Grand Junction (2 page)

Yes
, thinks the young man with the Hand that Heals Machines.
Something is definitely happening in Junkville. Something is continuing the work that has been going on for years already. Something is determined to make every trace of humanity disappear from this world
.

“We don’t have any statistical data, of course, but according to my sources it’s been talked about since last month. The year is ending in less than three weeks. If you ask me, it must have started in October.”

“October. Of course.”

Yuri McCoy is impassive. His smile remains fixed, intangible, on his face, splitting his flesh like the mouth opening of a battle mask.

“The anniversary of the destruction of the Metastructure twelve years ago,” continues the young man with the guitar. “Have you seen any specific examples with your own eyes?”

“Yes, two just last week. That’s what made me come looking for you.”

“But you seem to be saying I can’t do anything about it this time.”

“Right. At first glance, at least. I told you, the
thing
isn’t hunting machines or biocontained systems anymore.”

No
, thinks the man living in the hangar. The thing is no longer interested only in the artificial devices that helped humanity to survive for so long even as they subjugated it to their own existence. In an impromptu and, for now, completely incomprehensible manner, it has managed—like a virus—to jump from one species to another.

Now it is attacking men directly. And even better, it is attacking what it defines as men.

“You know,” remarks Yuri, “it seems a little like the first mutation. Do you remember it, or were you still too young?”

“The first mutation? When even machines that had never been connected to the Metastructure were affected, though it had been dead since ’57?”

“Yes. That was when some of us began to ask ourselves serious questions that have still never been answered. Remember what everyone living in Heavy Metal Valley says?”

“Tell me.”

“That you’re the answer, or that you carry it inside you. The proof is tangible. How else have you been able to repair machines and biosystems since you were seven years old?”

Yuri McCoy’s gaze sweeps around the objects stacked in the hangar—all the machines kept here in this storehouse; music, the giving of new life to sonorous electricity, vanished with everything else, is only the tip of the iceberg.

“It was only the year before I turned seven that the mutation, as you call it, took place. I remember it perfectly. Until then, only computers, machines, and biosystems that had been linked to the MegaNetwork were affected.”

“Yes, and all of a sudden on a lovely October morning the first entirely new machines, even the ones born well after the death of the Metastructure, and the ones that had never been connected to it, began to be affected in their turn. Same for biocontained systems. Only the ones you’ve healed are still resistant to the ‘virus.’ Apparently they’re still safe from all that up in the Ring, too.”

“I know. But you haven’t answered my question. So a second mutation is supposedly coming? Tell me about the two cases you saw.”

“I really believe the Nothingness is using the Metastructure as a tool to destroy not only mankind but any possible successor to it.”

“We’re in perfect agreement on that point, and you know it. The two cases, please?”

“They’re almost identical, just a little different in terms of the contamination process. They are losing the use of language.”

“I know. You just told me that. They’re becoming aphasic, is that it?”

Yuri’s smile remains suspended in the pale gravity of his face like the harbinger of an imminent, quiet cataclysm. His eyes seek out those of the young man with the guitar.

“It’s worse than that. Much worse.”

*   *   *

Yuri McCoy is right. It is much worse than amnesia, the loss of all memory. It is the chaotic falsification of memory. Dementia.

And it is much worse than aphasia. The
thing
, at first, drove the Control Metastructure to its own destruction. No one knew how it happened, really, but October 4, 2057, remained throughout what was left of human history as the fatal date, the day when the immense biocybernetic network that controlled the development of what was then called Human UniWorld had been contaminated by itself.

Immediately afterward, all the machines linked to the global mega-system had been stricken by the regressive process that made them run backward. In a few months, most of the electronic devices on the surface of the planet were reduced to silence, or more precisely, consigned to pure machine language, simple groupings of ones and zeros, deprived of all other means of communicating with one another or their human users; all interfaces annihilated, all programming language rendered unintelligible, all memory erased, all operational mechanisms blocked forever or put into continuous loops with themselves.

