Valerio Sirna
Rome, Torri dell’Acqua
June 17, 2182
Today, the light gives the city a crystalline and limpid appearance. The transparent air, carried by a light westerly breeze, grazes the buildings, trees, people’s hair, and the distant promontories. The balcony of this house overlooks the islands and the floating neighborhoods to the south of the archipelago. Directly in front of me, a few glimmers away, the ruins of the old fascist buildings of EUR, covered in lush mangroves and populated by crabs, mullets, and ibises, emerge from the stagnant waters of the swampy municipalities. “Rome is not eternal, and perhaps it doesn’t even exist,” it was said during the years of the Revolutions, after the floods that submerged entire neighborhoods, leaving only a handful of dry lands behind.
In this era with many names, some still remember what this region must have looked like in distant ages, after massive geological upheavals, when the city’s perimeter had yet to be etched into the blood-soaked earth. Our ancestors, who before the Great Darkness still had easy access to the technologies of knowledge and ancient memories, handed down the story of a primordial landscape where a vast gulf stretched out, from which numerous volcanic systems gradually emerged, both to the north and south. The craters began to erupt, and streams of incandescent lava collided and overlapped with showers of ash and debris, with telluric impacts; the mineral matter forced its way against the density of the waters. Then the sea began to recede, leaving behind islands and rocky massifs, eroded and carved by the currents, which dug ravines, precipices, valleys, pits, and watercourses, shaping the morphology of this city that, in part, can still be glimpsed from here, where I stand.
Before receding further and settling along the coastline to which the inhabitants of these territories would adapt for centuries, during that intermediate phase that lasted millions of years, life must have taken on amphibious biological traits similar to those being experienced by our small aquatic Xhejn. I watched her swim today. She spends more and more time in the water. She is five years old and already so well-adapted to the marine environment that getting her to sleep indoors is a struggle. It’s as if, in the sea, she transforms into an adult individual of another species, perfectly at home. I’m deeply impressed. After all, a mix of premonitions and instincts, combined with the excellent results we were achieving in our research, persuaded me, my daughter—who wished to host an embryo—and the other members of the Committee that a connection with the genome of a mysticete would be successful. However, we did not expect such a high percentage of species-shifting in the symbiont so early. Her increasingly bluish skin tone, silvery hair, and very dark eyes make her enchanting. It will be a pleasure to continue accompanying her transformations, her growth, and her choices during the summer and the seasons to come. I never thought that a mourning practice could be so joyous and vital.
Finally, when the negotiations between land and sea reached an agreement, they left behind, as residue, stable conditions favorable to human community life: small settlements, perched on the hills, formed around a Forum reclaimed from the marshy waters, which for some centuries would be the center of power and dominion over vast territories.
Now that the city has largely returned to being submerged, this resemblance to its ancestral landscape unsettles and surprises me. Like that network of small villages, our network of municipalities and neighborhoods has adapted to life atop the summits and crests of those same volcanic formations or on floating structures surrounded by salty lakes, deep marine canals, and wetlands.
Now that the city has returned to being largely flooded, this resemblance to its ancestral landscape disturbs and surprises me. Like that network of small villages, our web of municipalities and neighborhoods has adapted to life on the peaks and ridges of those same volcanic formations, or on floating structures surrounded by salt lakes, submerged marine channels, and marshes.
What, then, have we accomplished all these years? Have we retraced the steps of a geohistory ready to repeat itself in cycles and seasons? Have we been swept into a vortex of global anacyclosis, provoked by shifting territories? I know these are not useful questions. The issue lies elsewhere: what we have built is no longer enough; it must change and be reimagined. Times are changing, and dark ideologies that we thought we had sufficiently deconstructed and weakened are reemerging with force. It seemed impossible that it could happen. Fighting on every latitude, we dismantled the last legacies of nation-states from the ground up—zombies that tried to remain standing despite the great cosmic changes we were undergoing, after all the losses and centuries of oppression they caused.
We devoted our lives to reinventing and reworking systems of self-governance and civic economy, to diplomacy, art, ecosensuality, the proliferation of genders and kinships, and complicity with companion species, whether alive or extinct. We dedicated ourselves to rituals, reparations, building shelters, and listening to the genius loci. We rebuilt knowledge and relationships, as well as homes. We were supported by memories of many past experiences, in which human and extra-human assemblages collaborated in inventing new practices of resistance. Equalized incomes, universal education, a productivity that produces no waste, proportionate to the needs of communities and the availability of resources, an advanced, license-free science that takes on civic rather than economic demands—and a birthrate that, for some years now, has been slightly rising, with fewer of the newborns afflicted by serious, undiagnosable pathologies during gestation.
We carved out a decent prosperity on the ruins of a failed system. The first years were hard; there was nothing left, and we had to start over from scratch. Conflicts and violence never disappeared, of course, but they seemed muted, less pressing and urgent. We participated in and were agents of a grand collective detoxification. Rome, in those years, was an extraordinary applied laboratory, for those who experienced it firsthand and for those who received its modulations. It was networked with distant and nearby experiences, collecting and disseminating new concepts and desires that proliferated like spores. Those were years full of enthusiasm. Yes, it really happened, and I wish we would remember it.
