The Heart of the Traitorous Eight

Please remain calm, ladies and gentlemen. This is not a drill!

If you, dear reader, are reading this, it is because you are carrying a small smart device in your hand, like an implanted limb with a life of its own. And since it finds itself with you, so comfortable and relaxed, as if it were made to be right there, in your hand, I propose that you make yourself comfortable and allow me to illustrate something you have probably ignored in all these previous years, while you used it to take a selfie, watch an AI-generated video of a cat skydiving, or watch a Chinese drama on TikTok about a woman who finally leaves the man who mistreated her for years.

Please look at your mobile device with affection and empathy. Does it not seem to you that certain traces of humanity might emerge from its beautiful internal circuits and the blue light of its screen? Or perhaps it is merely the eyesight problems it is causing the average human. But the point of this opuscule is to try to see it as we see ourselves: the battery is its food, its air, and its water; the screen is its voice, which sometimes generates anxiety due to the number of pending notifications waiting to be checked. The camera, its eyes, which are sometimes faulty when they decide to use Instagram filters. And the operating system and memory, its brain, which is always just as full as ours, which is why the “insufficient storage” notification pops up when you try to record a video or take a photo.

Nevertheless, I pose a reflective question to you. What is a body without a heart? The answer is that literally "it is not" one, since its functioning ceases. Something similar happens to a mobile phone. If you could open it up, you might observe a small piece of silicon, whose function is to "pump" information and electricity to all parts of the device so that when you tell it you want to turn on the camera, it can do so, just like the heart when it pumps blood to your arm to allow you to move it. The white-coated scholars call it the Universal Integrated Circuit Card (UICC), but you and I, the simple everyday mortals, usually know it as the "chip".

However, circumstances were not always so favorable. There was a time when circuits looked more like a plate of poorly cooked spaghetti stirred up by a five-year-old trying to prolong the tasting process as long as possible. Something, in my opinion, very difficult to carry in a pocket without risk of piercing your thigh. Put yourself in that situation and imagine a chaotic city, with skyscrapers, roller coasters, and streets that go up and down, where everything sticks out and nothing can be compressed. Then, a tech genius had the idea of "putting a blanket over the city" to flatten it and make it smaller. Very nice, but useless, since the connections would fall apart, like a city without its roads. However, one of his friends had the eloquence to wonder whether it would work to redraw the connections with silver paint.

Fortunately for both of them, and for us, it did work, and thus, dear and attentive reader, the chip was born—a palpitating silicon heart capable of distributing impulses and information, created not in a laboratory by a man with a white beard and a face that hadn't slept for several days, but by eight eccentric young men, eager to change the world in their day. I met them in my youth, when photos were still black and white and we still sent paper letters (Yes, you can believe it; paper was used for writing); they were called the Traitorous Eight, not because they sold secret information to the CIA or to some rival company, but because they had the audacity to change the destiny of humanity, fed up with wires, just so that nowadays, you can watch memes while using the toilet, instead of reading newspapers as was done in my time.

This is their story. I recommend you hold on tight to your mobile device and don't drop it when there's a plot twist. If you do, you can't say I didn't warned you.

Welcome to the Heart of the Traitorous Eight.