Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction

by Mariano Villarreal

  “So tomorrow you’ve got to go to see the director?” I say, almost shocked, lying back against the headboard.

  “That’s right. Like in school, when you’ve misbehaved.” María seems almost delighted by the idea.

  “You don’t seem very worried.”

  “Why should I be? If they kick me out, I’ll find somewhere else to work. At the end of the day, I have a degree in Physics and I’m used to these kinds of rejections.”

  That’s how she is, eternally optimistic and unconcerned, as if her problems were not of this world. As if it weren’t important to eat well or have a good house. The most likely explanation is that in her brain there was only space for complex numerical sequences and quantum theories, mixed with some Zen Buddhism.

  “So what’s going on with your trip? Finally, you’re going to Spain.”

  “If everything works out, then yes. Tomorrow I’m going to see about the passport and the tickets and those things. I’ll miss your scolding at the Institute, but I promise to call you at night to find out how it went.”

  “That’s OK, then. Where is it you’re going?”

  “Malaga.”

  “What part of Spain is that?”

  “Andalusia.”

  “Interesting. Are there zombies there?”

  “There are, but very few of them. They’re creating some autonomous communities. Not just with solar energy and their own water source, but truly autonomous in a legal sense. As if they were a separate country, but with the same Spanish laws.”

  “And who rules it, who’s in charge?”

  “I suppose there’s a council or they choose a leader. The idea is to create an isolated space that’s free of zombies.”

  “A bunch of armed people who don’t need to fear the law, with the justification of an external enemy and under a dubiously democratic mandate. That sounds suspiciously like the Cuban Revolution to me. I don’t think it will work.”

  “A guy can’t even dream with you around.”

  VII

  I got to the corner and luckily there was no one on the phone. The day had been terrible and exhausting. I’d spent half the day in lines to get into the offices of the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment. The other half in interviews with bureaucrats who treated me as if trying to travel were a crime and I the prime suspect. That, plus turning in photocopies of my passport and visa, seals and signing mountains of paper, summarized my day.

  Now I had to fulfill a promise made the night before. I had already walked more than four blocks, finding only telephones that were broken or out of service. Finally, one worked that was on one of the walls of a bakery. There was no privacy because there were always people coming in or out. And when there was a line, the person on the phone might find themselves talking on the phone in the middle of the shop to get their bread. My call was not so private either. I dialed the number for María’s house. It rang.

  Across the street, on the wall of a repair shop, there was a new poster with the slogan:

  ZOMBIES IN DEFENSE OF SOCIALISM.

  Suddenly, for some strange reason, I remembered the processes of zombification and the zombie soldiers. A chill ran down my back.

  “Yeah?” It was María’s voice.

  “Listen, it’s me, Ricardo Miguel.”

  “Oh, hi.”

  “Tell me, how did it go with your bosses?”

  “Fine.”

  “What did they want to talk to you about?”

  “Nothing important.”

  “Did they threaten to kick you out of the Center like the last time?”

  “No.”

  “Are you OK?”

  “Of course. Everything’s fine.”

  “Well, I guess I called at a bad moment. Ciao.”

  “Ciao.”

  And I hung up.

  That had been the strangest conversation we’d had by phone since we met. Normally, one needs to pay her to shut up and now she was strangely laconic. My mind began to fill with wild ideas. Had they finally threatened her and had she given in to the pressure? What could terrify Iron Annie, who had so often confronted the scientific directors, the administration, and the sindicato?

  Because in Cuba to say “sindicato” is the same as saying administration. It’s acronym is CTC and means Central de Trabajadores de Cuba, Cuban Workers Central. Theoretically, it should be a united guild that worked everywhere, but in practice it’s just another organization one needs to pay and which doesn’t fix anything.

  I returned home a little worried. When I reached my block, but still on the road, the police were checking the papers of a zombie. Its owner was calm, neither gesticulating nor moving his hands in front of the official. He only spoke when he was asked something, he seemed as much a zombie as the real one. One of the cops approached me and pointed a finger at me. I showed him my CIDEZ card without saying a word, barely stopping. He nodded and turned toward the patrol car. An inexplicable act for a cop. As I turned the corner, I looked back just to check out his gait. The police officer walked slowly, looking at the ground, dragging his feet. As if he were another zombie.

  “I think I need a vacation,” I thought.

  I reached the door to my house worn out with worry. This time, only a dog barked. Then Ramón came out of his house and intercepted me before I could close the gate.

  “Ricardo!”

  “What is it, Ramón?”

  “I want to talk to you. We’ve received instruction to prepare conditions for a voluntary massive zombification. Each cuadra must present a volunteer to be zombified. Those converted into zombies will be the shock troops of the Revolution. Your family has been chosen to present a volunteer.”

  “But there is already a zombie in my house,” I didn’t even stop to think about the madness of a zombification. “There must be a lot of houses full of useless people who are already zombies and don’t know it.”

  “Watch your language, comrade. Your family has been chosen by the CDR. If you refuse, you could be seen as an anti-revolutionary attitude. Now tell me the name of the person who will be the volunteer zombie. … “

  “Let me think, let me think. I’ve got it. Why don’t you send your dried-up old mother to be zombified?”

