Grand Junction (66 page)

And Silverskin had absorbed this force that, he understood immediately, absorbed him in return, all of him, holding him inside of it as if in a prenatal placenta, permitting him to be a little more than a simple individual, offering him the possibility to become an integral part of the new species. Immortality is a network; the immortality of the entity is the ultimate form of recycling; through it, all of humanity’s organs will become interchangeable and constantly renewed thanks to collective multi-cloning.
“For a man like you,”
the android had said, smiling,
“becoming immortal is very simple. All you have to do is become like us.”

Everything had coalesced, suddenly. Everything imploded—all his certainties, all his doubts, all his hopes, and all his despair, too.

The android is much more than the last of his species built before the Fall.

He is the first carrier of a new form of humanity.

He is the intermediary; he bears it within him, and asks only to share it. “It is ‘she’ who asks me to serve, and to intercede for you others, poor humans; that is why she uses me, I who am not completely a man,” the android had told Silverskin on D-day, the day Silverskin accepted his offer. “‘She’ is the entity born of the Fall of the Metastructure, and she wants to complete her original mission: she wants to create a
neo
humanity. And, understand me, Silverskin, whatever the powers of this little boy you are hunting all over the Territory might be, they can never match those of the Anome.”

“The Anome?”

“That is the name I have given her; she has rewarded me for it.”

“What is it?”

“The force created by successive devolutions of the Fall of the Metastructure. It is this force that, molding the new humanity, I must build. It draws the plans, and I construct the edifice.”

“And what is this edifice?”

“What the boy can never offer you. He may be capable, somehow, of
promising absolute immunity against the Anome and its prior mutations, but this function is purely negative. He cannot offer the positive reality the Anome will bring you.”

“What positive reality? At the moment, it seems that he or she has simply exterminated practically three-quarters of the planet.”

“Immortality. Your body will be self-recycling, infinitely so, if you agree to become part of the Anome—that is, of the neohumanity.”

“You mentioned some sort of ‘contamination’?”

“It was a metaphor. The Anome is much more than a virus. And as for contamination—you should really see it as the ultimate contamination; that is, vaccination.”

“Somewhat like the boy in the north of the Territory, then.”

“No. I told you. The boy knows how to fight the local phenomena the Anome has invented to prepare humanity for the great mutation, but he cannot guarantee you immortality.”

“And you can? Prove it. Lay your cards on the table.”

“I’m not the one holding the cards. The Anome is. If you want answers to your questions, you must give yourself to ‘Him’ or ‘Her’—it doesn’t matter which. When you make contact, you will understand. And you will become immortal.”

“And in exchange, you are still asking just for the location of this other android?”

“The price has gone up slightly, actually. There are three of them now. Three fourth-generation androids. And something has to be done about this mysterious little man.”

“Three fourth-generation androids in the Territory? That’s impossible.”

“What’s impossible is usually just a truth poorly or incompletely understood. There are three of them. I know it. I have to find them.”

“You have to kill them, right?”

“The Anome will handle that, because they are its mortal enemies, and I am the only android to have integrated the death of the Metastructure at the moment of conception of its own identity. None of them can survive in the presence of the Anome. For me, it is the opposite. In a way, if the Anome could really incorporate itself in an individual unit, so to speak, you might say that I am the Anome. But really, I am only its principal vector. I am the one chosen by it as a machine/organ of reproduction.”

“But we humans … we can—I mean, can we survive in the presence of the Anome?”

“Yes. It is an ‘exchange.’ I’ll give you the details. Remember, fourth-generation androids and
Homo sapiens
are indistinguishable except for secondary differences.”

“You’re forgetting one essential difference—we aren’t born through multicloning in embryogenesis incubators.”

“No, that’s exactly right. But that’s what the Anome is really seeking. It needs men, just as much as men need the Anome.”

An
exchange
, thinks Silverskin. The Anome has good business sense. Whatever it really is, it fits into the Territory perfectly.

