Cosmos Incorporated (30 page)

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THE MACHINE-CHILD

He needs to be able to establish contact. It seems as simple as devising a method of communication between two species separated by several light-years of space and a few millennia of time.

Plotkin is the intensified inversion of the Man from the Camp. He is the imaginary Anti-Man from the Camp incorporated in the brain of Vivian McNellis. He is the form condensed, inverted, and divided, then reunified, human, vertical, centered, and mobile.

The Machine-Child, the child with no name—or, rather, with a hundred names minus one—the child with multiple pseudonyms and with only imaginary or fictive references, the child-idiot-genius connected to his machine-organs, the autistic dome-child with his comic books and neurogames and science fiction and pulp novels, the Machine-Child is himself the broad figure of the camp. The broad and rhizomic figure that, separated and fused, scattered, horizontal, nomadic and static at the same time,
metastatic,
is its image made flesh.

He too is creating worlds, but he is their prisoner. He lives in his fortress of numbers, in his network of machines, as if in a projection of his own fundamental autism. For him, the Created World is just a digital universe among millions of others; each snippet of his consciousness forms only one particular combination of the network metaconsciousness; each of his thoughts exists only in the emergence of a thought from the overall cyberstructure.

The fate to which Clovis Drummond regularly forces him to submit, in the guise of “recompense” for his slave work in prohibited neurosoftware trafficking, the fate the dirty snitch of a pedophilic bastard dealer makes him endure, has probably hammered the last nail into the coffin in which the Machine-Child is destined to spend his life, Plotkin thinks. Yet the Machine-Child has not entered into the service of Evil. He has not become wicked like his torturer. Such categorization means nothing to him, because he feels no effect from it. Really, he is already dead. He is already pure entropy. He wanders in his virtual labyrinths, searching, too, for light—but the only light he ever sees is the icy luminescence of the expansion of his network of machine-organs—the creation of a new piece of the labyrinth-world.

Clovis Drummond and his prohibited neurogames and his machinist pedophilia—all of that has simply been placed in one of the boxes of the child with ninety-nine names. And it now holds no more importance than an assembly routine permitting access to one or another of his machine-organs. He is Plotkin’s dark side. That is why he lives in the constant light of the incarcerating world of the nexus. He was
counter-produced
by the Creation of Plotkin, but outside the terms of Vivian McNellis’s narration—because this incarcerating, subterranean,
shadowy
light from the Camp is what has remained dark in the eyes of the girl from the sky. It is the moment of ultimate Degradation, the moment of being nailed to the cross. It is the moment of total dismemberment, body-mind made to serve the pedophiles of the planet and elsewhere, body-slave become flesh as fodder for the sexual appetites of the manager of the hotel. Body-Machine. Mind-Machine. Child-Machine.

It takes him only a few hours to create neurosoftware on demand, while it would take a team of programmers working full-time weeks, or even months. As Plotkin understands it, if Vivian McNellis—as the feminine incarnate figure of the Celestial Scribe—speaks to men by communicating with their language, this ageless adolescent in the dome does the same thing to
machines,
by communicating via
their
language.

You must be a Machine in order to “dominate” machines.

So the dome-child is a bit more than a man, according to the standards of Neon Park, but he is definitely still less than a machine, because of the singular place—the place of inverted sovereignty—that he occupies in the global rhizome of the Control Metastructure.

Plotkin realizes, as if paralyzed by the appearance of a supernatural truth, that the child represents a totally inverted version of the Christ incarnation. He represents the moment of Degradation in the shadow of the Machine-World.

Christ had to become Incarnate in Man, and to descend to the limits of subhumanity in order to create a world saved by Grace. The dome-child, the child from the human Camp-Universe, must lower himself to be a submachine, the lumpenproletariat of the Great Network of voluntary servitude—or, rather, of subjugated desire, in order to create worlds perverted by and for man, in exchange for a quasi-absolute disincarnation in the horribly immanent horizontality of the world of boxes.

To say he is the Devil would be to say nothing at all.

“The Machine is speaking to you. Do you wish to speak to the Machine?”

Contact. He must make contact.

