Tears in Rain (14 page)

“None,” he replied.

Husky was stunned. She wasn’t expecting that reply. To tell the truth, before that moment, it would never have occurred to her to ask such a question. Something hurt inside her head. A thought that was burning like an emotion. A rational recognition of marginalization. She noted the mindless defense mechanism of anger taking hold inside her. She did an about-face and, without any farewell, left the room. She could just hear Paul’s thick voice behind her.

“Remember, tomorrow at 13:00 in the Judiciary.”

Bruna charged down the dark corridors, crossed the lobby without greeting the guards and left the institute as if she were running away. But her flight lost its momentum as soon as she abandoned the building. She stopped a few yards from the entrance, in the middle of the night and on an empty street, not knowing what to do or where to go. She was too upset to go home; too angry to go to one of her usual hang-outs, such as Oli’s bar, and put up with the banal chitchat of some acquaintance; too full of death to remain on her own.
Four years, three months, and twenty-one days.

The cold air was a relief to her burning cheeks. She was standing on the sidewalk, feet slightly apart, feeling all the weight of her body, her neck sweaty, her arms relaxed, her stomach smooth and taut, her legs agile. Flesh alert, eager. A body raging with life. An acute unease began to take shape inside her, like a storm cloud in a late summer sky. Suddenly she remembered something and started to rummage through all her pockets. Finally, wrapped up in a crumpled piece of paper inside a box of painkillers in her backpack, she found what she was looking for—a candy. An oxytocin
cocktail. The tiny pill must have been lying forgotten in its hiding place for months, and it was a bit sticky. Bruna gave the pill a superficial clean, rubbing it between two fingers, and then she placed it under her tongue to speed up the impact of the drug. And for a few minutes, she focused on breathing and waiting. On relishing the cold night air. On emptying her mind and becoming all body.

There was a car parked in front of the entrance to the Forensic Anatomy Institute. It wasn’t a regulation police vehicle, but the gray license plates indicated that it was an official car. Without doubt the car belonged to Inspector Paul Lizard—the Reptile, the Caiman, that barely trustworthy hulk. Bruna inhaled deeply. Her skin was burning, but from within now. In a few moments, the rep would do something about that. About all that energy and fire. Shortly, Bruna would begin to cruise the city; she would surf the night in search of sex—of a carnal explosion capable of defeating death. The only possible eternity was between her legs. Like most humans and technohumans, Bruna was more or less bisexual; only a few individuals were exclusively heterosexual or homosexual. But on the whole, she preferred men, and in any case, tonight she wanted a man. Maybe someone as big as the reptile Lizard, a gigantic human whom she’d have begging for her android vagina. Bruna let loose a brief laugh. Her heart was beating faster, her body seemed to be boiling; the air was charged with pheromones. The rapture of the night. She was a star on the verge of bursting, a pulsating quasar. She walked a few steps, relishing her vigor and her agility, her hunger and her health. Relishing a ferocious happiness. She put her hand under her short metallic skirt and, leaning against the parked car, she took off her panties. Tonight she wanted to roam the city without any underwear. It wasn’t the first time she had done so, and it wouldn’t be the last. What pleasure to feel herself completely open, rid of hindrances, available. Before she headed off, she left her panties on the windscreen of the policeman’s car. The world buzzed around her and the beat of life throbbed in her veins, her heart and, in particular, at the center of her naked flower, right down there.

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Floating Worlds

Keywords: History of Science, Labaric Cult, aristopopulism, Plagues, Robot Wars, bilateral agreements, Second Cold War.

#63-025

Entry being edited

The
Floating Worlds
in existence at present are the
Democratic State of Cosmos
and the
Kingdom of Labari
. These two gigantic artificial structures maintain fixed orbits with respect to Earth, and are authentic worlds with complete autonomy. Although, for strategic reasons, Cosmos and Labari both adhere to a cryptic policy of data concealment, it is assumed that there are between five and six hundred million inhabitants on each of the Floating Worlds. They are all humans, as neither world allows technos or aliens to live there
, a fact which converts these Worlds into zones that are undoubtedly more secure for our species
.

The first references to the eventual need for the construction of an artificial world in the stratosphere to provide accommodation for at least a portion of humanity in the event of a catastrophe surfaced in the so-called
Atomic Era
—the decades in the mid-twentieth century that followed the explosion of the first nuclear fission bombs among civilian populations (
Hiroshima
and
Nagasaki
). But the idea of building alternative worlds in space became a social necessity and a real possibility during the twenty-first century, following the havoc wreaked by
global warming
, which raised the level of the oceans by six feet and inundated some 18 percent of the Earth’s surface
and, even more critically, following the high loss of life, despair, and insecurity caused by the
Plagues
, the
Rep War
, and the
Robot Wars
.

