Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (18 page)

“It’ll go away” I thought
and turned around. In this house we already have one, we don’t need
another pet. When I opened the door to the house, I turned back and
it had already gone. As if by magic, it lost itself in the night at
the same speed with which it had appeared. “Who knows, perhaps it
has a refuge among the trash, which by the way they haven’t picked
up since last night.” I tried to imagine it motionless among the
trash. Waiting. Who knows what it would be waiting for.
Technically, their bodies don’t need anything, but zombies insist
on being near people. After all, they were people until
recently.

And there it would remain
until it smelled another human and once again rose up. To walk
toward them. “Well, I suppose that it will also give my brother a
big scare when he returns,” I thought before going to bed. There
was nothing to fear in the night.

IV

On the wall of the lab there was a poster
with the slogan:

ZOMBIES YES, YANKEES NO.

There were three computers
spread around the room, in addition to a biological containment
tank of some four square meters. Inside the tank was the
experimental subject, catalogued as number 43. It banged its head
against the armored glass repeatedly, baring its teeth in a useless
attempt to bite something beyond its reach. It had inhaled the
aerosol version of the serum, so it would soon cease to attack and
prove to be as docile as a puppy. It was said that this version
will have many uses. What’s certain is that we were under a lot of
pressure to perfect it as soon as possible. It was whispered in the
hallways that it would be put in the fumigation equipment. Many
people here think that if it’s necessary to fumigate the entire
city then the zombie problem is getting out of control. Others just
say that we’re going to start to export the serum. But who are we
going to sell it to? Venezuela perhaps? Right now, the whole place
is a Z zone beside Colombia. The United States wouldn’t lift the
embargo, even if we gave them the vaccine against the Z virus as a
gift. And China is a bad place to do business. Would they exchange
the aerosol serum for articulated omnibuses or televisions?
Moreover, China says that it has the zombie problem under control.
Although, of course, no one believes them.

Nothing that’s happening
makes any sense.

That’s why, while we
finished the experiment, I busied myself in finishing a
three-dimensional model of the serum retrovirus. An alternative
task that, according to my mentor, will transform the serum into a
vaccine. I have little faith in it, but he is fervently
enthusiastic. He belongs to a generation that believed in science
as much as in Marxism-Leninism. It is said that his entire
graduating year inoculated themselves against the Z virus to test
the first vaccine. The Taino B was, of course, a failure. Now all
his classmates are zombies and he travels to the University of
Malaga every year to give a seminar on the development of the Cuban
serum and its uses. He’s never answered the question of why he
never took the vaccine. But it’s true that he is not one of the
people who favors the serum as a solution to the Z problem. He is
an old school researcher, searching for a vaccine.

Now he was arguing with
another of the sacred cows of Cuban science, the very creator of
the serum and head researcher. This man traveled to Düsseldorf
three times a year thanks to the zombies and twice a day they call
him from the OMS. He and my mentor argued heatedly about details of
the zombie issue that I didn’t even know existed.

“As far as I know, there
are only two population groups where unmutated versions of the
virus can be found: in Haiti and the Ukraine. In both populations,
the dead who return from their graves are friendly beings who
remember their pasts. In both cases, clinical death is present,
necrosis, a minimalization of cerebral function, but they always
retain memory and passivity. The aggressive impulses arose with
later mutations. First in the Ukraine because of radioactive
fallout from Chernobyl, and then in the American South for unknown
reasons.”

“We already know all
history. And it’s tempting to think that if our serum manages to
eliminate the aggressive impulse, it will also let them recover
memories. But there is not a single registered case after “Z Day”
where the virus was in its original form. And that business about
their having memories comes from observations during periods when
zombies were just folklore.”

“But if we model the most
probable molecular structure of the unmutated Z virus on the
computer, we could synthesize a regression serum.”

“I’m not seeing it. The
most we’ll achieve, and I am basing myself strictly on the models
we have of the virus...”

“Yes, of course, the model
made by the Russians which the Japanese posted online before the
mob of zombies attacked the Kobe Institute.”

“Exactly, because the
North American model hasn’t been shared with us. Well, if we
extrapolate an original virus with those incomplete models, the
most that we’ll achieve will be an increase in cerebral function.
And I am not sure as to which ones.”

“That is nonsense. How can
we look for a vaccine for the Z virus, which mutates almost as much
as AIDS? What we need is to redesign the retrovirus and control the
situation with the aerosol serum.”

My mentor looked at him
with those same eyes with which he must have looked at his
classmates when he showed them the ampoules with Taino B. He left a
dignified silence. His annual trip to the University of Malaga
would depend on his next words. No matter what he said, his gaze
proclaimed the phrase: “This is madness, don’t do it.” But the
director assumed his silence was a sort of professional victory
over a mentally inferior colleague. He left with the satisfaction
of having won a fair fight. Then my mentor turned toward me, the
weakest link in this food chain where trips abroad were more
important than scientific categories.

“How is the model going,
Ramón?” Now my trip to Malaga hangs in the balance.

“The structure is still
not stable,” I say, and I don’t need to turn around to see his
furrowed brow. “But perhaps with a better processor, I could
estimate all the variables.”

“Keep trying,” he says,
taciturn, and I start to fear for my job. “We’ll see what we can do
later with the cluster. I’ve asked for time to run our modeling and
iterate the basic equations, but I haven’t gotten an answer yet.
I’ll have to speak with people at the UH to see if they’ll let us
use theirs.”