  “Comrade, look...”

  “Look, Ramón. I’ve had a difficult day because some of us in this country still work instead of sticking out noses into the lives of other people. Do me a favor and get out of here with that list before I make you eat it.”

  “What you are is an anti-revolutionary!”

  “And what you are is a lousy squealer!”

  Contrary to what I expected, he remained quiet. Ramón is much larger than I am, physically, and it’s not like I think of myself as a violent kind of guy. In a fight, he would unquestionably win, but against all prognoses, he retreated in silence and looked at the ground as if he were ashamed.

  Suddenly, sounds could be heard in his house. As if a large dog scratched its nails on a door. The president of the CDR turned pale, turned around and entered his house.

  “Didn’t you put down your dog last week?” I said, but he didn’t bother to answer. “Now you’ve decided to keep the nasty dog inside your house, you SQUEALER!”

  “Ricardo Miguel” my mother shouted. “What’s going on?”

  When she says that, I feel like I were seven years old.

  Finally, I went inside.

  Ramón had gone into his house without saying another word.

  VIII

  María kept herself distant and wasn’t very chatty with me. She spent almost all her time locked in the room with the network servers and didn’t let anyone in. Not even me. Since her nature was rather hermit-like, this behavior was only suspicious to me. I decided to concentrate on my work until I went to her house again.

  I was in the basement of containment unit four. There, everything is refrigerated, isolated, and well-packaged. Not only are there various biological containment barriers to pass, we need to use insulated s
uits. In general, we researchers didn’t like to go down there. Not just because of the dangers involved, but because it’s very uncomfortable to work in the suits.

  The truth is, it was a bunker annex to the Research Center where the strains of all the mutations of the Z virus found in Cuba were kept. Despite the fact that the virus is not airborne, like the flu or the Ebola virus, the safety levels are ridiculously high. Something that’s understandable if we’re sufficiently paranoid as to be able to imagine a mutation of the zombie virus that propagates like the flu and not through the saliva of the infected.

  We were there looking for samples of un-mutated versions as part of the voluntary zombification project. With us was a lieutenant who said he had a degree in biochemistry, who belong to the division of engineers in the military industries of the FAR.

  The Ministry of the Fuerzas Armadas de la Revolución, the Revolutionary Armed Force, was created at the end of the 1960s from the remains of the Rebel Army that destroyed Fulgencio Batista in 1959. At first, both the uniform of its soldiers and its officials, as well as its campaign equipment, bore a striking resemblance to those of the US Army. But little by little, the M-1 rifles became AKM, just as the stripes of the sleeves transformed into golden epaulets in the pure style of the Red Army.

  The lieutenant looked like any of us, except for the fact that his head was shaved and when he ate he did so very quickly, like a pig. But he was efficient and quiet when he worked, so I had no objections to working with him.

  “So, they’re planning to convert these zombies into soldiers,” I said, in part to break the ice and in part to forget about María.

  “For the moment, they won’t be soldiers able to go into combat, but they’ll serve to march. We have the December 2 parade almost upon us and we don’t have sufficient human personnel for the military parade.”

  “But how will they make them march well? I’ve been through military service and I spent a lot of time marching, and believe me, that requires a coordination that zombies just don’t have.”

  The General Military Service was formerly called the Obligatory Military Services but the name was changed later because it sounded too fascist. But in practice it was the same: every citizen must serve at least two years in the regular army and then go into the reserves. One way of keeping a sizable army and at the same time saving the money that a professional army would cost. An efficient formula, that seemed straight out of Machiavelli’s The Art of War.

  The official looked at me and gave a half smile. “You all still haven’t realized about the synchronization?”

  “The what?”

  “It seems not. Well, in reality, we don’t now what causes it. It is an experimental fact but it’s a reliable as electricity. Our scientists are trying to give it a more or less coherent explanation before informing the Minister of Science. Zombies who live together for a long time begin to synchronize, and if they were inoculated with the serum at the same time it works better. They prefer to go about in groups, they walk the same and the group receives orders as if it were a single zombie.”

  “But that’s impossible.”

  “Theoretically it doesn’t yet have a foundation, but it is a fact. In the industries of the FAR we have work groups of five and ten zombies who function like a single individual. They can be shock troops with an efficiency that’s never been seen before. That’s how we make them march.”

  “But what causes this to happen?”

  “I repeat, there is no clear answer yet, but I’ve heard the scientists brainstorming about it. They won’t confirm anything that I tell you now, since the scientific reputations of a lot of important people are at stake and the subject seems like something out of science fiction.”

  “Go on, I’m listening. I love science fiction.”

  “Well, it seems that, in some way we don’t yet understand and which our instruments can’t measure, the zombies exchange information between themselves. I repeat that this is just a conjecture. But it turns out that when we analyze their behavior as a group, whether in small groups under the effects of the serum, or in larger masses such as the disturbances in other countries, well, a pattern emerges.”

  “A pattern?”

