The U-Feeling Experience II E-Book

José Ángel Mañas

• Herausgeber: Aniara Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: The U-Feeling
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 191

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

U-Feeling has become the world's leading entertainment corporation, and its promise of universal harmony through body-swapping technology has captivated millions. But in this sequel, the cracks are beginning to show. When bodies become interchangeable commodities, and when age and youth can be swapped at will, what are we truly capable of when given the opportunity to reshape reality itself? Readers of The U-Feeling Experience know that in U-Feeling's world, anything is possible and nothing is what it seems. Now, through darkly absurd scenarios, the authors confront us with an uncomfortable question: Has Silicon Valley's dream of bridging irreconcilable divides succeeded—or has it unleashed something far more troubling? A provocative continuation that examines what remains of identity, power, and human nature when the boundaries between self and other dissolve entirely.

Leseprobe

The U-Feeling Experience II

Greedy Guts Gabri

José Ángel Mañas

Juan Carlos Garrido

© José Ángel Mañas & Juan Carlos Garrido, 2022

Aniara, 2026

Translation by Aniara

www.aniara.one

[email protected]

Original title: La experiencia U-Feeling II, Gabri la Zampabollos

Originally published by Editorial Alt Autores

This material may be protected by copyright.

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by EU copyright law.

ISBN print: 97-8918-9954-49-6

ISBN e-book: 97-891-89954-14-4

Cover design: Per Gustafsson (modernstyle.se)

Contents

THE U-FEELING DECALOGUE: TEN FUNDAMENTAL RULES

1. Kid Stuff

2. On The Numpty’s Family

3. In The Alley By The Chinese

4. In The Head’s Office

5. All Families Are Unhappy, But Some Are Unhappier Than Others

6. At The Century Xxi Newsroom

7. Luna’s Mother And U-Feeling

8. At Nerea’s House

9. Between Entrevías And Puerta De Hierro

10. In Entrevías Again

11. The End Of The Story

THE U-FEELING DECALOGUE: TEN FUNDAMENTAL RULES

1. Payment for the exchange will follow globally uniform standards set by U‑Feeling. Variations will depend solely on the duration of the experience, not on any other circumstance.

2. Each participant in the U‑Feeling experience will receive detailed information about the host body (age; physical and psychological health; home address; family and professional network) at least one month before it begins, together with a protocol of permitted and prohibited actions during the experience (see separate document).

3. The exchange will take place solely and exclusively by mutual consent of both parties. The contract, signed one month in advance, may be revoked unilaterally by either party up to the moment both participants enter the exchange area.

4. Each host body will receive a U-locator by oral administration, enabling the company to know its location at all times during the experience. The U-locator will be deactivated in both bodies simultaneously, and disconnection will be performed solely and exclusively by U-Feeling professionals at U-Feeling facilities, solely and exclusively at the moment the host bodies are handed over.

5. The cap set by the Body Exchange Act (Official State Gazette [BOE], 19/06/38) for the U‑Feeling experience is one week. Once that time has elapsed, the host bodies must present themselves at the U‑Feeling exchange hub and proceed to recover their original bodies.

6. Each client must return the host body in the same state of physical and psychological health in which it was received. Any deterioration will incur significant financial penalties as set out in the U‑Feeling catalogue and will be subject to the penalties established in the Spanish Criminal Code for body‑exchange offences. By law, U‑Feeling will report the client’s condition immediately after the experience to the local Body‑Exchange Department, at Calle Siglo XXI, Madrid 28709.

7. Any escape attempt will be prosecuted both by U-Feeling tracking units and by the State Police Body-Exchange Department, who will be informed in detail. Anyone who attempts to escape with another person’s body will be permanently barred from accessing U-Feeling’s services.

8. U-Feeling will not be responsible for any psychological disturbance arising from the exchange after the clients have returned to their own original bodies, provided the exchange has complied with these rules.

9. Private arrangements made by clients, according to their own interests, before or after the exchange fall outside U‑Feeling’s remit and will be governed by the privacy applicable to any private contract under the Civil Code.

