Earth Keepers

by Jorge Alejandro Lavera

  The temptation to find out was immense, but he managed to overcome it. Juan Carlos opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. Did he confront his daughter and risk being stupid, or let it go?

  “I hope next time you can study something from the social side, especially the latest in morals and ethics,” he managed to say, raising an eyebrow.

  Now it was Marisol who turned beet red. Well, up until then there had been the possibility of an innocent coincidence. He decided he didn’t want to wonder about it. The intrigue was killing him. And Sofía was his daughter—and only fourteen years old, however smart she was.

  “Is she your girlfriend?” he asked his daughter, who choked and spit out the water she was drinking, spraying the entire kitchen.

  He’d worried for some time about why Sofía rejected boys and he attributed it to her thinking they were dumb. Now, putting two and two together, he understood that it was a different reason. Sofía slowly recovered, and looked at him scandalized, but Juan Carlos held her gaze.

  “Well?” he insisted.

  “Dad, please...you’re embarrassing me in front of my friend.”

  “I hope you haven’t had any alcohol or worse, drugs while you’re...studying, right?” he asked, looking at Marisol.

  They both looked at him, shocked.

  “Of course not, what do you think we are?” Marisol protested. Juan Carlos looked at them with a frown.

  “No, Dad, I swear.”

  Juan Carlos thought about digging a little deeper, but in the end decided there was no harm. Sofía was in a safe place and whatever they did, at least she wasn’t going to get pregnant. Looking at them both, he said:

  “Sofía, you know I worry about you. On one hand, you’re not a little girl any more, though on the other hand, you still are. I’m your father and I have to protect you from people who can...hurt you.”

  “You don’t need to worry about Sofía,” Marisol intervened. Juan Carlos looked at her.

  “Yes, I do. She’s my daughter. I trust Sofía but I don’t see why I should trust you. If I find out that you gave her drugs somehow or hurt my daughter...”

  “Please, nothing like that would ever, ever happen,” Marisol cut him off. “Really.”

  Juan Carlos shrugged his shoulders.

  “I hope not. Remember that legally, you’re an adult and she is a minor. I could report you and ruin your life for this,” he said, looking at them both again. “Now it’s best if you leave, Marisol.”

  Sofía and Marisol said good-bye quickly with a kiss on the cheek and they looked at him contritely. Marisol had the nerve to leave in silence.

  That night, he sat at the table with Sofía, but he didn’t eat. He calculated the time, and if he wanted to get in an eight hour fast, he couldn’t eat anything.

  “How did your errands go?” Sofía asked him.

  Juan Carlos knew that his daughter was trying to get him to talk about something else, trying to get out of talking about what had happened that afternoon. But that was okay, he didn’t feel like arguing about that now, either.

  “It went well. Very well, in fact. Look, it’s something very unusual, I wasn’t going to tell you anything about it but the more I think about it, the more I think it’s real. They went to too much trouble for it to be a scam or a joke, although...after the tests tomorrow I’ll know for sure.”

  Sofía had stopped eating and was looking at him curiously.

  “Dad, what are you talking about?”

  “Well, it’s that I got a strange email, look,” he showed it to Sofía on his cell phone.

  Sofía read it in a few seconds and frowned.

  “This isn’t a joke?”

  “It doesn’t seem like it. I found a website of theirs, check it out,” he said, showing it to her in the browser. “And today I went to a preliminary interview where they asked me all kinds of things and they had me sign a non-disclosure contract, that is I can’t tell you what I’m telling you, and much less anyone else, or they can put me in jail and fine me a lot of money.”

  “Maybe that’s the scam.”

  “Sue me for breaking the clause? I have to say that’s possible, but I’m supposed to have physical and psychological tests tomorrow and we’ll see.”

  “I can’t go with you?”

  “You have to go to school.”

  “Ugh,” she protested.

  “Anyway, I suspect that after fasting for eight hours, I won’t be the best company tomorrow.”

