Grand Junction (63 page)

LINK DE NOVA	YURI AND CAMPBELL
There is a black body. A black body of matter. This black body is the projected shadow of the Uncreated Light, he realizes, the Infinite Light that contains all infinities, all realities, all possibilities. Something is happening here, something connected to this light, to this black body; that much is obvious. Some force has been able to reverse the process inside the Metamachine, from this aqualung, and from this small, standard interface. Something, or someone, has successfully looped the Metastructure’s thanatic program in on itself, obliging it to incorporate the principle that will bring about its destruction. Something, someone, has been in the aqualung before him; worse, it seems to have been two different people—one of them not yet alive, the other already dead, and this before the Fall, and so before his own birth, and yet it seems that both of them were him.	Still this apparent immobility. The hand pressed against the wall interface, the unmoving aqualung. The black light all around them, through which they see the spectral apparitions that distinguish them from the shadows. Still this physical inertia. Is it happening inside his brain? Has his cortex established an invisible neuroconnection, or some other type of phenomenon entirely? Yuri realizes that Campbell, this phantom of astral light, is very likely asking himself the same questions. Their semitelepathy of almost-brothers. A twinning beyond anything genetic. On the lookout for the slightest abnormal phenomenon from the exoform, attentive to sudden variations in light intensity or transmutations of matter; like Yuri, his brain is ceaselessly imagining what is happening on the inside—that is, inside the machine called Link de Nova.
Like a mutual Most Holy Absorption—that is what is happening in him, he guesses—that is, he knows. His hand is no longer this anodized glove pressed against the wall interface. His hand is inside something, the something that is inside him. Osmosis? A strange disjunctive synthesis, really: he remains what he is, but at the same time he is this entity he is becoming, and the entity is becoming what it is while yet remaining unchanged in its nature. There is a sort of exchange happening, and yet this communication leaves each source unmingled with the other, and just as paradoxically they are only one; they remain a single, indivisible entity. It takes him only an instant to understand that he is experiencing a simulation of the principle of Incarnation. A terribly authentic simulation. A simulation that can only be—his whole consciousness is ablaze with it—a specific manifestation of reality. It takes him only an instant to understand that since the beginning, since the initial point of singularity of the experiment, an absolutely unforeseen phenomenon has been taking place.	It is very indistinct. The binoculars show emissions of very low-intensity energy from the aqualung. An optical illusion? Yuri’s gaze meets Campbell’s: obviously not. Energy emissions. Low intensity. A prelude. A process is beginning. Is the system being restored to working order? Is Link de Nova’s plan going to work? Is there a chance to counteract the postmechanical devolution by waking the ancient model of the Metastructure? Is there even really a possibility of reawakening what systematically self-destructed, as only this Machine-World could do? But the energy emissions do not seem to be gaining in power. He looks at Campbell. The phenomenon has not escaped his attention. And now, what is happening, exactly? One might say that the exoform is transforming, that the interface is transforming, that the hand and the wall are one, that the shadows and the light are one, that matter and infinity are one. That the aqualung and the infraworld of the dead network are one.

