“Listen to me, boys. When I’m done with you, you won’t be needing a spacecraft to fly across the universe, you hear me?” I said in anger. “What have you done to Amalia? Where is she?”
The tall one adopted a sympathetic attitude, “Keep calm, Restituto; if you want to see the corpse, we will show it to you later,” – he breathed in deeply and walked around as if he were carefully thinking about what his next sentence should be. “As for the concept of death, it is not exactly what you might think…” – “What do you mean?” I interrupted. “Something like 260 different dimensions have been discovered. Amalia’s death is in this dimension, but we do not know about the others…”
“We found out about them and how to travel from one to the other. That is how we manage to get from our planet to planet Earth. Thanks to the greatest physicist to ever exist, Mr. Álvaro García Pérez.” That sounded like a whole load of bullshit to me. And the two guys looked like a couple of freaks who either belonged to a sect or wanted my organs, or both alike. “Stop with the crap and let Amalia and me go, and I won’t hurt you too much. You guys don’t know who you’re talking to.”
“Yes, we do. You are Restituto Quintero Padrón, member of the Order, Caballero Legionario, you served at the tercio in the 2nd flag of Don Juan de Austria, spent many years in the province of Spanish Western Sahara and participated in the war of Sidi-Ifni. We know everything about you because our job is to get you to join our cause. But you still don’t believe us, do you?” – “I think you two are a couple of freaks.”
“That’s what I thought… Manolo! Panoramic view!” – he didn’t stop talking as the whiteness turned into darkness and large windows opened, immersing them in the black outside. Like the Milky Way with a billion stars, it just resembled outer space. “Manolo! Zero gravity!” – and a huge force lifted us. We began floating inside the chamber. The tall man spoke again, “Manolo, back to gravity +1!” and we fell to the floor like heavy sacks of potatoes. “Beautiful landing Manolo.” – “Thank you, Luis.”
“Well, Restituto, do you believe us now? If we had all the time in the world, I would let you process all this new information, but actually we have no time to lose.” I was so astonished that I couldn’t say anything. “First things first, I need to give you a little context before I trust you with a mission.” The words “trust” and “mission,” especially “mission,” kind of made something click inside my brain. “In the dimension we both live in,” said Luis, pointing at Manolo and himself, “humans have discovered interdimensional traveling.
As I told you, we owe it all to the best physicist ever, Don Alberto, who donated his discoveries to the kingdom of Spain. That gave us an edge over our enemies and the rest of the countries on planet Earth, for a time. What I haven’t told you is that dimensional traveling may imply changes in not only space but also time. As soon as other powers begin to copy our technology, they will not only colonize other inhabitable planets, just as we have already done, but also meddle and try to manipulate certain events from the past so they can prevail over us and control all of the known universe. Of course, we will try to do the same and defend ourselves, but changing past events can bring terrible consequences. Reality has become very unstable actually. Fortunately, it is not that easy to really change events. It takes a lot of modeling and calculus just to figure out what the right moves are, and it is also necessary to do it personally. That is, changes cannot be done remotely. An actual human being must be there, risking their own life to do this or that.”
“So you have thought of me to ‘make changes’ in history basically. And how am I supposed to do that?” I asked in awe.
“Well, the steps you have to take are very precisely defined, and you must follow them carefully. They have been designed by a powerful AI system we use. But not even the most powerful quantum computer can figure out all the possibilities that may arise with every change. However, we trust our artificial intelligence.” – “You make it sound easy…” – “But it isn’t. I still haven’t mentioned one of the caveats of this sort of mission. We cannot intervene in places where Spanish wasn’t the official language at any period of time in the past or that didn’t belong to the Hispanic Monarchy. It is not as easy as traveling to the past and killing Hitler, Napoleon or Churchill. Our AI has deducted that there are ‘big trends’ in history that are very difficult to change. History is not only about the big figures. We’ve discovered that, very often, apparently minor changes, especially related to technology, can be more far-reaching and longer-lasting than killing an important figure.”
“Do the enemies of Spain know all this?” – “It is very difficult to know how much they know. We suspect they have found out how to make certain changes in the past. That’s why our civilization is in danger. We have left behind the era of nation states, now there are only big cultural blocks that fight for control of the known universe. We, the Hispanic Union, have managed to survive only thanks to the discoveries of Don Alberto and can only trust the Black African Union. In fact, they control planet Earth thanks to an agreement we signed with them at the first stages of interdimensional travels. Our rivals are the Anglosaxon Union and the Mandarin Union. There are other minor entities, but most of the old 200+ countries joined one or the other union trying to survive. We live in a ‘world’ of rivalry and competition and we must do what we can to defend our way of living and our existence as a people.”
I guess I still looked a little skeptical… “So are you with us?” – “I suppose I joined the Order to protect the Hispanidad and as a retiree have nothing better to do…” – “Thanks, Resti, I knew you wouldn’t let us down with this!” said the tall guy in an outburst of joy. “If you ever call me that again, I will rearrange your face. And I don’t think you’ll like the outcome!” I replied.
Manolo brought a weird device, flat like a notebook, with some lights on its surface. “Listen, Restituto, it is very important that you fulfill each and every step of every mission, even though they may seem contradictory to previous missions or irrelevant.” “We have some agents in some of the specific dimensions, so you’ll have extra support. This tablet will be both our connection link to transport you from one mission to the next once one is completed and your guide towards the completion of each mission. Follow the instructions carefully.”
“The missions and processes will be carried out sequentially according to the instructions of the application.” I wasn’t sure whether I understood what I was getting into, but replied, “Yes, sure, whatever…”
“So then, press ‘start’, and I wish you all the best”
“Do you mean the letters in red, S-T-A-R-T?”…
(…to be continued…)
Transadaptation Volume 4 – Material Dissent
January: A Blinding Light and Then, All Darkness – Jonay Quintero Hernández (Spain)
February: The Opportunist – Lauren Voaden (United Kingdom)
March: A Stranger in my City – Alejandra Baccino (Uruguay)
April: A South African Soundtrack – Sarah-Leah Pimentel (South Africa)
May: Full Circle – Ina Maria Vogel (Germany)
June: La Lluvia en Bogotá – Adriana Uribe (Columbia)
July: Freedom – Krisztina Janosi (Hungary)
August: A Bus Ride – Svetlana Molchanova (Russia)
September: Transcendence – Armine Asryan (Nane Sevunts) (Armenia)
October: Motherhood – Marilin Guerrero Casas (Cuba)
November: To be announced – (hopefully) Gennady Bondarenko (Ukraine)
December: Open – Seyit Ali Dastan (Turkey)
Background – Context
Transadaptation Volume 3: Evanescent – Young Adulthood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2022)
Transadaptation Volume 2: Conceived – Childhood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2021)
Transadaptation Volume 1: In the Middle – Prelude to a Contemporary Transadaptation, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2020)
Peripatetic Alterity: A Philosophical Treatise on the Spectrum of Being – Romantics and Pragmatists by Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2019)
La Syncrétion of Polarization and Extremes Transposée, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2019)
The Codex of Uncertainty Transposed, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2018)
L’anthologie of Global Instability Transpuesta, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2017)
From Wahnsinnig to the Loony Bin: German and Russian Stories Transposed to Modern-day America, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2013)
Emblems and stories on the international community
Perception by country – Transposing emblems, articles, short stories and reports from around the world
Credits
Cover photo: Barcelona, Spain – A different dimension – Hanneke Wetzer (Shutterstock)
Source: The Codex of Uncertainty Transposed