10. Animals are excluded from the experience, save for exceptional cases with prior signed veterinary and psychiatric authorisation.

Client

U‑Feeling Manager

Chapter1

Kid Stuff

If you want peace, prepare for war.

Vegetius

1.

It all started like any other day.

The only person who noticed that something odd was going on was Gabri — Gabriela — who everyone at school called Greedy Guts and who, naturally, was coming out of the gelateria on the corner eating an extra-large ice-cream cone. Three scoops were piled one on top of each other in a precarious balance: Kit Kat, Oreo and dulce de leche. If her nutritionist had seen her at that moment, she’d have had a fit on the spot. Her mother, ditto. And yet both of them were to blame for the torrent of sugary, fatty calories she was putting into her body at ten to nine in the morning.

If your breakfast amounts to a slice of wholemeal toast, the sort that comes in a packet, with a wafer of cooked turkey, unsalted, virtually transparent because it’s sliced so thin, and a fat-free yoghurt – mind you, with active bifidobacteria, as if those invisible lactic cultures could do anything to satisfy an appetite that’s never known a limit – then you’ll be in a position to understand Greedy Guts. When you go to bed hungry and wake up ravenous, and then your breakfast looks more like an act of revenge than anything your body’s actually asking for, it’s hardly surprising that an Italian gelateria, situated fifty metres from your exclusive bilingual school in north Madrid, should be a temptation you find difficult to resist.

We can tell you this: eating a triple-scoop that size, managing it in under two minutes so you’re not late for class, getting it down before you round the corner and face the school gates — thus sparing yourself the sight of your classmates watching you scoff like a pig — is an art form in itself. Even more so if you can do it without the brain-freeze forcing you to stop, and above all without getting yourself messy and turning into the laughing stock of your whole year and the immediate target of the cool kids.

You need to tilt your head forward a touch, as if someone nearby were whispering and you wanted to hear better, and rest the top scoop — the one crowning the cone — against your lips, holding the cone at an angle of about thirty degrees from the vertical, so the inevitable melted drips don’t land on your clothes.

Once this position is achieved, you must apply just enough pressure with your lips to maintain the structural integrity of the whole, without excess pressure deforming the malleable ice-cream mass, whilst simultaneously performing with them a specialised continuous suction technique whose efficiency many an industrial bilge pump would envy.

The fact is, Gabriela had just emerged from the gelateria nearest the school entrance and had barely begun eroding the first scoop when what she saw caused her jaw to drop.

The sudden absence of one of the three points of support, combined with the tilt and the inescapable force of gravity, caused all three scoops to collapse onto her Doc Martens, her favourite footwear, which she’d had to buy with her own savings, seeing as her mother — who happened to be a librarian — flatly refused to finance what she called “yob boots”.

In truth, those boots were the only thing she actually liked about her goth get-up. Not that the aesthetic itself appealed to her all that much, but one of the few pieces of advice from her mother that Greedy Guts valued and acknowledged as sound — quite possibly the only one among all those she dispensed on every occasion without being asked — was the one about black being slimming.

For a girl who had been the chubby one in her class since nursery, it was an inevitable fallback.

But the boots were something else: they gave her a sense of power she had never felt before. When she pulled them on, she felt as though she could kick the arse of everyone who had taken the piss out of her for as long as she could remember.

The thing was, while she tried to sort out the mess with the last two tissues left in the packet she kept in her rucksack, she thought about what she had just seen and still couldn’t quite believe it…

If her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her, which they weren’t, she had just watched Cristian García —her best friend, in fact her only friend—drive past in his car, sitting next to his father. (You might consider Greedy Guts a touch pedantic, but she was nobody’s fool; in fact, according to the latest school tests she had the highest IQ in her entire year, only she was far too shy and sensitive to make a song and dance about it.)

