SHORT FICTION | SCIFI
Agrover’s hologram to Puerto Ricans
His message is urgent and entangled.
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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…
