The Vatican Games

by Alejandra Guibert

  It was clear that the alarmist statements made by The Other One concerning the water were not the key to the suicides. Since the World Government had increased fluoridation and inoculation levels, Galo had installed an illegal filter. Water in all its stages was in the hands of the World Government. From collection, treatment and supply, to consumption. It was decreed that water was the most valuable of all goods for the human species. It was also the most strictly controlled, not only as a defence against past dangers, but for future prosperity. The eugenics programme inoculated water with nanotechnological vaccines for people’s neuroprotection. Labelled by the World Government as daily ‘food’, they were delivered to every home without charge in the crystal clear drinking water. They provided immunisation against basic bacterial and viral diseases, including some types of cancer, as well as immunization against anxiety, anger, drug addiction. ‘Cognitive enhancement accessible to all for work and play’, the giant screens repeated endlessly.

  She looked at the empty chair. It was where Galo sat when preparing lessons on the membrane. The image of the chair became muddled in random flashes. Vera did not know where the images came from. They were unconnected to each other, repetitive, as when, as a child, Galo’s image came to her and drew her into the woods. In that boundless afternoon after which they would never be separated. Once again her visions took her to him. What did not make sense were the interspersed images. The empty chairs at two terminals in the processing room resurfaced in her memory as if they were the same chair. It was impossible not to notice the space among the hundreds of closely aligned terminals. She had seen them from Zillo’s office at the last weekly meeting.

  Her days were now spent allowing herself to be flooded by meanings brought to her by the death of both Galo and her mother; those that concerned their personal life histories. Although it was impossible for her to understand what those lives or those deaths carried with them, Vera did not want the path she chose to depend on eventualities. If there was anything she needed to understand, she would do so with all her senses. And with the awareness of that self which she strove to preserve.

  Being alone had never been a problem for her. This time her thoughts linked together to chain her within the deepest kind of loneliness. They conspired to bring long forgotten mistakes to the surface. The present would reinterpret decisions made in what was now painfully obviously a past life. Galo and Vera would be no more. In hindsight, the right decisions of the past were now the cause of her misfortune. One decision above all now settled on her conscience with piercing insistence. It appeared to her as an unbearable mistake. When Vera had learnt she was pregnant, thoughts of her mother would not leave her. She could not chase away the comparisons that kept coming to mind. Her mother had given birth to her, even when she had been raped. Alina had never doubted. Without being paradoxical, her pregnancy with Vera had rescued her. The scarce days of her youth had been filled with a reason. Although she had not known it, the herculean task of saving Vera had been placed in her hands.

  Vera, on the other hand, had been blessed with a good life like very few others. Now her secret had become a burden unshared; the meaning of her secret abominable, given the lives she had lost. Vera screamed in her dark bed. The child she had not wanted to bring into this world. The world she found so abhorrent had defeated her. It mocked her contempt. So it was not good enough for a child of hers? Neither would it be for her own existence, withdrawn from the reality into which she had been delivered. Even if she did not want that child, the world needed it.

  Not long after they had moved together, Galo and Vera had conceived without any help from the fertilization scheme. The weight Vera felt now having lost a baby was not on her conscience. It was having missed the possibility of holding on to Galo through his child; Galo who had been as fortunate as she was. He had left her on her own. He had left her with nothing.

  She recalled her initial surprise at the proof of her pregnancy between her fingers. The result: positive. Without any reservations, a new life was germinating. Galo and Vera had looked at each other differently with a look that was free of the conscience of the world. That night they had held each other in a tight embrace as though wanting to merge into each other’s bodies. As though trying to remake matter for a complete fusion of what they were made of. As if it were a miracle. They were going to have a baby. In repeating that idea it began to take on other meanings. Leaving their surprise in the past. Spoiling the excitement little by little. They were going to have a baby. Each reiteration dispelled the magic a little more like a fine cloud. With each minute that passed, conscience invaded more of their space. Taking over the place held by the initial instinct. Vera, who saw things clearly, could only see a murky hole where the future seemed to close in. That was almost like giving up her own child to other voices, other plans. They would be expectant with predatory yearning. The ranks of technology at the service of science. They would be testing her -like the tests her mother had told her about in those brief lines in her notebook- this time to discover the secret of life. Galo and Vera were joint creators of a wonder, spontaneous fertilization an amazing event worthy of analysis. However hard she tried, Vera could not imagine any other future. She had infected Galo with the certainty of her predictions. Galo, who had resisted, allowed himself to be persuaded, in spite of his intuition for life telling him the opposite. Together they had decided to give up the miracle. The deeper significance would not be revealed until the end.

