Fantastic Metropolis

But Carlos Esteves doesn’t care. They all bluff for sure. Like his comrades throughout the European fleet, he’s got his finger on the trigger button that activates the torpedoes. Carlos is a good man, a steadfast and obedient officer. He’s got an apartment, a family and a cat to feed. Like millions of other Europeans, he’s not inclined to share his small slice of heaven with anyone else. If the order ever arrives, he will carry it out. Pressing a button was to engage in safe and clean warfare. Death at a distance and the blessing of the abyss as a way to cleanse the world.

Carlos has his finger on the button when a furious migraine mounts all of a sudden. Bewildered, he blinks and shakes his head, fearing the onset of an aneurism, but strangely enough, there are words scrolling behind his retina. Words he thought had been lost forever.

Commlink Open
Downloading from Herschel Probe
5 Minutes and Counting Down
Thank You, Dear User

And in the moment that follows, he’s twelve years old again, has 360-degree stereo vision, six legs, and four operating pincers. There is not one but two stars in the sky, one huge and yellow, the other tiny, white and fulgurant. Here I am, he thinks, at the beach in Proxima 4!

In here the sky is so blue that the arachnid filters polarize in order to avoid permanent damage. To the left, Carlos sees a monumental cliff, arching, ruined by millennial erosion. To the left is an ocean, viscid and thick, covered by a carpet of seaweed that reaches far into the horizon. Beneath the ball-bearing polymer, the whole ground is made of shells, exoskeletons and dismembered ossicles, as if there’s not a single grain of sand in that beach, nothing, except for the fossil remains of a monumental hecatomb. Curious, Carlos rakes the soil with the jointed pincers and removes the topmost layers, but underneath them are still more, a collection of chromatic dregs more and more compressed until they begin to form solid plates. With three of his eyes, Carlos focuses on the images of frenetic and microscopic alien life frozen in sediment. Green, red, blue. The entire beach is a rainbow of gaudy colors, without a single conglomerating substance he could use to build the castle. Carlos knows he’s got little more than five minutes to prove his worth. Five minutes his “self” in a distant future would relive, review, and regard. To work! Carlos aims the arachnid’s head at the ocean and steers towards the water line. Thoraxes and exoskeletons crack under the device’s ball-bearings and track racks. Carlos doesn’t care. The ocean is packed with seaweed, something he could use to glue shells together. Quick, quick, the clock is ticking. High up, a flock of avian creatures heaves itself up in the air, deserting the cliff slopes. The air is filled with shrieks. Those which pass for birds in Proxima 4 don’t chirp. Instead, they stridulate in a wail of sirens. Carlos wonders if the passage of the arachnid is the cause for this much commotion, but soon realizes night had quickly fallen, even though both stars were still positioned at relatively noon. The beach quavers, nervous all of a sudden. The whole ocean recedes. Carlos raises his eyes to a curtain of water which soon becomes a wall. There he is before an immense, rising wave, ever-swelling, blotting out the sky. The wind now blows towards the liquid wall, hauling a handful of the unfortunate avians in its wake. Carlos is powerless, unable to run, escape, get out of there. Three minutes of subjective time still remain in the program, enough to suffer the direct impact of the wave. Even though he’s a kid, he knows he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. Alpha and Proxima Centauri had entered a junction point, something which only happens once in a million years. The stars’ gravitational fields cause disturbances in both systems. Seasonal tides. Cyclic extinctions. This is one of them.

Carlos forgets all about his project to build a sandcastle in a strange land. Carlos doesn’t want to die now, even though it’s only simulated death. But 4.3 light-years away from Earth, what can he do but wince, clench his fists and shriek in chorus with the birds, shriek until the kinetic energy of the tidal wave disintegrates him against the arching cliff…?

End Download
Systemic Error
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Carlos Esteves awakens on the command cabin floor of the frigate Gil Eanes, his finger pressed against the virtual fire button. The captain shouts orders and counter-orders in his ears. However, Carlos can’t help but curl up and tremble, clench his fists and cast torpedo after torpedo into the muddled waters of the Atlantic.

Such torpedoes have a near-paranoid artificial conscience. Once launched, they refuse to abort. Software glitch or sabotage by the Racial Liberation Front, who knows? One is enough. Refugee freighter down. And a still viable micro nuclear device concealed in the hold. Ignition. The entire sealine lights up, detonating every other bomb.

Carlos rises to his knees, eyes shut against the splendor of light. Light which reminds him of a hundred thousand million Alpha Centaurii.

Fifty years later, Carlos dies the way his virtual double died forty trillion kilometers away.

Killed by a shockwave.

In synchronicity.

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Translated from the Portuguese by Luís Rodrigues.