Castaways - Juan Pablo Noroña

PlutoniumSex raised his left hand from the neuropad, in wrapt attention as a drop of sweat stretched downward from his index finger. The exaggerated focus from the taxotropin allowed him to watch the process at a leisurely pace, magnified until it took up his entire field of vision and decelerated, by orders of magnitude —a slomo zoom on a slow processor— and superimposed like a bad fade on top of the icons and links which connected the web with his brain. Good lysergic material, but a nuisance in the middle of The Space. PlutoniumSex was bothered by his id, which forced him to be conscious of Flesh; another pathetic rebellion of protein against silicon. 

Suddenly, PlutoniumSex understood: environmental heat. Sweat means heat: that was the message which his id had slipped in like a subliminal image over his synaptic interface. He would not have guessed that it was warm. 

PlutoniumSex pulled out of The Space and ordered a dose of sympathetic complex from his Metabolix, as well as a cocktail of neurophysiological stabilizers. While he waited for these to kick in, he ordered a complete rundown of hardware, with emphasis on any problems which might cause thermal dissipation up to the third synergetic level. PlutoniumSex did not have the foggiest idea what was happening. 

Once he found himself active, PlutoniumSex also found himself heated up, slick, sticky with pure sweat, a disgusting mess of sweat, smells and more Flesh. Apparently the problem was very serious and had been developing for some time, and the worst of it was that the system alarm had not sounded. PlutoniumSex lifted himself up on his arm and remained on his side, enabling him to see his flatmate, BlueFly, lying, just like him, on a bed capsule, his entire body gleaming with perspiration. PlutoniumSex looked at his white abdomen and hip. It too oozed humidity. 

Because the surface of the bed was composed of tensor gel, it was slippery with sweat, and this made it difficult for PlutoniumSex to maneuver, first to remove his catheters and then to exit. That was further complicated by his own lack of muscle tone and coordination. He ended up slipping onto the floor with more or less controlled stumbles and painful twists of his limbs. Finally he crossed the two meters that separated him from Bluefly and began to press the pads on his console. He had no appetite for tackling this problem alone. 

While Bluefly went through the same process of disengagement, PlutoniumSex ran through the results of the evaluation in his head. The system recognized an increase in temperature but did not register any functional problems: everything was working perfectly. PlutoniumSex sighed. He would have to identify the problem himself and, even worse, fix it. It was then that he felt it, or, more precisely, didn't feel it. 

Whenever he had stood, the few times that that he had stood in this room, PlutoniumSex had felt the smooth freshness of refrigerated air falling down from the ceiling over his head and shoulders like a smooth benediction, but now he was not feeling it. The refrigeration was not functioning. Was it... broken? PlutoniumSex shuddered just thinking about it. He understood that things broke down, whether from inherent defects, bad use or fatigue, but all his experience in this regard was limited to the computational, and the solution was always easy: deactivate the function temporarily and buy another unit. But as far as refrigeration was concerned, PlutoniumSex knew nothing about anything. He did not know how it broke, let alone how to fix it. He needed to find someone who would know, and that someone didn't seem to be Bluefly. 

PlutoniumSex opened the door and walked into the hallway. 

He stopped dead in his tracks in shock. 

A hasty and asthmatic line was coursing through the hallway, like bubbles in the physiological serum inside a clear plastic hose. Othernights with their days numbered and themselves well aware of it, baby10s who had not reached 7 and who could be bought for the price of a 4, intensoids with feverish eyes, posttribals nonviolent for the moment, toughskins with invincible, reptilian features, neomen, their implants unstitched, plug-ins that were the spitting image of PlutoniumSex, totals with zombimorphic plastic faces, junkies in the worst moment of withdrawal, traffickers in both real and counterfeit weapons, shredlings having just escaped a nightmare of mutilations, mutes that would give them a fair fight, marked1s more fearful even than usual, pansexuals with every port duplicated into redundancy, anodized leadies in a bright variety of colors; and many more species and subspecies, including unique individuals, humans even. 

"What's happening?" PlutoniumSex grabbed a total by its rubbery shoulders and stopped it. "Where are you going?" 

"Outside," replied the total, a creature which specialized in the manipulation of bony structure. "Refrigeration and the ventilation are down, and nobody in the building can stand it any more." 

"Why doesn't somebody fix it?" 

The total shook its head. "Can't. The same plug-in who let himself into the building Net some time ago and raised all of our levels says that the system is up to who knows what." 

"Maybe the central machinery is broken. Someone should go fix it." 

"Well, I don't even know where that is. Do you?" 

"So then call the repair company. Let them come." 

The total looked at PlutoniumSex as if he had slipped a cog. "Who would come?" He added sarcastically, "Not even the Army comes here!" 

PlutoniumSex stood watching the wide back of the total as it marched through the hallway. No, he didn't know how to fix the refrigeration machinery. PlutoniumSex could evaluate and assemble all kind of electronic pieces and use them to build complete computing systems, but he sputtered like an overloaded outlet when faced with the slightest mechanical problem. Probably everyone in the building was at the same level of incompetence or worse. In this slagheap of technocriminal subcultures, everyone knew how to rob, traffic and sell any object, including his own body or others', but nobody knew how to work, how to do anything useful, boring, laborious and certainly nothing as poorly paying as fixing plumbing and compressors, or whatever it was that made up a refrigeration system. PlutoniumSex returned to his room, put on a robe of transgenic silk and joined up with the procession of bubbles. Bluefly could follow him if he wished, as soon as he got up. 

