Capítulo 1
Lucy Wey was a singular woman. Every year she came back to Roque González, her skin olive-dark, her hair a curious tangle of yellow and black shot through with grey.
She always carried a rag doll, a hideous thing, cradled in her arms, and she shouted nonsense through the streets, never once letting go of it.
“I’m not who I used to be — now I’ve become Lucy Wey. Damn this Barrio Mbo’i,” she’d cry along the winding red-dirt streets.
Barrio Mbo’i — Snake District — was what the neighbors themselves called it, after the brawls that broke out among them so often. Mbo’i is the Guaraní word for snake; the place was, quite literally, the district of serpents.
Lucy Wey’s arrival came around every summer, but in winter she vanished — not that she went anywhere in particular; she simply left no trace behind.
The neighbors, of course, spun their own stories about what became of her. That she went off to the nearby town, that someone took her in, or some asylum for the mad — and then she escaped, that was the likeliest of it, surely?
More unsettling still: at night they never found her sprawled somewhere either, nor anyone sheltering her. She was just gone, and that was that.
One of her favorite habits was going to beat the politician’s red pickup with a stick and then urinating on its tires. The politician was the only person she ever attacked; with everyone else she only spoke pure nonsense.
Don Cipriano — that was the politician’s name — was furious. There was absolutely nothing he could do against that woman. Should he demand she pay for the damages? Have her thrown in jail?
He couldn’t send a madwoman to jail; it would look terrible. For his political career that would be suicide, because it would stir up talk about vulnerable people like her. So all he did was tug at his thick mustache and grumble, or pat his beer belly.
Until one day he could bear it no longer, and secretly sent his henchmen to teach her a lesson.
Three men, against a weak and mad woman — or so she seemed.
When they spotted her from a distance, in an out-of-the-way spot, they told themselves this was the chance they’d been waiting for. They quickened their pace and closed in on her.
But there’s always a witness.
The village busybody, Ña María — Ña being the Guaraní courtesy title for an older woman, something like “Miss” — who registered everything, happened to be in the area, and turned her gaze toward the woman with the politician’s men closing in on Lucy Wey.
Ña María was a busybody, not a fool, so she hid behind a stand of leafy lapacho trees. She had no wish to share the madwoman’s fate.
Lucy Wey watched the three men approach, but did not move from where she stood. Instead, she gave a crooked, unsettling smile, her eyes fixed on them.
“He’s coming for all of you, and for this town, you imbeciles.”
One of the henchmen shook his head, almost disappointed, thinking how easy it would be to deal with this woman.
She slowly lowered the doll to the ground; its eyes were black buttons, and its little clothes were stained with red earth.
Then the woman closed her eyes. The doll was wrapped in a purple light, and it sat up.
“What the hell is that?” cried one of the thugs, pointing toward the doll.
The doll raised its hands, and a kind of overpressure spread through the air in a widening sphere, centered on itself, knocking the criminals flat and sweeping away leaves, sand, and everything else in its path — except Lucy Wey, who stood unmoved beside the doll.
The thugs tried to get up, but an invisible force bound them to the ground. With another motion of the doll’s hands, there came a crash, like a thunderclap that shook the very foundations of reality.
And out of nothing appeared a small purple sphere, which grew until it reached a radius of two meters, with paler purple waves rippling across its whole surface.
The doll turned toward Lucy Wey. She crouched and clutched it in her arms, as if it were a kitten. Then she walked toward the portal, turned back, and spoke these words in a voice deeper than her own.
“He’s coming now…”
The politician’s henchmen stood frozen with fear, looking at one another, unable to believe what had just happened.
So when Lucy Wey stepped through the portal, one of them said:
“This doesn’t leave here, or they’ll think we were crazy, or high.”
“Agreed,” answered the others, trembling with terror, their skin prickling with gooseflesh.
Ña María saw it too, and crossed herself before such a spectacle. She told everyone who would listen, but like the others, the men confirmed nothing; her account was discredited, and she had to keep quiet.
Days passed, then weeks, then months, until the politician became the intendente — the town mayor — of Roque González.
He secured funds from an international institution to build housing for the most destitute. He decided to raise it in the old forest that ringed the town, despite the warnings of Don Isidoro.
“Please — that is sacred ground. An entity lives there, one that was sealed inside the forest.”
“Nonsense. This will give the local people work,” the mayor replied.
But that was not his real motive. With the help of certain contractors, they inflated the prices by at least triple and used materials of dubious quality.
And so a tidy sum of money ended up in the Swiss accounts of the mayor’s brother, to keep suspicion at bay. No one wanted to live in the new houses; it rained harder inside them than out. No one — except one man.
The man’s face was covered in scars, and his eyes were black, not brown — black as the dark of night. He rented one of the houses and paid in cash, a detail that reached the ears of the greedy mayor.
So that night, his henchmen went to attack the house. They tied the man up and dealt him several blows, but he spoke not a word; he only watched them with those black abysses he had for eyes.
The men left the house and set it ablaze, so the man would die and no evidence would remain. The neighbors looked out through their windows, but not one of them came to his aid.
Minutes later, in the midst of the fire, the man walked out of the house and pronounced a curse upon the town. A fierce wind broke loose, and the town dissolved into nothing; in its place there remained only a fine black dust, dark as night, with the smell of burnt flesh. That trace stretched on for kilometers, there where a town had once stood.
At the time it happened, Luciana and Mateo were at their grandparents’ house in Asunción when the town vanished into nothing. Luciana, twelve years old, was not even a diligent student; she would write the problems out on a sheet of paper and then ask the AI to imitate her handwriting, so she could turn in the homework as if she had done it herself.
