“I still remember what happened to her...you can’t know that,” said Sofía anguished.
“No, I only know, I give you my guarantee. So it can’t be any other way.”
Sofía rolled her eyes: “What an ego you have.”
“I’m a doctor. How else can I be? Besides, I’m the best in the world,” Mederi smiled.
“Mama, who is with you?” Sofía heard in her mind.
“It’s your father,” she answered. In a way, he was. She also wasn’t sure if she’d understand if she said ‘It’s your engineer.’
“He’s good.”
“How do you know?”
“I can feel it.”
Sofía smiled with pride, caressing her belly. Yes, Mederi was a good man. And he had treated her very well.
The door suddenly opened and Damaris rushed in.
“Sofía, are you okay? And the baby?”
“Shh, calm down, everything’s fine.”
“What happened?”
“I got a little scared...when the baby talked to me.”
Damaris smiled as if she were going to laugh but looking at Sofía, she saw that it wasn’t a joke.
“What do you mean she talked to you?”
“In my mind, and in our language. I suppose that her intellect is everything that Tzedek hoped for. And with all my talking to my belly and her accessing my mind, she learned to communicate.”
Damaris opened her mouth and looked so surprised that Sofía couldn’t help but laugh.
“Can I hear her?”
“I don’t think so. Well, I don’t know. Right now I just know that she communicated with me. Like with Leora, maybe the nearness of her birth has something to do with it.”
Damaris put her ear carefully on Sofía’s belly.
“She doesn’t speak with her voice, you know,” said Sofía, amused.
“Who is leaning on me?” they both heard in their minds.
Damaris stood up, yelping with excitement.
“It’s true!” she shouted, with a smile from ear to ear, leaning on Sofía again.
“I’m Damaris, sweetheart.”
“Da..ma..ris. And me? Beba?”
“No. I have a name for you, if Damaris agrees.”
“You didn’t say anything to me.”
“I just thought of it. How do you like...Kadence?”
Damaris pouted.
“What—credence?”
“No, cadence, but with a ‘k.’ Kadence.”
“I like it.”
Sofía and Damaris smiled.
“Kadence it is then. Kadence Navarro Sartaris.”
YEAR ONE
Rho, November 25, 2029. 10:00 a.m.
Leora held Enrico in her arms, wrapped in a soft warm blanket.
“Shall we go meet Kadence?”
The baby looked at Leora and smiled.
Leora approached Sofía slowly, who was rocking Kadence. The newborn was tiny, but looked around attentively.
“Hello, Sofía,” Leora greeted her, giving her a kiss on the cheek.
Little Enrico took the opportunity to free his little arm from the blanket and touched Kadence’s head, who smiled and emitted a little squeal of pleasure. She stretched her hand out and took Enrico’s.
“I want to stay with her,” he signaled.
At almost a year, no one was surprised at Enrico’s ability to speak perfectly that he’d shown since he was six months old. However, both were left in pieces when Kadence also spoke.
“Enrico,” said the baby, with difficulty in an impossibly baby voice.
Both Sofía and Leora inhaled in surprise.
Holding hands, both babies turned their heads as if they were one, looking at their mothers.
From the moment they touched each other, their green eyes showed a visible glow in the iris, even in full light.
THE END
For now...
AUTHOR’S NOTES
The story is written with an open ending, so that you can imagine what will happen next, or you can read the second part. Of course, some things were left unanswered in this book, and others you can imagine whether they will go well or not.
I’d love to know what you thought of the book. Please write to me at [email protected]. If you liked it, please don’t forget to comment and recommend the book where you bought it, so that others will read it, too. It will take you five minutes and it will make me happy for weeks. ☺
If you didn’t like it, please tell me why, so I can improve my writing the next time. Believe me, I do my best. Thank you very much!
All the characters, situations, descriptive devices and circumstances that occur in the book are products of my imagination. The ideas presented may have a real basis, but anything that actually coincides with reality can be attributed to mere coincidence. Some of the places and scenarios are real and they were described with fidelity, but in some cases it was necessary to modify them for the purposes of the story.
I am especially grateful and I dedicate this book to my wife Marina, who encouraged me to write this novel. Thank you very much, my love.
I also want to thank the many readers who gave me their sincere opinion and encouraged me and helped me improve the writing and the story before publishing it, among them Yekeby Figueroa and Héctor Jacobo Mendoza. To Jorge Marquez and Mariana Mort, who helped detect many errors, and to Zue Dawzen for helping me and encouraging me at times when I needed it, to Elizabeth Norlam for a professional proofreading, leaving the work impeccable, and finally to Elizabeth Galbreth for a fantastic translation to English.
This book has 160,126 words. Despite having undergone multiple reviews and scrutiny of several people, it is very possible that some error has still escaped. If you have seen any, please let me know so I can correct it.
