The Vestigial Heart Page 5

  “Yes, I know, that’s why I forwarded his file to you. I knew this kid would be of interest.” As silver-tongued as ever, isn’t he, turning an insult into a compliment. “Indeed, you’ll have the chance to meet him at the New Year’s Eve convention, I’ve just appointed him to present one of his inventions.”

  “What? What kind of business model is this?” He needs to regain leadership of the company right now. “When have you ever seen a successful business that presents, as a great novelty, at its most important convention, a product that’s available to everyone on the public network!”

  “Calm down, Doctor, every one of these outbursts costs you four minutes of your life, you know that.”

  “Would you mind encrypting your pieces of advice? And then feed them to the worms.”

  “Sorry, I suppose I haven’t explained myself properly: the device Mar’10 will be presenting has been developed within the company and, therefore, is not on the register. I guess you’re worried about the ones that are on there. You can see potential in them, is that right?”

  “Of course I’m worried about them, they belong to the company. What are they doing on the net?”

  “Until now, that was the case, you’re right, but a year ago an amendment was passed that allows non-retroactive contracts to be drawn up, letting people claim intellectual property they developed in the years excluded. No one takes advantage of it, because your wage is reduced proportionally. In fact, I’d never even read the amendment. But this Mar’10 came to us saying he wanted recourse to it in order to keep his private projects for himself; you must have noticed that he believes very strongly in his own possibilities for success. Considering he’s a promising kid, something your interest is confirming to me, we decided to go ahead with the contract. Better to have him here than at the competition, right?”

  He’s irritating sometimes, but he was a wise choice for manager. The Doctor baptized him “the samurai of words” for his ability to take advantage of all the strengths of his adversary and turn them against him. He almost welcomed the nickname more than the promotion. He’s a bit boring, that much is true, no outbursts, no raising his voice … but the Doctor knows that comes as part of the package. And, it seems, this is the case with Mar’10 as well. Great ideas seasoned with an explosive mix of immaturity and a whole lot of pretension. If he could take them apart and put them back together again as he wished, he could make some truly great men. It’s got nothing to do with chromosomal selection, that’s child’s play compared to this. He’s not interested in potential qualities that are often lost along the way; he wants realities, proven expertise … the problem lies in how to isolate it. If he could extract the creative potential of Mar’10 and combine it with the wise, mature loyalty of Gatew … that would be a cutting-edge ROB.

  He’s getting distracted again, and Alph’s standing here with the next file ready, wasting time and letting him waste it. He frowns and looks at the robot angrily, in an attempt to make it understand that, in moments like this, when he’s lost in thought, he should interrupt him.

  11:43 a.m. – An indignant look after a long period of thought that I have respected. I interpret that he didn’t like the last candidate. I close all the folders and I ask him if he requires another service or if I should leave.

  “Fucking machine! Recover the previous state immediately.”

  11:44 a.m. – I make a note: when faced with a silence followed by an indignant look, it’s better not to make interpretations, and instead, by default, maintain the current state, no matter how long it may last.

  The name Miq 6’Smith rings a bell for the Doctor and, effectively, the man’s face takes him back to the calamitous time he spent at the Department of Innovation, during which only this one deaf kid was capable of developing anything. Back then no one understood why Miq rejected a cochlear implant: “we waste too much time listening,” he would say in sign language. And he was a trailblazer, considering the immense power that deaf culture has today, or the deaf species, as they like to call themselves. Even some hearing people, when advertising and noise pollution become unbearable, decide to plug their cochleas and join the tribe. A stroke of luck for CraftER. Idiosyncratic minorities are a great niche in the market: everything has to be adapted for them and that’s our specialty. HandicapER, however, had to rethink their implant production.

  It’s strange that, in all these years, he’s never heard anything about Miq. He avidly reads over his trajectory: projects and more projects, the majority developed alone and all pretty cutting-edge; he must be old by now: fifty-one years … he would rule him out straightaway if he weren’t the only candidate with experience in cognitive prostheses. Who knows, he might be the most reliable option.

  By way of a summary, Alpha+ presents him a series of graphics and quantitative comparisons that give Gem Matr’X a slight advantage over Miq, closely followed by Leo Mar’10 and, farther back, the other three girls, who are practically even. He would have liked to be able to rescue Mar’10 from the last position and declare him the main candidate, against the prognostic, in order to feed the legend of him as a boss who is extravagant and capricious with the staff but still endowed with an indisputable gift for sniffing out talented young people. He’s convinced that they have it, him the gift, and the boy the talent, although he decides to make Miq take on the neuropsychological filter as well … and the girl with the Picasso-esque profile, in case it confirms that indeed she has no idea who Picasso is.