  “Yes, that’s probably so.”

  EXAMINATIONS

  Buenos Aires, November 8, 2027. 7:50 a.m.

  When he arrived, he announced himself at reception, they asked his name, checked a list and took him to the back of the building. He noted with surprise that it looked like a hospital, with lots of white rooms with stretchers and sophisticated appliances, plus lots of doctors and nurses (or at least, men and women in medical gowns.)

  He didn’t have time to sit in the chairs in the hallway. From one of the rooms, a doctor appeared and called in a loud voice:

  “Juan Carlos Navarro!”

  “Here!” he said, heading towards the doctor, who took him into the room.

  “Good morning, I’m Dr. Leandro. Let me see your documents. Have you been fasting for eight hours?”

  “Yes, I have,” he said.

  “Okay, please sign here, then sit on the exam table and roll up your sleeve.”

  “Hmm,” grunted Juan Carlos. “I should tell you that I faint if they take blood.”

  “That bad?” smiled the doctor.

  “Um, yes. They told me it’s a vagus reflex or a vagus vein or something like that, and I decompensate,” explained Juan Carlos, blushing and then turning red, while signing the analysis sheet.

  “Don’t worry, it’s more common than you think, and I appreciate the heads up,” the doctor said, looking at him. “It isn’t any fun lifting dead weight off of the floor. So lie down on the stretcher.”

  “Perfect. I don’t decompensate if I’m lying down.”

  “Then it isn’t the blood that bothers you.”

  “Not if I’m lying down.”

  “Perfect. Put your feet up here so you have them up. Good.”

  The doctor applied a tourniquet to close off the circulation and had him open and close his fist several times. When he could see the vein clearly, he took a syringe and inserted the needle without Juan Carlos hardly even feeling it, and then took out a good amount of blood. He filled at least eight specimen tubes and a slide with it. Juan Carlos was sure that if he had been sitting, he’d be lying on the floor now, passed out, but when lying down, the long extraction didn’t bother him in the last. The doctor had a good hand.

  When it was finished, he sat up. The doctor told him to go back to the entrance and they said good-bye.

  Once he’d arrived at the reception area, they verified his documentation again and told him to go up to the first floor. There were people waiting for the elevators, so he looked for the stairs and went up them quickly to his destination.

  There he again found a ton of rooms and doctors, although remembering what they’d told him the day before, these must be psychologists. There was a reception desk next to the elevators, where he checked in. They took his information and invited him to take a seat in the waiting room.

  He heard angry voices and a burly man came out of the room screaming.

  “You think you can just discard me just like that? I’m better prepared than all the idiots here!”

  “Mr. Elías, calm down. Please understand we’re not the ones who set the criteria for admission and the tests...”

  “To hell with you! When you’re all dead I’ll be fine on my own. I’ll survive! Huh! Psychosis, I’ll show you psychosis...” he left, still shouting incoherently.

  Juan Carlos’ pulse was racing from the violent situation, but he calmed down little by little. He’d hardly been sitting there five minutes, thinking about going home, when they called his name. He s
aw a person in a white coat who waved him towards a small room and directed him inside.

  “Hello, Juan Carlos. I’m Dr. Martin, and I’m a psychologist and psychiatrist. I’m going to give you a psychological evaluation and an intelligence test like they explained to you yesterday. And yes, everything about the city is true.”

  “I’m starting to realize that, nobody would spend this much money on a joke.”

  “Of course, it isn’t a joke or a scam, this is very serious,” Martín corroborated. “Come in, sit here, and we’ll start. Tell me about yourself and your family. Then, we’ll go to some standard tests.”

  During the next three hours, after telling him about his daughter, his widowhood, and a ton of personal details, Juan Carlos was solving timed series, making drawings, assembling puzzles of different types, and while solving each item, Martin was verifying what he had done in the previous one and taking notes in the computer.

