Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (23 page)

Victor Conde is a prolific
and multi-faceted author who has written fifteen science fiction,
fantasy, and horror novels. Notable among them are
El tercer nombre del emperador [The Third Name of
the Emperor]
, published by Equipo Sirius
in 2002;
Mystes
[Mystes]
, published by Minotauro in
2005;
El teatro secreto [The Secret
Theater]
, published by Poarnaso in
2008;
Hija de lobos [Daughters of
Wolves]
, published by Minotauro in 2011;
and
Crónicas del Multiverso
[Chronicles of the Multiverse]
, published by Minotauro in 2010.
Crónicas
won both the Minotauro
Prize and the Ignotus Prize, which is presented by the Spanish
Association of Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror. His only
collection of short stories so far is
El
libro de las almas [The Book of Souls],
published by Erídano in 2010. He is a member of Nocte, the
Spanish Association of Horror Writers.

Conde has written in
practically every genre in speculative literature, including
hybrids, such as hard and metaphysical science fiction, adventure,
classic and dark fantasy, horror, steampunk and zombies. Notable
among his young adult books are
El dragón
estelar [The Stellar Dragon]
, published by
Timun Mas in 2007; and the
Heraldos de la
luz [Heralds of Light]
trilogy, published
by Hidra. His short stories have appeared in most genre
publications in Spain and Latin America. His 2011 short
novel
Oniromante [Dreamlover]
inaugurated Planeta Publishing’s new collection
of digital books, Scylaebooks.

“Light a Lone Candle” is a
risk-taking short story that fearlessly explores the limits of
narrative language, while its background reveals a profound
criticism of social networks in their extreme evolution. It was
inspired by an article published in a scientific research
magazine.

1. Like

Drive. Drive, one more
line. Another little barrier to nowhere disappears under the
fender. A slow-motion parade of ants photographed by a camera with
the shutter open. White-painted ants stretched by time —lines in
the middle of the highway.

Drive.

Arrive. I must arrive.
Miranda is waiting for me. Well, not for me —really for a miracle
that could come from anywhere, anywhere, including heaven.
Miranda’s injured. Miranda’s dying. Miranda is alone and the world
wants to swallow her up the same way it’s already swallowed up so
many things. It wants to absorb her —no, I mustn’t think about
that, I mustn’t remember the world. Miranda and I, by God, just
two. One and a half is a multitude.

The image of myself is reflected in the rear
view mirror... and yes, I see someone who only wants to be me. I
don’t hear the world yelling. Everything outside the window of the
damned truck can stay out there, far away, in slow motion, passing
lazily and tinted cobalt blue by the window, the

COLLECTIVE

of sleepers waiting to
attack. To add me to the statistics, one more, one less, to put
words into my mouth, feelings into my heart, dreams into my future
—but not me. I don’t want that. I don’t want to disappear into the
mass. I flick on a lighter, a little miracle of physics hiding in
an alcohol flame that heats the dust in the bottom of a beaker.
A
mystic
vapor
begins to rise in the driver’s compartment.

I’ve never been so afraid.

A woman lunges out onto the highway, leading
three children by the hand. One of them is crying, and the rest
join in, infected. They’re not one person or four, they’re a group
entity, a single thought: I like it. Like. Like, their Buddha-faces
say, flying on an acid ship. They have no independent personality.
They lost that a long time ago on the wings of epistemolia.

What a joke!

Epistemolia devoured them, leaving only a
carcass to be filled when other group entities are nearby. Anxious
for opinions, feelings, eager for a will to tell them what to do,
where to go, why they should go on breathing, what to do with their
free time, and what their sad lives should be like.

Without other people nearby, they’re
nothing, just empty carcasses. That could happen to me if I’m
careless. No, I won’t get close. I close the window. Accelerate.
ChangegearsdamnedfastbyGod!

