ChloroPhilia

Release date: 1/14/2025
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Would you sacrifice your humanity to save the world?

Kirmen is different from the other inhabitants of the Cloister, whose walls protect them all from the endless storm ravaging Earth. As a result of the Doctor’s cruel experiments, his physical form is gradually evolving into something better fit for survival in the world outside.

Kirmen worries about becoming a pariah, an outcast among the other denizens of the domes. But his desire for affection and acceptance, and his humanity, fade a way as the Doctor’s treatments progress. What will happen when the metamorphosis is complete ? What will be left of Kirmen and the group of survivors that he knows and loves?

In English for the first time (translated by Sue Burke), ChloroPhilia, an Ignotus Award - nominated novella by Cristina Jurado, is a strange coming–of-age story while addressing life after an environmental disaster, collective madness, and sacrifices made for the greater good.

About the Author

Cristina Jurado is a bilingual author, editor and translator of speculative fiction. In 2019 she became the first female writer to win the Best Novel Ignotus Award (Spain’s Hugo Award) for Bionautas. Her recent fiction includes the novella CloroFilia< and her collection of stories Alphaland. Since 2015 she has ran the Spanish multi-awarded magazine SuperSonic. In 2020 she was distinguished as Europe’s Best SF Promoter Award and started to work as a contributor for the bilingual quarterly Constelación magazine.

About the Translator

Sue Burke is the author of the science fiction novel Dual Memory. She also wrote Semosis, Interference, and Immunity Index, along with short stories, poems, and essays. as a result of living overseas, she's also a literary translator, working from Spanish into English for such writers as Angélica Gorodischer, Sofia Rhei, and Cristina Jurado. She's currently enjoying life in Chicago.

Excerpt

He opened his new eyes for the first time. The intense light made him close them immediately. The pain reminded him that now he needed to wear tinted glasses.

“My boy, you’re even uglier than before! I don’t think you’re going to be asked to dance anymore … or maybe you would. I mean, who knows what the hell girls like these days. You like girls, right?”

The patient tried to sigh but couldn’t through his overlapping lips. He raised his hand to separate them and open his mouth, something he’d have to learn to do by moving the new muscles on both sides of his jaw.

“Damn that wind!” the voice said. “It keeps making me nervous every time it blows that hard.”

He found it hard to answer. “I don’t hear anything, Doctor.” At least his voice still sounded like it used to.

“One of these days, the membranes will fly away, Kirmen. Remember what I’m saying. The wind will carry us wherever it wants. I only hope it’ll be someplace silent.”

The teenager rolled over in his hospital bed. “Have I been asleep for a long time?”

“Several sandstorms.”

“Where are my parents?”

“I suppose they’re getting everybody’s best wishes. I’ve never seen a couple that can fake being together that well. I almost believed that they love each other. Who knows? Maybe this mission really does bring them together. I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ve seen stranger things.”

“When can I go home?”

“You need to let your body get accustomed to this configuration. Close your mouth, boy, I can see all the way to the roots of your teeth!”

“If I close it, I can’t talk.”

“Why do you want to talk? There’s no one here you can give a speech to. Your parents are busy managing your newfound popularity. They won’t be back for a while. They’ll bring glasses so you can use your eyes. Until then, you’ll have to put up with me.”

The young man closed his lips and waited patiently. Fortunately, the old man stayed quiet until the ward nurse brought the glasses, then left without a word.

“Do you want me to put them on you or can you do it yourself?” he heard.

“I helped design them. I think I know what to do.”

The first thing he could make out when he opened his eyes was the old man, wearing a sterile suit, sitting on a chair next to his bed, scratching the inside of his thigh with evident pleasure. His back grew more bent year after year, and his gray mustache contrasted with his entirely white hair, which had thinned at the crown. The long fingers of the hand that wasn’t entertaining itself scratching his groin were drumming on his thigh, playing an imaginary piano. His face, in earlier times, was charming, but now displayed only wrinkles and a constantly disgusted look.

The doctor was pain: blood and skin extractions, inoculations, medications that gave him diarrhea, nausea that left him prostrate for days. Kirmen hated him with all his strength but feared him even more, just like he feared the whirlwinds outside.

Above him, the transparent ceiling; the curtains that isolated his room from the rest of the clinic let the dome be seen here. Outside, the sandstorm grew worse, the wind gusted more violently, and the structure vibrated as if it were about to take flight. The sand took days to settle after the storm, and the atmosphere outside had been the same color as sweaty gauze for months.

Outside was hell.

To Kirmen, the word hell seemed empty. If the world was quickened dust, those millions of particles flew like a living organism engulfing the planet, consuming everything solid they met like a vampire, pulverizing them, making itself bigger and more powerful. The monstrous dust devils had ridden the wind forever, and only people the doctor’s age had known a time without storms, a time with clear skies, waves in the sea, plants growing in the plains, forests, fields, and sand only at beaches and deserts. If safety existed solely in the habitats under a half-dozen connected domes, isolated from the exterior, then that was the world and the rest didn’t exist.

