17 > SIGN OF THE TIMES
When the sky splits in two that day, splits into vast monochrome sections torn by the storm, metal-clad gray-blue meteors falling in a shower to the Earth, the frigid wind blows in from the northwest, from what remains of the Arctic. What remains is still sufficient, when conditions permit, to create one-hundred-kilometer-per-hour blizzards from Quebec to Nova Scotia.
Temperatures fell sharply during the night; it is far below zero now. Even in January, this is unusual. The storm turned rapidly into a “powder factory,” a storm of whirling snow that swept the Territory like a polar armada.
The desert. The blizzard. South, west, north, east. A force seems to be coalescing all its energy against the Territory.
Yuri, who has been tormented by this thought several times already, thumbs through a book on cellular biochemistry while Chrysler oils his guns.
Neither books nor guns will be much help to us now, Yuri thinks. The thing is coming from somewhere, even if that somewhere is very close to the Nothingness. It is a sort of copy of it; it exists as such, maybe as a kind of negative form, a place from where the thing is planning its proliferation. It wants a body, certainly; it wants a world, all right—but it comes from somewhere; it possesses a niche. It lives within something, its primordial habitat, temporary though it might be. And, probably because it has left the Nothingness for this primordial habitat, it has developed a taste for it; now it wants something better. Something more. It wants to be a world. It wants to be the very body of Humanity.
No—neither books, even those that Djordjevic is having sent from Europe, nor guns, even the ones Chrysler takes such meticulous care of—no, none of it can really stand in the way of the thing. The thing that is becoming the World.
Yuri’s book lies unheeded in his lap for long minutes.
The conclusion is undeniable. If the thing is becoming the World, if it is transforming the former Earth into a Post-World dedicated to the Post-Machine in ontological principle, only an anti-thing would be capable of stopping it.
This anti-thing must then, by definition, be human. And at the same time it must, in its absolute entirety, be an Anti-World.
Even Link de Nova, thinks Yuri, falls short of that mark.
We all fall very short of the mark.
We are all grains of sand, and It is the storm. We are snowflakes, and It is the blizzard.
The thing should not be underestimated. It definitely deserves the initial capital letter that he sees in his mind when he thinks about it.
It has no name, but It devours all names. It has no substance, and It transforms into numbers what used to be the substance of the human bodies whose language It has digitalized.
It is as powerful as a whole World.
They are all as weak as insects in the face of it.
This kind of blizzard might last for days. The last one he can remember happened during the year following the death of the Metastructure.
Snowdrifts measuring up to two meters in height are massing all over the territory, covering the desert and its sand dunes, piling up on the arid plains and savannas covered with Cornus canadensis, sumac, orange hawkweed, phragmites, viperine and white snakewort, a constellation of frozen drifts and vast snowy tundras leaving only rare clumps frozen in place, the trees that survived the drought suddenly repainted with a layer of frost.
Even more than last month’s sandstorm, the blizzard will take its share of victims from the Territory. Certainly several dozen homeless, and poorly protected families in their fragile and unsanitary makeshift huts.
The snow and the sand come together here, in the Territory, in a sooty union. The snow will be quickly blackened by the coal on the hills of southern Junkville, and when it melts it will form lakes of silica in vast expanses of mud. The thing has truly started a process; the events are linking together with the icy causal logic of machinery.
The blizzard didn’t happen by chance.
The Professor just arrived.
And the library is coming, too.
The “second mutation” that transforms men into numeric data has gained speed exponentially over the past few days, reached proportions that have brought even Chrysler Campbell out of his habitual reserve.
The blizzard didn’t happen by chance. It didn’t come alone. The Thing is preparing for an attack of enormous magnitude.
The blizzard is a sign.
Now they are at war against the World as it is. Their visible enemies are countless, above all in the geological scheme, because it is this World that the Thing wants to transform into its own habitat.
But the Thing itself will most likely remain invisible. It will act on those pieces of the World that it has directly brought into its own service, for its “personal” use. It will remain out of public view, behind the scenes, under the table, backstage, watching its work play out.
The image is striking; it is so redoubtable, so meaningful, so blinding, so utterly devoid of illusion.
