Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (24 page)

Make way because I’m dying of laughter.

Close to the commune, I hear its song. I’m
terrified. The LSD is wearing off. Damn. I can’t stop, no, I won’t
stop, not for anything in this world, not even to shoot up. I have
to be

AWAKE.

I feel the song echoing around the dome
inside my skull. It calls to me, siren songs, the spell of Ulysses,
the drunkenness of Saint John the Evangelist. I hope you all go to
hell as a group. I hope there’s a place there for me, full time
with paid vacation, but as your jailer, with a cat-o’-nine-tails.
I’m sure Satan will sign me up and give me a contract. I have to
think about something to distract myself, accelerate, accelerate,
the needle jumps like a grasshopper in the speedometer, I have
to...

...think...

...about...

...something...

...else...

Buddhastimulation. Testiculation.
Destination.

Deification.

Once I saw a film about real experiments a
guy did exploring hyperstimulated states of consciousness. He
locked himself in a sensory privation tank for days and took peyote
balls until his brain really began to hallucinate. On one occasion
he believed he had been changed (physically, not figuratively) into
a kind of caveman. Another time, the Lamb of God wearing a deep sea
diving helmet dictated the second part of the Apocalypse, the
Return, in Hebrew at full speed. Then he screwed the Immaculate
Virgin who, afterward, was still the same, Immaculate, but not him.
He was stained for life. His name was placed on the list of the
most wanted by Heaven, where they have his photo pinned on a
bulletin board, with a reward on his head. His story gave me the
creeps.

For more than a decade
I’ve tried to be like this guy, to keep my individuality even at
the cost of my sanity. A faint flame in the eternal darkness, a
candle on a drifting ship flogged by a gale. That’s why I tattooed
fully half my body with a blue snake, to be
unique
. That’s why I experimented
with every known drug and stimulant. That’s why, at the last
moment, I wound up by pure chance at Nicolas Check’s Control
Center. And he introduced me to one of his “cousins,” but a real
one, a blood relative: Miranda.

Check welcomes me into his sanctum sanctorum
of druggies (I’m there again). Someone politically correct might
have exclaimed

HEY KID! GIVE ME A HUG!

but he does it instead of saying it because
acts and not words define people. Check is like that, outgoing,
generally like a Dalí Jesus, a guy with

BLUE JEANS

and a baggie in his hand, who greets you
from his throne on the water of the Red Sea and cordially invites
you to cross over into his world, his intifadas, his crusades
against the Moors, to the religious alienation that can only end in
martyrdom.

Check knows who I am even before I introduce
myself. Something in my cheekbones is from my father, and the chin
is all my mother’s, and a chain reaction in his head reels off the
genetic knot that produced me. And wow! Hey kid, finally, welcome,
we were waiting for you. Cross over the threshold of my nightmarish
life and

GET COMFORTABLE.

Miranda. She’s naked on the beach next door,
taking one of her morning swims. I see her (still in my memory)
leave the waters like Moses if he had forgotten his staff. The two
parts of the sea have fallen over her but they haven’t hurt her,
they’ve only gotten her wet: her brown hair, her freckled skin, her
little breasts, almost childlike, all areola. Her toes sink,
lovely, into the wet sand, the only way to leave footsteps
behind.

I see her for the first time

CRASH BOOM BANG!

whenever a nymph emerges from the seawater,
any smiling naiad gleaming of salt, and the vision of her naked
body is like a compressed psychosis, a catharsis of quantum states,
a shaved pubis that drips salt and foam, a singularity at the end
of the universe made female that reorganizes all my neuronal
connections at will, making my doomed subconscious scream for
help.

Im-pos-si-ble!

I think that I now have the female star for
my life.

And I, like an idiot, fell in love. I don’t
know if it was with the idea that Miranda still hadn’t tried the
epistemolia, that her thoughts were still virgin but not her body
(who knows how many times Check fucked her before telling her that
it was all a lie, that the final Divine Revelation is a joke), but
what’s certain is that I fell in her net like a fresh-faced dreamer
who’d just been born.

