Cosmos Incorporated (38 page)

> VERBA IGNIS

The Hotel Laika has become the active center of the autodisintegration of the Metastructure.

The police find only empty rooms, artificial intelligence with no memory, and access to the protective dome completely blocked. When they finally use explosives to break into the dome after several hours of unsuccessful trying, the county cops find a sort of exorganic iron lung containing a list of the organs of a certain Clovis Drummond, manager of the Laika and missing for several days, but they do not find any trace of a body. The exorganism is connected to a battery of nanocomputers whose encryption the Mohawk territory police’s decoding experts cannot break.

It seems that there has been no one in the hotel for more than a month. The strange cyborg cast the dome was sheltering has contaminated all of the computer structures in the building and even beyond. It does not stop even after CyberBranch agents seal off the dome and cut the hotel and its AI off from any connection with the exterior. It is obviously too late; a dead body is disincorporating in the Metastructure. Result: the Metastructure is recopying itself in a cadaver that it has literally devoured and is now decomposing along with it.

Another mystery for the territory cops: it is as if the Hotel Laika, in the space of a few hours on the evening of October 4, aged several decades at once. Virtually nothing is still operational; everything is used, broken, worn out. The most perfect desolation reigns there, “as if time were speeded up somehow,” concludes a scientific expert from Alberta without being able to identify the cause of the phenomenon.

Later, he will correct his diagnosis: “Really, it’s more like time went backward there.”

Vivian McNellis is aware of all of this, though she is in the process of becoming an angel. She knows it because she knows Plotkin is dead. The sacrificial man, the gambit man, the Man from the Camp, the man she was only able to love in the Third Time, in a single second of eternity and flame. The man who could only love in order to be destroyed. The man thanks to whom everything will be able to be written; the man thanks to whom everything has been written.

She knows it because she has become the black box itself, and that is why she emits luminous energy, in the paradoxical manner of a black hole that shines with all the radiance and all the matter it swallows.

It had to be this way, because what is going to happen has to happen.

The retroviral, autopoietic contamination of the Metastructure speeds up as the weeks go by. The world’s governance bureaus are hit with more and more serious “technical” problems, the likes of which have never been seen in Human UniWorld or its predecessors: the end of technology, the termination of technology by itself.

First, CyberBranch detectives locate so-called hot points across the surface of the globe. Emergency zones. The Hotel Laika is the first of these. Then a health security center in the Hong Kong region. This is followed by an entire university research compound in New Zealand. Then a transorbital transit camp at Valparaiso; a series of second-class hotels in Laos and Thailand; and other refugee and health-control camps in East Africa and Central Asia. Then, a few weeks later, at the end of the year, there is a change in the system; the hot points begin to fade, but now, and in a synchronic manner, it is the entire Metastructure that is affected. Specialists compare the process to the various stages of the progression of AIDS. During their investigation on behalf of the Metastructure, it disappears little by little, fades away,
annihilates
itself; and the UniWorld cops can do nothing to stop it.

When the epidemic reaches the Orbital Ring, it quickly becomes clear that every machine connected to Earth is following the entropic path of the Metastructure, but that those connected only to the Inter-polar Network of Geo-Orbital Nations, a sort of counterstructure the pioneers developed little by little simultaneously, in the forbidden “basements” of civilization, in the Free Space of a new samizdat—all the machines that have remained unconnected to the Metastructure since their creation, escape the phenomenon. It is noted that, as with AIDS, the number of exposures to the Metastructure, the number of connections to the social control cybermachine, determines the risk factor for a general retrowriting of the machine in question. Because, and this is repeated unsuccessfully by all the governance bureaus, it is enough for your bioportable nanocomputer to have been connected even once, for a few nanoseconds, with the global megamachine, for it to be infected and considered a sort of “benign carrier.” A second connection and then a third, et cetera, increase the risk of your machine being rapidly infected.

The disintegration has come to life in the very body of disintegration. Software evolves backward: at each new start-up or new use of a computer or any other machine connected to the NeuroNet meganetwork—and they all are connected, or almost all—programs, operating systems, routines, every bit of software present in that individual machine grow outdated by one or more generations at a single stroke. Very rapidly, millions, dozens, hundreds of millions of computers and nanoperipherals show and execute nothing but incomprehensible listings written in machine language, the binary base language common to all machines, their universal language, their own pre-Babel language.

Code, in its purest form. Ones and zeros. Nothing more than machine code.

Bioloaded systems do not escape the general deprogramming. Vital functions on artificial support break down one after the other, in great waves of medical-technological disaster. Brains contaminated by NeuroNet become pure chaos by the hundreds of thousands. Cybernetic organisms stop functioning; semiartificial life is frozen, as if entombed in a historical iceberg, in the icy embrace of the Afterworld.

At that moment—though any simultaneity between the
Aevum
and earthly time is a perception of the mind—at the instant when the Grand Junction cops finally break into the Hotel Laika’s dome, in the early morning of October 5, under the Deadlink interchange, it is midnight. The eternal midnight of the Third Time.

The vast cruciform shadow of the unfinished highway unfurls as if it has been nailed to the sky, where the stars have never been brighter.
This is what Plotkin wrote in the Created World,
thinks Lady van Harpel.
This is what the Man from the Camp was protecting, why he sacrificed himself.

There are two women here, and two men, and one angel.

And what caused the old lady to think what she just thought is the angel that is before her, before them; it is this creature of bodily light, this combustion of a body in the invisible, this spirit of dancing sunlight.

It is Vivian McNellis.

Her body is surrounded by a globe of light, light so pure, so white-hot that it could blind you, though it has the opposite effect of making you open your eyes even wider.