These “pieces of the world” that the Thing will manipulate like a theater director into serving it will not, of course, be trees, or combustion engines, or quartz watches, or adjustable wrenches.
They will be men.
Simple human beings.
Like him, and Chrysler.
Like any of the Territory’s inhabitants.
The blizzard is a sign. It is saying that winter will never end again, even under the hottest sun. The desert itself is a terrestrial blizzard.
The blizzard is a sign, Yuri tells himself again.
A sign that everything has been turned upside down, and will be again.
A sign that we haven’t seen anything yet.
The blizzard fills the earth and the sky for three full days, with intermittent brief periods of relative calm.
On the morning of the fourth day, the silence wakes Yuri even before Campbell is up.
A ray of light is penetrating the cabin through one of the Airbus windows and hits the adjacent wall, where there are two large “first-class” seats scavenged from among the plane crash debris. Chrysler is sleeping deeply on one of them, which has been pulled into a reclining position.
Yuri sees a square of intense blue out each window.
The weather is magnificent. The day promises to be mild and very bright.
The memory of the blizzard will recede, without disappearing altogether. It will remain like a memory of death, like a harbinger, like a grimacing mask in the collective dreams of what remains of the Territory’s humanity. It is becoming more and more like a game, a strategy, a trap. It is becoming more and more like a secret war.
After dressing he goes out onto the front steps and gets his first glimpse of the extent and magnitude of the damage left by the three-day blizzard.
In Aircrash Circle alone, two huts that had already suffered from the previous month’s huge storm are gone, wiped from the map, leaving nothing but scattered debris and corpses. One body is missing, that of a little girl eight years old. Five other cabins that had barely survived the sandstorm have now been reduced to ruins; one of the inhabitants is dead, crushed by a support structure. There are numerous wounded, some of them undoubtedly in critical condition.
Yuri makes a tour of the area to evaluate the damage and offer help, the Medikit on his back.
The snow, still immaculately white, glitters with a million silvery sparkles in the pale morning light. The sand, yellow as brass, contained the icy explosion with its dune ramparts and the large horizontal shields of the arid steppes.
Yuri remembers his intuition about the geological progression of the process. Not only are snow and sand mingling before mixing with the coal and garbage of Junkville but soon temperatures will return to normal and spring, with its average 30 degrees centigrade, will appear without a pause.
The polymorphous mud created by the mixture of all these deserts will suddenly swallow up the dried-out valleys and the few surviving rivers, likely provoking a series of floods that will engulf the entire Territory.
Everything above ground level will be immediately submerged; the rest will be carried away by landslides.
Snowdrifts are piling up against the sand dunes now, but soon their copulation, and their mingling with the coal dust and recycled garbage of Junkville, will produce a substance that is neither solid nor liquid, neither compressed nor powdery, neither black nor white nor yellow nor purple nor gray.
A material without stable substance or color, a material that will undoubtedly form the substratum and shape that the Thing gives to its New Human World.
Sand and snow, silica and ice, have common properties, thinks Yuri, observing the bicolored landscape that stretches on either side of the road.
Silica and ice cut like tiny natural shurikens. Snow, too, is composed of “grains,” and when conditions permit it can, like sand, reach that semi-liquid state that causes it to rush down mountain slopes at three hundred kilometers an hour.
“I counted thirty-five new cases just before the storm. Thirty-five on top of all the others. There are seventeen in Deadlink, according to my source. We’re entering an explosive phase.”
“How many in total at the moment?” asks Yuri, mechanically.
An enormous, icy snowdrift rears up alongside the road next to him, shining like a diamond meteorite in the sun, still nickel-brilliant in some places, already blackened and dirty in others.
“With the new list we’re at more than a hundred and fifty cases now. We’ve analyzed seventy-two of them.”
“When you say seventy-two, do you mean the cases we’ve been able to follow from beginning to end through the entire process?”
The road curves right, toward the white disk of the sun. Deadlink is only a few kilometers away now.
“No, we’ve only monitored twenty-eight of them in detail, stage by stage. And then another twenty partially, through several stages, and twenty more where we could only establish one biomap, usually the final one.”
“How many dead that we know of? A quarter of them?”
