The next day, would I still be here?

By Lorenzo di Gaio

This text has a story, global warming worries me, the future terrifies me. What will the future be for our children or grandchildren? Very clever, the one who can answer this question

Global warming is not just a subject that causes torment for an author. It's a reality. Periodically, the media gives us record temperatures, we worry and that's normal. It's those that scientists are finding in Siberia that torment me. In shirt sleeves in December on the shores of the Barents or Kara Seas, we are allowed to wonder about our future. A temperature that exceeds thirty degrees on the coast of the Laptev Sea presents us with a danger which. Permafrost has held viruses, bacteria, flora and fauna prisoner for time immemorial; if it warms up, what it holds prisoner will come back to life. I was shocked to read that a mammoth caught in the ice could come back to life.

This is the subject of this work. It is a work of fiction, even the characters who have a reality are diverted.

We are in Russia in a society in the process of decomposition, the foundations of society have collapsed, every man for himself has become the rule. Democracy is nothing more than a memory, the cult of personality is pushed to the extreme, even in Stalin's times it was more moderate. Putin is not a comrade, but he is not yet a czar. He maintains himself in power by evoking external and internal enemies. Its legitimacy rests on the power of its army. A machine gun is more convincing than a ballot. The press is put in line, a stay in a psychiatric hospital helps the journalists find the path to reason, and to forget absurd ideas.

A team of scientists even studies in Siberia, global warming offers previously unknown possibilities to search the ice, they are looking for traces of the past. They work in the service of the Kremlin and the army. The leader of the team, the one who screens power, military and political, and scientists, is a person who abuses his functions, nothing is a brake on his most unbridled vices.

The ice is melting, the temperature is rising, in Verkhoyansk, the coldest city in Russia, a temperature of thirty-eight degrees is recorded, it is getting hotter and hotter. Our team is worried, the permafrost will release viruses and bacteria. The man does not know them, he has probably never faced them.

They discover frozen animal bodies; they would never have been able to uncover them without global warming. Everything becomes possible, fear, anxiety and terror set in.

The military is becoming more and more interested in their findings. The army does not reassure them, it is a phenomenal force of repression.

The leader of the scientific expedition is ill, he has gastroenteritis, which gets worse as the days go by, and there is no sign of recovery. The doctor admits his inability to defeat it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lorenzo di Gaio
• Release date: Dec 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223194835

Book preview

Chapter 1

MY NAME IS DIMITRI, metrological engineer, I chose the profession of explorers. Most of the time I live in Siberia in Katanga; a fishing village, it is a former abandoned military post. I live inside abandoned buildings. My research on ice and global warming is of interest to the Kremlin and the army. Usually, these two entities leave me alone, I can play in my corner, imitating a child from before with his knucklebones game.

I have just celebrated my thirty-fifth birthday, I live with a girl I met in Krasnoyarsk, she is eighteen. She is of Enetse origin, one of the ethnic groups that inhabited Siberia before the Russians established themselves there. She remains attached to her culture. Her parents gave her a Slavic name Oulia.

I don’t explore alone, I belong to a multidisciplinary team of ten people.

The administration has set up a camp in the middle of the Taymir nature reserve.

We live in a large yurt, we store the equipment inside another.

By digging the ground, we hope to unearth vestiges of the past.

Oulia is waiting for me in Katanga.

This evening under the yurt, I chat with Yvan, a forty-year-old man, a chemist with a certain reputation, while drinking a glass of vodka, about our current project. We have unearthed almost incredible animal remains, we have the impression that we have captured them from life. A tiger preserved under the ice with saber-shaped teeth arouses our curiosity, I think of a Proailurus, but its name does not matter to us this evening. This animal has no injuries, it gives the impression of full possession of its means. His power and his musculature captivate me. Sofia, a biologist, a twenty-eight-year-old woman, is studying the presence of viruses and bacteria on her coat.

—If he bites our thigh, he crushes the femur by barely pinching, Yvan points out to me.

—You surprise me, I wonder about the cause of his death.

—Probably a cold period, a fear or an illness; the field of possibilities opens before us. The eggs we found next to him intrigue me, they don’t correspond to the same era.

—Chance may have brought them together.

We drink another glass of vodka.

In the morning, when we wake up, we share the task of breakfast, each taking turns tackling it. I eat cereal, then down a black coffee before diving back into the cold.

Inside a crevasse, I pick carefully, this place fills with treasure, animals still whole or bones, which I sort and number according to location. Then, all together, we have fun like with a puzzle trying to reconstruct a skeleton, pieces are often missing, I swear to the image of a carter, I had to read the fish catechism, which Hugo quotes us within his book ‘Les Misérables’.