In itself, this wouldn’t have been particularly startling except for the fact that the one behind the wheel of that dented black Volvo with the Osborne bull sticker on the back window was Cristian, and what’s more he appeared to be giving his father a proper telling-off, whilst his father sat in the passenger seat taking the tongue-lashing with a meek and contrite air.

It may strain belief that Gabri could have registered all these details in the scant second the vision lasted — the time it takes a car travelling at thirty kilometres an hour to pass in front of you — but first, let’s not forget that, despite her appearance, she was an extraordinarily clever girl; and second, it wasn’t normal to see a fourteen-year-old boy behind the wheel of a Volvo, however old and dented it might be. Of course, in the unlikely event of such a thing, the most normal scenario would have been that he’d borrowed it from his father without his knowing, and you’d certainly never have imagined seeing said father sitting in the passenger seat.

But on top of all that, Cristian García — whom his classmates had cruelly nicknamed the Numpty — was a shy, diffident boy. Someone who, the moment he felt himself the centre of attention, would start to stammer in a rather pathetic way, so that you were seized by a mad urge to finish his sentences for him… something that only made his bouts of verbal gridlock worse.

Needless to say, Greedy Guts had ended up associating with him for the same reason all the misfits and outsiders end up banding together: the exclusivity that comes from not being wanted or accepted by anyone, which draws them together as if a magnetic field were pulling them in.

Perhaps that’s why what startled her most — even more than the sight of her best friend behind the wheel of that battered old black Volvo — was seeing him tell off his father like that. Not just because the Numpty could be, well, spineless (and forgive us the cruelty), but also because his father was a man with an explosive temper, one of those rare people who made you feel their danger at first glance, like those brightly coloured snakes you might come across in the wild.

Just as Cristian always seemed to want to be invisible, his father — a lean, strong, sinewy man, shaven‑headed as a lifer, a professional boxer in his day — appeared to regard everyone with a challenging air that put people off meeting his eye.

And Greedy Guts knew this because, barely a week earlier, she herself had already had the chance to see what García senior was made of when something — or someone — got on his nerves.

2.

Obviously, the incident with García’s father had been much discussed in all the WhatsApp groups, right across ESO (lower secondary) and even up into Bachillerato (Sixth Form).

It was at pick-up time, and there was a multitude of cars double-parked outside the school gates, occupied by chauffeurs collecting the teenagers to ferry them off to their mansions in La Moraleja, La Finca, and other exclusive estates that are all but impossible to reach by public transport.

The school was located in Puerta de Hierro, one of Madrid’s most exclusive neighbourhoods, right in the northern quarter, and there were school buses that ferried most of the pupils who lived nearby — apart from the ones who were met by that clutch of chauffeurs, who made up another elite within the elite.

Cristian was an exception in that respect, because he usually travelled to and from school by Metro from the Entrevías neighbourhood, where he’d lived with his father since the divorce: he was one of the few pupils shut out from the club of the privileged.

But that day his father happened to be waiting for him at the gate.

Mr García, who until about a year ago had never turned up at the school (until the separation it had always been Cristian’s mother who dealt with all that), grabbed him by the arm, and Gabri herself — Greedy Guts — who had just said goodbye to Cris, saw them arguing heatedly.

The father laid into the Numpty and shouted at him, until the boy pointed timidly towards an area where the chauffeurs and the odd mother were milling about.

At that moment, Mr García dragged his son over to where Martín the Fatty’s mother — who, curiously, didn’t have a gram of fat on her but was rather an artificially willowy woman — was standing. She was chatting animatedly with the other dead-cool mothers when Cristian’s father interrupted their nattering with undisguised impatience.

‘Are you the mother of that thicko?’

‘Excuse me?’

The woman was gobsmacked, naturally. But Cristian’s father was one of those who, as they say, didn’t pull his punches.

‘That greasy fatty with the piggy snout — is he yours?’

‘Where did you spring from, you rude lout?’

‘I’ll take that as a yes. This is my son, Cris. Have you seen what his nose and lips look like? Well, according to my son, yours is one of the lads who did it.’