“As of right now, if you go back to our first contact, yeah, that’s about right. Thirty of the cases we only heard about are already dead. And when I talk about our seventy-two analyzed cases, I’m not including the eighteen that have died. We were at ninety not too long ago. It’s been a rocky January.”
Now the road is winding toward the Deadlink plateau. He can see the huge concrete star of the abandoned interchange and the long gray line of the uncompleted portion of the highway.
Deadlink is a township that extends the whole length of this abandoned highway for six or seven kilometers.
The “core” of the system, the uncompleted interchange, thrusts its steel-and-concrete struts skyward near a rocky butte at the bottom of which snakes the trace of a long-dried-out valley. It is the paradoxical off-center center of Deadlink, a linear city that resembles an immense serpent twisting north to south, with the sharp tresses of its star-shaped Gorgon’s head pointing toward each cardinal point.
The highway was, for the most part, built on a system of concrete pillars due to the marshy nature of the terrain in certain places. Planting stilts with integrated jacks had been less expensive than draining and drying the swamps—at the time. If they had waited just a little, the desert would have offered its unremitting services for free.
Masses of refugees had settled on these ten square kilometers and reproduced the natural hierarchy at its most primordial. The elite and their direct servants lived on firm ground, concrete, on high. The various lower strata lived either under the highway (for the intermediate castes) or at the far ends of land vaguely linked to the expressway in one way or another (for the lowest classes).
Twenty-five thousand people. It had rapidly become the most populated township in the Territory, with the exception of the “historic” cities of Grand Junction and Junkville. A human conglomerate where, like everywhere, but with even greater frenzy, everything could be sold, bought, traded, or stolen. A horizontal megamarket, a bazaar crammed onto a piece of Recyclo concrete, a long line of survival supermarkets where men and merchandise alike were arranged according to the particular layout of the highway.
Unlike the Junkville townships, Deadlink specializes in nothing—which means that anything and everything can be found there.
“They’re already there,” Yuri observes.
He can discern several groups of people scattered along the road at first, and as they get closer they see a huge crowd of humans. They are there en masse. There is a lot of capital here. A lot of biological capital. A lot of organs.
They have come from all over Junkville.
He recognizes their uniforms, their logos, their colors. There are the guys from Clockwork Orange County, in orange suits with black eight-branched crosses on their backs. The ones from Snake Zone, in green uniforms emblazoned with white serpents. He sees the numerous yellow suits of the Triads of Vortex Townships, with their small black-and-white emblems shaped like blocks of public works. There are the characteristic colors of other groups as well, groups that are new on the market, which he has seen only rarely: blue suits with the insignia of biodecontamination printed in red on the breasts and shoulders—the necros from Big Bag Recyclo—and the purple ones, without any visible distinctive signs, of the Autostrada experts. And—where are they from?—men dressed all in black, with yellow hearts on white disks showing on their backs and chests.
Campbell answers his silent question. “They’re brand new in the market. A Triad from Tin Machine.”
“Business is booming, you might say.”
“Yep. The World is booming.”
And as the World of the Thing continues to expand, humanity will be confined more and more narrowly, every day a little more, thinks Yuri.
Every day their chances are less. Every day their hope is less. Every day their will to fight is less.
He knows it; as the weeks have passed, it has practically become mechanical. They are continuing their investigation, but they both know that it is a complete waste.
As long as Link de Nova hasn’t found a way to stop this new mutation of the Thing, they will just be men living on borrowed time, like all the others, going about their daily business.
We really are the Camp Doctors. We have stopped paying attention to statistics. We have stopped paying attention to numbers. We are simply gathering data for the records.
What they see at Deadlink is repeated all over the Territory. The necro Triads are out in force. The new “digital infection” is no longer only a rumor; the whole south of the Territory is full of new cases, every day, every hour, every minute. The Triads are constantly on call and at work, all the way to Monolith Hills in the north.
During all this time, the breakdown rate of bio-implants and transgenic organs continues to increase.
And to this, the blizzard has added its own morbid count.
