Coloured Snow

By Juan Moisés De La Serna

Finally the time to end an intense day of work, full of annoyances has arrived. An actual marathon to complete my part in the gearbox that is the company in which I work, a company where it is impossible to stop without damaging the rest.
I was collecting some papers from my office when I heard the familiar sound that the computer makes when I receive a new email. At those hours, I usually don’t check them as I prefer to be fresh when I see them, and today had been an exhausting day. I’ll see it tomorrow when I come back. Generally, I don’t read them until the next morning, I don’t even do it at home with the intention of separating my professional and personal life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tektime
• Release date: Nov 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9788835414094

Book preview

Preface

Finally the time to end an intense day of work, full of annoyances has arrived. An actual marathon to complete my part in the gearbox that is the company in which I work, a company where it is impossible to stop without damaging the rest.

I was collecting some papers from my office when I heard the familiar sound that the computer makes when I receive a new email. At those hours, I usually don’t check them as I prefer to be fresh when I see them, and today had been an exhausting day. I’ll see it tomorrow when I come back. Generally, I don’t read them until the next morning, I don’t even do it at home with the intention of separating my professional and personal life.

Dedicated to my parents

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1. The strange image

Chapter 2: The start of the search

Chapter 3: Born again

Chapter 4: Someone wants to speak to you

Chapter 5: The child thief

Chapter 6: The return home

Chapter 1. The strange image

Finally the time to end an intense day of work, full of annoyances has arrived. An actual marathon to complete my part in the gearbox that is the company in which I work, a company where it is impossible to stop without damaging the rest.

I was collecting some papers from my office when I heard the familiar sound that the computer makes when I receive a new email. At those hours, I usually don’t check them as I prefer to be fresh when I see them, and today had been an exhausting day. I’ll see it tomorrow when I come back. Generally, I don’t read them until the next morning, I don’t even do it at home with the intention of separating my professional and personal life.

Work is work and home… is another thing, it is something that I had taken a long time to learn, after having overcome an exhausting sickness that is very frequent nowadays: an addiction to work.

That which had been my refuge for many years, even more when my interpersonal relationships didn’t work out the way I wanted or hoped.

This thing which could have been something negative because of the effort that it demanded, was compensated both economically and through the recognition from my colleagues.

I thought myself cured of it, even more so since I had started this job, a small magazine, well placed at the national level, but with no possibility of development.

It had refined my anxiety and my competitive spirit quite a bit, and I had managed to come to terms with the actual opportunities that I had in my life. But still, curiosity held its sway over me.

This auditory signal indicating a new email had disrupted my resolve and went as far as making me anxious to open it.

When I did, surprisingly, I saw a strange photo. It was a picture with varying colors, or more of a…, I didn’t know very well what it was. On a white background I could distinguish the colors yellow and blue without actually being able to tell what I was looking at.

I looked at who sent it to me in the hopes of discovering something more about this image, and to my surprise it was from a friend from work, with whom I had had passing affections without it leading to anything serious.

I knew that she had worked in multiple television companies and that she had specialised in climate news. She didn’t just give weather forecasts but also sometimes went to the scene of the news, she had been in zones with hurricanes, storms, tornados and many other meteorological phenomena that were large or rare enough to make the news.

I went back to look at the picture, some white lines, it had to be a photograph, but it was so strange. Suddenly I realised that it must be snow or at least it appeared to be.

It must have been a hill covered in snow because you could see small mounds that rose up at the bottom and at the top of the colors.

Was it colored snow? What a strange thing! Maybe the file was damaged or it had been corrupted during the transfer.

But where was my friend? The bottom of the photograph had the date and time, the day was correct but the time was not.

Maybe she had taken the photo a few hours ago and had just sent it to me, I didn’t know, but I continued to wonder, where could she be?

Determined to resolve this question, I went towards the IT department with the idea of asking for help to localise the origin of this message.

After one of the managers had explained to me that every message that was sent left a trail and that, using the right software, it was possible to discover through what countries the message had travelled from its origin until it reached me, he set himself to the task of finding it out and in under two minutes, he told me that the server number from which the message had been sent had a code that was from a program of Russian origin.

Russia?, I wondered, surprised by this information. I knew that my friend travelled a lot but so far? What had drawn her to go over there? What was she doing? And what did this bizarre photograph have to do with all of this?

It was a very weird way to get back in contact with someone after two decades.

Life is like that, if we don’t nurture a friendship every day, it will go out like the flame of a candle, and it will continue fading until you forget the names of your best friends and the only thing that is left is a few albums filled with photos of people that if you met again, would surprise you with how much they have changed.

It had already happened to me on a few occasions, to meet someone again after a while and they were nothing like what I remembered.

It might be that the passage of time changed my memories, leaving only the good ones, forgetting the aspects that I disliked about the person. Or that the person had changed with the passage of time, and that the person that I met after a period without contact did not resemble the person that I had known.

Maybe the same had happened to me with this friend but still, why would she have sent me a message and with such a strange photograph?

If I didn’t know her well, i would have thought that she had made a mistake but I knew that she didn’t like bothering people and that she didn’t know how to ask for help when she needed it either, she only left notes or pictures hinting at what she wanted or needed.

I still remember fondly of the time when she left a review of wedding dresses on my study notes when I went to the toilet and when I came back to my study material in the library I found it there.

At first I was a little bewildered and then I saw her smiling in the distance, waiting for my reaction. It was a little childish for my taste but it was very clear and precise.

It was certain that that photo was meant to communicate something or as a call for help, but I was not able to understand the message, especially considering that observing it showed nothing more than a pile of color streaked snow. Maybe that was it! The color must be of importance.

After thanking the IT manager for his help, I returned to my work space and began an internet search to see if it brought up anything about snow, colors and Russia.

To my surprise, I found multiple articles that referred to strange atmospheric phenomena, yellow or blue snow, and the explanation that these colors occurred because of a high concentration of ferrous materials and other metals in the clouds.

In Western Siberia, it rained colored snow, most of it was yellow but hues of orange and blue could also be seen. All of this snow fell in an area 100 km long and 1 km wide, affecting around 30,000 inhabitants. Furthermore, this snow was viscous and let off a bad smell.

According to ecologist groups mentioned in these journal articles, this could be caused because of a malfunction in a refinery or chemical fertilizer factory that had let substances seep out into the environment and stain the clouds.

Other than the fact that this was bizarre, I couldn’t see how this could have provided reason enough for her to have gone there herself, it was nothing more than a spectacle like fireworks were, pretty, but that was it.

What was clear was that she was in Russia when she had sent me this message and everything revolved around this coloured snow.

I understood a little better now what all this was about but I still didn’t comprehend what I was supposed to do, wait for her call, go find her? If she had at least left me a phone number to contact her, I could have asked her.

As I was doing this, a friend called me and said, Look there, at the TV. And to my surprise it was a piece of news about Russia where you could see a river where there were thousands of dead fish.

This wouldn’t have had too big an importance in such a country where environmental care was not a priority except that these were pictures of the Neva river as it passed through Saint Petersburg and that they had been taken by some tourists.

At first I didn’t