Grand Junction (17 page)

He and Campbell had exchanged a brief glance during that moment, as Pluto faded into silence, a glance of shared new awareness of this unknowable truth they had yet guessed. Then Chrysler resumed his interrogation as if nothing had happened.

“Other than the fact that your friend lives in the Territory, why Grand Junction, Professor?”

Yuri had instantly understood that Chrysler had detected the existence of a secret, as he often did. He was like a human computer, with digitally precise intuition; he fit right into the Territory’s singularly Darwinist system.

“The Metastructure has had … particular relations with the Territory of Grand Junction for a long time,” Zarkovsky had replied.

Yuri had immediately seized on two salient facts.

One: neither he nor Campbell had expressed the slightest emotion after Professor Zarkovsky’s astonishing assertion, as professional discipline demanded.

Two: Pluto Saint-Clair had blinked. He had even given a reflexive shudder, as he often did when hit with a sudden surge of adrenaline.

“Explain,” Chrysler said simply.

“First, remember the historical conditions under which the Metastructure came into being: it was anxious to stop the Second War of American Secession, like all the other conflicts born of the Grand Jihad.”

“So?”

“So, the Mohawk Territory of Grand Junction was spared by this conflict, just as it avoided the civil problems in Canada. Because of its aerospace business, the Territory was financially independent, but it profited greatly from UHU subsidies it received for the services it provided.”

“Frankly, Professor, this isn’t any big news to us. We were born in Grand Junction.”

“I’m just trying to give you some context. I was getting to the important part. Details that I only learned about later—too late, maybe. Here they are: in return for its loyalty, the Territory became one of the Metastructure’s ‘favorites,’ along with other places of the same type around the globe. So during the April ’56 update, Grand Junction, like the other favorites, was placed in the first line, the first wave, if you will, with each
wave following another and getting larger and larger, after triple verifications. It was only when this guy from Corpus Christi said the words
Grand Junction
that it came to me, and that I understood I had to get there as soon as possible.”

Yuri saw that Pluto Saint-Clair’s face had gone dead white, and he was shuffling his feet nervously.

That’s called fear
, Yuri had thought.

“What happened just before the Fall? How did the Metastructure’s last moments play out?”

“Starting in ’57, the problems sort of leveled out. Nothing we tried worked. The photonic emissions continued to increase, and the Metastructure talked constantly about this danger that was hanging over its head—and our heads. One day, I remember, it said to us: ‘I think the problem of these uncontrolled photonic emissions shows that it is by light that I will be destroyed.’

“So we programmed millions of antiviral routines capable of protecting the Metastructure from any photoelectric, laser, maser, ultraviolet, gamma-ray, or neutron emission attack. Around September ’57, one month before the Fall, the Metastructure warned us that the Final Cycle had just begun. Forces coalesced, the forces of the ‘Uncreated Light’—those were the very words it used—arrived on Earth to destroy it. The photonic emissions, which were sporadic, had now become virtually continuous. Then, on October 4 …”

“How did the Fall manifest itself for you in the laboratory?”

“It might surprise you, but we were plunged into a darkness blacker than most other humans experienced. Since the machine had no real material existence to speak of, well, the laboratory wasn’t really based anywhere. It brought together groups of researchers in all disciplines and from all the governance bureaus working in a network at the very heart of the Metastructure. When its death happened on that same day, we were the first ones affected. All our machines broke down instantly. Some of our researchers died during the first few hours. We have never been able to understand what happened. Only one of us, one of my assistants, using a metaprogram of his own design, was able to wrench a few pieces of information out of the nothingness.”

“What information?”

“Some ‘hot points,’ if you will. Localized points where the photonic emissions completely overwhelmed the Metastructure in the first instants, or nearly. We were able to register the phenomenon for an hour or two; then the last systems gave out.”

“What hot points?”

“Many of them. Dozens. All over the world. They didn’t stop multiplying. It was like a global epizootic. There were some in North America, obviously.”

“Here in the Northeast?”

