14 > KILLING BY NUMBERS
Nora Network welcomes them into her trailer as usual. Without real friendliness, or warmth, or even a trace of anything other than material interest; no sign of any feelings of friendship or recognition or even simple mild cronyism. Nothing like that ever comes from the mouth or emanates from the presence of this old shrew who has built a reputation over the past four decades as a professional creator of rumors, as quick to invent them as to discredit them, and as capable of starting them as of putting a stop to them. She knows, with an exactitude unequaled in the Territory, how to gather true information and to separate the incidental from the important—that is, the profitable. She has been a porn actress, a television sitcom host, a journalist specializing in human interest stories; she launched a magazine for transsexuals in Canada; she was a press attaché for an Indo-Californian film studio. She founded her own multi-sexual entertainment company, launched a line of transgenic cosmetics, speculated in real estate. She was even assistant to the director of the Committee to Reelect the Democratic Governor in Oregon, a few months before the beginning of the Second American Civil War.
She has lived her entire life by gossip, rumor, maneuvering, manipulation, dissimulation, fraud, and swindles of all types. She used up three husbands during her long career; before the End of the World, she collected three comfortable life insurance settlements. She is old, and she has survived the two Falls. She knows a lot of people. She knows a lot of things. She knows a lot of connections between things and people.
She is probably their number-one informer in the territory.
“Too bad she lives in this shitty township on the Ontarian border,” Chrysler says. “If she lived in Junkville we’d each have a dozen red Buicks, like that guy in Carbon City.”
The path leading to Ontario is a heavily forested trail just barely deserving of the name. Fortunately, Chrysler’s father’s survivalist leanings allowed him to leave his son with the know-how to best situations like this—the know-how, and, just as importantly, the Ford F-350. The paranoid ones are always right. Murphy’s Law was created for them, as was the world, and even what destroys it. If the worst is possible, then it has every chance of happening. To this might be added that if the worst appears impossible, don’t believe it. It’s a ruse.
The sun has risen high in a deep-chrome sky.
They left Pluto Saint-Clair at the bottom of Midnight Oil. The man hardly seemed affected by Sheriff Langlois’ categorical refusal to deviate from his rules. Actually, he seemed more preoccupied by something else, something unknown. He had appeared worried all through the return trip, during which he had not unclenched his teeth.
Yuri had recognized the signs of intense reflection. Their informer doesn’t have Chrysler’s brilliant intuitive intelligence. He mulls over problems indefinitely, like a mole burrowing ceaselessly until it finds the exit, the way to open air. Right now the mole is digging, Yuri thinks as Chrysler drives westward. It’s digging for the long haul.
But what is it digging for?
It is a little later when the idea surges to life in his mind, like an invisible machine suddenly freed from its shackles. His intelligence is neither the quasi-morbid turnover of Pluto Saint-Clair’s nor the intuitively logical flash of Chrysler Campbell’s; it is a hybrid of the two, or rather a third form. It is like someone writes a scenario in his mind, as if someone scatters the separate pieces of a great human puzzle across the whole Territory; it is as if someone writes the outline of a possible story inside his brain, and everything—each part of the whole, the whole itself—everything is terribly anchored in reality. That is, in the secret that hides reality. This discovery makes him shudder silently, while the yellow disk of the sun floods the street with blinding light, refracting in clouds of stars in the Plexiglas windshield, and in the distance he sees the angular height of Surveyor Plateau, a bluish mass backlit by a halo of golden dust. A cavalcade of tumbleweeds catches the rays with twisted branches as it whirls by at the side of the road.
* * *
“What’s wrong, Chrysler? You don’t seem too enthusiastic about the idea of visiting Nora Network. Not that I blame you. She’s a nasty old bat.”
“We don’t know if we’re immune, Yuri. Link de Nova and his powers have allowed us to save our bio-implants and our artificial organs; we know they can’t be touched by the thing, but what’s happening now is something … something else entirely. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since yesterday.”
“You know that the entity born of the Metastructure’s death isn’t transmittable from human to human like a virus. That’s what helped us understand that it isn’t a virus. I don’t think we’re risking anything by continuing our investigation, Chrysler.”
“Do you believe what Professor Zarkovsky says? This story about the Language-World?”
“I don’t know. But we know it isn’t a virus. And he knows it, too. There aren’t too many of us who do.”
“If it isn’t a virus, or even a form of the ‘metavirus’ like we thought, how will Link de Nova be able to do anything?”
