Tears in Rain Page 4

  And it was that remoteness that was so devastating, so unbearable.

  The inner remoteness was the second, and definitive, death of his son. Because if he couldn’t keep his little Edú alive in his memory, who else would?

  How weak, how untruthful and unfaithful was human memory. Yiannis knew that during those forty-nine years that had gone by, each and every cell in his body had renewed itself. Not a single original organic particle remained of the Yiannis he had once been, nothing save that transcellular and transtemporal current of air that was his memory, that spiritual thread woven by his identity. But if that thread, too, were broken, if it were unable to remember itself continuously in time, how did his past differ from a dream? To stop remembering was to destroy his world.

  It was for that reason—because he always felt that dizzy lack of trust in memory—that Yiannis decided to become a professional archivist. And for that same reason, from time to time he would really try to remember Edú from within. He would close his eyes and, with an enormous effort, endeavor to re-create some distant scene. Visualize again the old room, the outline of the furniture, the precise density of the shadow; feel the heat of the afternoon, the stillness of the air right against his skin; hear the silence barely broken by a calm, diminutive breath; smell the odor—so warm and so carnal—of that delightful little creature. Then and only then would he see again the child sleeping in his cot, and not even the whole child but maybe a reconstruction of his chubby little hand in all its purity and veracity, still baby soft; that perfect hand with its fingers curled, abandoned in repose and ignorant of its total vulnerability. With any luck, having reached this point, the memory would emerge from the past like a flash of light that pierced Yiannis, suddenly activating the suffering in all its intensity and making the old man cry. Cry from pain but also from gratitude, because somehow, and for just a moment, he had managed not simply to recall Edú, but to sense again that Edú had once been alive.

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  Teleportation

  Keywords: history of science, TP disorder, Cosmos Fever, Robot Wars, Day One, Other Beings, Human Peace, Global Agreements of Cassiopeia, sentient beings.

  #422-222

  Entry being edited

  Teleportation or teletransportation (TP) is one of humankind’s oldest dreams. Although quantum teleportation had been attempted in the twentieth century, the first significant experiment took place in 2006, when Professor Eugene Polzik, of the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, succeeded in teleporting a tiny, but macroscopic, object a distance of eighteen inches using light as the means of transmission of information about the object. It was not until 2067, however, with the discovery of the unsuspected light-boosting attributes of astatine—an extremely rare element on Earth but relatively abundant in the mines on Titan—that teleportation took a giant leap forward. In 2073, thanks to so-called dense light, capable of transporting 100,000 times more information in a manner that is 100,000 times more stable than laser light, Professor Darling Oumou Koité was teleported—or TP’d, as they say today—from Bamako (Mali) to Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. It was the first time that a human had been TP’d across outer space.

  As of that moment a genuine frenzy of exploration and conquest of the universe by the nations of Earth was unleashed. Given that teleportation eliminated distances and traveling a mile was thus no different from traveling a million miles, Earth’s governing bodies became locked in a race to colonize remote planets and exploit their resources. This was referred to as Cosmos Fever and became one of the principal triggers for the Robot Wars, which devastated Earth from 2079 to 2090. Teleportation was always prohibitively expensive, and for this reason it was general practice to TP exploration teams of no more than two or three people. Given that credible information was available for scarcely a few hundred planets with colonizing potential, it was not unknown for envoys from various countries to coincide at a particular target, either by chance or as a result of espionage, often resulting in violence. Numerous explorers died in combat or were assassinated, and the ongoing recurrence of diplomatic incidents heightened tensions worldwide. As the better-known destinations were seized or converted into bitterly disputed territories, the powers of Earth began to take more and more risks and to send their explorers to ever more remote and obscure places, which increased exponentially the already high loss of life among those being teleported. In 2080, the last year of Cosmos Fever, 98 percent of the explorers from Earth died (about 8,200 individuals, almost all of them technohumans). The majority of them simply disappeared during the transfer, perhaps disintegrating through error in deep intergalactic space, perhaps instantly volatilized while being TP’d to an unexpectedly fiery planet.

  By that stage, something that the scientists and governments had known since the earliest days of this technology had become public knowledge: teletransportation is an atomically imperfect process that can have grave side effects. This is a consequence of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, according to which not all the characteristics of a particle can be measured accurately. The very act of teleportation subjects particles to infinitesimal but essential changes. This means that any teleported organism experiences microscopic alterations; thus, what is reconstructed at its destination is not exactly the same as the original subject. Normally these alterations are minimal, subatomic, and imperceptible, but in a significant number of cases, the changes are important and dangerous: eyes moved to cheeks, defective lungs, hands without fingers, and even skulls lacking brains. This destructive effect of teleportation is referred to as TP disorder, and those individuals afflicted by visible deformities are colloquially known as mutants. It has, moreover, been established that repeated instances of teletransportation inevitably lead to organic harm. The likelihood of suffering a serious TP disorder increases exponentially with each transfer, reaching 100 percent as of the eleventh TP. The Global Agreements of Cassiopeia (2096) are currently in force, and these restrict to six the number of times living things (humans, technohumans, Other Beings, and animals) can be TP’d during their life span.

