48 >   HERE COME THE WARM JETS

They will say that in the following weeks, several raids are attempted by the Anome’s militia on the Territory-within-the-Territory. But the Fortress keeps its promises; it is the Sanctuary, the armor of the Prophecy: the Ark has created an impassable, invisible, and perfectly ontological barrier. No “neohuman” who has traded his individuation for participation in the immortal network can cross the border the Ark has drawn in the extreme north of the Territory.

They die. All of them. Instantaneously. The Ark breaks their intersubjective connection to the Anome. Their bodies collapse on the ground in a strange semighostly, semiorganic mass, a collection of digitized organs, before melting into the overall neoecology. Very quickly, the Anome’s Pope chooses to block off, in his turn, his area of influence, contenting himself with sending out patrols to monitor what is happening in the enemy camp. It is like medieval times again: competitive feudalism, rival city-states. It is like the moment of the very first battle.

Summer arrives. Waves of heat come to melt the last islands of icesand scattered across the Territory; the translucent, formless mud covers every nook of the landscape. The sun remains veiled behind a layer of metallic lacquer suspended in the sky. The neoecology is expanding into the atmosphere; the homogenous lukewarmness is spreading over the entire surface of the globe. The future is taking form. The form of the Anome. Men are reconfigurating themselves into a community that is erasing all real singularity little by little, giving way to overall communication in the form of constant traffic, the permanent recycling of all the fluxes of life. Believe in the Anome, because the Anome believes in you. Such are the platitudes spreading throughout what is left of humanity.

In the Territory-within-the-Territory, where this story was born and where it will end, extraordinary events are happening endlessly.

In the New Human World of the Anome, which now surrounds the Territory completely, men are either dying or choosing the collective immortality of the biological network. Fewer and fewer men are dying. More and more men are becoming immortal.

Hovering above Xenon Ridge, the infinite Ark continues to sparkle on all its visible and invisible frequencies emitted by all light, created or not. The Ark continues to watch over the cosmodrome, the north of the strip, and the city of Grand Junction—and, of course, the county of Heavy Metal Valley. The Ark is maintaining its invisible and impassible ontological barrier around the Territory-within-the-Territory; it is protecting the last men with its shield of bronze, providing the microspace so vital to the Law, and granting a few more days’ reprieve to those who have, until now, resisted all the successive mutations of posthumanity.

Soon, though, it will have to leave them without the slightest protection.

Soon it will have to do what must be done.

It, too, is only an instrument, after all.

“Link de Nova heals machines by individuating them through the active, conatural recognition of their internal infinities, and thus their poetic metalanguages. He can invent new machines whose programs are related to the mechanical poetry that singularizes them; the Ark is the first prototype. His ‘machines of light’ are powered by the mind—by Logos. They will allow the surviving humanity to travel to the limits of the Cosmos. That’s what he told me, Sheriff Langlois.”

Yuri and Chrysler have called an urgent meeting. The sheriff, Milan Djordjevic, and Paul Zarkovsky have asked to know as soon as possible why the boy in the Halo has shut himself away in his hangar again, why he is letting no one but Yuri enter, why the Ark seems to be transmuting, emitting even more light on wavelengths that become even more countless every day. The meeting is a makeshift one, held in the trailer-library where Link’s father spent entire weeks at a portable microcomputer from the turn of the century, writing the final version of the manuscript he carried with him for years. He has summarized the three previous versions, written and rewritten everything, day and night, kept awake by various drugs and synthetic caffeine. He has finally succeeded in obtaining permanent immunity for the thousands of surviving books. The attack destroyed barely a twentieth of the library. Here, the underground war was won. Here, a simple story was able to block the progression of the active nothingness. Here, Anti-Thought came up against the Meta-Cortex. The explosion destroyed and recreated the Cosmos in its entirety—several times.

Since that day, Yuri has considered some of the books as authentic weapons of mass destruction. He has also realized that, like all the others, he has a specific duty to accomplish in this war against Anomanity. And his duty will be to remain a Man of the Territory until the end.

“The last time Link locked himself up in his hangar, things didn’t exactly happen as planned,” observes the sheriff.

“You and I both know it’s the Law of the Territory. What counts isn’t what you have planned, it’s what has been planned for you,” Yuri says.

“What will happen? How will it go; what will it be like?” asks Milan Djordjevic, his anxiety obvious.