  If the Department of Health were to find out, they would lose everything. It was no longer possible to get RU-486 at every chemist. It was strictly delivered under supervision by the Ministry of the Interior to very few clinics. The unauthorised use of the drug merited the harshest punishment. Exceptionally the authorities went with individual cases of a request for abortion. Galo and Vera had evaded the bureaucracy which would have denied them a termination of pregnancy. Galo had at last managed to buy the pill. It had taken him an unexpectedly long time. Between innumerable false trails, bogus online traffickers and the danger of the authorities breathing down his neck. By the time Galo found a reliable source, nine weeks had passed. Vera’s physical reaction was violent and painful. The emotional cost was greater than they had imagined. Galo’s fear had been of losing Vera. Now Vera had lost him.

  She had once again survived. She was so like her mother, whom she sensed more than ever. She had seen the world like a factory, uninterested in life. She was right. So what? Her mother had given birth to her in the middle of death and despair. Vera’s world could not be any worse than that one. Now she knew it was not. The world without Galo was worse than any other world. In the darkness of the living room, lying on the sofa, unable to enter the room where she had known such happiness, Vera was also somewhat like that uninterested world.

  She had stood by doing nothing. She had not understood that Galo had a foot in each world. She regretted not being able to tell him. If only they had had the baby. Perhaps they would have been able to turn a new page. Days and nights became unusually long. In a second everything had changed. Her world had become as veiled as how she imagined her mother’s had been. Vera had been abandoned by her moon. She put up no resistance to going through the terrible darkness brought by seeing the darkness of others. In order to understand one’s own.

  She allowed unknown shadows to touch her in the harsh desert where she suddenly found herself. During the first quarter of the moon she started to feel her muscles reviving. As if drop by drop the thaw cleansed her inside and out. She gradually opened her eyes to the silver light that was touching her once more. She opened out slowly to the nocturnal beams that entered the room to wake her from a journey from which she had to return. Her time had not yet come. She must return to shine in other spaces.

  The electronic voucher Carda had given her was still on the table, next to the box she had been left by her mother. She picked it up and threw it into the trunk. The trip had expired but where she had been was far more exceptional and nec
essary. She put the notebook back in the bottom of the shoebox. She added each of the items in the order in which her mother had put them away. Her finger traced the image of her mother from her head to her feet before she put the photograph in the box too. She flattened each of the sides of the box to reduce the space and make a lid for it. Did the origin of her flesh matter? Did knowing it make any difference? She had spent her first few years in a convent surrounded by tenderness. Kind, generous women had nurtured her almost in silence. She had felt loved. She had felt no need to ask herself any questions. Now she had to be patient with the answers that would come in time. She might not have been able to bury her mother, but she could create a place to say goodbye to her. Her own place, where she would leave her little treasures. Next to Galo. As if keeping guard over them.

  PART VI

  All afternoon Vera tried to meet Carda in the corridors, the projection room, Cybersecurity, the control room, the entrance to the building. What she would not do was knock on his door. She passed it a dozen times and another dozen she opened hers just to poke her head out and wait for him to emerge. It was almost as if she were being made to pay for the times she had avoided him. If he was on-screen, he was in the building. She was just waiting for the moment to engineer a chance encounter. The day wore on without her having heard or seen him. Without being able to justify a minute longer of her allocated time, at the end of the afternoon Vera slowly went through the security checks, one by one. She closed her screen and prepared to leave the office. She opened the door once more. The silence as she went past Carda’s office still denied her the possibility of an encounter. Once downstairs she approached the guard at reception.

  ‘Have you seen Carda leave?’

  The guard looked straight ahead as if he knew and did not want to tell her.

  ‘Do you know if Carda’s been by to…’

  ‘Did you want to see me?’ Carda’s voice made her jump.

  ‘No… of course. I haven’t seen you today.’

  ‘Shall we go?’

  Vera walked alongside him, finding no excuse to chat. She clammed up and remained silent, as so often happened in his presence. When they got to the corner where they would go their separate ways, she managed to break the silence.

  ‘Before leaving for Borneo I saw two empty terminals from Zillo’s office. Another one this week.’

  Carda stopped. Without changing direction, he barely turned his head.

  ‘Yes, those vacancies have been filled. This week’s will soon be filled too.

  ‘Why did those operators leave?’ Vera could not find a less direct way to ask.

  ‘They usually change company. It’s a regular problem we have.’ Vera could not fail to notice the irritation in his voice. ‘Cybersecurity have already checked the modular systems. There has been no leak of information.’

  ‘Of course.’ It was clear to Vera that this was none of her business. She lacked any pretext for further questioning.

  ‘See you tomorrow.’ Carda continued on his way, leaving Vera disconcerted.

  If there was anything to be understood from the images bewildering her, it was clear that she shouldn’t ask Carda anything regarding the company’s employees, particularly given his odd answer to her question. Vera had not heard of any desertion of operators over the past few months. The zeal with which information was protected in the games industry did not give her any leeway to investigate.

