Grand Junction (69 page)

This war is being fought underneath the Territory, like the rhizomic structure of one of its many poisonous plants.

It is being fought out of human—and even mechanical—sight. It is being fought out of the reach of the living beings huddled in their shelters as neonature transforms the world, in apparent chaos that is actually very controlled.

Silica and ice.

Welcome to the Territory, welcome to the land that came from nowhere, welcome to the Territory; you will see, the sand is everywhere, welcome to the Territory, welcome to the new ice age, welcome to the Territory, the world is an old machine, Man is his own garbage.

The words will come more and more easily now, Yuri knows. The retreat forced on them by the neoworld has allowed him to continue his reading. Several volumes of theology and philosophy from the Library are stacked at the foot of his bed.

The double storm is pummeling the Territory; ice and sand have come to copulate here, to experiment here with the Post-World, the one in which Post-Humanity will live. But now the words are being etched within him, wherever he is, whatever he is experiencing, under any conditions. Even a huge double storm.

Snow and sand, ice and fire, cold and heat. The Thing is trying to annihilate opposites, Yuri suddenly realizes. To do that, it is forcing them to confront one another ecologically, to exhaust their energy reserves and cause them to die, leaving behind them this neoworld—median, flat, totally equalized, monometeorological—for us to live in.

Climatic chaos is only one phase of the process, like boiling water, and its Brownian movement will end in a state of equilibrium, once all the liquid has evaporated.

Climatic chaos is a stage; it is not the goal or even a means of exterminating the human species more quickly. It is just the period preliminary to the establishment of a total ecological and climatic order, perfectly harmonized, pacified, homogenized.

A sort of Paradise.

It took God seven days to create the World. It takes the double storm only half that time to recreate the Territory in its image.

Paradise: it reveals itself to them in the early morning of the fourth day, after the silica-ice storm gradually dies away during the third night. This is the neoworld the Thing is planning for the whole planet.

Paradise: the neoworld in its terminal phase. Sand and ice have blended into a sort of grayish mud that covers almost all the vegetation in the Territory. Even the hardiest weeds, the most poisonous plants have not survived. The predatory flora, too, was only a stage. A stage of the Fall—but now, we are in the Post-Fall. Only the trees that weren’t uprooted by the winds, large bushes, plants with aerial rhizomes, and a few particularly stout perennials are visible. All the rest have disappeared, replaced by this thick layer of icy sand that, under the rays of the spring sun, quickly melts into dull chrome-colored mud streaked with rusty brown. This is the new ecology planned for the devolving Post-Humanity. The equalization of hot and cold by overall, tempered lukewarmness; the equalization of the tropics and the Arctic via their mutually draining encounter; the equalization of desert and ice field through their systemic hybridization.

Paradise: a world of mud, thinks Yuri. The primitive mud of ancestral pagan beliefs and absolute monoatheism. A monochromatic world, monoclimatic and monogeological, where any manifestation of Beauty will, by nature, be impossible. A world of mud. A unidimensional world where all differences will be obliterated. A world of mud.
Planet Mud
. The gray world. A world without shadows or light; a world of permanent half-light. Neither hot nor cold. Temperate, balanced, tepid. Paradise, undoubtedly.

The Paradise of Post-Humanity.

It is beneath the ground of this gray all-encompassing Paradise that the secret war is raging. While the Arctic blizzard and the Midwestern simoon ravaged the Territory in concert, in the fury of unleashed elements, while the gray mud formed, while tumult reigned, while the sand-mud mixture covered the land, in the silence and serenity of numbers It continued to act, patiently pursuing its work of destruction, reaching a new stage of its offensive.

Its offensive against language.

The attack is no longer aimed at human “hardware platforms” and their individuation; it is no longer aimed at the language incarnate in man. This phase, the Third Fall, is still in progress, but it is drawing to an end.
Now the next one must be planned. The neoworld, where neohumanity will live, must be prepared. There will be the mud of sand and ice. There will be millions of deaths per day. There will be the numeric recycling of bodies.

And there will be the new communication.

