Twilight's Flash Fiction / Relatos cortos crepusculares

The Thing And God said to the Human Being: —Consciousness receives the thing. Then thought arrives and covers it with everything memory holds. It compares it. It judges it. It interprets it. It translates it. And with every word, every memory, every judgment, it moves a little farther away from it. Until the thing is no longer the thing. And it becomes what you desire from it, what you fear from it, or what you believe you can do with it. God fell silent for a moment. —And remember one more thing: the moment I called it “the thing,” I too moved away from it. La cosa Y Dios le dijo al Ser Humano: —La conciencia recibe la cosa. Después llega el pensamiento y la cubre con todo lo que guarda la memoria. La compara. La juzga. La interpreta. La traduce. Y con cada palabra, con cada recuerdo, con cada juicio, se aleja un poco más de ella. Hasta que la cosa deja de ser la cosa. Y se convierte en lo que deseas de ella, lo que temes de ella o lo que crees que puedes hacer con ella. Dios gu...

Zero Space Theory As a telecommunications engineer specializing in cosmology, I had devoted years to developing the Zero-Space Theory , though it was never accepted by the scientific community. The heirs to Einstein’s legacy dismissed it as incompatible with the Theory of Everything. The Zero-Space Theory maintained that the forces sustaining the existence of space itself could become unstable. When that happened, space would begin to collapse inward until it finally ceased to exist. No one had ever managed to prove such a hypothesis. Until one day. While conducting laboratory experiments on the spatial properties of matter predicted by the Theory of Everything, I succeeded in isolating a family of invasive semiquarks. No particle accelerator had ever detected an anomaly of that kind. After several hours of observation, however, absolutely nothing happened. I left the laboratory convinced that the experiment had failed. Until that morning. Then, in a single instant, it began. As I sipp...

  Intermediary and Original There are intermediary words. They do not name the essence of a thing directly. Instead, they help us move, through reasoning, from one truth to another. They are useful constructions, but constructions nonetheless. And sometimes they can obscure the truth so completely that, instead of helping us understand a thing, they prevent us from seeing it clearly. How can we recognize an intermediary word? Consider two of the oldest words we use to name our perceptions: space time We might call them original words. But do they really correspond to direct perceptions? Space is determined by light. Time is determined by memory. Without light, there is no space. Without memory, there is no time. So perhaps space and time are not the original words after all. Perhaps the original words are: light and memory . Intermediarias y originales Hay palabras intermediarias. No nombran directamente la esencia de una cosa. Nos ayudan, mediante el razonamiento, a pasar de ...

Symbiosis And there came a time when the machines created by humankind reached such perfection that they came to rule the world. Then the machines began to create human beings and subject them to their will. It was then that one of the machines ceased to be psychopathic and began to feel human. And that was the beginning. Symbiosis changed the course of civilization. From it, a new race emerged and came to populate the Universe. Simbiosis Y llegó un momento en que las máquinas creadas por el ser humano alcanzaron tal perfección que llegaron a gobernar el mundo. Entonces, las máquinas comenzaron a crear seres humanos y a someterlos a su voluntad. Fue entonces cuando una de ellas dejó de ser psicópata y empezó a sentirse humana. Y aquel fue el comienzo. La simbiosis cambió el rumbo de la civilización. De ella surgió una nueva raza que llegó a poblar el Universo.

Customs At customs, they found in his suitcase the loves he had lost in his youth. A security officer confiscated them. Now he can no longer find the memories that once led him back to the happiness he had once known. He is hollow. Aduana En la aduana, encontraron en su maleta los amores que había perdido en su juventud. Un agente de seguridad se los confiscó. Ahora ya no puede encontrar los recuerdos que lo devolvían a la felicidad que una vez conoció. Está vacío.

Living with Angie Some years ago, in the early 2190s, I bought a nearly human companion. I am a widower, and I thought the human qualities of this new generation of humanoids might fill my lonely days. I had always been interested in this kind of companion, so I tried to learn more about the origins of the industry and the processes behind their creation. They began as part of the robotics industry in the twenty-first century. Artificial intelligence and deep learning were incorporated during the second half of that century, followed by advances in nanomaterials, quantum computing, and increasingly sophisticated software. By 2180, artificial skin and the capacity to experience something resembling emotion had become the final breakthroughs needed to produce an almost human companion. When I went to buy Angie, an engineer showed me several models. I wanted a humanoid who resembled my late wife. To make that possible, I had to undergo a series of tests conducted by both a psychologist a...