Earth, year 2135 or 100 R.E.

"How right the ancients were to warn us that we are but mere playthings of the gods, forever subject to their whims!"

With these words, Dr. Shenfú had begun his lecture on multiverses and parallel lives. His presentation had generated great expectations and proved as fascinating as it seemed it would be for some of those in attendance.

Konstantinos and I had arrived right on time, but the lecture had to be delayed slightly due to a noisy protest by xenophobic, anti-humanoid dissenters near the auditorium. They disrupted traffic and even set off firecrackers, forcing law enforcement to intervene and suppress the protests. The rest of the population had grown accustomed to such disturbances, taking them in stride as a daily occurrence whenever the anniversary of the Era of Reset (E.R.) approached. This was why, a hundred years after its beginning, as the grand finale of the tenth annual colloquium commemorating its founding, the SEIACA Society for Archaeoastronomy had invited this renowned expert on extraterrestrial and paranormal research. I always associated these demonstrations with those that used to happen around the statue of Christopher Columbus on what was once called 'Día de la Raza' in Mexico.

The audience, composed of both Earthlings and aliens, had shown a keen interest in the subject because, as is customary, everything related to esoteric phenomena attracts people's morbid curiosity. The crux of Dr. Shenfú's discourse bordered on a peculiar warning about a certain Gildefer, a supposed interdimensional being with powers unimaginable to most of those present. Gildefer had created, in the dimension he inhabited, a purportedly perfect state of affairs, which he now intended to impose as a new order on other dimensions, universes, and worlds, according to Shenfú.

Shenfú explained that, for his first experiment, this character had set his sights on a group of planets in our dimension, including Earth. He had decided to upset our destinies, regardless of the will of the beings who lived on it. Those who would face Gildefer might see him as an extraordinary magician or perhaps, in the eyes of those who still clung to old religions, a messiah, a prodigy of divine origin, rather than a brutal conqueror or an obscene colonizing migrant from distant lands.

"For beings as simple as Earthlings, Gildefer could be seen as an eternal, infinite, perhaps immortal being. And I say perhaps because life and death, between the sacred and the profane, are two lines that run parallel and perhaps seem to meet at a point on the horizon. Perhaps they only signify the boundaries of two dimensions between which lies the space of no one, the Nothing. Perhaps nothingness is the bridge that leads to other dimensions that such simple beings have failed to interpret as extensions of reality", Shenfú said with an uncomfortable segregational tone and a strange verb conjugation, as if beneath his words he hid a truth accessible only to him or an encrypted message for someone unknown among the audience, perhaps me, for just when he emphasized the word "simple" I seemed to feel his gaze upon me. "Anyway, the existences that can be present on both sides happen in parallel, even though they may seem to occur at different times and distant places, in unknown worlds that seem like fantasies produced by the illusionistic arts of a Gildefer amused by turning other creatures and their worlds into happy puppets for his leisure and pleasure. For a long time", he added, "scientists and artists, especially those dedicated to narrating how things happen, have taken pleasure in imagining parallel universes. Today we know that they are a reality. But those same narrators amused themselves by posing the possible existence of communicating vessels between these parallelisms, so that beings from one place could move to the next as if crossing the street, a bridge, entering a tunnel or deciding to vacation on the nearest beach. Today we know that this is a reality and occurs more frequently than we supposed. The threads of destiny are intertwined and are more than mere speculation. There is someone, a being, a group of beings, an organization, a something that builds and deconstructs them. But there is also someone or something that perverts them whenever, by error or malice, a knot is produced in them or between them".

Tempers began to fray slightly in the auditorium. Some of us in the gallery exchanged amused and incredulous glances. The presentation had either been as entertaining as a bad joke or revealing of something beyond our imagination, just as I suppose lectures on UFOs, monsters, witchcraft, and ghosts had been more than a hundred years ago, when they were seen as inventions or hoaxes of minds prone to self-deception, before the opposite was proven. However, seated in the front row, the erudite Dr. Konstantinos Mirídakis didn't miss a detail of the lecture, taking notes every now and then, leaning forward from time to time, resting his chin on one or both hands. Then Shenfú exhibited the images that were the heart of his lecture. According to the academic, the so-called 'Shenfú Manuscript', found by him in the nineteenth terrestrial century during excavations in Turkey, tells more than just the romance about the vicissitudes of two parallel lives affected by this fateful Gildefer in some indefinite place and time. "The Epic of Gilgamesh and other Sumerian epics, the biblical chapter of the flood, and hundreds more legends are just a small fragment of this universal story which, as I show here, is full of gaps, of missing parts, and seems to be still being written, perhaps even now and by ourselves", he affirmed, and warned that, if this Gildefer were successful, humans and humanoids could be in grave danger.

