Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World

by Fabio Fernandes

  “Apocryphal report, my ass.”

  “Anyway, I discovered a few days ago that Carrilho was not the first victim.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “Negative. I found evidence of two killing sprees under mysterious circumstances. One in Salvador, the other in Recife, spread out over a few years before the War of Treason.”

  “Deaths in strange circumstances don’t even get close to the Fernão Carrilho massacre. Even without this exsanguinated corpse bullshit, the disappearance of the main Portuguese-Brazilian military leader, a few days before that crucial battle in the shadow of the walls of Recife, made life easier for the first Zumbi.”

  “Changing the subject a little, remember that story of Diamantina that I told you about? Of that Devil Captain, killed by the Diamond Contractor?”

  “The one who later escaped to Palmares with weapons and personal effects?”

  “The same fellow. João Fernandes de Oliveira, a relative of yours.” Gilson risks a smile. When he sees his friend is not amused, he goes on in a more serious tone. “Did you know I found a sketch, in fact a portrait, of that Devil? A hand drawing by a popular artist on the day of his hanging.”

  “A sketch?”

  “Yes. Made with charcoal. Want to take a look at it?”

  Fernandes nibbles at his lower lip. He shakes his head and snorts before nodding reluctantly with a sulky gesture.

  “Show me, then.” Gilson taps the indicator on the multifunctional desk top three times.

  Fernandes nods, now more emphatically, in order to make himself understood by the equipment’s routines.

  The gray-haired man pulls out a tiny green cube from one of the multiple pockets of his pants and puts it on the table top. The black surface begins to blaze with bluish glints and emits the characteristic peep of the access release.

  “The Devil Captain of the Geraes.” Gilson grunts softly. He gazes impatiently at the violet veins radiating above the cube. When nothing else happens, he explains: “Sketch of execution day in Diamantina.”

  The face of a rough-looking man, with vaguely Amerindian-looking features, though he doesn’t resemble a Tupi at all, floats over the black top. A slight gesture from Gilson’s left hand and the misshapen face begins to rotate clockwise.

  As the face turns to the journalist, he exhales slowly. The sketch depicts a horrendous individual. Gigantic eyes with yellow irises and pupils sharpened like those of a cat. Porcine nose with dilated nostrils, erected upright like a pair of dark caves; leathery lips; long hair with thick strands like an old piaçava broom.

  “These colors, the skin, the eyes, how did your program extrapolate those from a simple coal sketch?”

  “Artificial intelligence routines, of course.” Gilson smiles. “They used the descriptions of the Devil Captain collected at that time to fill in the blanks.”

  “Didn’t you say that the Palmares secret service had suppressed all descriptions of the criminal?”

  “I was wrong. Apparently, João Fernandes himself took care of it. But there were descriptions of the Devil Captain before the time of his capture.”

  “This bastard is a real monster.” Fernandes now looks at the nape of the holographic sketch covered by thick bristly hair.

  “Really, beyond monstrous, and it also looks a bit like the description of a guy who has been prowling around the port of Boston for a decade or so, that is, three or four years before the start of the American Revolution.”

  “Are you going to tell me that your mysterious murderer painted the town red in the Yankee war of independence?”

  “I have no proof of that.” Gilson spreads his hands with a sly grin on his lips. “There is no timely sketch of the murderer this time. But if you want, I can ask my Simbaac to generate a holo constructed from the descriptions of the police authorities of colonial Boston.”

  “You don’t have to.” Fernandes giggles in pure nervousness. “I know very well how clever these self-conscious artificial symbiotics are at anticipating the expectations of the users.”

  “You should put your prejudices aside and start wearing one. It is a matter of quality of life.”

  “No thank you.” As he shakes his head, the journalist manages to keep his angry stare fixed on the laid-back face of his technophile friend. Pellê and his gadgets! No way I will become a slave to a conceited conglomeration of A.I. routines. “I’m afraid to think about what the cyberneticists have programmed into these simbaacs…”

  “I have already seen you harboring the same mistrust regarding other First Republic inventions.” Gilson shrugs with a wry smile. “Anyway, do you remember that storm on the high seas that sank most of the British force sent to quell the insurrection at the port of Boston in 1775?”

