“She vanished in the flames — or did she ever really exist? An excerpt from my occult technology fiction novel, ARCANE TECH.”
Some surveillance cameras had caught the clash with the hooded men. I’d felt almost proud watching myself open fire on the fanatics. Then my blood ran cold: Inés, appearing in those frames like a diaphanous, translucent shape.
You could see me dragging along that absurd creature made of random feminine flickers and fog.
Among other things, I’d also noticed, from their comments, that the cops didn’t perceive that kind of incorporeal nothing at all.
As if she didn’t exist.
Maybe it was some anomaly in my neural implant…
whatever the reason, I could glimpse something they couldn’t.
“There were about a dozen dead and several wounded in last night’s riots,” a sergeant in his forties began. “You’re responsible for at least a couple of them.”
“I was attacked.”
“That’s for the judge to decide. Limit yourself to answering only when questioned,” a young officer in uniform scolded me, looking thick as a brick.
“I want a lawyer.”
The bastard backhanded me.
“Shut up, murderer!” he hissed.
“Instead of coming down on me, why don’t you stop those psychopaths from burning people alive?”
The question got under his skin. The cop started hitting me again. His clumsy blows didn’t hurt much. My mind was elsewhere. I’d been taking beatings for days now. After the string of senseless events — the massacres, the torture, the bonfires in the square — I was almost getting used to the punches too.
Either way, the tactical implant’s subroutine let me roll with my attacker’s movements, dodging the hardest hits. Eventually the idiot ran out of breath. He put the rest of the beating on hold.
“Witnesses mention a woman… Where is she?” asked a third officer, older, half-hidden in the shadows of the room. Until then he’d stayed silent, fidgeting with his gun.
“How the hell should I know. I have no idea…”
The moron hit me again. In the stomach this time.
“Pigs like you can’t do anything but hit people who can’t defend themselves. This turns you on, doesn’t it? Then you go jerk off in the latrines.”
He lost it, exactly like I wanted; he threw punches and slaps at random, never really landing a clean hit. The idiot was purple in the face. Furious. Something was eating him up inside.
The older officer was a lieutenant. He grabbed the brute and pulled him off me.
“You know, maybe it’s better if you answer the questions properly,” he said calmly. “You’re already in trouble up to your neck…”
The old man went back to sit behind the desk. He seemed the most reasonable of the bunch.
“I met the woman at a bar. We had something to eat together, then went to her place,” I answered.
“Where?”
“Exactly where you arrested me this morning.”
“You climbed out the window of a house that’s been empty for nearly a century,” the sergeant informed me. “Nobody wants to live there. They say it brings bad luck. There are supposed to be ghosts. The usual folk superstitions…”
“Her name?” the lieutenant asked.
“She said her name was Inés.”
The old man’s eyes went wide. He stared into empty space, stunned. The gun slipped from his hand onto the table. In the dim light of his station, I watched his face go pale.
What’s wrong with him? I wondered.
“Anyway, last night I drank too much and I must have been drugged too.”
“You’re pulling our leg,” the younger one snarled. “Leave him to me, I’ll make sure he loses the urge…”
“You gonna make me lose the urge with your mouth, or would you rather I stick it somewhere else?”
This time the bastard landed a clean hit — a kick straight to the face.
I sank into my own blood. Inés appeared in the darkness. She looked distressed, wearing that same incomprehensible, distant little smile of hers.
Where the hell did you run off to, stupid ghost? Look at the mess you’ve gotten me into…
She said nothing, just shook her head and opened her arms. She came closer. Her face began to decompose. Her beautiful, sad eyes were gone — nothing left but empty sockets crawling with insects.
A retch. The sensation of choking. Then, back to reality.
Two rolls of cotton plugged my nose. Coagulated blood filled my mouth.
I was in a cell. The young idiot watched me from beyond the bars. His fanatic’s stare wasn’t so different from the Black Church soldiers’. His fingers nervously worked something that looked like a rosary.
“You’ll be getting visitors tonight, pretty boy, and then…”
The cop flicked a lighter. I watched the blue flame swallow the bitter taste of blood.
“Fuck off, moron,” I replied wearily.
I let myself sink onto the floor, exhausted. Dying didn’t scare me, but being roasted alive was hardly the best way to leave this vale of tears. With my hands tied I couldn’t do much to escape my fate; the thought of fire on flesh was, to put it mildly, terrifying.
A few hours later, two hooded men burst into the cell and tried to douse me with some flammable liquid. The best I could come up with was spinning on myself, throwing kicks. I threw both assailants off balance. With a twist of the hips I caught one square in the groin. I spun again and managed to drop the other son of a bitch too. But it was only a matter of time; sooner or later they’d pin me down, and that would be the end.
Eventually they pinned me face-down, holding me under their boots. They finished soaking me.
When I heard the lighter click, I figured nothing could save me from the flames.
Unexpectedly, I heard the dull thud of suppressed gunshots. The two pigs dropped to the ground.
Someone came over, freed me from the cuffs, and helped me up. The lieutenant… he’d come, inexplicably, to my rescue. I met his grave, faintly haunted gaze.
An unmarked patrol car was waiting behind the station. Digital signature masked. No active transponder. No municipal telemetry beacon. Whoever the old cop was, he’d stopped following protocol a long time ago.
He hit the gas, tires screeching. We tore through the wet streets. The lieutenant explained that a tactical unit would take care of erasing every trace. The fanatics. The rosary-clutching thug. The blood. All of it would disappear. No reports. No investigation. No official file. As far as the institutional network was concerned, none of it had ever happened.
