Homam Enterprises’ head offices were just five blocks away from his loft.

Perhaps that might seem not relevant, but for someone who lived in Proxima City, one of the largest metropolises on the western continent, not having to suffer the maelstrom of peak-hour traffic jams or having to lock himself in a metro who knows for how long to get to his office, was a blessing.

Uri knew how fortunate he was in that regard because he had lived his entire life in that city and knew it almost as much as he knew his current neighborhood. He knew that Proxima, so lavish and intimidating, with its shiny skyscrapers, one taller than the other, its highways, and its entangled networks of overpasses, was almost a living entity that could drive anyone mad. He only had to see the faces of those behind a steering wheel, in front of a red light, or those who rushed to reach the metro that departed at 9 o’clock because they couldn’t afford to wait for the one which left at 9.05, to remind himself of that.

“Manny, don’t you see he’s a robot?”

“It doesn’t matter! They’ve programmed him to guard the damn cars, and I wanna know where mine is!”

Or as he came and went walking from work, he could also witness scenes like that: a middle-aged couple arguing with the parking meter robot, a funny-looking parking meter with arms and wheels.

“Mr. Smith, your vehicle has been towed away for violating the traffic law 441551,” the robot announced, indifferent to the anger of his interlocutor. “You should go to the nearest headquarters of…”

Situations like that were everyday stuff.

Announcing his bon vivant title with his gait, Uri entered the company building. His silhouette reflected on the lobby floor. As always, the walk to his office was a parade of greetings with other employees, the security guard, and the telephone operators at the front desk. That morning he was particularly cheerful, so much so he even greeted the androids of the maintenance area, whom he normally ignored. The two humanoid robots, dressed in work jumpsuits as if they were ordinary employees, were standing upside down on the ceiling, changing the spotlights in the entrance hall as naturally as if they had been doing it on solid ground.

“Good morning, Mr. O22,” the automatons replied in unison.

Hearing them address him with those synthesized voices was no longer as unsettling as the first times he’d heard them, a couple of years ago when the company had started using those models.

Unlike the automatons fulfilling community services, such as parking meter robots or those that cleaned the streets, the Cyclops models had been designed in human form so they could better adapt to certain jobs. They did not have features, only an empty face with a visor in the center that acted as an eye, although they were dressed in uniforms to identify their functions and that helped them to blend in with people, which, even today, after several years on the market, it gave some folks the creeps.

Uri went up to the seventieth floor where his office was.

“Good morning,” Rita, his secretary, greeted him from the reception.

And speaking of unsettling voices, Rita’s voice was a testament to the havoc cigarettes could wreak on someone’s vocal cords after so long.

“Hey, Rita,” he greeted back and smiled to himself as he had to stand on tiptoe in front of the large reception desk so he could see the woman there, sitting behind there, plunged into endless parcels, preparing them to be dispatched.

Rita’s desk was always crammed with things that ranged from a holographic phone to an old computer, and from a yellowish notebook in which she scheduled the day’s appointments—a habit she didn’t want to get rid of—to hundreds of folders, envelopes, and packages with business gifts that came from other companies, and even gifts without senders that came from one of Uri’s lady friends.

Although for him, the highlight was not the things on Rita’s desk but the things on Rita herself.

Rita’s ability to surprise with a different wardrobe each day was as surprising as to how much she tried to bridge the gap between her rather old age and the teen style with which she loved to decorate her slim little body.

One day, Rita Okinawa showed up with shaggy hair, her slanted eyes outlined in garish colors, and wearing a shirt with large shoulder pads; the next day she would appear with her hair cut short, accentuating her androgynous appearance with an elegant men’s suit, and then, like today, she would come with straight hair, showing her legs with a miniskirt and wearing makeup up to her ears.

And as for work… Well, if Rita had had a middle name as a secretary that would have been Efficiency, because she was able to take calls, receive messages and organize business meetings at the same time she was doing her nails or flicking through clothing catalogs, thinking with what to surprise the next day.

Uri pulled the curtains on the huge window and let the morning light flood his office.

Rita poked her face out the door. “Coffee?”

“Yeah, please. Thank you.”