Later, in the early afternoon, Alan Cybion informs him that he wants to go to New Arizona and then to the southwestern part of the Territory, to Grand Funk Railroad. The Anome wants to perfect its knowledge of the local topography. He asks Silverskin for the use of one of his hybrid Jeeps. Jade Silverskin senses in himself the fragmented presence of a being asking only to connect with other points in the network; he perceives the paradox of the indeterminable metabolic field absorbing him from the outside, this second skin superimposed precisely on the original, and without substance other than a form of invisible black light filling his organic interior with its serene opacity. He is immortal.

It is like the just barely physical substance of a second epidermis taken from the inside, yet which is becoming part of him from the outside. The Anome is in him, just as he is part of the Anome. It is an extremely soothing sensation. Maybe the most soothing he has ever felt. He is immortal.

Which is undoubtedly the reason why the first seconds of the discussion consist on his part of a few automatic nods of the head, even before he fully realizes that the rendezvous time has arrived and his guests are already present. He is immortal; it will be difficult for him to focus on anything other than this knowledge at each instant.

“I always begin with the bad news, Mr. Silverskin; that lets me lighten things up afterward with the good.”

“I’m listening and ready for your bad news, Mr. Belfond. Then we can get to the good.”

“There’s only one thing. We still haven’t found any trace of Vegas Orlando. But we have found what vanished briefly from our field of vision—I’m talking about the suspicious disappearance of Redcoat Willy and his friend, the ones Vegas Orlando hired to protect him and trap any possible followers. Better still, thanks to that, we have, I believe, marked out the
area to search for the two strangers in the black pickup, one of whom might well be the man with the red Kawasaki.”

“Start at the beginning, please. Red or black, I don’t care.”

“The colors are identifiers, Mr. Silverskin. First we went back to Deadlink, where we had the last eyewitness accounts mentioning a pale yellow Toyota pickup following a bright red Kawasaki. We requestioned all the witnesses listed. An old guy living in the north of the township had a flash of memory; he remembered that the motorbike and the Toyota were driving on Nexus Road, but that the Kawasaki turned off onto a side road leading into the savanna, to connect with a north-south road that cuts through the woods along Champlain Banks. Road C, I think—that’s what he told us. So we took that. When we got to Row 301, the last one of the whole series coming down from up there, the North Junction on Monolith Hills, we turned toward Neon Park and searched the whole city, with no result. Then we took Row 300 back, a hundred and fifty meters farther north, and then Nexus Road to Deadlink again. Not to interrogate the witnesses again, but to look for new ones—and, if possible, to find any migrants who had passed through Neon Park or its environs during the last three months.”

“And?”

“We found them. A group of nomads from Vermont. They crossed through that part of the Territory in early February and camped for a while in an abandoned part of the city. One afternoon they saw smoke rising from the hills nearby—thick, black smoke. There had been a noise like an explosion. They thought it was looters or something like that, and they fled. So we went back to Neon Park following the precise directions the nomads gave us, and we took Row 299—that’s where we found the Toyota. We’d just barely missed it the first time.”

“And the two men?”

“What do you think? After three months, the bodies were totally decomposed and the car was a hunk of scorched metal. It had been rolled into a ravine, but the two men were killed
before
that. We found a hypodermic needle in Redcoat Willy’s neck; I don’t know what killed the big black one, the corpse hunter from Vortex. It was a professional job.”

The man pauses, while Silverskin ponders the situation.

“I’ve also got to tell you that, unfortunately, we lost four men around eight days ago. They followed the guy with the black pickup, the one we’d been watching at Aircrash Circle. We lost track of the other one a week before in Snake Zone. So right away I stationed two teams permanently at
the crater. The guy had been missing for almost a month when he reappeared with some HMV cops; local witnesses told us about it. Then our men followed them, and no one ever saw them again. We’ve looked in Neon Park, but so far nothing’s turned up. They could be anywhere in the Territory, really.”

