Haus des Blicks, a few days later.

When Homero was finally able to write more than twenty-five thousand words, roughly fifty pages, he felt content. The numbers justified his effort, but immediately, doubt crept in, and he spent time revising, editing, correcting, modifying, and trimming until he was left with nothing again. He couldn't shout "Eureka!"

First, he concluded that his mistake lay in the planning of his ideas. Then, he assumed he didn't have a clear plot and subplots. He accused the former of not having defined characters, believing that the antagonists were lacking or lacked strength, thereby blurring the lines between his hero and heroine. He reviewed possible variations tirelessly, but without reaching a satisfactory outcome. So, he decided to simplify to the extreme, almost to the point of literary minimalism. He focused on the basics, without concern for the narrative genre, not aiming for anything more complex than simply telling something extracted from the depths of his being. He knew that readers appreciated nothing more than the intimate and unvarnished honesty of an author. And then he became distressed because he discovered that he simply had nothing to tell. He, the man nicknamed "Cuentero" since his youth, had no story to narrate! There were no more "chubby adventures" as his now geographically and emotionally distant friends used to call them. He wanted to tell something, but he had nothing. When it's common to have something and not want to narrate it, for any pretext or justification.

He searched the pages of diaries, in other people's conversations, on the internet, on social media, for something worthy of putting into a story. He looked at his seven cats, thinking about their adventures and those of their mothers, with whom, had they not gone away, he would have nine mouths to feed. Nothing moved him enough, whether out of habit or shock. He was simply blank, with nothing more to offer.

One afternoon, Homero approached a couple of young individuals in an attempt to exchange some ideas, hoping to refresh his perspective with their youthful point of view on the world. However, without explicitly stating it toward him, they labeled him not only as elder but "antique."

From their perspective, his ideas were outdated, surpassed by the social and technological transformations of the moment. In their eyes, his way of thinking was old-established, and his emotions and actions were mustiness. It was of little use, he concluded, to have been a university professor for over twenty years, concerned with current affairs, and even admired by some of his students. That was yesterday; today, he was seemingly a nobody. Despite not feeling old, he still had the same youthful curiosity to stay updated and was interested in all things current. He couldn't yet consider himself in full old age, at least not according to his own concept, which he remembered vividly.

This concept was instilled in him by his mother when, during his adolescence, she helped him create a theatrical character representing old age. It was then that he grasped this particular idea of senescence. So, how could he tell a story to today's generations? Were they really so different from those of the past? Or had he always been the different one? He had no doubt about it. While others were concerned with following fashion trends to feel part of a generation, identifying with a specific form of rebellion, and enjoying specific music and ways, he always distanced himself from the inclinations of his peers. In part, this explained why he didn't quite fit into society.

He was so aware of this that in his youth, he once wrote a poem titled "Salmon." He recalled some central verses: "I am like the salmon [...] / I sail / against customs, / and the need for common sense / becomes more common than usual. / In the struggle against the current, / I ignite. Yes, I resemble the salmon, / because my destiny indicates that I will inevitably die / in the jaws of others' envy, / or even better, / on the shore, / near the smooth bank, / resting my head / on your moist skin / satisfied with overcoming / the risks and obstacles / of your river of inconsistencies / where I will end up / exsanguinated and transformed / into what belongs to tomorrow / a seed".

The words of these young individuals made him feel disarmed and false. But his stubbornness would not waver in his determination to become the storyteller he dreamed of being.

* * *

On another evening, Homero entered a bookstore in search of innovations in storytelling, the construction of drama, adventure structuring, and updated language. He didn't resonate with anything he reviewed, except for the theoretical aspects. It wasn't because he disapproved of the new narrative; on the contrary, he was fascinated by the perspective from which the new generations approached existence and the new linguistic twists, albeit somewhat limited in their lexical range or repetitive in their relentless but marketable formula for structuring a story designed for consumption and disposal. Despite having a classical foundation, every era has its charm and disillusionment. In his case, it was that he only felt incapable of modernizing his way of expression to adapt to much more than just the demands of a literary market, without feeling that he was betraying his principles and, worst of all, his own identity. He refused to be something he was not, something he didn't understand or believed he didn't understand.