Foti, who has just celebrated his thirtieth birthday, trained as a doctor, he called us, he discovered a man and a woman still preserved by the cold. Their faces show suffering, but they have kept no visible trace of it. Rudimentary clothes made from skins and furs cover them, it is difficult to discern their ethnicity.

We return at four p.m., we have lunch, and we work on our discoveries. Today I devour a bowl of soup and some beef and potatoes. Each of us remains silent, because our finds pile up, each body, bone, or other concerns different eras, they could not have met. Rada, a thirty-year-old woman, a geographer, eliminates the hypothesis of a cemetery. And anyway, certain animals had disappeared when the man appeared. Igor, the head of the research, judges that this place must have represented an interest, a place to lie down or die. I admit that I like the idea of an elephant cemetery. Sofia asks about the cause of their death. A priori, nothing explains it. She confesses that she has spotted a virus, which she has named with the code name XP 35, it travels through time without incident, without mutating, it remains identical to itself through hundreds of thousands of years.

—Is he still alive? I questioned him.

—A priori no, he was caught in the ice, but he should be used to this universe; bacteria pollute the tiger’s skin. Either one or the other, they no longer exist today.

—Do they prove to be responsible for their deaths?

—I don’t know, it wouldn’t be impossible, but we are surrounded by harmless viruses and bacteria.

We return to our work. These discoveries open the way to a mysterious world, it is therefore terrifying.

Fifteen days later, Igor complained of stomach aches, which manifested themselves in the form of violent and untimely diarrhoea. They intervene at the wrong time, their inappropriate characters are disturbing. When he prepares a report, the Ministry of the Armed Forces and the Kremlin often request one, he is forced to interrupt his task to sit in the saddle. This fact disrupts his work and his mood. Unseemly, irreverent, inappropriate and impertinent, it forces him to repeat the same sentence several times. He would lose his Latin like a Roman priest.

Foti takes care of him, but he cannot relieve him. His potions and other medications cowardly abdicate in the face of this condition, they remain on their shelf, ashamed, copying the defeated soldier who returns from a distant campaign. He points at the food, perhaps the pork was cooked incorrectly. I dispute this accusation, it was I who prepared the last meal which incorporated it, I do not understand why we would not encounter such inconveniences if the fault lay with him. I know how to cook pork, God is my witness.

The discovery of an amphicyon intrigues me, a frozen bear dog, its appearance of a monster of two meters and fifty makes it impressive. The cold has seized him as he sleeps, he seems to be dreaming. He never dragged his gaiters into Siberia. I feel completely overwhelmed as if the sea had deposited me on the sand like an unfit body in its womb. What did he come here to do? My knowledge falters, I feel dizzy like a kid getting off a child’s merry-go-round.

In Sofia’s laboratory, I communicate to her my dismay at our discoveries. She admits to me that hers is the result of this virus. She defrosted one, it is still alive, it turns out to be very aggressive and lively. A question arises: is it dangerous?

I kiss her on the neck, she asks me about Oulia, I tell her that she is doing well by unbuttoning her pants, he falls to the ground, kneeling at her feet, I pull down her panties, I come to lick his treasure. We mate in the image of beasts, even prehistoric monsters appear civilised.

Then, I look at a bottle filled with a liquid, it contains the virus, I don’t see it, I despair. She laughed when she told me that Igor had slipped this tube between her buttocks. I knew that the most bizarre fantasies haunted him, I’m not surprised.

One evening when we had drunk too much, he showed me horrible videos on his tablet. The images seized me with fear, of women being decapitated by an executioner, of sharks munching on human beings, and other disgusting, sickening, nauseating sights, I lost myself in the qualifiers that depict my indignation. He confessed to me his masturbation in front of these abject scenes. I smiled and asked myself: how can a man experience sexual excitement at such a moment? Human beings despair me.

My penis, which is regaining strength, replaces the tube, she screams, I thrust in, I cum screaming inside her ass. After withdrawing, lying on the ground, I knead her breasts, she whispers to me that I am violent, but that she likes it.

After the bestial frenzy, she takes me to a room set up to preserve bodies, she recommends that I not touch them because of bacteria and unknown viruses. She reveals to me that Igor caressed that of the woman. I can’t take my eyes off the man’s penis even when it’s cool, it seems oversized. She whispers to me that she should scream when he puts it between her buttocks.

The animals show off their muscles, not a bit of fat disturbs their brutal strength, which is necessary to survive in a hostile land. They are all there, but at no time have they had the opportunity to cross paths. This impossible encounter leaves me feeling sick thinking about it.

A week later, Igor slipped into a coma, an army helicopter transporting him to one of their medical units.

In the evening over a glass of