Cosmos Incorporated (3 page)

ADRIAN-LOUISE VON TIMBERLECK, ANDROGYNOUS HIP-HOP PORNO MEGASTAR, SELLS ITS SCOTTISH CASTLE, HALF OF ITS SHARES IN THE FIRM BIOTECH NEONICS, AND ALL OF ITS CALIFORNIAN, CANADIAN, AND HAWAIIAN PROPERTIES TO PURCHASE A HIGH-SECURITY FLOATING CITY IN ASSOCIATION WITH JOANNA-CAROLINE TRUMP AND THE CHINESE GENETICS TYCOON MR. WEN LU-CHAN.
See Hyperpage 6 for the story from our special envoy to the Maputo naval shipyards….

The world in a few minutes of magnetic ribbon. The world in a dozen sentences. The world in a few short paragraphs. After the news comes a short commercial for Amtrak; images of a silent train against the enchanting backdrop of the British Columbian Rocky Mountains….

This, it seems, is the plan’s predetermined signal. The signal to activate the last inactive cells. Another rhizome, another coil of memory, unwinds itself. Several million neurons are suddenly freed from his subconscious black box and unleashed in a spray of cortical molecules.

It is an entire library, one that was hidden away deep in his own brain. It is an entire life that now, finally, takes shape.

It is an entire network of meanings that combine to give what previously had been nothing more than a mass of organs the appearance, the structure, the
body
of a life.

It is an entire history placed suddenly in his hands, in the quicksilver fire of electric light and high speed.

First, the Siberian childhood in Novosibirsk under the steely post-Soviet sky is abruptly supplanted by images of a gripping underworld. These new memories are no less vivid than the earlier ones: light, neon, lead glass, stars in the electric night, alcohol, dope, dancing, nightclubs, cash, girls, sex, big money, power, more neon, more lead glass, more stars, more girls, more sex. The scene whirls in his head for several seconds; it is as if an entire life—or, more accurately, an entire postadolescence—passes before his eyes.

What was that?
Hello?
He wants to shout at the instruction program.
Rewind the tape; show me again—I couldn’t quite catch all of it….

He heard English being spoken; he is sure of that much. Did he recognize parts of London somewhere in there? Hadn’t he caught a glimpse of Leicester Square? And the cars—shit, they were Jaguars, weren’t they, or classic Aston Martins? And the girls…typically British beauties at first; Celto-Saxons, brunettes with gray-blue eyes streaked with pale green, and the famous dentistry, teeth a bit prominent…and then—yes, the carnival had become more worldly; the scenes had been from all over: Latin America, South Africa, Central Asia, Iran, Russia, Japan…

Money. Drugs. Sex. The polar opposite of his gray childhood in the stricken Siberia of the 2010s. How did the boy of twelve, pedaling on his battered bicycle, become the young man of twenty, driving an E-type Jaguar down a Sussex country road with four supermodels along for the ride?

What
is
this?

His question hangs, unanswered.

An individual person is also a singular entity interwoven into the continuum of history, with a lineage all his own, but the instruction program’s neuro-implants give him only scanty information in this area. He knows nothing of his parents other than their names, which are part of his basic ID file, and he has no idea if he has brothers, sisters, uncles, cousins…. Born in 2001, Sergei has known nothing but war: the Grand Jihad. It is the only thing in his memory that makes any sense—albeit in a detached, historical way. Dates, figures, events. Almost five hundred million deaths in four decades. Twenty-five metropolises razed by nuclear bombardment, six on the North American continent and a dozen in the Russian Federation. More than a hundred of the world’s large cities destroyed in various ways: radium bombs, chemical attacks, bacterial warfare…not to mention the countless smaller towns and villages ravaged by the Great Planetary Civil War. Even now, on the periphery of the unified world, men are still being killed with machine guns, and with bombs, and by hand. Some countries were simply and completely wiped from the map. And only now were the tens, no, the
hundreds
of millions of indirectly caused deaths being realized, for as postwar spirits had risen, so had global temperatures, bringing their own insidious brand of catastrophe.