  Once the relevant instructions have been given to Alpha+, the Doctor can go back to the battle. He presses the button and the riddle flows back into his brain. He imagines the monks, each one neatly tucked away in his cell, taking four paces up to a miniscule window, which maybe even has a couple of bars, with their hands clasped behind their backs before peering out, only to turn around and retrace their steps. Silent. Uncommunicative … but united in a common meditation: what can they do to save the community. Perhaps he should dispense with all this scene setting and get to the point, the clock won’t let him get away with it. Hug 4’Tune’s proposals must always be thought of in computing terms: a series of identical processors that exchange data in a synchronized way, once a day; each one transmits whether or not he’s unwell, without knowing it himself, that’s the crux of it, and receives the information from all the others. At the heart of the question is lunchtime, that much is clear. If there are n sick people, each of them sees n-1 red marks, while the healthy people see n. The decision to commit suicide would be easy if they had been told how many sick people there were. For now, he’s pretty lost.

  Let’s try looking at it from another angle: reduced examples usually give clues. Right, a community with only one monk … leads to a stupid situation: he has to commit suicide because he must have contracted the disease but at the same time he doesn’t need to commit suicide because he won’t infect anyone. Making 4’Tune aware of the weak spot in his wording will give him a fractional advantage, he should have specified that in the convent there were at least two monks. He’ll try it with two, then, only one of whom is sick, so that there can be a risk of contagion. The one who doesn’t see the red mark commits suicide because it’s obvious that he must be the sick one, and it works for any number of monks as long as there’s only one infected. He’s on the right track. Now what if there are two people afflicted?

  An evil thought interferes with his thought process. If the message were a lie, no one would see any red marks, which would result in a collective suicide. What a clean way to eliminate whole communities in one fell swoop. Some of those anti-techno groups deserve it. Although, who can be sure that they’re as credulous and altruistic as the monks. No one is like that these days, the closest thing to monks are probably the robots … and, fucking hell, the last thing he needs is for them to auto-immolate. Goodbye, CraftER!

  What a swine, he’s losing valuable time that Hug 4’Tune will be taking advantage of to solve the riddle he gave him. At least he doesn’t have to attribute that t
o decrepitude, his mind has always been undisciplined like that and now insists on reflecting on what would happen if the liar were one of the monks themselves, who, to make it all more believable, had painted a red mark on his forehead. After the first lunch, they would all expect him to commit suicide, but he wouldn’t do it, of course, and, at the second lunch, each of the others would assume that he also had the mark and would kill himself. A lethal weapon, now operated from within. It’s got some teeth, this idea. Hey, they would commit suicide on the second day, something’s not right here, how could he miss that? If two people have the mark they’ll commit suicide after the second lunch and if three have it, after the third. Eureka! A totally superfluous liar has switched on the light bulb, it couldn’t have happened any other way. Who was talking about disciplining his mind? He hurriedly introduces the answer and raises his arms euphorically: prepare yourself, world, the great Craft has got plenty of fight left in him.

  8

  On Sunday, Silvana gets up at half past six, the same as every day. Even the warmth of Baltasar’s body isn’t enough to keep her in bed once she’s awake, despite having made love last night with a virtuosity that she has never achieved with any other man, and knowing that the only worthy climax would be for him to open his eyes with her still in his arms. But no. She’s felt different for days, free to transgress the most deeply rooted habits at the ComU, the ones that she helped to forge and that she still wholeheartedly believes in. Well, that’s not really right. It’s that she’s become used to dedicating the early morning hours to getting lost in books and the emotions of two centuries ago, and she’s found enjoyment in it. So much so that she’s not prepared to give it all up.

  She gets out of bed with more energy than ever, and, while she dresses herself head to toe in a tracksuit with her gaze fixed on the nakedness of her partner, a worrying thought sneaks in between the folds of her consciousness: bodies bore her. Standing stock-still with her arms only half covered, she repeats out loud, hypnotized: “Bodies bore me.” That’s definitely it, and it’s been happening for a while, but until this precise moment she hasn’t realized. The vague unease that comes over her while she gives massages might come from there, as well as the perplexity she experiences before the perfect musculature of some young people that no longer makes any impression on her. It bores her. That’s exactly the right term. Not indifference, or rejection. The smooth and shiny skin would attract her if she hadn’t seen it in so many interchangeable youths, and Balt … his naked figure, silhouetted against the white bed, was the last piece of the puzzle.

  She squeezes her eyes shut to stop the runaway thoughts she doesn’t recognize as her own. The body, senses … they’re the only gateway into emotions that she knows. She can’t disown them like this, they’re the tools she needs to work. Her life and ideals are built on them. Oh, see, what’s up with her these days? She nods her head decisively to expel these worrying thoughts while she zips her suit up to the top to protect her neck. These uncomfortable feelings are transitory, they’ll pass.

  Four quick strides later she is in the reading space and, before settling herself in the wrap-around armchair, she dedicates herself to the stretching and breathing rituals she performs every morning. She calls it revising the minuscules, the smallest muscles that always end up paying for the excess of the bigger ones, and only once she has confirmed that they are all awake and in the right place can she start her day. In the meantime, a flow of perception picks up the shy signals emitted from every corner of her body and puts them together to create a pleasant sense of well-being, of strength. And, surprisingly, she discovers that her body still interests her, which is lucky since it seems to be the only one that does.

