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Mara Vale Sci-Fi Noir Saga
Irrevocable Authorization
Mara Vale was a logistics analyst for an interstellar transportation corporation. Her job involved inventory control, verifying shipments, and coordinating warehouses and downtime. Occasionally, she would calculate risk factors.
He moved millions of tons of goods from one place to another without anyone asking too many questions. He wasn't going to save the world; it was a mundane job. But he was well paid.
The building where I worked was suspended in one of the city's middle rings, a functional tower with no defined identity, full of silent elevators and corridors with neutral lighting. A typical office building.
From his desk, he could see a strip of orbital traffic and, a little further down, the urban sprawl below, made up of stacked blocks, slightly faded neon lights, and the ever-present, constant steam rising from kitchens. The place where he lived belonged to a typical metropolis.
—“If someone ever writes an epic about this,” Mara said one morning, without looking up from her monitor , “I hope they leave me out.”
—“They’d leave you out without even trying.”— her boyfriend joked from the kitchen —“Nobody makes movies about office calculators.”
Mara barely smiled. Her boyfriend came out of the kitchen, placed two steaming mugs on the apartment table, and sat down across from her. The coffee smelled good, not like their everyday coffee; he'd used the luxury package they kept for special occasions.
—“Did they confirm the transfer?”— he asked.
—“Not yet. Human Resources never confirms anything. They always ignore you by not responding to emails.”
—“That’s how corporations work.” —
—“Yes. They are a constant threat to your nerves.”
They had been living together for two years. The apartment was small, functional, with thin walls and windows that never fully closed. It wasn't a bad place, but it wasn't exactly ideal for putting down roots for long. It was within the lower urban ring, a convenient area for working nearby, but inconvenient for envisioning a future together.
They were planning to leave. Whenever they could, they talked about real parks, with trees that weren't holographic prints. Without being too pretentious, they liked bars where the alcohol didn't taste like disinfectant. They wanted to move to a more family-oriented environment, the kind where you see couples strolling leisurely, without private security, and without implicit contracts hanging in the air.
—“A normal life.”— he would say, always with a gentle irony, as if he knew he was asking for too much.
Mara nodded. Not because they weren't normal, but because they needed to believe that it was still possible to create a simple family, like in the old days.
That week, the atmosphere at the corporation had shifted, becoming somewhat more tense. It wasn't immediately apparent, but Mara sensed it the way one senses errors before they appear on screen. Meetings were canceled without much explanation, internal channels went silent, and orders were duplicated and then vanished.
One afternoon, while reviewing a series of routine authorizations, his supervisor stopped behind his desk and called out to him:
—“Okay.” —
She looked up.
—“Yes?” —
—“I need you to validate a transit package.” —
—“Sure, which one?” —
He projected the data onto his monitor. The file was said to be from a secondary zone, nothing remarkable. It looked like a standard reassignment procedure
—“But this isn’t my area,” Mara said , frowning. “It belongs to urban infrastructure.”
—“I know. But they need a logistics firm to complete the circuit.”
—“Why?” —
—“Because bureaucrats need a reason to allow circuit closures.” —
Mara looked at him. Her boss looked away to look at his phone.
—“Is there something strange?”— she asked.
—“Nothing out of the ordinary. Afterward, it needs to go to management for final authorization.”
It was a phrase she had heard hundreds of times. She signed it like any other. The system confirmed the validation with a green pulse.
—“Okay.”— he said —“Anything else?”
—“No. That’s all.”
The supervisor left without saying goodbye.
That night, when she returned home, she found her boyfriend looking at real estate ads projected onto the wall.
—“Look at this.”— he said —“Green area north of the city, independent air filtration. It’s a little farther away, but…”—
—“Okay.”— Mara replied , putting down her jacket —“They won’t sell it today. We’ll see about it this weekend.”
—“Is everything alright at work?”
Mara hesitated for just a second.
—“Yes. Everything's normal.”
They had dinner talking about small things. About an old series they wanted to rewatch. About a bar that had closed without warning. About the acid rain that had fallen that morning and left opaque stains on the windows.
—“Have you ever thought about leaving the planet?”— her boyfriend suddenly asked.
—“No.”— Mara said —“Why? Did you?”—
—“Yes, sometimes.”
—“So what’s stopping you?”
—“This,” he replied, gesturing around —“You. Us. The idea that something can still be fixed in this mess.”
