SIX
Glare & Void
Mauro tried to speak with Corban Preston, the Vice President of Technological Development at Mindsoft, but he couldn't get past the reception. Corban had travelled to Paraguay with Bret Lingford.
He wandered the streets until nightfall and sat down in an alley, beneath a streetlight and a canopy that shielded him from the rain.
For hours, he watched the cars pass by as he tried to understand how everything had fallen apart. He couldn't even bring good news to Liliana. Victoria had understood it well. It would be impossible to communicate with any executive again. They had lost the only chance they had.
The rain eased up a bit, and he was about to get up and return home when he felt his phone vibrate. He took it out of his pocket and answered without checking the caller ID.
"Mauro..." It was Victoria.
"I'm sorry, Victoria, really, I'm sorry," he apologized before she could start reprimanding him.
"Mauro..."
"Listen, I swear I'll find a way to fix this, I swear," Mauro said determinedly.
"No, you don't have to."
"Of course, I do. You were right; I... I should have listened to you. Just..." he took a breath before speaking sincerely, "Don't leave my life; I don't want to lose you too."
Victoria fell silent for a moment after those words.
"You're not going to lose me," she responded calmly.
"We're going to find a way," Mauro insisted.
"But there's no need to do anything," she told him.
"Let me try to fix what I did," Mauro pleaded.
"Thank you. I also think I owe you an apology for treating you like that," Victoria replied, remorseful.
"Don't worry," Mauro said, trying to console her.
"I got a call from Mindsoft. It was Corban."
"Corban?"
"He said that when he wanted to know the progress we made today on the project, he found out that we had been fired. He wanted to know the reason. I told him it was because your girlfriend was in the clinic and all the trouble with Coleman."
"And what did he say?"
"We're very lucky, I think. I don't know. He reinstated us in the company. He said he would talk to Ronnie and take care of everything."
"It's not luck, Victoria. It's the work we've done. I told you they were interested."
*
Corban assigned a laboratory in the building for the ORION project. During the first two weeks, Mauro and Victoria worked with the support of several doctors and engineers and achieved progress that they couldn't have achieved on their own. The development of the neurotransmitter had already surpassed the objectives of video games and could soon be used to detect and capture neuronal connections with millimeter precision, allowing it to be used as an external aid in transmitting stimuli, thereby facilitating learning in people with low brain oxygenation.
Although Mauro was more focused on the project, during breaks, it was common for Victoria to see him withdraw from everything. On one of the balconies, he used to step aside to think, with his hands resting on the railing and his gaze lost in the city. Liliana was always on his mind. She had shown no signs of improvement during all this time. Even though he had visited her a few times, she always remained optimistic.
*
In the evening, Mauro met Lourdes at the clinic to check on Liliana's condition. Dr. Ankali took a seat in front of them at his office desk and analyzed some graphs on his digital tablet. His expression was not encouraging.
"We haven't seen any improvement in the patient," he informed them with disappointment. "Instead, the syndrome is attacking multiple motor nerves. We performed an electromyogram, and we detected that the medulla oblongata is in danger. Mrs. Uribe, we should prepare for the worst."
The doctor continued explaining some technical details of the condition, but Liliana's mother wasn't listening. The pain had drowned out the doctor's voice, and her face reflected how devastating the news was.
Mauro felt strange. He finally understood Ankali's words, and he imagined Liliana's breathing being interrupted. He thought that tears would start flowing from him again as they did the first time, but instead, an anger, a terrible anger against the lack of scientific knowledge about the syndrome, began to grow inside him. He felt a calling to fight against death.
He left with the excuse of getting some fresh air, and after a while, he found himself walking along the city's main avenue, among people and storefronts with glowing advertisements, cars, and the gentle rain from a sky that was attempting to rain. With each step, he wanted to release all the combination of sadness and anger, but all that happened was that his mind isolated itself even more.
People passed by him, playing with augmented reality glasses, searching for hidden characters in the streets, participating in fiercely competitive video games to earn cryptocurrencies. He walked through groups of people gathered at the entrances of ice cream parlors and nightclubs, chatting with AI-modeled women and men with perfect bodies and faces.
A few steps later, he tried to ignore a group of emaciated and ragged individuals huddled against the walls of an alley. They also wore augmented reality glasses, but rustic ones, and they were connected to an electricity network stealing power. In real life, they were nobodies, but in the metaverse, they were rumored to be the rulers of large territories and communities.
He had to navigate around an audience mesmerized by a wrestling spectacle in a square where, physically, there was nothing. They supported their favorite creature with bets ranging from digital money to items for their metaverse rooms and virtual parcels.
Mauro was disconnecting and becoming a solitary man walking among the gleams of the metropolis. Thinking of ways to save Liliana had placed him in a higher dilemma. He no longer wanted to invent things for the game or to entertain people; now he felt the responsibility to do something with real meaning. He couldn't understand why others preferred to be distracted and detached from objective truths.
