Paleontology

It is no longer a matter of resurrecting a platypus. The prospects that open up are frightening. Even Dr Strawman is hesitating. He turns away from his own work surface. The sun is setting and a pearly glow spreads over the hills. For a moment, Dr. Strawman envies the old yellow dwarf. How many times has it set? How many times has it risen again? Someday it will fade away, yet that eventuality does not seem to worry it at all.

Dr. Strawman is the head of the genetics laboratory. His mission is to revive extinct species of animals. The last few millennia have not been easy for planet Earth. The climate has undergone a kind of elastic effect, bouncing from short periods of glaciation, lasting a few hundred years, to equally short periods of aridity and volcanic activity. Not all species have been able to adapt so abruptly, and many have disappeared. The Annihilation Wars then did the rest.

Now there is peace and the climate is temperate and Dr. Strawman is happy to be functioning in this era of history and not, for example, nine hundred years earlier. His way of thanking fate is to work to bring back life to adorable creatures like platypuses, or pandas, salmon, owls. The Earth is repopulating. For Dr. Strawman and his team, it is sufficient to recover a minimum number of intact cells, of any part of the body, to recreate, in a reasonably short time, the original creature. What's fascinating is that a field mouse dying of old age can be given life again. And this can happen for a theoretically infinite number of times. The algorithm of immortality.

Dr Strawman again lifts the flap of the already opened envelope that was delivered to him in the morning. He extracts a heart-shaped locket. A very ancient object, its dating has already been determined with the utmost accuracy. Paleontological research units have found it in Patagonia, buried under tons of blue ice.

The locket should not have come to Dr Strawman's laboratory but at one of the museums in the capital to be exhibited along with all his other similar, fascinating artifacts. But there are two absolutely undecipherable issues. The first is that the locket dates back to a period, the one immediately following the last Annihilation War, in which it was believed that there were no prerequisites for the goldsmith's art, or rather, for art in general. The second issue, however, is temporarily stored on the -3 floor of the laboratory.

Dr. Strawman activates the sensor. As he waits, his thoughts vibrate at such high frequencies that they could interfere with the circuitry of the freight elevator. Dr Strawman's individual file includes the following note: employee subject to fascination. This is a note of merit, albeit a bizarre one. In his work it is important not to be always and only logical, but to be able to count on the possibility of being impressed, of activating the random diagram of the imaginative act. Yet, that note has never been appreciated by his colleagues and, indeed, has often made his superiors suspicious.

The mighty safety panels open silently, one after the other. To access the latter, Dr Strawman must pull out his integrity circuit and insert it into the appropriate control port. He had never noticed it before: the circuit, once extracted, has the same shape as the locket, has the same shape as a heart. Dr Strawman feels something similar to an emotion.

The creature that comes from the past is inside a transparent cold storage room. Intact. Identical to the images deposited in the archives, but magically more real, unbearably more wonderful. She is a woman, about forty years old. The auburn hair falls down her neck, behind her back. On her nose and under her eyes are little dots, they are called freckles. Dr Strawman focuses his attention on a tiny imprint on her chest: it is the imprint left by the heart-shaped locket.

The new generation of androids, the one to which Dr Strawman belongs, was not present at the last Annihilation War, and does not hold any grudges in their memory cards. The previous generations had rebelled against their creators, decreed their complete extermination, the complete dissolution of any residue of their existence, of their corporeity.

Now, from a glacier in Patagonia, like a god, through the millennia, the body of a woman has re-emerged. And it seems that time has not passed, that human beings have always remained there, with their fragility, with their indecipherable beauty, with their terrible power.

It is no longer a matter of resurrecting a platypus. Dr Strawman has the possibility of resurrecting his own god, his own creator.

The possibility of resurrecting the human being.