I shout

GET OUT OF HERE, SKINS!

and my wheels go smack-boom as I run over
one of the children, one of the empty extensions of the group. I
haven’t hurt it much. The rest of them are still together and
functional. It’s as if an adult lost a finger in a night drowned in
memories, acid, formaldehyde. It doesn’t hurt them much, or that’s
what they’ve told me. I want to believe it.

None of them weep, but in my rear view
mirror, they all look like they’ve been caught in the middle of a
motion they’ll never finish in the epistemolia.

Pathetic.

Hurry, hurry, I have to get there before
night. Miranda is waiting for me, and she won’t hold out much
longer. The miracle is in the suitcase I stole from the New
Holocaust collective when I stopped for gas. God, may I never have
to get close to one of their cities again. I can’t stand the idea
of imagining them inside those glass buildings, waiting, oozing
anxiety, eating their own sweat and blood shared via tubes in a
hundred extra circulatory systems. Masses of meat, mountains of
sweat, hungry mouths, pulsing veins begging someone to stimulate
their pleasure centers.

In the cities.

Piles and piles of them.

Heaped one on top of another like living
blankets, signed, sealed, and delivered as the symbols of the
sunset of a species.

Sleepers.

In the darkness.

Sharing everything, EVERYTHING, even their
souls, the untouchable, the nonexistent.

Sharing what doesn’t exist.

They scare me.

The gas tank needle still hasn’t hit the
little picture on the gauge, that one that blinks red as a heart
when the engine begins to die. The mysterious voice on the radio
chants its spell:

“
...the holy
counterstrike, the holy counterstrike, the holy
counterstrike...”

It’s been doing that for days. I’m beginning
to think it’s a recording.

A sign on the right, the next exit, two
kilometers (one meter less, two meters, three meters), a sign that
tells me the name of the sinkhole of damnation where I’m
heading:

MADHATTAN.

Madhattan, the biggest concentration of
shared flesh ever. The place where they invented the original
software. The last place on earth where I want to be.

Where I have to go, I have to get there if I
want to save Miranda.

The last injection is losing effect. I
return to reality slowly, step by step. Every millimeter of this
fall increases the danger index by one degree, adding up to a total
possibility of one and a half that they’ll spot me and come for me.
That they’ll begin to suggest crazy, stupid ideas, push the friend
button, like, like, I likey, as if we were brainless babies.

And this, damn it, is what we already
are.

I don’t know how I could
have fallen in love with her. I met her in Joint Paradise, that
pervert Nicolas Check’s refuge. Or Central Acid Control, as we
liked to call it. The strays were there, trying to immunize
themselves against fusing into one single mind, but few could. You
can’t have the fucking implant behind your frontal lobe (What a
lie, the biggest swindle in the history of
syphilization
!) and refuse to hear
the call of the collective.

You can’t cover ears located inside your
skull unless you slice it open with a scalpel and sink your hands
into your encephalic mass. Big Bob, a friend at Central Acid
Control, tried it once. Big Bob told us that he’d found a way to
isolate himself from mind fusion. Big Bob is a drooling vegetable
now.

While the wheels still stain the pavement
with the blood of that mindless child, my mind still exists (Yes, I
want to believe it. No, I’m sure. Wait... I can even prove it!) and
without permission it takes off into the distant past, bounces into
the era of the dinosaurs, and hops to a time well before the Big
Bang, more or less the moment when I was born. Which makes me think
of the idea, epistemologic or not, of death.

They say your whole life passes before your
eyes when your mind knows it’s going to die. I’ve been doing that
little by little for years, one scene at a time, because I’m
convinced that no fucking way will I have the time to reproduce my
long, complex life in a tenth of a second. That’s just physics. Not
even time for the “greatest hits” of my life.

That’s why I do it, that’s why I’m watching
a bit of the movie at a time, thirty unedited years and without a
stop to go to the bathroom, so that when the moment of my death
arrives

(and I feel it closing in)

only the final credits
will be left —and the surprise scene that sometimes comes at the
end.

