Zero Feet Apart

The elevator ascended without a sound. The polished steel walls reflected Lucía's image with almost insulting precision: her carelessly tied hair, the gray suit she'd been told was "neutral," and that expression that attempted to be firm, but was actually charged with something closer to vertigo.

When the doors opened on the 47th floor, she was greeted by a completely silent hallway. There were no signs, no windows, no distractions. Just beige carpet, opaque walls, and an air conditioner that made it impossible to distinguish the passage of time. In that artificially clean environment, even her heartbeat seemed like a system error.

NCA, the company that had recruited Lucía three weeks earlier, didn't appear on search engines. It had no social media or logos. It was a corporation that operated from the shadows, offering "reputation management" at the highest levels. Translated: they cleaned up messes, erased traces, protected those who could pay for the most convenient truth. Lucía walked with measured steps until she reached an unmarked door. She knocked once. A dry, male voice authorized her entry.

The office was half-hidden by frosted glass. There, a man with a pale face and dark circles under his eyes handed her a tablet without looking at it.

"Confidentiality agreement. Level zero. From now on, you remember nothing of what you were before."

She signed.

There was no turning back.

Lucía Vega was a brilliant and cold-blooded organizational psychologist, trained to be the best in her field. Her life revolved exclusively around work; she had no ties outside the corporation or a defined personal life. Her past was marked by sacrifice and discipline, with no room for error or affection. Although she seemed impenetrable, she carried a deep loneliness that manifested itself in moments of vulnerability.

The induction lasted less than ten minutes. They gave her a biometric pass, a code, and a command: "Never talk about yourself. No one here is a person, we are all a function."

Her office was at the end of the east wing, a windowless cubicle facing a wall of screens. Around her, the other employees tapped away at the type of work. There were no murmurs or coffee breaks. Only efficiency. Lucía observed those around her: men and women with neutral expressions, dressed in dull colors. None of them looked up from the screen, as if life were contained exclusively within the monitor.

On the main monitor, her first task appeared:

Content review: case G41-R. Client: confidential. Objective: remove emotional traces from the records.

Remove emotions? she thought. But she didn't ask.

Hours passed. Documents, videos, audio recordings. Distorted stories. The job was to polish the official version of reality, make it digestible, justifiable, "normal." The traces of harm had to be erased, the guilt diluted. The process was methodical: analyzing the recordings, detecting words or gestures that were too human, cutting them, editing them, replacing them with controlled expressions. Precise. Cold. No anesthesia.