Grand Junction (68 page)

“That is exactly why Link de Nova’s transformation has to take place,” says Campbell, coolly. “He can anticipate the Thing’s mutations; he’s one step ahead of it. In any case, there won’t be any more delayed attacks like before, which means that we still have a chance. The Vatican may have fallen, but there’s still the Territory. There’s still HMV, the Fortress, and there’s still Link. Link, who is going to reverse the phenomenon. Or, rather—Link, who
is
the Phenomenon.”

Yuri remains silent.

Later, as if to strike the fatal blow, Judith shows them the video files she has received from the Ring via the hangar radio station.

“By a stroke of luck, I received these the morning before the night Link locked himself into his studio, after you came back from the Hotel Laika. I had to run them through some decoding software that still doesn’t work too well; that’s what’s taken so much time,” she informs them.

The software might not work well, but the world seems to be faring even worse. Much worse. It has been years since they have seen images like this. Years that humanity has lived this way, cut off from itself, just like before the Metastructure—but now it is after the Fall, and so mankind has been delivered up to the Thing; that is, to the principle of inverted individuation, and integrated by the Metastructure during its extinction, and now incorporated in turn by the humanity that is the material face of this machine without substance of its own, as a species, as a genome, mechanically, biologically, in the definitive plan of the singularity annihilating itself in false numeric infinity. It is the most redoubtable trap in which humanity has ever found itself caught. Because this trap is not only itself but what it has become.

They have to see the extent of the damage. They are the Camp Doctors. And the Camp is the World.

“The first drone flew over southern Asia, and this is what it picked up: The few surviving metropolises, which have become mass shantytowns, are experiencing the exact same deadly monsoon; everywhere—in the streets, on the sidewalks, in the abandoned pathways of the slums and the huge boulevards of the megacities, inside makeshift shelters, Recyclo particleboard
houses, prefabricated houses, Combi-Cubes, luxury hotels-turned–superprotected bunkers, malls-turned-colonies, office buildings taken over by hordes of migrants, aerostations, factories, ports, docks, dikes, breakwaters, cartels of floating houses, offshore cities, clusters of drilling platforms, cargo ships and ocean liners–turned–nautical cities—the scene is identical, from India to the Philippines, from southern China to Australia: corpses piled in the streets and on the decks of ships, thrown into the seas or tossed into dumpsters waiting for the local recyclers—sharks or humans, which might as well be the same thing. Whole groups of men and women—and children—in various stages of devolution, haunting public places with their bizarre presences and their digitized language before sinking, sometimes in a clean drop, sometimes a pathetic downward slide, falling where they are, and where they will soon become part of neonature while their digital ghost is stored somewhere, in some ‘box,’ forever.”

No, the news from planet Earth is not very good.

“The second drone circumnavigated the Mediterranean—Asia Minor, the Middle East, northern Africa, southern Europe. I think this might interest you.”

And so they see what they do not want to see, they, who are already men of the Post-Fall. What they see is indeed the “last gasp of history;” they see that the entire terrestrial globe has been transformed into a field of experimentation for the Thing, a planetary Camp, but without any Red Cross to salvage it from what might happen—no, the whole world is at the mercy of the Thing’s dual desert, its digital desert, its snow/sand desert, the very desert that will strike here in approximately twenty-four hours.

