Grand Junction (64 page)

LINK DE NOVA	YURI AND CAMPBELL
Like the resilient crystal of a resistance? He goes inside the bunker, crawling through the sand. He realizes immediately that it is a huge underground library; he is walking among shelves filled with books of all sorts. The subterranean bunker is like a giant version of the Library of the Territory. Very rapidly, in the library/blockhouse, he comes across Names, People, and the Book. He is going to confront the truth at the speed of light.	contains, and what it contains is becoming what it is: a translucent, metastable, protean structure showing its own interior space—that is, Link de Nova. And Link de Nova is not the same anymore. Or, rather, of course he is the same, except that he is also engulfed in this matter/light and all his biological organs are visible, exposed to their view like a schema of general anatomy. His body is the light. This is physical, thinks Yuri. It is happening in the body.
Names, People, the Book. The Trinity incarnated here in the depths of a bunker/library. He discovers a vast room, a rectangular cube of ecru concrete. A military-looking metal desk. Two desk chairs. A sort of microreplica of the normal world in the schematic state. And on the chairs sit a man and a woman. And in the middle of the desk there is a book, an enormous manuscript, at least a thousand pages stacked right in the center of the Bakelite surface. The woman speaks: “You are in the Cosmogonic Narration Center. I am your mother.” “And I am your father,” says the man, “and we are one. We are not your ‘biological’ parents, though we created you; you were created, but you were not born . The World of Angels follows its own laws. You were born of our union, and yet your father was only a fiction made flesh by act of the cosmogonic power with which your mother was gifted. You come from another story. Practically from another world. You were born at the moment your father caused the singularity of life to arise within a semidigital creature that lived in the exoplasm. You are not that ‘child in the box,’ and yet you are its shadow, born by the luminous dynamic of ontic narration, because your father also placed a dead body inside the exoplasm. This dead body was	It is happening in the body. In the body. But that means it is also in the mind, especially in the mind. They are one. Body-mind; what happens is a specific reaction that enters the synthetic disjunction of the body and the mind. These luminous emissions indicate that a form of metalanguage is taking shape within Link de Nova. This is certainly not what they planned. For example: now, Link is a luminous extension of the network that has come back to life, but not as it was before. Link has changed the order of things. He has not reanimated the Metastructure; he has opened an infiniteness in the heart of reality, and this infinity is now absorbing him. In the proper sense of the word. He has become the principal agent of some luminous circuitry traveling the network and his organism in the form of an ascending spiral constantly increasing in intensity, leaping from quantum orbit to quantum orbit. Not only is he this living processor but his mouth is open—open not to speak but to swallow all the nothingness of the Numbers stored in the fossil trace. Yuri can see them, like a pipe of humming darkness that emerges from the interface to penetrate the aqualung and enter the wide-open mouth of Link de Nova. The Transmutation of energy. The phase

LINK DE NOVA	YURI AND CAMPBELL
incorporated as part of the principle of individuation by the Metastructure, which was killed by so doing, but it left behind it a devolving Humanity that then individuated the final result of the process. You were created by this operation. Your adoptive father has been trying for more than ten years to tell of this adventure in which he participated; he has gathered testimonials, he has rewritten his book three times. You will be the one that permits the book to exist.” Link understands: his “narrative” parents form a single being, while yet remaining separate. The mystery of Incarnation is a principle that, once applied, may be found at all stages of individual experience. So the father/ mother being, the man/woman, while remaining man/father and mother/ woman, holds out the manuscript on the steel table. “This book must be written. It will be, because you are the antenna that will transmit it to your adoptive father’s brain. This Library is the last monad that has resisted the Antiworld, and what is to come, and what is already here. But the secret heart of the monad is contained in this single book. It is worth all the books we have brought together in the Library. It keeps all the others together. If it dies, they will all die.	difference of recycling. The numerical nothingness absorbed by the luminous body-spirit is immediately transposed into its reverse principle: the light of Names. He catches a glimpse of them, too, in the quicksilver current flowing along the neurospinal cord. Yuri realizes that Link is acting in a way exactly opposite of the men affected by the numeric devolution: he is not spitting out Numbers, he is swallowing them. The light is not being extinguished inside him so it can be reborn in the form of his digitized body somewhere, it is being reborn in him to ensure the extinction of what digitalizes bodies even before their deaths. Yuri understands just how dangerous what Link is doing is. He understands, too, just how necessary it is—and he understands how that makes it all the more dangerous. Red zone, maximum risk. What will the consequences be, of his supernatural acts on the real state of the World? And what will the aftereffects be for his own metabolism? Can he even survive an experience as intense and radical as the one he is living through? And at the very instant of the quantum leap, Yuri realizes that Link may survive, but he will never be exactly the same. He realizes that the change is only beginning.
There is no discontinuity between each sequence; it is a process, an infinity that stretches between him and what he is becoming at each instant. The bunker has disappeared; as a monad it has reconfigured itself into the form of an ecology surviving in the middle of the desert. In the ocean of sand, from time to time Link comes across a bunch of half-buried books, though he keeps Milan Djordjevic’s manuscript clutched tightly in his hand. He will be an antenna that writes the definitive version in the	No, nothing happens as foreseen—it is so foreseeable! Link has not reawakened the Metastructure, he has absorbed its principle of individuation. And though Yuri does not understand how or why, this principle of individuation of the Metamachine has appeared, at the very moment of its disappearance, in the aqualung connected to this interface under the dome covering the roof of this particular hotel, here in Grand Junction. So, of course, what is physical is beginning to transcend itself, and what is

LINK DE NOVA	YURI AND CAMPBELL
internal light of the man. Express transubstantiation: he will give shape to the Word in another body as his body becomes the Word, in a process of inscription—something is happening as he walks along this oceanless beach, this beach without spray. What is happening is extremely simple, yet the physics at work are of redoubtable complexity. He is absorbing the exoplasmic aqualung. It is becoming him and he is becoming it; they are forming a single entity, while yet remaining distinct. The globe of light is him; his being is individuating the flesh-code-meaning unity, and it is for this reason that the manuscript suddenly smolders in his hands, an atomic sphere, disintegrating in fire that reunifies matter and life. This fire will burn in him, now and forever.	not yet physical is doing the same: body-mind unified in the paradox of light, a third state between existence and nonexistence. Yuri, filled with wonder, watches the metamorphosis taking place before his eyes: the exoplasm is incorporating Link de Nova’s organism; Link de Nova’s organism is singularizing the exoplasm, which is being born at this very moment; Yuri knows it—it is the first true “natural cyborg” in human history. Even the computer devices that are not connected to the network are engulfed in the light; they are recombining to become organs/machines in the new human condition of which Link is now the bearer. He is an Anti-Metastructure in himself, and at the same time he is also the Anti-Fall correlated to it. He is the eminent paradox of living light.
And now everything is being consumed; his entire body is rising to the temperature of incandescence. Everything is burning, shining with a brightness never before attained; everything lives in infinite singularity; everything is real, everything is absolutely artificial; everything is the Word, everything is transfigured in the	Everything is shining; everything is being consumed as if in a furnace hotter than the sun. What is hardly a man anymore is a man-machine-light synthesis; he will speak a new language, capable of silencing the numbers of death. Everything is already so bright—everything is transfigured in the