The halo of light is resplendent in the darkness, a quicksilver nova sparkling in the depths of the shadows, in the middle of nowhere, in the very heart of the devolution, and inside it, what was the body of Vivian McNellis has become a slender field of luminous vibrations that physics, concreteness, supermateriality leave in no doubt.

Above the globe of light, they can all discern a strange form rising, like a double plume of fire that seems simultaneously to ascend toward the sky and descend from it. It appears to be a ladder of pure radiation, a double helix that twists in space-time just above the glorified body of what was once, perhaps, a terrestrial creature.

Jacob’s ladder,
they think, almost at the same instant.

The divine Antenna, by which the body of Light will be transmitted back to its sender and its only true recipient.

Everything began a few hours earlier, when the android girl had a dream and came to wake up Lady van Harpel in her camp bed at the other end of the mobile home.

“Something is happening,” the android said.

“What do you mean?”

“I can already feel something changing in me. It is physical, not symbolic—”

“You want to talk about your baptism at two o’clock in the morning, Sydia?” asked Lady van Harpel, a bit coldly.

“I need to tell you what’s happening; it is very important!” the former orbital prostitute replied, edgily.

Sydia Nova was no longer feeling those moments of quantum correlation with the other android, the one she had become vaguely acquainted with during her stay at the Hotel Laika. Because they shared the same space-time, because they came from the same manufacturer and belonged to the same biotechnological generation, she and he were bizarrely connected.

“It’s a low-intensity connection,” she explained, “but around once a day we share a single piece of information with each other. For example, I will suddenly know that he took a night train in Thailand or a taxi in Mexico, or that he ate lamb curry in the south of India, or that he slept in a big hotel in Sydney. It’s always stochastic, very factual, very brief.”

“And?” Lady van Harpel asked.

“It hasn’t happened for more than a week. It’s over. The quantum correlation initiated by our meeting in the hotel has been annihilated. In both senses. I’m sure of it.”

“Well, that’s excellent news, Sydia. I think we can both go back to bed now.”

“No,” said the android girl. “This is only the beginning. For two days I’ve been having very violent dreams, where Plotkin and Vivian McNellis appear to me. This night it was different. It was stronger.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“She’s waiting for us,” said the android girl simply. “Under the interchange. And she put the same dream message in the heads of two men living in HMV, one of whom is Father Newman, who baptized me.”

“What are you talking about?” Lady van Harpel had gotten suddenly to her feet. Her old cellular telephone beeped. It was Father Newman. He was on the way from HMV.

With another man. A man who had just arrived in the area, and who had had the same dream.

They are reunited now, under the Deadlink interchange. In human time, it is the early morning of October 5, but that means nothing here. We are in the discontinuous time of angelogenesis, circumspect time, the time that synthetically disconnects all others.

The man who has just arrived, the stranger—Lady van Harpel has met him several times during the last few weeks, during visits to HMV. He is a friend of Father Newman’s; he is Eastern European, a Catholic, and a writer. When he introduced himself to her, he explained succinctly that he used many pseudonyms, some of which he cited without evoking any memories whatsoever in Lady van Harpel’s head. Later, when she told Sydia Nova about the meeting, the android’s face went pale, her eyes glazed with a translucent film. “Jeffrey Alhambra Carpenter? Strange. That was one of the identity boxes the Machine-Child used. He read books published under that pseudonym.”

Now they are there, all four of them, under the main keystone of the abandoned interchange, facing the angel Vivian McNellis has become. Lady van Harpel knows that the man, knowing nothing of the strange link between his existence and that of a being he never knew, is yet well aware that he is present at an extraordinary event, The Event. He too had the dream, the dream that was quite simply the retrotranstemporal copy of what is happening here, now, under the interchange that stretches its huge black piles toward the golden sand of the Milky Way.

Lady van Harpel realizes at that moment that it is precisely because she is clairvoyant, a true medium, that she did not receive Vivian McNellis’s dream message as the three others did. There must always be a blind spot in one’s vision, a bit of shadow in the light. Her gifts of precognition probably prevented the retrotranscription of the event in her own brain.

Her role is different. She must observe now, during the time she has left to live here. She must observe and ensure that everything happens smoothly.

What she must do, for once, is not really see. She must simply watch.

Watch and listen.

And, if possible, hear.

“I am the fourth human face of Metatron, the Celestial Scribe. I am what has come to close the last moments of humanity, and to usher in what will succeed it. In this I am an inverted version of the Fourth Knight, but if I have come, it is because he is there. The Technical World, in a few months, will have gone. No need of a terminating Flood to condemn this humanity; it is destroying itself without any outside help. Even its most powerful technological tools have become accelerators of the entropy the whole system is experiencing. The World cannot, for all that, return to any ‘initial’ or ‘previous’ state; it combines, in its breaking down, all the phases that preceded it. The overall ‘body’ of the Metastructure is disintegrating as it copies its metabolism onto the
bodybranes
of the Machine-Child. It is the most perfect trap that technology could have created for itself. As you see, the disappearance of the Metastructure potentially opens a space of freedom, unless man chooses the path of
false liberty,
the path of anal regression, the path of crime, genocide, and tyranny; and if it thus unknowingly invokes the coming of another terminating machine, a planetary social-control structure even more terrible than what the UHU has tried to be for the past twenty years.

“My body is consuming what remains of it in you. You will know everything about me; you will know my life, everything I have done, everything I tried to do, everything I wasn’t able to accomplish. And thus you will know Plotkin, the Man from the Camp, the man invented in an isolation cell. You will know his ‘life,’ his various reconstructions. You will know the moment when he became real and alive, the moment when he chose to have a soul, the moment when he chose sacrifice so he would be able to exist. And you will thus be capable of keeping his memory alive. One of you is a writer; you know, now, that your gifts have been given to you by the Great Narrator so that you can, one day, pass it all along through writing.