  Finally, with the timer in hand, Martín turned a pile of paper upside down and said:

  “Now, I’m going to show you a series of images. Each one has a mistake. Find it, point it out, and explain it.”

  He turned over the first sheet, a photo of an astronaut walking on the Moon.

  “Go,” he said, clicking on the timer.

  “In the photo that’s supposed to be the Moon, you can see the Moon in the background.”

  Martín stopped the timer and looked at it.

  “Three seconds, wow. You don’t see anything else? How about the flag flying? Does the photo look real or created in a photo studio?”

  “The photo is real,” Juan Carlos observed. “What is faked with Photoshop is that they put the Moon instead of the Earth in the sky. The flag isn’t ‘flying,’ since there’s no air on the Moon, but there is very low gravity. If you look here, you’ll see that the flag is supported by a very thin rod, and any rubbing with the flag, just putting it on, would cause it to shake smoothly for a long time.”

  “Okay, next,” continued Martín, turning the second sheet over and activating the chronometer.

  Juan Carlos saw a sheet with the following sequence:

  1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144,233,377,610,987,1597

  Find the error on this paige.

  Juan Carlos looked at it a second and said: “The error is that ‘page’ is misspelled.”

  “Did you even verify the sequence?”

  “No. You and the text said there’s only one error, so when I saw the error, I didn’t look for another one. Should I have? And anyway, I recognize the Fibonacci sequence.”

  “Two seconds...no, Juan Carlos, it’s more than perfect. Let’s continue...”

  They went on for another thirty minutes looking at fifty sheets. This exam usually took a couple of hours and Martín passed his hand over his head. He took notes on the computer and finally said:

  “Very good, Juan Carlos, would you be so good as to wait for me in the hall?”

  “Yes, of course.” He stood up, left the consult room and went to sit down. Martín closed the door.

  Juan Carlos watched people come and go from the various consult rooms. Half an hour later, Martín opened the door.

  “Juan Carlos, if it’s possible, I would like it if you could go on to the next interview immediately.”

  Juan Carlos looked at the time and said:

  “Well, truthfully, I’m hungry, but I don’t have any problem with that. Just let me tell my daughter about the delay.”

  “Of course, of course,” Martín agreed.

  He let Sofía know by telephone that they were still doing tests, and not to worry.

  “It’s almost noon. I’ll come get you to go out and eat, Dad.”

  “Okay, I’ll see you, then. You know the address?” he asked, knowing that his daughter could handle herself just fine in any kind of transportation.

  “Yes, see you later,” Sofía answered and hung up.

  He left Dr. Martín and headed towards the fifth floor as the doctor had indicated.

  POLYGRAPH

  Buenos Aires, November 8, 2027. 1:30 p.m.

  Juan Carlos came out of the elevator and at a small reception area on the fifth floor, they told him:

  “Leave your paperwork here, please, we’ll give it back to you when you’re done,” and had him go to the interview room.

  As soon as he entered, he stopped in surprise. The door closed behind him with a locking noise.

  Before him was a table that reminded him of school exams. A large desk, with not three but five people behind it. Three men and two women, sitting alternately. On this side, a single chair ready for him. There were also two people who, judging by their uniforms, were security personnel, at the sides of the room, as well as a woman in a white jacket who he assumed was a doctor or nurse.

  He approached slowly. The person in the center was much taller than the others, with darker skin, with light hair, unusual clear green eyes, and a long, thick, curly beard. There was some kind of device on the table.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Navarro. We’d like to ask you some more questions.”

  “What’s happening? W-w-what’s that?” he asked nervously.

  “It’s a type of polygraph, do you know what a polygraph is?”

  “A lie detector? Do you think I was lying or cheating?” he asked. He thought a bit, and then realized the tests must have gone better than he thought, or they wouldn’t be doing this.

  “Let’s say we want to rule out the possibility.”