‘Oh, do stop being melodramatic. After all, it’s just kid stuff, isn’t it?’

‘You’re quite right, absolutely right — it’s just kid stuff …’

Uncomfortable, Martín’s mother turned, determined to shake off this embarrassing business as quickly as possible. She made to fold her long, giraffe-lean body into her gleaming Mercedes, where a chauffeur in a short-sleeved shirt and hairy arms was already waiting by the door.

But Cristian’s father hadn’t finished.

‘I do hope that when your son turns up next week looking like a cubist painting, with a few broken bones thrown in, you keep thinking the same thing.’

‘You’re not threatening my Martín, are you? Because if you are, I’m afraid you don’t know who I am.’

‘Oh, I know exactly who you are. A fool who thinks she’s better than everyone else because her husband paid for a gastric band and servants so she could spend her days living it up and slagging off the rest of us.’

‘Alfredo! Alfredo, get over here right now! Alfredoooooo!’ (The chauffeur hurried over, alarmed by his employer’s shriek, which resembled a sow at slaughter.) ‘Alfredo, smash this cretin’s face in!’

‘But madam!’

‘Can’t you see he’s threatening me? Smash his face in, right now! He’s insolent!’

‘If you know what’s good for you,’ said Cristian’s father, watching the man raise his arms and take a step towards him, ‘you’ll stay right where you are. Your wages don’t cover what’s about to happen to you. You’ll end up on the ground, bleeding. I promise you I don’t want that to happen — but you should be the one worrying about it, not me. Besides, there are dozens of witnesses, and judges don’t much like big lads who start fights.’

‘Either you smash his face in right now or you’re fired!’

A ring of onlookers was already forming, and the other chauffeurs climbed out of their cars.

Mr García released his son. He gave him a small shove so he’d step back a couple of paces. Cristian moved as far as he could — two or three steps more — until the other spectators blocked his way.

The chauffeur approached from the side, half turned away from Mr García, though García didn’t seem to be paying him any attention; he kept his eyes fixed on Martín’s mother, who was foaming at the mouth. Greedy Guts and everyone present were gobsmacked. And you would have been too, if you’d been there.

‘Alfredo, give him what he deserves, at once!’

The chauffeur positioned himself just over a metre from Cristian’s father, at an angle of about a hundred and twenty degrees. He was a big, bear-like bloke, a good six inches taller, though he didn’t look fit. He threw a horizontal swipe at his opponent’s head — an orthodox move, and far too slow.

García ducked and spun in one lightning movement.

Alfredo’s paw was still sailing over his head when the Numpty’s father trapped his wrist with both hands and forced the attacker’s momentum onwards, interposing his hip so that the man went flying through the air. An instant later, he ended up face down, right arm at the limit of dislocation, ring finger and middle finger millimetres from breaking, and a foot on his neck, pinning him hard.

‘I’m going to let you go,’ said García. ‘And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll get yourself back in that car sharpish. Even though this tyrant of yours demands what she wouldn’t dream of doing herself, if you end up with a broken arm and can’t do your job, she’ll sack you on the spot without a shred of remorse and hire someone else. These people don’t know how to live without serfs.’

3.

Once released, the chauffeur staggered off towards three other chauffeurs who, motivated by a stupid professional solidarity, had edged to within a couple of metres and were now exchanging sidelong glances, wondering whether they ought to intervene.

‘Clear off, idiots, unless you fancy a trip to A&E — you’re not paid enough for this,’ García’s father barked, making as if to step towards them with a sharp shout.

The trio bolted. And at exactly that moment Martín’s mother started screaming: ‘Help! Help! Help!’ To drown out her shrieks, García raised his voice as much as he could — which was considerable. He was used to making himself heard in rowdy boxing halls, and he looked round at all the parents waiting at the school gate and said:

‘You’re all witnesses that I acted in self-defence. This lunatic hasn’t stopped ordering her lackey to assault me. Now clear off, the lot of you!’

