12 >   GANG OF FOUR

Four men. A makeshift shelter. A sandstorm.

Four men. A territory. A nameless, borderless thing.

Four men. A secret. A young man at the heart of that secret.

Four men. Their secrets. Their hopes, their dreams, their past, their present, their future.

And the wind that is striking and shaking everything in this world.

And the sand that cuts and tears anything onto which the wind hurls it.

And the shrieking black-and-purple sky, thundering, roaring like thousands of invisible rotors.

Only the silence intrudes. Chrysler makes tea in his samovar. Pluto Saint-Clair has settled in an armchair in the southwest corner of the Combi-Cube, where a portion of the A380’s fuselage has been soldered.

The Professor sits in an antique leather armchair almost a century old, not far from the small athletic-training area. Yuri is in that part of the single room that is kept for his particular use, near the entry door taken from the crashed Airbus, furnished with his camp bed, a rotating office chair, and the analytic materials in their locked metal boxes.

When Pluto Saint-Clair opened the door of his Combi-Cube to them this morning in Midnight Oil, Yuri and Chrysler had greeted him with well-rehearsed, calm smiles firmly in place on their faces.

“The Professor is here. He’s waiting for you.”

“I would hope so. We didn’t get up at the crack of dawn so we could watch the sunrise,” Chrysler had retorted.

“I’ll explain everything. We need to move the Professor off BlackSky Ridge as fast as possible, but first we should talk. Come in.”

Yuri had followed Chrysler into Pluto Saint-Clair’s large one-room dwelling. They were there. The zero hour. The moment of truth. Meeting, finally, this man from Texas who participated in the development of the Metastructure.

Both Yuri and Chrysler knew—and each was aware of the other’s knowledge—that they were establishing a connection between the origin and the end, between the old man who designed the last version of the Machine-World on one hand, and the young man who heals machines, bionic implants, and modified organisms on the other. The young man with the guitar, who alone seems able to resist the entity born of the very death of the Professor’s Metamachine.

“Paul Zarkovsky,” Pluto introduced the man, a bit awkwardly. The three men faced one another in the center of the room.

“Chrysler Campbell. This is my associate, Yuri McCoy. We’re very happy to meet you, Professor Zarkovsky,” the Aircrash Circle trafficker said smoothly.

The four of them had then sat down, and long seconds of silence passed during which Yuri and Chrysler calmly—that is, with all sensors in high gear—contemplated the man that Pluto Saint-Clair had been waiting months for, the man who, perhaps, in association with Link de Nova, might be able to vanquish the thing and its second mutation, the horror transforming men into modems and leaving nothing of them but a vast catalogue of binary-language organs.

They had stayed that way, unmoving, in Pluto’s Combi-Cube, just as they now sit immobile around the steaming tea that Campbell has just set down on his camping table—prudently welded to the floor of the hybrid cabin—as the storm reaches its maximum ferocity outside. The anemometer is attached to the roof, but Chrysler has managed to cobble together a functional extension reaching inside the Combi-Cube, a small electromechanical dial with teetering numbers that allows him to read with precision the wind speeds in real time.

“One hundred seventeen kilometers an hour. It’s stabilizing,” he says, after consulting the device.

He says nothing more. The silence takes over again, as does the din of the storm.

A similar silence fell during the first seconds of their meeting that morning in Pluto Saint-Clair’s home.

Chrysler had regarded the Professor with his usual cold intensity.

He was going to take his usual no-anesthetic approach, Yuri thought.

“Okay. I think nobody here wants to lose any more time than necessary. So I’ll get right to the point, Mr. Zarkovsky.”

“That was my purpose in coming here as well, Mr. Campbell.”

“But you haven’t yet achieved your purpose, as far as I can tell. And that’s precisely why we’re here. Let’s lay all our cards out on the table. We know about the library coming from Italy, and we’ve agreed to ensure its safety while it’s in Quebec—under certain conditions, of course, that we’ll get to later. But what’s more important, especially here in the Territory, is that you need information. And it so happens that we do, too.”

“Are you talking about an exchange? A ‘deal’? Is that it?”

“No, Professor Zarkovsky. Not exactly; not in the sense that you mean it.”