The UH, the
two-hundred-year-old University of Havana, the second in America. I
studied there and I can assure you that the mathematicians are so
possessive of their network that they wouldn’t let us use it even
if we brought them a letter from the State Council. I think that my
job has no future and this condemns me to not having any future.
With a bit of luck, they’ll send me to the Biotechnology Institute
to study AIDS.

But I still have some time
until my mentor —and later the director— convince themselves that
we’re on a dead-end street. My hopes are that the University of
Malaga doesn’t realize this. Of course, they have other things on
their mind. They were closer than anyone in the European Union to
finding a vaccine for the Z virus, but when the CIDEZ created the
serum they stopped all their research along that line. From what I
know, there is an institution called the Office for the
Transmission of Scientific Results, which as I understand is the
interface with the business environment, that suggested they
contact us. Since then, they make joint research projects with the
CIDEZ. And what’s more important, they exchange
specialists.

In my opinion, if the OTRI
suggested that the University focus its efforts, and its resources,
in perfecting the Cuban serum instead of a vaccine, it’s because
this is more profitable. On that point, capitalism is more
assertive than we are. They don’t care that our research for a cure
is a disaster: if they can get an aerosol serum, they can sell it
to all the autonomous communities that resist, isolated from the
world, the zombie attacks in the European area. I guess a smoke
bomb that could turn a mob of aggressive zombies into a contingent
of obedient workers must be worth money, right?

According to the hierarchy
of Cuban research institutes, this trip should be mine. But others
were competing for this grant. And a trip to Spain at this moment
is very beneficial for the family economy. Let’s be sincere, for
any of us, a trip abroad is a lottery. But everything depends on
the support my research director made for me. That’s why I must
concentrate on my job, even though I realize before he does that
it’s a failure.

The head researcher left
the place. Within the containment tank, number 43 had stopped
grunting and banging the crystal. I hadn’t spoken to Maria since
the day before. Nor had I heard anything about the zombification,
although it was still in the work plan. Nonetheless, no one had
touched the subject; it seemed, for things to work properly, it was
necessary to use María’s method and protest about
everything.

You can blame these damned tests with the
aerosol serum.

V

Saturday.

The best day of the week.
The day to sleep all morning. The best moment for housewives to
prepare clothes to wash, for kids to watch cartoons on tv and for
teenagers to get ready to go out at night. It’s the day of rest par
excellence. The moment when the family is all together and without
pressure. Perhaps that’s why Saturdays are when the inspectors of
the Campaign to Fight against the
Aedes
Aegypti
decided to stop by your
house.

But first let’s go by
parts.

Aedes Aegypti is the
scientific name of a mosquito. And not just any mosquito: it is
easily recognizable for having white stripes on its legs. But the
quality that made it famous is that it is the mosquito that
transmits dengue fever. Officially, the Cuban Revolution
categorizes it as an Enemy and this gave rise to a campaign of
almost-military proportions. Despite the fact that this year the
“war against the mosquito” would celebrate its fifteenth
anniversary, this tiny insect still wasn’t among the ranks of
species in danger of extinction. Which calls into questions all
those ecological discourses on the environmental impact of human
activity.

As for dengue fever, it is
a danger as real as the Z virus. But our government, instead of
investing resources in eliminating stagnant water, paving the
streets to avoid puddles and maintaining the hygiene of the city,
decided on two things: to use those resources to pay expensive
lawyers to free the five heroes who were prisoners in the United
States and to cast the blame for the proliferation of the mosquito
on the people. That’s how things are, the blame for the poor
results of the famous campaign against the mosquito is our own.
Why? Because we put out vases with water and don’t cover the toilet
tanks. Then the Ministry of Public Health sends inspectors to every
house to verify that everything is in order.

In practice, those
mosquito inspectors only care about signing the
visto
and leaving. The actual name
of the
visto
is
the Control of Antifocal Visits, a small piece of paper that exists
in every home. On it, the inspectors register their observations;
then other inspectors come who supervise the work of the earlier
ones and they check that there are annotations on the
visto
. And then other
inspectors at an even higher level come to check that the two
earlier annotations exists. In short, everything comes down to
signing papers, interrupting the privacy of others, and leaving the
poor mosquito in peace to lay its eggs in the puddles in the
street.

The inspector who rings
the bell of our gate, even though it’s open, is short, muscular,
and tanned by working under the sun. He barely moves, barely
speaks. Mama goes out to the door and shouts at him that we’re not
going to fumigate today. The man’s face shows no objection. He asks
for the
visto
,
makes a few annotations on it, and leaves.

From the window of my
room, which looks over the portal, I see how he walks dragging his
feet as if he were a zombie. Unconsciously, I look toward the dead
end. He approaches it and the sign on the wall remains the same as
ever. My eyes look for the zombie from the night before. On the
opposite sidewalk is a trash can; as always, it’s overflowing, and
the bags of household refuse are scattered on the ground. This is
normal, they’re always a few days late in collecting it. I see a
movement among the trash, slight, almost imperceptible, as if it
were alive. As if something lay within it.

Mama’s shout draws my
attention away from the trash can. I didn’t have time to confirm if
it was really the refuse that was moving, or if it were just an
illusion of my tired vision from so much computer work. Now, two
women have appeared at the door and they’re arguing with my mother.
She calls me again and I hurry to go down.

The women are middle aged,
overweight, and with beads of sweat running down their faces.
They’re carrying folders stuffed with papers in their hands.
Surely, they’re inspectors of something. Lately, there are
inspectors for everything. Our government likes to keep us
supervised at all times.