"The document is disturbing. It describes Gildefer's actions as having immediate effects. But the immediacy referred to is not as we imagine it or measure it in our limited human and humanoid capacities. The immediate may be happening right now, beside us, already in progress; or it may have happened centuries ago, which in universal time could correspond to an instant, and then this warning I am giving you is already late and we only have to become aware of what has been done; not to resign ourselves, but to remedy what is possible. Perhaps we are not even at the beginning and we have time to stop Gildefer's intentions, if we understand how to achieve it. Distance, duration, and promptness are relative. Don't be fooled. I'm not talking to you about an ancient novel, although the content of the tome makes direct or indirect reference to myths and legends from various eras, cultures, worlds, and dimensions. We are facing a true chronoscope. Please don't confuse the concept with the 'cronopio' invented by the distinguished Earthly writer Julio Cortázar, although personally I don't rule out the possibility that he himself was, given his literary intuition, a chronoscope and his concept was distorted in its form by the enthusiastic scholars of his life and work.

Chronoscope? It was the first time I had heard such a term. Konstantinos would explain it to me in detail later.

After saying that, some skeptics, annoyed despite the evidence shown, left the auditorium amid a chorus of boos. "Proof!", some shouted. "Circumstantial evidence is not proof!", others claimed, leaving indignantly at what they considered a mockery of their intelligence. In a way, the scandal reminded me of what happened to one of the first researchers of these phenomena, the Mexican journalist Jaime Maussán, back in 2023, when he presented mummified alien bodies before the Mexican Congress. It was the time when several countries in the world began to open up information, classified files and documents, to prepare people and the way for the definitive encounter with the first type three alien civilizations on the Kardashev scale, already present but hidden on Earth and other worlds; an encounter that would happen twelve years later.

In the midst of the commotion, Shenfú remained unfazed and continued explaining that the complex document, written in a wide variety of languages, begins by recounting two seemingly disparate, isolated matters, but which the text considers as fundamental pieces from which parallel plots unfold, of a greater, complex mystery that, due to the way the content of the tome was organized and Shenfú presumed, the original author or authors had tried to solve without much success. Shenfú concluded his speech by inviting those interested, whether they were partners, colleagues or friends of SEIACA, to collaborate in the research of a subject that was challenging for human and humanoid existence.

"I know that the search for clues about the origin of life on Earth is something that some consider to be surpassed, understood, but this manuscript allows us to suspect that we could be very wrong, and the mythical Eden that all cultures inside or outside of Earth speak of, did not even take place where each of them points to for their respective planet. True, each has its own version and perspective, its own cosmological, anthropological, physical, chemical, biological or theological view of paradise, the evolutionary process, and therefore a local cradle of its particular civilization. However, let us recognize and accept: there is no natural law that sets a single and precise point for the emergence of life and everything around us, is there?" After that question, Shenfú paused dramatically, which helped to calm the mood in a certain sector of the audience.

"This manuscript seems to answer yes. And far from any theocentric speculation, examining what is currently legible in it, one can have as a first conclusion the need to open up the range of possibilities and aim for a more primordial objective, such as discovering the site of the origin of life in the universe. I repeat, in the universe! Perhaps even the creator himself! Is this Gildefer from a type four or five civilization? Is he the creator or his opposite; or neither? Even if there is no creative will, the truth is that there was a primary cause of Everything and Nothing. Is our tangible reality a footprint or a shadow projected under the events occurring in other dimensions? How much does the parallelism between worlds and universes define or distinguish us? How much does it matter to understand if the universe is contained within an immeasurable but finite sphere; or has no limit or boundaries? Does it expand, does it contract; or do galaxies, star clusters, nebulae, and thousands of astronomical phenomena only flow like a blade of grass or leaves on the surface or in the depths of an infinite lake that, like water between our hands, slips through the cracks of our humble understanding, which perhaps finds a seat as removable, muddying mud? Is darkness matter or just an effect of the limited perception of our senses and our instruments, a vulgar twilight in which reason loses its way? Our hypothetical and parallel other selves, from other universes, are they mere fictions or a real derivation of us, an extension of us, a detachment of us; or do they only have a minimal resemblance to us in their way of existing and being unique in themselves? There is the challenge! It is not just a philosophical, metaphysical, imaginative, scientific challenge, a waste of time and effort as the pragmatists most occupied with the daily, again, for the immediate and necessary, accuse. Perhaps the immediate and the necessary, in contrast with freedom, is one of Gildefer's traps to distract our attention from what is truly fundamental, making us believe that the ephemeral and present is what is valuable, what matters most because yesterday is already history and tomorrow is yet to be written. And the clues, this is my presumption, we could find them in this document or collection of documents that contain more than one mystery. But we need not only to study it, to analyze it as it is now. We need to complete it. I hope that some of you see, in the arguments I have presented, sufficient reasons to join this ambitious project, to unravel the secrets of the document that I have been presenting to you".