After finishing his studies, about which he still remembers very little, it seems that he joined one of the numerous paramilitary security and counterespionage organizations thriving on the postwar globe: the Red Star Order. Formed by former career Soviet and post-Soviet Red Army officers, and with bases in California and South America, the Order had quickly risen to the top of the ranks of high-tech transnational companies, renting the services of its cyborg samurai to paragovernmental shoguns and techno-mafiosi; they were moving shadows; barely detectable, elite mercenaries in tight digital flux; assassins in constant competition in the new planetary world created by the UHU—this new feudal world forged by the fires of the Grand Jihad, even after it was supposedly long over. In truth, the war had never really ended. It could not end. There was nothing now but a world slowly collapsing to the rhythm of its own technospherical unification, a world surviving only through terror, espionage, nexuses, and biological special effects.

The man had had his back turned to him for a long time now, standing in front of a large bay window dominated by a view of Lake Baikal. The waters were deepest blue, ultramarine striped with myriad shades of cobalt, and they filled the entire lower half of the window. Above them, the sky was a fiery, blinding yellow. The scene was as pure as a religious icon.

The man had turned toward him once more now, but in Plotkin’s newly reawakened memory his face remained hazy, the distinctive features blurred by an encrypted neurodigital procedure. In all probability, he would never have been able to identify the face anyway, even with the aid of cortical nanosurgery. There are things one knows just by guessing them; it is what is generally called “intuition,” but it is only the simple act of letting people figure you out.

“You will act completely alone until the time of your retrieval. You will receive a large bonus for it
—if
you are successful.

“Your client will pay a
very
large bonus just for him. You will need to be very sure that all the data is in order. If something doesn’t match up, I will drop the whole thing immediately. I will keep the advance to cover costs and damages; you will keep the rest, and no one will be able to accuse me of breaking the contract. There, you’ve been warned. My lawyers in Micronesia have a copy of your papers; they’ll take care of everything. You don’t kill the mayor of a large American city without taking a lot of big risks these days.

“He’s only an Indian, and it’s not really
that
big of a city. You’ll hardly even be on U.S. soil, really—or Canadian soil, for that matter. Consider it a sort of extraterritorial zone; they call it autonomous territory. Believe me, you won’t do any better than seventy-five-thousand Pan-Am dollars plus expenses these days.”

“If you want me to act alone, you’d better be prepared for a lot of expenses; I’m telling you that right now. I’m going to have to grease a lot of palms.”

“You don’t need to worry about that. You’ll act alone, and you’ll develop your own plan, but we’ll be in charge of the overall scheme.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll receive one
—one—
communiqué during your trip. That will be your only help from the outside. I don’t know what the e-mail will say, or when it will be sent to you. But I do know that it will give you a substantial advantage over the other guy’s security system. Don’t ask me any more than that. All the information is locked up tighter than a tomb.”

“That’s a good beginning. You know I’ll be taking an antipod shuttle to the American East Coast, or maybe a simple supersonic—it doesn’t matter—but then I’ll have to get past more than one checkpoint in one of the highest-security astroports in the world, and I don’t mean your stronghold. I’m talking about the Windsor Astroport Complex.”

“I told you, don’t worry. Everything’s been taken care of. You’ll see; you’ll slide through it like a neutrino passing through a cloud.”

“I’d like a more specific answer, if you don’t mind. I guess I don’t know as much about neutrinos as I should.”

The man, whom he knows only as Vassily, had grinned widely at that.

The grin has stayed with him, suspended in the blank space of a face without an identity. Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat seems vastly more human in comparison.

In his memory, the grin speaks again. “We’ve planned everything to make sure you succeed,” it says. “We are prepared to pay you more money than you can possibly imagine.

“With your permission, we are going to remake you completely.”

Later, as he walked through the city streets toward the great lake, he requested an optic download of several maps and video and photographic documents from databases in Canada. By the time he reached the lakeshore, he had, in the right corner of his stereo-optic screen, photos of the Great Lakes that identically matched what he would have seen with his normal vision.

