Three Messages and a Warning - By Eduardo Jimenez Mayo Page 0,34

crowds begin to gather, staring in astonishment at the exposed body of a mermaid languishing on a rocky crag.

Future Perfect

Gerardo Sifuentes

Translated by Chris N. Brown

I earn my living illustrating the future that men see. Scientists, engineers, and editors show plans and sketches of the machinery and landscapes their minds create so that I can translate them into a screen simulating life. This is a real job. My portfolio includes the most diverse futuramas: orbital factories, underwater cities, all sorts of flying vehicles and robots in action. The work is published in magazines, book covers, and video-game packaging. Some images are part of ambitious industrial projects waiting to be financed. Very few are realized, most because they are unaffordable, or the future inevitably defeats them, and in most cases it’s better that it happened that way. The uncertain atmosphere of the day to come made me very pessimistic. In reality the future has no determined form, maybe not even a meaning, so one has to constantly reinvent it. Mr. Dobrunas agreed with me on this point. I met this character just when I had lost my confidence in my ability to create proper futures.

He showed up at the house one afternoon, referred to me by Professor Melampus, the futurologist from the university. Mr. Dobrunas presented himself like a doctor but never mentioned his specialty or the school where he studied. His tall figure in a tailored suit, aquiline face, and nervous temperament intimidated me. Coarsely overgrown eyebrows accentuated the obsessive and malicious look. Dobrunas needed illustrations for a biology project: the creation of a series of genetically altered plants whose details were specified in the beat-up binder he carried with him. When asked to elaborate upon his descriptions, since botany was a new theme for me, he appeared to ignore me and pointed at a Chinese communist propaganda poster hanging on the wall of my studio, in which a worker, a soldier, and a peasant looked confidently to the horizon. “This is the image of the world that I want,” he said with histrionic solemnity.

My father, a popular political cartoonist in his time, told the story of a sixteenth century cartographer who marked the unknown sections of ocean incorporated in his works with chimerical monsters peeping out of the surface of the water. One day, the cartographer was surprised to hear of some sailors describing encounters with the creatures he had invented in the maps.

In Mr. Dobrunas’ project, the plants with altered genes appear to be more the product of a delusional whimsy than the experimental fruit of scientific erudition. At the beginning his annotations described in extravagant detail sprouts of webbed leaves emerging timidly from thousands of test tubes in a greenhouse laboratory. But a few pages later, the flowers, and then vegetables, evolved to form part of a dark, unearthly garden, composed mostly of gigantic carnivorous plants with extravagant bulbs in every color. The doctor’s spectral sketches were made with trembling lines reloaded with black ink. To read the notes, written with tiny, perfect handwriting, his digressions looked far from being scientific experiments worthy of being taken seriously. The findings focused more on a sort of metaphysics than genetic engineering. I thought about suggesting he first send the project to some specialist, but since the pay was good and immediate I decided to take the work. After that I dedicated myself to it. To give life to the improbable—the proposal wasn’t for me to judge.

A couple of weeks passed. Dobrunas appeared to be pleased with the sketches I showed him on the computer screen, and confirmed it had brought to life this insane botany he had created with adolescent enthusiasm. Later he showed up with a briefcase stuffed with notebooks, in which he had written up a more ambitious plan than I had expected.

The schizophrenic paradise of Dr. Dobrunas included vast prairies seeded with gigantic husks, growing human fetuses inside like mandrake roots. This was the principle of an eccentric vegetable bestiary, in which he described a symbiotic society between humanity and the giant plants, and included the details of a religion created for the coexistence of the two species. As an exercise of the imagination it attracted me, if it could be done with the tone of a crude B-movie, with superfluous explanations to create these creatures. But what impressed me more were the conclusions: his proposal for an ambitious plan to repopulate the Earth. No more, no less. This wasn’t a serious biology project, but a badly