  “I may not use those smart symbiotics, but know that I take my doses of mnemonic enzymes all right.” Fernandes glances suspiciously at his friend. “Come on, what’s the wreck of that task force got to do with your so-called mysterious homicides sponsored by the secret service of Palmares? As far as I know, there were no Luso-Brazilians aboard those British ships.”

  “Indeed, I suppose there weren’t. There was, however, an undeniable interest on the part of the Palmarine elite in fostering separatist movements in America.”

  “Nobody ignores this interest. This doesn’t imply that agents or supernatural forces of the Republic caused those shipwrecks.”

  “What if I told you that your distant relative, João Fernandes, was in Philadelphia a few weeks before those fateful wrecks?”

  “I would say that this is no coincidence.” The journalist smiles innocently. “After all, we know that Palmares was negotiating the supply of arms and ammunition to the rebels. We also know that, at the end of his life, João Fernandes became a kind of informal diplomat from Palmares.”

  “You’ve got a point. But, what if I told you there was no storm on the night of the shipwrecks? You can check it by loading the weather conditions of all previous and later days in regions near and far from Massachusetts Bay. Then, just ask your systems to interpolate the data in a short-term climate simulation. There was no storm.” Gilson lays his fingers on the multifunctional top. In the end, he knows that his friend, a technophobe, won’t accept this suggestion. “Probably it was only a lame excuse from the British to justify the real reason for the claims.”

  “Okay, Pellê. And what would that be?”

  “I don’t know for sure. But I don’t rule out the possibility of a Palmarine naval intervention.”

  “Against the Royal Navy?” Fernandes lets out a whistle and arches his eyebrow in a theatrical way to emphasize disbelief. “The guys held the greatest naval power of the day. Palmares didn’t have by far the means necessary to meet them.”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t take that many ships.”

  “It’s all right. You served in the Navy, not me.” The journalist winks at the interlocutor.

  “I’m serious.” Gilson peers at the ceiling thoughtfully. “Only one or two ships, with crew members with superhuman powers.”

  “There you go again.” Fernandes offers his friend his best condescending smile. “What a huge obsession, eh?”

  “There are times when I wonder if instead of several agents with superhuman powers we might not be dealing with a single individual…”

  “Impossible. According to their own research, the mysterious murders have been occurring for over three hundred years.”

  “It’s true.” Gilson nods, intrigued. “However, the modus operandi is almost always the same and the few descriptions, spread over several countries and hundreds of years, coincide with each other.”

  “You’re not suggesting that we’re facing an immortal murderer, are you?”

  “I confess that this has been one of my working hypotheses.” Gilson shakes his head. “A hypothesis that keeps me awake at night.”

  “You look even crazier than I thought.”

  “Yes, my friend.” The gray-haired man gives the fat man a defiant look. “It’
s just to check if I’m going crazy that I came here to ask you for help. I need you to analyze the data I collected in the last few months and the correlations and assumptions I have made between these data.”

  “I don’t want to be involved.”

  “But you looked at the previous batch of data.”

  “And I bitterly regretted that analysis.” Fernandes stares at his friend with an apprehensive look. “You were not the only one to lose your sleep. To this day I have nightmares about your conclusions.”

  “You’re the only person I can turn to.”

  “It’s all right. I confess I was overwhelmed by your conclusions.” The journalist shakes his hands in disgust. “But there remains the indisputable fact that you have no proof whatsoever.”

  “Please help me find it.”

  “No, Pellê. Not this time.”

  “But why?

  Fernandes releases a deep sigh before replying:

  “Because I’m afraid.” He raises his hand to stop the other’s response. “Afraid of what will happen to us if this whole story turns out to be true.”