Mara didn't answer. She stared at the distorted reflection of the city in the glass. The lights were flickering as if something were malfunctioning in the overall system.
Hours later, while he slept, Mara checked the authorization she had signed again on her personal computer. The file was there, clean, correct. Nothing indicated risk. Nothing pointed to consequences.
Only one detail bothered her: the area code. It was her area.
He tried to access additional information. The system responded with an automated message.
Unauthorized access.
—“Sure.”— I murmured —“Nothing out of protocol.” —
She closed the terminal and sat in the darkness for a long time, listening to the distant murmur of orbital traffic. She thought about parks, people gathered in bars, families strolling slowly. She thought about how easy it was to sign something when language was designed to say nothing.
She went to bed without waking him.
Before
falling asleep, an unsettling, persistent thought struck her: that
normality wasn't a state, but an extension. And that someone, at some
higher level, had just decided that this extension was over.
The next day, the manager summoned her late in the day, when the building was already beginning to empty and the lighting system was automatically dimming to save energy. Mara knew something was wrong even before she entered the office.
—“Close the door.”— he said, without looking at her.
He was a meticulous man, perhaps too meticulous for that industry. He wore a dark suit, and his hands were immaculate. On his desk there were no personal belongings, only a suspended screen and an unbranded mug.
—“Did something happen?”— Mara asked .
—“Nothing serious.”— he replied . —“In fact, it’s just a formality.”
That word always preceded trouble. He projected a file onto a multimedia screen. A long, boring technical dossier, saturated with codes and cross-references. Mara recognized the format instantly.
—“Scheduled demolition.”— said the chief —“Of urban infrastructure.”
—“That’s right. It’s not my area,” he replied.
—“I know,” he repeated, with the same cadence as his supervisor days before —“But logistical validation was needed to close the operational loop.”
Mara quickly scanned the document. Coordinates, deadlines, risk estimates. Everything seemed to fit together. But something didn't add up. While she was reading, and without the manager seeing, she started recording the conversation on her phone.
—“This is big.”— he said —“This isn’t just any old area.”
—“It’s an old building block. A run-down area.” — confirmed his boss.
—“Four blocks.”— she corrected —“And they’re not empty.”
The boss settled into his chair. For the first time, he looked her straight in the eye.
—“Mara, I’m not going to ask you to interpret the entire context. But we need to make it operational. It meets the basic evacuation standard. And it requires a final signature. That’s all I ask.”
—“But this should go through a full committee,” Mara said , incredulous.
—“And it will pass. But later.” — he said vaguely.
She looked at him silently.
The boss sighed, as if the scene was tiring him. He zoomed in on a section of the file. It seemed like a simple, almost banal order:
Demolition authorization due to structural risk pending .
A standard text, replicated thousands of times in the city.
—“I don’t have the authority to sign it.”— Mara said .
There was a tense silence. From outside came the distant hum of maintenance drones.
—“If you don’t sign,” he finally said , “someone else will. And that person won’t have your judgment or your care.”
Mara glanced down at the document. She saw the figures, the timelines, and the execution windows. She also saw that the manager was noticeably nervous. Something wasn't right.
—“Why the urgency? Why is the committee avoiding it?” she asked.
—“Well…”— he admitted —“we require an urgent solution without delay.”
—“What problem?”—
The manager did not respond immediately. He closed the main file, leaving only the final order visible.
—“One we cannot afford to explain.”
Mara thought about the lower blocks, about the life crammed inside those buildings. She thought about how easy it was to call something else a collapse .
—“I want a written explanation. A backup.”— he said.
—“There won’t be one.” —
—“Then this is illegal.”
—“I told you it will go through the committee later.”—
—“It’s not the same.” —
—“In this city, it usually is.”— he said, with a slight, tired smile.
He handed her the digital signature field. The cursor blinked patiently.
—“But this… is very irregular. I can’t.”— Mara refused .
The manager thought for a few seconds. Finally, he sighed and said:
—“This is so important, Mara, that if you continue to refuse, you’ll have to look for another job tomorrow.”
That's what decided everything. The pressure was so intense that Mara signed.
—“After this, I never want to see this file again.” — she said in protest .
—“Don’t worry, you won’t see it.”
The system emitted the green validation pulse and filed the order with a nondescript number, indistinguishable from thousands of others. The screen displayed the usual message:
Authorization granted.
