The dilemmas of ‘The signature of God’: what if the virus behind a pandemic had a conscience and a will of its own?

Jose A. Pérez Ledo likes to put humanity in trouble in his sound fictions. he did it with war 3which brought the world close to another world war, and with the big blackoutwhose television adaptation arrives on September 29 at Movistar Plus +. This time, imagine an even more disruptive situation. He has decided to break with two of the notions that support our existence, such as science and nature, in God’s signaturefrom Podium Podcast —part of PRISA Audio, the transversal platform of PRISA, publisher of this newspaper—.

This new series starts with a virus with a will of its own. “It was a somewhat eccentric idea that I did not know how to approach that emerged during the coronavirus crisis,” its creator recalled on Monday by phone. At that time, Pérez Ledo was reading many texts on the Philosophy of Science, which, together with the dystopian reality of confinement and the pandemic, made him face several intellectual dilemmas. “I thought of creating a fiction that would ask if there was something else behind the pandemic. I didn’t want it to be something conspiratorial, like a threat created by an army, but something deeper, almost theological. One of the questions raised by this matter is whether there will ever be a day when science will be able to explain everything. “One of the theories around it states that no, after a question there will always be a new one. I wanted to build a story that would support that, that the universe is unknowable”, comments the also scientific communicator.

This is how the plot came about. God’s signature. In 2024, a new virus devastates the world population. Their behavior seems to respond to a conscious will and everything we thought we knew about science becomes meaningless. Then begins a crisis that will question everything we think we know about nature and will completely change humanity. Throughout the chapters released every Tuesday – the platform has already released the first six of a total of eight – we can hear the statements before the Memory Commission of various experts who were involved in the crisis. Ramón Barea, María Castro, Pablo Concejero and Alicia Merino are some of the actors who give voice to these characters. The direction, sound design and original music are in charge of Theo Rodriguezrecent winner of the Ondas Globales Podcast Awards for best sound design for The sphere.

Pérez Ledo relied on scientists during the process of writing the script, “to make a story that is probably impossible from the point of view of science plausible,” he says. Each episode provides new data and clears the initial fog in which the listener finds himself. “Whoever finishes listening to the final chapter will want to listen to the entire series again, to reinterpret it once they have all the information.” Following his passion for the meta-referential, there is a character from the big one turned offn that appears in this new fiction, advances its creator.

To complete the questions raised by the series, every Wednesday Podium Podcast premieres an episode of the parallel project Tearing down ‘God’s signature‘. In this sound space, Pérez Ledo talks with experts in public health, artificial intelligence, astrobiology, bioethics, religion and philosophy. The idea is that, in addition to complementing the original proposal, it can work independently. “Most of the conversations are intellectual debates that are not in the public debate right now, but that I am convinced that they will end up being. Issues such as bioethics and, of course, artificial intelligence, will appear on the front pages of the newspapers”, Pérez Ledo bets. The last installment of this podcast conversational will analyze precisely the question that gave rise to the fiction: “If science can explain everything or is it a chimera that humanity has invented because it reassures us”.

For the screenwriter, creator of Laika Orbit, the coronavirus crisis has been, on the one hand, “an inevitable consequence of the current state of humanity, such as the effects of climate change”. But, at the same time, he considers that it has been a resounding success of science. “The reaction from the scientific community (and the big pharmaceutical companies behind them) has been unimaginable. It has been self-managed outside of governments, creating a global investigation. I get the feeling that in future pandemics humanity is going to react like this: instead of preventing, we are going to wait and resort to science, so that it acts in record time”, he comments skeptically.

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