“The American Northeast, actually. New York and your Territory, but also Canada. And in Chile, Argentina, East Africa, central Asia, southern Russia, eastern Asia, China, New Zealand … I could go on and on.”

“Did it correspond to your successive waves during the update?”

“No. Not at all. It seemed completely random to us at the time, though we hadn’t been able to record the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the phenomenon, the time it took for my young assistant’s metaprogram to initialize.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Yuri had perceived a tiny movement from Pluto Saint-Clair. A tensing. The repression of a shudder. A minute shock. Almost nothing.

A small nothing that the Professor had said without realizing its importance. A small nothing that Pluto was hiding from all of them. Just as they were keeping an essential fact from him. Just as the Professor had undoubtedly not told them everything he knew.

Four men. Four secrets. A shelter on the brink of an abyss. A storm serving as the advance guard for the desert. Four men still disunited against a terribly monolithic World.

“It was around the end of ’56 that I began to look at the problem from another angle. Until then, since June, we’d been looking for what didn’t work in our update, and we hadn’t found anything. I told myself that maybe we should look in what
had
worked. Maybe the cause of the phenomenon would be there, in something that had worked
too well
, with consequences we didn’t expect. So I searched for weeks and weeks—three months, at least—reprofiling and refiguring all my data. One day it became as plain as the nose on my face. I had had the solution in front of
my eyes since the beginning, because I was the one that had supervised that entire part of the operation.”

“Your World program, was that it?”

“Yes. But understand this: the Metamachine wasn’t conscious in the common sense of the word, and yet it was more than just a computer program. It was alive, in its own way. Like all living organisms, it needed a real world in order to evolve, even just to survive. That is what I created for it. Or, more exactly, my ‘Language-World’ metaprogram acted so as to make it understand the fact that it is language that creates worlds—that creates them and destroys them at the same time. It was at that moment—around April ’57—one year after the general swing toward the new operating system, that I began to think I might have made a mistake. I didn’t know what the mistake was exactly, but I sensed something. I tried to do very specific research, but a lot of databases had been shut down for years or even decades. That’s when I noticed that the majority of scientific innovation had ceased shortly after the Metastructure came into being, in the 2030s. It wasn’t really a secret anymore for anyone in our field, but we chalked it up as another of the many problems the Machine-World had to handle simultaneously—getting huge climatic changes and depopulation issues under control; the general reorganization of global society, health safety, pacification or freezing of most of the major conflicts in North America, central Asia, and the Indian Ocean; restarting world economic activity, et cetera. For us, the implementation of the update at the end of the 2040s—when the first version had fully proven its capabilities despite a few pockets of resistance in some geopolitical areas, particularly in southern Europe—the update, I realized, proved that the Machine-World was functioning perfectly, and that after it was restored to working order it would be able to complete the unification of the globe and to relaunch a vast program of multidisciplinary scientific research of worldwide importance. On that day, I remember, I began to ask myself questions. I tried, unsuccessfully, to establish pertinent axes of research—especially in genetics, when, a little later, during the summer, I inquired about the problem directly to the Metastructure. Why did you, I asked, slow down—even stop—so much promising research in strategic areas like quantum physics, speculative genetics, neuropsychiatry, non-Aristotelian mathematics, anthropology, and cosmogony? Do you know what it said to me in return? ‘I alone will now be the judge of what research axes are pertinent for the survival of Humanity, meaning myself.’ Why, I asked, have
you shut down all these databases from the early part of the century concerning the emission of biophotons by DNA? Its answer was, ‘You’ve figured that out, have you? I’ll tell you; I will never make this data available except to someone whose tenacity, loyalty, and scientific objectivity have led them precisely to it.’ Then I asked it, do you think I will be able to do that? ‘You are already doing it,’ it answered. And it gave me access to all that data.”

“And then?”

“It was too late. By the time I had even a vague idea of what we were confronted with, the Cataclysm of October fourth had arrived.”