“In what sense, then?”

“It’s simple, as you’ll see. First, you’re going to tell us everything we need to hear, so that we know precisely what we can tell you.”

“That doesn’t sound very fair to me,” Pluto Saint-Clair had remarked.

“There’s only one fair thing in this world, Pluto, and that’s death. Which is becoming the world as we speak. Total equality from cradle to grave, which will soon be the same thing. So spare me your humanist couplets, please.”

“In any case, I don’t think I really have a choice,” the Professor said fatalistically, shooting Chrysler a blank gaze.

“You’re wrong, Mr. Zarkovsky. There is always a choice. Certainly between living and dying; perhaps less today than yesterday, but also the choice between betrayal and loyalty, between safety and risk, between defending yourself and letting yourself bleed. The choice between dying for nothing or dying for a reason.”

“Very well,” said the Professor, with a sigh. “What do you want to know?”

“I told you. It’s very simple. Everything. We want to know everything.”

The Professor drew in a long breath and closed his eyes for a few moments, leaning heavily against the back of his chair.

“Everything” is obviously going to be a whole lot, Yuri had said to himself.

Chrysler knew exactly what he wanted to know, and in what order he wanted to know it. He had written out a sort of preliminary list, using the information Pluto and Yuri already had. Now he wanted to put names and places on the paper, too, as well as the relationships between them.

At the same time, there was the Territory of Grand Junction—the reality, the place that was their ally, and there was the map of this territory. But the map was incomplete. Specifically, it was lacking the “place of origin” of the true storm, the invisible one, the silent one, the one darkening not only the sky but the Earth itself as well. It was lacking exactly what the Professor from southern Texas had come to bring them. The map of the Invisible.

“You’ll begin by telling us about your true duties within the organization that updated the Metamachine. You’ll tell us about this ‘final version’ you helped design.”

Chrysler had delineated, in a few words, the first phase of the operation. It was a commandment pronounced without the slightest apparent authority—Yuri knew his acolyte well. He was simply stating the request as fact, as if it had already been fulfilled.

So the Professor began recounting the final days of the Metastructure, the final days of the World-Machine. The final days of the Human Empire.

“At the end of the 2040s, on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, the Metastructure put out an international call for bids for an overall ‘update.’ Of course, it would be supervising the work, the prehiring selections, the final selections, et cetera. But the system engineers worked in cooperation with it in real time. They modified entire sections of the Metaorganism in simulation processors and the Metastructure chose, oriented, decided—”

“It updated itself using the humans in its service?”

“Yes, exactly. But by 2050, the first team hadn’t made much real progress, so the Metastructure dissolved it and put out a new call for bids, for a second project. I was hired at the beginning of ’51. I had just come back from spending a long time in orbit working for an Australian biotech firm. The new team slaved away like a band of the damned. In two years we made more progress than the previous guys, but—I don’t know—the Metastructure wasn’t really satisfied. Still just quantitative changes, it said. It wanted a qualitative leap. It wanted to be better, it said. During the holiday season at the end of ’52, the idea came to me little by little, and in the spring of the following year I proposed a new line of study. It was accepted by the Metastructure.”

“That was the qualitative leap it had been waiting for.”

“Yes. For once, I hadn’t relied on my pure scientific knowledge. Genetics, biochemistry, neurocybernetics, et cetera.”

“On what, then?”

“You won’t believe me.”

“You have no idea how many fairy tales I’ve ended up believing in the last twelve years.”

“I didn’t rely on fairy tales, my dear sir, but on old philosophical works. Leibniz, especially, but also on some ancient patristic texts.”

“Patristic?”

“The Church Fathers. ‘Christian’ philosophy, if you will, dating from before the Renaissance.”

“Ah—and what did this provide?”

“The final version of the Metastructure. The qualitative leap it was seeking. And that motivated it to nominate us—the whole laboratory team—for the Nobel Prize. We carried out many experiments in 2055; then, on April 4, 2056, the Metastructure’s twenty-ninth anniversary, we set the entire updating process in motion in a single night. It was a real success.”

“In view of what came later, the word success seems a little euphemistic to me,” says Chrysler dryly.