“Why are you helping me?” I asked, feeling a rib that seemed pretty likely cracked.
The lieutenant kept his eyes fixed on the road.
“Some of us still remember what an oath means, even with everything falling apart.” He looked disappointed, but not resigned. “There’s only a few of us left. We’re La Limpieza. That’s what they call us.”
“Sanitation crew?”
He nodded.
“No badges. No automated reports. No political backers. Just people willing to clear away the filth the system prefers to ignore.” His fingers tightened around the wheel, nervous. “These ignorant fanatics are basically an infection now — spreading everywhere.”
The wipers screeched with a hypnotic rhythm across the windshield.
I looked out the window.
“Good to know there are still a few antibodies left in circulation.”
He gave an almost imperceptible nod. He stayed quiet for a moment, following the drift of his own thoughts. Something like an inner conflict showed on his face.
“Tell me about Inés,” he said suddenly.
I told him what I remembered. The procession, the abandoned house, the strange gaps in my memory, the hallucinations… I left out the more intimate part; things were already complicated enough to explain as it was.
The lieutenant handed me an old-fashioned tablet, its screen cracked. The original of an old file.
The report had been filed in 2029. The file concerned a high-end escort. Newspaper clippings from the time indicated she’d been fairly well known, in certain occult circles, for her mediumistic abilities.
I found myself repeating the words in my head.
Mediumistic abilities… Is this some kind of joke?
There were written testimonies referring to her ESP. Disturbing abilities. Deep knowledge of cosmic mechanisms… almost prophetic predictions…
A couple of specialists had diagnosed serious neurological anomalies. She’d been treated with heavy-handed neuromodulators. Committed multiple times to psychiatric hospitals: the kind that make you crazy even if you weren’t to begin with.
Finally, the damned fanatics of the fundamentalist brotherhood had accused her of witchcraft and threatened her with death.
The story had ended badly.
In flames.
I studied the mugshot. A gaunt-looking woman, no makeup. Indeterminate age, gray hair, a tired look about her.
And yet:
her eyes… that sad smile… they were familiar. Too familiar…
“The city surveillance network detected no woman presence,” the lieutenant went on.
I looked up.
“What?”
“City cameras, private security systems, civilian drones… Nothing. No trace.”
It had started falling harder.
Rain drummed on the roof.
“No match anywhere in the mesh.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Security AI classified the incident as a collective perceptual anomaly.”
I stared at him.
“A hallucination? But I saw her.”
“There’s no doubt about that… You claim you were together.”
He shook his head.
“Still…”
He let the sentence hang, unfinished.
A long pause followed.
I listened to the raindrops ticking in the silence.
“Still what?”
The lieutenant let out a long sigh. Almost a groan.
“I think I saw her too,” he finally admitted.
Low-rise housing blocks slid past the window. We were leaving the outskirts behind.
“Two days ago my father died.”
He went on. His voice was tinged with sadness.
“Just before he passed, he confided in me. He told me, to my complete surprise, that his wife — the woman I’d always called mom — wasn’t my real, biological mother.”
His jaw tightened.
“I figured he was delirious — the opioids, the fever, the agony, whatever it was… As he was dying he said her name.”
The lieutenant tapped a finger against the tablet.
“Inés. Inés Rivas. She’d been his secret lover, for years.”
We sat in silence, stunned.
The wipers kept up their back-and-forth across the glass. Once. Twice, three times, four, on into infinity…
“The following night I had a dream.” He hesitated. “Or maybe it wasn’t a dream.”
A nervous laugh escaped him, dissolving into an uneasy grimace.
“There was a woman in the flames. She wouldn’t stop calling my name.”
He swallowed saliva, with some effort.
“So I started digging through the sealed archives. Through unsolved homicides. I couldn’t stop. I spent the whole weekend on it. Day and night. Finally I found the damned file.”
The old cop looked visibly shaken by the memory.
“And then you showed up.”
He took a couple of deep breaths. Finally, he let a slow trickle of words flow out, searching for the right ones.
“The woman in the file… the woman only the two of us could make out in the recordings… the woman you were with… In that face, her face; I recognized my mother.”
I sat there, frozen.
At that moment, they could have told me that eating dried shit would make me immortal, and I’d have believed it.
The lieutenant kept his eyes fixed on the road. Like me, he was trying to find a logical explanation for something that, quite simply, had none to give.
“I need one more confirmation. The last one.” He managed, his voice hoarse. “We’re talking about the same person, aren’t we?”
I nodded.
The highway lights reflected off the windshield.
“How can that be…?” he whispered.
I thought about the candles. The symbols. The house in ruins. The smell of the herbs. Inés’s impossible eyes as they watched me from the dark.
“I’ll be shocked if I understand any of this…” I rubbed the back of my neck, trying to ease the tension.
“I remember one thing she said. Something your mother must have considered important.”
The lieutenant looked at me.
“Energy chooses which of its infinite forms it deems appropriate to manifest itself in…”
The old cop turned his eyes back to the road. He didn’t say another word. He shook his head again. He didn’t understand, obviously.
But he wasn’t the only one.
The patrol car kept eating up the kilometers toward Madrid.
Finally I got out at the edge of the sector. The cop stayed motionless in his seat. Almost catatonic.
After walking about twenty paces, I turned around one last time.
He was still there, the car parked, his gaze lost somewhere beyond the windshield. A man trying to connect fifty years of absence with the emptiness of one impossible night.
Who the hell was Inés, anyway?
Read this and you’ll find out. Maybe… 👇
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