The new communication between men, the posthumans whose collective immortality will give them quasi-divine status, will be of a radically new type. It will no longer depend on language, which will have been destroyed, but on the direct neuroconnection of each brain via the neohuman biological network; but in order for that to happen, the extermination of verbal transmission alone will not be enough. It will be absolutely necessary—even before having done away with human cortexes and their linguistic systems—to find a way to prevent any
written transmission
. Because written transmission is memory, and moreover it is a global text in perpetual transformation. Written transmission is a brain in itself. It structures and illuminates thought. It is capable of bridging life and death. It can record names, stories, events. It can destroy all the Anome is doing. In order for the neoworld to have any hope of lasting, it must annihilate all preceding history. It must annihilate every individual, destroy every thought, every possibility of thought. It must abolish even the smallest
trace
of language.

The men of PaperPlan who have just emerged from their homes see that their entire stock is now unusable; books, journals, newspapers, brochures—everything has been erased. Everything. Not a letter remains. The pages are as blank as if nothing were ever printed on them. As the day continues, the men of the township will receive disparate information from all over Junkville, telling them that the phenomenon is expanding. In Neo Pepsico the jars of jam, tubes of medication, sacks of grain, and instruction manuals have had all their descriptives erased in the space of a few days. The same thing has happened in Ultrabox and some parts of Vortex Townships.

The men of Junkville still do not know what is happening. They do not know a war is raging beneath their feet, on the rhizomic face of the world, where light is nothing but a chemical substratum.

They cannot know, because even if they understood the meaning of this attack against written marks, they would not be able to guess exactly what the attack is in fact aimed at. They would not suspect the presence of an enemy of this Thing that is erasing language.

This adversary, this Enemy of the Thing the people of Junkville are
not even aware exists, this holdout opponent, this final dissident, is fighting its own war in the subterranean depths of the neoworld.

His Machine is ready. It is a beautiful machine. A war machine. A military device. A trap.

It is the most beautiful machine ever created since the invention of machines—that is, since the invention of man.

Light. Every good trap should be able to function in daylight, Campbell often says.

Thanks to the powers he received from his nongenetic creation, for Link this paradigm is virtually inverted: all light should conceal a good trap.

He has succeeded.

Six full days. No randomness in the numerology of creating universes. Six days to recreate a World—or, rather, six days to prevent it from being recreated in the image of neohumanity.

Yes, he has succeeded.

The Neomachine. A Machine of the fourth type. Neither biological nor mechanical nor symbolic, but a disjunctive synthesis permanently renewed by Light, by the Most Holy Electricity become a principle of absolute individuation.

The Hypermachine: at once the antinome of the Metastructure
and
its inverted principle—the Thing. The Hypermachine, the third party, the projection outside the incarcerating space of the dialectic. The Hypermachine, the cognitive weapon, the absolute enemy of Post-Humanity, the
Enola Gay
come to atomize its neoworld of universal mud through the performative action of electric music, the Music of Electricity, the Music in which Electricity is the principle of individuation, the Music that will cause the electric body of the whole planet to sing.

Today is the morning of the Seventh Day; the elements themselves are at rest. I will keep the hangar closed and let the world continue its course. Tomorrow I will show the last humans in the Territory what Logos can do against the Thing; I will show them the Neomachine that has come to fight the neoecology. I will show them the Hypermachine that will completely destroy Post-Humanity.

I will show them the Light.

The Light when it becomes Fire.

*   *   *

Morning comes.

The eighth, by Link de Nova’s count.

Another morning on which people gather around the hangar. It has been five full days since the beginning of the storm. The fifth day of the hybrid neoecology, the fifth day of the world of mud.

Morning has come.

The morning of the New Machine.

The morning of the last free men.

The morning of the last finite numbers.

Morning has come. The morning of the transfinite aleph, the morning of light, the morning of the metaliving.

Link de Nova’s morning has come.

The morning of the Great Amazement, the transmutation of the Energy into Words, the morning the machine has been surpassed by itself.

