Twilight's Flash Fiction / Relatos cortos crepusculares

 Tar We have just left the exosphere. Four powerful engines drive the massive machine that carries us to Mars. We venture into the unsettling black nothingness. Everything has gone according to plan—until a small incident puts us on alert: the ship is experiencing a gradual loss of speed from an unknown cause. None of the monitoring systems or external cameras detects anything, except for the dark background surrounding the ship. A total void in which the telescopes show no trace of stellar objects. I decide to go outside to try to understand what is happening. I open one of the side hatches and float out with a sense of apprehension. I can make out a black, viscous mass advancing along the metallic surface. It looks like tar. It approaches quickly and traps my glove; upon contact, it hardens into a block as solid as granite. I look in every direction. What I see is the same solid mass spreading throughout space. The communication systems warn me that this telepathic connec...

The Basement It had been only a short time since they had settled into the house on the outskirts of town—a large, spacious, and very old building. Alex and Shannon lived there with their little daughter, Sharon. One sunny day, Alex returned from work and found Shannon planting beautiful orchids in the garden. When he entered the house, he noticed that the basement hatch was open. “Sharon? Are you there?” “Sharon?” He started down the stairs, and a foul smell almost made him vomit. The darkness prevented him from seeing that little Sharon was opening small white boxes arranged in chronological order. Covering his nose and mouth with his arm, he continued down until he reached the light switch. When he turned it on, the white boxes began to decompose and vanished. But for a brief moment, he could see them—millions of them—immaculate and fragile, containing the bad thoughts that had taken place in that house, thoughts that Shannon had unknowingly released. The nauseating ...

Savannah Her black skin contrasted with her deep blue eyes. With a Sudanese father and a Norwegian mother, she had spent most of her life traveling as a reporter for a major newspaper. Now retired, she was enthusiastic about a project she had been shaping for years. Her idea was to organize the transport of food to drought-stricken areas of the world through Worldnet, the global communications network that had inherited the old Internet. The latest breakthroughs in electromagnetic transport made it possible to transform matter into energy, send it to its destination, and then transform it back into matter while preserving all its properties. To accomplish this, she had amassed a small fortune that would allow her to launch a pilot test. The plan was to send food from Sudan—rich in raw materials—to Norway, a country devastated by the climate change that had occurred a few years earlier. The pilot test consisted of sending several containers of cereals. It was the first attempt at tel...

The Eye of God In ancient Greece, in the garden of the academy, a philosopher, surrounded by his students, spoke about infinity. The infinite is an abstraction of the mind. Surely we, the human beings arrive at this idea from arithmetic, of thinking of an infinite number of numbers. But the existence of infinite distances is only a conception of the mind.  "Teacher, if there are no infinite distances, what is the structure of space? Is there anything beyond space?" "To think of the existence of something beyond space contains the same thought of infinity. It is a game of the mind. There is nothingness." "But the mind cannot apprehend nothingness." "Beyond the universes there is nothing. The whole of the existing is metaphorically called The Eye of God. Space is made up of light. The straight line trajectory is another invention of the mind. There is no straight line except in our mind." El ojo de Dios En la antigua Grecia, en...