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Spanish version: June 2016 - June 2018
English version: July 2018 - December 2018
ADDENDUM
What follows is information relevant to the story, but may seem unnecessary to some readers, or even boring for those who don’t enjoy ‘hard’ science fiction with a lot of technical explanations. If you’re happy with the book, you can skip this section completely. If you want ‘a little more,’ keep reading...
Rho: Rho was fairly flat. Except for the Tower in the middle that had ten floors, all the other buildings were houses of one or two floors. The city was divided into square blocks of three hundred twenty-five feet on each side, and each block divided into four equal parts with a single house on each. The first rays of the sun hit the Tower first, and then went down to the four blocks surrounding it, where there was a hospital that occupied almost one whole block, an exchange center filled another, a high-tech center encompassed a third, and a fantastic park on the fourth. The technology center extended below the earth for six subfloors. On one of them was a meat factory. From cow muscle cells, a laboratory ‘cultivated’ the tissues and literally created meat equal to that of cattle, without having to kill a single animal.
Everything was very symmetrical and ordered, but above all, modern and efficient. The streets of the city, as well as the roofs of the houses, were made of photovoltaic cells with multiple overlapping layers. They had used millions of cells and hundreds of thousands were stored for spare parts in the technology center’s warehouse. The amount of energy generated by the streets alone was significant and fed the houses and the city center by direct lines, all of which were interconnected to balance the demand. Every house also had a set of high capacity batteries with converters for consumption outside of daytime hours. The city itself was connected to an underground nuclear fusion reactor and the hydroelectric turbines of a dam, both a couple of miles away, which provided more power for high consumption needs such as heating and factories, for example. The factories were automated, of course, and consisted of magnificent 3D printers that could use almost any material, even metal, as raw material for manufactu
ring. To get a product, you just had to ask for it or load the design into the computer.
All wires were run underground. There wasn’t a post or a cable in sight. Lights on the edges of the streets and the roofs illuminated the roads and grounds at night.
The city also had ‘parking’ for the automatic vehicles they used. When they weren’t in use, the electric and autonomous cars were accommodated in the parking centers in parking lots. When someone needed a car, they asked for it with a program on their cell phone and the nearest car automatically came to take them to their destination.
All of the consumption in the city was administered by the central computer, which kept track of what was produced and consumed by each person. Every device in the city was equipped to recognize the person who tried to use it, either by their credentials, their fingerprints, their retina or even their DNA according to the importance and cost of the device.
Faraday cage: Effect by which the electromagnetic field inside a conductor in equilibrium is zero, canceling the effect of external fields (for example, an electromagnetic pulse).
ZSLP: The Atlantean transport system doesn’t work by disintegration or teleportation or anything like that, but by pairs of cylinders that create a portal. During the time that the cylinders are energized, the distance between them is zero so going from one continent to another is as simple and instantaneous as going from one side to the other of the cylinder, as easy as crossing a threshold. The mechanism doesn’t consume more or less energy when something crosses it because all the consumption is for sustaining the union that cancels the space between the cylinders, so it doesn’t matter what passes through the portal. The limitation is in the time that the connection can be sustained. And since each cylinder has its own nuclear fusion generator, the time is extensive.
However, the possibility for connection is limited to the three cylinders that exist, each one near an Atlantean city. For the technology to work, there has to be a cylinder in each extreme of the points of transfer. It isn’t possible to ‘bend’ space with only one cylinder.
For this reason, the extraterrestrials first sent an automatic probe with what was necessary to assemble a cylinder and its energy source. The Atlanteans had taken what they could to reproduce the design and finally achieved it, at least in part. In order to make an interstellar portal they needed thousands of times the energy generated for a local trip, with an additional problem: the alignment of the portals had to be exact. With fixed transfer stations on Earth that was relatively easy to achieve. It pointed in one direction and the cylinder was fixed in that position and ready. On the other hand, to link with an objective outside the planet, the problem became terribly difficult. Planets and stars move at a considerable speed, both rotating and moving all the time.
Thus, they had to point at the objective and once the link was achieved, keep the direction of the cylinder lined up with the objective. The great distance was an advantage because the relative movements seemed closer and reduced the amplitude of the movement of the cylinder, but until now they had only been able to experiment with a transfer to the Moon, and despite numerous attempts, it had been impossible to align the cylinders for little more than a few seconds. The precision and delicacy of the movement necessary surpassed even the best available computers. And even taking advantage of the suction of the vacuum to send something at full speed, when the cylinders were misaligned, the link was cut off and if something was being moved just at that moment, it was torn and destroyed when space was deployed. The aliens had found a way to solve this, but the problem had remained a mystery to the Atlanteans.