“We know it isn’t a virus. Its modus operandi has changed. It no longer attacks the biological or the mechanical, but their symbolic juncture. So I don’t think Link de Nova’s powers will act like antiviral software—without which it can’t function, like everything else. We have to conclude that it is acting directly on the Post-Machine—that’s the only term that really applies. And so both of them will change their modi operandi, their strategies. This is a war.”
“A war? You mean, a war between Link de Nova and the thing?”
“Obviously he is the only human being still alive on this Earth that can thwart its plans. If you look at it in a strictly ecological sense, the Post-Machine isn’t doing anything but fighting for its survival. And survival, to it, means the establishment of its own world. In which we are nothing but parasites. Just material to be used and thrown away at will.”
The sun is so bright that it seems as if it could char the retinas of every person on Earth as it bounces off every object it touches. Even the shadows look full of savage light.
“I’m thinking of something else. Something that should have caught our attention a long time ago.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The rumor.”
“The rumor, Yuri? About Link de Nova, you mean?”
“Not really, but that’s part of it.”
“We both know that isn’t a rumor. We’re in a position to know it.”
“I know. Precisely.”
“Precisely what?”
“Precisely, we know it isn’t a rumor.”
“A competition between rudimentary syllogisms, nothing more.”
“Listen to me, though: as you know, this rumor isn’t the only one floating around the territory.”
“Grand Junction could export them on an industrial scale if the world still existed. And fortunately, they would have blurred the radar screens.”
“But as you said yourself, the rumor about Link isn’t a rumor.”
“The competition continues, eh? Amateurs welcome.”
“Follow my reasoning for a minute, please. I thought that was maybe the case for the other rumors, or at least some of them. Then I started cross-checking against what Zarkovsky told us. And I remembered Pluto’s bizarre attitude at the mention of certain details. And … I think the rumor that says the Metastructure’s death began here is true. I think it’s part of the Territory. I don’t know exactly where, but I think Pluto does.”
“The Fall began in Grand Junction?”
“Yes. I’m almost sure of it.”
“How?”
“Everything fits, Chrysler. But I think more than one person has a piece of the answer, though I’m not positive about it.”
“Pluto? The Professor?”
“Yes, but also Link de Nova, his parents, us, Wilbur Langlois’ old informant in Monolith Hills, our informant maybe, and people we don’t even know.”
“Are you thinking of the HMV Christians?”
“Yes. I have to say that’s very likely.”
The silence is thick, as if the landscape and the light are hanging diaphanously in the air, with the various strata of dust blowing lazily in the wind like large translucent rotors.
“Do you think this has anything to do with what the Professor told us?”
“The Professor told us a lot, Chrysler. He also kept his mouth shut a lot.”
“I mean, what he said about selection, about the first wave for the ’56 update. Grand Junction was part of the selection process; he was very clear about that.”
“He was also very clear when he said there was no link. Remember? Within thirty minutes, the phenomenon expanded over the entire surface of the globe.”
“Yes, but he also told us the first twenty minutes of the recording were missing. Nobody really knows where it spread from, and so it might have begun here.”
“Okay, but that doesn’t have anything to do with his update. I’m pretty sure of that.”
“That seems most logical to me.”
Yuri wonders if this, perhaps, is the limit for Chrysler Campbell, the human computer. Logic.
He can’t say why exactly, but he guesses that logic imposes limitations on the intimate understanding of phenomena. And this thought crystallizes what he wants to say. “No, Chrysler; the update in itself doesn’t have anything to do with it. I mean his story about the first wave. All the technical details distracted our attention from the main thing.”
“And what is the main thing?”
“The main thing is the other rumor that isn’t really a rumor. The main thing is Link de Nova.”
“Explain.”
“All the mysteries related to the Metastructure are related to one another. That’s normal. They form the ultimate network, the one of all human bodies and consciousnesses. So Link de Nova and the exact place where the Fall began are intimately connected. And that is the proof that the place is somewhere in the territory.”
“It’s also the proof that Professor Zarkovsky’s arrival has nothing to do with chance.”
“There’s no such thing as chance, Chrysler. It is proof that the end of the world started here, and proof that it will finish here, too. Even the end of the world must have an ending.”
Campbell doesn’t reply at first, concentrating on the road that climbs sharply up the steep slope of the rocky butte. Then he turns to Yuri for an instant. “The end of the world will be over when the world is, Yuri. When we’re all dead.”
“Possibly, Chrysler. But we can also look at the phenomenon another way. The death of man is a passage. So, the end of death’s endless rein will be the beginning of the reign of eternal life.”
Campbell bursts out laughing. “Shit, Yuri, you talk like the HMV Christians!”
“They might not be wrong. There is mystery in the link between life and death, and the Post-Machine entity is like a sort of life-size game that is obligated to make us discover it.”