  The risks involved in transfers, the deaths and numerous disappearances of explorers, the prohibitive costs, and the beginning of the Robot Wars all combined to put an end to Cosmos Fever and to the enthusiasm for teleportation. As of 2081, TP was used solely to support the exploitation of the distant planet Potosí, the only heavenly body beyond the solar system discovered during Cosmos Fever whose resources proved sufficiently profitable to develop a mining industry. In the early years, ownership of Potosí was shared by the European Union, China, and the American Federation. Post-Unification, it belongs to the United States of the Earth, although the most productive mines have been sold to the Kingdom of Labari and the Democratic State of Cosmos.

  The first documented encounter between human beings from Earth and Other Beings, or ETBs (extraterrestrial beings), took place on May 3, 2090, a date thereafter known as Day One. On that day an alien spaceship landed on the Chinese sector of the mining colony of Potosí. Inside it were Gnés explorers, a people from the planet Gnío, close to Potosí; both planets circle the star Fomalhaut. Their ship was very fast and very advanced technically, although their displacement method was conventional and they traveled at well below the speed of light. They knew nothing of physical teleportation but had developed an ultrasonic means of communication supported by light beams, and capable of reaching phenomen
al distances in record time. Thanks to such messages, or telegnés, the Gnés had established nonvisual contact with two other remote extraterrestrial civilizations, the Omaás and the Balabís. We humans had ceased to be alone in the universe.

  The impact of such a remarkable discovery was absolute. Three days later Human Peace was signed, thereby ending the Robot Wars. Though the accord was undoubtedly deemed to have been driven by the fear the extraterrestrials inspired in the inhabitants of our planet (the very name—Human Peace–almost suggests a desire to highlight the unity of this species against the aliens), a positive feeling of community began to develop over the few short years leading into the Unification process and the creation of the United States of the Earth in 2098. At the same time, contact was established with the three ETB civilizations, and there is no doubt that the existence of teleportation was the most significant factor enabling a genuine political and cultural exchange among the four worlds: for the first time, everyone could meet face-to-face. There were studies, reports, the intensive training of translators, negotiations, pre-agreements, emissaries being TP’d, myriad telegnés crisscrossing the galaxies, and frantic diplomatic activity throughout the universe. It soon became clear that the four species were in no way competing against one another and posed no threat to one another. Their home planets were vast distances apart, and teletransportation was equally harmful to all of them. The grandeur of the cosmos seemed somehow to encourage human nobility, and the talks advanced rapidly and harmoniously, culminating in the Global Agreements of Cassiopeia in 2096, the first interstellar treaty in history. The agreements regulate the patenting and use of technologies (for example, we buy the Gnés’ telegnés, and they buy teleportation from us, but both the intellectual property and the rights to exploitation belong exclusively to the civilization that developed the particular invention), the exchange of goods, the type of currency, the use of teletransportation, terms of migration, etc. Faced with the need to coin a word that would define our new partners in the universe and identify us with them, the term

  sentient beings, an expression borrowed from the Buddhist tradition, was agreed to. The sentients (G’nayam in Gnés, Laluala in Balabí, Amoa in Omaánese) constitute a new level in the taxonomy of living things. If, up to that point, human beings had belonged to the kingdom Animalia, the phylum Cordata, the class Mammalia, the order Primates, the family Hominidae, the genus Homo and the species Homo sapiens, after the agreements a new rank was added—the line Sintiente, located between class and order—because, curiously, all extraterrestrials appear to be mammals and to have hair of one sort or another.

  Although teleportation has enabled the four civilizations to exchange ambassadors, it is not very common to see an alien in person. In total, there are fewer than twenty thousand aliens on our planet, a tiny number compared with the four billion citizens of Earth, known as Earthlings. Each diplomatic delegation consists of three thousand individuals, spread across the most important cities in the USE. There are also about ten thousand Omaás, who TP’d to Earth fleeing from a religious war on their own planet. That said, their unusual looks are extremely well known to all, thanks to the images screened on the news. The official name for extraterrestrials is Other Beings, but they are commonly referred to as bichos, or creeps.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “I found this on my desk two days ago,” said Myriam Chi.

