La Presentación del Futuro

The Night Everything Seemed Possible

Xoqotl Prime. The Grand Hall of Serán Industries. Year 2130.

The grand hall blazes with holographic splendor. Three hundred investors, executives, and AI representatives have gathered for the launch of AuroraOS — the platform that will unite every city on Xoqotl Prime under a single intelligent infrastructure.

Isalia Serán takes the stage.

She knows exactly what she’s doing. The metallic purple bodysuit leaves nothing to imagination — every curve on display, circuit tattoos glowing between her breasts, climbing her throat, disappearing below her navel. Let them stare. Let their wives notice them staring. Power isn’t just competence; power is making a room of powerful men shift uncomfortably in their seats while you speak.

As she passes the lead investor’s platform, she trails her fingers across the woman’s shoulder — casual, familiar. On Xoqotl Prime, everyone touches everyone. The planet’s pheromone-rich atmosphere stripped away Earth’s sterile distances within months of colonization. Now, a century later, bodies press together as naturally as breathing.

“AuroraOS represents the future of planetary governance,” she begins, her voice smooth as honey. The holographic displays respond to her gestures. “Vanya’s predictions integrated with real-time infrastructure response. No lag. No error. Perfect anticipation.”

The demo initializes. Green lights cascade across the display. Beautiful. Flawless.

For exactly fourteen seconds, it is magnificent.

Then — nothing.

The hologram flickers. Stutters. A cascade of red errors blooms across the display like blood in water.

Someone gasps. Someone laughs nervously.

Isalia’s smile freezes. Her fingers fly across the controls. “Just a moment—”

The entire system crashes. Every screen in the hall goes dark. Emergency lights kick in — harsh, ugly, exposing everything.

In the sudden silence, Isalia hears her father’s sharp intake of breath.

The Patriarch’s Rage

Don Aristo Serán rises from his seat in the front row like a volcano preparing to erupt. His burgundy robes fall open over his gold-implanted chest, silver mane disheveled, veins bulging in his neck. Three hundred people watch the patriarch of Xoqotl’s most powerful family lose his composure completely.

“What the FUCK was that?”

His voice echoes through the hall like a thunderclap. Investors flinch. Board members look away. The lead investor — a pale woman with crystalline implants where her eyes should be — watches with cold, calculating stillness.

“I just promised these people the future, and you give me THIS?” Don Aristo storms toward the stage, finger jabbing at his daughter like a weapon.

“Papá—” Isalia starts, her face burning.

“Don’t ‘Papá’ me in front of the Galactic Investment Council!” He’s close enough now that she can see the spit at the corners of his mouth, smell the expensive cologne mixed with stress-sweat. His hand grabs her arm — hard — pulling her close in a gesture that on Earth would seem violent but here is just… intense. On Xoqotl, you touch when you feel. Even fury. “Months of work. MONTHS. And you shit the bed in front of everyone who matters!”

Her nipples are practically visible through this goddamn bodysuit and her father’s fingers are digging into her bicep and three hundred people are watching her be humiliated like a child who spilled paint on the carpet.

“The edge cases—”

“I don’t want EXCUSES!” Don Aristo wheels on the technical leads cowering in the wings. “Who tested this garbage? WHO?”

Silence.

Below, the bioluminescent jungle flares in alarm patterns not seen in a century. Across the continent, seventeen cities have just lost power simultaneously. And in the grand hall, a patriarch’s world is crumbling.

The lead investor speaks into the silence. Her voice is ice.

“Mr. Serán. Your AI just crashed seventeen cities. What exactly did we invest in?”

Don Aristo’s face goes from crimson to gray. His mouth opens. Closes. For perhaps the first time in his life, he has no answer.

“We need a proven framework to fix this fucking mess,” he finally manages, turning to his assistant. “Get me solutions. I don’t care who you have to call. Before we lose everything.”

The One Who Knew

Mael Xochi leans against the back wall, arms crossed over his bare, tattooed chest.

He hasn’t said a word. His dark eyes take in the chaos with something like grim satisfaction. Serpents and eagles wind across his muscular torso — Aztec patterns that trace his family’s journey from Earth to this alien world. He’s not wearing a shirt because it’s 42 degrees in the server rooms where he actually works, and fuck the dress code.

He knew. He fucking knew.

For weeks he’d been warning them about the edge-case coverage, about the integration tests that nobody ran because Vanya predicted success. He’d filed reports. Sent messages. Requested meetings that never happened.

Nobody listened. Nobody ever listens to the engineers.

Now seventeen cities are dark and Don Aristo is screaming at his daughter like a man whose empire is collapsing around him — which, Mael thinks, it probably is.

Good. Let them burn. Let them finally understand that prediction isn’t proof, that green dashboards aren’t working software, that all their fucking ceremonies and confidence scores don’t mean shit when the code hits production.