  “A learning pattern. A sign of group intelligence. Each individual doesn’t manifest traces of learning or intelligence, but the overall set of many individuals does.”

  “Like a hive mind along the lines of ants and things like that.”

  “That is the word that the scientists use often, a hive mind. I don’t understand much but they start to talk about the theory of chaos and of complexity and they talk of attempt to create hive minds by joining computers. They even say that it’s a form of intelligence. Hive intelligence, they call it.”

  “Are you saying that the Z virus communicates between itself on a molecular level and the entire viral community creates a gigantic intelligence that functions like a hive?”

  “You said that. I officially haven’t said anything.”

  “Agreed, comrade. It will stay between you and me.”

  And at that moment, the biological leak alarm went off.

  IX

  Afternoon fell on the neighborhood and the sun lit up the sign at the end of the street. A figure walked slowly along the sidewalk, a few meters from my house. It was headed toward the road, three blocks away, right where the P2 and the 174 stop, the only routes that pass by this neighborhood. The walker walked in silence and a little clumsily, dragging his feet. He moved in a way that looked almost comical. At times, he moved his head from side to side, struggling for balance. Sometimes, he seemed drunk, unable to control his body and about to tumble to the sidewalk. He wasn’t a large child, nor a hopeless alcoholic, and his skin was wrinkled and half rotted. The sun had burned wounds on his face and arms, and coagulated blood could be seen in the unclosed gashes. One needed to be stupid not to recognize him. He was a zombie.

  Not some runaway zombie, one of those that attacked during the nights of the first days of the Z crisis; this, unquestionably, had been inoculated with the serum and then abandoned by its owner.

  A street zombie, like a homeless dog.

  But since when could a street zombie wander loose at this hour without someone calling the police? Things had really changed. Before, there were controls everywhere. Only wild zombies were seen at night. People bitten by their own zombies and then transformed, aggressive and without the serum. But that was just at the start of the epidemic, then came the Anti-Zombie Police Brigade that patrolled at night. A full truck that came at the Vigilancia’s call.

  It had been days since I had last seen the president of the Committee. It seems that after the problem we had, he stuck his tail between his legs and locked himself in his house. The incident didn’t have any major consequences, either. When they came by to distribute the televisions per CDR, we were on the list and abuela now has a new Chinese Atec-panda. No one at our home has much hope that it will last, because that’s how things are with Chinese products. We have the sad example of the Chinese buses, which by that time were almost all broken.

  Carmita, from the Vigilancia, hadn’t come by to bother us about the copy of the letter and the authorizations for my brother. They’d already given Mama Panchito’s ration for the month. Things were becoming more relaxed. As always happens in this country. A zombie wanders down the block, without authorization or supervision, and no one calls the CDR night guard, the public lighting isn’t turned on, and after ten at night everyone turns off their lights. Even our president. The late night patrol cars no longer drive past. You can tell that the fury about the zombies and the political hysteria about the serum and the Z virus have died down. The slogan of BUILDING SOCIALISM, WITH ZOMBIES will become as tarnished and pasé as SOCIALISM OR DEATH and all the others. Now the dead walk alone down the streets and no one is afraid of them. Everything in this country is always a joke.

  I’m very bored since I’m home all the time. My body is conditioned to get up at five eve
ry morning, take two buses crammed with people and work for eight hours. I don’t know how to do anything else. That’s what I’ve done all my life. First in the Biotechnology Institute, then in Tropical Medicine, and finally in the CIDEZ. When the accident happened, they sent all the researchers home with sixty percent of their salary —a biological leak they told us. But more time has passed than what is established in the quarantine protocols, and no one has called me nor has anyone from the Institute come to find me. It’s strange. The bosses always demand work and never let you rest more than they’re forced to grant you. Something must have happened in the CIDEZ, something that justifies this silence. Before, they were coming by to bother us at every moment, and with every anomaly in zombie behavior they called. If I refused, they said they’d given me the phone precisely so they could locate me. But now there is just silence. No calls at three in the morning, and no Institute vehicles are parked at the door of the house. I’ve thought to call them and ask. Sometimes I am afraid about the nature of that mysterious biological leak. I fear that it’s gotten out of their hands. What other thing of a biological nature could escape from an institute like that, except for zombies? What kind of zombies can make such a commotion?

  I decided not to call them. Over the years, I’ve learned never to volunteer. If they don’t want to call, all the better for me. Every month I collect my pay. I don’t need to do extra work and, after all, a good rest will do me good. At least, that’s what I thought at first. Now I’m dying to do something, even if it’s useless. I’m unimaginably bored. I keep waking up at five in the morning, every day, religiously, even though I have nowhere to go.

  But now I have time to see things in more detail. To follow the patterns of society. Now that I don’t have to get up in order to go to work, I can see things I didn’t see before. Like how there’s a zombie that’s always in the trash on the corner, as if it were a stray dog. People throw it things and it nibbles on them. As if it were an abandoned pet, as if they’d never given it serum, and something inside it tells it that it must not bite people in order to survive. This was the zombie I’d seen that night. At first it had seemed strange to me, now its part of the landscape.