The conference did not end in the best way. Shouts, hat-throwing, and disqualifications made the finale. With difficulty, Dr. Mirídakis approached Shenfú along with some other characters, they talked for a few minutes and said goodbye with a cordial embrace. Konstantinos looked around until he located me. With a gesture he called me to reach him at the exit and we boarded a taxi.

"Well, that's settled, Homer!", said Konstantinos with notable enthusiasm as soon as the taxi started. On the way he explained that he had arranged a meeting with Dr. Shenfú for the evening, so he could show us the mysterious manuscript. We would join the challenge. I turned to Konstantinos with an inquisitive look. I was annoyed that he had decided to include me in the challenge without asking me. I already had enough with having been swallowed by a black hole and, like a modern argonaut, getting lost in time and space in pursuit of an adventure without an apparent destination, or an unfortunate destination.

"Come on, Homer, don't look at me like that! Remember you promised to help me with this endeavor and we have to find her. Something tells me that talking to Shenfú will help us find clues so that I can recover her". Konstantinos's face saddened as he thought of his beloved Marmara. I squeezed his arm in a gesture of solidarity. I remembered my promise made in the confines of Calima and nodded. Everything seemed like a bad dream.

Suddenly, masked assailants attacked the vehicle by surprise, throwing balloons filled with paint at the windows, which forced the driver to swerve, dodge the mob and take an alternative route to avoid the commotion of the perverse exhibitionists. Konstantinos reacted with the terror of someone who has experienced a burst of war. For me, on the other hand, the scene seemed like a déjà vu, the sequel to a dream I had once had in my past.

* * *

Haus des Blicks, 2022.

Life offers many challenges, of all kinds. The year was just beginning, and the noisy catfight abruptly woke Homer up in the middle of the night. One of the feral cats that roamed the neighborhood had tried to enter the house and Rorick, the alpha cat, the shaggy king of his pack, must have surprised and confronted him in defense of the territory. The commotion caused all the other cats to jump, more curious and alert than supportive of Rorick. They went to perch on the steps of the stairs or crouched behind furniture and corners, Blue, Tabby, Ying, Yang, and the twins Walky and Talky.

Homer sleepily watched the scene. He thought that in it, or in the recent dream images still fresh in his memory, he could find a reason to tell a story. He went back to bed, turned his head on the pillow immediately canceling the option. In the half-sleep, however, he thought he saw a black shadow moving through the gloom of the room and stopping at the side of his bed. It seemed to him that it had a human figure and was floating. He tried to move a muscle without succeeding due to his deep relaxation. Then, the shadow leaned towards him and posed a challenge to him as a commission: to tell his biography. In exchange for what?, Homer mentally questioned without getting an answer. The silhouette faded into the twilight.

Homer opened his eyes and sat up agitated, sweaty. Had that been a nightmare? He remembered when many years ago he went to a psychiatrist to solve his sleep disorder. Among the apparent symptoms he described to the doctor were visions or supposed encounters of this type, which he classified as spectral and did not necessarily occur during the sleep phase, sometimes they happened while he was awake. He assumed that the medication at the time had solved the issue, but now he doubted and feared what might come next. He rationally reflected on all this. The cats returned to the bed. He turned sideways to go back to sleep. Blue massaged him as usual on the shoulder of the arm extended under the sheets. Tabby settled in a corner. The tiny Talky, on one side of his legs. The mischievous Walky, near his feet, while the princess Ying on these; Rorick climbed to his exposed arm resting his head on Homer's shoulder, fixing his gaze on him, purring in his ear with a lullaby rhythm. They were like a body of guards returning to their posts on the roads, the entrances and the battlements around the citadel of Homer's soul. And Yang, his white wizard cat with gray eyes who embodied his childhood desire to have the lion cub Simba from the cartoons he loved so much, curled up between Blue and Rorick.