Pleurisy, pneumonia, hypothermia, various strains of the flu, bronchitis, serious sinusitis—any of it may swoop down at any moment to convey you to a body bag, prettily decorated with the colors of the Triad that comes to take care of your corpse.
In the midst of the unmoving dual-toned sand-snow, the multicolored activity of the necro Triads looks like a circus act—like those he saw one day on one of Chrysler’s digidiscs. The necros are everywhere, all over Deadlink, even at the cabin of Yuri and Chrysler’s informant there, a member of the upper classes who lived in a UManHome capsule almost at the very edge of the unfinished highway. Then, in the afternoon, the “Camp Doctors” seek seventeen new cases there. Find eleven. Are able to analyze only nine.
The moving polychromy of these recycling agents of death is nothing less than fascinating. It is like a parody of the whole World in its configuration, like a luminous shadow. Jesters of the King. The Desert King. The Blizzard King. The King Thing.
They feel as if they are the only living beings in that desert of sand and ice.
Maybe they are, thinks Yuri.
The sun is sinking when they take Nexus Road to the north. Chrysler, arriving at the intersection with Row 299, the most direct route to the former city of Neon Park, stops the car, calmly and in utter silence. Yuri does not speak. Chrysler stares fixedly toward the east, toward what was once the city of transformists, the city of body tuning, the acropolis of an electronuclear god.
Yuri finds a Roxy Music cassette, For Your Pleasure, in the pickup’s glove compartment. It seems to fit the situation perfectly.
Nights clothed in velvet and silver lamé under the cold glare of neon light; cities illuminated in full futuristic flamboyance; haute couture gowns draping purely filmic creatures; a black panther on a leash; electric guitars crossed on the body of a supermodel.
A world that disappeared long before he was born.
Long before his parents were born.
A world that seems more distant now than the most remote ages of human history, a century that seems to have been bypassed by its own past.
“Do you know why they want to see us?”
Chrysler has just started the car again, wordlessly. He gives no explanation for stopping at the intersection of Row 299.
“I got a call from Link de Nova. There’s a big meeting. It’s important. They want to see us, that’s all I know. But it’s about something you have doubts about, apparently.”
The library, thinks Yuri. That’s it. The library must be nearing Halifax.
“I mean,” Campbell corrects himself instinctively, “that it’s probably about what’s been happening over the past three months in the territory.”
Maybe the Professor has finally heard about the latest epidemic, thinks Yuri. They have been concealing it from him—but now they have stores of analytical data built up. They can conduct an authentic statistical study.
Of course, it might all lead to nothing.
Chrysler answers his unspoken question, as he so often does. “Sheriff Langlois knows all about it, especially what’s going on in Monolith Hills. There have been cases up there—fewer than in Junkville, but enough, I think, that his informant told him about it. He may have kept the secret; maybe not.”
“If they want to see us, it has something to do with the Thing. If by any chance they still don’t know about the second mutation and the epidemic explosion going on, I think we should tell them about it first thing.”
“Yes,” answers Chrysler, simply.
They come into view of the intersection with North Junction Road, which leads to the northern end of the strip and then to a side road connected to Apollo Drive, down near the cosmodrome. An updraft causes swarms of tumbleweeds to whirl among the rows and slopes.
This time it is Yuri who instinctively turns his head in a specific direction, as if drawn by an irresistible magnetic force. He watches the strip for as long as he can, then follows it with his eyes in the rearview mirror until it disappears into the distance behind them.
They cross the border of the county of Heavy Metal Valley. The rocky spine of Xenon Ridge, which marks the county’s southern entry point, rises a few kilometers ahead of them.
Almost immediately, Yuri sees blue-and-white patrol cars sparkling in the sun. Waiting, patiently, for them.
The icy snowdrifts become interspersed with rock, sand, arid ochre earth, patches of skin-irritating weeds, thorny bushes, and a few hardy shrubs.
Hot, cold, ice, fire, desert, ice floes, sand, snow, unnatural nature, dehumanized machines, demechanized humans. It’s all there. All the signs are present.
All the signs indicate that the real Cataclysm hasn’t truly happened yet.
All the signs indicate that it is extremely near.
All the signs indicate that no one will be able to perceive its true form.
All the signs indicate that no one will even know it is happening.