Free The Lost Origin by Matilde Asensi

immense, expensively-erected building. Nevertheless, I never faced thecode empty-handed since while I wrote routines and algorithms, a sixth sense kept me aware of where those dark areas were that probably would later be the source of all problems. And I never doubted the truth of those intuitions. When, upon finishing a program, I applied the compiler to test the function, it always ended up confirming the connection between the final errors and those dark areas. Looking for them and finding them was much more interesting than correcting them, because correcting was something simple and mechanical, while discovering the problem, chasing after it, following a feeling or a suspicion, had its element of the heroic, of Ulysses trying to get to Ithaca.
    As if my brother were an application with millions of lines, my valuable sixth sense was warning me of the presence of dark areas related to the errors in his brain. The problem was that I had not written that supposed program that represented Daniel, so despite my suspicions of the existence of those incorrect data, I didn’t have a way to find out how to locate and repair them.
    I spent the rest of that second night working and attending to my brother, but by the time light began to enter through the window and Ona had waked, I had already come to the decision that I would throw myself completely into the business of clarifying (if my sixth sense was right and if it was feasible) the possible correlation between Daniel’s agnosia and Cotard’s, on one side, and his strange research project, on the other. If I was fooling myself, and, as I had told Ona that afternoon, everything was a product of our nerves and the fear we felt, the only thing I had to lose was the time invested, and if, moreover, over the coming days Daniel responded to the treatment and was cured, would he be enough of an idiot to reproach me for chasing after a surely ridiculous hunch? Well, maybe he would, but it didn’t matter.
    When we arrived on Xiprer Street I went up with my sister-in-law to her apartment to pick up the paper written by Daniel, because I wanted to study it that afternoon, but when I left, I left loaded with a mountain of books on the Inca and with the folders of research documents about the
quipus
.
    I went to bed around nine-thirty in the morning, wiped out, with irritated eyes, and exhausted like never before in my life. Owing to the change in my sleep schedule and to having sat up all night, I suffered from jet-lag without having crossed the Atlantic, but even so, I told the system to wake me at three in the afternoon, because I had a lot to do and very little time to do it.
    I was deeply asleep when Vivaldi, Allegro from Concerto for Mandolin, began to sound throughout the house. The central computer selected, from among my favorites, a different melody for every day, depending on the time of year, the time of day that I was waking up, and the weather outside. My entire house was constructed around my personality, and over the years a strange symbiosis had been produced between the artificial intelligence system that regulated it and myself. It had learned and perfected itself on its own, in such a way that it had become a kind of telepathic majordomo obsessed with serving me and attending to me like a mother.
    The curtains of the wide French windows that looked out on the garden were softly opening, allowing a tenuous ocean green light to come in, while the screen that completely covered the back wall reproduced a visualization of Van Gogh’s L'église d'Auvers-sur-Oise. It was still daytime and I still felt terribly sleepy, so I squeezed my eyelids shut, put the pillow over my head, and bellowed: “Five more minutes!” causing the sudden death of the special effects. The bad thing was that Magdalena, the housekeeper, immune to the voice recognition system, was already coming through the door with the breakfast tray.
    “Do you really want to keep sleeping?” she asked, taken