Then, on a dusty shelf, he found an old work he had always wanted to acquire, but had resisted buying due to its title, driven by a denial of the underlying reality. The book was, and will be for a long time, a slap in the face to the aspirations of any established or aspiring writer. As if Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet," Jean-Paul Sartre's "Nausea," and similar works weren't enough on the topic, Gabriel Zaid's "The Too Many Books" multiplied his unease, lacerating him like a poisoned dart with the toxin of reason. Mortally wounded, his long-embraced dream of becoming a writer with a capital "W," in the full extent of the pompous word, gave way to frustration. It placed Homero, according to him and much to his chagrin, as just another among the many unremarkable bards of the land. They were more comfortable crafting advertising texts or horrendous rap and reggaeton songs that showed no respect for the musicality of words, or like the indecent heralds of distorted news calamities in brief, insipid audio or video clips shared virulently through social networks, which were blessed for some and cursed for others.

Why bother adding one more book, one more piece of content to the rows of slumbering just works lined up on the shelves of bookstores, libraries, catalogs, digital clouds, or streaming platforms? Because it was true, in the information ecosystem, sometimes the publishing industry, driven by the enthusiasm of compulsive writers, overwhelmed society with works that, while important in some way or another, ended up forgotten and despised by the dwindling number of readers, more attached to the ephemeral than the memorable.

From this perspective, Homero found it senseless that influential bloggers of the moment, those replacements of yesterday's opinion leaders, simultaneously explored the experience of saying inconsequential hesitation in their vlogs and the poor way of writing their editorial debuts, whether fiction, poetic or essayistic. Churned out by editors more interested in profits and commissions than in contributing to cultural principles. The reason behind the newly coined term to complement the pandemic, the "infodemic," seemed to have become a virus as deadly as any other. If Ebola made organs bleed painfully, the infodemic dried up neurons and senses. In a comparative context, Homero found it difficult to become a bestseller or a Nobel laureate like other writers who achieved glory in the twentieth century, even at advanced ages. On the contrary, when compared to those of his generation who had made a career from a very early age, he felt that life had slipped away pursuing a crude daydream, perhaps born from his lack of talent or his stubbornness.

Homero could indeed be classified by age and year of birth, as well as certain stylistic details, within the so-called "Generación del Crack" (Crack Generation). However, since this group had always operated as a kind of exclusive writers club limited to seven friends, a rather pretentious attitude, and given that Homero preferred to avoid categorical labels, he remained an unclassifiable author, a speck in the literary mirror between the Latin American Boom and the subsequent apparent absence of schools and trends.

It was envy that gnawed at his spirit, he questioned, and tried to expiate his guilt by striving to amend his omissions in youth, both in literature and in the most intimate aspect of his love and sexual life, which was extremely ridiculous due to its nonexistence. With his caustic humor, he had at some point described it with self-critical irony in his titled "Notes of a Clueless Seducer."

So, whenever he sat down in front of the blank page, it wasn't the page and its emptiness that terrified Homero, but the awareness of the emptiness in his spirit and the feeling of uselessness that others instigated directly or indirectly regarding his craft, profession, and vocation. Worse, regarding his humanity.

This became even more complicated when he started feeling guilty of negligence and unable to even find credible excuses to justify his non-compliance or resignation. He thought about Orestes, the years they had spent making literature together, and it weighed heavily on him to recognize himself as a traitor to his loyal expectations. He had promised him a saga or a series of novels under the suggestive title of "Beastly Labyrinth," and it seemed more like Homero himself had become lost in the labyrinth of his egotistical pretensions and inconsistency.

Driven by dissatisfaction rather than negligence, Homero threw himself on the bed with an absurd idea in mind: what if he didn't actually exist and was only the product of someone else's imagination? If another writer, perhaps on another planet, was shaping him, what would the biography planned for him be like? That would explain why he was now in some kind of limbo or purgatory, waiting for the moment to kickstart his heroic adventure.