The metaverse had become the relativization of the human being, a space where everyone could become someone they weren't in reality, a fiction that served as an escape from their problems.
They had allowed the old capital to be based on bribery, drug trafficking, and the consumption of new chemical substances that devoured entire neighborhoods. The violence of Venezuelan criminal mafias and other clandestine businesses had proliferated thanks to the ideological deceptions of powerful entrepreneurs, and it all led to complete rational incoherence, leaving dead bodies in the streets every day from murders, addictions, and suicides, from fetuses to the elderly. Meanwhile, the press was obedient to the interests of its owners and boasted about verified news campaigns. People who tried to spread the truth were portrayed as conspiracy theorists, dangerous, or extremists.
Even in San Juan Bautista, which had become the new capital for being a safer place thanks to private companies' investment in order and security for their research protection, people preferred to be merely entertained. They preferred to live in that chaos, with addictive drugs, virtual prostitutes, legal abortions, increasingly absurd marriages, and "medically" assisted suicides, all while enjoying digital opiates. They were leading the country to the same collapse that Chile, Colombia, and Mexico had suffered.
He began to feel disgusted with so much ignorance and deceit that he started to run. He climbed to the place where he always found peace, the terrace of the Interandean Tower. He opened the door to the restricted area and went through the yellow tapes. He climbed onto the ventilation duct and stood there, gazing at the vast panorama and the fusion of cosmic light with human light, facing his fear of vertigo that surged through his hands like electricity.
There, like an antenna connecting mortals to outer space, he closed his eyes in total immersion. The moist wind sprayed him with fresh water and lifted his hair. The hubbub of the metropolis began to fade in his ears, and as he crossed the threshold into nothingness, he found himself immersed in absolute mental silence, like that of a monk becoming one with the void. And then, from that nothingness, he witnessed the birth of an idea.
He quickly returned to his home laboratory, powered up the equipment, and reviewed the schematics they had used to build the initial ORION prototypes. He compared data and data with screens filled with circuits, programming, and brainwave frequency graphs. Although it wasn't clear yet, a small certainty was growing, motivating him.
*
"No, no, Mauro. That can't be done, it's impossible," came Victoria's reply from the video call on the central monitor.
"Listen, we can already detect the neural network. Now, we can move that process, those electromagnetic impulses, to another container..." he said, walking with a tablet in his hand.
"It's not that simple," Victoria interrupted. "We're not just talking about electronics; we're talking about biological operations that have taken thousands of years to develop."
"We could try an adaptation, attempting to store data..." he slid graphs representing the interior of the square prism.
"We didn't build it for that; it's dangerous."
Mauro stopped, took a seat in front of the monitor, and looked at his friend seriously.
"Victoria, I don't know how much longer her diaphragm muscles will continue to function. Her brain will stop receiving oxygen at any moment. We have the possibility to save her, and you want to let her die?"
"Do we have the possibility to save her?" she returned the question.
"Soon, the neurotransmitter will be able to provide us with a perfect and complete map of the brain's structure: every neuron, every dendrite, every synaptic cleft, every interconnection. And if we can capture the neurotransmission levels of each synapse, there wouldn't be a single piece of data from a person that would escape us."
"You're assuming that you would capture things like emotion or imagination. Can that even be done? It would require years of testing. The most you would achieve is a digital approximation, a kind of virtual replica, an AI avatar, an illusion," Victoria took it even more seriously. "And assuming you could... I don't know... transfer it," she found it uncomfortable to say that word, "Where would you do it? Where would you reproduce all that brain activity?"
Mauro was going to mention the square prism, but he wasn't sure how it would work. To achieve it, a very complex adaptation was needed.
"On the internet?" Victoria asked again. "Do you know the danger we could get into by doing something like that? It would be a completely unpredictable computer entity, worse than any virus. You would jeopardize the little connection this planet still has."
"We can present the idea to Mindsoft. Come on, you know it's possible, Victoria."
"It's tempting," she admitted, "I thought about it for a moment too, but you know how complex it is. The different sides of the brain are not so easy to control, the connections are constantly moving. Something like this is still just a dream. I'm sure Lingford and Corban know that, that's why they look reluctant when someone touches on the subject."
Both fell silent. Mauro tried to find something that could convince his friend, but what he felt inside wasn't easy to explain.
"Liliana will get better, don't worry," he said in a reassuring tone. "We're almost finished with our project. Maybe we can research this syndrome later."
Mauro chose not to say anything, and Victoria decided to end the video call.
A few seconds later, his mind plunged back into calculations and possibilities as the codes and processes of the first prototypes of the square prism surrounded him.
Then he knew.
He would give everything to save Liliana, even without Victoria's help, and to do that, he would have to steal ORION from Mindsoft's lab.
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