  She’s at it again. Is this thought going to ruin her day? She opens the e-book and brings up the pending reading tree. In the biography branch, after consuming those of Mahatma Gandhi and Sigmund Freud, she abandoned Albert Einstein’s as it was too technical, and instead got into that of his wife, Mileva Marić, written by a compatriot and contemporary: Desanka Trbuhović-Gjurić. The name blinks in red on a terminal branch of the tree. It’s not the experiences of Albert, nor even those of Mileva that interest her, but those of Desanka. A completely unknown woman. Strongly affected by the personality of the genius’s wife, she dedicated herself to paying homage to her and making sure she went down in history. A curious expression, that is still understood but without anyone ever making use of it … there’s no such thing as history anymore, only a flux that records itself, collectively, without critical individuals, or, if there are, we lack the ability to recognize them. Maybe there are still Einsteins, but the Milevas and Desankas have died out and, with them, the possibility of going down in history has become history. She smiles. That slogan sounds more like Baltasar’s than hers, and the fleeting reference to his body silhouetted against the bed impedes her thought process again. Boredom when faced with bodies, had those women ever felt that? Or is it a modern feeling, as impossible to transfer through time as Mileva’s self-abnegation or Desanka’s admiration of another? Self-sacrifice as a way to highlight another person’s merits is a concept that no one understands nowadays, not even her, and she has no interest in recovering it, but reverence before an almost superhuman quality is an essential accompaniment if the former is to survive … without fans there are no heroes. Without the ability to differentiate or the desire to emulate, all direction is lost, and the boomerang becomes inevitable.

  She lifts her gaze from the text, surprised at how she’s linked everything together. Recovering admiration in this way will become an important step toward the milestone they’re all after. Just the argument she needs to convince the Ideological Committee to dedicate more resources to her sentimentality research. Until now neither Baltasar nor Seb have fully supported it, and they’re big fish. Neither of them has told her so openly, but she’s certainly noticed it. And it’s logical. A whole life trying to bring people closer together, physically, fighting against the devices that distance us: no more virtual work, no more electronic contact … and not only in social and work-related fields, but also in the most intimate circles. That’s where the ComU came from, and that leitmotif that Baltasar used to stir up his followers at meetings, “we must touch skin,” he shouted, and with the same words, whispered into her ear, he ignited her like a torch. She squeezes her eyes closed to undo the spell that seems to be possessing her today. It’s been years since she’s thought about those words, so badly timed now, but at the same time so pertinent. The subconscious, Freud would say, is always in the shadows and well aware of the games being played on the surface. She covers her face with her hands in an attempt to contain all these uncontrollable associations and organize her ideas. Her mind is working like the e-book now, with boughs, branches and twigs, trains of thought aborted here and there that she would like to take up again, though she lacks the tools.

  When she opens her eyes, aside from Desanka, she sees other flashing markers: Zweig in the memories section, Freud-Abraham in letters, Flaubert in romantic novels, Solomon in psychology texts … she’ll do the same thing, take note of the pending threads so she can return to them when she feels like it. First, she needs to focus on admiration as a key tool for stopping the boomerang. Second, despite physical distance being important to this affect, the net result seems to be a marked proximity, a different kind of contact, according to the descriptions of the biographers and psychologists she has consulted. It’s not a million miles away from the aims of the ComU, then. Third, and here is where it’s harder for her, until she’d remembered that slogan about the skin she hadn’t made the connection: is her interest in this distant affection what has provoked the disinterest she feels toward bodies? If that were the case, the committee would have a strong reason to object, to avoid it spreading like an epidemic. And if what’s happening is the opposite? That, without realizing, it’s the malaise that’s brought her to these men and women who are disembodied but loaded with more powerful affections than those
found nowadays?

  She would like to think that today’s unease has nothing to do with this months-long pursuit, that tomorrow she’ll wake up with her passion for bodies and skin renewed, and that she’ll be able to go back to normal, to the life that’s always fulfilled her, while at the same time continuing with her research and books … but the doubt is too strong, it’s become an obsession. She goes to stand up and give up on her reading, just as Baltasar enters the room. Clumsily, but tenderly, he sweeps back her hair to kiss her on the forehead, before fixing her with an interrogative but still sleepy gaze.

  “I know, I know,” she says, “but I’ve reached a really interesting part, and you were still asleep …”

  “Those ancient leaders again?” He kneels down to see what she’s reading. “I’ll have no choice but to challenge them to a duel. So many distinguished names, it could be a pantheon. Who’s this Desanka fellow?”

  “She’s a woman.”

  “Wow, you really are making it hard for me, I’ll never be able to fight her. How do you challenge a female rival?”

  “Come on, stop with the foolishness. What time do we need to leave?”

  “Don’t change the subject. Tell me what’s so interesting about this Desanka person.”

  “Read it yourself.” She turns the e-book showing the paragraphs she’s highlighted round to face him.

  … Mileva’s personality began to interest me many years ago; the depth of her thought and emotions moved me … I’ve started writing to do justice to her thirst for knowledge and her search for the highest values … I cannot allow Mileva to be forgotten while her husband receives all the public recognition.