SHORT FICTION | SCIFI
Agrover’s hologram to Puerto Ricans
His message is urgent and entangled.
A femtosecond rendering of an uncanny head; smiling, like a mischievous
20-year old Ernesto Guevara. Hair vantablack; long at the top, left side, and back — right side barren, ersatz follicles no longer work;
here, a meta-ink embed reads:
a writer takes its pen
to write the words again
that all in love is fair
Eyes as black as his hair, they’ve the sparkle of knowing and unknowing.
A small Soneto de las Estrellas inked below his left earlobe….
Mi gente del dosmilveinte:
Words from the past are often met with resistance and irony. Are words from the future any more valuable? Did Barron Trump III deserve the Nobel Peace Prize? When was the last time that I saw a flower? Should I be allowed pangs of solastalgia?
La bioluminiscencia se extinguió en Puerto Rico en el 2045.
My Prime Directive: guide them to fight La Última Gran Guasábara.
Code put here — in gossamer neural networks — weaved from data gathered by Puertorricana Collectors, assessed by The Guabancex Council.
The neural blur will be made clear to you — you’ve no choice. This unmoored likeness of my head is programed to populate the span of your REMs. Let’s begin with The Puertorricana Collectors: people that accepted a Singularity, or Synths that embraced some sort of Humanity. They’re encyclopedists and archaeologists; collectors and cultural debris scholars.
This data is relayed to the Council’s computers,
regulated by the North Atlantic Empire.
My likeness is that of an early Collector from the mid-23rd century. Not many of us remain. About 7,000,000 humans left on Earth — 7 make up the Council; 21, with varying degrees of uncanniness, account for The Collectors.
The Council is made of The Last Puerto Ricans: alive beyond the millennium, with the help of biotech that’s incipient in your time-slice; descendants of the ones who could not get aboard the Quantum Weaver Yocahú. The NAE allowed them to pour genes and memes in neural networks, which animate objects of bioink and graphene…like Me. Something emerged: clumsy replicas, capable of mimicry. Not quite a Being.
Only 28 remain, 7 — the Council — are untainted with the stuff of Synths. They oversee The Collectors, tasked with prompting measurable events, via holonomic transmissions, across multiple time-slices.
I’m what’s allowed to remain from failed Puerto Rican projects; what’s left after aftermaths. You see, dear boricua—you were still allowed to call yourselves that, noble people — after centuries of slow-motion decay and immanent precariousness, what was known as the Puerto Rican Archipelago could no longer support mammalian life; uninhabited for the first time since 2000 BCE. Peoples, ways of seeing and being, assessed as non viable: irreversibly judged by Northern Agency. What in your time-slice is called — and never stop calling it that, please — colonialism.
Huge swaths of land deemed uninhabitable…
¡el cinturón del planeta está casi vacío!
We’re in a mess. Uncanny darlings like me must relay messages to ancient humans. With the hope of fine-tuning spatio-temporal anomalies —
driving results that one day may warrant clonation.
Don’t ask when I came from. I don’t know exactly.
My time-slice is pregnant of your mistakes, but we’ve managed to pluck strings properly, producing viable reverberations, ideal reveries for doomed people:
to thine own Self be true, boricua. This is the kernel of The Message.
As I said before, some notion of Truth — Beauty — has to be rescued.
My Prime Directive cannot be fulfilled if this message does not reach its target. No pierdas el hilo: We must prove deserving of replication.
Reflect on Self. I know it’s too much to ask; but, consider your time-slice: vermilion skies in Oregon, Amazon’s tears are trillions of leaves, your land raped by emergent crypto-colonialism, defiled by home-grown sycophants…
Reflect on your contingencies. When I come from they became zeitgeist. Dozens of hyper-hurricanes per season — your haptic memory is adjacent to María…The Council tuned my holographic coordinates to 2020.
All Spanish dialects were banned by the NAE centuries ago. In spite of this — and with very poor tachyon entanglement equipment — the Collectors rescued a legacy, and beamed it to your pineal glands. Hypnagogic jolts, iridescent light-play remixes the same old Cassandras: despierta, boricua, defiende lo tuyo.
The thing is, perplexed Puertorro,
I’m a warning, maybe the last one.
The jig is up —
Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment has come.
Some Truth must be part of your legacy. For this to happen, The Council requires of me some checks and receipts for my efforts. That the message yields tangible spatio-temporal results. Then We can present our case: Puerto Rican phenotypes deemed worthy to walk the Earth, again.
Please forgive me, but my Prime Directive is predicated on what the Council allowed Collectors to embed; what code to collect; which permutations can bear the message, without severing entanglements. This is why I spoke of God a few moments ago; the message has to be properly grafted —