As the high-speed train glides silently along on its cushion of air, a sudden realization strikes him: according to his newly reactivated memory, he had sat on a bank of the promenade lining the gray and pink pebbled beach, against the backdrop of hills ringing the bay with its crenellated cliffs and peaks, dotted here and there with old, half-ruined Soviet-era buildings and the new structures erected to support the tourism that had been revived over the past fifty years thanks to global warming and, more recently, the “official” end of the Grand Jihad. Now, as he superimposes the plains of the American-Canadian border, here between Quebec and Ontario, on the Siberian landscape of his recollections, the two sets of images seem almost identical. Or—are there really
four
images? Two split universes—two spaces, two times? There is the original one, implanted in his memory cells, which seems to unwind in tandem with the train’s magnetic suspension track, but which also appears to contain the image of Lake Baikal that now imprints itself so strongly on top of the view out the window. And there are the new images too, the ones so unlike the view outside the train, that stem from the memories he has just remembered….

His reactivated memory now allows him to access data about the world, data that the instruction program sent him several days earlier, but that has only now risen to the surface of his “awareness.” It is an impossible paradox: through his memories, he is receiving information that he will only understand later on, and that will superimpose itself on the “real” world flashing by outside the train windows. It is called “inclusive feedback,” the instruction program tells him, as it simultaneously incites the synthesis of a particular endorphin that will keep him from falling into a state of parapsychotic crisis.

The topological similarity between the two worlds naturally strengthens this reciprocal inclusion of reactivated memory and “real” world data. He moves as if interfacing between two barely distinct mirror images in space and time. There, in Siberia, sitting still on the shores of Lake Baikal. Here, speeding toward steppes newly created by global warming. And now, passing vast lakes, immense flat plains, forests of birch and conifer separated by wider and wider stretches of open space…

And the local Baikonur at the end of the journey.

While walking on the beaches of Lake Baikal, he had studied the data provided by the Corp—all the data available on the contract hit, down to the color of his boxer shorts, and everything about Grand Junction, the private city he ran.

But that he was not supposed to run for much longer.

His memory implants had downloaded the equivalent of an entire dictionary into his brain at superhuman speed, while he waited for Vassily and his men to take him to the Order’s laboratory, where he would undergo transgenic reforming and the imposition of partial amnesia before being flown to Windsor, Ontario.

Now, while the outside world unfurled like a series of concentric waves of which he was the temporary center, the foundations of his personality appeared, tracing the specific topography of his psyche as if weaving a semantic plot ceaselessly reflecting this end of the limitless world.

The memories themselves are black boxes, full of secret operations, clandestine information, gestating crimes, and twists that defy common sense.

His personality itself, with the exception of the information planted there by the neuronal instruction program, is undoubtedly formed of a daring and inexplicable mixture of real and false memories. He has several lives in one, but none of them is complete. Nothing is true or false any longer. But there is at least a general schema in place now, shaping his view of the world and of himself.

He is a hired killer en route to Grand Junction, this city-cosmodrome, this vast Amerindian territory where spatial industry is in the hands of private entrepreneurs, insane businessmen, and the Amerindian gambling mafiosi.

It is the derelict Las Vegas of the Orbital Paradise, the last Free City, the newest Space Boomtown. It is the last private point of entry to the High Frontier left on North American soil.

He has been sent there to kill a man named Orville Blackburn.

Orville Blackburn is the Mohawk mayor of Grand Junction. He is rich, powerful, well protected. He will not be an easy target. But this man has broken some promise to the largest Russo-American mafia in the northeast.

He is a dead man.

The train is passing by an abandoned section of highway. A few grain silos stand in the distance like zeppelins vertically suspended by reverse gravity. The landscape is flat. The sky is deep indigo. Night is falling.

Soon he will arrive at his destination.

