el señor Metatron, who has come along like a sparkling torch to hover in the middle of station 14’s ceiling; el señor Metatron, who glows insolently among the police station’s surveillance cameras; el señor Metatron now knows everything about the various procedures, methodologies, organizations, and plans of Grand Junction’s security forces. It
—he—
is undoubtedly the secret weapon Plotkin was told about in Siberia, the weapon that should let him
—if his memory works correctly; how ironic to think of that!—
override the enemy’s security systems.

Plotkin’s memory may not be the best, but el señor Metatron simply brushes that off as rotten luck. This bit of incandescent plasma would make child’s play of security networks and countermeasures; he is sandwiched between two worlds, strolling on Plotkin’s retina and neurons with no indication, even to the most modern scanners, that there is even the tiniest bit of suspicious cerebral activity. He is more false than all the false worlds that make up this one. More false than false—does that even mean anything?

That is why el señor Metatron was designed for the Red Star Order. To be clandestine now requires the ability to appear to a single brain, without even the Global Megabrain questioning what is happening. To be true is to be more false than the world itself.

In any case, this seems to be one of the surest ways to reach some kind of truth. It is perhaps Metatron—who else?—who is sending coded messages to Plotkin’s brain; he might not even be aware that he is doing it. El señor Metatron is not just a simple program. He may not have a body to speak of, but he has a voice and a mind, things that he cannot understand in himself. It is undoubtedly Metatron—it must be—who sent him those unconscious messages about fire and its presence in the Bible…and in the rock music of the twentieth century.

Plotkin receives a temporary visitor’s permit for the City Hall’s yellow zone. Jennifer CK2564, the fat mixed-blood at the registration office, will only allow him three hours.
You came here what for?
she had asked him, in barely comprehensible English. He had explained that he was trying to contact a manager in the Municipal Consortium’s financial department and that an introductory e-mail would be sent as soon as possible, but as a paid commission inspector, he had been sent to clear the way, et cetera, et cetera.

Jennifer CK2564 had cut him off short by handing him a dirty-beige token chip with the number 3 written in black in its center.
Three hours,
she had said, already signaling for the next person in line.

He had left station 14 well pleased, and begun to walk through the downtown streets.

Once he passes the barrier, he has full access to all the departments. He can go everywhere except the “orange” and “red” zones. He starts by taking Korolev-4, one of the large boulevards that divides Korolev Plaza into a star (it is modeled on the plaza with the same name in Paris); a venerable Korolev R-5, more than a hundred years old now and bought cheaply from the Russians forty years earlier, sits enthroned atop a grassy butte in the middle of the plaza, and large numbered streets form a vast eight-pointed star around it. At the corners of each arterial street, facing the antique rocket, tall buildings house various departments of the Municipal Consortium, linked by elegant circular walkways designed and built by a famous Indonesian architect in the 2020s when Grand Junction was at the peak of its power and could play with it as it wished.

Here, the crowd is very different from the one at the Enterprise aerostation. This is the administrative heart of the city; body-tuning-operation recipients have none of the brassy, cheap showiness of the trans-Gs at the aerostation or on the strip; with body tuning, the majority of modifications are internal and duly masked by nanosurgery. Here, people look more human than natural humans—this has been the new trend for a good dozen years now. High-quality Versace-Motorola suits seem to be the norm for men, long Prada-Sony dresses for the women. Here, the crowd moves in lines cleaner and more fluid than the chaos that reigns at the city’s gateway. Here, people work—or at least they work very hard at appearing to do so.

He turns off at the second circular avenue, called Mariner Street. It is a downtown typical of the short-lived 2010–2020 boom. The prevailing style is neo-Gothic with, toward the end of the period, the characteristic emergence of neoclassical styles that are still all the rage today. High crenellated towers overlook arches and naves in translucent composite or molded concrete in which statues representing pop stars, Gothic martyrs from the Middle Ages, famous Amerindian gods, and mythical figures from the space race are arranged in bas-relief or even built into the structure like gargoyles from an ageless age. These buildings are most often painted dark red, violet, mauve, or blue, cold and old-fashioned, while the more recent buildings—the ones from after the 2020s—duplicate the vivid colors of the palaces in Knossos or Babylon, complete with hanging gardens filled with lush, genetically modified bonsai jungles.

