The morning in Mexico City was dense, one of those where the sun is already warm before eight and the smog looks like a sheet stretched across the sky. Damián got off the subway car with his backpack on his back, feeling strange: as if the city were speaking another language. The faces around him were moving hurriedly, but he no longer felt rushed.
He rode the escalator past students with headphones, people eating tamales for breakfast, and vendors selling pirated USB drives. When he stepped out onto the street, he took a deep breath. It was hard to call it "air."
The Technological Institute campus looked the same, but it didn't feel the same. As he crossed the main gate, the noise of students, honking horns, and the wheels of wheeled backpacks mingled with a feeling he couldn't shake.
"Hey, Damián!" a voice pulled him out of his reverie.
It was Sofía, his internship partner. She was carrying a thick folder under her arm and her hair tied back in a hasty braid.
"Have you submitted the final log yet? You disappeared," she said with a half smile.
"I went south... with my family. I just got back yesterday."
"Well, I hope they don't catch you off guard. Professor Jiménez is sharpening his teeth," he joked, but with some nervousness.
Damián frowned.
"Why?"
"I don't know... he's weird." He rejected Roberto's report without explanation. And he asked to review all the projects with "more rigor," he said.
Damián nodded, without saying anything else.
He entered the administrative building. In the main hallway, the fans were turning slowly, and the institutional wallpaper was peeling from a corner near the ceiling. The "Academic Excellence 2013" plaques still hung like relics from an era no one remembered.
As he approached the school check-in window to check his status, his cell phone vibrated:
[Institutional Notification]
Subject: Summons – Academic Coordination of Systems Engineering
Date: today
Time: immediately
Reason: Final evaluation of professional internship – irregularity detected.
Please report to Professor Orlando Jiménez.
Damián felt a knot in his stomach.
He put the phone away. He turned around.
In Hallway B, where the professors' offices were, the atmosphere was different. Fewer students. More silence. The smell of old coffee. The door at the back had a rusty plaque:
"Professor Orlando Jiménez – Academic Coordination of Systems Engineering"
He knocked.
"Come in," said a dry voice on the other end.
Damián pushed the door and entered.
The air was heavy. The blinds were down. The desk was filled with folders, an open laptop, and a handleless ceramic mug. Sitting in front of him, with an impenetrable expression, was Professor Jiménez.
Bald, with a neatly trimmed mustache, and a light blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the forearm. His voice had the same tone as his face: he didn't ask for dialogue, he gave verdicts.
"Sit down, García."
Damián obeyed.
He knew something was wrong.
But he had no idea how wrong.
Damián sat at the desk, noticing how the chair had one leg shorter than the others. The room was dim, with the only ray of light coming through the dusty blinds.
Jiménez didn't look at him immediately. He was typing something on his laptop, slowly, as if each letter were a decision. He finally looked up. His eyes were gray, lifeless.
"García... your final internship report presents a serious problem," he said, as if talking about the weather.
"What kind of problem?" Damián asked, remaining calm.
Jiménez slid a folder toward him.
Inside were printouts of his report with several highlighted pages. Beside it, a printed document with screenshots, excerpts from technical articles, and source code.
"This," the professor said, tapping his finger on the sheet, "matches word for word with content we found online. Entire paragraphs. Traced diagrams. Even the function names."
"That's… impossible," Damian shook his head. "I wrote that entire report. I used references, yes, but every part of the development was mine. The code is mine. Even the one that failed. I did it from scratch, here in the labs."
"It's funny how they always say the same thing," Jiménez interrupted, as if he'd heard the whole thing before. "What you can't explain to me is how that code, yours, has identical traces to a Russian repository published three years ago."
Damian frowned.
"Russian repository?"
"Don't act naive, Garcia. This isn't about whether you copied a line or the entire block. It's about whether your work is statistically impossible to be original with that level of coincidence."
Damian felt the air in the office thicken. He looked at the documents. Some graphics did look similar, but he hadn't copied them. Many were generic, taken from standard manuals. Others simply agreed because they solved the same problem.
"Who reviewed this? You?"
"Me and another member of the academic council. You're not being judged by me alone."
"Can I appeal?"
"Not at this stage. The resolution was delivered this morning. Officially, you're expelled for dishonest conduct and a serious breach of academic integrity."
Damián didn't move.
He didn't even blink.
He only heard the whir of a fan in the corner of the office.
Jiménez closed the laptop with a soft click.
"You knew it wasn't enough to be good, García. There are ways. Processes. Respect for academic work."
Damián stood up. He didn't apologize. He didn't plead.
He looked at the man in front of him as if he were looking at a corrupted file no longer worth recovering.
"You made a mistake," he said.
Jiménez raised an eyebrow.
"Oh, really?"
Damián nodded, his voice low but firm.
"You're going to regret it."
And he left without closing the door.
The building's hallways seemed longer than ever.
Damián walked with the measured stride of someone about to explode but can't afford to break down. He didn't cry. He didn't clench his fists. He just walked, while the voices around him—greetings between classmates, jokes about exams, the sound of an old printer—seemed like echoes of a life he no longer belonged to.
He took the stairs two at a time, dodging backpacks, posters taped up with masking tape, and indifferent glances. No one knew what had happened. No one had any reason to know.
He went out to the central courtyard.
