Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World

by Fabio Fernandes

  “You understand what’s going on, right?” You were struck by a 9 mm bullet that probably passed close to the femoral artery. If you don’t get help, you’ll suffer septic shock in a matter of minutes and die shortly after. Come on, give me the card with the data!” He got annoyed and started fumbling at her clothes for the card. “If you have them, you know we’ll find them anyway, even if it’s at the autopsy.” He frowned. “Unless…”

  She laughed and her body trembled in the process.

  “Right. I never had them.”

  A decoy. Her job was simply to keep them busy as long as possible to maximize the chances of the card getting to the right hands. In fact, it was she who had taken it from the Cairo building, but Mariana had passed it shortly before entering the bathroom of Trianon-MASP, one of the few blind spots in the station’s cameras. The original plan was for her to surrender the card and disappear, but as soon as the delivery was made she saw that it would not be enough. To ensure the escape of the true carrier, she should stage a flight. It was only for this reason that she had made a point of continuing to appear on the station’s cameras, only to run when she had already been noticed. Once she realized she would no longer be able to foil the pursuers, she had tried to lure them into places of increasingly difficult access, even if it was obvious that they would not offer any way out. Watching how the mysterious agent seemed upset, the plan had worked perfectly.

  “I can’t believe you fell for such an old trick,” she whispered weakly.

  He brought his fingers back to his ear.

  “It’s not here! I repeat, the package is not here! Spread out and look around, she must have hidden it somewhere.”

  “…and to end your chances once and for all, you shot the only person you could interrogate to learn the whereabouts of the card. It will take at least half an hour until medical help arrives here, even if you call a helicopter. Unless one of your men is very good at first aid, I’ll be dead by then.”

  She had no idea if what she was saying was really accurate. She had studied design, not medicine. But the important thing then was for the agent to believe what she said. She was trying her best to stay sharp, but things were getting harder and harder. He ended up calling medics by the communicator anyway, then he turned his attention to the girl’s leg. He took off his jacket and pressed it with his hands against the wound where the hot blood continued to flow.

  “Are you really willing to die for it?” he asked without believing. He kept pressing the wound and staring down at her face, which looked paler and paler.

  “There’s not much else I can do, is there?” She sighed. “Anyway, if it means saving thousands of lives, it’s a price I’m willing to pay.”

  “I don’t understand… You’re on the good side of the scale. Mariana Souza, daughter of the president of the SSE…the company that merged with HSA two months ago and you became their advertising girl, turned the face of the company… You are beautiful, could even become an holovision artist if you wanted. People like you are the most privileged by the actions of this project.”

  The shapes began to fall apart. She could still see what was happening around her, but her perception was beginning to fail. It was scary.

  “The population deserves more than that. I wouldn’t be able to let you cause such a disaster knowing I could have done something about it. I wouldn’t be able to let them manipulate people that way.”

  “The population needs to be manipulated. It’s safer that way. To ensure the progress of society. People don’t care that it’s different. Have you noticed our politics? It’s comical how the audience can watch the same show repeatedly and still laugh at all the scenes in each of the reruns. This is how it works… To be guided while thinking you are in control, otherwise there will be chaos. Sometimes someone needs to fall for the rest to go in the right direction. You know it’s the best for everyone.”

  “For everyone or for the Golden Society?”

  He stared at her with a surprised look. How much does this girl know about all this?

  “The Society does its best to put the population on the right track.”

  “All I can see is a bunch of rich bastards who think they can dominate the world with their corporations. People should be able to choose their own destiny, have all the cards laid out on the table and be able to make their own choices, according to what they believe. Sorry if I look too idealistic.”

  The process of stopping the bleeding wasn’t working. There was blood all over the floor and the agent’s hands were already soaked. Her breathing was weak and she seemed about to lose consciousness. After all that, he realized that he didn’t want her to die. Not just because of the mission. She was intelligent, unique, and could think by herself, something rare now. And she was willing to sacrifice herself to fulfill her purpose. In a way, he admired her.

  “Mariana… I’m sorry.” He looked in her eyes. Then he cleared his throat. “Probably all of this will be covered up, so your father will not see on the news that you were a terrorist or something. Would you like to say something to him?”

  She shook her head slowly.

  “You know, somehow it was nice to have talked to you. You can change, you know.”

  The pain was beginning to fade. Mariana felt her body numb and knew what was to come. She was more afraid than ever, but something inside told her that she had done the right thing, and now she could be at peace.

  When paramedics from the emergency service finally arrived, they found the agent sitting with his head down beside the young woman, who wasn’t breathing anymore.

  The Next Day

  Newscasts announced how the daughter of the president of one of the country’s largest corporations had been kidnapped and found dead in a warehouse away from the city. Elsewhere in the city, in absolute secrecy, another group of people mourned what had happened and, with the information obtained on a small memory card, discussed how they could prevent a huge solar energy capture space station from falling from the sky.

