One hundred and fifty-four years, six months and thirteen days of solitude

Many months later, as she faced the supermarket line, Francisca Fernández was to remember that distant afternoon when her major announced the quarantine. At the time Bocondá was a massive city, chaotic, hectic, polluted, an inhabited monster. The world had moved on from the days of worrying about helping the so-called third world countries, to ignoring them completely. Every year during the month of March a family of clean businessmen would set up their pop-ups in the centre of the city, and with a great uproar of iPads and drones, they would display new inventions. First, they brought the facial recognition. A smart looking businessman, with a clean suit, introduced himself as Conroy, put on a loud demonstration of what he called the promise of a secure, crimeless future. He went from house to house demonstrating how face recognition never failed, no matter how prominent or not the features of each person were. From the poorest to the richest, the whole population could be identified. ‘Nothing can go wrong, we have it all under control,’ the businessman proclaimed with a kind accent. ‘It’s simply a matter of trusting technology.’ Francisca Fernández, whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic, thought it would be possible to make use of that powerful invention to control whole populations through their lack of peace of mind. Conroy, who was a positive man, reassured her: ‘It won’t get out of control.’ But Francisca at that time did not believe in the honesty of governments, so she got back in her car and drove away. Aiza, her dog, always faithful at her side, was happy to see her return home. ‘Don’t worry, next week I’ll take you to the park every day, I promise,’ Francisca reassured her. For several months she wasn’t able to take Aiza further away than her block, no parks and no random walks around the city, and each time they stepped outside, people looked at them as criminals, or even worse, disease-carrying entities. They explored every inch of their small apartment, daily, unamazed, dragging their hopes for health and a miracle vaccine that was promised by every government on the daily. It took 17 months, 6 days and 17 hours for the vaccine to finally become a reality. This became a true calamity when the face recognition machines were merged with guns. All sick citizens must die, for healthy ones to be free.

At the end of March, the businessmen had left. Not as the usually did, with multiple business opportunities and bags full of money, no. They ran fearing to have to face an apocalypse in a country that didn’t have the necessary elements to. But, where do you hide when the world is ending? Let’s not kid each other, no amount of iPads or drones can save you when the end is near. The citizens of Bocondá remained hopeful still, the foreign seller said face recognition meant a peaceful future and they had spent almost all of their minimum wage to ensure no wrong could come. ‘Science has eliminated distance,’ Conroy proclaimed. ‘In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house.’ That was already the case, for those with access to the internet and a computer or smartphone, the most vulnerable and uneducated ones did not need to know that though. No matter what, there was a smell of optimism and hope surrounding the city, after everything the country had faced, it was impossible to not make it through this as well.

A rumour started spreading: those who cover their skins with a mix of honey, lemon and toilet paper won’t get sick. ‘The important part is making sure you cover all your body in the toilet paper,’ they said, ‘the slightest bit of visible skin and it’s no longer effective.’ In an attempt to ensure health, the habitants of Bocondá ran to the supermarkets to buy the needed materials for this infallible grandma’s cure, not without first buying them in bulks just in case they needed to do it more than once. Over the protests of scientists, who were worried about superstition being trusted over science, pamphlets were given out to all citizens citing scientific studies proving the grandma’s potion to be pointless and unnecessary. Meanwhile, the face-recognition machinery started presenting issues, healthy citizens would be categorized as ill and dying patients were listed as healthy or cured.

Francisca would spend hours in her room, calculating the strategic possibilities of erasing the never-ending information by the media announcing the impending doom. She knew the cure to the disastrous results of the pandemic were hidden somewhere in a mixture of a secret ingredient and kindness. She sent her theories to the government, accompanied by numerous descriptions of her hypothesis and several pages of explanatory sketches. ‘We either survive together or die together,’ she’d warned them, but somehow all her emails were identified as spam. Even though standing outside the house for over a minute was little less than impossible at the time, Francisca Fernández promised to undertake it as soon as the government ordered to study the pandemic in a humanistic way. For several months she waited for an answer. Finally, tired of waiting, she bemoaned to Aiza the failure of her project and rejoined the rest of humanity in the oppressive feeling of damnation.

Francisca Fernández spent the long months of the peak of the curve season shut up in a small room where no one would interrupt her, soaring through the social feed of people explaining the painful deaths and dying hope. Having completely abandoned her domestic obligations, she spent entire nights in the bed watching the interminable shows offered on Netflix and had almost lost the ability to differentiate reality from fiction. That was the period in which she acquired the habit of talking to herself, of walking through the apartment without noticing no one else was there, as Aiza had learned to survive by feeding on the packages she would steal from the deliveries the neighbours ordered. Suddenly, without warning, her feverish activity was interrupted and was replaced by a shy expectation. The announcement of a new type of medicine flooded the news, loudly being repeated on all possible platforms, it was unavoidable. Finally, one Tuesday in December, at lunchtime, all at once the medicine was released and the whole population of the world held their breath in the anticipation of what was to come. The people would remember for the rest of their lives the amazement with which everyone, devastated by the crushing weight of the untruthful hope came by, as they discovered this new medicine didn’t cure anyone but gave all the recipients a couple of feathers in their backs which, after three months, would become fully developed wings.

Leaders of the world streamed in syntony as they announced to the world: ‘Humans may not survive the plague, but the winged humanoids definitely will.’

Those who used to be ill and pitied were now glorified, their wings allowed them freedom, as no frontiers could stop all the human-birds from flying to their families and loved ones, or even to their dreamed vacation destinations that were now empty of all the annoying tourists. Life got colourful and cheerful again, for just a little while. It hadn’t even been a week before the news of the human-birds getting their feather plucked began. Some justified grilling the human-birds: ‘They aren’t real humans, not anymore. Their meat, however, has already digested the cure.’

And so the winged and non-winged humans began a war. It was a rudimentary one, as governments still hadn’t recovered from that abysmal economical fall. Activists gathered from both species and as soon as it started, it stopped. No one had enough will to keep the conflict going on. But, as it always happens, collaboration became the true clear north.

The winged-people destroyed the face identifying machines, which allowed the unwinged-humans to walk again alone. New jobs started: winged delivery servers, winged nursing homes, flying vacations planners, flying yoga instructors, and much more. And so, little by little, the new normal started settling in. Which meant, winged-robbers, winged-rapes, winged-singers and also, winged-heartbreaks.

Francisca Fernández was a silent observer. Alone at her apartment, she had allowed for time to pass. With no one to infect her, she had survived. That’s when the vaccine finally came to fruition when nobody needed it anymore. Winged-people refuse vaccination, fearing it might mean losing their wings. And non-winged people had already cured on their own.

And so life continued, as it always does, with corrupt winged-politicians, and the humble winged-poor.