The manager immediately closed the file
—“I can’t thank you enough. Good job. You can go now.”—
Mara didn't answer. She left the office with a sense of relief, but she felt strangely uneasy. She knew she had fallen into a trap set by her superior, but she didn't know exactly what it was.
In the elevator, as it descended to the lower levels, he understood the maneuver with belated clarity: the collapse of the buildings was just a mask. In reality, by evading the committee, they would erase some trace they didn't want to leave visible: people, records, evidence, clues. It was impossible to know what they were hiding. But it all boiled down to urban planning correction.
When the gates opened, the city greeted her with its usual routine: lights, noise, traffic. Nothing indicated that she had just signed her own death warrant.
She walked toward the exit, a fixed thought nagging at her: at some point in the process, someone had decided she was expendable. And that her signature was the cleanest way to prove it. When she got home, she protected the conversation by recording it in a safe place.
The next day, while she was in the office, the pressurization bells began to chime like a mechanical requiem: deep, slow, inescapable. It wasn't an alarm; it was a procedure. Mara was in her office when the first pulse pierced the walls, a dull tremor that rattled in her teeth. She looked up from her desk too late.
—“What was that?”— he asked, still unaware that it had already happened.
No one answered him. On the screens, the maps of the doomed blocks flickered and turned red, one after another. Automatic sealing. Total containment protocol. Gradual depressurization.
Horrified, she recalled the minimum evacuation protocol the manager had assured her of. It allowed four hours to evacuate the area. That would never have been enough for so many people.
—“No.”— she whispered.
She ran to the center console. Her fingers trembled as she searched for the authorization log. The system took forever to respond. When it did, her name appeared on the first line, clean, formal, and unmistakable.
IRREVOCABLE AUTHORIZATION – VALIDATED SIGNATURE
Operator: Mara Vale.
He felt his air leaving him before anyone else out there.
—“This is a mistake,” she said aloud, as if the room could correct her. —“I didn’t sign for this.”
The system didn't argue. It simply displayed the time, the biometric key, the neural fingerprint. Everything was in order.
In the streets, thousands of people carried on with their lives for the first few seconds. Some stared at the sky as the oxygen began to thin. Others pounded on sealed doors, bewildered. There were screams, but the emptiness quickly swallowed them. The city was efficient even at killing.
Mara activated the emergency channel.
—“Central, this is Mara Vale. Stop the protocol. I repeat: stop the depressurization immediately.”
Static. Then a tired voice.
—“That’s not possible. The order is in progress.”
—“I am the order!”— he shouted —“Withdraw her!”—
—“The authorization is irrevocable.”— the voice replied, almost sadly —“You know that.”
Then she thought about her boyfriend.
He opened the residents' sub-registry. He looked up the name. There it was. Block 12-B. Red zone. His partner. His world split in two.
He could never remember how he left the office. He didn't remember who he pushed or which doors he forced open. He only remembered the fixed, burning, singular idea: to find the manager who had placed the order in front of him, disguised as routine, a minor formality, a necessary evil.
—“Where is he?”— he shouted in the command corridor —“Tell me where he is!”—
No one answered. Some looked down. Others pretended not to see her. They knew what was happening. She found him in the observation room, calmly looking at the metrics.
He took one step forward. Two. His pulse pounded in his temples.
—“I’m going to kill you.” —
She didn't get close. Three security guards grabbed her from behind. Someone shouted her name. Another called for backup.
—“Let me go!”— he roared —“Let me go or I’ll kill you all!”—
She felt the prick in her neck. First a cold sensation, then nothing.
She woke up with a blank memory. The hospital smelled of disinfectant and defeat. She was restrained and sedated. The lights were soft, almost gentle, as if they wanted to apologize.
A nurse spoke to him in a low voice.
—“You need to rest. You've been through a traumatic event.”
Mara turned her face toward the sealed window. Beyond it, the city was still alive. Orderly. Clean.
—“I signed it.”— he said, without emotion —“I killed them.”
The nurse didn't answer. Somewhere deep inside, where there was still some oxygen, something in Mara shut down forever.
The authorization had been irrevocable.
Justice acted swiftly.
She was accused of trying to erase key evidence of a human trafficking network operating under corporate licenses. The file was meticulous, sealed, with conclusions written before anyone asked questions. Mara understood this when she saw her name printed as the technical lead .
The company tried to deny her help. But she had the conversation recorded.
