Victor Alberto Bueno Marichal: Always the same things

Always the same things

It dawned cold outside, the cloudy sky only let in a little sunlight, but the little birds began to sing at the scheduled time.

The standard theme for Type VI agricultural production units had been selected by secret ballot, “Farm,” so the wall screens showed what the designers assumed would look like through the windows of a third-world farm in In the 20th century, after much work, he had managed to deactivate the rooster crowing, but he had left the birds.

The urge to urinate had woken him up. 5:34 a.m. It was still dark. After urinating he looked out the bathroom window hopefully, he rarely got up early, suddenly it was worth taking a photo of the dawn. It was still dark, it was very cloudy. Cloudy Sunday. He had no coffee, he had nothing to do, and he was not sleepy. He went to bed knowing that he wouldn’t be able to sleep. On a screen that occupied the wall in front of him he saw the same faces as always giving the same news as always, he decided not to turn up the volume.

“Always the same” he said to himself and added: little by little one becomes disillusioned.

He decided to eat, and from the refrigerator he took out a two-liter container of orange-flavored juice. Once he had tried natural orange juice, but he didn’t like it. He preferred orange-flavored juice because it is thicker and tastes more like orange, and it is much cheaper.

He knew that It was necessary to squeeze several oranges to get a liter of juice.

He knew that there were fruits that were more complicated.

“Everyone knows that everything was very laborious before,” he thought.

From a cabinet built into the wall he took out a bag with a sheet of cheese between two sheets of bread, put it in the feed synthesizer and in thirty seconds removed a perfect sandwich of melted cheese.

The cheese was not made from animal milk and the bread was not made from cereal flour. Algae and fungi. That’s all. Processed in some way that made them taste better than the originals and were much cheaper.

Slowly, blowing, carefully, avoiding burning himself, he bit into the sandwich and finished pushing the first bite into his stomach with several gulps of juice.

Camembert-he said out loud.

Ca-mem-bert – he repeated, trying to remember the name well again, which he had already forgotten.

Next week I’ll switch to Camembert—he told himself.

On the feed synthesizer he looked for camembert and selected it.

He had been eating only gouda cheese sandwiches for more than two months.

With the sandwich in his right hand and the container of orange-flavored juice in his left, he looked out the bathroom window again, although without much hope. He was still cloudy. That day there would be no spectacular photos of the radioactive clouds, nor any interesting drone battles.

What he called a window was actually a screen that was connected to a camera that was more than two hundred meters above him on the surface. It wasn’t really a window, it was much better than a window since one could make it spin and point it to the sky or in any direction one wanted.

He finished the sandwich, put the juice container in the refrigerator and decided to go to bed, even though he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. Lying down, with his back supported by three large pillows, he turned up the volume and listened to the same thing as always.

--The inhuman dictator of the eastern bloc continues to force his army to bomb our country, almost all the missiles they launched at us have been destroyed, we have responded to his unjustified attack minimizing the collateral damage to civilians – said for the thousandth time the leader of the country, surrounded by his civil and military work team.

He left the speakers silent again and decided to go tend to the algae breeding tanks and the mushroom fields.

He worked four hours straight, took a shower and went to bed wearing only his underwear. He turned up the volume and listened to the democratic leader of his country congratulating citizens of good will for their selfless collaboration in the defense of freedom, now that the Western bloc had started the underground war in response to the continuous provocations of the eastern bloc and assured to be sure of victory. –God is with us and with our drones and robots—said the leader, as he always said when saying goodbye.

He had nothing to do since he had worked the mandatory four hours a month, he did not feel curious enough to check his mailbox, nor his wall in carelibro.

He sent a message to Leonardo Bardo VIII to write him a love poem that he needed to send to a classmate to see if she would be interested in combining his genes with hims. Like him, she was in the rearguard and her expectations of reaching old age were more likely than the average of the population. There was no genetic incompatibility among her ancestors; they were the ideal couple because they shared a certain recessive gene with a great presence in the high command.

This is what Leonardo Bardo VIII responded to him:

It’s not love’s fault

It’s not love’s fault if you get tired

If pushed by hormones

Look for it in gardens with thorns without roses

Where it never passes through

It’s not love’s fault if you blush

If shyness paralyzes you

If in the fight for survival

They always defeat you

Say love

Decree it several times