Plotkin realizes that his own brain is somehow able to read the thoughts of the Machine-Child. It is both strange and fascinating. The thought boxes of the Box-Child emerge sporadically from their machine network and write themselves on the surface of his memory—him, the Man from the Hidden Side of the Earth. But it seems impossible to duplicate the action in reverse, to find any way to print words from the outside on the brain of the young autistic.

Plotkin looks at Balthazar. Balthazar looks at Plotkin.

They understand each other without saying anything.

Yes, contact.

Meaning, for the Box-Child, a disconnection.

Proceed by disconnection.
A machine is a game of disconnections.
They must find a way to act as a discontinuity in this ontology formed by the ongoing continuum of the machines; they must find a way to divide the zero operator. They must divide what has already been divided, and
divide what has done the dividing.

“Is your GPS telecontroller still working?” he asks Balthazar.

The dog nods his head.

“Okay, connect to one of his small peripheral nanomachines,” Plotkin instructs. “And activate an entry-exit driver with a channel that opens onto nothing.”

After a few seconds, the dog sighs. “It’s impossible. In this system, everything that opens closes immediately on one of his boxes.” He seems genuinely disappointed. “As soon as a channel activates with him, he makes a scheme appear that is specific to the cyberstructure. They’re always different. I’ve never seen that before.”

Plotkin understands. The man in the box
is the box;
his mind is the world, the world of boxes that his mind creates as he goes, from software components of the Control Metastructure.

The man in the box is all of humanity.

Each of the Machine-Child’s ninety-nine identities was taken from a box; each of them is linked to a singular narrative world. For the Box-Child, who dissolves all narrations, all dialogue, all temporality in the digital acid of the Control Metastructure, the only narrative possible comes from this nominative diagram. The diagram draws a line like an escape route between the boxes themselves; the diagram shows the potential for resistance to the enclosure of incarcerating digital worlds; the diagram shows up like a very weak light lost amid the shadows. The diagram, Plotkin senses with his entire being/nonbeing, is the closest thing possible to life for the Box-Child.

This list.

This list of names.

This list of names that winds among their various boxes of origin to give them a new sense—this list is the life of the Machine-Child; it is what neither Clovis Drummond nor the neurosoftware traffickers can exploit. It is what the colonists in the Ring cannot buy, what the renegade programmers cannot program, what the Neon Park bionicians cannot manufacture, what the illegal body tuners cannot conceive.

It is like literature, condensed to its zero expression point.

And so Plotkin
understands.

Or rather, so he thinks. To be precise, so he
writes
in his own brain.

Something is occurring in him. He can transcribe the topology of the World of boxes of the Machine-Child directly in his consciousness. He understands that literature too is a game of disconnections, a singular machine. He realizes that maybe now he can begin to
dialogue
with the Machine-Child, by sharing his catalogue of identities.

Each identity is connected to a box, a world, and each world forms an interface with the others. Each box is a lamina, a one-dimensional membrane that serves as a junction between continuums in quantum physics. The boxes are half-open, half-closed; they cannot even be seen as geometric plans. They evoke puckers, lines of cleavage that fold back one on another.

D-branes. Bodybranes. Dimensions incorporated in the organless body of the Machine-Child. Symbolic machines continuously disincarnating the flesh he is barely made of. Bodybranes. In the Middle Ages, Nicolas de Cues described an analogous process. In his memory, Plotkin sees the living fire of the Word coming out of the mouth of Vivian McNellis, speaking to him from the very center of his head:
I’m trying to say that all these creatures folded into God are God, in the same way that once they are unfolded in the Creation of the world, they are the world.

So he must unwind the thread. He must follow the
vinculum
of the Box-Child. In it, he must try to find the meaning—or co-define it along with him.

And now Plotkin understands the strange bond that unites the Creator and the Creation, the Narrator and the Character; they are built together—they reproduce, at their own level, the movement that occurs between God and His human creatures. The Creation of Man is the moment when God, immutable, eternal, unique, and unknowable, risks ontological change, the moment when He decides to make Himself knowable, mutable, in multiple forms and thus mortal. God is only mortal and mutable in the World of Man—the World Created by His Creation. In the same way, a Narrator will live and die with his character or characters in the Created World of his fiction.