  * * *

  Gabriel Cantareira was born in 1990 and lives in Itatiba, São Paulo. He holds a degree in Computer Science from USP and currently holds a master’s degree. In addition to writing, he is interested in visual arts and music. Find him on DeviantArt: tioshadow.deviantart.com

  Gary Johnson

  Daniel I. Dutra

  Before starting, it’s necessary to clarify that I have no concrete proof of any of the events reported in this document. This is only an attempt to organize in a text the information obtained, and I believe it will be of great value to the scholars to whom I will deliver this report duly followed by what I believe to be circumstantial evidence that will confirm my story. The best way to begin is by telling a little bit about myself, how I had my first contact with the journal of my great-grandfather Giuseppe Gagliardi, and how this led me to notice Father Roberto Landell de Moura and his scientific discoveries. Discoveries which, I might add, defy everything we know about the world and which I had a hard time believing myself, in part because of the lack of evidence to support my great-grandfather’s account—perhaps the best evidence for the famed fire of St. Joseph’s Church on August 15, 1909, a fact duly reported and whose occurrence still challenges attempts at rational explanation.

  However, I am obliged to state that the main reason for my reluctance to believe the accounts found in my great-grandfather’s journals is because, deep inside, I refuse to believe that something so impossible can be true. For if it’s true, humanity will have to rethink its whole conception of life, soul, existence, and God. And most people are not prepared to take such a turn of events.

  My name is Leonardo Gagliardi, I’m 25 years old. I was born in the city of Porto Alegre. I have a degree in Letters from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. I am a descendant of Italians on my mother’s side. My great-grandfather, the abovementioned Giuseppe Gagliardi, was born in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy in the year 1878 and emigrated to Brazil at the age of five. Hi
s family settled in the colony of Dona Isabel, now known as the city of Bento Gonçalves, in Rio Grande do Sul. Giuseppe Gagliardi left home at age 22, moving to Porto Alegre in search of opportunities in the capital. He worked in a variety of professions, from public toilet cleaner to street vendor of nuts, until, in 1907, he got a job as a janitor in St. Joseph’s Church. The priest in charge of that parish was a man called Roberto Landell de Moura.

  I must confess that I had never heard of Father Roberto Landell de Moura before. A quick search in sources as different as Google and the public library of Porto Alegre revealed to me that Roberto Landell de Moura was a telecommunications pioneer in Brazil. A year before Guglielmo Marconi in Italy, Father Moura had successfully completed the first transmissions of telegraphy and wireless telephony. Unfortunately, the scientist-priest didn’t get the recognition he deserved, but it’s not my intention to talk about Father Moura’s findings in the area of telecommunications. I want to talk about another discovery of the scientist-priest. A discovery that tends to be remembered as secondary by historians dedicated to rescuing from obscurity the name of the inventor of radio: this discovery is bioelectrography.

  First, I need to talk a little more about myself so that you can understand how I got involved in this situation. I had been studying for two years in the Doctorate Program of Italian Literature in the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. I had my application accepted in a cultural exchange program that offered me the opportunity to spend a year at the University of Bologna. I tried to get all the paperwork I needed to get my passport. That’s when I discovered that, being a descendant of Italians, I could apply for dual citizenship. The official of the Italian embassy who answered me informed me that, in order to claim dual citizenship, I needed first of all to present my great-grandfather’s birth certificate.

  Having Italian citizenship would undoubtedly open many career opportunities for me. So I started the document search. I spoke to my grandmother, but she said that she didn’t know where the certificate was, and wasn’t even sure if it still existed, but that perhaps I could find it, or a clue that could lead to it, in my great-grandfather’s diaries. Ensconced in an old handmade wooden trunk that was falling apart, the diaries consisted of a total of 58 notebooks—each recording a year of his life. My great-grandfather had started the habit at the age of fourteen and didn’t stop, continuing to write until his death. It was in these texts that I discovered how the lives of my great-grandfather and Father Moura intersected.

  I will now tell you about my great-grandfather’s diaries. They relate all the details of his life, from ordinary, banal moments, such as the victory of the Grêmio team in the Porto Alegre City Championship in 1919 to historical events such as the Revolution of 1923, personal moments that marked his life, like the birth of his daughter, my grandmother, in 1928. One peculiarity of the diaries that made the comprehension of texts a real challenge was the fact that they were written in Italian. According to my grandmother, my great-grandfather wrote in Italian because, despite being able to speak Portuguese, he had never learned to write in this language. I say that reading the diaries was a challenge because my great-grandfather was writing in a dialect typical of northwestern Italy and, as if that wasn’t enough, it was an obsolete dialect of more than a century ago. I forwarded copies of the journals to the Department of Neo-Latin Languages at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and I hoped that the experts would be able to decipher the passages beyond my linguistic ability. So, even though I am proficient in the Italian language, I found it very difficult to understand the writings and what I am reporting in this document is only what my knowledge in Italian has allowed me to decipher from its content.

  My great-grandfather’s work in the parish of St. Joseph’s consisted of services as diverse as sweeping the floor of the nave, mowing the lawn, watering the plants, and repairing the church pews. In short, he was a real handyman. Father Roberto Landell de Moura had nothing to say about him but good words. Father Moura is described as a docile, gentle, and beloved man in the community. However, if my great-grandfather echoed those who appreciated Father Landell de Moura as a person, the same could not be said of the scientist Roberto Landell de Moura. The journals, especially those written between 1907 and 1909, are filled with notes on the experiments the priest held in his laboratory in the basement of the church.