>
THE HOTEL LAIKA

The Grand Junction high-speed-train station is a cosmopolitan shambles where the crowds throng like a human octopus in a city immediately reminiscent of Babel—that is, a mixture of Nero’s Rome and Hollywood Boulevard.

He shuts down most of his multifrequency circuits almost at once, unable to deal with the onslaught of audible and inaudible signals of a million different types and from a million different sources.

In the few minutes it takes him to get off the high-speed train, reach the immense main hall via a series of squeaky old escalators, and pass through a teeming galaxy of humanity under the hall’s vast neobyzantine dome toward the lot where the robotaxis are parked, he counts at least twenty-five different languages. He has met or seen thousands of people; seen smiles and smirks, lips tightly pursed or wide open in expressions of expectation, surprise, anger; faces stressed, impatient, neutral, and joyous. He has heard countless sorts of exclamations, laughs, quarrels, and idioms superimposed on one another in a strange Baroque symphony composed of every expletive on Earth.

The first thing he notices is the large number of “body tuners”—devotees of genetic transformation. His implant informs him that Grand Junction has a continent-wide reputation as one of the capitals of the biotech underground. Anything can be found there; anything can be bought. Or sold.

Especially bodies. Human bodies. For reasons the implant leaves unclear, the city and particularly a few of its “hot spots” serve as a refuge for all the body-tuning devotees who lack the means to obtain a true trans-G transformation cure in China or Australia.

If that is the case, they come here and are operated on—for still quite substantial sums—by charlatans and doctors speedily trained in barely approved African medical schools who end most months working for one or another of the local mafias. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are more than a few “damaged” among the transgenic population of Grand Junction.

He passes several compact groups of international tourists duly escorted by their guides/bodyguards, noting among the atomized crowd the pointillist presence of “untouchables” in the terminal—the people who are not even allowed to enter the arrival area; they stand scattered and immobile, solitary in the midst of the interminable dance of humans in transit. He notes the recurring presence of genetic monsters among them—this time “naturals,” born of chromosomal mutations caused by various changes in the environment and in man himself. These natural genetic monsters are considered lower than low in Grand Junction; even a body tuner whose seedy operation has been a spectacular failure is considered to be higher on the ladder, because his/her body still has some market value. At the Metabolism and Organ Commodity Exchange, genetic monsters born of this regression of humanity are not even rated as high as slaves—which is to say, objects—since in most cases their deformities render them virtually incapable of performing the smallest task. For a long time, Grand Junction’s human garbage tried to survive in the darkest and most isolated corners of the station, relentlessly hunted by the city’s sanitary police, before being finally shoved to the periphery, where, it is said, they all ultimately disappeared, kidnapped by some gang of renegade doctors or a mafia black-market clinic that quickly harvested whatever parts might be recyclable.

He also meets two very beautiful women. The first is a piquant brunette with green eyes and a Louise Brooks haircut, translucent frontal antennae, and pointed ears like Peter Pan. She loiters coquettishly on the balcony of a small cafeteria filled with newly arrived travelers, selling drinks laced with various meta-amphetamines that are legal in the autonomous Mohawk territory. He comes across the other girl a bit later, their paths crossing as he descends the wide escalators—whose green walls remind him, falsely or not, of an old swimming pool from his childhood—on his way to the enormous exit hall. She is a young blonde, hair knotted in an upturned plume, blue eyes vibrant with bemused intelligence, dressed sportily but with the grace of a woman who can wear anything and look good in it. She bears no obvious outward signs of transgenic modification, but that is meaningless—indeed, Plotkin knows this better than anyone.

Their eyes meet briefly, just for the time it takes for a bird to die of exhaustion in full flight. Then their paths diverge forever, like atoms scattered in outer space.

The city map is a prosthetic extension of his memory, superimposing itself on the concrete reality of the thousands of individuals who converge and diverge here, in a machine without even the slightest remainder of human tissue.

So he knows that the Grand Junction terminal is not the
real
terminal; not really the end of the road.