  “Look, Fernandes, I’m afraid too.” Gilson stares at his friend with a straight face. “But I need to know.” In view of his interlocutor’s lack of reaction, he proposes as a last resort, “Let’s agree on this: If my worst suspicions are confirmed, we only disclose the results of our study if we both agree on the terms of this disclosure, okay?”

  “And you’re going to resist the temptation to blow the whistle?”

  “You have my word.”

  Carlos Fernandes stares his old friend in the eye. He doesn’t answer immediately, and when he does, he doesn’t give in:

  “You’re not going to leave me alone until I agree to help you in this madness, are you?”

  “It’s not crazy, and deep down, you want to know the truth too.”

  The worst thing was that Pellê was right.

  * * *

  First, Fernandes verifies the consistency of the information stored in the green cube his friend gave him.

  As discreetly as possible, he follows in the footsteps of the renowned writer, getting roughly the same facts and figures.

  Then the correlation work. Since he doesn’t have the talent and patience to undertake the task himself, he turns to the intranet of Voice of the Morning, the news agency for which he works. Of course he takes every conceivable safeguard of secrecy. Because, in this respect, he is as paranoid as his old friend. He nurtures a deep conviction that the intelligence service of Palmares is able to infiltrate wherever there is a personal network, public or private, so it pays to be careful.

  When the multifunctional’s manager program announces the completion of the processing task and displays the results, Fernandes shoots to his feet.

  In addition to the events written by his friend on previous occasions, even more: according to Sir Abraham Stoker’s memoirs, a misshapen Indian associated with the Palmares embassy in London had influenced him in the writing of his masterpiece, Dracula.

  “Son of a bitch! Pellê was right!”

  Frightened, he says to the multifunc:

  “Connect me to Pellê.”

  The program tries to comply with the order. It tries to comply for seventy-two hours, until it says, to the despair of its user, that Gilson Pellegrino is not connected to the Net.

  “Disconnected? Not possible! Unless…”

  No. Better not to even think about it!

  Now that he has discovered that everything Pellê has suspected is true and that Palmares most likely has a superpowerful, immortal secret agent, he can’t contact his friend.

  Whereabouts unknown.

  He feels terrified. Alone in the face of an unfathomable veiled threat. Terrified, no. Creeped out.

  He gets really terrified when he finds out that that Pellê’s simbaac hasn’t connected at all in the last two weeks.

  3 Evasive Maneuvers

  To reach Jupiter’s orbit in record time, Jonas Spider boards in an unmanned high acceleration vehicle. With its antimatter-filled converter, the Fulgurant is able to maintain a constant acceleration of 25 m / s2. Although designed as an unmanned spacecraft to conduct high-priority loads to the Outer System, it has a tiny individual cabin and even a life-sustaining apparatus that has been concealed inside its secondary propellers. Of course, an ordinary crewman or passenger couldn’t withstand a 150% acceleration higher than that of Earth’s gravity for too long. Neither would it survive unscathed by the radiation emanating from the proton-antiproton collisions of the M-E converter, since the material annihilator shielding was kept to a minimum, in order to optimize the performance of the craft and increase its payload capacity. However, high acceleration and ionizing radiation don’t pose insurmountable risks to the wearer of an armored smart suit.

  Unlike most unmanned transports, giant spacecraft that slowly move from Earth orbit to the Outer System, taking months or years to reach their final destinations, a vehicle of high acceleration—because it shows urgency—draws attention to itself. That’s why it’s not fitting for Jonas to come to Europa aboard a ship of this class. What’s more, it’s an unmanned spacecraft. Hence, the need to stop in a discreet orbital station of Io, boarding there like a normal passenger for Europa.

  * * *

  Tied in his bed to prevent a sudden movement from hurling him into the cabin, Jonas Spider casts a puzzled glance at the hologram of Jupiter slowly turning on the roof of the compartment. He smiles weakly. Even in this less-than-lunar gravitational acceleration, he would lay inert, if not for the protection of the suit.

