Cosmos Incorporated by Maurice G. Dantec Read Free Book Online Page B

color of the Grand-C-Cabs company, and an old Pink Floyd song, “Interstellar Overdrive,” had started up along with the engine. Excellent choice, but it was a remake, not the original; a cover by a robotized Japanese chamber music quartet.
    He had been surprised to discover this knowledge within himself, unaided by the instruction program. Was it part of his original personality?
    The remake wasn’t very good—he was sure of that, in any case—and he eventually asked the robotaxi to either turn down the volume or find another station. A second later, the strains of a Sinatra tune had flowed comfortably through the car.
    Now he is nearing Monolith Hills, where, he recalls, there is a copy of the famous black object from the Stanley Kubrick film.
    “Do you have an exact address, sir?” the robotaxi’s artificial intelligence inquires pleasantly as they approach the off-ramp, in a low-quality digital voice.
    “Hotel Laika, 38010 Leonov Alley,” he answers mechanically, prompted by the instruction program’s memory bloc.
    The Toyota takes the first off-ramp after the long tunnel from which they have just emerged and continues eastward, toward a succession of wooded hills forming a long promontory that rises above the city, along a winding road dimly lit by tungsten streetlamps. He has just enough time to make out a green sign indicating the name of the road—10 South—and several words, phosphorescent in the robotaxi’s headlights, reading:

    Cosmodrome—Grand Junction North: Exit 17
    Monolith Hills, Voskhod Boulevard, Leonov Alley
    To Heavy Metal Valley: Junction Road,
    Nexus Road, Xenon Road
    Drive Safely

    The robotaxi zigzags among the hills, avoiding Voskhod Boulevard “because of traffic; there are road works in progress,” the digital voice explains as it traverses streets bordered by scattered houses, before rejoining the
strip.
Leonov Alley.
    The strip covers a little more than forty thousand numbers on the cadastre. It is around twelve kilometers long, following a sort of natural plateau leveling the tops of the hills, and it is here that nearly all of Grand Junction’s shady and bootlegging activities of all types take place. Just outside downtown and the technological research districts of the northern suburbs, like the sordid neighborhoods adjacent to the aerostation, the Monolith Hills strip serves as a channel for frustration, desire, and crime. It is in a sort of orbit all its own: no longer inside the city proper, but not really outside it either.
    The Municipal Consortium had probably not planned this situation, but neither had it done anything to prevent it. The Monolith Hills strip is easily accessed from the city; numerous roads cut through the wooded hills to connect with the streets that cross the long neon spinal cord.
    The downtown area and its technological suburbs have remained relatively well preserved. They are more presentable to the international media and to financiers, but everyone, including the journalists, knows the Hills are the place to go to get their rocks off.
    The strip is a long, seemingly endless stretch of motels, brothels, bars, nightclubs, sex shops, arenas for violent sport, auditoriums, and neuro-electronic game arcades. A motley crowd throngs the sidewalks and crosses the streets in packs in front of the robotaxi, which can legally do no more than blast its horn. It is a different crowd, though, than the one at the aerostation. But it isn’t the same one that was huddled in the arrival area, either; there it had seemed like some of the people had never even left the confines of Enterprise.
    This was a similar crowd, but it was not haggard with shock, ready to erupt into violence at the slightest provocation. No, this was the aerostation crowd in two, three, five, ten, thirty years.
    Here is the core of Grand Junction’s social security. Here is the jungle. The electric jungle. It is worse than a jungle. It is the secret heart of the city. Death reigns here, a