This time he’s eating pork tamales. Not the slop that pops out of the autochef (a German invention, of course; when were there ever any good German chefs?), but real tamales that I made myself. In a real kitchen. Following the old Rubble City recipe.
“You people don’t know anything about punctuality, but man, you sure know how to cook!” my friend says with his mouth full, polishing off the last tamale.
Ymala, who taught me how to make them, died when she was ten. Broncodust.
“Chill, Fats,” I mutter, absorbed in finishing my last series of bench presses with the variable gravity bar, now set to a respectable 115 kilos. “Gimme time… After all… it’s officially just… five minutes since… I got the… urgent call… Won’t look good if… I get there first… now, will it?”
Allergic to anything that smells like physical exertion, the expansive Catalan condomnaut looks on with visceral disapproval as, bathed in sweat, I replace the ingenious device on its stand. “I don’t know why you insist on this nonsense, Cubanito,” he points out, again. “At your age, with your complexion and your undernourished past, and refusing to use steroids, you’ll never have a hot bod or win Mr. Nu Barsa. So what’s the point?”
“It helps me… to think,” I only half-lie to him, as I lie on the bench doing pec flies with the variable gravity dumbbells, dialed down to a manageable twenty kilos.
In Rubble City, since I was the age when any boy with an imagination aspires to grow up to be a brawny he-man and look like a superhero (for example, like that nasty, unbearable, but delicious specimen of masculinity, Jordi Barceló), I dreamed of having a set of gym equipment like this.
My set of ultratech variable gravity bars handily replaces a roomful of traditional weights while taking up much less space. They’re superlight when turned off, so I can take them with me almost anywhere. The only drawback, for a poor kid from Rubble City, is that like all sophisticated devices, especially those that use Alien technologies such as Algolese gravity control, they’re almost a hundred times more expensive.
So one of the first things I did when I became a Contact Specialist in Nu Barsa eight years ago and got my first credit chip was to run out and make a childhood dream come true by buying this superadvanced gym set.
It isn’t totally wrong to say exercise helps me to think. Mainly to think about how far I’ve come since I was a starving brat on the streets of Rubble City, CH. And about how much it cost me to get here and how far I’ll go to keep this life. And acquire more stuff, if I can.
On the other hand, it’s true that I’ll never look like the third officer of the hyperjump frigate Antoni Gaudí, much less like the professional bodybuilders he used to work out with. Human mounds of genetic privilege, two hundred kilos of pure muscle and barely 5 percent body fat, sweating and panting in the enclave’s gyms, metabolisms so altered by hormone and steroid cocktails that they rarely live to see the age of sixty.
I’ll pass. But I’m not planning on becoming a flabby mass like my elephantine friend Puigcorbé, either. And if it sounds like I’m making a big deal of his weight, well… yeah. I am. Can’t help it. That’s how it is. Like, I love the guy, but I’m not blind: he’s fat. Gargantuan. And it’s his own doing. Not like Kar—eh, best to not think about her, after that nightmare.
Narcís has one major advantage, though: as my friend, he’s exempt from the category of “fucking whale,” which is what I call everybody with a BMI over 35.
In my mind only. I’m not so suicidal as to call them that to their faces. Some obese guys are surprisingly strong. Hot-tempered, too. Potential threats to the health of anyone who rashly reminds them of their condition.
Well, let them kill me—if they can catch me, because I can sure outrun them. But that doesn’t change a basic fact: I’ll never be like them. I’d rather die than let my body go.
No, I’m planning to retire someday and enjoy life.
I’m not making this up. To be a condomnaut, you don’t necessarily have to be a muscle freak or a gymnast or an expert in martial arts, but you should be able to control your own body—especially the body parts that bodybuilders, gymnasts, and martial arts masters tend to neglect.
To be a condomnaut, you don’t necessarily have to be a muscle freak or a gymnast or an expert in martial arts, but you should be able to control your own body—especially the body parts that body builders, gymnasts, and martial arts masters tend to neglect.
Nothing wrong with looking fantastic, of course.
“¡Completo Camagüey!” I pant, marking the end of my exercise routine with a Cuban phrase that must have already been ancient when I heard it from the grown-ups back in Rubble City, though I never really understood what it meant. “Listen, if you’re all that impatient, why don’t you play with Diosdadito for a while. Just leave me alone. I need a couple of minutes to take a shower and get dressed, and then we’ll go. Bet I’ll get there at practically the same time as everyone else, but unlike them I’ll be… ”
“…fresh and unstressed, right?” Narcís finishes my sentence for me. Then he smiles and raises his colossal right arm toward the ring of magnetic fields that runs around the entire perimeter of my apartment, a couple of inches from the ceiling. That’s the energy cage of my biovort, Diosdadito. “You’re a calculating scoundrel, Josué. You not just scheming to make Miquel think you’re always ready for anything; you also don’t want anyone to suspect you were tipped off due to my good ear and exceptional deductive abilities,” he says with false modesty, while the approach of his biofield sends my pet scurrying to investigate, with a fabulous display of colors. “Cojons, I love your creature. What a pity you refuse to sell it to me—it’s always so affectionate.”
Sell it? Dream on. Not even to Narcís, my best friend.
That is, unless I have to face some catastrophe. Such as not having my contract renewed, which would make my economic situation go downhill, fast.
A biovort—short for biovortex—is a small creature composed of energy. Biovorts live in the coronas of a handful of rare stars in the Milky Way. Though not rational beings, they are among the very few plasma-based life forms, or lifelike forms, that exist. So their price is literally astronomical. So high that I never could have allowed myself to own one, except that a certain Kigran was so satisfied by my performance during Contact that she decided to give me an extra gift for my skill and dedication to interspecies fraternity. This was in spite of our brutal difference in size: her, more than three hundred meters long; me, just under five foot seven tall.
With my usual amalgam of nostalgia and guilt, I named my plasmic gift “Diosdadito” in honor of the old babalawo from my Rubble City childhood. It cost me an arm and a leg to set up a containment system inside my apartment to safely hold a creature that could vaporize the whole building in an instant if ionized gas were to escape from one of its magnetic branches. But the truth is, it really impresses my visitors, the way it darts across the ceiling and puts on spectacular shows of shifting shapes and colors. Too bad I can’t pet it like Antares. All the same, it’s proof of how well things are going for me. Quite the status symbol.
And it really helped me impress that materialist, Nerys.
Exobiologists tell me that some biovorts even come to recognize their owners. So I still have hopes that one of these years Diosdadito will stop offering its dazzling displays of pleasure to every stranger who pops by (even if it’s a regular visitor, such as Nerys or Narcís and his wife Sonya) and reserve all or at least most of its affections for its master. What’s the point of having a pet, whatever its price, if not only you’re unable to touch it, but it’s not even going to pay you any special attention?