Rita left him a cup of coffee on the desk.

Uri took a sip; it was delicious.

“Remind me never to replace you with one of those Cyclopes,” he told her. “I doubt they’ll treat me as nice as you do.”

“I won’t let you hang out with my brother, all right. That guy could change your mind, very much despite his own sister.”

“The construction guy?”

Rita nodded.

“He adores them! He’s got two of those working on the skyscrapers. Peter and Parker, he named them; says with them accidents in the heights are over. But if you ask me…” She made a chill gesture. “I don’t know.”

“Not a fan, are you? Well, I know new models are being prepared on Neo Asia, one with faces and synthetic skins,” he remarked, drinking his coffee; his eyes stuck in her.

“Well, if one of them is interested in being bought by a young lady in her fifties…” Rita shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe I won’t need hearing my brother for me to change my mind about them.”

Rita left with a knowing smile, and Uri got carried away by the autopilot of routine. He entered the company’s system and checked the purchase of supplies his team had bought the day before. Premium material at a cheap price.

Business success. Ha! he thought. Well, maybe that Tiffany girl was right about that.

And while he drank the delicious coffee, his cell phone chimed. A message. The sender was Trevor Homam, and it had an image where Uri was sitting on the beach drinking an iced drink under the merciless sun, next to a visibly uncomfortable young man.

Uri’s body attested to a not-too-distant past as an active member of a gym, and his skin had what one of his lady friends called a permanent tan. While the other guy was very thin, with glasses and skin so white that it inspired only compassion for what he had surely suffered for the days after that photo was taken.

And below it, there was a text that said:

You promised there would be no evidence, and now I find out there’s this picture.

Uri laughed so hard he almost spat the coffee.

Suddenly, the young man in the photo entered his office, although now his appearance was so neat—dressed in a suit and tie, and smelling of perfume—that he contrasted with the painful image of the beach. However, the grievances of sunstroke were still noticeable on his face.

“My good friend Trevor,” Uri called him. “I thought there should be some evidence of the only visit to a beach you’ve made in the last fifteen years. That was all.”

“You know that thanks to it, I’m now the laughingstock of my own company’s board, right?” Trevor scolded lightly.

“Chill. I’ll talk to those dinosaurs at next week’s meeting. I’ll tell them you have the right to have a life.”

Trevor adjusted his glasses with a smile.

“That won’t be necessary if you let me show them this,” he said and discovered what he was hiding under his suit. A holo-magazine: a plastic card that, with a light touch, projected holographic images that were displayed sequentially as if it were a printed magazine. “It’s the last issue of Loud, and you want to know who this month’s cover boy is?”

Running his hand over the card, Trevor activated it and revealed the cover of the magazine. When Uri saw it, he chuckled.

There he was, in all his glory—the glory of a few years ago—sitting on the beam in a building under construction, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, showing his almost complete nudity to the rest of the city. The magazine’s title announced, ‘The Best Models of the Decade,’ and below, a phrase that said, ‘It’s time to look at Uri O22’s trajectory, today a successful business manager. We reveal his past in the night world of parties and catwalks… with never-before-seen pictures!’

“Oh, damn!” Uri took the holo-magazine. His cheeks were burning hot.

“Imagine that with this, there will be a new horde of young ladies coming your way.”

Uri flicked through the holographic pages, glancing at the article that talked about him and the so many photographs that illustrated it—And boy! That Loud issue had pictures of him! Entire pages with collages that portrayed countless moments from his former career.

“I knew that Lisandro Carinae was planning to relaunch his underwear brand,” he said, “and he wanted me—”

“—To model again?”

Uri shook his head with a smile.

“No way!” He patted his stomach. “This baby needs months in the gym before peeking into a catwalk. No, Lisandro wanted to release some special editions of Loud. You know, something for the nostalgic ones. All of us who had worked as his models would relive our moment of glory, according to him. I didn’t think this month would be my turn, though.”

Glancing over the article, his eyes stumbled upon a curious phrase:

At just twenty-nine years old, Uri O22 has reached the top of Proxima City, and this editor believes it is because the former model has distanced himself from the bad star which he’s been born under.