  A week in Galileo and no sign of the mysterious adversary. Worst of all was the feeling that this Enigma, whoever or whatever he is, got wind of his coming. Otherwise, how to explain that it had disappeared or, an alarming hypothesis, is hidden, undetectable to the sensors of the VIB?

  It’s most likely that Enigma has escaped from the international scientific base to some other place on Europa. Jonas doesn’t even exclude the possibility that his adversary has traveled upward, to one of the satellite’s three orbital stations. Although the launch logs don’t indicate departures of manned vehicles after their arrival from Io in the Oswaldo Cruz, it is possible that the Palmarine intelligence has unregistered ships. He doesn’t intend to commit the old naïve mistake of underestimating the enemy’s ingenuity, responsible for many of the failures in Brazilian military history.

  So much rush—the journey from Earth orbit to Jupiter done in an acceleration of more than two gravities, provided by the new M-E converters and only bearable with the VIB compensation system fully activated—for nothing.

  It’s almost as if this Enigma had sensed my imminent arrival… In any case, at least there have been no casualties among the Service operatives since then.

  The most senior agent, Vitor Machado, enters the stateroom he shares with Spider. With a rank equivalent to major, Machado is one of three operatives who survived the incursions of the Enigma and the only one informed about the mission and resources of Lieutenant Spider.

  “Confirmed.” Machado stands in front of the other, whispering huskily. “All the 212 Palmarinos residing in Galileo are normal human beings.”

  “So, as far as we know, they don’t qualify as the Enigma.” Jonas unties himself, raises his torso and sits on the bed to face his superior. And if, contrary to what Intelligence has been stating for decades, our opponent turns out to be only a normal human, a subject whose extraordinary powers are provided by VIB-like armor? We wouldn’t be able to detect him when he was out of the shell …

  “Following the recommendation of the Service command, I checked the tomographic profiles of the other 397 foreigners.”

  “They’re normal, too.” At the agent’s somber expression, Spider concludes, discouraged.

  “Right. On my own, I checked the 59 Brazilian citizens residing at the base. As you may already guess, they are exactly who we thought they were.”

  “Enigma has left the base.”


  “How?” Machado frowns darkly. “We checked all the launches prior to the arrival of the Oswaldo Cruz. Our agents on other bases on Europa and on the other satellites have verified the identities of all foreigners who have come from here. We are pretty sure that Enigma did not leave Galileo this way.”

  “What if he used a surface vehicle?”

  “Possible but unlikely. The pressurized tractors available here have a range of two hundred miles and the nearest station is more than three times as far away.”

  “Besides, it’s a mere organic mining station of the Asian Consortium.” Spider nods to his superior. “There are only five residents there.”

  “Unless our adversary is somewhere out there.”

  “You mean, out in the open?”

  “That, or an improvised shelter near the base.”

  “We could throw a handful of microprobes to check this—” Spider breaks off as he remembers the obvious. “No. The probes’ detection systems would interfere with the equipment that the several scientific teams have spread around Galileo.”

  “Yeah.” Machado closes his jaws before proposing in a low voice, “Would you be able to explore the vicinity of the base without disturbing the ongoing experiments out there?”

  “It’s possible. The suit has sophisticated camouflage circuits. It was designed for the purpose of being virtually undetectable.”

  “Maybe it’s worth a search, then.”

  * * *

  A new habitat for the True People. Who would have thought? A son of the night under the light of Jupiter… A whole virgin planet just for him!

  He had never imagined that the Ebony would trust him so much as to allow him to leave Earth, a planet to which his ancestors referred to as the “Mortal World.” Much less for Europa, the most exciting scientific frontier in the Solar System.

  His Palmarine allies were ingenious, he gave them that. After all, the First Republic owes science not only for its very existence but, above all, for the opportunity to explore this world of exotic beauty. A satellite endowed with alien life, though microscopic and generally sealed under layers of tens of miles of ice more solid than any terrestrial rock.