  Juan Carlos sat down without protest and the woman connected a band on his arm, one on the thumb of his right hand, and various electrodes on his chest and torso. Finally, she put a sort of helmet on him. It had electrodes that adjusted to various points on his head. In addition to the helmet, she lowered a kind of sensor that, although it did not cover his vision, he could see that it was pointed at one eye.

  “Ready, we’re going to calibrate,” the woman said, going to a computer screen on a table to the left. “I need you to answer two questions truthfully, two intentional lies, and two that you don’t know the answer to. Answer honestly now, what is your complete name?”

  “Juan Carlos Navarro.”

  “What’s the name of the star closest to the Earth?”

  “The sun,” he affirmed, thinking it was a captious question.

  “Now lie, please. Is the sun a star? Isn’t Alpha Centauri the nearest star?”

  “The sun isn’t a star, Alpha is the nearest star,” lied Juan Carlos.

  “What is my name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, I really don’t have any idea.”

  “Perfect. To finish up, I’ll ask the next two questions, but don’t open your mouth. Don’t say a word, or make a gesture or move a muscle, is that clear?”

  “Yes, very clear,” answered Juan Carlos, intrigued.

  “Is my coat white?”

  “Yes, of course it is,” thought Juan Carlos.

  “Try to think only ‘yes’ or ‘no.’

  “Is she reading my mind with that gadget?” thought Juan Carlos.

  “Is the color of my jacket white?” the woman repeated.

  “Yes,” thought Juan Carlos.

  “Are there more than twenty people in the room?”

  “No,” thought Juan Carlos.

  “Perfect, everything is ready.”

  “Mr. Navarro, thank you very much for your patience up until now. We need to ask a few more questions and then we’ll explain everything. Please, answer everything completely honestly. Agreed?” proposed the man in the center.

  “Go ahead,” agreed Juan Carlos, partly amazed, partly tired. It was pretty clear that if he tried to lie, they’d know it.

  “Do you think that women should have an equal place in society?” asked the first woman on the panel, the second person from the left.

  “Without a doubt, I’m of the thought that gender is irrelevant with respect to most jobs. It isn’t important to me wheth
er it’s a man or woman, but that it’s the best person for the job.”

  “And what happens if a person is black, or Jewish, or Chinese, Hindu, Mongolian, Korean, or Japanese? Would you have a problem with any particular group of humans?” asked the first man on the panel.

  “Not that I can think of,” answered Juan Carlos. “As in the case with women, it seems to me that the important thing is that the person is up to what he has to do. I don’t see why their ethnicity should matter.”

  The woman in the white coat was looking at the computer monitor, and gestured affirmatively with her head towards the panel.

  “What do you think about abortion?” asked the second woman.

  Juan Carlos remembered when his wife got pregnant with Sofía. They hadn’t expected to conceive, but somehow Raquel’s pills had failed. They talked about it for almost a month, without arguing, about whether or not to abort. He was prepared to help her if that was her decision, but in the end, she couldn’t do it and decided to have her. And it complicated their lives incredibly, but now she was the person beside him in his life, and thanks to that, he wasn’t alone. He got a lump in his throat.

  “Personally, I think the woman is the only one who can have the last word about the subject and who must make the decision. Abortion isn’t something to be done lightly, or shouldn’t be. I believe that a woman who isn’t prepared to be a mother, and knows that, shouldn’t be obligated to be one. Having said that, the new creature is a human being and it isn’t their fault, but there are ways to detect a pregnancy almost immediately and there is no excuse for waiting months before taking action. I’m in agreement with it being legal and there being medical support for a woman who decides to abort, before the fetus grows and develops any capacity for pain. That would be before three months of conception. As a matter of principle, it would allow women to abort legally without restrictions until a maximum of a month and a half since conception. That is, two months since the last menstruation. The woman would have had two opportunities to realize that her period hadn’t come. After that time, I would only allow abortion legally in the case of danger to the woman’s health or the unfeasibility of the fetus.”