For Plotkin, this will have direct consequences from now on. He is also participating directly in the
Aevum,
the Third Time of the angels. He carries with him this circumspect and discontinuous time Vivian McNellis uses to create her own narrative-worlds. But he can only use it here, where, justifiably, Vivian McNellis cannot.

Here, in the black box under the dome of the Hotel Laika. In the machine-brain of the child with ninety-nine names, in his constant extrojection inside the Control Metastructure of the United Human Universe.

Here. In the shadows.

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METATRONIC BLACK BOX

“It’s extremely troubling. It’s like the incarnation of my crises of infinite division. It’s like they have attained cyberorganic synthesis.”

Vivian McNellis is standing in front of him, looking like an asteroid is about to crash at their feet.

“Yes, he is the Technical World. His mind never stops dividing—you’re right. He divides himself, and in order to do it he constantly divides the world into boxes and brings them together in his Machine-Box, which is really him. It’s a sort of antiphysics.”

Plotkin’s voice seems covered with ice water; it flows from his mouth like a waterfall from a vast frozen block. They are in the McNellises’ double room. Jordan June stares out the window with vacant eyes; Balthazar sits near him in a strangely similar position. Dawn, pale as the face of death, rises above Monolith Hills. Men are still sleeping.

“Monopsychism,” the girl says.

“What?”

“Monopsychism. The theory of Averroës, supported by some Latin scholar like Siger of Brabant. Saint Thomas Aquinas argued against it brilliantly around 1270.”

“There were two identity boxes named Saint Thomas Aquinas and this Averroës in the ninety-nine the dome-child had.”

Vivian McNellis’s face registers a sudden flash of intense curiosity. “Really?”

“Ah—you absolutely can’t make any sort of contact with the Machine-Child? In any way? You can’t even see what I see when I’m under the dome, or what is being written in me? You can’t read anything past the entry to the box?”

“No. He is the impossible figure in my narration. He was created when I created you—I mean, when I used the narrative instrument for your creation during my Third Day. But he comes from the bi-day of infinite division, from my anticrisis. He is a totally separate intellect—the materialization of monopsychism. He doesn’t think.
Homo non intelligit,
they called it in the thirteenth century.”

“He doesn’t think?”

“No. He is thought by the
Machine,
thought by his network of boxes that make up the Control Metastructure within him. Understand—in monopsychism, the ‘I’ is not divided; it is the subject that is cleaved. It is only a point of intersection, without any real singularity, between the intelligible images that mobilize his intelligence and the separate intellect-agent that has inscribed the images in him. He isn’t a hacker, or a sort of megavirus that contaminates the Metastructure using a particular system. He is the Metastructure as a whole self, and as the always different, mutable sum of its parts, he retrowrites it directly in his nervous system, I think.”

“So, it’s like the Metastructure is contaminating him?”

“Yes. That’s what makes him the incarnation of monopsychism, the devilish inversion of thought. Averroës and his partisans argued—against all evidence—that Aristotle was the first to invent the concept of a single intellect-agent, simultaneously separated from God and from the human soul, as well as from its intellective part. According to them, this separate intellect-agent thought
through us.
And, in fact, we were thought by it. So, despite our individual differences, a single and unique entity—but not a divine one—thinks constantly via the ‘network’ of human brains. It
thinks
us, and that isn’t all. It
produces
us. Like Saint Thomas said, this is a theory that makes man into an exclusively thought being, not a thinking one.”

“Isn’t it Descartes that we should invoke to counter the infinite expansion of the Machine-Child?”

“No. That’s the first mistake.
Cogito ergo sum
is only a dialectic inversion of the same ‘thought.’ It isn’t about defining the total autonomy of human thought by itself, or the autonomy of a separate intellect-agent that thinks us, either. It is about daring to affirm:
I am not, therefore I think.
It is because I am able to detach my ‘thinking’ animal destiny from my ‘life’ contained in death; it is because I conceive of my existence as the dynamic of its own future that I think, and thus I live. I live
outside
of death.”