Miranda.

The girl with the gentle glance.

The girl with the incurable illness.

The only being in the world who had
developed a natural implant, without surgery, behind her parietal
lobe. She was cursed to have her brain converted into a biomodem
that could fuse with the fucking epistemolia.

The next evolutionary step.

Nature so gorged on dope that it wants to
sign up for the social networks.

My love. I’m trying to save her from her
destiny’s lasting schizophrenia.

The skyscrapers of Madhattan are just ahead.
I can finally make them out after the last curve. Fear, pure fear
hides in them. Terror.

I have to get through the depths of the
immense favela that keeps its prehistoric name, pre-epistemolia,
but I don’t think the truck can handle it. This junk heap dates
back to the time when people still worked, but I don’t think any
war horse on ten wheels could survive the final attack of my
crusade.

No, I’ll have to abandon it in the depths of
the favela where all the detritus falls. Where not even they dare
to go.

Check is waiting for me. He says Miranda is
dying and the last gasps of her individuality are dissolving with
every second that passes. And I’m the only thing that can save
her.

I’m worried about the way he uses this
expression, this impersonal “thing” instead of the more familiar
and human “person.” Maybe he only thinks of me as a thing, an
instrument. Another part of his medical arsenal to extirpate the
epistemolia, the lobotomization of the human social radar
screen.

If that’s true, I welcome his plan, and I
don’t care what it involves. The only thing that matters to me now,
the only thing that makes me feel human, is the remote possibility
of saving Miranda. To grab idiot nature and show it where it can
put its final demented evolutionary step.

I park the truck (that is, I crash its
thousand tons of fury and ten wheels bathed in the blood of skins)
in the depths of the favela, in a mountain of shit. I take the
shotgun and get out of the cab. I look up.

The skyscrapers.

They’re up there, I know it. I can sense
them. The final injection, I take out the packet, I do a seppuku
with it in my arm. The venom, sweet venom, begins to flow down
through the arteries, down, down, down, accumulating inertia,
getting faster and faster. Running red lights. Pushing away the
echoes of the sleepers’ song.

The entire Milky Way

EEEEXPLOOOODES

before my hallucinating retina. Protect
yourself from the shock wave of my brain, kid.

Hi, it’s me again. The one and only. I’m
here.

I load the sawed-off shotgun with a
movie-like, epic click-clack!, spinning it in one hand. I load,
shoot, and load again, one less node of sleeping meat in this
world. One cell less in the Great Organism to worry about.

I don’t know if it’s the buzz from the acid
or all the rage I’ve accumulated inside, but fuck, I’m dying to
start to deliver.

3: I Like You

I climb, I fear, I tremble.

I climb through the shacks of Madhattan,
through the piles of feces, through the vines of burned fiber optic
that used to convey what was foolishly called “the salvation of the
world.” I have my sights set on the objective, a suitcase with
miraculous medicine in one hand, the definitive antidote against
the definitive evil in the other hand.

Check’s sanctuary is up there, in the least
probable spot, in the technological crossroads from which the new
guru of individuality is trying to give birth to a technology to
fight the epistemolia. Without spectacular results so far.

I feel like a cross between Charles Bronson
(an old star in the ultraviolent movies of my youth) and Tarzan.
Tarzan of the apes. No, Tarzan of the turkey, cold turkey, which
gives me wings and takes me flying to

God, a skin at ten o’clock straight ahead,
BANG, I spit fire from my barrel, a comfortable recoil on the
shoulder, brains that fly and hit the wall, ha ha, three points,
partner!

the place beyond the point of no return just
west of the West. Concentrate, kid, concentrate for Yahweh and
Zarathustra and Buddha and all the other ancient traffickers of
half-truths. Concentrate so you don’t fall or you’ll become a
pretty postage stamp on the roof on the truck

Another one on the left, click-clack, BANG
BANG, an arm, two legs, his metaphysically high face looking at me
as if he were seeking forgiveness for not having understood the
joke! Ha ha, one less!