Once again, melancholy, not nostalgia or fatigue, would set the stage for a new reverie that, unlike others, instead of being taken as a catalyst, a starting point, or guidance from the depths or some kind of mysterious dimension, wouldn't end up drowned in The Sea of Oblivion and Absence.

* * *

Aboard the interplanetary shuttle Magellan-HS001A, in some remote corner of the universe.

I found myself adrift in the midst of an eerie calm, where the stars shimmered like gleaming jewels amidst the dark crests of an undulating cosmos, resembling an immeasurable ocean. To my surprise, a voice shattered the silence of the Magellan-HS001A interplanetary shuttle" —.giving voice to her narrator, Homero, Ana Gramma gradually began to rouse the other four crew members from their unconsciousness

"What has happened? Are we dead?," asked Asterion, the pilot, weakly as he returned to his senses. Meanwhile, Konstantinos half-opened his eyes and emitted a faint groan. Ulises struggled to raise a hand and pressed a button on the control panel, causing the window shutters to retract, deactivating the force field. I gazed through the translucent fuselage constructed from the geometry of a hyperbolic parabola and observed how the black hole receded, moving either slowly or swiftly, depending on one's interpretation of events. Its once fearsome spectacle, despite being depicted as a looming threat by astrophysicists and artists for years, now appeared to me as a captivating yet harmless monstrosity.

"Where are we?," I inquired of Ulises, the mission's captain, whom I had known since we became friends and adventure companions while practicing rafting on Earth and in the misty Gamma-33.

"I don't know, Homero. Nor can I explain whether we are alive, dead, or transformed into something else," he replied, his confusion evident as he touched his body and face, a gesture we all imitated.

"Well, for someone who's supposed to be very dead, I feel quite alive, and vice versa, for someone who's supposed to be very alive, I feel dead," remarked Alcides with his characteristic sense of irony.

"Perhaps death is not merely a change of state but a different form of perception," mused Asterion.

"Or science has been mistaken in its hypotheses about the effects of black holes —said Konstantinos—, and, given their cosmic magnificence, imagined them as voracious devourers of matter when perhaps they are nothing more than colossal cold fusion reactors, reorganizing accumulated energy, much like tea leaves swirling in a vortex stirred by a spoon."

"Or cows lifted by a tornado, or waste pulled down the toilet siphon," Alcides quipped, injecting his characteristic and somewhat irreverent humor into Konstantinos' explanatory profusion.

Ulises queried THETIS about our location and condition. A full-sized, female-like hologram materialized among us. This THETIS, or Space-Time Travel Intelligent System, was created by the Dédalus Consortium, utilizing Tetradic Harmonical Engineering Travel Implicit System engines—a fusion of artificial intelligence, Warp drives, and Tokamak fusion reactors. It allowed us to travel beyond the terrestrial solar system not only at speeds far surpassing that of light but also with safety, artificially inducing the controlled deformation of the space-time mesh and opening dimensional highways that facilitated instantaneous travel from one point in time and space to another, something we once believed to be confined to the realm of dreams. But what we had just experienced upon being swallowed by the black hole exceeded all expectations.

"Calculating... Navigation systems and shuttle integrity status: nominal. Location: unknown."

"Seek known references in the vicinity and extend the survey to the limits of the sensors. If necessary, conduct a visual comparison between star maps stored in the database and the environment to determine possible coherent juxtapositions with variants of viewpoints and perspectives," Ulises instructed.

"Sounding... Comparing... Nearest known object: SN-1984N," the sophisticated voice of the ship's AI, THETIS, responded.

"That's a supernova!" exclaimed Ulises in astonishment.

"Supernova SN-1984N located in the NGC-T184 galaxy, near the Aquarius constellation, visible alongside the galaxies of the T184 group between the asteroids (155) Scylla and (388) Charybdis," THETIS continued.