“A game?”
“Yes—a sort of giant simulator. A simulator meant to make selections among humans. The Professor is right when he talks about a Camp-World. Except that our destruction in itself isn’t the goal. I don’t know what the goal is—not yet—but it’s like I told you; it is connected to the zero point, let’s call it, and to Link de Nova. It’s connected to what we are investigating right now.”
“The second mutation?”
“Yes. And we might as well admit that it won’t be the last.”
Surveyor Plateau juts up ahead of them, its ochre surface dotted with small glens and clumps of pine woods valiantly resisting the new climatic conditions. It is a vast expanse of rock and copses yellowed by the sun, in the center of which are blocks of mobile homes, cobbled-together shelters, and collapsible houses.
Ten square kilometers now unfarmable, on which nothing will grow except a little more than five thousand souls.
And among these “souls” is the one waiting for them. One that knows everything about everything. And above all, one that uses her tongue to make money whenever the opportunity arises.
The very spirit of the territory. The very spirit of the World.
The aluminum trailer gleams in the windshield like a chunk of diamond fallen from the sky.
The door is open. Nora Network is waiting for them. The soul of the territory in all her splendor, says Yuri to himself.
Perhaps it would have been better if she hadn’t.
“The guy you mean doesn’t live far from here; he’s at the city’s northern exit. I’ll give you his exact address if we can agree on a price. And there is another one, no doubt about it; a similar case on X-15 in Ontario. You know my contact there. If we can agree on a price, he’ll take you to the case in question. It’s a woman, as far as I know.”
It could just as well be a striped antelope or a Louis Quinze chest of drawers, Yuri thinks. This old bitch lies like breathing.
Chrysler knows how to deal with the old ex-millionaire of Surveyor Plateau. It is amazingly simple. All you have to do is “agree on a price.”
He starts out by paying, as if he is at a poker table. He pays the fee to enter the trailer and bother Madame. By acting that way he shows that he is in good faith, and then the negotiation can begin without any tension, both of them well aware of how high or low the other can go.
Pure negotiation. Business. The oldest kind of prostitution in the world. They could be selling Winchesters and doctored whiskey to the Comanche Indians, Yuri thinks, like in the twentieth-century westerns Chrysler has shown him.
They sell information for information. They sell the survival of machines and the men connected to them, for information. They sell good-condition, ready-to-use materials, for information.
They would sell the whole Territory for information. Yes, says Yuri to himself, not without amusement. They’re ready to sell the Territory for a map.
A Samsung DVD player, restored to working order and immunized by Link de Nova; more than a hundred DVDs of every type; films from the twentieth century, compilations of television shows, military biographies. Yuri isn’t sure this is what the ex-millionaire from Oregon really goes in for, but he knows that after a dozen years even the pickiest people tend to compromise. This is the starting point, and it places Nora Network in a very agreeable position, even if the word sympathy obviously isn’t applicable to the situation.
The second lot prepared by Chrysler is brought up after another ten minutes or so of negotiations, no more. A small microwave oven from the 2020s, in perfect working order. Yuri realizes that Chrysler, as always, has perfectly anticipated the price for which the old courtesan will sell her information. Especially after the excellent beginning.
And finally, in return for access to X-15, Chrysler asks Nora Network if she has a special preference for any product, anything they might be able to get to her within the next forty-eight or seventy-two hours.
Her appetite whetted by the newly restored antiques, Nora Network accepts this slightly unusual condition.
She thinks for a few moments; then, struck by sudden inspiration, she stands and goes toward her bedroom, separated from the rest of the trailer by a series of Japanese partitions.
She returns with several metallic objects in her hands.
A few old Braun razors. Battery-operated lightbulbs, able to work within a mechanism or to function independently, with neon or xenon tubes. An antique portable record player for 45 rpm vinyl records. A fire-resistant ceramic miniradiator.
Chrysler stares at the old woman uncomprehendingly.
“These are just electric objects. No computer components. If they’re broken it is because they died a natural death. We can’t do anything about it.”
Nora Network fixes her black eyes on Campbell’s. “No. You’re wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“They didn’t die a natural death. Everything worked perfectly until yesterday. Everything. Ten electric lightbulbs with all the filaments still attached in a single block. Their batteries were new. Tested. They’re drained and can’t be recharged.”
Chrysler inspects the objects one by one. “Yesterday, you said?”
“Yes. Yesterday morning they stopped working.”
“Just as the storm arrived in the Territory.”
“Right.”
“If you want me to help you with this problem, Nora, you’re going to have to give me some information absolutely free. Please understand, I’m not trying to take advantage of the situation. Necessity makes law, that’s all.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Are there other cases like yours in the area? A regression of the simplest electrical systems?”