Now we must deal with the PPU. Unbelievable. A grotesque name, almost a parody: the Patriarchal Human Party. At times, we struggle to believe that anyone would want to reclaim these words. The issue might be reduced to a bad joke if it weren’t for the PPU increasingly embodying those colonial myths of masculinity and purity resurrected from a past we never thought could be rehabilitated today.
And so, for a few weeks now, we’ve found ourselves in assembly with a handful of bullies passionate about provocations, poisoning discussions, and seemingly animated only by a destructive impulse. Clearly, they grew up among us, but we didn’t notice. It’s a political failure on our part, but we cannot yet assess its true scale. It’s possible those bad ideas won’t find effective and lasting operationality if we work well.
Today, a proposal will be discussed that they managed to get to the Neighborhood Council in a short time: the introduction of an urban surveillance force, the so-called “Guardian Angels,” a patrol of armed citizens wielding vaporwave F24s, meant to prevent instances of “harmful intimacy” between human communities and other animal species. They’ve reintroduced words like “control” or “invasion,” whose meanings we had barely remembered. I don’t think they’ll manage to get it to a vote, but in any case, we won’t give them any rest.
Thick smoke in the kitchen. I burned lunch!
Rome, Water Towers
April 24, 2200
What I’ve transcribed here are the final pages of Tana Tsìli’s diary—my grandmother—written, according to both the date indicated in the text and the timestamp of the last save, two days before she was murdered. I discovered this document this morning in the submerged and abandoned archives of the Southern Intermunicipal Fund, which was flooded during a water terrorism operation carried out by the PPU in November ’85, an operation known as Flame #6. It was practically a witch hunt, beginning two years earlier with the ambush that killed Tana, and by then already counting five other unredressed operations, including another high-profile murder: Ivana Zanderos, the 32-year-old delegate of the Neighborhood Assembly of Vigne Emerse, assassinated in February ’84 during her third month in office, gunned down at 10 p.m. on her way to a hakan-tech music concert.
After replacing the battery and repairing the moisture-damaged connections, the reader’s hardware came back to life. The copy in my hands, which is also the original, is in YO format. It had been cataloged as Grain Deposit Log B24, Year 2177, and thus ended up among the documents deemed “non-priority” for recovery after the “incident.” I managed to decode the filing protocols and trace back the name under which the document was originally saved: Tana Tsìli Diaries ’81-’82 (Year of Death). The handwritten addition of the caption in parentheses stands out as a glaring violation of archival protocols, giving it an especially ominous tone.
I know everything about Tana. I’ve studied her, read her, searched for her. She has appeared to me countless times in dreams, telling me her stories and memories. I know why she was killed. Yet, right now, I need to calm down, to release all the love, rage, longing, admiration, and sarcasm overwhelming me after reading these pages, or I’ll explode.
There’s not a breath of air today. The green parrots—which, I’ve read, have been increasing significantly lately—have all settled on the power pole outside my bedroom window. They’re squawking so obnoxiously it’s giving me a headache (I think I’m becoming a hypochondriac). As if that weren’t enough, the storm last week knocked out the connections; electricity is only available every other day now, and I’m practically in the dark. I don’t feel like calming down—there’s no way I could.
First: Those inclined toward politics influence collective paths more than those who aren’t. And you, with your unbearable leaderly tones, couldn’t see it, but instead naturalized your abilities. Politics isn’t for everyone, as you and your kind, who could speak, propose, persuade, stubbornly believed. I can’t endure sitting through long discussions; I don’t know how to handle approval or criticism. The few times I mustered the courage to speak in an assembly, I had planned out every word in my head beforehand, and even then, my voice trembled. If I try to listen, I get lost quickly—I miss key points, or nothing seems clear or important. In that kind of fog, thoughts don’t come to me; I can’t form ideas or responses, so I stay silent.
You always believed that practice—raising us on a diet of bread and assemblies, as you imagined raising us, the few live births—would give everyone the skills necessary to participate in political life, and that the best solution comes from everyone’s contribution. I disagree. Instinctively. I can’t argue it better right now.
(It reminds me of one of the few classic texts still readable in its entirety, Menexenus—somehow surviving the blackouts and floods: somewhere in it, Plato has Aspasia praise democracy, declaring that “democracy is nothing but aristocracy with the approval of the masses.”)
Second: Those who thought like you in the past rejected the idea that a disaster would be necessary to bring down capitalism. Only struggle would suffice. But that’s not how it went. The end of the world arrived before the end of capitalism—or, in some way, the two had to coincide. The “Earth’s movements,” as you call them, radically influenced the evolution of political-economic-social forms. And, of course, the process happens in reverse too. What doubts do you have about this? Am I to believe that the bias of anthropocentrism still haunted you like a ghost? You, who witnessed an apocalypse that was both geological and cultural.