After an exhausting descent through the stairs —the elevators were both the location and the motive for turf wars— PlutoniumSex arrived at the crowd milling around in the courtyard that opened out onto the front of the building. People were sitting on the ground, taking up an enormous area, occupying all the walking space, including the entrance itself. Everybody was in the way. PlutoniumSex waded through the mass between protests and punches until he reached the outermost zone, and he sat down right there. Little by little others joined him, walking past him in ever more lines of beings seated like him, with their legs picked up and hugging their knees, or in other squeezed positions. Since the night was cold and a breeze was blowing, the people tended to huddle in search of a little warmth; but huddling alone in distrust and precaution. 

PlutoniumSex raised his eyes to the gray sky, closed off between walls of steel and glass. It looked as desperate as he was in this world of nonsensical consumption, unreal economics, useless professions, unsustainable disorder, wickedly unnatural images and ridiculous marginality of so much institutionality. "God," PlutoniumSex said, burying his head between his knees. "How I hate cyberpunk!" 

Original title: Náufragos

Translation: Daniel W. Koon

Versión en castellano

Chimera - Juan Pablo Noroña

His back to the cat, the owner butters a piece of toast. He is frightened to death but resists the urge to turn around because somehow he knows that he is safe as long as he hears the animal mewing. Furthermore, he does not know for certain whether it happens when the animal is out of his sight or only in the fleeting and confusing instant in which it flits across the corner of his eye; and so for now he can feel safe and turning around to avoid the feline eclipse could prove counterproductive. Because for a fraction of a second the cat would be in the zone that brings it from the corner of his eye to the center of his field of vision, and the owner would see it.
It would be foolish, though, to plan to spend the entire day in the kitchen, parked in front of the table with his gaze fixed on the washer. Also useless: at any instant the cat could enter his field of vision on its own paws. This latter possibility would perhaps be a relief, since while the animal is in sight it is only a black and white, long-haired kitty with a springy tail and woolly, chubby cheeks. Still, the transition would be frightening, hair-raising, and then of course would come the anxious ordeal of having it next to him, and fighting to stay awake, and deciding not to leave the house, and putting off the change for as long as possible. Resigned to the fact that there is no solution for this problem, the owner chews his toast with neither appetite nor pleasure. And then it happens.
A creature at once both horrible and spellbinding, a chimera of imprecise form and indistinct edges is perched atop the table. Its colors are dizzying, its symmetry unreal, simultaneously both possessing and lacking recognizable structures and organs; it moves over the tiles maintaining all the while a glacial calm about itself.
The owner blinks, and before his eyes his little black and white cat spars with him with its left paw while mewing plaintively.
“Nothing I can do about it,” the owner thinks, and he chews his toast. If the beast would just remain, he would know how to deal with it. Is it his own lunacy, hallucinations caused by physical and mental exhaustion, or is his cat really an impossible scoundrel which only reveals its true colors under hazy, ambiguous conditions, torturing him with uncertainty and fear? Whichever it is, he is all alone with this problem: if the chimera is real, nobody will believe him; if it is a delirium, he can’t afford the luxury of confessing his foolishness to anyone else, not in the present circumstances of his life. Not to mention, accusing such a sweet little kitty of being some kind of monster...
On the kitchen table, the cat sniffs at the perfumed crumbs of butter that have fallen between the tiles and on its own fur. The owner sighs, puts the toast in his mouth, charges after the animal with both hands and carries it with him to the living room. He has no other choice but what he is about to do.
The owner leaves the cat, now purring and trembling on the sofa, and places what is left of the toast next to its mouth. The cat mews its thanks and wrestles off a piece of bread with its front teeth, as if afraid of the butter smudging its snout. And when the animal closes its eyes, the man also closes his, tightly, and as the pet begins to nibble the bread, the owner begins to back out blindly in the direction of his bedroom and does so without tripping, knowing the route, until he reaches his own room and closes the door behind himself, stealthily, very carefully, without opening his eyes, and he supports himself on the moist wood, desperate and secure for the evening.
All the windows are hermetically sealed and there are no other doors. The owner pounces on the bed, takes several pills from the nightstand and swallows two as if they were a handful. Later, in the living room, the chimera cannot fit its anomalous shape onto the sofa, nor can its unnatural texture tolerate the surface of the couch. Luckily, it knows a perfect sleeping spot. The chimera gets off the sofa, walks in the direction of the owner’s room and arrives at the dividing wall, which does not stop it, and the creature crosses it as if it or the wall were illusory, gas, the smoky image of a fevered mind.
Inside is its master. The chimera climbs smoothly and cautiously onto the bed. The man is sound asleep, and it can climb over him, placing itself between his chest and his stomach, in the warm and firm hollow under his ribs, and it settles in. Its fantastic colors glitter excitedly in the same rhythm as its purring, while its yellow-green eyes stroke its owner’s face with a look of absolute and infinite adoration.

Original title: Quimera
Translation: Daniel W. Koon


Versión en castellano