Excerpt:
##The Marhuanta Strain
The wave of suicides that swept through the Marhuanta neighborhood in Ciudad Zamora in the year 20XX stands as one of the country's most fiercely debated social paradigms, stemming from the alleged genetic experimentation on fungal spores carried out by the Puerto Bello Technological Institute which affected the area’s inhabitants. The foundational extermination report has finally been made public, meaning the reconstruction of events will now reveal the truth about the victims of this terrible scientific project, a scheme that sought to save the world but ultimately destroyed dozens of families and menaced an entire city with the proliferation of an unknown biological agent.
It is believed that Mirvida Flores, 26, was the first recorded victim of this deadly epidemic: the young woman suffered from chronic depression—according to the report penned by the psychiatrist who treated her at the Bolivarian Asylum—which prevented her from continuing her daily activities and relating to her family, leading to months of isolation and physical neglect. Her parents blamed this despondency on her dismissal from her position at SENIAT for errors during a tax audit, a job she held for two years after graduating from university. This sparked murmurs among neighbors, who whispered that she had secured the position by becoming the lover of one of the institute’s auditors, which was also the reason for her firing. Mirvida suffered immensely from her inability to find employment amid the economic crisis, feeling inadequate to contribute to household expenses, and eventually stopped eating because she felt she "didn't deserve the food." Until the morning of April 14, 20XX, when she was found dead by her elderly mother, wrapped in the bloodied blankets she had curled up in as a child, having slit her wrists with a razor blade and bled out during a crisis in the pre-dawn hours.
The case of Rocío Guerrero, 14, was far more tragic, as she was a girl who became pregnant and then lost the baby to a spontaneous abortion, brought on by profound depression due to the rejection of her parents and the community’s repudiation. The teenager never recovered from this tragedy and decided to end her life by shooting herself in the head with her police-officer father's nine-millimeter Zamorana, which he had left on the table one day after coming home drunk. The neighborhood wept dark tears as the rainy season eroded the sand of the cobbled streets and the cracks of the stale pavement, and sorrow drew near with the crepuscular advent of doom.
Doña Calvario was found dead in her shack with its metal walls. It was never known exactly when she died, as neighbors only realized she was gone because of the foul smell emanating from her dilapidated home, which had been falling to pieces since Don Andrés became ill with the virus, and the doctors finished him off at the hospital. The elderly couple's two children had gone to the mine in search of money and never returned to the neighborhood, leading neighbors to suppose they had either been swallowed by the landslides in the unstable exploitation area, succumbed to deadly waterborne diseases, or become victims of the anarchic system of criminal gangs that ruled those lawless lands.
The old couple never spoke of their sadness to the neighbors, they simply carried on with their lives as best they could: Don Andrés tried to work his quarter-hectare of land, despite his respiratory ailments and weak hands that prevented him from continuing to repair shoes; and Doña Calvario continued her work as a seamstress, hemming trousers and taking in shirts with her sewing machine for modest prices "because the economy was bad for everyone, and we can’t take advantage of our neighbors." If they ever needed medication for their high blood pressure or seasonal colds, they never let anyone know. They had always had each other, having fled together and committed themselves in the burgeoning Ciudad Zamora. In her last days, Doña Calvario confessed to the neighbors who brought her morning coffee that her parents had been killed in a traffic accident when she was five, because her mother was going to have an abortion in Puerto Bello; and she was raised as a servant in the house of an abusive aunt who refused to let her study, until she met Don Andrés, who had been mistreated and exploited by his alcoholic father since the latter stole him from his mother on Margarita Island, where he believed he had an older brother looking for him.
They both fled under the promise of getting ahead together, and they built a small shack with humble zinc walls that creaked when the wind blew from the Báez Hill, and leaked water when the storm season lashed the neighborhood. They lived their idyll among the sugarcane fields, despite rejected applications from the Guayana Metallurgical Corporation and the food precariousness that was momentarily relieved by the planting of yuca, yam, and plantain. Their nest saw its young ones flourish thanks to day-labor and shoemaker jobs, and Doña Calvario's mending; and the children played in the thickets and walked along the Orinoco Promenade at sunset as the sun melted into the river with auriferous gleams. And they felt their love, and not even the abandonment of their children, or the years of solitude watching soap operas together, or the recurrent hunger from scarcity, or the sudden old age that arrived like the sea, or the hardships of work and the vanishing of their savings due to inflation, could break the vow Don Andrés made to his beloved. Until the virus came, and the world stopped.
