I turned to face my acumen. The light from Victor Mature’s miner’s helmet dazzled my eyes, but that was probably just the jack’s way of explaining the stars I saw from the bump on my head. The homunculus flew overhead, clutching My Pet Dog’s corpse in his claws. The wetnurse was standing on a stepladder as a waist-deep flood of information spilled into our little world.
“Guess what, gang,” I said. “You’re all fired. I don’t need to work twenty-three point seven hours a day anymore, and neither does anyone else. God will provide.” In headspace, I held up two pieces of miracle bread, and threw them to the floor. Then I fired my acumen agents. With my gun.
The jack removal took longer than I thought it would. The scalpel felt too heavy in my hands; my fingers were too stiff to move. My connection to the jacknet was a distant scream, like a child left behind in a parking lot by his deranged parents. George’s eyes were still open, in spite of the narcotic. What would he be like when he woke up? Would he still be tied into the Godnet, like the monks upstairs? Like me? An overheated Jesus guided my hands, and my thoughts. His face was red, and steam poured from his ears.
The police took my ego agents’ posthumous statements. (Damn backups.) I heard their filing cabinet drawer slam shut and echo. They’d get to my case by the time I was ninety, if I lived that long. My dry cleaning was done and the menu for the next three weeks needed to be planned; provisions needed to be requisitioned. My apartment back in the city wanted to know if it could please water the plants. A personal ad wrote itself for me and begged for my eyeblink signature. Sneaky anarchist magnetizdats nipped at my ankles, demanding attention. Helicopter blades were talking to me, saying “hurry hurry hurry” with the whip of wind. I had a deadline to meet. One deadline a second, every second, for the rest of my life.
(“‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner’ is as powerful for its cadence as it is for its content. Once integrated into the head, it is actually hard to remove. Rather, one begins to receive, the monks say, messages from God,” Kelly said, mimicking the sing-song of the prayer.)
I sent the jacknet a final, very important message, the same one George had sent me. Jesus forgive me, a miserable sinner. I reached behind my neck and blindly disconnected my jack. I was alone, but for the constant prayer on my lips and the love for every man and woman in the world. The Godnet.
* * * *
I ate a sandwich and sat on the hill just outside the monastery, waiting for the helicopter. Everyone in the Godnet ate that sandwich, the two pieces of bread coming straight from George’s miracle—after I brushed the dirt off of them, of course. And I tasted gyros in Cyprus, kimchi in Pyongyang, and injera in Addis Ababa. And I even felt the tickle of a patch here and exhaust-stained breakfast coffee there, from the first jacknetters to be infected with the God virus. Information wasn’t a horrible flood of jingles and logos and unfair trades of wayward seconds of processing time any more; it was a smile, a wave, a breeze, a broken leg. Even the dying felt good, because there was always a birth right behind it.
It was odd, being alone, but not at all scary anymore. It was odd, being one with the world and everyone in it. It was hard, eating a sandwich and incessantly muttering the prayer at the same time. It was nice, though, to know that the Godnet would be giving me food and water and love and a place to live. Miracle bread for everyone. I heard angels’ wings, but they were really only the spinning rotors of the copter.
The trip back. I spoke with the pilot. She had kids. She played the cello. She’d been raped once, at 13, but was healing now, and her lips moved with an invisible prayer. Her jack was cold and nearly dormant, buzzing with low-grade euphoria. We were just in range of the city, and I could already hear the Jesus Prayer—the God virus—in the ear of every poor jacked bastard in town. It was all prayer now; they shut down the news, the soaps, and even the ads. The reporters were too busy taking time off to report on the collapse of the economy, the wine flowing from the public urinals, the lame walking, the stupid finally getting a clue, the kids actually sleeping—really really sleeping and then getting up because it was morning, not because it was time for their shifts. As we flew down into the city, the sun rose into the already-shrinking pool of brown smog that sat atop the skyline like a bad toupee. Morning. Not work or betweenwork or morework. I knew what time of day it was.
Copyright © 2002 Nick Mamatas
* * * *
Nick Mamatas is a New Yorker exiled to Jersey City. His essays on cyberculture, politics, and digital art have appeared in The Village Voice, In These Times, Silicon Alley Reporter, Artbyte, Disinfo.com, and other magazines. His fiction has appeared in Talebones and Speculon. “Northern Gothic,” his first novella, was released by Soft Skull Press in November, 2001. For more about him, see his Web site.
Other Cities #5 of 12: Ylla’s Choice
By Benjamin Rosenbaum
1/21/01
Fifth in a monthly series of excerpts from The Book of All Cities.
Ylla’s Choice is a spherical city of several million. Its bonsai gardeners should be famous throughout the galaxy; its actors orate well; its corridors are clean, and through the shielded glass windows of a marvelous design, the glowing swirl of gas outside is beautiful.
Its citizens continually register their political opinions, and the city reconfigures itself to allow each inhabitant to be ruled according to the system he or she believes in. Almost the only violence in Ylla’s Choice is among the poets, for the Formalists and the Tragicals often come to blows.
It is true that, due to its peculiar situation, the city is of strictly limited size. A less sophisticated polity might require some coercive sort of population control. But in practice, the membership of the Uncontrolled Breeding Party is always a small fringe; the Tragical poets provide a continual advertisement for the virtues of Death; and those who do procreate usually wait until the semicentennial Generation Year, so that their children can go to school together.
The teachers at the Children’s School have found that it is wise not to reveal the particular situation of Ylla’s Choice too soon, or the children may suffer from depression in adolescence—a time when they naturally long for travel, adventure, and upheaval, and yearn to escape their calm and moderate city. Only when the students have understood quantum astrophysics, the dance of topology and time; only when they have understood the war, poverty, hatred, and violence still found—forever found—on places far from Ylla’s Choice; only when they have learned the story of Ylla, whose advances in computational social science allowed for a society free of the evils of history—only then are they told the truth.
They learn that Ylla’s design for a perfect society worked only for a closed system of a certain size. In any open system, according to her simulations, some outside force—war or revolution elsewhere, barbarians at the gates, the plagues and weapons that are the natural result of expansionist societies—would always destroy her dream.
But Ylla found a way to keep her city safe from all that, safe from solar flares and stray comets, safe from any future cataclysm, no matter how great.
The students, when they learn the final lesson of the Children’s School, are taken to the shielded window to look into the glowing swirl of charged gas that surrounds and powers Ylla’s Choice. And there they are shown the marvelous machines that protect their city from the tidal forces below. For Ylla’s Choice is not in orbit: it is falling straight into the beam of the strange pulsar Yoruba-7, into its great burst, not only of electromagnetic radiation, but also of chronons, the quantum particles of time. It is these chronons, surging through the city and its inhabitants, that give the city its leisurely ages of history. Because the chronons so dramatically exaggerate their experience of time, the torrent of energy surging from the chronopulsar appears to the inhabitants of Ylla’s Choice as a gentle and nurturing cloud of light.
The students learn that, on Earth, it is 10:47:58.2734 p.m. UTC, August 22, 2369. And it always will be. For at 10:47:58.2735 p.m. of that same day on Earth, long after their furthest descendants have led full and happy lives in the perfect city, Ylla’s Choice will be torn apart in an instant by the pulsar’s burst.