* * *

The next morning, Yang was nowhere to be found in the house, he had gone out again. It wasn't unusual, all the cats did it. Ever since he had his first kitten and trusting in the side effects of sterilization as a way to lessen the strength of instinct, Homer decided to keep doors and windows open to allow them to roam freely, within the limits of prudence in which he had tamed them; but this one, Yang, had already gotten lost once for a week, at the end of which and fortunately, Homer found him in a distant abandoned house. This time the writer searched for him for days, weeks, months without finding him. Why had he gotten lost? What had driven him to stray beyond the territorial limits indicated by Homer? The desire for adventure, the willful trait characteristic of all felines? Some abnormal cause?

It was impossible for Cuentero not to connect this episode with other anecdotes from when, at different times, two of his dogs were lost due to the carelessness of his father who, like the cats and given his Leo sign, sometimes sinned from excessive confidence.

The first case occurred when Toño left the door open and the pet, a collie dog named Milky, went out. After weeks of anguish, the veterinarian reported that some neighbors had brought in Milky, run over, with no more consequence than suffering a slight atrophy in his right hind leg, which caused it to retract when the dog stood still, giving him an appearance of an elegant dancer touching the ground with the tips of his toes. Since then, Toño had mockingly referred to Milky as the 'dancing dog' or 'Milky Nureyev'. And since the dog also had an atrophied testicle, for which he could not reproduce, the nickname took on a denigrating and discriminatory meaning.

The second case was when, in a similar situation, Toño left the door open and Candy, a cinnamon cocker spaniel, ran out quickly. Toño, worried, got in the car and started it to cut her off a few blocks ahead, got out abruptly, took off his belt and with a gesture of fury hit the belt against the sidewalk a couple of times breaking the buckle. But that, instead of stopping the blundering Candy, made her see the scene as a form of play and then she barked at Toño more, who couldn't control the most amusing dog by making him lose his temper and threatening to walk away. Then, Homer, knowing the pet like the palm of his hand, left the house with her favorite ball and, from a distance, whistling, bounced the ball a couple of times. Candy, hearing the sounds, stopped and turned enthusiastically to answer the call to the game, which Homer took advantage of to take her back to the house.

Towards the end of the year, dejected, resigned to Yang's absence, Cuentero continued to divide his time between the challenges of writing his project, organizing and classifying his library, tending his garden, cleaning the house and other activities of a set of more or less customary pending matters. Matters that perhaps to others might seem silly, idle, and that showed Cuentero as a dirty slob, a hoarder living in irresponsible self-indulgence and laziness, and not scraping his life from the same priorities as the rest, in whose eyes his life seemed not to advance just like his novel. "Oh, my son! Now that I will not be here, you're going to live in the dirt", his mother would have told him a few days before she died. She was right, but not for the reasons given by others. It didn't matter to the others, Homer concluded, that his circumstance defined him in rude ways or that, having spent decades postponing his dreams, he now dared to try to realize them at any cost, step by step.

That doing things step by step, focused on things, showed him, in the eyes of others, as he defined in a phrase that characterized him, slow but sure; more so now, especially living alone in a mansion and with seven cats, or rather six, whose real weight, more often than desirable, exceeded his obligations over his aspirations, his strengths over his possibilities. Of course, assuming his sixty years of age and as he could have explained to some critic, the 'Son of the Black Count', Alexandre Dumas père, in some previous century, Homer had something clear: it's not the same thing The Three Musketeers than Twenty Years After.

In reality, he had always been restless and didn't like to sit idle, especially when it came to ensuring a sufficient economy for survival, at least. In that, as in other things, he was very much like his father. His restlessness, however, was not limited to the physical, but above all to the intellectual, the spiritual, and the creative. In that, he was much more like his mother.