“I hadn’t heard of any before it happened to me; I swear, Campbell.”
Yuri knows how much stock to put in one of Nora Network’s promises, especially when she isn’t bound by a real agreement, a contract, an exchange, a transaction. Business is just another form of prostitution for her.
But he also knows they have no choice but to act like they believe her, or at least to accept her version of the facts while politely making clear that she isn’t really fooling them.
They load Nora Network’s cargo into a Recyclo particleboard box that they then place on the pickup’s backseat, and bid their usual summary farewells to their old informer. The aluminum trailer shines for an instant in the windshield as Chrysler makes a half turn and pulls back onto the road that leads north from Surveyor Plateau.
Nora Network was, as usual, very useful.
Even better. For once, she didn’t just point out coordinates on a map. For once, she gave them access to a new map. One that is still indecipherable, true, but that just needs to be deciphered.
Yuri has a hunch. They might easily find a connection between the “second mutation” about which they have been gathering data for more than two weeks and this new “illness” afflicting even the simplest electrical machines.
If what Nora Network says turns out to be true, it means that the Post-Machine has kicked into a higher gear. This time it has decided not to leave any time for humans to adapt to the successive “Falls.” It seems in a hurry to finish things.
Yuri is suddenly hit with the realization that only Gabriel Link de Nova can bring them the answer. Everything is converging to bring about a new meeting, outside the county of HMV and as soon as possible.
And as soon as possible—he knows that Chrysler has arrived at the same conclusion when he parks the truck beside a collapsible house—as soon as possible means this very night.
This very night, somewhere in the north of the Territory.
The man from Surveyor Plateau is in what they have established as phase three of the process. The last alphanumeric phase before the transition to pure binary language. Phase one, syntactic dislocation of sentences. Phase two, compression into phonemes. Phase three, alphabetic atomization with systematic progressive serialization, the harbinger of purely numeric language based on the binary code that will mark the fourth phase. Then comes phase five, or the “postlinguistic phase”: total digitization of language; transformation of the body into a modem. The phases overlap slightly during transitions from one to another.
The man can produce only series of letters and numbers now. The most terrible part, thinks Yuri, is that the man can still understand what is said to him, and probably what is happening to him as well. Communication hasn’t been cut; it has been cloven.
They discussed their plan only a little during the drive. Yuri knows they are on the same wavelength; a handful of brief exchanges is generally enough for them to agree upon what must be done.
They, too, are kicking into a higher gear.
Chrysler immediately injects the man with a powerful anxiolytic. Then he waits a little, and explains the situation and prognosis. He explains what they are going to do, and the procedure that must be followed. He tells the man what he must do if he is to have even a chance of survival. What they need him to do if he doesn’t want to die, leaving nothing behind but a digital map of himself.
The man mutters something incomprehensible, his head bobbing endlessly up and down.
Yuri is already preparing the various analytical instruments.
There are orange suits at the city’s gate. Yuri recognizes them instantly as necro Triads. Clockwork Orange County, from the color of them. A half dozen men are busily occupied around two bodies laid out side by side on the public street. The rear hatch of an old ambulance painted in the township’s colors is open, ready to swallow up the crude stretchers on which the necros place the corpses with no more care than a farmer for his slaughtered livestock.
X-15 is the main township in the north of the Territory, located in Ontario. It is on the peripheries of the counties of Grand Junction and Grand Funk Railroad, just on the other side of the hills abutted by Surveyor Plateau. The road leading to it is in a pathetic state of disrepair; Chrysler has to switch into 4×4 mode for most of the drive there, using up precious liters of gasoline. The spiny ghosts of tumbleweeds roll ahead of them on the path like vegetal advance men.
But now, gasoline doesn’t matter much. Nor does the state of the roads. Or even the sandstorms.
Yuri, maybe for the first time in his life, can see a shadow of worry on his colleague’s face. Chrysler doesn’t like this, this conjunction of events, and Yuri cannot blame him, even if he sees things with a certain degree of fatalism. The “second mutation,” the “Third Fall,” whatever you want to call it—the digitalization of human language seems to be happening in concert with a new attack on electrical technology. This time, its threat reaches down to the simplest current modulator, the smallest alternator, the most archaic battery, a simple neon tube. Down to the tiniest spark.
And more worrisome still, this new attack seems to coincide with the upcoming arrival of a precious library in the Territory. And with the recent one of a man who presided over the design of the final version of the Metastructure.
It is clear that a lot is going on. Much too much. Much too much to take it as any kind of coincidence.
