Grand Junction (65 page)

Halo
.

It is morning. An efflorescent, turquoise morning in the Territory. They reach the crest of Xenon Ridge, the hotel, the strip, the cosmodrome, the city of Grand Junction behind them, a cavalcade of gray-green tumble-weeds blowing in front of them. They walk silently among the cottony quicksilver reeds in tall bunches at their feet, a ball of pure gold just rising above the line of the horizon. The World is more and more beautiful. The World is no longer the World; Man will soon no longer be Man, but everything remains suffused with the light of each instant.

Once, Yuri remembers, he had the sense that his life was taking a radical turn, growing ever closer to infinity. What happened in the hotel very much resembles this infinity; he knows he is part of the greatest secret the Territory has ever hidden, however skimpy in substance.

Link de Nova walks between him and Campbell, calmly keeping pace.

Link de Nova?

Rather, the being he has become. But hasn’t he simply become what he is? He is almost thirteen years old; hasn’t he simply undergone the meta human equivalent of the millennia-old rite of passage to adulthood?

A pupa hatching. Caterpillar-butterfly. Actualized simultaneity of successive units. Yes, that’s it; Link has become entirely what he is, and what he has become is not really human; he never has been, and he never can be, because in truth he is much
more
than that. And, even more complex, Yuri realizes that the first
natural cyborg
in history is a counterproduct of the neonature engulfing the Earth. He is completely a man; he is completely a Metamachine; and he is Electricity-Light, the
Logos-Eikon
of mechanical division. Completely. And yet he is only a single being, perfectly unique and singular.

He is a unique and singular being whose luminous body is emitting
nearly all the frequencies in the visible spectrum, creating a gold-silver halo all around him. The exoplasm and its integrated nanocomponents have become organs in the biophysical supermachine that is Link de Nova, and the light keeps all these multiplicities in one dynamic, active, actualized unit.

They won’t be able to hide the secret for long in the Valley of Heavy Metal; they need to stay coherent: wanting to hide it from the residents of HMV means running the risk of revealing it, in one way or another, to the men on the outside. This very morning they will speak to Milan Djordjevic and Paul Zarkovsky, and then request an urgent meeting of the City Council. Sheriff Langlois’ security measures have quite a time in store for them. The Fortress will become the Citadel, the Sanctuary, the Tabernacle itself. The Law of Bronze will become Titanium Armor.

When you can’t hide a secret, Campbell often says, you have to shine a bright light on it. Light can blind. It can even keep certain essential details from being seen.

In this particular case, thinks Yuri, gazing at the brilliant silhouette superimposed on Link’s organic structure, that is no metaphor. Link himself is light. He is infinite division. He is the first cyborg of neonature. He is singularity-infinity-action. He is man-machine-electricity. He is body-mind-light. He is matter-space-time. He is what was hidden inside him. The greatest secret in the Territory.

They are descending the mesa when, all at once, they perceive the presence of a living being behind them, and Yuri knows that, at the same instant, all three of them have guessed who it is.

The dog gives an almost comical grimace of surprise when they stop and turn toward him in concert.

Balthazar, the bionic dog, the mascot of HMV, the guardian of the Hotel Laika. Why was he absent the previous night? On that night, of all nights? Yuri realizes that while the three humans are gifted with their own particular intuitive mechanisms, Balthazar, the bionic dog of war, has remained true to his own. And he has as much to tell them as to ask them.

He has probably followed them from the hotel, but why didn’t he come up under the dome, where he knows everything is always happening?

The dog himself explains it to them. He anticipated the boy’s visit, as usual, and he had remained on the premises. He did not go under the dome because it proved impossible. The whole hotel suddenly became an extremely dangerous place, more lethal than the immediate surroundings
of a stripped-down nuclear reactor, and the intensity of the “radiation” increased with one’s proximity to the dome. He had had a great deal of difficulty even reaching the eighth floor, and he hadn’t been able to stay in the hallway on the top floor for more than a few minutes.

