Read an extract from the science fiction novel by Michel Nieva dengue Boy

Death, you mean?

Spreada-Aigle on this strange white surface which was under the sun of Antarctica, dengue, destroyed, to escape everything in more than a second. What about looking back in the space of a few moments when a boy, a girl, a destroyed vacuum, believes that he is about to die? Could he think of his dear mother, deplore the father he did not know, or perhaps remember a humorous or traumatic anecdote involving his classmates? To tell the truth, little else had happened during his short time on earth. However (because the mind works in a mysterious and unpredictable way, in particular the spirit of a mutant mosquito), the destroyed dengue did not think of any of these people, but rather of a story that her mother read her at bedtime, the history of the history of history Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She remembered the opening by heart:

“Once upon a time, during a frozen and windy winter night, he lived a queen there. This queen looked at the snow fall as she knit out the window. Through the window, the snowflakes fell slowly and rhythmically in unpredictable models, such as feathers of an infinite pillow. As she looked at the wonder of the falling snow, she accidentally stung one of her fingers with the needle. Three drops of blood fell on the snow. And the queen thought: if only I could have a girl who was as white as snow, as red as blood, and as beautiful as winter!

This opening has always disrupted dengue (as it was at the time). Among other things, he did not understand half of the words: what the hell was winterwhat is coldwhat is snowAnd why did they provoke such a fascination?

A girl as darling as snowas beautiful as winter . . .

The mystery of these words, whose meanings had always escaped him, aroused an even greater suspicion: does that mean that me, the aberrant boy dengue, with my green and yellow spots, must be as white as snow and as beautiful as winter for my mom to really love me and cherish me?

It was impossible to know, and in this future in which the cold, winter and snow had disappeared from the earth, there was no empirical means of living their effects (at least not for a Victorica bet). Naturally, his mother, who had also spent her miserable life in Victorica, did not help much. All she knew (or intuited so strongly that she believed that she knew) is that the snow was soft and beautiful, and the skin of beautiful children had the same color and the same pleasant texture, unlike her child of dengue, whose epidermis was hairy, hard, a greenish color. Because of this, dengue boy, like a kind of kabbalistic rabbi, convinced himself that if he could access the mystifying sense of cold,, winter And snowHe would open the sacred chest with his mysteries and the secret of the way of obtaining his mother's affection.

Because there was nothing that the insect wanted more than being white as snow, beautiful as winter and darling by his mother!

The desire to access the enigmatic material hidden by these words was held on the poor insect, and he traveled each dictionary and encyclopedia that he could find in search of the answers. He read the definitions over and over again:

Winter. Name. Obob. The season extinguished during the earthly year which occurred between fall and spring, also extinguished.

For example: “Winter was the coldest period of the year.”

Cold. Name. Obob. Body sensation produced by low temperatures, characteristics of ancient winter.

For example: “It was cold during the winter, especially if there was snow.”

Snow. Name. Precipitation in the form of small white ice crystals formed directly from air water vapor at a temperature below 32 ° F, which occurred during the earthly winter, and which still occurs on other planets or on earth by artificial means.

For example: “There was so much snow during the winter!”

The poor boy read these definitions, and read them again, then read again, but, to his great disappointment, did not understand anything. Was it because (as his classmates have always claimed him) that he was half a break? Winter,, cold,, snow. Simple words. Words! And worse still, words that were to be explained using other words, whose definitions were even more vague and imprecise.

Wint-is, cold, sn-ot.

Hermetic hieroglyphs that the boy savor the phoneme by phoneme, under the illusion that by doing so, the flesh which had once laid under their vibrant skin would not evaporate before his eyes. But, withdrawn from the meaning that had once inspired life, all that remained was a carcass hollow of its meaning.

Wint-is, cold, sn-ot.

Atmospheric phenomena that so many humans and other species had suffered and endured during the millennia, and which were now only a simple planetary mystery, a speculative prose written by fossils, the empty scriptures of water and soil, the geological imprint of nothingness!