This is what they see, what Judith Sevigny shows them, what the men of the Ring have filmed: The drone is endowed with a powerful multifrequency optical system that can be focused across long distances, and it is also equipped with four wide-lens microcameras attached to tether cables, which it can lower on command to very low altitudes, four or five hundred meters above the earth, a drop of around eighty thousand feet. Battered children and adolescents, limbs cut from living bodies, gang rapes, eviscerations, castrations; people hanged with barbed wire or drowned in sewers or septic tanks, burned alive in tubs filled with gasoline or sulfur; women hunted down and put in cages, raped mercilessly, mutilated, tortured, kept as sexual slaves in arenas, railway stations, on
highway interchanges and airport tarmacs before being cut apart with chain saws or plunged into vats of sulfuric acid; elderly people executed en masse with machine guns or thrown alive into rivers; the wounded, the ill, and the handicapped thrown out of hospital windows and finished off with machetes and bayonets; babies piled up and sprayed with kerosene and set aflame, or impaled on jutting metal shanks; men and women forced to participate in the torture of their own children; decapitated heads paraded through the streets on hundreds of metal pikes by joyous crowds of rabble; mutilated corpses turned into puppets, nailed down, branded, hung, their limbs passed from hand to hand like so many toys. Yes, thinks Yuri, THIS IS MAN: Vatican City in flames, ravaged by hordes of looters leaving piles of shit and puddles of urine on the altars, the ancient and medieval statues, the Doric and Corinthian columns, the Roman arcades and Gothic naves, while their armed cohorts impale, crucify, shoot, decapitate, dismember, crush, scorch, and burn anyone who has the misfortune to cross their paths. Flying cameras are equipped with high-fidelity, multidirectional, long-distance zoom lenses and sound recorders. The screams, cries, pleas for mercy, tears, wails of babies, supplications, sobs, insults, prayers, exhortations, laughs—it is all there. The Crucifixion of the First Rome, the Rome of Saint Peter, in digital high definition. Transatmospheric microcameras were one of the last technologies developed by the U.S. Army before the disappearance of the United States of America; their precision is completely reliable. The Tiber is flowing red with blood; the flames leap in all their thermal variations; the sky is purplish black like an exposed, diseased heart. The faces are visible, though they cannot be seen straight-on; the details are clean, as stark as a medicolegal autopsy report. They are the Camp Doctors. The last agonized gasp of human civilization has been recorded perfectly. The World has filmed its own end. The machine eyes from space have done their job. The face of humanity is there for them to see, in its entirety, just as it is—that is, just as it is no more.

The horizon is choked with a thick screen of black smoke above a fire-colored line like the Devil’s smile. The Eternal City has fallen. Man has been delivered into the hands of the worst possible foe: himself.

The Abomination is spreading.

The state-of-the-art optics of the flying microcameras have recorded and then diffused these images all over the Ring. The anonymous eyes of the machines have observed the horror unblinking and transmitted it to
the collective anonymity of the orbital nation. They have seen. They have
memorized
. They are the witnesses of the Great Testimony, the witnesses of the Last Martyrdom. They are the
last witnesses
.

There are images it would be better not to see. There are images that are worth more unseen. There are images officially prohibited from being seen, even for a fraction of a second.

Link knows it, just as he knows all the rest. During the three days and three nights he has spent shut away in the hangar, he has, more than anything else, been listening to the Light. Listening to the Voice, the Voice rising from his own electric body, his metaorganism dancing with quarks and neutrinos, and he can now see what will succeed the Radio of the Territory.

It is so simple. A Led Zeppelin that will turn the sedentary Grand Dynamite Audio into a squadron of electro-aerial migratory birds, a fleet of high-altitude sonic bombardiers, the air force of exiles rooted everywhere, everywhere the terrestrial magnetic field is present—that is, everywhere on Earth.

No one can see—for now, in any case—how the Light and he are going to proceed, in concert, to create the Neomachine.
I’m in control of the secrets now
, he thinks. In less than twenty-four hours the Territory will be hit by the double storm; it will probably last two or three days, maybe more. There is enough time to finish building the Neomachine—or the
Hypermachine
, as he calls it sometimes—while remaining hidden within the hybrid shadows of ice and sand. No eye can penetrate the mystery that is already at work, beginning to draw new plans, new diagrams, new codes, a whole new language, and channeling energy through them—channeling Most Holy Electricity.

No eye can capture the Light; nobody can see the face of the Machine before its completion. In a week at most, he will unveil it to the community of HMV. His Neomachine will be able to fight the Thing on its own territory; it will unleash its implacable D-day, its “Overlord” plan. It will storm the beaches and destroy its Capital, wherever that might be, because that is how he has designed it, with the help of the Cognitive Light: the Hypermachine will be attracted by the superprinciple of the Thing just like a missile is irresistibly drawn to a heat source, like a carnivore tracks its prey, like a needle caught by a magnet.