He explains to them that an invisible energy barrier had prevented him from entering the topmost service stairways. He tells them what they should already know.

“I don’t know what you created up there,” says Balthazar. “But I think you’ve set off what is going to become a global catastrophe. Link de Nova’s mutation seems to me to be a clear and obvious indicator.”

And Yuri, dumbfounded, hears Campbell answer the talking dog:

“Link’s mutation is an indicator, but you don’t know how to read it. And as for the global catastrophe you’re talking about, best to admit to yourself that it’s all that can save us now.”

“A catastrophe is going to save us? Is that bounty-hunter humor?”

And Campbell smiles the smile of a Territory carnivore. “When the threat consists of the establishment of an order based on permanent recycling, my dear Balthazar, health lies in the occurrence of a total event that will restore the dynamic of the living.”

Lord, thinks Yuri. Has Campbell been reading books from the Library on the sly?

No, you idiot, it’s what happened last night in the hotel. Campbell, too, realized that we were experimental subjects just as much as Link—he, just as much as I, experienced the flashes of awareness that the situation itself brought on.

None of the three of us is the same anymore. None of the three of us will ever be the same.

We have gone over to the other side.

The other side of infinity.

Here, on the earth of the last men, the sky is transforming. To the south, a new black-and-bronze wall is rising in the Pennsylvania sky and heading for the Territory, stirring up immense swarms of silica and dust. Another huge Arctic blizzard is coming from the north, its clouds of white powder slowly filling the boreal sky.

The atmospheric changes in progress do not escape the notice of the
men heading for their respective homes, or the dog making for his own. A new double torment, snowstorm/sandstorm, will soon vent its wrath on the Territory—and this time it will not miss its target; it is clear that the Thing is clamping its climatic jaws down on them, the resistance fighters.

If the changes in the weather are obvious to men—even artificial ones—and to dogs—even amplified ones—there is no way they can avoid being detected by one of the large purple crows native to the Territory. The bird rises up in front of them, soaring from the top of a pile of crushed vehicles and soaring southeast with great strokes of its powerful wings, toward where the morning light is illuminating everything.

The bird flies above the Territory, passing the small townships of the central steppes and then Aircrash Circle, skirting Omega Blocks, crossing the highway north of Junkville and then gliding in concentric circles above the large city where everything is recycled. It turns toward Neo Pepsico, the city’s supermarket. The township specializes in food, alcohol, and household products of all kinds—canned foods, meat, sugar, salt, spices, pasta, cloned rice, synthetic coffee, detergent, paint, soap, wax, paint remover, acid, some basic medications—everything is available. Some local Triads even grow fruits and vegetables in subterranean hydroponic incubators. This is where birds such as the crow generally go in search of sustenance. A little farther on, elongating its elliptical circle, the bird passes above Leatherneck Mills, the township of leather tanners and clothing manufacturers, who produce garments from recycled materials of all origins. It is the Fashion and Style Center of the region. Between the two townships there is a small, solitary butte marking the western border, not far from Midnight Oil. The bird does not know the name of the butte, or of any other place in the Territory; for it, human signs are just an epiphenomenon of nature, the only thing that counts.

This isolated butte is jointly managed by the two large neighboring townships. It is the source of a commodity generally little sought-after in Junkville, but which sometimes finds a taker or two.

Books. Magazines. Newspapers. Writing. Fixed images, drawings or photos, the work of rotary presses and glossy paper. The tanners and couturiers of Leatherneck know how to stitch, splice, and restore, and they know techniques for processing cellulose. The merchant Triads of Neo Pepsico know how to store, and how to sell. It is a symbiotic complementariness. Men are much closer to nature than they like to think. And especially to this encroaching neonature.

The bird soars above PaperPlan, the microtownship of pornographic magazines, bus-station books, business prospectuses, tourist brochures, and political tracts.

Now the crow lands. It has spotted some kernels of corn and bits of frozen beef accidentally spilled by a transshipment truck.