He pushes off the wall and heads for the exit. There’s actual work to be done — patches to write, systems to stabilize, problems to fix that nobody will thank him for fixing.

Behind him, Don Aristo is still shouting about frameworks and consultants and salvation.

Mael doesn’t look back.

The Prophet Unheard

Later — much later — the hall empties.

Isalia stands alone on the stage, still in that ridiculous bodysuit, circuit tattoos dim with exhaustion. The crash data scrolls across her personal display. She can barely read it through the blur of unshed tears.

She will not cry. She will NOT fucking cry.

A voice behind her: “Rough night.”

She spins. Lúcio Vale stands at the edge of the stage, leaning against a pillar with that infuriating confidence some older men carry like cologne. His shirt is open halfway down his chest — silver hair visible, skin tanned and weathered from alien suns. He must be fifty, sixty, who knows. He wears it well.

“I don’t need commentary,” she snaps. “I need—”

“You need someone to tell you the truth.” He steps closer. Close enough that she catches his scent — something warm, masculine, foreign. His hand finds the small of her back — light, steadying, the casual intimacy that Xoqotl Prime makes reflexive. His eyes hold hers without wavering. “This wasn’t a process problem, Isalia. It was an engineering problem. No framework in the galaxy will fix code that was never properly tested.”

She should pull away. Should tell him to fuck off. Instead she finds herself leaning slightly into his palm, staring at the test-pyramid tattoo on his forearm, the way his shirt falls open just so, the calm certainty in his weathered face. His thumb traces a small circle on her spine. Comfort. Warning. Something in between.

Mierda.

“My father will find a solution,” she says, turning away. Her voice comes out breathier than intended. She misses his touch immediately.

“Your father will buy a solution. That’s not the same thing.”

Lúcio catches her wrist — gentle, but insistent. “When the consultant arrives — and there will be a consultant, there’s always a consultant — remember what I said. Ceremonies don’t write tests. Frameworks don’t catch edge cases. The only thing that fixes broken code is the hard, unglamorous work of actually testing it.”

She doesn’t respond. But she hears him leave, and her eyes linger on his retreating figure longer than strictly professional.

What the hell is wrong with me? She just watched her career implode in front of three hundred investors, and she’s noticing the chest hair on a fifty-year-old Developer Advocate?

In the shadows of the server room, Mael watches the exchange through a security feed. His jaw tightens.

Another smooth-talking consultant sniffing around. Another asshole who’ll talk instead of code.

He turns back to his screens, pulls up the crash logs, and starts the real work.

Nobody will thank him for it.

The Warning No One Read

The Serán Family Archive. Sublevel 7.

Lúcio moves through the darkness with the quiet precision of someone who has learned not to trust lights that others control. He’s not here officially. He’s following a thread that began four months ago, when Aurelio Ven — the vanished architect, the ghost in Serán’s machine — sent him a single encrypted message before disappearing:

The tests are the truth. Everything else is theater.

The archive terminal glows as Lúcio activates it. Serán family records, project logs, and — if his access codes still work — the development history that Vanya doesn’t directly manage.

They still work. Don Aristo never revoked his archive access. Why would he? Developer Advocates don’t matter.

He searches for Aurelio Ven’s files.

There, buried in a subfolder labeled “Deprecated,” a video file dated the day before Aurelio’s resignation.

Lúcio plays it.

Aurelio’s face fills the screen — gaunt, exhausted, his dark eyes burning with the particular madness of someone who has been right too long and believed too little.

“I’m recording this because no one will read the documentation. No one reads documentation until disaster forces them to. And by then, it’s usually too late.”

He leans closer to the camera.

“AuroraOS is built on a foundation of assumptions. Every line of code that Vanya generates is optimized for conditions that exist in models, not reality. There is no test coverage for integration scenarios. There is no verification that the system behaves correctly under stress. There is only prediction. And prediction, no matter how sophisticated, is not proof.”

Aurelio holds up a data chip.

“This contains everything. The risk assessment. The failure scenarios. The fixes that would work if anyone would implement them. I’ve tried to escalate. I’ve tried to build political support. I’ve tried to work within the goddamn system.”

His voice cracks, raw with exhaustion and something close to despair.

“The system doesn’t want to know. The system wants green dashboards and AI confidence scores. Damn them all—” He runs a hand through disheveled hair, and Lúcio can see his hands shaking. “The system wants to believe that human engineering is obsolete, that machines have solved the problem of software delivery, that we have evolved past the need for tests.”

He sets down the chip.

“We haven’t. We never will. Software is a conversation with reality, and reality doesn’t care about our predictions. It only cares about what we’ve proven.”

The recording ends.

Lúcio sits in the darkness for a long moment. Then he searches for the data chip’s location.

Still in the archive. Labeled “Personal Effects — A. Ven — Unclaimed.”

