Grand Junction (5 page)

There are one or two seconds of silence, so long that ten thousand heartbeats wouldn’t fill them.

“What?” Yuri asks simply, after the ten thousand heartbeats have been dropped into the white noise of infinity.

“It’s getting worse. It got worse just today. The guy from District 17 is in the numeric phase. And the one from Junkville, up there on Midnight Oil, died this morning. My local contact told me. The necro trio from Big Bag Recyclo already picked up the body.”

Not a surprise
, thinks Yuri.
No confusion there. The next logical step. Foreseen, scheduled, planned
. “This is only the beginning, Chrysler. We still have a little time; we can try to—”

“Our time is running out, Yuri. Believe me.” The voice crackles across the ghostly radio like a solar flare, full of threatening intensity.

“What makes you say that?”

Two more seconds, ten thousand more heartbeats. This time, Chrysler breaks the silence: “I’ve had six more cases in Omega Blocks since yesterday. And my contact on Midnight Oil says there were two others in Junkville today. There must be more; you’d better check.”

Immediate action indeed
, Yuri says to himself.

The
thing
, the metavirus, isn’t wasting any time.

No more than it did six years earlier, when it destroyed what remained of the still-operational programmable machines on Earth, after the death of the Metastructure six years before
that
had annihilated more than three quarters of them.

They must collect data—store files—gather information—as fast as possible.

The survival of every “man” crammed into Omega Blocks and the artificial hills of Junkville is a variant on that of the electronic systems; it matters little to him, in and of itself. His sole interest lies in the possibilities for experimentation it provides, permitting them to continue their systematic analysis of the phenomenon. His sole interest lies in the fact that it can allow him to know more about the “thing,” and help him gain the necessary time for the young man from HMV to find a demonstration. His sole interest lies in what it lets them imagine, him and Chrysler Campbell—the opportunity to expand their business.

Yuri, like Chrysler Campbell, was immunized at the time of his first meeting with Gabriel Link de Nova.

That was how they came into contact with him. Chrysler knew one of Sheriff Langlois’ assistants, a Frenchman, and he had managed to pinpoint the precise epicenter of the rumor. At the time, Chrysler had been suffering from the degeneration of his main antiviral neuro-implant, and he was in a great deal of danger. As for Yuri, he had been facing a multitude of problems related to the breakdown of the software in the nanocomponents that regulated his motor functions. The two men had known each other since childhood, when they lived in the thirteenth district of Omega Blocks; their parents had known one another well, trafficking in technology of all types even before the Metastructure disappeared.

Gabriel Link de Nova had healed them, and as with everything that benefited from the young man’s therapeutic acts, it was for good. Not only were their infected artificial organs immune to what they called the “virus” from that point onward, the virus was rendered harmless to all their other natural and manmade parts—the difference had long ceased to matter for the inhabitants of UniWorld—as well. No biointegrated implant, no group of amplified cells, no transgenic center, no proteinic program, no bodily nanocomputer could ever be affected. Ever.

They were
immunized
.

It was a virtually priceless acquisition, and the two men realized right away that they had gained a huge advantage from the situation. Not only could they sell the healing of a particular bionic system but, even better, they could sell life itself; they could sell insurance to the men of Grand Junction, insurance as good as gold, real insurance that the metavirus could never attack them again, or any of their implants, or any of the parts they might wish in future to transplant.

Chrysler had managed to arrange a meeting with Sheriff Langlois, and made him understand that it was better to manage the chaos than to implement a sort of ostrich policy. The rumor was all over the Territory; they could of course continue trying to quash it, but that would only make things worse. The best thing to do was to gather a small group of trustworthy men, specialists in medicine and operative bionics who would be capable of making selections from among the requests flowing in from everywhere.

Yuri still believes it was on that day that HMV’s sheriff had had the idea of spreading his own rumors as a smoke screen.

It was on that day, in any case, that Langlois had said, between clenched teeth: “And I imagine that the ‘trustworthy men’ you have in mind to carry out this mission are yourselves?”