Hell was outside for those born before the domes were sealed shut, the people who entered the Cloister old enough to remember a different world they could compare with the present. Those ancient people talked about fantastical things—water extending a million times farther and deeper than the artificial lakes and tanks of the domes, so enormous that one shore couldn’t be seen from the other shore, and the water was filled with all kinds of life. They said the seas contained extraordinary creatures, some as gigantic as the electric generators, capable of destroying a boat dozens of meters long with a slap of their tails. Others had elastic globe-shaped bodies sprouting velvety, sinuous tentacles with suction cups that could asphyxiate an adult with their embrace. Enormous communities of fish moved like a single organism, imitating the furious dust.

They also said that before the storms, forests had grown a thousand times bigger than the wetlands in the domes, kilometer after kilometer of towering trees had loomed over the land, where air plants hung from branches and four-legged animals climbed and moved through the green maze. Stories spread describing settlements built near rivers of crystalline water, where cabins were higher than the Cloister domes, made of concrete like the tunnels, now deserted for years, that had connected to the exterior. Those cabins could hold thousands of people in living spaces one on top of the other with vehicles moving vertically between them.

Some people even described powerful machines to look beyond the skies and other machines with generators that could lift entire crews into the air to visit what was on the other side of the atmosphere, whatever was there.

Most people considered all that as the stuff of legend, realities so far from their own that they had to be the fruits of imagination or age-distorted memories. And, despite the pictures and moving images, despite the books and their illustrations in vivid color, despite the sounds heard on recordings, to Kirmen it seemed impossible that the elderly were referring to the same planet where he lived.

Because he, like everyone else born beneath the domes, knew only the Cloister. Their world was made of interconnected habitats with controlled humidity and temperature, in which strict rules dictated social interactions. Zero waste, sustainability, communal work, and life preservation. Anyone deviating from those principles was corrected.

The boy lowered his eyes as he lifted his hands to see if they were as he remembered, the color and texture of oak trees. And they were, dark brown, covered by rough cork-like skin with lengthwise grooves. His arms, unusually long, hung below his knees and seemed more like branches. Long arms and exceptional height made him look like a young tree.

His hair had disappeared in his infancy during the first stages of treatment, so he usually covered his bald head with a baseball cap. He had a couple of them that had belonged to his father, gifts back when they remained in regular contact. The one on the bedside table to his left had once been dark blue, and the letters NY were still legible. He realized he had never asked his father what those letters meant or how he’d gotten the hat, but it was also true they rarely spoke much now.

Kirmen couldn’t recall ever seeing his hands or skin looking any other way, brownish and tough. He’d been told that from a distance, he seemed covered with tattoos, and up close, the tattoos were irregular creases remarkably and strangely resembling the grooves on tree trunks.

He had seen pictures from his infancy when he looked like a baby with smooth tan skin. When other boys’ faces filled with pimples from hormones, Kirmen grew little knots along his arms, hands, and upper thighs. At times, odd bulges began to develop, but the doctor carefully removed them.

Those lumps were examined to make sure they weren’t cancerous cysts. They often appeared on his body, as he was told, because of his treatments. Still, despite his deformed, strange appearance, he grew like a weed, ironically. He was never ill or had the breathing problems that affected many people in the Cloister, and he was immune to the most common illnesses. His dark skin resisted cuts and bruises, and it healed fast. He stoically withstood the pain as therapy caused changes in his body, along with operations and invasive treatments, but he never fell ill from bacteria or viruses, and his postoperative recovery set records.

The doctor kept the cysts in an aqueous solution and even gave them names: Zoltan, Sync, Manna … Kirmen found it particularly perverse that they were in clear plastic containers clearly labeled as his cysts. One was especially repugnant. It was in the shape of a penis with swollen glands and its label read: “Pixie: cyst #17 from Kirmen.” It had grown on his left arm and, after removing and studying it, the doctor treated it as if it were a sentient creature.

“Look at who’s here!” he would say, half-smiling, every time Kirmen came into his office. “I told you that the keratinization of his jaw was getting faster, Pixie … Pixie, you should see these cells!”

Pixie stood in the center of the doctor’s desk so that every patient in his office had it directly before their eyes.

The boy didn’t understand why that man, after spending years treating him and following his case attentively since he’d been an infant, humiliated him that way. He didn’t understand the little shop of horrors his office had become or his obsession with talking to the phallic cyst as if it could listen. He had the impression that he was merely a scientific possession, a decades-long experiment, something that the doctor found invaluable and, at the same time, despised profoundly, that horrified him just as much as it interested him.