The sun beat down, reflecting off the white tiles. A group of students were laughing in front of a bench. One of them was Luis, his classmate since the first semester.
"Hey, Damián! Did you finish your internship yet? What did they say?"
Damián paused for only a second.
"They expelled me," he said.
Luis frowned, as if he hadn't understood the word.
"What?"
"Plagiarism, according to them," he replied, emotionless. "Although it wasn't like that."
Luis fell silent. So did the group. The laughter died quickly.
Damián kept walking.
He didn't run. He didn't flee.
He just walked out, leaving behind classrooms, doors, schedules, and everything he'd once thought mattered.
The city outside was the same as always, but Damián wasn't anymore.
He walked aimlessly. He crossed streets without looking at the light. He went into a convenience store, bought a bottle of water, and left without drinking it.
Finally, he sat down on a park bench three blocks from campus. Surrounded by withered trees and battered benches. Children running around. People eating lunch. Pigeons hunting for crumbs.
He squeezed the bottle cap until his palm hurt.
Then, without thinking, he activated the system.
"User in altered emotional state."
"Frustration and resolution levels detected."
"Do you wish to activate the task-based evolution module?"
"What's that?" he murmured.
"Challenge reward system. As you complete measurable achievements in the real world, additional modules, resources, and knowledge will be unlocked."
"You don't need external validation. Just results."
Damián closed his eyes.
For the first time, he didn't feel like he'd lost.
He felt like a weight had been lifted from him.
He no longer had to prove anything to Jiménez.
Not to that university.
Not to anyone.
He just had to build.
"Activate it," he thought.
"Module activated: Task-reward cycle."
Task 1: Demonstrate your capabilities outside the system.
Objective: Create a working prototype without institutional support.
Reward: Access to a level 1 industrial expansion module."
Damian opened his eyes. The sky was the same.
But the world was no longer the same.
"Task 1: Create a functional prototype without institutional support."
"Reward: Industrial Expansion Module – Level 1."
Damián read the mission for the third time.
He was sitting on the park bench, watching people walk by. Everything was still spinning. But inside, something had stopped. Or maybe the other way around: something had started.
"What is considered a functional prototype?" he thought.
"A device, system, or software with demonstrable utility. It must be built with own resources or indirectly sourced legally. It cannot be supported by any educational institution, private or state."
"And how will you know if it works?"
"I will know."
Gaia's response wasn't arrogant. It was confident. Like a mother who doesn't need to prove her love.
"Then let's do it," she said quietly, to herself.
"Assist module activated."
"I suggest developing a microcontroller with our own architecture for startup."
"Capacity: low. Cost: minimal. Estimated time: 6 days."
"And then?"
"That's up to you."
Damián took out his notebook. He began writing quickly, scribbling ideas, possible designs. A simple motherboard. Internal instructions. A real function: environmental monitoring, energy optimization, whatever.
He felt like he had fire in his veins.
Suddenly, Gaia spoke again. But her tone changed. It was less technical. More… present.
"They kicked you out of their system."
"So now you'll build a new one."
Hours later, in his apartment, Damián vigorously cleaned his desk. He removed old papers, unused cables, dirty dishes. He opened a box of components he'd had for months: resistors, sensors, a small OLED display, unsoldered microcontrollers.
"Bill of materials detected. Possible schematic preloaded."
The interface projected a mental model: a small board with an integrated circuit, a Wi-Fi connection, and an embedded operating system, based on one Damián had never heard of. But which he now understood perfectly.
"Proposed function: Urban environmental monitoring device. CO₂, temperature, and humidity readings. Data sent to a mobile app. Code: 100% user-developed."
Damián nodded.
He didn't need more classrooms. Or more signatures.
He just needed a soldering iron, a notebook, and enough silence to create.
And the system, for the first time, treated him not as a student, but as an authority.
The old fan whirred in its corner, pushing hot air against the peeling wall. On the desk, an orderly mess of cables, chips, solder joints, and sensors spread out like a small, makeshift space station. The heart of NovaCore's first physical node.
Damián leaned forward, the magnifying glass over a condenser lens, and adjusted the terminals with surgical precision. Gaia didn't speak. She only projected small auxiliary windows in his mind with instructions, codes, schematics, suggestions. As if her knowledge presented itself to him just when he needed it, without forcing anything.
"Soldering correct."
"Voltage spikes within range."
The board had a name already mentally engraved: ENV-01.
An environmental sensor that would read data from the urban environment and send it, in real time, to a lightweight mobile interface. Simple wasn't trivial. It was functional. What could show, without shouting, that he knew. That he could.
In his notebook, Damián had already outlined more ideas:
Solar energy controller.
Autonomous cooling system for low-power devices.
Preliminary design of a modular graphics card.
Everything was connected. Each project was another root sprouting from his mind into soil that had previously seemed dry.
He stood up and walked over to the window.
Outside, Mexico City breathed like an immense, indifferent animal. Streetlights, flat roofs, trucks roaring in the distance. In the sky, clouds with patches of light.
"You lost a student," he said softly.
"But I just won my freedom."
"Progress: 37% of the prototype complete."
"Estimate: 3 days remaining."
Damián smiled, tired but firm.
His new life hadn't begun at a graduation ceremony.
It had begun when he was kicked out.
And he chose not to knock on the door to go back inside.
But build your own.