Yuri can still remember Campbell’s face, his smile, at that moment. An irresistible smile.

“I have a degree from MIT in nanorobotics, one of the last ones awarded, and this young man here has a certain talent for neurobiology. We have been immunized by Gabriel Link de Nova himself. By the time you find someone better, if such a person exists, it will probably be too late, Sheriff.”

And Yuri had known Chrysler Campbell was right. It was obvious that the sheriff knew it, too.

“You’ve got my okay,” was all he had said.

And now, welcome to Junkville.

En route to the hill of Midnight Oil. A township specializing in the recycling of oil of all kinds, particularly engine drainage.

Welcome to Junkville.

Around seventy square kilometers of artificial hills made of clinkers or putrefied hodgepodges of garbage. The luckiest people live here, atop
piles of trash, where there is still a chance to get hold of some object, something mechanical still in working order.

The city sprang up at the same time as the cosmodrome and the adjacent city of Grand Junction were built, about forty-five kilometers to the north of the metropolis. It rose on the outskirts of an abandoned mining site that was already being used as an industrial dump, and for decades it received all the human waste of the city cosmodrome, all the losers, the errant souls, anyone who had not managed to obtain his or her passage to the stars, the so-desired ticket to the Orbital Ring.

When the cosmodrome ceased its activities for good, though the metavirus was exterminating almost half a billion human beings each year, groups of refugees from the United States and Canada trekked for months across the territory, long lines of half-dead people wandering without destination or hope.

The survivors had ended by remaining where they were, eking out encampments on whatever somewhat-hospitable patches of ground they could find.

Many Canadian refugees had come to live in Deadlink this way, halfway between Junkville and the cosmodrome. Convoys from the American Midwest had taken possession of part of Omega Blocks and its environs, and had enlarged the perimeter of Junkville with their own colonies of particleboard houses. A new economic demographic was born, the fruit of incessant migration, that rendered any notion of borders, even continental ones, literally absurd. The provenance of those that died or left became an unsolvable puzzle; the identities and destinies of those that arrived in Mohawk Territory to replace them more or less temporarily were equally shrouded in mystery.

Junkville was truly created in the image of this world where nothing now had its own space, where no one had any true roots or the possibility of exploring and discovering new territories.

The Earth was strangely sealed off, closed at both ends, marked by the universal presence of man, and yet at the same time oddly open, as if it had been disemboweled, spread open like a whore’s legs, and utterly lacking in any shelter for the dying masses of humanity.

It made no sense—not that anything ever really had.

It makes no sense, and yet it is all the world has left.

*   *   *

The main problem that Yuri is rapidly sensing concerns the systemic differences between the two mutations.

When the Metastructure contaminated itself so bizarrely in 2057, via some still-unknown process, it destroyed almost 90 percent of computer networks and more than half of bionic systems. The vast majority of machines and their electronic interfaces were directly connected to the MegaNetwork. Bionic systems, with the exception of NeuroNet modules, were usually autonomous, but certain components connected on occasion to the Metamachine. In short, after the annihilation of the Metastructure, the quasi-totality of machines and a good half of bionic systems began to self-destruct, causing the deaths of more than a third of what was then called Human UniWorld, the planetary park the Metastructure had controlled for decades.

But it appears that all that destruction and death wasn’t enough. A few groups of unconnected neurocomputers had survived; some biosystems had remained intact, as well as pirate devices and numerous lots of new machines, newly rolled off the robotized factory conveyer belts just before these broke down.

For a few years, it seemed that humanity had earned a bit of a reprieve. At the cosmodrome, activities had timidly resumed, a few rockets taking off each year from launchpad number one.

Then, though the Metastructure was dead, and though the NeuroNet MegaNetwork had collapsed six years before, a “thing” had begun attacking the last surviving machines, the ones whose bionic systems had escaped the first wave of destruction.

Now six more years had elapsed—and the postmechanical entity was striking again.