This part of the city is almost the oldest, if you don’t count prehistory; it dates from the twentieth century, before private space exploration and before the Grand Jihad, when Grand Junction was still just a small town nestled alongside a Canadian National railway line in a Mohawk reserve partly located in Quebecois territory and partly in American—in the state of NewYork, within the borders of Vermont, and less than fifty kilometers from Ontario. Later, the “leopard spots” of the Mohawk reservations were partially united. The autonomous territory developed a triple border. Grand Junction itself was a bilingual city, and a large percentage of the inhabitants still speak French.

Well, Grand Junction French.

Here, humans are prosthetic extensions of urbanization. Each quarter, each street has its own dress code, which is more or less a life code. Clothing brands are only the signs that point to urbanization as the utopian-atopian achievement of the human beings who circulate within it. They are signs. They are urbanization. They are indistinguishable from the structure, the forms, even the topology of the city. Born as the world began a steep decline, Grand Junction had the time during its golden age to condense everything of the city and posthumanity into a single matrix. Thanks to their off-center location, the autonomous territory and the zone of Grand Junction escaped the various waves of attacks that brought down North America’s metropolises during the Grand Jihad. Grand Junction was even able to stay out of the conflict during the War of Secession; it had the time to carry the urban phenomenon to the peak of success, just before everything came tumbling down.

Men live here in a dream of total integration among machines and society. Here and there are UHU-approved religious shops and even legal interactive fetishes leaning against the walls of buildings, in plain view on the sidewalks. Men or women can be seen plugged into them, heads inclined toward the bluish haloes of the neuroconnections. Plotkin notes the presence of numerous Amerindian divinities, pre-Columbian ones from Central America, as well as those from Siberian shamanic rites and primitive slave and Nordic religions, and even a few syncretisms that have risen from the mass of transcendences supported by the magic of the UHU, whose federative slogan appears each day at sunrise, written in clean white clouds disturbed only by the dark oblong fuselage of an occasional passing zeppelin.
This is the source of the UHU’s power,
Plotkin muses to himself, again without really understanding where the thought is coming from.
It can swallow up complex singularities and unforeseen new innovations. It can even admit differences, just like indifferences.
This world-machine is much more intelligent than it appears to him—worse still, it is more intelligent than he can imagine. With the exception of terrorist groups and “intolerant” religions—especially Catholic, Orthodox, and Evangelical Christians, officially banned since the brief armistice of the Grand Jihad and the “interim” concord with the circum-Mediterranean Islamic states and the American ones in Michigan, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C.—absolutely every possible and imaginable divinity existed in this new cosmopolitan Rome, the Rome of the End Time. Grand Junction, he knows (thanks to data acquired in Siberia—or had he acquired it somewhere else?), is regarded as a model of city living among the states federated under the aegis of the UHU.

He goes to 1044 Korolev-6 and asks to see Mr. Samuel Gerald M231, the deputy subcomptroller for the cosmodrome’s general insurance department. They exchange banal small talk; Plotkin explains “why he has come” and is given two or three sheets of digital cellulose and a small disk, then advised to make an appointment. He insists a little, as planned, and obtains an express visit to the office of another peon named Jaggi S127, with whom the circus starts all over again. Plotkin acts like a complete automaton; he doesn’t need to have anything to do with Mr. Samuel Gerald M231 or Mr. Jaggi S127 or their damn numerical prospectuses, strictly speaking, but it is part of the plan. On that point, at least, what remains of the instruction program was clear.

For three hours he acts like a robot, leaving dozens of traces in temporary and permanent files. False traces. Traces that won’t be traces of anyone.

Traces that won’t even be traces.