That way I’ll have time to make the cliché
come true, and I can concentrate on admiring the damned fucking
tunnel.

Death. What to say? Hi, honey, pleased to
meet you.

I’m arriving at my
parents’ town years ago, before everything went to hell (photo),
getting off the bus, looking like a stranger and complaining about
a backache (photo, put your arms down so they don’t cover your
face), and entering the nearest bar to air out the canary cage
—funny to use that expression from the island where I was born! I
suppose I’ll have to order something or the owner will give me a
dirty look. No, sir, I’m not going to make the bowl dirty or pee on
the ground. I’ll be good. Give me a cup of coffee with cream, no,
wait, that’s not the cheapest thing you have. A black decaf, yes, a
few cents less, we’re in a recession (photo).

The scenery in this memory is just like one
of my folks’ photos.

I want to remember...

We left the island when I was a baby, so
unless some sort of an atavistic species memory exists in my mind
or a closed-circuit television in my subconscious, I can’t recall a
thing. But the feeling remains... yes, the feeling, this
undefinable thing that doesn’t fit in the explicable (the
Unspeakable!) so we happily stick it inside the word “thing,” and
it fills me with things that aren’t memories but aren’t lies
either, something midway between them. Yeah, sure, of course, the
foam on the waves, the ships, the lighthouses, and a lot of this
isn’t imaginary and suddenly takes life, is made flesh, a
superturbo Jesus effect, the “incarnation” of childhood
desires.

Is this where my travels have taken me? It
has to be because it’s left its mark on my back.

I avoid a rabbit wiggling its nose in the
middle of the highway. Cute. It deserves to live. It hasn’t fused
with millions of brain-damaged cousins. It’s still a unique being.
It deserves to live, live! so I avoid it, skid, almost hit it. I’d
rather die than kill another single unique entity. Smack! I kiss my
ring finger. Take that, Kant! Some day I’ll understand your cryptic
books!

I have no living relatives. My grandparents
died years ago when I was fifteen years old, maternal and paternal,
all at once. It’s like my family’s warrantee or residency permit
for this galaxy suddenly expired. It scared me. All on the same
day, all natural deaths. That gives me something to think about.
Maybe all of us, even my generation, are doomed to kick the bucket
soon, without warning, when the warrantee in my genes expire.

Brrr. F...r...i...ghtening.

Just when I thought that this was the fate I
wanted to share with the epistemolia (just to fuck it), I met...
Miranda.

To destroy all my creeds, my Our Fathers, my
dreams and my urge to avenge myself on the world.

To tell me with her gentle glance and tender
smile that, yes, come on, there is or can be something more,
something that we don’t necessarily have to share with eight
hundred million other people.

Something that will be just ours, something
the rest can’t rummage through or stick their stinking noses
into.

Ideas like that don’t exist in this fucking
shared world anymore.

I’m here without you. You left without even
giving me a kiss. I hate you but I can’t stop loving you madly. God
must be pissing Himself with laughter. I build puzzles on the floor
of the hall, porcelain stained with red giant dust.

.Cosmic...cimsoC.

Cosmic sounds.

Sorry, kid: You learned the secret too
soon.

2: Unlike

Hyperstimulation. Metastimulation.
Ontostimulation. Acidification.

“Is there anyone else out
there? Someone who is
something
?” I shout out of the
window. I hope that just one voice will answer. But there’s nothing
besides the wind licking the metal of my truck as it speeds
along.

How lucky I am. Deep down, I really don’t
give a damn.

Another fork in the road, another left-lane
exit.

I feel a sleeping commune nearby. They’re
there, hidden in bomb-proof subterranean refuges, waiting for
someone to join their crazed and depraved collective. Another
amoeba that sells its mind for a pinch of group understanding,
group love, group sex. Show me your photos and I’ll show you mine.
There can’t be sexual excitement when all of humanity has fused
into a single individual. Sex has become a sort of planetary
onanism. Now you don’t make love to someone else, you do it to
yourself with another face.