“On that night, Mr. Campbell, the operation was a total success. It was around two months later, as the laboratory was being dismantled, that we received an urgent message from the Global Governance Bureau. The Metastructure wanted to renew our contract, for at least a year. But no one knew why.”

“Except you, I imagine.”

“We were brought into the loop very quickly, as a matter of fact. The Metastructure was starting to have problems. Phenomena unknown up to that point were developing inside it. It didn’t understand, and it needed us. We got to work. Nonstop. Day and night, for months and months.”

“And?”

“And we didn’t find anything. Around October ’56, the phenomena increased. We were seeing them several times a week, but we still didn’t understand what was happening; at least, we couldn’t determine the cause.”

“What kinds of problems were they?”

“Many kinds. First, the Metastructure alerted us that an unknown force was attacking it, or preparing to attack it. We tested its pseudocortical circuits; there were no paranoid tendencies. Then we determined that the parasitic phenomena affecting it were coming from the uncontrolled emission of photons in its own genetic structure. The emissions kept increasing in intensity and we were still unable to locate their source. Finally we realized that the update carried out according to my design might very probably be at the origin of our problems. It was a catastrophe.”

“Why? I don’t mean to ask why it was a catastrophe, but why was your update the source of the problems?”

“We weren’t sure. We didn’t have any formal proof, just suppositions. It had to do with my basic idea. An idea that utterly completed the Metastructure’s mission—really, all I had done was to finalize the Megamachine’s ontological project. I gave it the means to be truly, 100 percent, what it was. I assured its destiny, in a way, and that’s exactly what happened.”

“What was this update, Professor?”

“It was what the Metastructure wanted to be but didn’t know how. I gave it the solution. But the solution led to an even larger problem.”

“What did it want to be?”

“It wanted to be itself. I told you. It wanted a body, and it wanted a World. But since the World was its ‘body,’ if it really desired to be incarnated in a real, individuated body, it would have to lose the World, and thus ‘de-create’ it. And if it wanted a World, it would have to ‘de-create’ bodies. That’s what I told it. It was part of the fundamental makeup of its double constraint. What the ‘Language-World’ metaprogram was aiming to transcend.”

“You might say it did both.”

“Exactly. All it could do was vacillate constantly between the two poles of de-creation, without ever physically managing to start a process of individuation.”

“But the bizarre thing is that its failure meant our loss.”

“That is the real paradox of this entity. The Metastructure enslaved mankind, yet its disappearance is leading to ultimate slavery. In self-destructing, it was able to create the world it wanted.”

“A desert?”

“Worse than the desert itself. The desert is only a form of the thing.”

“Then what?”

“A Camp, Mr. Campbell. A Camp-World. A global concentration camp.”

Stretched out near the Airbus emergency-exit hatch that serves as the entry door in Chrysler’s Combi-Cube, Yuri listens to the sandstorm scour the world outside, the Territory, the little cabin in Aircrash Circle. He remembers the night-desert that fell over them with Professor Zarkovsky’s last words, and the anguish that had turned to calm serenity as he accepted the terrible intrusion of the truth. A Camp-World. A planetary concentration camp. A world where life has no more value than sand, and death no more than the value of a number.

He and Campbell had exchanged a brief glance during that moment, as Pluto faded into silence, a glance of shared new awareness of this unknowable truth they had yet guessed. Then Chrysler resumed his interrogation as if nothing had happened.

“Other than the fact that your friend lives in the Territory, why Grand Junction, Professor?”

Yuri had instantly understood that Chrysler had detected the existence of a secret, as he often did. He was like a human computer, with digitally precise intuition; he fit right into the Territory’s singularly Darwinist system.

“The Metastructure has had … particular relations with the Territory of Grand Junction for a long time,” Zarkovsky had replied.

Yuri had immediately seized on two salient facts.

One: neither he nor Campbell had expressed the slightest emotion after Professor Zarkovsky’s astonishing assertion, as professional discipline demanded.

Two: Pluto Saint-Clair had blinked. He had even given a reflexive shudder, as he often did when hit with a sudden surge of adrenaline.

“Explain,” Chrysler said simply.