Because of his parents' inclinations toward History, science, and art, family conversations often revolved around anecdotes describing the parental paths of their ancestors as intertwined paths among the ephemerides of Mexico. The dinner table mentions of onomastics, heraldry, and family lineage fueled Homer's imagination, who was gradually absorbed by the fascination until, in the early 1990s, he formally took on as another challenge the task of delving into the labyrinthine meanders of the family's dynastic biography. It was, he thought, his way of assuming the debt that his existence implied, and not only that, but also of leaving a record of the passage through life of himself and those who preceded him. But, also, one day during those years, while his mother was showing him some memories from the collection she kept in her 'world', she gave him a challenging instruction and one more challenge:

"Son, I'm organizing all the family memories so that, when I'm no longer here, you'll take care of distributing among your sisters and you the ones that correspond to each one", the maternal sayings resonated in Cuentero's memory. "Some are duplicated or triplicated so that they have the same, but others are for each one. In any case, these few, very few, related to your deceased sister, Sandrita, my Picolina, correspond to your sister Patricia"

Not all the memories were in order. His mother was missing the notes and writings she had stored in different places. After her death, Homer fully fulfilled the commitment, except for the notes, which he found little by little and scattered. He had promised to organize them, transcribe them, and share them, as well as the numerous family photographs and films that his father had taken throughout his life, but the slowness to which his personal circumstance led him slowed him down in the task, causing in the others a distorted feeling of disappointment similar to the one he imagined in his dusty books, which he never finished organizing or taking out of the drawer in his eagerness to write them.

One of those days of occupational therapy between his garden and his library, while racking his brains to find a way to organize his ideas for the saga, Cuentero spent time classifying his books for the umpteenth time. Among those books and notebooks, some acquired by his mother, he would suddenly find some note of hers with a reflection on the value of motherhood, old age, the love she always professed for her children and Homer's father despite everything, some thought with pretensions of a poem, or the inklings of a story or novel that, for him, in his capacity as a writer, were true treasures that justified his legacy and his efforts, but were also a reminder of the claims that he was the object of for his delay in sharing. He would extract them, caress them with his hands and eyes, collect them in a section of his library that he called Mom Rabbit's Basket, with the idea of being able to deliver the edited set to his family someday.

These findings also reaffirmed his position on valuing books more for their content than for their form. He had once been reluctant to make marks on them, write in their margins or courtesy pages, so as not to damage them and diminish their validity as collectibles and without considering what they are, contain and represent. But reading his mother's notes reinforced his old conviction: loving books like that was a stupidity more typical of petty, ambitious booksellers than of true bibliophiles. If book collectors measured the rarity of a book by its edition, its covers, material, errata, and peculiarities, for Homer the valuable thing was the original words, these were the initial measure, they contained the essence. Everything else, including amendments, cross-outs, and even the very personal and accessory carpetovetonic notes – understood as Camilo José Cela defined them – could not alter beyond the substance of a work as the speculating collectors later claimed, for whom a tested document in any way saw its exchange value reduced, unless the annotation implied an instituted form of certification, or the addendum attached or sealed had the character of an ex libris or signature topographic label. How many times did he discuss this topic with his mother! Every year. Every year after their purchases at the Book Fair of the Palacio de Minería when, like a pair of Ali Baba thieves, they would revel in their bookish booty. And it is that books, for his mother as well and even more especially for him, had a meaning that went beyond spines and edges.

He had lost count of the times he had repeated this organizational task, always interrupted by some reason if not technical, such as a computer failure, of another kind. The fact is that, as if he were Sisyphus struggling, once yes and another no, to climb to the succinct summit of a slope the heavy burden of his impious inconsistency – which stubbornly fell as soon as it touched the peak of tolerance –Homer classified and reclassified a tenth of the almost five thousand copies – not counting those added electronically in the memory of his computer – of his collection pompously named by him 'Biblioteca Javitanus', in allusion to his nickname 'Javito' invented by him in his youth as his first literary pseudonym, and with which he was known for years among his circle of friends. The reasons for inventing that nickname were also others.

It's time to make a revelation.

As you well know, dear reader, every work of fiction more or less fits a basic dramatic structure that can vary from one work to another, from one genre to another, from one medium to another, and at the whim of the author or producer. This work is no exception; and at this point where we are, the moment corresponds to the step dedicated to the statement of the challenges that the characters must face, although they are sometimes exposed as loose ends.

If you, dear reader, already suspected that the surnames of Homer's ancestors and other family members did not match his name, unraveling this relationship will be part of your challenge, if you are willing to continue delving into the set of plots that are emerging.

The real name of our protagonist was another. That of Homer Núñez 'Cuentero' he had borrowed, in his adulthood, from a Chilean electrician and storyteller with whom he had contact by virtue of social networks, and with whom he had a fleeting but endearing friendship, a cause for which he dared to ask for permission to use his name and pseudonym with the idea of naming a novel character. Yes, you see, this one now that appears to you fragmented between dreams, trips, temporalities, locations and that the individual behind the name 'Homer' made him doubt if he would not be himself the product of someone else's imagination somewhere in the universe.