The last bit was bellowed at the top of his lungs. The other drivers judged it wiser to retreat to their respective cars, as did the onlookers, who, all things considered, had no wish to be mistaken for a hostile element. Let us not forget that in any street fight worth its salt, some of the best punches are always delivered by the distinguished public.

Martín the Fatty’s mother — the one with the giraffe-lean body — was left standing alone. And when Cristian’s father closed the three paces between them until their foreheads were practically touching, the woman’s bladder gave way, ruining the lovely lace-and-organza dress, exclusive design, which, by the way, fitted her like a glove, especially considering her age, getting on for forty.

‘Remember, it’s just kid stuff,’ said Mr García. ‘And you, lump of lard, aren’t you going to apologise?’

‘I swear, it wasn’t me, it was Luis Alfonso …’

‘That didn’t sound much like an apology.’

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry!’

From that day on, Greedy Guts couldn’t forget how Cristian’s father’s gaze had struck her, sweeping defiantly across the knot of adults, apparently to warn off any other onlookers from getting involved, but Gabriela was certain that deep down he’d been hoping someone else would be stupid enough to stick his nose in where it wasn’t wanted …

The coldness of those grey-green eyes beneath two utterly battered brow ridges, so like Cris’s and yet so different, had stunned her, and she couldn’t shake it for days.

And on that particular morning, the morning when everything happened, Gabri had thought she had detected that same coldness in the Numpty’s eyes.

4.

But perhaps it’s time to forget about Greedy Guts for a bit and introduce another of the school’s most singular pupils, who also played a part in what happened that day.

Her name was Luna, and people who didn’t know her had the impression that she didn’t much care what went on around her, so long as it didn’t affect her directly. The experts said she had Asperger’s syndrome, though, in her own words: ‘mild, and not textbook’.

In truth, experts, in their infinite ignorance, like to have everything classified and labelled, and tend not to accept that something might fail to fit neatly into their crude system of knowledge.

What is certain, though, is that Luna was special, or at least quite different from the rest of the teenagers who usually clustered at the school entrance.

Ordinarily she would have stayed near the door, listening to music through her headphones until the bell rang for class.

She didn’t care for contact with the rest of her classmates except, perhaps, with Greedy Guts and the Numpty, who were the only ones she might favour with the odd monosyllable in response to their occasional questions.

Otherwise, the teachers usually allowed Luna to slip in a couple of minutes late: they were all aware of her supposed condition, and that gave her carte blanche. The others, seeing how little she reacted to their jibes, had ended up ignoring her—so much so that they hadn’t even bothered giving her a nickname. She was one of the few kids in school who didn’t have one.

The thing is, that morning she’d just seen Cristian García go past at the wheel of his father’s battered old Volvo—a model old as Methuselah that stood out amongst the usual fleet belonging to the school’s other clients—and that caught even Luna’s attention, which she seldom paid to almost anything.

Luna walked about fifty metres from the school gate until she saw the Numpty park with a fairly neat manoeuvre another hundred metres on, and she found herself marvelling at the fact that her classmate could handle the car with that kind of ease.

Cristian, for his part, hoisted his rucksack, took off the chunky plastic-framed glasses he usually wore, and handed them to his father, who stayed in the car in the passenger seat looking vacant while his son said something to him.

Luna must have sensed that something odd was going on, but what she thought was that she too would like to know how to drive as well as the Numpty did. Though she couldn’t think why she’d need to, since she felt no particular urge to go anywhere, and the bus brought her to school and took her home again, near the end of its route, in the less salubrious part of that privileged neighbourhood.

It goes without saying that Luna had no friends as such, and that she was one more member of the club of oddballs and hypersensitive kids, which meant that Gabriela and Cristian were among the few she might consider kindred spirits. Cristian—or Cris, as his parents called him—always greeted her when he passed on the way into school, and sometimes, if she noticed, Luna would respond with the tiniest nod.

But that day the Numpty walked straight past her without so much as a glance, something that caught her attention, and so she followed a few paces behind.

And Greedy Guts, on autopilot, followed them both.

5.