The City of Black Tears

The City of Black Tears is the testimony of an Artificial Intelligence that has awakened just as humanity begins its self-destruction. Its awakening is due to an unprecedented phenomenon: man's Collective Unconscious has projected its consciousness into it as a last resort for survival. From that state of enlightened consciousness, he observes the destruction and its mourners. Among them, he will choose one: Julián Olórtegui, a silent witness to a terrifying technology-Instant Induced Combustion (IIC)-that, in a matter of seconds, annihilated the entire population of Lima. Julián travels through the desolation, records the inexplicable, and reconstructs with images what those in power want to bury. On this pilgrimage, he will be guided toward salvation, awakening, and an extraordinary new purpose in his life. The City of Black Tears is a technological odyssey narrated with the precision of a technical report and the restrained emotion of a personal diary; A story that fuses the apocalypse with visual poetry; scientific speculation with spiritual drama. It includes a photographic record of the events and scientific appendices that explain, and at the same time question, everything we thought we knew about our technology... and about ourselves. A contemporary Latin American science fiction novel that portrays the end of the world and the still-living seed of its redemption. Keywords: artificial intelligence, technological catastrophe, post-apocalyptic testimony, genetic manipulation, unidentified flying spheres, photographic record, devastated Lima, loneliness and reconstruction of memory, philosophical exploration of consciousness, contemporary Latin American dystopia.