  There was no way she could get around the security checks, even if she could decipher the codes to access staff records. The measurement would alter the quantum system. It would be logged as an intrusion into areas she was not authorised to access. Vera had been born when security systems had failed. Like invisible wires fencing everything in, new mechanisms now flourished in a compact network of global intercommunication. At the same time as Vera’s healthy nervous system was developing networks were filling in elusive spaces like swollen veins. Security services had unlimited access to citizens’ data. From the millions of cameras to the databases. Security was a vast mattress on which big bosses slept peacefully thanks to the equilibrium among states. On the street, minor crimes had become sporadic events. Almost all of them acts of madness or recklessness. Anyone could become a suspect. Cameras alerted security to any movement that strayed from predictable patterns of public behaviour. Sensors picked up noises in excess of certain decibels. The paranoia commonly felt in public spaces was not merely the result of intrusive cameras. A culture of mistrust had flourished after the cataclysm.

  The commonest crime took place behind closed doors at a terminal. Cyber pirates used phishing sites to garner information. Stealing bank details and taking the identity of employees in order to access company information were severely punished. For many the punishment was no match for the enormous rewards offered. With PIX, the most advanced interception program, black boxes connected to the internet linked online information for analysis. Once on the mother server of each government, they interconnected with the Mother Hub. In spite of the high success rate of the cybernetic police, piratechnology was advancing in strides. It forced the Anti-Cybercrime Department to constantly keep one step ahead of malware creators in order to neutralise new forms of intrusion.

  At the same time, analytical systems ensured employees’ well-being. Employees were symbiotically linked to their terminals, every press on the keyboard monitored, its intensity measured through sensors recording the user’s pulse, galvanic skin response, brain signals. Each facial expression was explored on-screen. The company offered support to tense or tired employees. It rewarded them if they were satisfied or, even, happy. Meanwhile each terminal logged the actual work done by an individual. More than ten percent of time lost was electronically deducted from their salary, dispensing with charts and bureaucracy. Working full time without any breaks was rewarded. Punishments or rewards did not interfere with the basis of working life. The hours of the short working day were easily outnumbered by those spent on leisure. There were generous incentives. Rewards were output directly to the terminals with the anticipated audio warning. The ping signalling a bonus was a welcome sound, similar to the buzzer used for the prizes awarded in games. The excitement of recompense for effort.

  A daily quota for Internet access was a way for companies to avoid the need to block employees from using it at work. Once exceeded, daily access was automatically cut off. With each terminal opening on recognition of the operator’s iris, the link between operator and terminal deepened, from their voice, to messages, replies. The terminal knew everything, gave everything, rewarded everything. It also demanded unconditional dedication.

  With all websites registered on the Central Unit, control programs monitored any unusual activity. The cyber police would be aware of any breach. The world was a secure place. For the first time citizens were provided with the security they wanted for their leisure. With biometric cards, automatic recognition of number plates, identification sensors, location of mobiles, electronic travel cards – a fingerprint database at every airport in the world. Everybody was safe provided it was known who they were and where and how they lived, worked and played.

  Vera waited for operator 324 outside the building. He worked at the terminal next to the one which had become vacant that week.

  ‘Do you know his name?’

  ‘His name, no. Some of his avatars. In Cf he’s Conde90.’

  ‘Do you ever play together?’

  ‘We sometimes meet on-screen to compete. He’s much more advanced than I am. No offence, but I prefer Islamic World. It’s more user friendly. For him there’s nothing better than Cf.’

  ‘When did you last play against him?’

  ‘The day before he left. I didn’t see him on-screen anymore.’

  ‘Do you know why he left?’

  ‘I thought he liked it here.’

  ‘Do you know where he lives?’

  ‘No. Has he done something wrong?’

  ‘Do you know 151 personally? He also left his
terminal more than two weeks ago.’

  ‘Conde90, and Roco55, that’s 151. He was always on screen with Cf. I don’t know his name.’

  ‘What about 314? He also left.’

  ‘Yes. He was in my column. I don’t know him either. They were very advanced Cf players.’

  ‘Do you know his avatar too?’

  ‘Vals009. Now if you don’t mind, I’m expected elsewhere. It’s the on-screen Street Marathon tournament.’

  Sparse as the information was, it revealed that the three operators were linked by their choice of entertainment and their decision to leave the company. She needed to find the common denominator. Though she did not know why she was seeking these answers like tiny pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, thousands of them, with Vera unable even to hazard a guess as to their final composition.

  She stopped spending time at her natural refuges. In the morning she worked at home to find out where the three operators had disappeared to. It was not an easy task and it would take time. She only had the names of their avatars to start with. The sensitivity of the security systems meant that Vera had to tread very lightly indeed so as not to disturb a single particle which might give her away. The company would accept nothing but transparency. Although working blind, it was all she had.

  Whatever their real names were, neither Roco55 nor Vals009 knew the operators at the terminals next to them. Neither operator 150 nor 152, nor 313 or 315 had a personal relationship, although they could almost touch the neighbouring operators. Their answers were even more laconic.

  ‘Those colleagues are on-screen. We are linked by our avatars.’ Operator 150 was more curt than 324 had been.

  ‘I don’t know those avatars. I hardly play Cf. I prefer games that aren’t connected with work.’ Operator 313 seemed to be a sensible person.