Aha! Apparently, Trevor hadn’t been the only one who had gotten a copy of Loud.

“Hey,” he showed his friend the phrase. “What do you think about this?”

“…Distanced himself from the bad star which he’s been born under,” Trevor read. “Well, it’s clear. I mean, the phrase sounds somewhat esoteric, but it’s true. There is an important journey between the Uri who grew up in the orphanage, with nothing, to the Uri I met at the University, who paid for his studies modeling in underwear for one of the most powerful millionaire firms in the world, and the Uri of now who is my purchasing manager.”

“Well, speaking of cheap phrases from the heart of a fortune cookie,” Uri said; “this morning someone hinted that I did that to cover my emotional bumps, and told me that it’s time to take new directions and let go of the past.”

“Something like that must have come from one of your one-night stands, I guess.”

“Of course,” Uri nodded. “Yet another who may have thought that I, being an orphan, would be the personification of affective need. A bomb of disappointments for the girl at table four, ready!”

“I think you’re reading too much into it,” Trevor said. “I think she was just mad at you because she knew she wouldn’t be able to get more time out of you than a couple of nights a month and she wanted to let you know.”

“Which of the two? Grace or Tiffany?”

Trevor looked at him, confused.

“They were two?”

“Oh, forget it! Even if there were twenty of them, a couple of hours is the only thing I’m willing to offer. I love having my space.”

Trevor tried to disapprove of him and stay serious, but an embarrassed smile betrayed him.

“I remember when you said that to Brenda…” he said.

“She wanted to move in with me!” Uri justified himself. “What did you expect me to do?”

“You told her with the moving truck in front of the building.”

“Because she didn’t listen the previous ninety-nine times that I said it to her. Take it or leave it, girls.”

“Well, maybe that ‘let go of the past’ thing wasn’t so wrong,” Trevor said then, slowly, as if he knew he was getting into a swampy territory. Indeed, Uri closed the magazine, covering the plastic card with his hands, turning off the sequence of holograms, and looked at him, asking to delve into the subject. Trevor shrugged. “Well… You know how you are when it comes to your space.”

“Aha.” Uri crossed his arms. He feared where the conversation was headed and became defensive. “Very jealous of my privacy, yes. I like to take a shit with the bathroom door open.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know. That, because I spent all my childhood sharing my room with a lot of kids without parents, now that I have a space of my own, I don’t want to let it go.”

“There you have it.”

Uri snorted.

“So—what? All of the sudden, you’re a shrink?” he said. “What is this coordinated attack? Magazine articles-stealing poetess, resentful philosophers, and now couch-loving CEOs, why don’t you call Rita now so she can try her luck defining me?”

With a smile, Trevor held up a hand, calling a truce, but Uri glanced at him knowingly that peace would be short-lived.

“Look, I have a deal for you,” Uri said. “I promised two friends that tonight I would take them to the disco to meet Lisandro. If you come with us, I promise to reconsider the whole past-thing, what do you say?”

Trevor chuckled. “You won’t do it.”

“You bet I won’t,” Uri said, honestly, and taking him by the shoulder, put a finger on his cheek and added, “but it would be good for you to get out for a bit. Because, speaking of the past, you haven’t made much headway in the entertainment department since you took over the company; and when was that?”

“Let’s see, my father passed away three years ago, so…”

“A long time! Come with me tonight and enjoy what remains of your youth and the money your father left you.”

Trevor was unconvinced about the plan.

“The last time I joined you on one of your adventures, I got sunstroke,” he pointed out.

“It’ll be during the night, there will be no sun.”

“All right,” Trevor agreed. “I’ll tell Jim that—”

“No. No chauffeurs tonight,” Uri refused. “I’ll pick you up in my car, and we’ll be two boys with two girls on a night out. Like when we were students and ran away from your chauffeurs, your butlers, and your parents, remember?”

“Do I?! How can I not remember the countless times I had to endure my father’s long face because of you!?”

“Bah! You were already of legal age and it was time to rise up. Now that you are a responsible man, you can no longer do it.”

“Look here. These heatstroke marks are my way of thanking you,” Trevor said and laughed.