Erasing Buenos Aires

The rain in Buenos Aires didn’t fall anymore; it crawled down the sides of buildings like liquid chrome, engineered nanobots masquerading as water. Nothing authentic remained in this city that had once throbbed with passion and life—nothing except the memories of two old friends.

Matías arrived first at what remained of El Histórico, a café that had survived three economic collapses, two revolutions, and one alien visitation. They’d preserved the façade, at least—holographic projections of peeling paint and rustic wood—while the guts of the place had gone sleek, all sharp edges and self-cleaning surfaces that reflected nothing.

He ordered a “Torino Classic,” synthetic coffee with enzyme boosters designed to replicate the jittery authenticity of caffeine without the environmental impact. The barista—a GeneTech human with modified retinas that scrolled customer preferences across her vision—nodded wordlessly. Her movements were efficient, soulless, like a machine mimicking what baristas used to be.

Damián appeared ten minutes later, his face the same yet different. Age was optional now, of course, but he’d chosen to keep some lines, some character. A fucking rebel, even after all this time.

“Thirty years, boludo,” Damián said, slipping into the booth. The bench recognized his DNA signature and adjusted to his spine curvature. “Though I suppose we’ve ‘seen’ each other plenty.”

Matías snorted. “VidChat isn’t seeing. Those augmented projections make everyone look like they just stepped out of a fashion sim.”

“Says the man with the liver implant that filters toxins in real-time.” Damián grinned, but it didn’t reach his eyes. Not entirely.

“Necessity, not vanity,” Matías responded, tapping his abdomen where the medical tech hummed beneath synthetic skin. “Remember when we used to get drunk on Quilmes and feel it the next day?”

“Remember when ‘coffee’ came from fucking plants?” Damián picked up his steaming cup—ceramic, a pretentious touch in an age of self-heating polymers—and sipped. “They say this tastes exactly like the real thing. But they don’t know, do they? The kids. They’ve never had the real thing.”

“That’s progress for you.” Matías leaned back, his eyes traveling over the holographic newspapers floating above neighboring tables, headlines about water wars and Mars colonies scrolling by silently. “You can’t miss what you never had.”

“But we do,” Damián said simply. “We miss the fuck out of it.”

Neither spoke for a while after that, letting the artificial sounds of clinking cups and murmured conversations wash over them. The café’s ambiance director was good—they’d programmed just the right level of background noise, the exact acoustic profile of how El Histórico had sounded when it was just a café, not a historical recreation of one.

“Remember that Boca match against River? 2028?” Matías suddenly said, his voice taking on the reverent tone reserved for sacred memories. “Last season before they moved everything into the VR leagues.”

Damián’s face cracked open in a genuine smile, the kind that even the best emotional modification implants couldn’t fake. “How could I forget? Fucking Martínez with that bicycle kick in the 89th minute. The stadium nearly collapsed.”

“And that lunatic with the drum who kept banging even after security tried to take it away—”

“—and the old guy who’d been going to matches since the ’70s, telling everyone about Maradona—”

“—and the smell! Mierda, the smell of sweat and beer and those choripán they used to sell outside.”

“They’ve got those smell generators in the VR suites now,” Damián said, something bitter creeping into his voice. “They say they’ve perfectly replicated everything.”

“But it’s not the same,” Matías finished. “You can’t replicate the feeling of not knowing what would happen next. The fucking unpredictability of it all.”

Damián nodded, reaching inside his jacket. He pulled out something small and flat—an actual photograph, yellowed and creased. Matías stared at it like it was an artifact from another civilization. In a way, it was.

The photo showed two young men, arms slung around each other’s shoulders, blue and gold Boca jerseys stained with beer, their faces contorted in mid-shout. La Bombonera loomed behind them, a cathedral of concrete and passion.

“I had it preserved,” Damián explained. “Cost me three months’ universal credit. They had to use some special process—photographs don’t last anymore, not without intervention.”

Matías reached for it, his fingers trembling slightly. “We were so fucking young.”

“And stupid,” Damián added. “Remember how we thought the world was ending?”

“Wasn’t it, though?”

The world hadn’t ended. Not precisely. It had transformed, cell by cell, pixel by pixel, until the analog reality they’d known had been replaced by something cleaner, more efficient, less human.

“I’m going in for the procedure tomorrow,” Damián said suddenly, his words dropping like stones into still water.

Matías didn’t need to ask what procedure. The Memory Extraction and Neural Drainage—MEND, they called it, with the sick irony that only corporate branding could achieve. The ultimate disconnection. People did it for all sorts of reasons: traumatic memories, failed loves, unbearable loss. Sometimes, just to make space for new memories in aging brains that couldn’t afford the premium neural storage upgrades.

“Why?” The question emerged as barely a whisper.

Damián’s eyes—still the same deep brown they’d always been, at least he hadn’t changed that—fixed on a point somewhere beyond Matías’s shoulder. “Because it hurts too much. Remembering what we had. What’s gone. I look at you, and I see everything we’ve lost.”

“So you’re just going to erase me? Thirty years of friendship?”

“It’s not just you. It’s… everything. The world we knew. I can’t live with one foot in the past anymore.” Damián pushed the photograph across the table. “You keep this. I won’t need it.”

Matías felt something inside him fracture—something organic, something that all the augmented reality and synthetic enzymes in the world couldn’t fix. “So this is goodbye, then. For real.”

“For real,” Damián confirmed, the words heavy with finality. “No more annual VidChats with their awkward silences. No more pretending we still have anything in common besides memories of a world that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Matías wanted to argue, to grab his friend by his genetically optimized shoulders and shake him until he came to his senses. But what would be the point? They were relics, both of them. Analog men in a digital world.

“Does it hurt?” he asked instead. “The procedure.”

“They say no. In and out in an hour. Very precise. They can remove specific memory threads without damaging adjacent neural pathways.” Damián’s lips curved in what might have been a smile in another lifetime. “Convenient, no? Like editing a document. Delete the paragraphs you don’t like.”

The rain outside intensified, the nanobots programmed to cleanse atmospheric pollutants working overtime. Tomorrow, the sky would be artificially, perfectly blue.

“One last thing,” Damián said, reaching into his pocket again. This time he pulled out a small device, no bigger than a fingernail. “If you ever change your mind… if you ever want to follow me into blissful ignorance… this has the access codes to my memory backup. They keep them, you know. In case you change your mind.”

He placed it next to the photograph. Two relics—one of what had been, one of what could be erased.

“Don’t you want to know what you’ll remember instead?” Matías asked, not touching either object. “What they’ll replace me with in your mind?”

“Nothing. Just a void where you used to be. Better than a lie.” Damián stood, his movement triggering an automatic adjustment in the table height. “That’s what I requested, anyway. A clean excision.”

Matías remained seated as Damián walked away. He didn’t watch him go. Instead, he stared at the photograph and the memory key, side by side on the slick surface of a table designed to repel any stain or mark, to remain pristine no matter what was spilled upon it.

When he finally looked up, Buenos Aires stretched before him through the café window—gleaming, efficient, soulless. Somewhere in that labyrinth of augmented reality and corporate architecture, a machine was preparing to erase him from his best friend’s mind.

He picked up his synthetic coffee and drained it in one swallow. The enzymes hit his bloodstream with calculated precision, stimulating exactly the right receptors to simulate the jolt of real caffeine. Perfect in every way, except for what mattered.

The rain continued to fall, washing away nothing.