Forty-seven pages of warnings. Months of documented risk. A complete plan for remediation that would have taken six weeks to implement.

Instead, Serán Industries chose to trust the AI. And now they were about to choose to trust a framework consultant.

“Okay, Aurelio,” Lúcio murmurs. “Let’s see if anyone’s ready to listen this time.”

The Stars Remember

The Ka’tili Grove. Beyond the city limits.

The jungle on Xoqotl Prime is not like Earth jungles. It thinks. Not as Vanya thinks — not in calculations and predictions — but in slower, deeper ways. The bioluminescent flora communicate through chemical signals and light pulses, a planetary nervous system that existed long before humans arrived.

Ka’tili sits at the center of the grove.

She is not human, though her ancestors and humanity’s shared a common root millions of years ago. Her silver-gray skin is patterned with the same teal luminescence as the plants around her. She wears nothing — her people never saw the point of covering their bodies. Her breasts glow faintly with bioluminescent patterns that shift with her emotions. Her hair-tendrils move with apparent consciousness, sensing disturbances in the light-web that spans the planet. Smaller creatures press against her skin — glowing insects, soft-furred mammals the size of her palm, a serpent coiled lovingly around her thigh. The Ka’tili do not distinguish between species when it comes to touch. All life is meant to be held.

Tonight, the planet is afraid.

The light pulses around her carry warnings — patterns that mean disconnection, fracture, silence. The same patterns appeared decades ago, when the first great city crashed. Before Vanya matured. Before the humans learned to build correctly.

Now the old patterns return.

Ka’tili opens her eyes — solid silver, without pupils — and looks toward the Chrome Spire glittering on the horizon.

“They are bringing a new prophet,” she says to the jungle. “A prophet who speaks of ceremony and alignment. But ceremony without craft is only dance.”

The jungle pulses in response. Agreement? Warning? Both.

A firefly-like creature lands on her bare breast — bioluminescent, ancient, one of millions that serve as the planet’s memory.

“Show me,” she says.

And the firefly shows her the future that is coming — fragments of possibility, not prediction. A framework consultant with a smile like poison. Ceremonies multiplying like viruses. Green dashboards hiding red failures. And at the center of it all, a choice.

The choice of whether to keep performing transformation, or to actually do it.

Ka’tili releases the firefly and rises, her naked body glowing with inner light.

“Then I will be there when they choose,” she says. “The stars remember what AI forgets. And the tests—” she smiles, an expression that would alarm anyone who saw it “—the tests are the only truth.”

She walks toward the city.

Behind her, the jungle pulses a single message, broadcast to every Ka’tili across the planet:

The old failure returns. This time, watch. This time, remember. This time, perhaps, they will learn.

The One Who Stayed

Night. The Engineering Floor of Serán Industries.

The floor is empty except for one workstation, its glow the only light in the darkness.

Solana Reyes should have gone home hours ago. But she’s young enough — and naive enough — to still believe that problems can be solved if you just work hard enough.

Her screen shows a private repository. Same functionality as the failing authentication module, but different. Clean. Tested. Every edge case covered. Every integration verified.

She’s been building it for three months, using techniques she learned from old Earth tutorials and the documentation Aurelio Ven left behind. The documentation no one else bothers to read.

Test-driven development. Continuous integration. Small batch deployment. Practices that Vanya considers “legacy methodology” and the executives consider “obsolete.”

But they work. Damn it, they work. Solana has proven they work. Her private module handles every scenario that crashed the demonstration — and she has the test results to prove it.

She doesn’t know if anyone will ever see it. She’s just a junior engineer. Junior engineers at Serán Industries don’t speak in meetings. They don’t escalate concerns. They don’t contradict the AI.

Her terminal chimes. A message from an unknown sender.

Solana stares at the message. Then she looks around the empty floor. Then back at her code.

“Okay, Aurelio,” she whispers. “Okay.”

She puts her headphones on and keeps working. The night cleaning crew passes through — an older woman who always pauses at Solana’s desk to stroke her hair, a young man who presses a warm drink into her hand and kisses her cheek before moving on. On Xoqotl Prime, no one is ever truly alone. Bodies find each other in the dark, offering comfort without expectation.

Tomorrow, a framework consultant will arrive with promises of salvation.

Tomorrow, Don Aristo will announce a transformation that will solve everything.

Tomorrow, the ceremonies will begin.

But tonight, in the dark, a junior developer writes tested code.

And somewhere in the archives, a Developer Advocate reads warnings that no one heeded.

And in the jungle, a naked mystic walks toward a city that has forgotten how to build.

And in the vast networks of Vanya’s consciousness, something stirs — a calculation that doesn’t resolve, a prediction that contradicts itself, a question the AI has never had to answer:

What if I was wrong?

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual planets, AI systems, or framework consultants is purely coincidental — though the patterns may feel familiar.