Then, one beautiful day, when the mechanical healing powers with which he was blessed were fully revealed to him, the young man from the hangar had heard his parents gravely discussing a “new phase” in the “process.” A few weeks later, they had told him that now any machine, even those manufactured from uncontaminated components, was condemned to a more or less brief working life.

Electricity, his mother had said to him. Most Holy Electricity. Even that was now threatened by this machine disease. “Every computerized machine is built using binary laws of Boolean mathematics,” his father had put in. “The disappearance of the Metastructure was a mechanical thing—but paradoxically, it continues to exist in a negative but active mode. Some of us think the Control Metastructure chose its own death as a metamorphic tool. By breaking down, it also broke down humanity and thus achieved its goal. Now it is changing to another configuration, another form, and we are seeing only the embryonic version of it.”

It was then that he had told his parents he might be in a position to do something about this problem.

“During the first stage,” says Yuri, “diseases present symptoms of known psychiatric pathologies. Sporadic memory loss, possible problems with orientation … then the signs of linguistic malfunction appear. The first
case I saw was at Omega Blocks. District 17, a refugee from Quebec. He was already in an advanced stage of the disease. He still had a perfect vocabulary and knew all the grammatical rules of French, but his sentences no longer made any sense at all; the syntactic structure was completely garbled—verbs, subjects, pronouns, object complements, adjectives—no logical order at all anymore. Everything was mixed up. Like Texto-Gensys software with completely random parameters. I saw him again a few days later, and he was even worse. He could only produce sequences of vowels and consonants, and those pretty much continuously.”

“I see,” the young man with the guitar says, simply.

It is much worse than silence, which would certainly not suit the process trying now to destroy the last machine—Man.

It is more demonic than the absence of language. It is the terminal mechanization of language. And Yuri has just given him a perfect illustration of it.

“The second case lives in Junkville. Well, maybe ‘lives’ isn’t the right word. It looks like the terminal stage of contamination. I can’t confirm that, of course, but it looks like it. The man won’t live much longer.”

“What is it?”

“The after-phase. The stage after language. What is secretly sending it out into the universe.
Numbers.”

“Numbers?”

“Yes. Try to remember. The Control Metastructure was in control for around thirty years. It froze the Grand Jihad and the various interethnic conflicts in Europe, the American civil wars, the war in central Asia, et cetera. To maintain and expand its regime, it created the UHU—Human UniWorld—the successor to the United Nations. It pacified the world, and managed to co-mechanize mankind completely. What the
thing
, the Post-Machine, if you will, is doing is flattening everything into the same level of equipotence, reducing everything to a common denominator, but without needing any ‘interface’ or any positive pseudoreality. It is a sort of ‘negative Metastructure’; it doesn’t kill language, it causes it to survive at its zero point. It mechanizes it to incorporate it into man, so that he will regress completely along with the general devolution, like all the machines. And for this mission to succeed, it is converting everything into numeric language. Do you follow me?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Becoming co-mechanized and then de-mechanizing without having
developed as a human being will kill a man,
but he will die like a machine
. It’s the ultimate trap of technology.”

“I understand all that, Yuri. Tell me why you came to see me.”

“The man I saw in Junkville could only talk in sequences of binary numbers, at crazily high speed and without stopping, day and night. He didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, and was barely able to drink a few rations of water each day. And when I saw him again two days ago … God, when I saw him again! He wasn’t a man anymore.”

“What was he, then?”

“A modem. He was reeling off numeric binary code at the speed of a turn-of-the-century modem. My God, he would open his mouth and this noise came out, you know, like digital white noise, the sound of 128 kilo-octets of information per second, coming directly from his larynx. Tomorrow, maybe the day after tomorrow, he’ll be dead.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I took all kinds of samples and did some in vivo tests. When people go into this numeric phase, all the cells in their nervous systems become empty. The cellular information is ejected vocally just before the destruction of the nerve cell.”

