Three Messages and a Warning - By Eduardo Jimenez Mayo Page 0,11
going to dance at this new place: “the Laboratory.” My grandparents spent twenty-seven months locked in a laboratory. The majority of the captives died, electrocuted, driven insane, the victims of prolonged exposure to artificial light. But what the hell! Let’s dance—who can feel bad about something everyone thinks never happened? So what if my fingernails shine at night?
When I was a kid I used to believe if I changed my name I could leave behind everything I knew: the stories I’d heard at family meals, the memory of the image files my grandpa kept hidden under the bed, stuff I’d witnessed in clandestine recordings downloaded from the internet, dreams, nightmares. A pure infantile fantasy: you are who you are. Your parents can go to a lot of trouble during your childhood to wipe out certain characteristics and encourage the development of others. But there are things you can’t eradicate: some of us are born with fluorescent fingernails. One among a hundred, one in a thousand, one in a million. Now, nobody has to know about it; the combination of two <> agents in a compound injection inhibits the organic production of lucipherase for ninety days. By this means, achieving effective negation is relatively simple, requiring only self-discipline and money. Natural selection can be bought at the corner drugstore. That’s why Mama can’t understand how an insignificant biological defect could have changed me into someone so different from the personality prototype she and Papa imagined for me.
An insignificant biological defect?
Imagine how it feels to see your fingernails glow in the dark, to discover that you are the result of an attempt at extermination that supposedly never happened. Having to remember night after night the years that your grandparents, along with another six million idealists, invested in collecting from garbage dumps recordings buried in the shells of old computers, all in order to manufacture a damned map of human memory, which in the end only left behind nursery rhymes for producing insomniac children.
After predicting the attacks of 7/12, the group of data collectors was pursued and captured by the authorities. Someone had to be blamed for what happened on July twelfth. The prisoners were classified as conspirators and their names added to the list of subjects for experimentation, along with the demented, the freaks, the handicapped, criminals, and the homeless. The cities involved in the war among corporations contented themselves with having a scapegoat to blame. Nobody ever pointed a finger at those people who’d done nothing to prevent the dispute from exploding in the first place. Of the caged prisoners, only one group managed to escape when the laboratories became the enemy’s preferred targets. According to my grandpa, this group included those who, during the incarceration, had envisioned a plan for the future. What this plan was, my grandpa never told us—although I’ve harbored my own suspicions for a long time. To be exact, for nineteen years, four months, and nine days. That is to say, since the last time any of the people closest to the survivors heard anything from them. For the rest of the city’s inhabitants, it was only a week in which the tabloid headlines focused on profiting from the series of blackouts and strange visions experienced by city dwellers one Tuesday the nineteenth at nightfall.
Science magazines still publish articles attempting to correlate rumors about the experiments practiced for years on humans with the appearance of the swarms of electric fireflies that now make our metropolis world famous. Experts qualify this phenomenon as a resultant mutation, similar to what occurred in field mice in Chernobyl, the epicenter of the biggest nuclear disaster in history. Research conducted in the area concluded that the magnitude of evolutionary change experienced by these animals after the accident was greater than that experienced by many species in ten million years. In an analysis of just one shared gene in nine mice collected within a restricted thirty-kilometer radius in Ukraine, forty-six mutations were detected.
The hour of the fireflies has become the city’s major tourist attraction. Visitors from all over the globe pay exorbitant premiums to rent rooms with views of the street. They order room service and wait for nightfall to witness the spectacle of luminous swarms that take over the avenues at that strange hour when daylight fades but it’s not yet night. The glowing insects fly through the streets in one of the most beautiful natural displays on the planet, one which can only be appreciated from behind a car windshield