The real terminal is the cosmodrome itself.
It’s on the other side of the city—actually, the other side of the county. There are direct lines of communication between the arrival station and the departure astroport, but they are only for maintenance, security, or people possessing special puce cards approved by the Municipal Consortium that manages the city and spatial activity.

From the Enterprise train station, where, under immense holograms of the mythic
Star Trek
vessel as well as an enormous replica of the prototype shuttle with the same name built by the Americans in the late 1970s, the MagLev™ monorail line crosses paths with the old Amtraks of Canadian National, and from the Enterprise aerostation, where the giant zeppelins of the regular transamerican lines hover alongside electric airplanes belonging to this or that genetic-engineering tycoon, thousands of men and women stream each day. Of this teeming mass, very few will reach their true destination—the sharp point of their destiny. The cosmodrome.
Cape Gagarin.

For it is not so easy to gain access to this Holy of Holies itself, even with tickets costing 75,000, 125,000, or even 250,000 Pan-Am dollars apiece, according to whether you choose to travel on an old, rebuilt Soyuz with an antique Atlas Centaur shoved up its ass or, even worse, a locally built fireball perched atop a fifty-year-old Japanese H-4, or an ancient American orbital shuttle purchased from NASA and partially refitted, or a Texican airplane-missile hybrid, or a good old Chinese capsule from the twenties coupled to a modern Brazilian launcher.

No, even before you obtain this ticket, the price of which is fixed according to a complex reckoning system approved by the UHU, you must often wait for years. Therein lies the guile of the economy that regulates the city. Some people have been waiting since the private cosmodrome opened, when the space industry had not yet been crushed by global terrorism, and when the Amerindian and Russo-American mafias, intelligently located in a transborder territory with lax legal standards, were attracting investors, capital, and research centers in droves. Even before the Windsor International Astroport was completed, more than thirty-five years ago. It might truthfully be said, in fact, that many people died before they were ever able to leave for the High Frontier.

He learns all this as he walks through the aerostation; he learns it while the topological network of the disaster sketches itself in his brain; he learns it as he travels toward the darkest night that has fallen on Earth.

The enormous discrepancy between supply and demand had been amplified by the horrors of the Grand Jihad, its psychological consequences, and the progressive abandonment of “unused” space by bloated government bureaucracies.

There had been some who had tried to survive on makeshift boats, reclamation freighters, unused or pirated offshore platforms in international waters turned into shelters for stateless refugees of ethnic conflict, or even houses floating just off coastlines submerged by rising ocean waters. Others had abandoned the traditional large cities, riddled as they were with every type of civil disorder, for what remained of nature—but this too had soon been corrupted, full of knots of humanity; enormous, metastasizing shantytowns with ever-changing borders; nomadic colonies of Recyclo™ particleboard folding houses swarming like so many ants and devouring trees, earth, and water as they went.

And then there had been those who attempted to take their chances up there in the Ring.

Of course, not
everything
was entirely ruined here below, because UniWorld would have nothing left to manage if the world ended. But—and Plotkin asked himself if the feeling might possibly be shared by anyone else on the planet—the overall impression was definitely that
something had been seriously fucked up.

Why had the giant cartels left the High Frontier? Only the military and the media sent satellites there now. Only the Global Control Bureau—the UHU militia—maintained a handful of stations in circumterrestrial or circumlunar orbit. True, aerospace companies had ended up developing supersonic planes, then transatmospheric ones that could fly businessmen and tourists from Helsinki to Buenos Aires in an hour, but all large-scale space-colonization projects had been frozen during the war, and never taken up again.

Only a few adventurous souls and mafia associations had persevered.

Space had become a true Far West, a
Far Sky,
a Frontier that the paltry legal provisions of the UHU Space Development Authority could never hope to regulate. By definition, the Frontier was marginal. It did not move; the margin would remain the margin, and the World was at no risk for change. And one could assume, without too much chance of being mistaken, that the World understood things would remain as they were for a long time to come.