Third: Where have your ideas led us today? To the explosion of violence and the systematic racisms we face now. Were you blinded and intoxicated by utopia? The people who aligned with the PPU back then—those who would strongly shape future policies until today’s situation—likely participated in the Revolution years alongside you, in some way, but with the sense of not truly being part of the celebration. People consumed by a sense of exclusion, humiliated, frustrated, angry. I feel disgusted by their vile arguments, but I sense the atmosphere that spawned them. They were the masses faced with the visions of a cultured and, despite everything, privileged aristocracy.
You signed the Posthuman Solidarity Pacts, ratified the agreements for the Inter-Species Universal Income, but you failed to see who you were leaving out. It wasn’t just a handful of bullies, Grandma—it was a political formation with extremist ideas, organizing for years. How could you not see it? You were too prepared and experienced not to notice the problem. If you acted in good faith, you minimized the contingencies; otherwise, you didn’t want to confront them, thinking the oppressive structures of the past had been completely eradicated.
Had you forgotten the phrase (“thus, from now on, may anyone who dares to scale my walls die”) shouted by the mythical founder of this city after killing his brother? And the fact that the two twins were born of a rape? Did you think it was so difficult to resurrect ancient proprietary myths and curses you had merely managed to suppress?
Surviving the end of one world, imagining another, and making it work were undoubtedly difficult tasks. But yes, you made many mistakes.
It had been weeks since I’d gone into the water. Maybe that’s why I’ve been struggling to breathe at times lately and feeling constantly exhausted. Now my back aches as though I’ve made some great effort. The purifiers haven’t worked for months, so I prefer fatigue over the sores and burns caused by the contaminated waters. I stay at home, longing for that dense silence, for the way thoughts flow when I’m deep underwater.
The sprawl of apartment blocks surrounding Corviale—the massive housing structure built in the 20th century on a hill south of the city, with its last 4 meters now above water, topped by the 13-story Water Towers where we live—used to host one of the largest associations of Posidonia algae in the city. These algae made the waters crystal clear and teeming with life, periodically covering the coasts with egagropiles, those brown balls of plant matter I played with for years. With the disappearance of the algae, the submerged buildings have stopped swaying. Their stark, barren, corroded walls have reemerged, like a déjà vu. The past has come back to stare at us from below.
I knew I would find the hidden document. This time I knew where to look. After leaving the archive, I needed to suspend time, to postpone the moment I’d start reading, so I kept swimming aimlessly. I headed toward what used to be the city center, following the ancient Via Portuense that once led to the sea. As I glided over neighborhoods, streets, and rows of condominiums, it felt as if I were absorbing memories and wounds from a forsaken, overwhelmed, and stubbornly hesitant daily life. The seabed showed traffic jams, shopping carts, and Sunday trips to malls. Images emerged uncontrollably: leashed dogs, tree-lined boulevards, protests, clusters of students in schoolyards, crowds of tourists, overcrowded buses, faces pressed against windows, the river flowing gently, and seagulls chasing snakes slithering across cobblestones into drains. They say the warm light of the sun, grazing the ruins of the imperial city an hour before sunset, once had something eternal and unmistakable about it.
I was about to head back when a shadow behind the Colosseum caught my attention. I leaned in, resting my cheek on a surviving arch from the upper order, careful not to be seen: a whale floated in the arena’s center, its shadow cast on the sandy seabed amid rubble and debris. It was motionless but breathing, suspended, so massive it had little room to maneuver—perhaps resting—its silver-striped belly shimmering under the light’s reflections. I began to tremble, swallowing water in terror. I surfaced quickly and swam home as fast as I could. In some circumstances, the chromosomal stabilizers I take can trigger hallucinations and panic attacks.
Fourth: You couldn’t have imagined this, not in the optimistic years of stability right after Reconstruction—the sense of isolation and frustration of being the only individual within thousands of kilometers who is the product of a cross between Homo sapiens and Balaenoptera musculus. One among one hundred thousand, carrying the weight of being a hope for newborn science and its experiments. The blue whale was officially declared extinct in August 2180, three years after my birth, when the last specimen beached itself on the sinking coasts of Florida. This story is inscribed in my body. And the gaze of your generation on people like me, born from connections with extinct companion species, was loaded with exoticizing care. It was far from innocent and paved the way for the violence I face today.
But worst of all, you didn’t ask me. You decided for me what I should be. You imposed a principle of transcendence, a melancholic, nostalgic utopia on the materiality of what I would become. You pinned me to dualism. And yet, this back-and-forth of my body, this ever-shifting territory that keeps me alive—created by your wild, non-functional, and imaginative gesture—is all I have.
I’m crying, Grandma, rivers of tears, as you taught me to do.
At the moment, I can’t say what will become of me, of us—assuming there is a “we”—of us who are alive, who resist, who inhabit times that don’t satisfy us. But I want your life and your death to continue secretly nurturing, within me and within “us,” the desire for a world yet to come.
CHRONOLOGY
2066 – 2138: Dark Years – environmental disasters, poverty, growing inequality, technological regression
2119: Birth of Tana Tsìli
2138 – 2168: Revolutions and Reconstruction
2168 – 2180: Years of stability and prosperity
2177: Birth of Xhejn Tsìli
2182: Death of Tana Tsìli
2180 – 2200: Years of backlash and violence