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than twenty years, like many industrial facilities in the area, a neural implant tells him knowingly. The postwar world is much like an interminable prewar one; all Unimanity seems resigned to the slow death of the globuscule. The ultimate depletion is so close that each individual thing shines with the intense light of extinction, just as stars glow brightest before going nova, then supernova. Nature may have been pushed aside by ecoglobal planning, but human cities are turning back into jungles: half-petrified virgin forests in the stagnant water of this unified human world, barely distinguishable from what remains of the natural wilderness around them, or from the out-of-control efflorescence running riot in the deserted streets, the silent highways; the empty buildings, shopping centers, and subway stations.
    In these dead cities, cities abandoned by men, nature has become savage again, escaping the automated cycles and engineers of geo-global planning. It is the last vestige of liberty left by technology to the world of
Homo sapiens.
It does not lack a certain tragic beauty.
             
    So,
he is
Sergei Diego Plotkin.
    But who is Sergei Diego Plotkin?
    Why is he here, on this train?
Why am I here, on this train,
he asks himself.
    To kill a man, that is certain. But who? And why? For whom?
With
whom?
    A flying advertisement has just plastered itself to the train window. The intelligent follicle of celluloid has somehow—he has no idea how—found its way here. It is a message from a Catholic station outlawed by the UHU’s Council for Ethical Vigilance and cites the words of the Gospel of John about the Antichrist in small luminescent phrases that tremble a little in the prism of the Securimax™ glass:
He is king of the sons of pride.
    The clandestine prospectus is finally detected by the MagLev™’s internal network, and a small electrostatic discharge breaks its hold on the metaglass. It disappears as quickly as if swallowed by an abrupt depressurization.
    The UHU doesn’t toy with that sort of deviance.
    Plotkin orders a light meal on the compartment’s console; a young Filipino Amtrak employee brings it to him a few minutes later. He swallows the pieces of transgenic sushi mechanically while the console, set to automatic mode, shows him the news on a screen set into the wall opposite him, part of the luxury cabin’s internal network. It is set to CNN-MTV’s
News of the Hour,
and text of the latest headlines scroll laterally by in a translucent gray band while an ethically approved erotic video clip plays in the background; two adolescent girls, barely out of puberty, sing in the rain amid fences and blank walls while an apathetic crowd watches. They are a revival of the group Tatu, a pair of young, Russian, faux-lesbian girls produced by Trevor Horn in the early 2000s. He is certain of all of this, down to the smallest detail, without knowing why.
    ONGOING NEGOTIATIONS FOR THE RATIFICATION OF THE TREATY OF ODESSA REMAIN STALLED OVER THE SAME QUESTIONS, a UHU representative, Mr. Zordaiev, informs us from the edge of the Black Sea. See Hyperpage 12-A for the interview with our special correspondent in Odessa….
    PRISCILLA PRESLEY III AND JENNIFER SLOANE-BARTOW, QUEEN OF AUSTRALIAN WINE, ON THE BRINK OF DIVORCE, says the
Pacific Enquirer.
Click to enter Hyperpage…
    TURKMENISTAN SIGNS AN ACCORD OF COOPERATION WITH TEXAS, New Petroleum Industries Syndicate said yesterday….
    MOROCCAN, LIBYAN, EGYPTIAN, LEBANO-SYRIAN, AND TURKISH TROOPS EN ROUTE TO MARSEILLE TO AID EUROFEDERALIST FORCES IN THEIR FIGHT AGAINST DISSIDENT ISLAMIC GUERRILLAS, Reuters-AP reports….
    ISLAMIC EUROPEAN FORCES HAVE ISSUED A STATEMENT FROM THEIR LONDON HEADQUARTERS THAT THEY WILL NOT ACCEPT ANY GOVERNMENT OTHER THAN ONE THAT IS SUBJECT TO SHARI’A LAW; THEIR BELGIAN AND FRENCH COUNTERPARTS HAVE FOLLOWED SUIT, says our special correspondent in the United Kingdom….
    THE 3,227 UNCLONED CHIHUAHUAS OF FORMER TV STAR OPRAH WINFREY,