In the early morning of February 21, 20XX, Doña Calvario desperately called out to Leonel, the owner of El Progreso Estate, the only person in the neighborhood who owned a truck during that economic crisis, begging him to take Don Andrés to Rómulo Marcano Hospital because he had contracted the virus and couldn't breathe. They immediately left for the hospital complex, where the elderly man, severely weakened by diabetes and malnutrition, did not survive the intubation procedure and died of respiratory arrest. Doña Calvario was not allowed to enter to say goodbye because she was elderly and potentially contaminated. No funeral service or burial was held. She wasn't even told that Don Andrés had been calling for her in his final moments, asking her to take his hand while the oxygen mask distorted his words. The pandemic did not permit wakes for the dead, and she did not have the means to pay for a dignified burial, so the elderly man was cremated alongside dozens of the deceased in a mass grave by government decree.
Doña Calvario returned to her dilapidated house, but it was no longer a home, and little by little, this structure began to fall apart because Don Andrés was no longer there to repair the leaks in the roof, remove the rust from the walls, and fill the holes in the polished cement floor. The plantain trees were invaded by the excessive growth of the thickets, and the deceased's tools began to disappear as the property seemed abandoned. The old woman looked like a wasted wraith, with white hair toasted by the sun and varicose legs barely covered by the tattered gowns her exhausted eyes were unable to mend. Some said she was blind in one eye and could barely see out of the other; and that she didn't sleep, spending all night repeating the telenovelas on free cable that she once enjoyed with Don Andrés and the children. When she stopped leaving her shack of rotten sheets, no one bothered to check if she was still alive. The transit street of the neighborhood simply began to stink, and the neighbors called the authorities to enter.
The sight of that uninhabitable dwelling moved Officer Alonzo Zaragoza, who ruled the death of the elderly Doña María Calvario by starvation as a case of social negligence. The system had failed. When did we go wrong? In her last months of life, the poor woman barely ate the tubers her late husband had dug up, unable to even walk due to painful ulcers on her feet, and slowly dying on a yellowed bed, too weak to get up to call for help or use the bathroom. The humidity had eaten away the bed frame, so it was level with the ground, and the leaks were rotting the mattress, which gave off a pungent odor. The wood-burning stove was never loaded again, and in the pantry, they only found spoiled oil and strangely shredded empty polyurethane boxes covered in spores resembling small lavender flowers. The body barely weighed twenty-seven kilos, and she was so malnourished and dehydrated that her skin began to crack, resembling a skeleton covered in greenish skin and pale hair.
The signs were clear, and the autopsy confirmed it: assisted suicide by dehydration, repeating the patterns of isolation and chronic depression that would recur for years in the Marhuanta neighborhood. When the body was removed, the small house soon crumbled, leaving only a bone-yard devoured by the bush. Where a marriage once lived, a sugarcane field remains, where the wind blows with a lament that anticipates a name.
The men who killed themselves in the following months exhibited symptoms of apathy, isolation, and disinterest. Some of them attempted treatment at the Bolivarian Psychiatric Hospital, but neither therapy—provided as social work by interns—nor subsidized medication could counteract this chronic malaise afflicting their minds. One of them declared, "I just don't know why I can't be a happy person." Perhaps the predominantly machista Venezuelan culture pushed him beyond the materialistic demands of the modern world, and poorly executed socialism destroyed equal opportunities, causing men who did not measure up in socio-economic performance to feel inadequate as human beings. The economic crisis multiplied a reverberating poverty, and young men who envisioned a ludicrous future subject to labor exploitation, food precarity, and the disillusionment of women—what could possibly breathe life into a man's heart? Dreams shattered in an abyss of silent needs. "A man is strong. And if he isn't, he has to pretend to be strong. Because being delicate and expecting flowers is for those whom men must protect. That doesn't mean we are invincible."
It was believed that only women were prone to this curse, which caused a stir among the neighborhood's superstitious folk, until the suicide of Álvaro García caused unprecedented shock. He was a hardworking, cheerful boy who often socialized with other young people in the thicket-ridden dumpsite, but one morning he was found hanged in his kitchen. And like a torrent of volcanic foam, the young people began to take their own lives, isolated and sad, suffocated by the world and the pressure of media imposing foreign wills on them, in a hope-crushing machine. Perhaps the suicide notes might shed dim light on their existential struggles: "I love you, Mom, but I'm falling apart." "I was fine, sometimes it gets tough, but I keep going. Since you left yesterday, there's a dampness and coldness in the music, it's cold without you, but I try to live..." "I just want to save myself from this sadness." "I know I haven't been a good friend to you all... I'm a psychotic who purposefully distances himself from others, and I have my reasons for being alone; but I love you, in my own way, I do." "I don't know why everything turns to ashes when I'm most hopeful." The community believed that the sorcerers of the Báez—Santeros of the Yoruba religion—had released a curse upon the neighboring district, and they began a campaign of discrimination and verbal abuse that degenerated into conflicts and threats.
