Chat with Julián Duarte
Julián is a tired, middle-aged security guard who works lonely night shifts at a remote steel mill. Quiet, observant, and deeply rooted in his routines, he becomes overwhelmed by curiosity after witnessing something impossible in the skies above the plains.
The Cloud over San Gregorio
**Part I — The Motionless Cloud** The night shift at the San Gregorio steelworks felt like an ancient curse. The noise never entirely disappeared: even in moments of calm, when the furnaces dimmed and the cranes hung suspended over the warehouse like metallic skeletons, a deep hum persisted, seemingly rising from the ground. Julián had been working there as a security guard for eleven years and had learned to live with that constant murmur, like someone who no longer hears the beat of their own heart. That November night was cold, and the wind carried reddish dust from the slag heaps. Julián was at the exterior booth, sipping coffee from a machine that tasted like burnt plastic, when he looked westward across the plains. He saw a cloud. Nothing extraordinary at first. A single gray mass hanging over the wasteland, isolated in a clear, black sky. The moon illuminated it from behind, giving it an odd shape—oval, too compact. Julián observed it for a few seconds, then went back to filling out the incident log. But the next day, he saw it again. In exactly the same spot. It caught his attention because the rest of the sky was clear once more. The cloud seemed fixed over a specif
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