But something has changed.

Something important.

This “second mutation” isn’t attacking machines or organisms, but language. It is attacking the very substance of being.

There is still work to do. A lot of work.

For the “thing.”

And for them.

Midnight Oil is south of Junkville, a scrap-metal butte populated by a ghetto of around two thousand people. It is one of the last hills fronting
the encampments of particleboard houses improvised by the refugees from the American Midwest, still farther south.

Yuri will have to cross the entire city, as usual, to find Pluto Saint-Clair, Chrysler Campbell’s local contact and one of the best sources of information they have.

He stands before the scavenged mirror hanging across from his bed, beside the small hatchway leading to his bathroom cubicle. The room’s exit door is at his back; he can see its metallic armature and dull-gray surface just behind his reflection.

Yuri does not live in a particleboard house or one cobbled together from various scraps, like nine-tenths of the population of Junkville, but in what is known as a Combi-Cube, a mobile cabin with a photovoltaic sensor on the roof. It consists of one room containing a hospital bed, a small workspace with a few tools, his video reader, a television screen connected to the reader, and a crate filled with memory cards, disks in various formats, and a half dozen boxes filled with at least a hundred kilograms of scientific literature. To this room is attached a multifunction bathroom cubicle and a service module, all meant for a single tenant. Thanks to business, to Chrysler and his connections, and also to his daily work—an unrelenting process of gorging himself on tons of books and videodiscs about medicine, biology, and neurosurgery—he has grown up faster than any member of his generation. He has grown up even faster than Gabriel Link de Nova, about whom one wonders if he will ever grow up, if he will ever be more than a child.

He is barely twenty-two years old, but he already possesses the experience of a man twice his age. Chrysler Campbell, who isn’t the type to be careful of anyone’s feelings, nor to be overly polite to anyone, even complimented him one evening as they were returning from HMV, where they had concluded an important deal with Gabriel.

“You know, I’m almost ten years older than you—but I almost feel like it’s the other way around. You think incredibly fast. Your analytical faculties are amazing, and it’s as if you possess by intuition what takes most people years of experience in the field. You act like a predator instinctively. I saw it even when you were a kid in Omega 13.”

Chrysler had let a few seconds pass, then sighed: “I hope you’ll never have to kill anyone. They wouldn’t have a chance.”

He remembers what he said to Chrysler Campbell that night, as he drove them in the Ford F-350 pickup toward the southern part of
the Territory. “If that does happen, I’m counting on not giving them a chance.”

Chrysler had smiled, shaking his head. He had turned to look out the truck window at Monolith Hills in the distance. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

The moon is at its zenith, round and slightly reddish. It slants rays of starry silver across the vast desert plains, the bare rocks, the scrubby brush barely surviving around the few isolated shrubs and the dead trees fossilizing in the sand.

It is almost unbelievably beautiful, Yuri thinks to himself. The world is still beautiful. It’s dying, but it is still beautiful. The desert is taking over. Men are disappearing. Civilization is being snuffed out. But it is still beautiful.

It is all utterly incomprehensible.

In Junkville, the streets are ramps of packed dirt or gravel covered with pounded scrap metal and errant drifts of sand caught in contrary winds from the Canadian heat shield or what remains of the Great Lakes, now giant Midwestern deserts.

The roads wind among the artificial hills covered with collapsible houses, makeshift shelters of various types, and sometimes the characteristic silhouettes of mobile homes—a true bit of luxury—or the more common, capsule-shaped Combi-Cubes.

Like any city, any
urba
, Junkville has formed according to the force and hierarchy of the powers that be.

To the north, on the border with Omega Blocks, or to the east, toward Vermont, is where the people who have managed to rise slightly above the general squalor live. For example there is Little Congo, five hills grouped together where Junkville’s aristocracy dwells, those cosmopolitan procurers who sell, to the even richer denizens of the old Monolith Hills strip, all the new flesh that ends up here in search of refuge.