The experiments they had carried out with CERN allowed them to refine and perfect the technique and when they began to build the cities, Tzedek undertook to secretly build a generator and a cylinder near each one, starting the ZSLP, or Zero Space Link Project. Each cylinder had the capacity to orient itself, fire up remotely, and connect with that of any other city.
The Atlantean Decalogue: The list that Juan Carlos saw in relief on the wall of the control center, read as follows:
1 - You will not intentionally harm or hurt others, physically or psychologically.
2 - You will not be violent unnecessarily.
3 - You will be honest as long as that does not harm anyone.
4 - You will not treat anyone differently because of their origin, class, gender, religion, or physical appearance.
5 - You will not consider any other Atlantean as inferior.
6 - You will help those who cannot fend for themselves.
7 – You will stop cruelty against any living being when you see it.
8 - You will study and help the progress of knowledge.
9 - You will collaborate to maintain the general welfare of your community and its surroundings.
10 - You will enjoy life, it is the only one you have.
It is worth clarifying that all Atlantean precepts applied only with other Atlanteans. Humans were not benefited by them.
NOAA: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, United States
Goode projection: Also known as homolosine projection or interrupted projection, is a cartographic projection that was created by the geographer John Paul Goode in 1923.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goode_homolosine_projection
Πατέρας: /patéras/ Father, in Greek.
CERN: European Organization for Nuclear Research, the largest research laboratory in particle physics in the world.
CDC: Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States.
USAMRIID: United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
Geiger-Müller counter (G-M): An instrument that allows measurement of the radioactivity of an object or place. It is a detector of particles and ionizing radiation. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiger_counter
UFO: Acronym for ‘Unidentified Flying Object,’ technically speaking, anything observed in the sky when it cannot be determined what it is, not necessarily an extraterrestrial ship.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:
BOLAS: A weapon unique to South American culture that has no direct translation to English. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolas
ABOUT PIRACY
It may be impossible to eradicate piracy. The teenager who lives with their mother will never pay for a book or a movie because he does not have a job, he does not know what it is to earn a living and respect the effort and work of others, nor he does not care. However, copying a digital book is committing a robbery and therefore that person is a thief.
The biggest problem, however, isn’t the thief who shares digital books, but the platforms that facilitate the operation of pirates without any control. For that young man to have had access to that PDF means that at some point someone took the trouble to get (buy) a copy of the book and to scan or digitally copy it and then sell it illegally.
The one who distributes the pirated PDF books ‘free’ doesn’t do it for love of culture, or for love of art. He charges for it, through advertising on his page and therefore earns a profit.
Piracy is not advertising for the author. Piracy does not recommend, what it does is obtain profit by duplicating a work without having the right to do so. If you want to help an author, recommend his work, do not offer it for free so everyone can copy it. Authors who are millionaires number about a dozen.
The rest, which are in the millions, depend on each sale to put a little more food on their plate. And every sale lost by piracy is demoralizing for the author, who sometimes abandons his passion because he cannot sustain himself with sales. There is very little left from each sale to an author, a tenth in a physical book and little more in a digital one, because there are distributors, printers, publishers, etc. They take a good slice of each book. Many people live from each book. When a thief sells pirated copies of books, a single person is stealing food from the plate of the author's family and all those other families. And the one who buys is an accomplice.
; The price of books is not an excuse to steal. There are very cheap books. There are practically free books and they are pirated in the same way as the more expensive ones, because those who buy or use a pirated book don’t care who it hurts. They believe it doesn’t hurt anyone. But starting with the author, there is a whole chain of people harmed by piracy, starting with the author's family and following with the layout designers, cover designers, editors, proofreaders, translators, and distributors, among many others. All of them live, or at least try to, from the production of each physical and digital book. When you photocopy a book or sell a copied digital, you are cheating all these people to divert money to a parasite who only steals the work of others.
To justify piracy, there are those who say they would pay for the book after they read it, if they like it. That is as absurd as saying that I go to the supermarket and if the merchandise works for me and I use it, then I’ll pay for it. But also in most platforms, if you have a problem with the quality of the book, you can get a refund if it really is that bad, so to say that to copy PDFs because there are very poorly written books is not an excuse, either.
Piracy IS a crime under current law. Making it easy to copy a digital or photocopy a book does not make it less of a crime. A book is a product, it has a work of elaboration and production and if it is pirated, the cost of "making it" is not recovered. So don’t complain when books are increasingly massive, superficial, low culture, or poor quality. Because of piracy and those who illegally resell books or share them for free, the publishers only look at the authors who guarantee them the sale of millions of copies immediately, and all the other authors have to fight every day to obtain each sale. But they’re all pirated in the same way, because once it’s established that it’s okay to pirate a best seller, anything can be pirated.
Support independent authors. If you really are "poor,” take advantage of promotions, but say no to piracy en masse. Contact the authors—they will thank you.
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