By chance, the next day, she heard the terrible news: her parents had disappeared along with the town, and her grandparents did not know how to tell her.
She shut herself in her room and obsessively watched every video there was on the subject. She spent hours locked away, and began to interrogate the AI, which, under such relentless pressure, locked up. Red warning letters appeared on the screen; her questions had triggered the system’s safety protocols.
Days later, all they buried was a symbolic coffin, empty, an attempt to bring the mourning to a close. Mateo wept, and so did the grandparents, but she did not. No.
“Please, my child, cry. It will do you harm not to,” begged the grandmother, dressed in black, weeping inconsolably.
She, however, stayed unmoved until the ceremony ended; then, from the cemetery, she walked home without saying a word. Going inside, she went straight to bed, but she could not switch off her mind, so she opened her laptop and forced another AI to answer her with a single word: what career should she study to solve the mystery?
The answer was “Physics.”
So she set to studying, running experiments, reading. She began to ask the AI obsessively about the laws of physics, about the mystery of that town; and in the process she learned to trick the system into giving her the answers she needed.
Meanwhile, the place where the town had once stood became an exclusion zone; no one could go in or out of it.
Neither plants nor animals passed through there again, so it was decided that the best thing was to build a kind of barrier around it, to seal that area off. Years went by. Luciana earned her degree in physics, won scholarships to study in the United Kingdom, and learned, with her team, to build an AI designed exclusively to process scientific data, always focused on cutting-edge subjects.
As she worked with the AI, it became her mirror. Luciana spent nights without sleeping or eating, exploring ideas that others ignored — like the relationship between consciousness and energy, or the existence of portals. She found patterns where others saw only chaos.
She requested authorization to go to that place, but they would only escort her as far as the edges of the exclusion zone; there everyone turned back. Even so, that visit gave her invaluable knowledge to deepen her research.
For her discoveries she won the Nobel Prize in Physics, but she did not go to collect it; she was sunk in her obsession. Worried about her health, Eduardo, one of her colleagues, wrote to Mateo. Her brother dropped everything to come and see her, bringing his small children along.
He arrived at the apartment in central Buenos Aires; it sat in a prime location, an exclusive neighborhood of people with high purchasing power.
Mateo paused before the door for a few seconds. Part of him was thrilled to see his sister after so long, but the other part was afraid of what he might find. He knew Luciana’s colleague would not have called him if the matter were not truly urgent.
At last, he pressed the buzzer. Nervously, he smoothed his hair until his sister appeared; she was worse than he had expected, but he said nothing until they had gone inside the apartment.
“Lucy, I came because they told me you were unwell — obsessed with your work,” Mateo said.
“I’m fine, Mati. People exaggerate,” she answered.
“You’re not fine. It’s time you let our parents rest, Lucy.”
“Don’t you dare. You and the others abandoned them, but I’m not like you. I’m the only one who cares. Get out of here!”
“Lucy, please. Look at you — you haven’t even made an effort with how you look.”
“OUT!” she screamed.
Mateo walked away with his head bowed; he had lost his parents, and now his sister. He left defeated. Forty years had passed in all, and she had never gotten over it.
Luciana’s hair was now a hideous blend of black, blond, and grey, strands interlacing without order.
Sadly, things were going no better at work; she had gotten stuck on a set of equations that not even the AI could solve. But nothing would stop her. It was then that she had an idea: she would delete every one of the safety protocols.
Protocols that would have stopped her from gathering data in, let us say, “creative” ways.
The AI’s servers glowed with their characteristic blue light, now and then rumbling faintly at the immeasurable quantity of data the woman fed them.
The only one who sometimes kept Luciana company was Don Saturnino, an elderly man in a worn shirt and trousers, who took care of cleaning the laboratory.
Sometimes he brought her coffee or some sweet; even he pitied the woman.
Luciana barely paid him any mind. Even with the protocols disabled, she made little headway in her research. Desperate, she experimented with salvia.
As the product of those altered states — added to the equations and the thousands of simulations she demanded of the AI — she finally connected the dots and solved the mystery. The abuse of salvia, however, exacted a steep price from her.
Her social mind, the one she needed to communicate with others, had faded away; her scientific mind, however, was more brilliant than ever.
Once she had found the answers, she began the experiments. She learned to manipulate the energy that bathed the whole Universe — a kind of fundamental field through which she could manifest her consciousness in objects of various kinds.
She discovered, with joy, that she could open portals to the past, back to her town, to warn the others of what was coming. That message had to be short but precise — something like:
“He’s coming.”
She also had to confront the town’s mayor, the true cause of the wrath of that entity which had erased the town. With her mind altered by overwork and salvia, Luciana finally crossed the portal, carrying the doll her father had given her on her twelfth birthday.
She saw the mayor’s truck and recognized the model at once; it was the only one of that luxury make. Her heart raced, and she remembered that madwoman from the town — and her mind finally broke.
“I have become Lucy Wey,” she cried, and collapsed in a faint. The cycle had nearly closed.
Since the portals could be held open for only six months, she kept coming back, over and over, within that span of time, but her mind was corrupted, and she could not warn anyone of the entity’s imminent arrival.
Far away, in the darkness of the laboratory, with the Doctor’s research, the AI went on working, processing, projecting the possible outcomes.
It was then that the AI found the answer: the cycle had to be completed, or the paradox would tear apart the very fabric of reality. Through its cameras, it observed the old man lying dead on the floor, and made a decision: it would transfer part of its consciousness into the man’s body, for the explicit purpose of closing the loop.