The gray-eyed gaze of the young man with the guitar wanders over the machines arranged and stacked in the hangar.

They are the result of years of research, of bartering, of work, of contribution.

He has traded the use of his Healing Hand—on a defective pacemaker, a contaminated neurocomputer, a malfunctioning robotic lung, an antiviral-protein nanogenerator, a vision amplifier, an artificial sex organ, a tomographic scanner, a MemoCard implant, a simple shortwave radio—for a few specialized Rickenbacker transistors or the instruction manual of a last-century digital synthesizer.

But even as he began to offer his gifts to what remained of humanity down here in the Territory of Grand Junction, men were dropping like flies all over the planet.

At the time, there were still a few working television sets in Heavy Metal Valley; he had seen images dating from the first year after the End of the Machine: men and women, brought down in a single stroke in the streets of the last surviving metropolises, like during the siege of Leningrad.

SMACK! A vaguely humanoid sack of rags topples abruptly to the
ground. A body falls onto the sidewalk—in the middle of the street—against the wall of a bank or a metro station—against a basement window—onto the hood of a car—against the steering wheel of a bus or a train—at a restaurant table—at a store’s checkout counter—in the midst of a crowd that automatically steps over and around it, collectively intelligent but knowing that nothing can be done for the man or woman who has just fallen.

In Grand Junction alone, it was estimated that 40 percent of individuals with biocontained systems were contaminated and as a result would either die or be severely and permanently handicapped. The
body tuner
city of Neon Park was practically erased from the map, more deftly than if the neighboring nuclear plant had exploded.

Very quickly, the city cosmodrome had been emptied of half its population, either by mass death or “voluntary” emigration. The strongly protected launch facilities had remained in operation a few months at most before they broke down in their turn.

As the years passed, this postmechanical biocide had grown. Calmly. Like a production schedule, with its quotas, balance sheets, accounting, methodology. The religious wars and various politico-ethnic conflicts that had erupted, without any police or humanitarian order capable of controlling them, into a bloody profusion of abominations of every type, sputtered out one after the other like the last bonfires of the end of the world, for lack of combatants, operating materials, weapons, ammunition, fuel, and, in the end, desire.

The Mohawk municipal authorities had managed to scavenge some new devices—never connected to the Metastructure—and had then tried to relaunch the space activities on which the Territory’s entire economy depended.

There was a slight shiver of hope during the year marking the centennial of Yuri Gagarin’s flight, but two years later, under the absolutely unforeseen impact of the first postmortem mutation,
all
electronic machines had broken down irreparably. This time, the cosmodrome had closed its doors for good.

Six years old at the time, he had watched on the last few remaining television screens in operation as entire cities were wiped from the map, enormous migrant populations following them into the abyss like errant colonies of lemmings annihilating themselves in silence. Every day, everywhere, millions of human beings died, felled by the abrupt malfunction of
a nanocomponent or a vital implant. Everywhere. All the time. Without even the smallest pause.

Grand Junction was petrified forever in the silica and the hot southern wind, like a riparian forest made of metallic alloy and carbon-carbon.

A dozen rockets stood ready for launch in the hangars, without a chance of ever leaving the soil of Earth.

The cosmodrome and the city around it slowly crumbled into the dunes pushing coastward from the Midwest and central Canada.

Yuri McCoy has departed into the night on his antique, gasoline-powered Kawasaki.

The young man with the guitar watches as he vanishes toward the south, then stands another long moment in the warehouse doorway, eyes raised toward the Milky Way.

Something terrible is going to happen.

Again, here, in Grand Junction.

A
thing
, both invisible and hypervisible; paradoxically a non-being and a superexistent one, located everywhere and nowhere. The Post-Machine, as Yuri called it, is trying to take what remains of humanity along with it in its implacable postmortem metamorphosis.