It was as if time had never been allowed inside the room. There were no windows and no pictures on the walls. Cream wallpaper stretched up to the ceiling, then broke into the circular pattern of shadows projected by the hanging lamps. The synthetic fur covering the floor purred along with the movements of the President’s feet over it. The President looked around the room, then towards a point right a couple of metres behind the screen of his computer. The muscles in his shoulder relaxed, lowering his elbows just below the edge of his desk. He wished that his were still the times of ticking clocks, counting the cascade of minutes as mothers repeat their lullabies night after night. But sound also seemed to have sunk silently into the rug, in the pores of the wallpaper. It had to look like his decision had been taken through doubt and suffering, and he needed the proof of passing hours.
The President run his hand along the balding top of his hair. The foundation was wearing off, and the edge of a scale rubbed against the tip of his fingers. He kept playing with it for a while, running it under his nails, one after the other, as deep as it could go without hurting his flesh. Social etiquette was an unnecessary concern in the depth of his underground bunker. There was no need to conceal his nature any more than a man would silence his bowels in the privacy of his bathroom. After all, it was only a few years earlier that his mutant nature had won him millions of votes during the elections. He had to tame it down to the minimum necessary visual proof, so to appear as reassuring to pure-breed humans as he was to the mutant underclasses. Hence the foundation, the human mannerisms and the elocution classes to help him control the intonation of his speeches – only dropping the mutant accent when required.
It was just a matter of killing time. Not far off from what he was about to do, once he would have executed the remaining time needed for proof of torment of his soul. Killing the time of the cities, in which he was brought up, killing the time of the farm where he was born. Another time would reign, after the vanishing of that night. The fact that he had never experienced it himself was no good reason for him not to desire it to descend as widely as possible over the globe. By giving his order to his attendants, he would have given birth to a new epoch. Like all good parents, he was only marginally saddened by the fact that he would not have been included into it.
A timid knocking on the door. The President pretended not to have heard it, as he looked at his reflection on the dark screen of his computer, making sure that his eyes were bloodshot, and his hair aptly dishevelled.
“Yes?” asked the President, with a grave voice.
When the door opened, the attendant saw the silhouette of the President’s back and shoulders emerging form the vast surface of his black desk, like the sculpture of a bust from its pedestal.
“Mr President, I’m sorry to disturb you.”
“Go on,” replied the President, without turning.
“Mr President, the generals asked me to enquire whether a decision has been reached about the missiles. There are forty-nine orbiting stations ready to launch at your order.” The attendant hesitated a moment. “Or... to withdraw to the upper atmosphere, if you wish to call the operation off.”
The President silently counted until seven, then sighed.
“Indeed, I have reached a decision.”
The attendant clenched his fists.
“But I need more time, before I can communicate it to the generals. This night will change the future of this planet. Tell the generals not to be in a hurry. Tell them to go outside of their meeting rooms and look at the world outside. It might be the last time they will have a chance to see it as they’ve always known it.”
The attendant cleared his throat, but the “Yessir” he uttered before leaving the room still had a choked note to it.
The President looked at the clock in the top left corner of his computer screen. Ten more minutes, then it would have been time. He loosened his tie and stretched back on his chair. It had taken him years to get to that position. Years of treachery, deceit and humiliation. There was something beautiful, he though, something almost heroic in the speed with which he was about to lose everything. True, there was still a remote chance that history books in the future – if indeed there was going to be a future – might have passed the memory of his decision as the pinnacle of fearless patriotism. It was not a slim chance, if one considered the stupidity of official history, yet it wasn’t even worth thinking about. The future the President was concerned about, on that lonely night in his underground bunker, was not that of human history. Once he would have given his order to the generals, and the generals would have transmitted it in numeric sequences to the forty-nine nuclear satellites orbiting around the globe, the future of humanity would have become a minoritarian affair. Two nukes per satellite, travelling faster than sound speed through the atmosphere, lighting ninety-eight simultaneous explosions on the other side of the planet, calling for the immediate response of as many explosions on this side of the Earth. For a few seconds, he thought, this lump of space rock will become a new Sun. Once the nuclear dawn would end, days would no longer be counted on our same old clocks.