“I’m not sure even Link knows that exactly. There are internal mutations affecting him, and consequently the whole he forms with the Ark, and through it with the entire Territory-within-the-Territory, what we call the Sanctuary. If the Ark transforms, Link transforms. If Link transforms, the World—the real one, what remains of it—will transform in its turn. It will transform in order to stay real, whereas the planet of the Anome is only a simulation-cum-nature that will end by constantly mutating without ever changing, ensuring the permanence of its pseudoecology.”

“What do we have to do?” asks the Professor.

“Nothing, now. Mr. Djordjevic has succeeded in stopping the antiscriptural attack by writing the story of the origins of what we have lived through. This shows that the Anome has its limits, even against simple humans. Link is a very special case; never forget that he was written, never born, and that now, in his unique way, he will be able to be born in this world.”

“I want you to keep me informed—especially about this birth into the world,” says the sheriff coldly, by way of ending the conversation.

Link has become the very diagram of the event; he is what is actualizing through the infinite process of his own individuation. He is what is; he is pure Logos. He is the experience of light as the singular psychic state of the Cosmos. He is this singularity that extends into infinity, and he is the infinity born of this singularity. He is ready now. He is the process of cognition of light; he is the science of light—the science of light that knows itself, through itself, through all the infinities it contains within it.

The hangar itself is part of the plan. It is his epidermis—or, rather, his exoskeleton. And the Sanctuary, all of it, will become his Body. The Ark will become his metabrain. The cosmodrome, the Hotel Laika, and the city of HMV will come together into a vast single structure, a metastructure of light.

The Vessel of the Infinite.

But for that to happen as planned, the Ark is going to have to engulf the whole Territory-within-the-Territory within its Halo. And as a consequence of that, the invisible ontological border protecting them from Anomanity will disappear.

It is here that the gulf will widen. It is this differential that will open the chasm, the chasm necessary for any real unity, the sacrifice necessary for all salvation, the wound that cannot be scarred over until the End Time, the very meaning of Beauty becoming Truth arching against the aworld.

And Link is the productive diagram of all of this. The End Time is here. It is now, and sudden, and yet it has been happening, and will continue to happen, for a long time.

Link will open the stars to the song of the Third Humanity, to all those who commit to adventuring through the Infinite in the Vessel, those who will leave with the Territory-within-the-Territory, with the cosmodrome, with the Hotel Laika, with Humvee. With the Library.

And he will open the doors of Eternity to those who choose to defend the county during the time of the Great Transmigration.

Link knows that the creation of the Vessel will take exactly six days, just like the creation of any World. On the seventh day it will rise passively into orbit, following the lines of force of the magnetosphere, and it will join the vast conglomerate of the migrating Ring, integrating this into its luminous metastructure, and the Ark will fuse to it upon this collision to become the operative brain capable of piloting the whole thing throughout Infinity, leaving on the Ridge nothing but a micropoint of singularity that will one day be recognizable only to the Vessel.

The Territory-within-the-Territory will attach itself to the former Orbital Ring; the land of the Canadian Shield, as old as the creation of the Earth, will join with the very last machines Humanity knew how to build. The gasoline-powered automobiles and trucks, the cosmodrome facilities, the tubular structures of the Hotel Laika, the Library, the rockets, the capsules, the space stations, the orbiting asteroids, the rocks, the flowers and plants of the Territory—all will be unified by the infinite light.

All this will become a world.

Link knows it. It is the Plan. It is what will be written.

He is the diagram of it. He is what will be part of it until extinction, a hyperluminous extinction, an extinction through which he will be born, finally, as a completely different form of life without the slightest memory of his present “existence,” as if he never existed at all.

He has never existed.

He will be born.

Everything will come together.

The globe of light appeared during the night. Yuri watched it form, slowly, bit by bit. He knows this is the signal. The creation of the Vessel has begun. Maps are being drawn on the Territory; plans are being born in the substance of the World; the infinite light will soon pass into an active phase. Words will finally produce things.

The men of the Territory-within-the-Territory must be warned. The Law must be alerted. Sheriff Langlois must be informed. He wanted to be kept informed.

He does not know yet that this won’t accomplish a thing. He does not know yet that nothing can be changed anymore. You cannot change what has already happened.

For everything is being written in the brain of Link de Nova, the emitter of the globe of light. Everything is being written there; everything, or almost everything, has already been written there.