Every man and woman who has come from almost all the communities of Heavy Metal Valley can see, glowing golden in the morning light, what emerges from Link de Nova’s hangar, floating a few meters above the earth, haloed with solar light pulsing from quicksilver veins. The levels of fluidity and viscosity of this matter-that-is-not-matter would thwart any attempt at measuring them—rhes and poises demultiplied in infinite differentials, permanently reversing their asymmetry. Nothing is really stable at the heart of this hyperluminous plasma, which is neither gas nor solid nor liquid
nor plasma
.

All of them—Yuri McCoy, Chrysler Campbell, Judith Sevigny, her parents, Sheriff Langlois and all his deputies, the two androids from the Ring, Francisco Alpini, Milan Djordjevic, Professor Zarkovsky, Sydia Nova, Father Newman, Lady van Harpel, the Sommervilles, the dog Balthazar, and dozens of other families, dozens of other couples, dozens of other solitary individuals, and even a large purple crow that has just alighted on the top of a pile of smashed cars—all of them are facing the incomprehensible, the unknowable, the inexplicable, the impossible.

They are facing the future of the Machine. They are facing the future of Humanity.

Later, Yuri will ask himself how to describe such an apparition, such an “object,” such a phenomenon.

It is not natural—but it is not artificial, either. It is, again, the disjunctive
synthesis of two species whose operation is infinitely maintained by this globe of active light framing intangible perimeters.

Object? What object? Where does matter begin? Where does light begin? Where does energy stop? Where does infinity end?

The first words that come to him are: Welcome to the Territory, welcome to the place where only surreal is a possibility, welcome to the Territory, you face the fact that everything here can be done, welcome to the Territory, welcome to the very last unknown identity, welcome to the Territory, as you see, a new world has just begun.

There is a sort of poetry in what is happening before their eyes. But what kind of poetry, if not an unknown form, a form not yet created—because what it is saying, describing, evoking, has no recognized existence? Any religious prohibitions notwithstanding, how does one paint God? It does not make any sense; any representation of infinity is impossible by its very nature.

For that matter, how does one convey what is a notch below God—a phenomenon that incontestably belongs to the order of the divine, the
supernatural
, or to one of its manifestations here on Earth?

How does one paint an angel?

How does one portray the Ark of the Covenant?

And seeing Link standing at the hangar door, the black Gibson hanging from its strap around his neck, Yuri realizes that you cannot paint God. You cannot describe an angel. You cannot depict the Ark of the Covenant and its Tabernacle.

But there is a way to make contact with them. Through the Word, of course. But the Word is not necessarily made up of
words
.

The Word is the Voice. It is a Song. It is thus a Body. It is music capable of reaching the far-distant stars.

And this is very precisely what Link has understood. It is what he will now put into practice. It is what he will cast upon the world.

The cosmic Antenna, the human Monad, the Neomachine; the Ark, as he calls it.

It is not entirely mechanical, but neither is it entirely biological. It is a multidimensional form of light at different levels of “density;” perhaps even at different levels of speed, of mass; all paradoxes are imaginable. It is holding a strange structure in place: a black double orb, two large circles, one enclosed inside the other at a 90-degree angle, forming a schematic globe, the inside of which is clearly visible in the powerful solar light.

The studio.
The whole studio
.

All the instruments. The guitars, the Dobros, the mandolins, the synthesizers, the samplers, the sequencers, the various keyboards, the electric violins and acoustic cellos, the saxophones and trumpets, the basses, the rhythm boxes, the microphones, the mixing consoles, the recorders, the amplifiers, the speakers, the digital disk readers, the microcomputers, the racks and effects pedals, the headphones, the cables, the electric transformers, the radio transmission station—even the huge church organ is atop the Machine with all its jutting tubes. Everything has become an organic unit, a single meta-instrument that vibrates and pulses, a cardiac ventricle amid the swarming photons. It is glowing with energy, as if the fire-colored halo is taking form in the assembled machines. And Yuri realizes that there is no “as if” about it; he realizes that this is very exactly what is taking place, that this is the precise nature of the process at work.