LINK DE NOVA	YURI AND CAMPBELL
There is an infinite tension between himself and the other, all the others, any other, all the “himselves,” all the unknowns he contains; the world is for him a machine-organ barely distinct from his body-mind, and other senses than the ones usually responsible for perception have immediately and simultaneously mobilized. He sees in the tunnel of black light like he is seeing the inside of his own body, on another plane of reality he sees himself in the black box of the Hotel Laika; he can distinguish the organisms of his two friends; he can detect all the presences that lived here at one time or another, like a sort of metastable identity, at once unitary and multiple. He can see the phantoms of the past; he can see numbers; he can see Yuri and Campbell as holographic specters. And he can see the names. All the names.	What can be happening in this body that is turning into light, this body itself enclosed by another body, a biological body/machine-body, input/output , bootstrap process? Light, thinks Yuri, light, the visible face of Electricity—it is light that is being configured in the form of a third term, synthetic, permitting two corporalities to be only one. One? One with the local network interface, and thus one with the whole fossilized MegaNetwork, one with what is hidden beneath the desert of the world, one with all beings, all places, all forms of energy. Yuri realizes that light, thus composed, makes Link de Nova the true observer of the experimental transformations at work. He is the one seeing. They are the ones seen. He is the experience, but they are the phenomena.
But the question remains: If an entity is incarnating in him, individuating totally in him, is it this fossilized Metastructure, as if frozen forever in a photograph of itself taken at the moment of its death? And if it is the Metastructure as a thanatological principle of the highest order, why is he not dead? Why does he sense, instead, that a completely different phenomenon is at work? Has his hand not become a luminous torch, like the extremity of the exoform’s neurospinal cord? Is this light not being incorporated into the tunnel of black light? Is not the black body, the “dark energy” of the universe, via this secret World, this vanished Metaworld, being incorporated into him? He is, himself, the Radio of the Territory. He understands better now to what extent he is an antenna. What is being incorporated into him is reemitted, transmuted, toward its source, and the light created by this transfer of energy is incorporated into the	Quantum leap. The emissions of rays are localizable now, and their intensity is increasing with every instant. A phenomenon is occurring—no need to look at Campbell to know that they are on the same wavelength. Link de Nova’s hand now resembles a flaming torch. The neurospinal cord is a tube of pure light. The interface itself is shining with a mercurial light, as if halogen blocks were blazing on the other side of the wall. Electricity, thinks Yuri. Something is happening with Electricity. Something is happening with Light. The entire surface of the aqualung is glowing now; behind the translucent face mask they can clearly see the emission of light analogous to what is emanating from the interface. A loop, thinks Yuri; he has created a loop. What has he done? Turn a loop into a loop? But he quickly realizes his error. The transmutations are happening in a series. The light from the aqualung is the same as the light from

LINK DE NOVA	YURI AND CAMPBELL
shadows of the Metastructure, to illuminate it little by little. It is linked to the dynamic of the process. To make an inanimate substance live, the Power of the Word is absolutely necessary. And the Word is not satisfied by the indefinite, by the repeating loop of sameness; it requires infinity. It requires the divine helix.	the interface, which is the same as the light from Link de Nova. And quantum leaps are happening one after another; they are no longer variations in intensity, but rather ontological breaks combining in perfect simultaneity. Remember, all machines are networks of disconnections.
The dark tunnel has turned back on itself; it has translated its visible surface with its invisible subworld. And this secret world is total light, infinite, containing all infinities. Megamillions and megamillions of numbers, stored in the cold-storage chamber of false infinity, even blacker than the darkness of the dead network, because they are a trace of the nothingness as such. The numbers themselves are rearranging themselves in a photonic dance of flaming firebrands and rays whirling in solar hurricanes. Stupefied, he realizes that the numbers are transforming, that an overall commutation is happening little by little in their new configurations, and through the infinite light they are becoming names. He understands why he is a cosmobiological antenna; he understands that the double helix is connected by a third entity—light. He understands why the hidden structure of DNA is Trinitarian.	No. This is impossible. The transformation is physical, and this time all the actions are synchronous, or nearly. The light has again increased tenfold, maybe a hundredfold in intensity in each specific “machine;” at the same time, it seems that the aqualung is undergoing a mysterious metamorphosis—it is turning back on itself, like a glove, yet simultaneously, and more than ever, the hand and the neurospinal cord are one, outlined in fire against the wall interface. But that is not all; it seems that a sort of depressurization is breathing in the contents of the interface toward the exoform; it is not light that seems to trace a vortex moving from quantum leap to quantum leap; it is not the dead network, extinguished and inactive; it is not the ghost of the Metastructure. It is a force of unknown origin, come from the shadows of the world that are now being illuminated.
Names, People, Books. Code, Flesh, Meaning. Where is he, now that he has crossed this globe of light? A beach? A desert, rather. The immense desert that is swallowing up the world. He is walking in the desert, and yet the desert is coming to him. Concrete rising above the sand. A bunker. A buried bunker. A bunker in the middle of the desert-world.	And now the aqualung is not only illuminated from the interior, not just showing the world its internal surface; it is becoming entirely luminous, like a paradoxically “solid” assemblage of simple photons. It is becoming a visible “metastructure,” an entity situated beyond the mechanical and the biological. It is becoming what it