The only season that the Pampas and the Antarctic Caribbean knew was the summer, burning, relentless, homogeneous. So when zero dengue, her body still numb by the poison, believed that she was going to die and had seen a drop of her own blood (to be precise, the blood she had without discriminance), the perplexed fable Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

And indeed, the memory she believed that her last was appropriate, because her poisoned body had in fact landed on the ice rink of the great winter cruise, the flagship ship of the cruise company, which traveled along the Caribbean coast in Antarctica, recreating for its visitors the cold season, now disappeared from the earth, and its elementary materials: snow, glaciers and icebergs. On these luxury cruise ships, managing AIS's advanced technology, tourists could discover the unique winter delights for themselves, including one of its largest attractions, the largest skating rink on the planet!

And that was precisely where the dengue died landed, ruining the pleasure of tourists. Imagine the scene: on this imposing ice cream plate, one hundred and nineteenth and a feet long and fifty-five wide, which crossed the terrace of the twenty-story cruise ship with a direct view of the virgin and burning sea, a large crowd of visitors had flocked for having had a unique experience, since these spntacular landscapes are not due to another geological era. This was not only an opportunity to skate with the undoubted and elegant stride of ice skates on a frozen sheet, but to do so at temperatures below zero, from the atmosphere in which the ice rink had been installed recreated under the waves. In addition to that, it was Christmas, the busiest and most impatient season of international tourism. And so, as the carols rank out, enthrald tourists clad in heavy coats Moved Like Swans Gliding over a terra incognita, this white rectangle whisfture was suspicious by the heculean efforts of extremely powerful refrigerating machines, surface of artificial ice decored with flags of all the Countries from Before the Great Thaw, opposite a monumental, Pure Gold Statue of Prometheus Stealing Fire from the Gods, for the rink was an imitation of the vanied for a long time at the Rockefeller Center, in Old New York, also many leagues under the sea now.

Naturally, the sculptor hired by the cruise ship had been clever enough to replace the flame in the right hand of Prometheus with a huge block of pure ice, which the Titan was flying from the abyss of planetary time so that these rich tourists can recover (as long as the Holocene. In fact, it was the slogan of the cruise company: “12,000 years of history in one place, the big winter cruise“, As he promised to perfectly recreate this lost planetary terrain that winter as humans knew, he was born and died. Thus, “hibernation” (as the company called the cruise experience in its advertisements) has progressed up of the lower floors, telling twelve thousand years of winter history in the growing order. It started on the lower deck, where they had recreated the end of the Pleistocene in a huge refrigerator with robotic mammoths and mastodons, including a family game in which you had to trigger a fire with sticks and stones before the attack of prehistoric mammals. The higher levels offered a variety of experiences from the old winter: the most historic included invasive Scandinavian cities with a Viking ship, with the ability to kill, fire and rape, or cross the Andes on General de Cheval of General de San Martín, while on floors dedicated to general entertainment, there were ski slopes all different types of winter precipitation, including Snow, hail and grins. There was also a huge igloo with an outdoor cinema, a casino, a spa, a carousel, a cocktail bar and a sushi and barbecue restaurant, among other hibernation attractions, which, the advertisements of the cruise ship, ensured visitors, winter recreated in detail. The ancient frozen delights of ice, snow and cold were an authentic treasure of the gods, stolen by Prometheus himself for the exclusive pleasure of visitors to cruise: a real paradise in which you could access a secret mystery which was now irreparably lost. The skaters slipped through the rink in an atmosphere of pure jubilation, helped by Christmas songs, and people laughed while they crashed hilarious in each other and danced, radiating against each other in shared bliss. A real unforgettable celebration that would be forever recorded on the retinas of tourists, an authentic dream, if it had been for the mosquito landing violently and suddenly on the skating rink and ruining everything.

This extract is reproduced with the permission of the novel Dengue By Michel Nieva (translated by Rahul Bery), now with the snake tail. North American edition available from Astra House. This novel is the latest choice for the New Scientist Book Club. Register and read with us here