“First, remember the historical conditions under which the Metastructure came into being: it was anxious to stop the Second War of American Secession, like all the other conflicts born of the Grand Jihad.”

“So?”

“So, the Mohawk Territory of Grand Junction was spared by this conflict, just as it avoided the civil problems in Canada. Because of its aerospace business, the Territory was financially independent, but it profited greatly from UHU subsidies it received for the services it provided.”

“Frankly, Professor, this isn’t any big news to us. We were born in Grand Junction.”

“I’m just trying to give you some context. I was getting to the important part. Details that I only learned about later—too late, maybe. Here they are: in return for its loyalty, the Territory became one of the Metastructure’s ‘favorites,’ along with other places of the same type around the globe. So during the April ’56 update, Grand Junction, like the other favorites, was placed in the first line, the first wave, if you will, with each wave following another and getting larger and larger, after triple verifications. It was only when this guy from Corpus Christi said the words Grand Junction that it came to me, and that I understood I had to get there as soon as possible.”

Yuri saw that Pluto Saint-Clair’s face had gone dead white, and he was shuffling his feet nervously.

That’s called fear, Yuri had thought.

“What happened just before the Fall? How did the Metastructure’s last moments play out?”

“Starting in ’57, the problems sort of leveled out. Nothing we tried worked. The photonic emissions continued to increase, and the Metastructure talked constantly about this danger that was hanging over its head—and our heads. One day, I remember, it said to us: ‘I think the problem of these uncontrolled photonic emissions shows that it is by light that I will be destroyed.’

“So we programmed millions of antiviral routines capable of protecting the Metastructure from any photoelectric, laser, maser, ultraviolet, gamma-ray, or neutron emission attack. Around September ’57, one month before the Fall, the Metastructure warned us that the Final Cycle had just begun. Forces coalesced, the forces of the ‘Uncreated Light’—those were the very words it used—arrived on Earth to destroy it. The photonic emissions, which were sporadic, had now become virtually continuous. Then, on October 4 …”

“How did the Fall manifest itself for you in the laboratory?”

“It might surprise you, but we were plunged into a darkness blacker than most other humans experienced. Since the machine had no real material existence to speak of, well, the laboratory wasn’t really based anywhere. It brought together groups of researchers in all disciplines and from all the governance bureaus working in a network at the very heart of the Metastructure. When its death happened on that same day, we were the first ones affected. All our machines broke down instantly. Some of our researchers died during the first few hours. We have never been able to understand what happened. Only one of us, one of my assistants, using a metaprogram of his own design, was able to wrench a few pieces of information out of the nothingness.”

“What information?”

“Some ‘hot points,’ if you will. Localized points where the photonic emissions completely overwhelmed the Metastructure in the first instants, or nearly. We were able to register the phenomenon for an hour or two; then the last systems gave out.”

“What hot points?”

“Many of them. Dozens. All over the world. They didn’t stop multiplying. It was like a global epizootic. There were some in North America, obviously.”

“Here in the Northeast?”

“The American Northeast, actually. New York and your Territory, but also Canada. And in Chile, Argentina, East Africa, central Asia, southern Russia, eastern Asia, China, New Zealand … I could go on and on.”

“Did it correspond to your successive waves during the update?”

“No. Not at all. It seemed completely random to us at the time, though we hadn’t been able to record the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the phenomenon, the time it took for my young assistant’s metaprogram to initialize.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Yuri had perceived a tiny movement from Pluto Saint-Clair. A tensing. The repression of a shudder. A minute shock. Almost nothing.

A small nothing that the Professor had said without realizing its importance. A small nothing that Pluto was hiding from all of them. Just as they were keeping an essential fact from him. Just as the Professor had undoubtedly not told them everything he knew.

Four men. Four secrets. A shelter on the brink of an abyss. A storm serving as the advance guard for the desert. Four men still disunited against a terribly monolithic World.

“It was around the end of ’56 that I began to look at the problem from another angle. Until then, since June, we’d been looking for what didn’t work in our update, and we hadn’t found anything. I told myself that maybe we should look in what had worked. Maybe the cause of the phenomenon would be there, in something that had worked too well, with consequences we didn’t expect. So I searched for weeks and weeks—three months, at least—reprofiling and refiguring all my data. One day it became as plain as the nose on my face. I had had the solution in front of my eyes since the beginning, because I was the one that had supervised that entire part of the operation.”