Plotkin stares at the young woman. “I had the same thought during my transnarrative neo-Genesis. Did you—did you keep on thinking me after you produced me?”

“I see what you’re thinking, but there is a fundamental difference: I didn’t think you; I wrote you. I don’t think myself through you, as the monopsychic intellect theories of Averroës would have it. I re-created myself through the process of your creation—meaning, I used the temporary pencil of the Celestial Scribe. My narration can take life, which is what happened, but we remain two distinct, separate entities. I am not even your progenitor. I am not at all the human equivalent of that intellect that is separated but constantly reunited in men in the place of separation—thanks, they say, to the ‘images’ that serve as contact surfaces for this intellect in the human brain. But also, oddly, like with you, I gave birth to him—or, rather, I opened his antiworld by opening the narrative process of your creation. I am only an instrument of transcription, remember.”

Plotkin is quiet for a long moment. Balthazar and Jordan McNellis continue to watch the street in silence. The window is already reflecting the first red rays of dawn.

From now on there is only one question, and it concerns the fate of several human beings. Several human beings teetering on the brink of the abyss.

“What can we do?” Plotkin asks.

“There is only one thing to do,” the girl says. “You know what it is.”

Plotkin looks Vivian McNellis straight in the eyes. She returns his gaze unblinkingly.

“Kill him?”

“If it turns out to be the only solution. We have to stop his proliferation. At each expansion of the network of semantic boxes through which he is thought, my brain breaks down a little more. He is the active transcription of the counter-effects of my retrotranspositional bursts.”

“Bursts?”

“Moments of biophotonic illumination, when I manage to sublimate the Days of Infinite Division. He is the rest. He is the infinitely destroyed indestructible the French writer Maurice Blanchot described.”

Plotkin thinks for a moment.

“That means we can’t destroy him—we can’t kill him. He is already dead. In a way, we have to admit that he is Death itself. Death come alive.”

The girl looks at him with large, clear eyes. Her face reflects pure desolation.

“Yes. You’re right.”

“I am right,” Plotkin says dryly. “And that is a very bad sign.”

In the machine language of the Machine-Child, the federative slogan of the United Human Universe translates as follows:

ONE MACHINE FOR ALL

ONE INTERFACE FOR EACH.

The child’s multi-identity network draws a complex diagram among the various progenitive boxes, the founding “membranes” of his “personality.” They form several subensembles, one sometimes included within another, occasionally with one or more intersections.

First, there seems to be a series of links extending outward from the Clint Eastwood box toward other boxes whose relationships to the first seem to have nothing in common—Marie Curie, for example. The same is true for the Philip K. Dick box and that of General Custer, both of which seem connected to virtually all the other boxes.

He can rapidly trace the specific configuration of “English” boxes, the ones that contain the names of several 1980s rock musicians. He has no idea where this particular semantic grouping might have come from, but he knows now which brain it has come to interfere with.

The Saint Thomas Aquinas and Averroës boxes are linked by the Vivian McNellis box, which serves as an intersection for them. In this, Plotkin sees proof that the Machine-Child assimilates everything within his reach, including the most secret relationships between humans, across times and worlds. And he does it without even the slightest twinge of guilt; he does it because he was thought by the world, the World become Control Metastructure. He does it because his semantic boxes are the equivalent of the “images” through which, according to Averroës and his partisans, our consciousness interfaces with the separate intellect.

The list can bring together fictional beings and real persons, characters from books or movies and authors and playwrights, even actors or actresses representing personages from fiction written by one literary hack or another. The list gives the appearance of a nominalist horizon expanded to its maximum, each of the ninety-nine boxes forming a “degree,” a specific section of the space thus created. The list causes the cohabitation of universal myths and utter unknowns. It is truly like the fractal of all humanity.

The simplest grouping is made up of the hotel guests assembled in Vivian McNellis’s narration-world. Plotkin sees himself there, and the McNellis girl and her brother, and others—the bionic dog, Cheyenne Hawkwind, and even Jason Texas Lagrange and the mayor of the city he had once come to kill. But the dome-child also has his “black hole”: he could not assimilate the renegade androids into his boxes, and Plotkin senses that this failure will soon provide him with a way to penetrate this monopsychic universe by which “John Smith” is constantly thought. It is because they are created human machines that the Box-Child, a constantly uncreated machine-man, cannot “read” them. The hotel’s androids are a key—an encryption—as much as the decryption program connected to him. They will allow him to open the door, to find the access code. The access code to the black box itself. The access code to the machine-head.