They rarely move as a group anywhere unless
they’re hungry or one of their corpuscles has been hurt and is
constantly transmitting pain to the rest, and they have to cure it
if they can or else amputate the corpuscle.

But things like that, abandoned to their
free will, have degenerated into authentic horrors of collective
humanity.

Dragging themselves through the labyrinths
of the favelas are monsters created by the fusion of minds and
bodies, animated nightmares worthy of medieval bestiaries, which
must be exterminated at all cost. Human centipedes, for example,
who snake in silence in search of more links to add to their
delirious chains. Beasts born in the spontaneous evolution of the
sleepers, united by chains of respiration and hunger. But they’re
not alone.

There are also the greased meats tied
together by chains of internal excretion, one in the mouth of
another in an endless cycle. Or for me the most appalling of all,
the starfish: Nodules of six or more members united by the head,
their brains combined into a single thing, a multifaceted soup of
neurons that hopes to reach the summit of single thought.

Monsters of post-modernity. Human feces in a
world that doesn’t matter to them anymore.

I run into one of these starfish when I’m
starting to believe that nothing can stop me. Seven naked bodies of
different ages and sexes sewn together by a crazed puppeteer at
head height, a god that had a welding torch and didn’t know what to
do with it.

The starfish looks at me
with fourteen eyes and no doubt wonders what this lone prey with a
blue serpent tattooed on his body will do as he wanders around. A
sign of identity, how does he dare! Blasphemy, blasphemy! Let’s all
get the heretic, at the count of
arrgh
!

I shoot. I thank my personal divinity that
shotgun pellets cover an area and not a single line, so I get most
of them. The starfish writhes in pain, bleeding, losing several
members. The rest screech, dying, pushing the mental button, don’t
like! don’t like! which lets them expel their damaged members. The
miraculous button that denies pain. Damn, by the Virgin’s panties,
I didn’t expect to give them this pleasure.

Another shot and I’ll run out of ammunition.
I point at the nucleus, the encephalic mass. One explosion of bone
and what lies inside comes out like a jet and stains the ceiling of
the shack, a ceiling roasting in the sun. The encephalic mass, the
brain soup, begins to boil.

Click-clack and shit, I know I’m out of
rounds. Up, that’s my only chance, up and to the right, in the
direction of Never-Never. There’s salvation, Check’s sanctuary.

Then I hear another shot.
It wasn’t me. The skins don’t know how to use weapons, so it has to
be another
individual
. Another prey.

I look up. Check, waiting
for me in his lookout, a repeating rifle in his hands. Hey, buddy,
come on up. And I say sure, fuck, what do you think I’m trying to
do? And he gives me his hand and empties his magazine into what
remains of the starfish, reducing it to a pile of trembling bodies
that until this moment thought they were a part of something
bigger, the dream of the infrahuman
gestalt
.

“
You’re late,” he says by
way of greeting. A bitter smile writhes like a wound on his lips.
He’s let his beard grow and I’m sure he hasn’t found the comb I
lent him years ago.

“
I had to come a long
way,” I say. But now it doesn’t matter. I’m here. I’m alive. I’m
still me.

What a rush. Lucy has left the sky, stealing
the diamonds.

I enter by the Central Acid Control main
door (two mounted sheets of concrete and asbestos). There, as if he
were the guardian spirit of Camelot itself, Check guards the
incorruptible body of Miranda.

I see her lying on a cot, dressed in a kind
of tunic that unites her with ancient myths, a Helen of Troy who
isn’t there, instead she’s in Madhattan, eyes shut, lids down like
the curtain of an old theater where the magic ended a long time
ago. She seems to be asleep. No, she seems... dead.

That thought terrorizes me with almost
physical pain, but Check quickly calms me down.