“Your World program, was that it?”

“Yes. But understand this: the Metamachine wasn’t conscious in the common sense of the word, and yet it was more than just a computer program. It was alive, in its own way. Like all living organisms, it needed a real world in order to evolve, even just to survive. That is what I created for it. Or, more exactly, my ‘Language-World’ metaprogram acted so as to make it understand the fact that it is language that creates worlds—that creates them and destroys them at the same time. It was at that moment—around April ’57—one year after the general swing toward the new operating system, that I began to think I might have made a mistake. I didn’t know what the mistake was exactly, but I sensed something. I tried to do very specific research, but a lot of databases had been shut down for years or even decades. That’s when I noticed that the majority of scientific innovation had ceased shortly after the Metastructure came into being, in the 2030s. It wasn’t really a secret anymore for anyone in our field, but we chalked it up as another of the many problems the Machine-World had to handle simultaneously—getting huge climatic changes and depopulation issues under control; the general reorganization of global society, health safety, pacification or freezing of most of the major conflicts in North America, central Asia, and the Indian Ocean; restarting world economic activity, et cetera. For us, the implementation of the update at the end of the 2040s—when the first version had fully proven its capabilities despite a few pockets of resistance in some geopolitical areas, particularly in southern Europe—the update, I realized, proved that the Machine-World was functioning perfectly, and that after it was restored to working order it would be able to complete the unification of the globe and to relaunch a vast program of multidisciplinary scientific research of worldwide importance. On that day, I remember, I began to ask myself questions. I tried, unsuccessfully, to establish pertinent axes of research—especially in genetics, when, a little later, during the summer, I inquired about the problem directly to the Metastructure. Why did you, I asked, slow down—even stop—so much promising research in strategic areas like quantum physics, speculative genetics, neuropsychiatry, non-Aristotelian mathematics, anthropology, and cosmogony? Do you know what it said to me in return? ‘I alone will now be the judge of what research axes are pertinent for the survival of Humanity, meaning myself.’ Why, I asked, have you shut down all these databases from the early part of the century concerning the emission of biophotons by DNA? Its answer was, ‘You’ve figured that out, have you? I’ll tell you; I will never make this data available except to someone whose tenacity, loyalty, and scientific objectivity have led them precisely to it.’ Then I asked it, do you think I will be able to do that? ‘You are already doing it,’ it answered. And it gave me access to all that data.”

“And then?”

“It was too late. By the time I had even a vague idea of what we were confronted with, the Cataclysm of October fourth had arrived.”

A question was burning on Yuri’s lips like pure alcohol. He hoped Chrysler would not lose sight of the tiny bit of essential information contained in Professor Zarkovsky’s tale. And, as always, Chrysler proved that he would never miss such a critical detail.

“You mentioned a ‘Language-World’ update, is that right? You taught the Metastructure that it is language that creates and destroys worlds. Do I understand that correctly?”

“Exactly, Mr. Campbell. I still don’t know why, but there was a close link between those emissions of light and a multitude of phenomena that appeared at that time. The moment when my colleagues and I began to speak of devolution. Evolution in reverse. But not in the sense of reversed linear chronology. This is a much more complex phenomenon that we might compare to a ‘folding over’; the evolutionary dynamic turns back on itself, passes back by itself again and again, crosses itself, takes itself apart, mingles with its own past, becomes a sort of matter in constant hybridization.”

“Could language become matter?”

“I don’t know yet. One of the strangest things the Metastructure told us before its death was the feeling it had of ‘going backward.’ It said, ‘I think the alarm signals I told you about a year ago came from the future, from my future. From the day of my own disappearance, marking a stopping point, and I think they came back through time to warn me, or perhaps to condemn me. I don’t know what it means, but I know the laboratory’s ‘Language-World’ update made this transmutation possible. And do not ask what my disappearance will be like, because machine, world, and metaconscience, I am meant to be virtually immortal.’”

“Well, we must admit that, in a sense, it is,” Chrysler had said. “Even, and especially, in death.”