—“They want me to be the one who made the mistake,” he told the lawyer . “But I’m not going to be the scapegoat. I have the recording that proves it.”
“We won’t abandon you,” he replied . “But for that to happen, we need your cooperation.”
The corporation deployed lawyers and spent millions on her defense. They avoided jail time and dropped the criminal case. They reached a settlement to compensate her with an obscene sum, enough to buy her silence for several lifetimes. The agreement included absolute, retroactive, and lifetime confidentiality clauses.
—“This doesn’t look like protection. It’s a gag order.”— Mara said as she signed.
—“It’s a good survival… for you.”— the lawyer corrected.
When she left the building, she understood something that wasn't in any contract: the system didn't need monsters. Just efficient employees who signed without a second thought.
Having recovered from the initial shock, she tried to file a complaint on her own. She spoke with a low-profile prosecutor, a middle-aged man who wouldn't let her finish her sentences.
—“I have no jurisdiction,” he said . “This is beyond my authority.”
—“We have the proof,” Mara insisted . “Records, transfers, routes. Missing people.”
The prosecutor closed the folder without looking at it.
—“I have a family,” she whispered apologetically. —“I’m sorry.”
Things didn't go any better for him with the judge.
—“You have already been compensated,” she said . “Don’t dredge up the past.”
Nobody was listening. Or everyone was listening to the side that was most convenient.
Then she tried to escape. She sold what she could, changed her identity, moved between secondary stations. She thought that if she disappeared, at least she would retain something resembling the truth. She didn't get very far. They located her before she crossed the third ring road.
—“You shouldn’t have run, darling,” one of the men who intercepted her said . “You’re forcing us to be less kind.”
She was kidnapped and subjected to a psychological retraining program , illegal even by the corporation's standards. Endless interrogation sessions under white lights. Tracking devices were implanted under her scalp while she was unconscious. Her memory was partially erased, leaving irregular gaps.
—“Tell me what you remember!”— they ordered.
—“I don’t know!”— she would reply, and it was true.
They didn't break her because something in Mara refused to give way completely. But they left her incomplete. With fragmented memories that didn't fit together and white silences that hurt more than any pain.
One night, while she was drugged and semi-conscious, the nurse slipped into her bed. She couldn't move or speak. She could only register the moment. He undressed her completely and mounted her. The man was breathing rapidly. When he finished, he left without a word, as if nothing had happened.
The next morning, Mara stared at the ceiling and thought that this was the system's true function: not only to destroy you, but to convince you that you weren't worth rebuilding. She didn't scream or cry. She simply stored what remained of herself in the only place they couldn't completely implant or erase: inside her head.
The transfer was planned to move her from one place to another and make her presence untraceable. The vehicle had no markings. Just a route code and a spotless interior. Mara was strapped to the stretcher, drugged with a low dose of tranquilizers. Just enough so she wouldn't seem dangerous. But just enough so she could talk.
At a stop along the way, the nurse closed the rear hatch and activated automatic mode.
—“Don’t move.”— he said as he pulled down his pants —“This is going to be quick.” —
Mara barely turned her head. Perhaps it was the same man. Because of the way he was breathing. Because of the way he was touching her with his hands. The man pulled down her clothes, leaving her genitals exposed.
—“Do they always give you the night shifts?” she asked, her voice thick with emotion.
He looked at her, surprised, as he lowered his pants.
—“You should be asleep.” —
—“Sometimes it’s better to be awake, like now.”— she said.
The man smiled uncomfortably.
Mara let the silence stretch out. Then she sighed, almost vulnerable. When he climbed on top of her, he asked:
—“Will you be in the other hospital too?”
—“No.”— he replied —“This ends here.”
—“Too bad. Maybe you'd like to say goodbye properly.”
The nurse frowned, hesitating for a second. That was enough.
—“Don’t play with me.”— she said with her face pressed against his.
Mara barely smiled. She replied:
—“I never play.”— she whispered as she brushed her tongue against the man’s face.
He bent down, and after a moment's hesitation, released the woman's left hand. The captive felt immediate pain, but her body responded. She grabbed the lantern and struck him hard on the head.
The stretcher shook. The nurse fell off, stunned and surprised. He managed to stammer:
—“What did you do…?!”—
Mara half sat up. The second blow surprised him before he could finish the sentence. He was knocked unconscious
—“Remembering you. That’s what I did.”— he said.
