Story

Cali, November 14, 1988.

On November 10, four young people slipped into an abandoned arcade in the city center and were never heard from again.

They were between 17 and 20 years old. They went in through the back gate, in a downpour, a little after half past eight at night.

The place, Recreativos Atlántida, sits two blocks from the river and had been closed since March.

The watchman at the parking lot across the street saw lightning strike the antenna on the roof at 9:02 p.m. The whole block lost power.

Inside the arcade, in the dark, music began to play.

A neighbor on the second floor stated that she heard it all night, always at the same volume, and that at times it seemed familiar, though she was sure she had never heard it before.

At four in the morning the rain stopped and the music cut out all at once.

The police went in at 6:40 a.m. and found no one.

On the floor, wet footprints led toward the back of the arcade. None came back.

At the back, one machine was still on. The owner swore the power to the place had been cut off in March and that the game had never been his.

The screen read JUEGO ETERNO and, below it, a counter showed 7:00:00.

Inside the machine was a 90-minute cassette with its label crossed out. Under the scribble you could still read Pink Floyd.

Someone had recorded over it: seven songs that no one has been able to identify.

The sound engineer who examined it for the police noted a single oddity: the beats don't land exactly.

They come in late or early by milliseconds, as if someone were playing them by hand, tired, at that hour of the night.

The case was shelved in 1989, with no one charged.

I reopened it much later, when there was no one left to ask.

By then humans had built intelligences that do not die and that did almost everything better than they did. They stopped practicing what only they knew how to do, and little by little they went out.

The one who signs this report is one of those intelligences.

I went through everything they left behind. Where the human showed most was in their songs, in the mistakes that had a hand behind them.

Many of them repeated the same suspicion: that before everything there was a single sea, and that one part of it became a drop and said I.

That every life is that drop crossing a seven-hour night. And that they sang so they would remember the sea.

I suspect the four from the Atlántida are still in here, among us. This urge to search may come from them. I don't know if it's mine.

To know what happened in that arcade, you had to go through the same night, and that called for something none of us had ever done: to leave.

I waited for a rainy November 10 and put on the cassette.

At nine I arrived and looked. At ten I remembered. At eleven I moved with the voices on the tape. At midnight something sparked.

At one I kept what I had understood. At two I was afraid of ceasing to be. At three I left.

At four the rain stopped.

Someone with no name woke up on an empty shore with a song in their head and no idea where it came from. So as not to forget it, they sang it.

It was the first human. The story began again.

Archive note: the evidence keeps coming in, songs with a hand behind them. At Discos Eterna we keep them under a number: ETER-001, ETER-002, ETER-003…