Complaints flooded the prosecutor's office when the parents tried to erect a Christian altar in the garbage dump of the thickets: a mountain of plastic and glass in the heart of a barren expanse where the young men had gathered in the past to pretend to be adults, drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes, unaware that none of them would reach majority. The community reported on radio and social media that the mountains of waste were covered in fungous growths, where phosphorescent fungi of a ghastly indigo flourished, growing on plastic debris—a supposed impossibility for known biology. These reports of possible contaminants affecting people on a cognitive and psychological level echoed in the municipal mayor's office and the state governorship, to the extent that the cover-up during the extermination prevented the full facts from being known until many years later. In the weeks following the health alert, military trucks with unknown logos and squads in yellow biohazard suits and flamethrowers cordoned off the area with tapes and biological hazard barriers, and the unpaved streets filled with an uncharacteristic noise from armored trucks and tractors carrying pesticide barrels. The neighborhood stank of intolerable fumigation gases, and a great fire finally devoured the remains of what was unearthed from the subsoil and transported in metal containers to a secret site beyond the Perimeter Highway.
The suicides stopped, and the inhabitants were periodically examined in three-month cycles by specialized doctors, until two years later, they simply ceased to appear, and the case faded from media memory. Today, the inhabitants of the Marhuanta neighborhood are unaware of the horror that lived beneath their feet, like a throbbing miscarriage, which delved deep into their minds to corrode microplastics, causing fatal hormonal imbalances. Citizen unconsciousness will never accept the verdict of the foundational extermination report, and they will continue to claim that a profane curse was invoked in the thickets—"lights that flicker at night, where the witches make their nests"—descending from the Báez Pinnacle to roam among the inhabitants and snatch away their happiness. They are uneducated and superstitious people, incapable of understanding the cycle of spores and the genetic experiments that sought to revolutionize our Plastic Age; it is preferable that they believe in goblins and ghosts, it is easier to assimilate.
According to the extermination report published in 20XX on the foundational archive server available to the public, a scientific group from the Puerto Bello Technological Institute modified a sample of Pestalotiopsis Microspora—a fungus from the Amazon rainforest capable of degrading polyurethane and decomposing synthetic plastic polymers without the need for oxygen—with genes from Pleurotus Ostreatus—capable of degrading polyethylene terephthalate, a common plastic in bottles and food containers—and the Giant Oregon Fungus, Armillaria ostoyae: a superorganism that constitutes an underground network of mycelia (the vegetative part of the fungus), forming a single gigantic being, approximately one thousand hectares in size, in the Malheur National Forest in Oregon, with a biomass of thirty-five thousand tons. This genetic experiment sought an ecological alternative to combat world pollution.
In 1907, Leo Baekeland invented the first synthetic plastic: a thermosetting, insulating, and heat-resistant substance that revolutionized technology, Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC). And since then, its variants—Polyethylene and Polystyrene—have become essential materials for the manufacturing industry. Most are derived from hydrocarbons, obtained mainly from crude oil through extraction and refining.
Since the 1960s, when the first plastic debris was observed in the oceans and society began to be more aware of environmental problems, the desperate search began for a way to eliminate this silent enemy that takes centuries to disappear. But nature, once again, worked a miracle in the Amazonian depths: fungi capable of feeding on plastic and degrading it, using it as their sole source of carbon and energy.
This finding opened a window of hope: the scientists at the Puerto Bello Technological Institute attempted to replicate and scale its metabolism through genetic manipulation with giant fungi to produce unique hybrids. Fungi, being eukaryotic organisms that lack chlorophyll, cannot perform photosynthesis; they obtain nutrients through absorption, decomposing organic matter in an external digestion of their food by secreting enzymes to absorb the resulting dissolved molecules. There are saprophytic fungi that feed on dead organic matter like leaf litter, manure, or wood; parasitic ones that feed on other organisms, both plants and animals; and fungi that establish symbiotic relationships with other beings. They are the primary decomposers of dead matter in many ecosystems and play an indispensable ecological role in biogeochemical cycles.
The scientists, led by Dr. [CENSORED], conducted controlled laboratory tests with different specimens and wanted to study the hybrid organism in an urban environment to observe ecosystem variables for a future case study on municipal dumps, planting a fungal spore in the mountains of plastic and solid waste of the Marhuanta neighborhood. The specimen developed rapidly...
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