Before its piercing predator’s eyes stands the small hill of PaperPlan and the containers piled around the few cabins scattered on the clinker butte. It sees two men inspecting their containers and speaking loudly, punctuating their words with sweeping gestures and interjections.

The purple crow cannot understand what they are saying, but as it flutters up to perch on the roof of the nearest Combi-Cube, it sees what may have provoked their agitation.

The human signs have disappeared. The small graphics have been erased from most of the pages of those assemblages of paper and black ink they love to look at.

The photos and drawings are still there, but the newspapers, the magazines, the books, the circulars, the thinnest booklets are now empty of any writing or nearly so; some signs are still there in the form of strange, incomplete ideograms, but these too are slowly and systematically vanishing as if touched by an invisible eraser. The two men hurry to warn their neighbors, waving stark-white sheets of cellulose. No more writing, no more printed graphics, no more black ink—this seems to aggravate the men on the small hill to an extremely high degree. The phenomenon has affected all of PaperPlan in a single stroke. The panic is palpable. Something has come again to smash the human anthill.

The crow takes flight again, turning back toward the north of the Territory, to its point of origin.

It is the silent bearer of news that is already changing the world; it is the mute witness to the annihilation of the word.

It is only a Territory crow. But it knows.

When events are endless lines cut into a process, no specific point can really be aware of singularities put in motion. Simultaneity in action, when it is total, cannot be described. It lacks—not sense, but a code that can make it understandable.

The reunion with Link de Nova. The globe of light illuminates his whole mobile home; the functionalities of the exoplasm are now part of his biological structure; his body shows, as if via a constantly working
X-ray machine, all his internal organs, natural and artificial, because they are a single substance in the same being, all of it held together by the active presence of the halo.

The meeting with his parents, ontological shock of great magnitude, and then the sheriff, and then the members of the Council. Truth, full-faced, as clean and implacable as the brightness of a one-megaton bomb. Now we all know, thinks Yuri. Now the best-kept secret in the Territory is the Fortress itself.

Link de Nova’s firmness is remarkable for a boy of his age.

“I am neither a human nor an android. I am the first cyborg in neonature. I was created, but I was not born, except through the intermediary of a narrative twelve years ago—my parents know it, but they couldn’t tell. My father is trying to write the story: I am the product of an ontological operation conducted on the Metastructure by a man who became flesh from a fiction created by the woman with whom he conceived me; they were two absolutely distinct natures, yet only one. I am the intensified inversion of a semiexistent creature that was produced as a side effect of the creation of the fiction-man, a ‘Box-Child’ closed in his exoplasm, a sort of humanoid image of the base principle of the Metastructure. I am thus a true fiction, a fiction made real. And this transmutation that is happening in me is the result of the individuation by my being of all the humanity stored by the Metastructure at the time. Rather than penetrating the devolution from inside the Metastructure—its fossil—as I initially planned, I have incorporated the devolution by individuating the fossil Metastructure. I believe I will be able to immunize all the people in the Territory little by little, and, more than that, I am becoming the sole carrier of the devolutionary mutation that I am incorporating, and then disincorporating in light. Do you understand?”

Yuri thinks to himself that it does not matter very much whether they understand or not, or who doesn’t understand, or who understands what, or who understands anything else. What counts is that the boy with the guitar is now all the Electricity of the Word; he is the active form of Light. He is the life within the Halo.

The sun casts its pale, iridescent light on the peaks of the township of Little Congo. Through the window of his mobile home at the summit, the man from Neon Park watches the slow glaciation of the landscape in the bluish light of dawn. A large purple crow is flying over Neo Pepsico.

It is done. The operation took place in the depths of the night. An operation that will change him more deeply than all the others he has carried out on his own body. And this time he was not the one doing the operating. Besides, can one really call it an “operation”? Not in the surgical sense, at any rate. Because all the android did was open his mouth and extract a miniscule black granule, like a morsel of coal.
“The entity has created this from my body and its genetically symbiotic nanoimplants. It is a part of my body, if you will, but it has been reengineered by the entity. This is the means of entry.”