He is the narrative of what they are living, the narration in act, the invisible narration, the secret machine. Link himself was written in an earlier story, and yet it is also the story Milan Djordjevic completed just in time, during these past few weeks, under unimaginable pressure. Yuri knows that Link is a living metaphor for the paradox of the Word made Flesh; he is its signaling image. He was produced by the narration of Angels. He is a simultaneity in act. He was created by that earlier narrative from before the Fall of the Metastructure, but it is his adoptive father who managed to write, twelve years later, the story that led to his being put in the world. The Anome probably does not know this. The Anome could never have anticipated this. Neohumanity cannot even imagine this.

Thanks to absolute freedom of narration paired with the no-less-absolute necessity of writing, the Library will be able to travel to the Ring almost totally intact, and then toward Infinity; it will become one with the other metamachines of the Vessel.

The manuscript will remain. The Story. The written Singularity.

A single book will remain.

Along with the corpses of all the men who will choose sacrifice.

Like he will do.

The immense structure of light can be seen for dozens of kilometers in all directions. The rumor has spread throughout the Territory with the speed of a virus. Very quickly, the frontier patrols have multiplied. Reports are piling up endlessly on the desks of the bishops and the ethical vigilance officers.

On the second day, the globe of light is racked with indescribable internal movements, variations in intensity, wavelength, and density.

The reports continue to pile up. Patrols are now outnumbered by larger and larger groups of gawkers who have come from all over the Territory to stare at the phenomenon.

The “phenomenon” shines like a sun, day and night.

And things keep happening behind the crown of light.

“When everything is finished, I will enter the Ark and we will join the forming Vessel. I will become the Vessel. And I will also be the point of singularity that remains on the Ridge, the secret signal that will allow it to come back. I will be at the two ends of Infinity simultaneously; I am a quantum singularity, a supercord whose every elementary particle is detectable only in the world of created Matter, though it is a dynamic extension, endless, in all other dimensions. I am the Ariadne’s thread that passes through all worlds, the human luminous station; in me, all light, created and uncreated, comes together infinitely. I am what sees and hears the universe exploding on itself; I am, in fact, a sort of machine, too. But my trap is called ‘poiesis.’”

Wilbur Langlois has already made his provisions. The Law of the Territory will be vigilant to the end—that is, to his own death, to its last etching in his body. The Law will become a martyr. Sacrifice, testimony, illumination. And he has already established it as an iron-clad rule that the members of the local militia, as well as his deputies who have families, will be part of the voyage.

He will not. Like all the single men and women in the Territory who have chosen to guard HMV and Link de Nova to the death.

No obligation. No order. No prescription. Volunteers only. But the Law of the Territory does not only watch over them, it lives in them. The sheriff is barely surprised to realize that all the single men and women are opting for the most unreasonable, the most unthinkable choice—the freest choice, the only real one. Old Lady van Harpel, for example, volunteered immediately, armed with an antique Colt .45 automatic and a Marlin .44 double-barreled rifle topped with a Schmidt & Bender telescopic lens. Lady van Harpel is not the type to change her mind in this type of situation. She made her decision days earlier, and Sheriff Langlois considers this the decisive factor in her freedom, as it is in everyone’s. The Law of the Territory is the shadow of Freedom. It will illuminate the whole Territory. Yuri McCoy and Chrysler Campbell have already become part of his armed force of deputies. Territory Men, thinks Langlois. They will stay. They will all stay to the end.

“Tonight, the first elements of transfinite hypermatter will be in place. I will assemble everything in the city of Humvee; that’s where the Travelers of Infinity should gather. The other structures will come later. The process will take six days in total. Those people that cannot leave should stay on the Ridge, as close to the Ark as possible. Then I will be without the slightest protection. If I die at that moment, the Transmigration will not be able to take place. But after that I can die, in order to finally be born.”

So the chasm has opened, like a traumatic seal to their solidarity, like the inscription of the initial-initiator-igniting act into flesh. The Territory-within-the-Territory is, in its entirety, the prismatic crystal of the experience; it is condensing all the speeds of light now; it is a star that has settled to Earth and will soon depart again.

It is from this primordial separation that the Third Humanity is being born—the Humanity of after the Third Fall—because it is made up not only of those who will travel through Infinity but also of all those who will die so that this can take place.

All civilizations are born from the sacrifice of their greatest members.

*   *   *

Link is the productive diagram of their life, he who was written; he is the transfinite engine of the narrative, the weakest link of the chain and what guarantees the chain’s invincibility. Nothing can be weaker than its weakest link.