  It was during this period that Father Moura received the visit of James Paulsen. A visit that lasted for a period of two years. As far as I could gather, Moura welcomed Paulsen into his residence.

  James Paulsen was an American engineer and physicist. Father Moura met him while in the United States between 1903 and 1905, to where he left in search of new opportunities, since in Brazil his inventions in telecommunications were simply ignored by the government. Father Moura met James Paulsen in a lecture by Professor Willem de Sitter, promoted by the Department of Physics at New York University.

  The two worked in a laboratory set up in the basement of St. Joseph’s church. There were numerous journal entries about how Moura and Paulsen entered the basement at dusk, leaving only at dawn, or even the next morning. My great-grandfather never had access to the laboratory, having seen it only at a glance. When it was necessary to have a word with the priest, he was instructed to knock on the door and wait for him to come out to meet him. All that my great-grandfather could see from the lab is that what he described as an oval machine with a transparent cylinder at the top, plus several pictures hanging on a blackboard that, however, didn’t appear to be photographs in the traditional sense, but pictures of dark figures whose contours resembled human bodies, wrapped in flames of various hues, some of an intense white, some gray or darker shades—the tones changed from photo to photo. At least that is what I deduced from my translation of the text. However, it may be that the lack of further information is due to the fact that my great-grandfather looked only at a glance at the laboratory, since Moura always closed the door behind him when he had to talk to my great-grandfather or to anyone else who dared to bother him in his lab. Attempts to question the priest about the nature of his work in the basement resulted in laconic and fruitless answers, and my great-grandfather did not insist.

  There are several excerpts from the diaries, identifying not only the day, but also the time when they were written, in which strange noises of machines and lights coming from the basement are described. One of the entries in the diary speaks of an intense blaze, which changed color constantly and would be very similar to what was in the photos, but multicolored, emanating through the cracks of the closed basement windows and illuminating the floor.

  But what really puzzled my great-grandfather was what he witnessed on the night of August 1, 1909. A modest hut in the backyard of the Church of St. Joseph served as his home. It was a rainy night. The strong wind had knocked down a tree branch which, in its turn, broke a church window. My great-grandfather had to leave in the middle of the night to solve the problem. After removing the branch and covering the window with wooden planks, he saw a multicolored light shining through the crevices of the small rectangular windows in the basement, illuminating the paved floor that surrounded the church. As it was raining, my great-grandfather noticed a phenomenon that surprised him: falling and coming in contact with the light, the raindrops evaporated. He described what he witnessed as thousands of “coils of cigarette smoke” sprouting from the lit floor in plain darkness.

  On August 6th of that same year, Father Moura gave my great-grandfather money so that he could buy a dog, a German Shepherd puppy to be exact. He was busy preparing the church for Sunday mass, and for this reason asked Dorival—a black kid who lived near the church and could easily be found throwing a ball in the street—to go to the public market instead and fetch a pup. Dorival’s arrival with the puppy coincided with that of James Paulsen, whom Father Moura was waiting for in his office. My great-grandfather took the dog, who was in a small cage, tipped the boy and, along with James Paulsen, went to see Father Moura. />
  James Paulsen’s Portuguese was awful, much worse than my great-grandfather’s, who had lived a big part of his life in the colony and never quite mastered our language. However, the American had the necessary fluency to make bigoted comments about the young Dorival. Comments that greatly annoyed Father Moura, who until then was unaware of the racist side of his friend and fellow scientist. Among his unpleasant remarks, Paulsen said that blacks shouldn’t attend the same church as whites and shouldn’t even be considered Christians, since they had no soul. He also made a comment to my great-grandfather, a tall, light-haired man with clear eyes, that the Italians were a privileged people because there were no blacks in their country contaminating the purity of the European race. Convinced of the superiority of the white race, Paulsen did not understand why Father Moura didn’t pursue the matter.

  On August 8th, the priest called my great-grandfather to his office and asked him to look for Dr. André Macedo, a veterinarian. The night before, the multicolored lights had appeared again and the seemingly unrelated events gained new meaning at Sunday Mass. After Mass, my great-grandfather could not help overhearing the conversation of two ladies sitting on a bench in front of the church as he cleared the front steps. The two ladies are identified in the diaries as “Dona Lorena” and “Dona Vera,” the latter the wife of André Macedo. Dona Vera told her friend about the call that her husband had received at Father Moura’s church. Macedo saw something that bothered him greatly. According to her husband’s account, the priest had in his possession what appeared to be a German Shepherd pup, except that this pup, despite having the size and bone structure corresponding to a dog of his age, had all the diseases of an elderly dog, such as arthritis and cataracts. Father Moura asked the doctor if he could keep a secret, but he apparently didn’t resist the temptation to confide in his wife. Looking back over the situation, my great-grandfather wrote that he had remembered hearing a cry or howling from a dog in the middle of the night, but that was of little consequence, believing that it was only the puppy’s reaction to its first night in the new home.