I am the Black Box of the World to be restored, the World to be reinvented, the World to be transfigured
.

I am a process based on true infinity; now I must simultaneously encompass all its successive units
.

Never again will anything be imprisoned in the dungeon of the indefinite, uninterrupted numeric series, that eternal recurrence that is neither eternal nor a recurrence—a
resumption
—of anything. Only the concreteness of matter, the very relative elasticity of time and space, the finiteness of earthly substances will produce the illusion of a series of discontinuous actions, but it will be nothing; there may be specific phases of the process, but they will be on the surface.

It will all be genetic.

True wars sometimes happen out of the sight of those who are fighting them. Some wars are so secret that the people fighting them are unaware of their existence. Some wars are so obvious that they assault the eyes, blinding you with their
realness
.

There are twelve thousand functioning radios spread across the Territory. They say the necessary length of exposure varies according to the individual, so the sheriff’s men distributing the radios are giving clear, simple instructions that carry the weight of law: for some people, just listening to a snippet of music is enough; others might need to listen to the same piece several times, and still others might require one or more hearings of different pieces. It is up to you to find your best use of 1001 MHz. When you are immunized, you will know it. It is like a program being restarted; you will feel a sort of spark inside you and all your symptoms of breakdown—alphanumeric or biosystemic—will have disappeared. When that happens, give or trade your radio to anyone you like, as long as it is to another resident of the Territory.

They say that more than twenty-five thousand people have been immunized in the first month. But the HMV radios are becoming the most costly merchandise in the history of business. The Territory’s own economy is slowing down the decontamination; the Territory’s own economy is slowing down the plan; it is slowing down the war against the Thing. The Territory’s own economy is threatening itself. As Campbell remarked recently to Yuri: “I’m surprised that someone like Sheriff Langlois believed for even a minute that the majority of the people in Grand Junction would follow his order to distribute the ‘savior radios’
for free
. It won’t take long for that to become the business to end all businesses.”

Twenty-five thousand, maybe thirty thousand—between 8 and 10 percent
of the Territory’s population. That’s not so bad, thinks Yuri. It’s a beginning; it gives us an idea, at least, that we can fight the Thing. Of course there’s still a lot to do, and Link is undoubtedly doing it in his hangar.

Yuri can feel the change. He can feel that the era of secrets is changing—but not because they are disappearing.

They are simply changing hands.

To fight a war, you need a battlefield. The Territory is that battlefield. Neonature is moving on to the final phase of acceleration.

When the two storms finally collide over the former American-Quebecois border, everything else the Territory’s inhabitants have ever experienced in terms of the fury of the elements dwindles away to nothing. This, this is an assault straight out of Hell.

The shock is indescribable. Without Campbell’s science, their cabin would never have resisted this attack from the sky. Despite numerous security measures, Sheriff Langlois cannot prevent the deaths of a couple of elderly residents, or of two children from the same family, or the complete disappearance of a third.

“Two hundred and twenty kilometers an hour,” says Campbell, looking at his anemometer at the storm’s height, on the second day. “Two hundred and twenty-two, to be precise. I’ve never seen anything like it, even in the Territory.”

The Great Blizzard in a head-on collision with the Gale of Sand. Silica against ice, silica with ice, silica in the ice, and vice versa. The snow is black, the sand is gold, the sky is white, the sky is invisible. Atmospheric machines in massive convulsion, a fourth-type encounter: ecology against ecology, world against world, contact made to form a single reality—cold shadows of Arctic air, hot shadows of desert wind. The whirling whiteness from the north, the cyclonic darkness from the south.

And in the middle, the Territory. The battlefield of the last world.

In a place like Grand Junction, you have to remember that everything—absolutely everything—is a trap, a developing machine.

In the Territory, the Territory itself is the trap. And now it is also a battlefield for climatic elements clashing in the domain of the visible, even though sometimes nothing at all can be seen. And it is the theater of a much more secret clash—a war waged in the subterranean depths of the
invisible, there where men cannot go. Neither men nor animals. No one. Not even blizzards and sandstorms.