PART I
ONE
Lights & Stars
Mauro had become a fugitive from justice for attempting to save the life of the woman he loved. He had managed to evade the private security of the company that was pursuing him, and now he was hiding in a secret laboratory with a couple of devices he had stolen. He was twenty-eight years old and on the verge of inventing a device that could change the perception of life and death.
There was only one small, fixed window in the warehouse. The blue light of dusk streamed in as the glass was constantly beaten by the rain. The water running down refracted and blurred the city lights and the headlights of cars passing by outside. The place was small, and the doors and windows were closed, with the ceiling descending toward the back.
A series of cables and hoses snaked along the floor towards a spider-shaped device on a transparent plastic stand. Next to it was a central processing unit in the shape of an elongated prism (a rectangular cuboid) made of dark metal. The side of the prism was open, revealing a complex structure of shimmering and interconnected filaments, some of which were delicate threads coming up from the floor.
Mauro sat with his back to these devices, facing the light of a complex assembly of translucent monitors and advanced computers. He was working among a multitude of open windows with cascades of different codes and neural graphics, accompanied by the sound of fans and some sounds of digital processing. On the table, he consulted several translucent digital boards filled with frequency analysis and statistics, typing at the same speed as his thoughts.
He had lost track of how long he had been programming and realigning code. His hair was disheveled, and his beard was unkempt. His gaze was exhausted, but his precision and concentration remained sharp. There was a certain adrenaline running through his body that helped him stay awake. He didn't have much time to achieve the adaptation of both devices, and a single mistake could be enough to never see her again.
He entered a series of commands, and the main monitor filled with information. Then he turned to another one to analyze what it displayed. On the screen, a simulation of the connections that needed to be made for a precise link between the square prism and the spider-like device had been generated. He quickly checked something on the desktop tablet before moving back.
As he stood up, mental fatigue began to set in, and his steps became a bit slower. When he reached the devices, he held a pair of thin tweezers in each hand, resembling a surgeon, and began reconnecting the delicate filaments with the threads of the prism as shown in the simulated images.
At that moment, amid the occasional sound of tires on the wet pavement made by cars passing near the warehouse, he heard one playing a high-volume synthesized pop song. Instantly, he recognized the soft vocals of his girlfriend and turned in the direction of the sound. He faced the metal door; it was closed, but the memory of her hair waving in the wind on the rooftop seemed to pierce through the metal and settle in his mind. He closed his eyelids as he surrendered to the melody of that celestial song and felt her presence again, imagining that he was standing in front of her once more.
*
He remembered her there, when she could still move, walking on the edge of the tallest building in the city, a structure that soared four hundred meters as the tallest in Latin America. The structure of the Interandean Tower was covered with square plates of a dark material that gleamed like a magnificent mirror, and from the top, one could see the lights of the entire Metropolis of San Juan Bautista.
His girlfriend seemed surrounded by circuits as if she were the central node of an orderly network of ducts, iridescent points, and luminous lines that ascended vertically among several screens with announcements from the National News. The windows of all the buildings projected downward, reflecting everything, so they enveloped her almost merging her with the stars.
Mauro was behind her, watching her from a safe distance. At that time, he had a trimmed beard and short hair, gray pants, sneakers, and a black windbreaker. They had the habit of climbing together to the top of the building to admire the lights that came on at dusk. That day, they were in a restricted area. His girlfriend had found the access door with a damaged lock and had slipped in to explore.
"Lily, that's enough, stop walking around there," Mauro said.
Liliana Mayberry was walking on a ventilation duct. She had a slender build and was of short stature. She owed her last name to her American father. She always had a smile on her face that instantly awakened optimism in anyone who looked at her, a fresh breeze that brought peace, an aura of fragility and innocence that invited care and protection.
She was dressed in gray pants and a warm cream wool sweater with Andean alpaca patterns. A style that most people her age considered old-fashioned, but she liked it, saying it connected her to the earth and the cosmos. She stopped among the points of light that gleamed behind her and turned to Mauro. She extended her arm and with a finger, she invited him to come closer, playfully.
"What's the matter, darling, are you afraid of heights?" she said with her bright and sweet soprano voice.
"Stop playing, it's not funny," Mauro warned her, while trying to suppress the tingling that ran through his hands as he watched her move on the edge of the void.
"Come on, nothing will happen, see? I haven't fallen. Or do you think I'm dead?" She made a slight hip movement from side to side to tease him.
"Come back before you are."
Liliana raised her head and closed her eyes to feel the breeze that had arrived at that moment. A few raindrops settled on her cheeks. Her posture was very much like that of an angel about to take off from the ground.
Mauro watched his girlfriend's hair wave in the wind and had the impression that time stretched, in an elongated and almost magical moment that remained engraved in his memory.
"I won't fall. Neither will you," Liliana assured him with a calm voice and waited for a response for a few seconds. Not hearing it, she opened her eyes. "Mauro, come... If I were supposed to die by falling from here and I don't, a car would run me over when I cross the street."
"I don't think fate has anything to do with that, Lily. It's just a matter of being careful," Mauro said in a serious tone, knowing that he didn't share his girlfriend's belief.
"Without it, I wouldn't have met you," Liliana replied with a smile, avoiding delving into the topic so as not to start an endless discussion, which she didn't want to do in such a special place for both of them. "Fate is part of the universe," she simply explained. "Everything is connected."
"Are you going to start with that again?" Mauro said as he crossed his arms.
"At least come a little closer," Liliana asked, setting the topic aside. She turned toward the city. Her green eyes sparkled with the lights of the metropolis. She opened her arms wide and embraced the elongated buildings with projected advertisements, the narrow streets, the avenues, the distant Tungurahua volcano, and the artificial lake in the center. "It's like I can hug a galaxy!" she shouted over the sea of lights and stretched as far as she could.
"I can see it from here."
She turned to look at him over her shoulder.
"Are you sure you don't want to come?"
He nodded, lips pressed in a confident smirk.
His girlfriend placed half of her foot over the edge.
"What are you doing?" Mauro asked, feeling a nervous twinge in his palms.
"If the universe doesn't want me to die, I won't die," Liliana said as she extended her leg completely while balancing with her arms.
"All right, all right!" He crouched down, passed the yellow danger tape that was stretched between chrome pipes, and began to approach slowly and carefully.
His girlfriend returned her foot to the edge and began to turn toward him, but due to the moisture, her shoe slipped, and she lost her balance.
"Lily!" Mauro exclaimed as she disappeared with a scream behind the ventilation duct.
He hurried toward her, put his hands on the metal, and stuck his head out to look on the other side.
He found a thick ledge below the ventilation duct, and there was Liliana, lying on her back, covering her mouth to contain her laughter. There had never been any danger; she had been joking about falling off the building the whole time.
His girlfriend noticed Mauro's pale expression and burst into laughter.
"You're crazy!" Mauro said and climbed onto the ventilation duct, jumping onto the ledge with a tickle attack straight to her stomach. Liliana began to twist as she tried to get his hands off her, laughing so hard that she was gasping for air.
Being with her was like jumping out of an airplane at dusk, without a parachute. Mauro could forget everything for a moment, and he had forgotten that his friend and collaborator, a woman of Asian descent named Victoria Wong, was waiting for him.
*
Mauro opened his eyes just as the song ended outside. The atmosphere fell into a rainy calm, interrupted only by the wailing of police sirens in the distance. Mauro refocused and continued working on the twinkling threads of the device.
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