Awakenings

The era of sentient machines and innovation to extend life is near, or perhaps, that world is already here. In this collection of stories, author Baltar Xinzo explores different venues for this future, its dangers, and unexpected consequences in the best tradition of scientific fiction but keeping a keen eye on his very human characters. A sentient robot used in construction has an epiphany about his former life as a human. Two men histories entwine in a circular dialogue of brutality and dead that keeps rewriting itself. A man awakens in a synthetic world divided by a white wall. A father and his son went to the job interview, where they would face a deal that would entangle their lives unexpectedly. All these are pieces of a puzzle describing a future that might start taking shape in your mind while you read this remarkable compilation.

Related Books

A Collection of Future Memories

The stories collected in this volume are about the coming to realization of our place as observers of reality, which sometimes contradicts our conventional ideas of who we are. We, the observers, are the ones who construct this illusion of the shared experience that we came to know as the world. Memories train our response and color our daily experience, our interaction with the world around us, reinforcing that illusion of a distinct personality. These stories challenge us to think about what would be of our sense of self if we had the technology to replicate and let evolve our mind in a different substrate, biological or artificial.

In “Once I Was Many,” a construction robot realizes that the echoes of many humans’ lives hunt its mind. Those false recollections are glimpses of many sentient lives, hinting that existence might be more than the successful execution of complex tasks. After all, individuality may be an attribution worth pursuing.

In “The White Wall,” a man wakes up in a strange world set by regularities, simple rules imposing on him a routine that he must obey to continue living. Was his previous self, the one he resists forgetting, just a persistent memory of a dream? If so, is this world the only reality that ever was?

The exploration of what might be reality takes a different turn in “Opus Eleven,” where two individuals meet recursively at the verge of grasping the hidden truth about their lives, a moment that seems almost at reach but never quite so. Who is the dreamer, and who is the passenger of a dream? Is reality just a dream? Perhaps, this is a mind cage in which only one is the victim and the other, the torturer.

Finally, but not at least, in “Intangible,” a boy accompanies his father to a job interview that would change their lives forever. A revolutionary technology is on the verge of disrupting society, and ruthless people offered them a deal that would put them in the improbable annals of history. However, it is unlikely they would ever see the benefits of their sacrifice.

Each story has many layers of complexity. On the surface, these stories explore the idea of extracting our mind from its biological constraints, keeping the schema of our psyche intact while preserving part of or all our memories, and imprint them into a more malleable media. However, under the surface, the stories explore the grief, loss, resentment, bliss, and compassion of their very human characters facing the awakening to a truth not always welcomed or sought.

I hope you enjoy reading these stories as much as I enjoyed writing them. If some of them resonate with you and leave a permanent memory, this collection has met its goal.

Baltar Xinzo, December 2023