“I think I’ve created something monstrous in spite of myself,” Vivian McNellis says.

“The whole world is monstrous,” Plotkin says. “You shouldn’t take it on yourself.”

The hastily thought-up answer does little to console the young woman, whose large, clear eyes seem clouded with vaporous crystal.

“We all create monsters, don’t we? When we aren’t created
by
them. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?” she whispers.

Plotkin observes the girl closely. She seems to be at the limits of psychic exhaustion. He detects an immense rift in her, a great chasm opening on the purest anguish. In her, he sees the moral terror of the creator. And he—he is that anguish made real, the very incarnation of her terror. He is the Man from the Camp, the Man from the Hidden Face of the Earth, the man with no memory, come to kill the mayor of this city; he is the free man in Capsule 108.

He is Vivian McNellis’s monster, and he shares this ontology with the Machine-Child. “The Monster”
—that which is monstrous.
That which makes shadows visible, that which moves in the gray area between Good and Evil. That which is perhaps capable of bearing light into the darkest, densest corner of a black hole.

“We must use the androids,” he says.

“What?”

“The androids. The hotel androids. They aren’t part of the Machine-Child’s genetic list. They aren’t in his matrix. And I think I know why.”

“Why, then?”

“Because androids are schizophrenic by nature. Their ontology is based on the existential disconnection of non-objects in the Machine-Child’s world of membranes-boxes-universes.”

“Androids are schizophrenic
by nature
?”

“Yes; I think it was William S. Burroughs who wrote that somewhere.”

“Well, how should we use them?”

“I don’t know yet. I have to think. Come up with a plan of action. I need to think about what has happened so far, if you know what I mean.”

The shadow of a smile flickers over the girl’s lips. “I understand completely. You are now the agent of the narrative—you are the engine of your own story. The only one, except for the androids, who can go up under the dome. I have to trust you.”

Plotkin looks at the McNellis girl. Her beauty is consuming him slowly, like the fire inside an anaerobic oven. Something inside him is twisting—not an object, or an organ, but something that seems like it might dislocate his whole being from the inside.

“You would be doing the right thing,” he says. “You don’t have the slightest shadow of another solution.”

He is painfully aware that he is actually talking to himself.

“Now I need to cause my own luminous shadow to enter into you,” she says.

Plotkin shivers. “What do you mean?”

“Right now your metanarrative power is still only developing. Besides, I don’t have any more time. I must give you a part of myself
—sacrifice
a part of myself.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Sacrifice. I must exchange your death for my life.”

Plotkin sighs, smiling weakly. “Try to be a little less cryptic for once, please.”

“That won’t be easy. This entire process involves your future, your present, and even your past. You were created and then rebuilt; you became free, but now you’re going to have to fight
against
that freedom. You are going to have to fight against yourself.”

“And?”

“I am going to give you what you need to master your burgeoning embryonic power. I am going to give you part of Metatron’s power. I am going to give you access to one of the Celestial Pencils.”

“Cosmogonic powers?”

“No, I’m not able to do that. But I am going to open a channel for you toward Metatron’s black box. That way, you will be able to link your narrative with the Created World—but you won’t be able to create anything in itself; you will only be an interface, an entry-exit system toward the black box of the angel of the Face.”

Plotkin smiles. “I think that will be quite sufficient.”

“Yes, I should say so,” Vivian McNellis replies. From out of nowhere she takes a tiny black cube, which she holds out to him in her open palm.

A microbox, no larger than a pill, as black as night.

“What is that, some sort of orbital drug?”

Vivian McNellis smiles feebly. “In a way. This is the noncoding part of my genome, my neuroquantum DNA. It is, so to speak, my flesh and blood. You are going to swallow it.”

Plotkin gulps, feeling as if a billiard ball has suddenly become lodged in his throat. “Will I become like you?”