The Kingdom of Labari is named after the founder of the
Church of the One Creed
, the Argentinian
Heriberto Labari
(2001–2071). A podiatrist by profession, Labari was born on September 11, 2001, the day of the well-known attack on the World Trade Center in New York, a coincidence he would subsequently use as evidence of his predestination. When he turned thirty, Labari pronounced that he had received a divine message. He gave up his work, founded the Church of the One Creed, and dedicated himself to preaching about the
Labaric Cult
, which, according to him, was the original and primordial religion brought to Earth by extraterrestrials in remote times and subsequently perverted and broken up through ignorance and greed into the planet’s various beliefs. The cult offered a syncretic mix of the bestknown religions, especially Christianity and Islam, together with ingredients from role-play and fantasy, with overtones reminiscent of a medieval, hierarchical, sexist, subservient, and highly ritualistic world. In order to disseminate his teachings, Heriberto Labari wrote some twenty science fiction novels that quickly became very popular.
“My fantastic tales are the Christian parables of the twenty-first century,” he once declared. It must be remembered that the founding of the Church of the One Creed coincided with the terrible years of the Plagues, one of the most violent and tragic periods in the history of humanity, and Labari’s message seemed to offer security and the possibility of salvation. When the prophet died in 2071, killed by a fanatical Shi’ite assassin, there were already hundreds of millions of
Ones
throughout Earth. Some of them, ranging from Arab sheiks from the Persian Gulf region to important Western entrepreneurs, were incredibly wealthy.

A few years before his death, Labari had begun to speak about the construction of a stratospheric world, not only in order to flee from an ever more convulsed Earth, but also to create a perfect society based on the rigid parameters of the Labaric Cult. His posthumous novel,
The Kingdom of the Pure
, specified in great detail what such a place would be like. Labari is shaped like a thick ring or, rather, an enormous pneumatic tire. By all accounts, it was generated by semiartificial bacteria capable of reproducing themselves in space at dizzying speed and forming a light, semiorganic, porous, and practically indestructible material that does not lose
its shape. The details of this highly innovative technology remain a secret. It is striking that a society that is officially antitechnology has been capable of a scientific discovery of this caliber, even if the processes employed are either natural or seem to imitate nature in some way. The Kingdom’s inhabitants live inside the walls of the outer ring; and, in the interior, an immense reservoir of water and hydrogenreleasing algae supplies the Kingdom’s energy needs.

While Labari is the result of a new religion, Cosmos is the product of an ideology.
Although perhaps both end up being the same.
When the Moon Pact, which ended the Rep War, was signed in 2062, there was only one state that did not sign it: Russia. At that time, the old Russian empire was going through the worst moment in its history. It was a bankrupt nation, devastated by gangs and drastically reduced in size thanks to successive wars and bitter conflicts with its neighbors, who had been shrinking its borders. Since the Russians were so poor and backward that they did not even have technohuman production plants, the fact that they had not signed the Moon Pact did not alter in any way the effectiveness of the agreement. But the refusal to sign made
Amaia Elescanova
—who had just been
elected president of that nation in ruins—famous overnight.

Elescanova (2013–2104) was the founder and leader of the
Regeneration
(or
PeГeHepauИЯ
)
Party
. She argued that all the evils of the world were the result of the abandonment of utopias and of surrender to the abuses of capitalism. While she maintained that both Marxism and the Soviet model were obsolete, she nevertheless demanded the creation of a common revolutionary front to end the world’s inequalities. In her essay
Responsible Minorities and Contented Masses
, the cornerstone of her ideology, Elescanova proposed a society governed by the wisest and the fittest, along the lines of Plato’s republic but strengthened by scientific advances : “The same zygote could even be employed to boost the best qualities of the new ruling class, by employing eugenic techniques (...) Science and Social Conscience United to Create the Supermen and Superwomen of the Future
(capital letters in the original text)
.”

Regenerationism, or
aristopopulism
as it rapidly came to be called, spread like wildfire throughout the world, especially after the mid-2070s, when various nations began to impose a charge for clean air, and citizens with fewer resources were forced to emigrate en masse to the more polluted zones. But it
was not just the financially weak sectors that adopted Elescanova’s doctrine. Powerful parties from various countries and differing ideologies—from the extreme left to the extreme right—joined forces with the Russian leader in 2077 to form the
International Aristopopular Movement
(
IAM
), an antibourgeois, antireligion, and anticapitalist organization although, paradoxically, one that had considerable capital at its disposal.

A movement such as this naturally aspires to world domination, but perhaps Earth did not appear to the IAM to have much of a future. Whether it was for this reason or the news that the Labarians were going to build a floating kingdom, what is certain is that the IAM’s first decision was to build its own extraterrestrial platform. In fact, a fierce competition of sorts arose between the Ones and the Aristopopulists to see who could finish their project first, as if the remarkable achievement of an artificial world might serve as an advertising ploy for their respective, if opposing, life visions. Despite starting the race later, the IAM won; the Democratic State of Cosmos was inaugurated in 2087, while the first subjects of the Kingdom of Labari did not arrive until 2088.