  She leaned forward and handed Bruna a small holograph ball. Bruna held it in her palm and pressed the button. Immediately, a three-dimensional image of the RRM leader formed on her hand. It was no more than four inches tall, but it clearly showed Myriam in her entirety, smiling and waving. Suddenly, from nowhere, a minuscule hand appeared holding a knife, and the blade, enormous by comparison, slit the rep’s belly from top to bottom and, using the tip of the weapon as a lever, skillfully extracted her intestines. Her guts spilled out and the hologram switched off. That was it, but it was more than enough.

  “Shit,” murmured Bruna despite herself.

  She had felt the impact of the scene in her stomach, but a millisecond later she had managed to recover her aplomb. She pressed the button again and this time paid closer attention.

  “You’re smiling the whole time. It must be an image from a news bulletin, or—”

  “It’s from the end of one of last year’s rallies. We holographed the whole thing and sell it in our souvenir shop. Our sympathizers buy it. It’s a way of raising funds for the movement.”

  “So anyone can get hold of it.”

  “We have many supporters, and that hologram is one of our most popular items.”

  Bruna picked up a particular timbre in Myriam’s words, an ironically sarcastic tone, and glanced up. The other woman gazed back at her with an impenetrable look. Long, wavy, chestnut-brown hair, a tailored suit, makeup on her face. For the leader of a radical movement, she had an oddly conventional look. Bruna pressed the ball again. The superimposed image of the disembowelment seemed to be real, not virtual. Maybe it was of an animal in some slaughterhouse.

  “It’s in fact a fairly clumsy piece of work, Chi. I’d say it’s a homemade job. But it’s very effective, because that wholly unexpected and horrific butchery prevents you from noticing the defects. Can I hang on to it?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll return it as soon as I’ve analyzed it.”

  “As you can understand, there’s no way I want it. But yes, I suppose it’s evidence that has to be kept.”

  Hah, thought Bruna, I’ve got you. Myriam had accompanied the sentence with a small sigh, and her strong and somewhat arrogant pose of the world-leader-who-is-above-such-trifles had cracked a little, showing a flash of fear. Yes, of course she was frightened, and rightly so. Husky vaguely recalled other, earlier incidents during Chi’s rallies that were violent and disruptive, even some supremacists who had tried to shoot her—or was it blow her up with a bomb? When Bruna had arrived at the RRM headquarters, she’d had to go through various security checks, including a full body scan.

  “And you say that, apart from you, there are only two other people authorized to enter this office?”

  “That’s right. My personal assistant and the head of security. And neither of them opened the door. The register that records lock activity shows no one entering here from the time I left the previous night until when I returned the following morning. And by then the holograph ball was already on my desk.”

  “Which means that someone has manipulated the register. Maybe someone internal. The head of security?”

  “Impossible.”

  “You’d be amazed at the infinite possibilities of the impossible.”

  Myriam cleared her throat.

  “She’s my partner. We’ve been together for three years. I know her. And we love each other.”

  Bruna had a fleeting vision of Myriam as a potential lover. That cold self-assurance punctuated by the fragility of fear; that loud, intrusive activism linked with her old-fashioned appearance. Why, she even had fingernails painted in the retro style! All those contradictions magnified her attractiveness. For a moment Bruna convinced herself that she could understand why the head of security had fallen for her. But finding Myriam sexy put Bruna in a bad mood.

  “And what can you tell me about your personal assistant? Do you love him enough to exonerate him, too?” she asked, with uncalled-for rudeness.

  Myriam Chi didn’t react.

  “He’s also beyond suspicion. We’ve worked together for too many years. Don’t make a mistake. Don’t waste your time looking where you shouldn’t. I repeat that this is linked to trafficking in adulterated memories. I’m certain of it. That’s what you have to investigate and that’s precisely why I’ve called you: because you saw one of the victims.”

  Indeed, Myriam had told her all this in a commanding tone as soon as Bruna had arrived. The RRM leader had explained to her that before Cata Caín, there had already been four other reps who had died in similar circumstances. And that when she became
interested in the matter and went to talk with friends and colleagues of the victims, she began to receive strange threats: anonymous, untraceable phone calls; increasingly threatening messages on her computer; and finally the holograph ball, more intimidating because of its appearance in her office than because of its gruesome content. Bruna wasn’t used to having her clients tell her what she had to do; usually, it was the opposite. People hired private detectives when they felt at a loss, when they felt threatened but weren’t sure by what, or when they needed to prove some suspicion so dark that they didn’t even know where to begin to look. A private detective’s clients were generally lost in confusion. Otherwise they would have gone to the police or the courts. And Bruna knew from experience that the more confused the person hiring her was the better their working relationship would be, because then the client would give the sleuth greater freedom and be more grateful for the smallest fact the detective might find. If truth be told, a private detective was a finder of certainties.