Cuando cae la noche

Ricardo Muñozo was famous, and notorious, for winning almost every case. He was a sought-after criminal lawyer, hired for cases considered simply unsolvable. There was hardly anyone who could empathize with his clients the way he could. He analyzed their psychology, retraced the paths they had taken, and above all, he didn’t rely solely on texts, words, and vague statements. He became one with the material, researched relentlessly, visited crime scenes, attended interrogations, and grilled law enforcement officers. He knew how corrupt this world was and how little chance you had when dealing with a powerful member of the so called elite. Money and power took precedence over justice and morality. That had always been the case, but it didn’t stop Ricardo from trying everything he could to reclaim at least a fragment of justice. While many appreciated his work... and he even received awards and bonuses that didn’t interest him in the slightest, he was, of course, a thorn in the side of others and their hypocritical machinations. He was a disruptive force who had been poking around in dubious deals and plans for far too long, someone who saw more than others and either passed that knowledge on or kept it to himself to use at the right moment.

Since winning his first case, he had been on a long list of those meant to be silenced. He repeatedly found himself in dangerous situations and carefully laid traps, his life was constantly at risk… but he didn’t give up. He was stubborn, this was his life, his destiny.. the only thing that truly tied him to this world. He felt he had lost everything else, or else saw normal things like friendships or intimate relationships as permanently endangered because of him… because of his stubbornness, his damn sense of justice, and his almost manic compulsion to put behind bars those who always managed to slip their heads out of the noose.

A murder case captivated the media. What became public was what they wanted people to see, what they wanted them to believe. A man was found dead in his car. It looked like suicide, but he was no stranger to the public eye. He was one of those who had fought for the truth for years, who had tried to stop those building a system designed to make humanity more transparent. Free will was to be dismantled in a way people wouldn’t notice, would even welcome, feeling protected and secure. And so the murdered man was labeled a psychopath and conspiracy theorist… someone who resisted progress and backed it up with lies and hate speech. Of course. What else? Mark M. wasn’t someone who raised his voice, he simply kept filing requests. FOIA requests, for years in different states. On the same projects, the same pilot programs, the same interfaces that officially had nothing to do with one another. He compared tenders, secured technical documentation before it disappeared, transcribed city council meetings that were never published, and layered data sets on top of each other until it became clear that decisions were being recommended long before anyone officially made them. He didn’t publish manifestos, just tables, heat maps, temporal overlaps between police presence and social welfare checks, between insurance adjustments and municipal risk assessments. After his death, his applications became campaigns, his data sets became shadow archives, and a man who wanted to show how decisions were made became someone who allegedly couldn’t accept that progress requires sacrifice.

Ricardo dropped everything, canceled all his appointments, grabbed the case, and took on the defense of a dead man. And once again, he let himself get carried away, doing his own research, hoarding the information he found, hiding it while making sure people knew he had it and would use it. And so, sitting in the dock was a man of rank and renown, whose name stood for progress around the world, surrounded by a squadron of defenders who could not have been more corrupt. A name invoked in political speeches whenever modernization was mentioned. A name featured in funding programs when cities were to become smarter. A name that declared in interviews that security was not a restriction, but a service. Vax was the founder of CiCrit, an infrastructure group that digitized management systems, bundled data streams, and provided decision-making models that supposedly only made recommendations. His software ran in traffic control centers, police databases, social welfare offices, insurance companies, and border authorities. He had created platforms that, eventually, no one could afford to do without. He was considered the architect of the efficient city, someone who turned chaotic administrations into predictable systems. Ministries consulted him, local authorities signed framework agreements, and international committees invited him to define standards that did not yet exist.

And now he sat there, flanked by lawyers who knew every procedural error before it even happened, looking like a man who knew that even a guilty verdict would be a mere formality. The case dragged on,  all the evidence Ricardo presented was shattered, ignored, or twisted. But that was normal.. it was part of the fight, and it didn’t make him give up. On the contrary, he kept finding new angles, new reasons to reopen the case. Neither the court nor political allies could stop him. After six months, the first dissenting voices emerged. The media grew curious, and some even dared to spread anonymous theories online. A picture began to form, one that was never meant to be seen. And suddenly the dynamics shifted, and Vax found himself in a serious impasse that even his money and connections could not overcome.

What Ricardo found was not a secret folder, not a spectacular leak. It was an add-on module in an early contract from CC, inconspicuously worded, responsible for “prioritization.” This module stored ratings and how often they were confirmed. Three identical ratings and one risk were considered stable. Three checks on the same street. Three checks of the same family. Three appearances by the same patrol. After that, it was no longer suspicion, it was status. Ricardo revealed timelines, he showed how a single algorithmic flag triggered actions that then served as proof of its own correctness. In one case, the chain ended in a deadly operation. The “stabilized risk profile” was months old and had never been questioned. The pilot program from which it originated had been personally approved by Vax. A test environment under real conditions. For the first time, the path could be traced. From a calculation to a decision. From a decision to a death.

Vax didn’t intervene because he was “monitoring.” And slowly, people began to understand that progress didn’t always mean someone was watching. Sometimes it just meant no one was objecting anymore. The court found it proven that the pilot program approved by Vax generated operational risk profiles whose stabilization was based not on new behavior, but on repeated actions. That these profiles influenced official decisions without any mandatory human reassessment. And that in this specific case, such a stabilized status caused a police operation that ended fatally. According to the judgment, Vax had put a system into circulation whose decision-making logic was capable of generating self-confirming measures beyond effective control. Guilty of negligent homicide as an indirect perpetrator and commercial fraud against public contractors for providing a flawed decision-making model. Prison sentence. No parole.

Ricardo was satisfied, but not content. Now he wanted to connect it to the whole world. To show that everything Vax had done served one purpose: to confine humanity.. and that it had happened under the watchful eyes of politicians, celebrities, and other powerful figures who had offered money and assistance. And then one thing led to another. A shot in the open street, a struggle for survival that lasted months. Threats that couldn’t be traced. Ricardo was meant to be erased along with all the evidence he had gathered. But he was lucky, a small organization took it upon itself to protect him, to give him a new life… to make him invisible. At first, Ricardo resisted. He didn’t consider his life valuable enough to justify all that effort. He wanted to keep researching, keep analyzing… stand in court again and prove he would not be intimidated. But he wasn’t given that choice. The media published the date of his death, a funeral was held.

And so Ricardo Muñozo became a man who would be forgotten, while a man named Joaquin had to begin a new life far away from it all, because inside his head was enough evidence that had to be protected. It had to be kept alive at all costs.

When Joaquin picked up the newspaper that day, translated the French words, and realized that Vax was free again, he promised himself that one day he would step out of hiding, but cautiously, carefully… until then, he would play the lonely man who was rarely seen, who never left his house, who lived in a place where no one paid attention to him…

FYI: Some parts of this storyline were inspired by conversations with friends, about real events. A few elements were revised with the help of ChatGPT, which might be noticeable in places.