"We're beyond our galaxy! Damn it! We're either dead or we've left behind a colossal cemetery! Unbelievable!" Alcides exclaimed, his characteristic negativity evident as he rubbed his peculiar cat-like eyes, as described by Mármara, the girl Konstantinos was in love with.

"Vital signs of the crew remain unchanged," THETIS added. "No crew member has sustained injuries or radiation-related side effects."

"I don't know if it's a relief to know we're alive," Asterion pondered, caressing one of his horns.

As Alcides says, given the distance we've strayed from the original route, we can assume our acquaintances and anyone who might have come after us are already corpses. I had no idea what had happened and what might happen next. My companions, more knowledgeable about these physical sciences, engaged in a discussion that was part optimistic, part pessimistic, about our chances of survival. Since my fate was somehow predetermined, it wasn't something that concerned me. Ultimately, the only certainty in anyone's life is death, unless a miracle occurs.

In his role as captain, Ulises sought to maintain composure and instructed THETIS to provide certain information he deemed relevant to the case. He particularly requested a calculated and detailed recreation with which to speculatively project how we had ended up in this part of space, where we were headed, the time that had passed, and so on.

"Five minutes and forty-three seconds ago, two hundredths, shuttle Magellan-HS001A departed from the Dédalus-UCA1 spacecraft with a programmed straight trajectory toward the designated destination on the world CA001, to investigate a magnetic anomaly in its proximity..." THETIS projected a three-dimensional recreation as a holographic model on the control panel. I maintained my composure. None of the words in the three-dimensional recreation made any sense to me, except for one piece of information. According to THETIS, a little over five minutes had passed since we had departed from the mothership, but I remembered it had happened five days ago. Instinctively, I asked aloud what year it was, and THETIS interrupted its technical explanation to respond that it was the year 2035 AD. We all exchanged incredulous glances. Something had to be seriously wrong, or THETIS had suffered a major malfunction. Ulises requested Asterion to run a comprehensive system analysis. Everything seemed to be in order.

None of this had been part of the training, as far as I could recall, and to be honest, I was wondering at that moment what had motivated me to volunteer for this flight, undoubtedly one with an uncertain prognosis. I've never been quite sure if spacecraft fly or sail.

The anxiety of my mind continuing to draw a blank intensified these musings. It made me realize that my inability to create a satisfying storyline in the progress of the bestial Labyrinth saga I had promised to Orestes Crisomallón, my editor, had driven me to seek something so akin to an adventure within an adventure.

The gravity of the situation was that not only had my creativity floundered, but also those of us aboard that tiny spacecraft, resembling nothing more than an insignificant rowboat. We were adrift without a course in the vastest of oceans.

I remembered the moment when, back on Earth, Ulises had questioned if I was sure about joining the team—now debating what was preferable, seeking a way back or resigning ourselves to our fate. Meanwhile, my imagination transported me and made me see us as those ancient mariners, the pioneers of terrestrial cartography, who, due to an extraordinary storm, suddenly lost their bearings and found themselves lost and fearful in some remote, uncharted location. Beyond the edges of the map, even beyond the marginal illustrations warning of the likely existence of monstrous, terrible, and hungry creatures. It brought to mind that mid-20th-century melodramatic fiction that so amusingly and fantastically exposed the then-remote possibility of getting lost in space. But this was real and much farther away than the neighborhood of Alpha Centauri.

Only once before in my life on Earth had I experienced the feeling of being between Scylla and Charybdis. It was when I was rafting in the midst of the rapids of the Zambezi River, and I felt closer to the end than this time. Perhaps because back then, the mariners on the inflatable boat or canoe were determined to triumph over adversity and their own fears, while now, we all felt so content and confident in THETIS, the perfect artificial intelligence helmswoman capable of navigating any ship to safety after sailing through the stormy nebular darkness of Wangché shijai, that remote region of space known as The Sea of Oblivion and Absence.

I was lost in these thoughts while THETIS and the rest deliberated on what to do after. The rest? No, someone was missing from the group, but it seemed that only I had noticed.