Dark Dystopia

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PREFACE

The world has succumbed to the idea that the State is an unquestionable entity. It is not common to ask, for example, why do we have to pay taxes, since for this type of question there is an established consensus based on a kind of inexplicable duty, which is difficult to remove or replace with another reality. However, people do not stop asking some of these things in their inner self; they feel that this duty is not a convincing answer to certain whys, and this is due to the very nature of being

It may be that, following the example above, we do not have to pay taxes. Why can the State take over part of the income which a person generates by his work without there being any consequences? Why is it that when the State does it it is called a tax and when any person does it it is called theft? (...) If it seems to us that questions as transcendental as these have answers that look crude, why not keep asking them (even in the external debate) until we find the answers that satisfy us?

You know that great geniuses, instead of affirming things, ask themselves questions. Newton, for example, put forward a whole cosmological theory of mechanics and motion based on a simple question: Why doesn't the Moon fall on the Earth? The access to knowledge is in doubt, that initial intrigue about what we see, perceive or intuit and which invites us to elaborate or investigate.

Let's say that Antiutopia: Chronicles of the Undesirable goes that way. It is not knowledge but a perennial doubt about the reality that is presented before our eyes...

The word anti-utopy is a little-used synonym for the word dystopia, that is, a different way of referring to something about which we think we have a clear idea. However, the fact that it can be rethought in this unusual way, implies that there are surely characteristics of the phenomenon that we have not yet noticed or about which the level of deepening is very low.

For me, the word anti-utopy is a way of putting on the table the idea that dystopias are not obvious things, but worlds with normalized or assumed realities by everyone in which there are one or a few individuals, worldly human beings, who ask themselves a key question: "Is this right?

Everyone knows and respects George Orwell's work, especially 1984, a novel published in the 1940s, which describes how the state has managed to take over every aspect of its subjects' lives, from the economy to privacy. But in this work the author's own intrinsic critique of the setting on which the story is set is so obvious that the reader sometimes forgets that for the characters within the story the issue is not so obvious. Therefore, what is important in a dystopia is not that the reader assumes the undesirability of the context, but the moment in the narrative when the character does so, that moment when the doubt first appears: Is this all right, and then it is discovered that the answer is no.

We can see this much better portrayed in a work that, while famous, is not as famous as 1984; I'm talking about Fahrenheit 451, by American writer Ray Bradbury. Here the idea of assuming reality as something that is and is not questioned, pays off in your face from the beginning, and even as a reader (who knows beforehand that you are going to read something situated in an undesirable context) you manage to be fooled. Little by little, just like Guy Montag (the main character in Fahrenheit 451), you realize that something is wrong and that by questioning it, even introspectively, you discover things that could be better, like a world with free knowledge or free of taxes, to name a couple of examples.

Although beyond a very utopian idea of a society without a State, it could be argued that our closest reality could be a dystopia (a community, a family, a love relationship...) because, in the end, these things -which seem to be small- mean, more than other things, our whole world.

A dystopia can be a world with totalitarian states, yes, but it can also be a futuristic world where clones are used as slaves or as a mechanism for domination, or it can also be a world where young people are increasingly superfluous, or a world where there is no privacy, or one where women cover their faces with a black cloak.

SEEDS TO THE NORTH

I predict that the man

will resign himself every day

to more egregious companies;

soon there will be no

but warriors and bandits.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

The garden of forking paths

1. The march in the cold

A helicopter with the logo of the ASIAC (Adriano Castillo Independent Security Agency) lands on an empty lot on one of the islands of the Svalbard archipelago. Three men descend from the aircraft and make sure that all the devices contained in their black uniforms work properly. Although it looks very light, the clothing that covers them from their feet to their necks protects them from the enormous cold at the North Pole because it is made of materials that concentrate the body temperature inside and prevent the circulation of the cold breeze through their fibres.

-Everything in order? -asks the copilot of the helicopter through the communications network shared by the agents and which is also monitored by the ASIAC Central, located in Caracas, Venezuela's most populous city.

-Everything is in order," confirms the group's commander, Félix Frontado, a man with a tanned complexion and short, brown, curly hair. The devices are working properly.

-After we finish, I'll order a cup of hot chocolate and some gingerbread cookies, -says Josh Bright, a blond, blue-eyed man with an English-speaking accent, the only cash from the American branch of ASIAC present in the mission.

Everyone laughs with the comment and Danilo Garza (the last of the three agents, robust, bald and dark skinned) addresses him: The sensitive gringa spoke. What we need is a good rum waffle, a mondongo and delete it.

-Shut up and put on your balaclavas, or we'll all be bald from the cold," says Felix, and although it seems like a serious comment, it provokes a virulent look on the face of Danilo, the only bald one of the three.

