The MANIAC

by Benjamín Labatut

Paul was capable of absorbing everything around him while making no differentiations. His mind was fully porous, lacking, perhaps, some essential membrane; he was not so much interested in the world as he was invaded by its many forms. With nothing to keep him safe, he felt raw and exposed to the information flowing constantly back and forth across his blood-brain barrier.

This precarious equilibrium, this macabre game, never really ended, even after the Cold War did. Far too many of these weapons are still there, biding their time, watched over by flawed and aging mechanisms of control, preserved in steel sarcophagi like the long-dead bodies of the ancient pharaohs, ready and waiting for the life that begins with death.