She stretched as far as she could, but with one hand free, it wasn't impossible. With a swift pull, Mara ripped the keys from his belt. She was free.
He struck him twice more angrily. He didn't check if he was still alive. He frantically searched inside the ambulance. He was trying to find a scalpel.
When he found it, he felt his scalp until he located the tracker. He plunged the scalpel in until he reached the device. He extracted it as a stream of blood ran down his face.
Using a stapler, he closed the gash and then disinfected the wound. He removed the nurse's clothes and dressed himself. Then he threw the body out of the ambulance.
Half dead, she drove the ambulance as best she could. Fragmented memories appeared and disappeared like torn advertisements. When the fuel ran out, she abandoned the vehicle and walked until her legs gave out.
They hadn't been able to extract the passwords to his accounts. Not with drugs, not with downloads, not with memory wipes. The accounts remained untouched. A blood-stained compensation, now transformed into a multi-million dollar source of income.
She arrived in the city. And as she got lost among the lower levels, Mara understood something with a new clarity: normality was not the goal.
It was a statistical trap, but now she had been left out of the sample.
Living from place to place, Mara rebuilt herself in the suburbs, where the city stopped pretending. She lived in windowless rooms, in repurposed underground corridors, in blocks that the official map had forgotten.
He changed his name as easily as he changed his coat. He slept little and listened to people a lot. He quickly learned that survival was anything but romantic: it was about repetition, error, and correction.
She met an old military instructor who lived in a gymnasium, surrounded by torn sandbags and outdated holograms of human anatomy. He had an artificial leg. It didn't take much to convince him to train her in self-defense.
—“I’m not going to teach you how to fight,” he told him on the first day . “I’m going to teach you how to finish off your opponent quickly.”
—“That’s exactly what I’m looking for.”— Mara replied .
He watched her for a long time.
—“I figured as much. Why do you need it?”
—“Because when you start something, you have to finish it.”
He didn't ask for more details. The old men who had seen wars no longer needed to be told complete stories.
They trained in the early hours. Sharp blows, holds, how to injure joints. He learned where to apply pressure, for how long, and when to release. He learned that in combat, killing wasn't an act of fury, but of economy.
—“The common mistake,” he said, correcting his posture , “is believing that strength wins. In reality, it’s how you face it and the determination you have that wins.”
—“And the blame?”—
The old man barely smiled.
—“Guilt only comes if you have to kill. But when you've decided to do it, it's because you have a valid reason.”
Mara understood that fighting was almost always a definitive solution.
In another neighborhood, she met Lila one night while walking home. A customer was punching her in the face. The blow sounded hard and sharp. Mara reacted before she even thought. The man fell with a broken nose and a badly injured knee.
—“It didn’t take that much.”— said Lila , as she adjusted her split lip.
—“Yes.”— Mara replied with barely contained anger —“It was necessary.”
Lila understood that perhaps Mara , for some reason, identified with her. Out of gratitude, she invited her for a drink at a random bar.
As they drank, Lila looked at her curiously. She had spent many nights as a prostitute, and had seen many fights.
—“You don’t fight like just anyone would.” —
—“I don’t. I’m training.”
—“Good.”— said Lila —“Those who don’t know how to fight well don’t last long in the nights of the suburbs.”
And so, little by little, they became friends. Lila taught her what the gym couldn't: how to seduce by disarming defenses, how to read faces and glances, understanding desire and ambition. How to cast hooks to catch your favorite prey.
—“It’s not about him liking you,” she explained . “It’s about making him believe you like him. That’s what ultimately makes them lose you.”
—“For men or women?”
—“Does it matter? Everyone is the same.”— Lila smiled. —“Language is the same. You just have to change your accent.”
Mara learned to modulate her voice, to offer silences to learn to listen. She understood that people like to talk about themselves. And if you're good at that, the other person feels in control. She learned that seduction wasn't always about sex; often it was about managing expectations.
Over time, he stopped thinking about justice. Justice was a different concept for the righteous than for the insane. He didn't need justice because the dead didn't come back. And the guilty rarely paid justly, especially if they had money or power. The system would always operate with an obscene bias. If the guilty ever did pay, it wouldn't be justly.
What Mara was looking for now was something else. A personal equilibrium, crooked, imperfect. A balance she knew didn't exist in society, but which she could impose, case by case, body to body.
It didn't get better, it got more effective. And that, in that rotten city, was a different way of finding the truth.
END
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