Link is the productive diagram; he is what makes the Law of the Territory a gift of the Living, a unique and infinite flux that yet fragments at each singularity as at its point of origin. He is what frames choices and impossibilities, absolute necessities and freedoms that are no less vital. He is the wave that surges from every inference of Beauty, from everything outside of the false natural world, from everything the true world contains of artifice, from everything that gives meaning to the most secret of traps. He is the chemistry of impossible materials, the formal logic of Post-Matter, the biophysics of the metaorganisms assimilating into the transfinite Light. He is the eye that sees and the mouth that speaks, the guitar that sings and the body that dances; he is the machine that captures and records, and the antimachine that emits-illuminates. He is himself the incarnation of a quantum theory of gravitation; his own origin coincides with the moment of the Big Bang, those 10^–43 seconds that followed him and in which everything was absolutely unified; he is the science of light, the science of cognition in action. He is the initial point of the invention of time, space, energy. He is what is happening, what has happened, what will happen.

The Travelers are waiting in what will be the heart of the Vessel; they are waiting to disconnect from the real World created by the overall Simulation it is in the process of becoming; they are awaiting the Cosmos in their metal microcity, which is turning, little by little, into a monad of light.

On the Ridge, a line of armed men is backlit all around the Ark. The last line. They are the Guardians of the Territory-within-the-Territory, the last soldiers, the last true humans. They are the ones who will die so that life can take place again, the ones who will die in order for death to die, too.

And now, who can really describe what is going to happen?

Who will be able to give an idea of what will be the final, blinding act in the completed history of Humanity? And how?

Who knows how to tell the story of the destruction—and, what is more, the Genesis—of a World?

*   *   *

They meet at Bulldozer Park. Yuri walks toward her. He holds out to her one of the antique military kraft-paper envelopes Campbell inherited from his father. Chrysler waits for him a short distance away, his face turned in the direction of the Ridge where the last Guardians of the Territory are gathering.

“I wrote something. For you. Don’t open this letter until you’ve gone. Don’t tell anyone about it—ever. It’s called Grand Junction. It’s like one of the songs Link and I have been writing. When you come back here, thousands of years will have passed. But the Territory will still be here. It will be here to serve as the new aleph point for Humanity, the place where you can build New Jerusalem, the place that will be ready to welcome Him.”

Light is the song of Electricity. Light is the language of all machines. Light has become the Territory. And Light is the boy with the guitar who is the individuation of it. He has become the instrument, the organum. He has become what he is.

“Why not come with us?”

Yuri cannot speak, though his eyes are eloquent. “Because you have to go.”

Link is the event that arises from infinity in action. All the stacked automobiles of Humvee are now simply light forms in movement-vibration-flux; they have become waves, their mass converting into energy that will soon be moving faster than the speed of light. All the heavy metal heaped here has become lighter than helium, but it has never been as visible; mutating toward a state of beyond-matter, it has come infinitely close to every process of human cognition that can observe it.

“If I stay here with the others, you and the Travelers can leave. That’s the way it is. Anomanity will want to prevent what is happening. And we will hold it off long enough for the Vessel to be finished. It’s the Law, Judith. The Law of the Territory. This will be its final intervention.”

She says simply: “Come with me, Yuri. Please. If you don’t, I’ll stay, too.”

Yuri answers without thinking for even a fraction of a second. She does not understand.

“Not only would Sheriff Langlois formally prohibit you from doing that, he would have my total support. And the support of everyone else, too, I’m sure. It’s the Law of the Territory, Judith, don’t you understand? This Law that is about to be extinguished, but which has to shine one last time. You have to leave. Now.”

And Yuri looks at her, hypnotized by her beauty, this beauty he is seeing for the very last time, but that will stay with him until his last breath. Maybe he has the right to a second burst, a final spark, after all.

He takes her face between his hands and lets the glittering energy that flowed between their lips the last time they met happen one more time. His fingers tangle for the second and last time in the night-black mass of her hair. Twice is a lot; usually we have the right to only one life. It is as simple as the formation of a star, as simple as the creation of a man, as simple as the destruction of a world.

Love will tear us apart, he thinks a bit later, as he watches her move slowly toward her family’s mobile home. The Joy Division song inspired the pages written in the envelope he gave her. Only Judith will read it; she will be back here in three thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand years, maybe more. It will be their secret, shared by them alone, between the two ends of infinity.

Yuri half turns and faces the Ridge and the line of the last Guardians of the Territory. Faces his destiny, faces his origins, faces what he is, for once and for all. What he has always been.

Campbell turns to him, his eyes gleaming like one of the Territory’s poisonous plants. The moment has come.

It is their moment. Theirs alone. The moment they were born to live.