Chapter 3 – part 1 "Descent"
Rafi arrives in Spain, emotionally and culturally detached. His precision holds — but barely.
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The seat reclined further than it needed to.
Rafi sat in business class, angled diagonally in a leather shell lined with low lighting and chrome. The windows were already dimmed, but he kept his mask on anyway. Not to sleep — that was never the goal — but to block the movement of other people. The twitch of a wrist two rows down. The blink of a woman adjusting her neck pillow. The flight attendant speaking softly in three languages at once.
He hadn't slept.
He rarely did on flights, but now it was different. He didn't lie awake out of stress or ideas. There was simply nothing in him that needed rest. The body followed commands. The mind stayed quiet. Not calm — hollow.
It was that absence that allowed him to work. The weightlessness inside. The uninterruptible stillness.
He had written three thousand lines of system logic since takeoff.
He deleted all of it before landing.
The plane touched down without a jolt. He didn't clap, didn't glance outside, didn't acknowledge the shift from air to ground. The flight had been nine hours. It felt like zero.
At the terminal, his name was spelled wrong on the car service placard. He corrected it with a pen, handed it back to the driver, and said nothing else.
The car was black, newer than expected, but the AC coughed. The driver played music. Not loudly. But it still counted.
Outside, Barcelona moved like a body too big for its skeleton. Winding alleys. Buildings pressed too close. People on benches leaning into conversation like it mattered. Dogs wandered without leashes. A boy kicked a soda can down the length of an entire street.
Rafi kept the window up.
The hotel was older than it looked. Marble lobby, cathedral ceilings, light fixtures that had once belonged to someone's home and now pretended they were art. The receptionist smiled too long.
His room key clicked once, then resisted, then gave in.
The suite was uneven. Original floors, repolished too many times. The angles of the walls weren't true. One of the windows refused to shut completely. From the terrace, the sound of a violin drifted up from the street — not music, just practice.
Rafi walked the length of the room once. Stopped by the mirror. He looked exactly like he had in Tokyo. His face didn't reflect the new time zone. Or any time zone.
He removed his watch, placed it beside the bed.
Sat.
The bed was too soft.
He opened his tablet. No notifications. No errors.
He stared at the lock screen for a full minute.
Then, to the empty room, under his breath:
"This was a mistake "
Rafi explores the venue alone. The space reflects the city's contradictions — historic and futuristic, beautiful but inefficient. He prepares to work, but something, or someone, interrupts his clarity.
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The walk to the venue was short.
No car. No assistant. Rafi preferred it that way.
He left the hotel with a narrow messenger bag and sunglasses, moving through the sunlight like a question that didn't want answering. The city smelled like heat trapped in old stone, oranges rotting in bins, and cigarette smoke lifting from the fingers of men who didn't care if it drifted into your lungs.
It was ten a.m., but Barcelona didn't move fast. Everything here flowed. Bent. Laughed at the idea of punctuality.
The venue was a modern shell built inside older bones. From the outside, it looked like a cathedral that had been redesigned by someone who hated straight lines. The arches had been reinforced with brushed metal. Translucent fiber cables trailed down from old stained glass. There were banners with the words:
EMPATHY IN MOTION – ENCLAVE PROTOCOL 9
and a logo shaped like a fractal leaf.
Rafi scanned his delegate badge and stepped through the main entrance.
The floor was cold beneath his shoes. Stone laid centuries ago. You could feel its unevenness through rubber soles. He moved through the atrium — vaulted ceilings, soft digital light overlays that mimicked clouds shifting. He could see where the restorers had preserved cracks on purpose, like scars framed in gold.
To his left, a half-wall divided the café area. Lightwood benches. Modular workstations. A cluster of people already talking too loudly about ethics in automation.
He ignored them. Sat at an unoccupied desk. Connected to the closed conference Wi-Fi. No one spoke to him.
The tablet unfolded. The display blinked once, then expanded his notes.
He reviewed the slides. Adjusted timing. Optimized transitions. One line of code caught his attention — a visual demo embedded in the keynote. He corrected it before the frame had finished loading.
And still, something pressed at the edge of his concentration.
A flicker. A presence.
Across the room, someone sat alone near the far wall. A woman. Long dark hair. One leg crossed over the other, heels loose at her ankles. She wasn't looking at a device. Wasn't scribbling notes. She had one elbow on the back of the bench and her chin tilted slightly toward the ceiling — as if measuring the height of the arches with her breath.
She didn't fidget.
Didn't smile.
She was either very still… or very tired of being watched.
Rafi looked away before she could glance in his direction.
He returned to the keynote outline.
Pressed a button.
Tested a slide.
But the formatting was wrong now — too fast.
Something off about the rhythm.
He fixed it without thinking, then shut the device.
It didn't feel like progress.
It felt like something had shifted, and he didn't know what it was yet.