Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction

by Mariano Villarreal

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.

  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 screa
m 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 wo
und 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.

  He tells me that her brain can’t isolate itself from the song anymore. She can’t cover her ears because they’re inside her head, and if we operate on her, we risk losing her, like the Big and Stupid Bob. Bob the ace with the scalpel. The living vegetable over there, looking at me without seeing me from the corner. Sometimes Check uses him as a flower vase or coat rack. Other times he uses him as an altar to get in