Of course, the current war was just an excuse. A pretext that the President had skilfully crafted over months of propaganda, until the soul of his people and of his generals started to glow with bloodthirsty fury. It had been a long, exhausting job, and more then once the President had experienced the bite of doubts and anxiety. Was his ambition worth the extermination of billions of creatures? Was it worth his own likely extermination, at the hands of the angry mob, once the consequences of his decision would have become apparent to all? Sitting on the arm chair of a TV studio, or in the changing room of a theatre, after one of the countless political speeches he had given in the last few months, the President often had to close his eyes and look back at the mysterious force that was leading him along his masterwork of suicidal deceit. It was not an easy task, like looking into the depth of the darkest galaxy. All that emerged were flashing images, memories, fragments of thought. He remembered the persecutions him and his family had been subjected to, at the hand of pure-breed humans. He recalled the violent cult of identity that years before lead so many of his fellow mutants to begin the ten-years war for mutant supremacy – and the bloodbaths that followed, until the final truce.
When he was young, he had studied philosophy. He could still recall many of the debates about mutant and human nature that used to fire up the lecture halls, the rants about purity, the roller-coasters of dialectics. Most of all, he could remember the obsession about the Fathers: human fathers, mutant fathers, the worshipping of the mystery of the origin.
Even back then, when his future career as a President hardly existed even in the realm of possibilities, he could feel that sense of nausea that would never abandon him. It was during the nauseous years of his formation, that he had sworn to himself, if ever was possible, to break away from the loop that had bound his kind and that of the humans to a state of endless war. That night, in the clinical atmosphere of cream-white wallpaper, the time had finally come to keep faith to his oath. The ghost of the Fathers could finally be killed. In its place, a new Father would give light to a new world, inhabited by new creatures, neither pure nor mutant. How could anything be ever again defined as mutant or pure, once the entire world would be enveloped in life-changing radiations? What name, what origin could be ascribed to the new creatures that will populate the new nuclear world? He alone would have been the Father – a Father nobody would ever be able to recall, once the last human and the last mutant would perish under the heavy breezes of uranium winds.
The President looked back at the clock. The ten minutes had long passed. He could hear the muffled echo of his assistant’s anxious pacing outside the door. He clicked a button on his computer and the door opened with a hiss.
The attendant stood still, at the threshold of the room. The President looked at his impeccable suit, his geometric haircut, the thick layer of foundation on his scaly skin. He was one of the mutants that he had inserted within state administration after winning the elections. The President looked into his purple eyes, so similar to the eyes of his late mother. To the fear that he saw spreading over his attendant’s made-up face, he could only reply with a faint smile, the intimate correspondence between two dying bodies.
“Give the order,” said the President.
The attendant didn’t move.
“The...” he mumbled, as if trying to delay the inevitable.
“Yes, the order to fire. Tell the generals.”
“I will tell the generals,” repeated the attendant, motionless.
“Did you forget anything?” asked the President, with a smile.
“Mr President, yessir,” replied the attendant, straightening his posture. He gave the military salute to the President, then turned his back with mechanic resoluteness, like the marionette of a soldier.
The President clicked again and the door shut. He stood up, massaging his achey knees and shoulders. He remained still for a few seconds, as if waiting for a sense of relief to pervade him, or the consciousness of having done the right thing. But it was as if time had never been allowed inside the room, and the events that were taking place outside, between the atmosphere and the graveyards of the planet, hadn’t yet managed to reach the depths of his bunker. Standing between the end of history and the birth of a new radioactive world, the President felt what his fellow citizens were about to experience in a few days, once the radiations would have sealed off entire areas of the globe. Looking straight into the future, the President could see the monstrous child of his sacrifice, the beautifully glowing land of the future. Stepping towards the door, towards the end of his career and of his life, it was like a good father that he felt only a light shooting of pain, as he realised that he would have never been allowed in it.