A question was burning on Yuri’s lips like pure alcohol. He hoped Chrysler would not lose sight of the tiny bit of essential information contained in Professor Zarkovsky’s tale. And, as always, Chrysler proved that he would never miss such a critical detail.

“You mentioned a ‘Language-World’ update, is that right? You taught the Metastructure that it is language that creates and destroys worlds. Do I understand that correctly?”

“Exactly, Mr. Campbell. I still don’t know why, but there was a close link between those emissions of light and a multitude of phenomena that appeared at that time. The moment when my colleagues and I began to speak of
devolution
. Evolution in reverse. But not in the sense of reversed linear chronology. This is a much more complex phenomenon that we might compare to a ‘folding over’; the evolutionary dynamic turns back on itself, passes back by itself again and again, crosses itself, takes itself apart, mingles with its own past, becomes a sort of matter in constant hybridization.”

“Could language become matter?”

“I don’t know yet. One of the strangest things the Metastructure told us before its death was the feeling it had of ‘going backward.’ It said, ‘I think the alarm signals I told you about a year ago came from the future, from my future. From the day of my own disappearance, marking a stopping point, and I think they came back through time to warn me, or perhaps to condemn me. I don’t know what it means, but I know the laboratory’s ‘Language-World’ update made this transmutation possible. And do not ask what my disappearance will be like, because machine, world, and metaconscience, I am meant to be virtually immortal.’”

“Well, we must admit that, in a sense, it is,” Chrysler had said. “Even, and especially, in death.”

The storm lasts until late in the night, linking the night-desert with the desert-night taking possession of the world. The sand and wind whirl and shriek without stopping for hours. Shortly after dusk, Campbell hears it begin to calm a bit; at regular intervals he reads aloud the number displayed on his anemometer’s counter. It is past midnight when silence finally descends on the Territory.

Utter, deathlike silence. No longer even the slightest whisper of the wind or the tiniest noise of plant or animal. It is a silence like the one that preceded the Great Noise of Creation, Yuri says to himself. And a silence like the one that will follow it.

The four men haven’t changed places for the entire day. The Professor fell asleep in his armchair for a few hours when the storm was at its strongest, waking the moment it ended.

Chrysler prepares a simple meal of nutritional rations and canned food scrounged in Neo Pepsico, Junkville’s supermarket. They eat in silence amid the deafening silence that has replaced the din of climatic chaos, until Chrysler Campbell decides to resume the conversation they began that very morning.

There is still information to be collected, Yuri tells himself, but the Professor is also here to receive his share of the data. The exchange will happen soon. It will be in the ninth inning, when at some random moment Chrysler will have to drop a few crumbs. The important thing, Yuri knows, is to learn as much as possible before giving out the information that Zarkovsky is looking for. They have to exploit both his trust and their own power, however temporary. The Professor’s entire memory must be drawn out. His entire confession. His entire crime.

In exchange for which they will open the doors of Heavy Metal Valley to him.

The Professor doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell against Campbell, and Pluto Saint-Clair won’t be able to provide much recourse for him at all.

And the Professor is visibly aware of all this. He allows a bitter smile to curl his lips as Chrysler nonchalantly picks up the thread of his interrogation as if only a few seconds have passed since he asked the last question.

“You were talking about Christian Scholasticism this morning. You told us it contributed greatly to the design of your update. I need to know more.”

Yuri is flabbergasted. As always, Chrysler’s surprise attacks come when they are least expected.

“What do you know about the major Christian heresies of the early centuries? What do you really know about what you call Scholasticism? Do the names of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Bonaventure, Saint Irene, Saint Bernard, Duns Scotus, Jean Cassien, or Nicolas de Cues mean anything to any of you?”

Zarkovsky has a point, Yuri thinks. A serious point. Chrysler is venturing into unexplored terrain. And neither he nor Pluto will be able to help Campbell here. He ventured into unknown territory—first mistake—and alone—second mistake. But this time, Chrysler proves that on occasion, to conquer, you can’t worry about your adversary’s maneuvers. You have to persist, to hang on, to cede nothing. Go in headfirst. Destroy everything in your way.