Cosmos Incorporated Read Online Free

hour on its magnetically cushioned monorail. Such speed was an achievement twenty-five years ago. Soon it will seem like a miracle; after that, it will seem impossible.
    During the voyage, the rest of his memory implants, which have remained deliberately inactive until now, will release their stores of information and thus complete the making of this Man who has come here to kill another man.
    The first coil begins to unwind, and he learns that his Russian cortical nanocomputer, bought from the mafia, is a pirated derivative of the “secret defense” neuroprobe used by the combat team controllers of the United American Republics’ Aerospace Force. Logically, the technology went unrecognized by the astroport’s security systems. It passed the test. It is essential—and quite fascinating.
    The next thing he learns is that, over the next few days, this bio-computer will autodevelop within his nervous system, giving him a complete ensemble of neuroportable weapons. The modifications will take place at night while he sleeps; he won’t feel a thing.
    The World
—in.
The World
—out.
His personality autoforms. Cortical
bootstrap
under the tungsten ramps of the magnetic train’s corridors. He is Sergei Diego Plotkin. He just arrived at Windsor’s international astroport en route to Grand Junction. He is carrying clandestine technology. And he must execute a man.
    The compartment door slides open when he swipes his UniPol-approved intelligent travel card. He sits down in the window seat registered under his name.
    Immediately, one of his nanomemory implants issues a warning.
The Order has ensured that your first-class, high-security, four-seat compartment will be empty. Do not talk to anyone, except in case of force majeure, during your trip to Grand Junction.
    He has no idea which Order this refers to, but no matter. He knows that he will be traveling alone.
    The wide glass windows give an expansive view of the world outside: an unlit, iron-gray sky supports the horizon-scratching high tension wires of Hydro-Québec; it forms an ashy dome over the remnants of an industrial-age aluminum city, long abandoned, with an enormous, oxide-scorched sign bearing the letters ALCAN on a rust-streaked blue triangle. The scene hovers in the foreground for an instant. A deserted road cuts a rectilinear line through its center.
    The scenery of southeastern Canada unrolls in fleeting, overlapping lines, intercut by successive flashes of recollection, at almost three hundred meters per second.
    The plains are blue in the twilight air. They quiver gently all the way to the banks of Lake Ontario, whose waves roll away beyond the line of the horizon, disappearing into the pale, green-lit sky.
    Childhood. The courtyard of a dilapidated tenement for career soldiers, where the idle children of an unpaid army play soccer in the overheated August air.
    “Boris!” cries one of the children. “Pass, Boris, pass!”
    “Sergei, are you crazy?” replies the echo of another voice.
    The second voice whirls in the glittering emptiness of a Catholic-school afternoon. It is a Catherine wheel of metallic spokes shrieking in tandem effort, while a ribbon of gray asphalt, seeming to fill every inch of space, unwinds in a long stone-colored spool.
    Here he is, riding his old bicycle through the suburbs of Novosibirsk. He is twelve or thirteen years old. Tall metal chimneys, grouped in enormous tubular polypods, jut into the sulfur-colored sky. Petrochemical factories send their undulating flares toward the horizon like banners of war in an industrial crusade already lost. He is a Russian child; it is the beginning of the twenty-first century. He knows his country squandered everything during the preceding century. He knows his people are slowly disappearing. He knows that in this downtrodden world, big dreams don’t have a chance.
    Objective vision: an unused electronuclear power plant on the Ontario–New York state border. It has been abandoned for more