-It wasn't funny, Felix," Danilo replies. -You know I have severe alopecia.

-Stop your whining, nigger. You have a lot of fun playing practical jokes on people. They had to get back at you someday, don't you think?

-Yes, but revenge is more painful.

-More painful? -Josh objects. I never charged you for the underwear you made me out of white pepper.

-Well, you...

-Hey! Felix interrupts. Let's stop talking about work. We're late. We have to get to the Crop Trust building at 3:06 in the morning, and that's forty minutes away. Let's go...

The arctic landscape of the Svalbard archipelago looks so clean that it seems not to belong to an era where man dominates every corner of the Earth with his tall, crystalline cities. The three men are surprised to see polar bears. They thought that those who deceived the world with an alleged anthropogenic warming of the Earth had at least succeeded in the extinction of that species. But fortunately that was not the case. They even feel the need to prepare their automatic weapons ahead of time to defend themselves from those precious but fearsome creatures.

The tone of the journey changes when human buildings appear on the horizon. Now it is even more extraordinary that a city as picturesque as Longyearbyen can be in a place as turbulent as the Svalbard Archipelago, where temperatures reach minus 40 degrees Celsius at the coldest times of the year and where blizzards are so strong that it seems that they could knock down their skyscrapers at any moment. There is no shortage of tall buildings in Longyearbyen, because a city as cosmopolitan as that, which attracts so many different cultures, is guaranteed to experience rapid economic growth.

When you reach the top of the hill before the city, the view is enhanced by a sea of light, a variety of colours and intensities, static and moving glows - the perfect example that there is no place in the universe that human beings cannot conquer in a big way.

***

A slim, middle-aged, Latin-European-looking man enters the office of ASIAC director Andreas Valentiner, and the latter rises with unusual nerves to greet him: Mr. Ferrari. A pleasure to have you back in our premises.

-I have already told you to refer to me as Milo, Andreas," says the man in an affable and authentic tone. I don't like being called by my last name. Then others think I have shares in the car company and I don't. Besides, it's not my favorite car brand. I'm more of a three-pronged star and a bullfighter. You understand me, don't you?

-Of course I understand you, Milo," answers Andreas with a purposeful smile. He's only affirmative in everything because he thinks he has to be, even though Milo isn't the kind of millionaire who wants to get his boots licked, especially when he knows that one of his jokes wasn't funny. -But sit down, I'm worried to see you standing. -Would you like something to drink?

-A coffee, please.

-Sure. They'll bring it right away.

Andreas unfolds a small holographic screen and presses a button inside which is drawn a smoking cup.

-I hope I have enough time,' says Milo, intending to go straight to the point, 'because I'll be stretching it out a bit.

-I actually set aside the whole afternoon for you. You looked worried in your phone call to me yesterday.

-And I am. Again, the mere fact that I own a multinational pharmaceutical company makes me deal with conquering fanatics. Sometimes I wish I could say so far, but... if I don't, who will?

-What exactly do you mean?

-I mean, I imagine you remember what happened at Cacique's, don't you? -I do.

-Well, yes. -Not in detail, but I do remember the basics; what everyone remembers, in fact.

-Let's see, what exactly do you remember? -Milo says as he rolls his eyes.

-The people that Angel Cabello's regime sent to Ciudad Cacique, either because they were considered dissidents or because they were political dissidents, lost their freedom forever; their loved ones never saw them again. After the coup d'état of 2045, Cacique became a giant cemetery. I remember that weeks after the end of the Civil War, at the end of the year forty-seven, photographs and videos of the thousands of skeletons piled up on its streets began to appear. It was something as horrible as it was mysterious, although some time later it became known that the Venafarma Corporation was the cause of those mass deaths. That's all I could tell you, Milo.

-Not bad. That's certainly what everyone remembers. People think that Venafarma is just a legal name on the National Register of Companies which now represents only a mere vestige of what happened at that time. But what if I told you that Venafarma still acts and is still as dangerous as before?

-It would be very difficult to believe, unless he explained it in a convincing way.

-My company, the Anabella Corporation, has been the competitor of the Venafarma Corporation practically since both were created in the eighties of the last century. We have been like the Coke & Pepsi of the Venezuelan pharmaceutical market and also of some international markets. But we have always had a fundamental difference that is important to emphasize: Anabella has always been characterized by a behavior adjusted to the terms of fair play, while Venafarma has walked more along the line of the trap. This unethical behavior of Venafarma has made its managers experiment with really dangerous things, things that in the end have exploded in its face and supposed its decadence. You see...

"Around the year 2043, Marco Guerrero, then majority shareholder of Venafarma, used his influence in the government to gain a monopoly on the control