The bureaucrats of the Global Governance Bureau, who were in charge of Unimanity and the institutions of the UHU, lost all interest in any subsequent development in the Ring. The only thing that mattered was that it did not interfere with daily civil and military operations, global telecommunications, or social and climatic control satellites.

It was strange, this feeling that in fact the twenty-first century was the first one in which not only had human history more or less stopped, it had actually begun to move in reverse. The state of the space industry, one hundred years after the launch of
Sputnik I,
was unequivocally characteristic of the state of everything, and in any case, there was no equivalent to the current atmosphere of decadence in the long history of human empires.

For UniWorld, a few eccentric billionaires and a pack of dingoes trying to shut themselves up inside a pressurized sardine can while continuing to pay taxes to the Universal Fiscal Agency might just as well have wanted to hold transsexual orgies on the moon; they were free citizens, after all, well informed of the dangers involved in any temporary or permanent move outside natural human surroundings. UniWorld disavowed any legal or moral responsibility, and serenely continued to tax them.

Order reigned, all the better for there being none.

Anarchy begins immediately outside the Enterprise aerostation.

He quickly realizes that this is the city’s principal source of wealth, and that it is necessary to maintain the system of waiting and selection, as well as ironfisted control over ticket prices, in order to conserve the dynamic of this chaos, this inexhaustible source of power and money.

For in this state of chaos, as in all others, “freedom” is only a contingency of necessity. He doesn’t yet know where this primal intuition comes from, but it makes his spirit tingle. When disorder is allowed to be society’s guiding principle, the social engine ends by breaking down completely; both the explosive matter that initiates propulsion and the basic structure that maintains coherent operation fall apart. This permits rapid and very substantial gains—people depend on liberty, which is bound to necessity; people depend on voluntary servitude. People depend on
desire.

It is volatile fuel to depend on, fuel that makes the world itself volatile too.

So here there is a blazing new motor—or, rather, the perfect appearance of one. It is really a simulacrum, where hundreds of thousands of human shadows move through a lovely cavern that hides the walls of an immense strongbox.

So this is Grand Junction. It sweeps you away in a flood of human desire; it is monistic, pure, terribly active, foaming in thousands of individual droplets and dashing itself against the walls of civilization. It is a huge brothel turned toward the stars. It is a lottery, a circus act that has become a true piece of the World. That has become a society.

Rapidly, letting his neuro-implants gather a few more bits of information as he navigates the different floors of Enterprise, he realizes that a “ticket to ride,” as they say here, for an orbital flight is worthless in itself, even at the price of a quarter of a million on a high-security launcher. It is not for one of these that all these people have waited years, some until they died, crammed into capsule motels and collapsible shantytowns, luxury hotels and casinos, squalid streets and neoclassical villas; it is not for one of these that they are ready to steal, kill, humiliate, be humiliated, cheat, corrupt, lie, hate, love. It is for a document made of cloned recyclable cellulose, courtesy of UniGlobal Recyclo™, a piece of yellow paper called the Golden Track.

The Golden Track is an official document duly stamped by the UHU—which of course keeps a copy of the number—that authorizes you to be a permanent resident in the Orbital Ring, and to apply for a flight to one of the lunar stations or Martian colonies that was lucky enough to gain autonomy during the Grand Jihad. The Golden Track lets you rent or buy, in cash, lease, or rent to own—with the amount and type of transaction clearly stated—a UHU-approved habitation module of one type or another, before you are assigned to one or another of the colonies of orbital stations grouped in star-shaped clusters that make up the Orbring, the Orbital Ring. Without this UHU-approved piece of paper, there is no point in leaving for the Ring; no one will be there waiting for you, and you will be automatically reshuffled into the waiting crowd. You must go through the entire corrupt bureaucratic, technocratic process before you can even hope to obtain one of these yellow slips; and if you want to make sure you have even a slight chance to get one, it is in your best interest to pre-buy your place right away. The waiting list is very, very long, you see, and that is how Grand Junction prospers so easily, by fixing ticket prices while interminably drawing out the process of getting one of these passports to the sky.