It is clear that the Post-Machine is taking the lead. It seems to know their resistance points, their plans, in advance.
Eventually, Chrysler must admit that his young friend Yuri is right. It is like a game.
A game on a global scale.
A game that they have to win, at any price, to avoid complete extinction.
The X-15 victim was indeed a woman. Nora wasn’t lying, muses Yuri to himself, almost disappointedly. It was a woman. Is still a woman, he mentally corrects himself. Which means that the moment when she will no longer be a woman is getting closer every second.
A young woman a few years older than him; twenty-five or twenty-six at most. She is a Mohawk mixed-blood named Lucie Lebois-Davenport. She lives in a small makeshift hut built of various scavenged materials. Nora Network’s contact, a former cop with the Vermont State Police, has explained to them that she arrived in the area shortly after the “Second Fall” of ’63, from what remains of Montreal.
Pretty, thinks Yuri, contemplating the nearly nude body stretched out on the helium bed.
The neighbors are aware of what is happening, but they have no idea what to do, and they make no attempt to hide their mistrust of strangers—especially strangers like Chrysler and Yuri. Chrysler, however, immediately sets them straight:
“We aren’t members of a necro Triad from Junkville, I promise you. If men like the ones you described to us have been lurking around this area, they weren’t us.”
“Men in green uniforms with a white snake on the back,” one of the neighbors elaborates.
Snake Zone Triads, both of them think immediately. The telepathic bond that connects them at such moments vibrates between their brains.
The competition is getting fiercer; the race is tightening. The death benefits are increasing in value.
“We want to try to understand what is happening, and to save this young woman,” Yuri says. “If you don’t believe us, go talk to Diamond-back Curtiss here in X-15, or ask Nora Network on Surveyor Plateau.”
Chrysler takes advantage of the shock that Nora’s name still provokes in these parts.
“In two days, three at most, this young woman will be dead. We want to take samples and conduct biotests. One of you can stay as a witness if you like. When we have the results of the first tests, we’ll tell you what we can do.”
Yuri understands why his friend is lying to them. Of course they’re going to take the girl away! At any price—meaning, of course, as cheaply as possible. They will take her to Surveyor Plateau, where they will pick up the man in phase three, and then get everyone to the north of the Territory and Link de Nova. To the one that might be able to save them. To the one who needs to know—to let them all know—if he can do anything to help or not.
The man and the girl are going to serve as guinea pigs for Link de Nova, Yuri thinks. And for us all.
Young Lebois-Davenport is in the middle of phase four. She recites endless lists of binary numbers at a still-comprehensible but very rapid speed, something Yuri has already seen during his investigation in Junkville. But the juxtaposition of the two cases—the man on Surveyor and the girl here, so close in time and space—has ignited a spark of new understanding in his mind.
As long as they are in the alphanumeric phase, they can still interact with the world, the outside, other men. With difficulty, certainly, but at least it is still possible.
As soon as phase four begins, it will be over. Communication will not be cut or cloven, it will be saturated.
And when they move into phase five, which is no longer really a “phase,” communication will be neither cut nor cloven nor saturated. It will become the body of language itself, in its entirety, transforming the body into a digital map of itself.
They proceed with their tests and biopsies, and with the initial analysis.
Chrysler turns his head toward the witness and asks him to go and fetch the authorities for the residential block; when they arrive, full of sympathy and interest in the “doctors” at work, he requests permission to take the “patient” to their “private clinic” in Aircrash Circle.
The men and women of the neighborhood council deliberate for long minutes; then the spokesman announces, fatalistically, that they agree to Chrysler’s request. There is probably nothing else left to do, the man sighs.
Chrysler thanks them as a humanitarian doctor would—if any still existed.
Then they load the girl onto the military stretcher Chrysler inherited from his father, which can fit into any vehicle—helicopter, plane, tank, armored truck, warship.
Or a Ford F-150 pickup.
They leave X-15 and drive toward the center of the Territory as the sun is reaching its zenith. The sky is the color of the Atlantic Ocean at this time of year—a deep, cold blue containing the white-gold disk of the sun.
Then, later, the black vehicle stops a few minutes away from the former border of the state of New York, just long enough for a fourth passenger to take his place in the backseat next to the Recyclo particleboard box. This man does not speak as they cross the west of the county toward Aircrash Circle. Their “private clinic,” thinks Yuri, smiling.
In the bed of the pickup, under the Atlantic sky and the white-gold sun, lying on a military stretcher dating from the Second Gulf War, a young woman recites an endless series of binary numbers, long sequences of ones and zeros projected toward the stars, hidden by the haze of day.