“Are these bounty hunters working with the HMV cops?”

“No doubt about it, Mr. Silverskin.”

Belfond pauses for a few more seconds to allow Silverskin to contemplate these new details. Now the real fun begins.

“Now let’s move on to the essential point, if you don’t mind. Strange things are happening in Junkville, and all over the Territory.”

“Explain.”

“Twice now, the HMV county police have come down to trade completely restored vehicles in Autostrada.”

“Nothing odd about that; the sheriff’s men do that regularly. Business exchanges with the north of the Territory are profitable. What’s the problem?”

“They’ve come down twice in
one
month. My informers say they’ve never seen so much activity in Autostrada.”

“Listen, Belfond, they need gasoline, or I don’t know what, so they’ve doubled their pace. You’re not—”

“That isn’t it, Mr. Silverskin. Listen to me; they’ve traded a total of a dozen all-terrain vehicles in perfect working order—normally it would be three months before they unloaded that many, and it wouldn’t be for gasoline from Reservoir Can or food from Neo Pepsico, or even whores from Toy Division.”

“What, then?”

“Radios, Mr. Silverskin. Thousands of them. Rumors have been circulating for two weeks; the techno Triads are scooping up every available radio. But that’s not all; there’s a lot more.”

“So far I can’t say you’ve impressed me. So the HMV cops are collecting all the radios in the Territory. The choice of available noisemakers is pretty much infinite; a lot of good it will do them!”

“You’re missing the essential point: it seems that the county cops, along with their militia of volunteers, are going all over the Territory distributing these radios for free.”

“That doesn’t make sense, Belfond. Something for free in the Territory?”

“Yes. It’ll make sense when I tell you that inoperative radios come out
of HMV in perfect working order, and that anyone who listens to a particular frequency—I don’t know which—on these radios immediately has no more trouble related to the successive ‘Falls,’ including the last one. Do you see what I’m talking about now, what’s happening, where it’s happening and how, or do you need me to draw you a picture?”

Jade Silverskin begins shuddering as if he has been hit by a high-caliber bullet. Everything stops. Everything begins to make sense.

The north of the Territory. The former Quebec. Sheriff Langlois’ Fortress. That’s where the Professor from Texas and the boy with the secret powers are hiding. That’s where Vegas Orlando probably died. That’s where the two bounty hunters must be living. That’s where the working radios are coming from.

That’s where the android lives, the one Alan Cybion wants to destroy.

The
androids
, rather.

But everything has changed on the other side of the mirror, too.

The mysterious boy has found a way to heal and immunize some of the humans in the Territory against the various mutations of the Post-Metastructure. Now he is managing to use radios as a means of transmitting his healing powers. Good. Very good.

It is no small feat, he has to admit.

But it carries no weight in comparison to what the android born of the Metastructure’s extinction can offer.

As he told Silverskin one day,
“I have some information that will interest you, and that is well worth its price, believe me. You’ll see.”

Alan Cybion, the android claiming to have been born at the exact time of the Metastructure’s death, possesses a power greatly superior to any the little man in HMV can possibly have.

The android has come to the Territory to begin the true transformation of Humanity. He has come to change man, to permit him to pass to the other side of the mutations designed as
methods of selection
, and to finally live in peace.

The peace of immortality.

Silverskin looks at Belfond and his colleagues with utter calm. The network is trying to take shape within him; it wants to stretch to other points that will join its process of infinite recycling.

But everything flows from the source; everything remains pure within the logic born of this absolute form of numeric infinity operating in the depths of his body, like a permanent calculator—he understands; yes, he understands what the Anome is doing. Instead of transforming the
living into numbers, like during the last mutation, it is now translating numbers into neolife; thus everything is being born in concert with this profound peace, with his second skin, his second identity, this double interface that, by nature, makes him a nonsingular being, one constantly seeking an addition to its digital infinity, part of a network, but with the opaque, placental joy offered by this promise of infinite recycling, this hope of biological, collective, global immortality.