Pere Pozanco

Pere Pozanco

42,195

An Analog Heart Running In a Digital World

How long can an analog heart endure running in a digital world?

March 2024. Hugo runs his first marathon. He works as an engineer at KORE, a Silicon Valley tech giant with headquarters in Barcelona. He programs the algorithms that dictate the lives of millions of users, while his own life drifts through dark mazes.

He runs the way Big Techs run: fast, ambitious, never looking back.

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2026

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DO WE CHASE WHAT WE NEED, OR WHAT WE ARE TOLD WE NEED?

WHY DO WE RUN SO FAST? WHAT IS OUR GOAL?

An unfortunate mistake drags Hugo into an operation aimed at uncovering how KORE designs addictive products to trap its users. He has been training for months for something far bigger than a race: defeating his rival, a high-ranking executive within the corporation. It is the first piece of a plan that seems impossible. But the true motive driving every single stride is something else. An old wound that this operation, unintentionally, might finally heal.

But Lucía is not part of the equation. Nor is her son. They enter through the back door, without making a sound. A nuisance, almost, for a man who only cares about his goal. Living with them forces him back to the question he always avoided. In the end, his training offers him what he was not looking for: 42 kilometers and 195 meters —the exact distance between who he is and who he wants to be.

A corporate thriller of raw realism and Orwellian sweat, written by a tech industry insider. But above all, an intimate story about love, fatherhood, and guilt. About finding a reason to start over.

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TRAILER OFFICIAL

Scenes

bio

Hugo

My name is Hugo. I’m a software engineer. I work at KORE, a Silicon Valley tech giant based in Barcelona.

I program algorithms designed to make you do exactly what I want. Or rather, what my bosses want. You don’t notice. And they pay me incredibly well for it. I just turned 32, and this 2023 I just made a 100 grand.

With my lines of code, I design the person you aim to be. I shape your habits, using hyper-targeted ads to remind you whether you’re succeeding or failing.

AUTHOR

PERE POZANCO

I have spent 30 years capturing and retaining the attention of online audiences. I know exactly how those habits are hardwired. 

I peer into the vaults of Silicon Valley's tech giants through the cracks opened by my childhood friend, an executive in several of them for over two decades. He has validated every single line.

I have pushed through kilometer 28, kilometer 35, kilometer 40… and all the way to the finish line.

At 19, I walked into an Alberto Blecua lecture at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He introduced me to Don Quixote. Ever since, I have changed houses, jobs, partners, and ideas. I have grown old. But I never really left that classroom. It defined everything I am. Including this novel: 42,195. The longest distance I have ever run.

bio

Hugo

My name is Hugo. I’m a software engineer. I work at KORE, a Silicon Valley tech giant based in Barcelona.

I program algorithms designed to make you do exactly what I want. Or rather, what my bosses want. You don’t notice. And they pay me incredibly well for it. I just turned 32, and this 2023 I just made a 100 grand.

With my lines of code, I design the person you aim to be. I shape your habits, using hyper-targeted ads to remind you whether you’re succeeding or failing.

Author

Pere
Pozanco

I have spent 30 years capturing and retaining the attention of online audiences. I know exactly how those habits are hardwired. 

I peer into the vaults of Silicon Valley's tech giants through the cracks opened by my childhood friend, an executive in several of them for over two decades. He has validated every single line.

I have pushed through kilometer 28, kilometer 35, kilometer 40… and all the way to the finish line.

At 19, I walked into an Alberto Blecua lecture at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He introduced me to Don Quixote. Ever since, I have changed houses, jobs, partners, and ideas. I have grown old. But I never really left that classroom. It defined everything I am. Including this novel: 42,195. The longest distance I have ever run.

42.195

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Some stories are meant to be heard, too!
Some stories are meant to be heard, too!

Love

Chapter 5: Running

“Let’s talk about it.”
“About what?”
“About your grandmother’s phone. I saw it.”
“You saw it? Took you long enough to ask…”
Lucía reaches into her handbag and pulls out a prehistoric flip phone, the kind old people still use. I can’t help teasing her about the oversized buttons and the tiny screen.
She tells me she uses a company smartphone at the bank, but once she’s off the clock, she wants to be left alone. She’s after a more analog life. Simpler. Pre-internet. Switching to a basic phone was part of that decision: calls and texts, nothing else.
“I’m happier this way. My life is calmer now. With a smartphone, my attention was constantly being pulled in a dozen different directions—work emails, social media, WhatsApp. It wears you down. One day I had enough. I want my life to belong to me. Not to the companies behind all that.”
“So you want to live without technology?” I ask, skeptical.
“I know technology has its upsides. And I use some of them. But I don’t want the dependency I had before. There’s something dark about that kind of addiction. It throws me off balance. Maybe I’m just nostalgic, but… what’s so wrong with being bored? With doing things slowly, without a screen in front of your face? What’s wrong with reading a book or listening to an entire album from the nineties without being interrupted? Or writing letters again? Nobody opens the mailbox hoping to find one anymore. It’s just bills and junk mail. Doesn’t that strike you as tragic? I tell my son there’s a zombie epidemic—people glued to their phones. I don’t want him turning into one.”
“You want him to inherit your fears?”
“Or my judgment. To me, they’re the same thing.”

(…)

When we leave the restaurant, Lucía calls the babysitter. She steps a few yards away to talk, while I sit on a bench facing the sea.
The laughter fades.
What’s left is confusion. And guilt.
How do you drain guilt out of yourself?
Sometimes someone shows you something about yourself without meaning to. Something you’d never noticed. Or never wanted to notice.
I watch her while she talks. Her eyes catch the dim light. She hangs up, snaps the phone shut with a click, and walks back toward me.
We stroll along the waterfront toward El Born.
“You know, I haven’t looked at a screen once.”
“Good boy. You’re all grown up.”
“With your museum-piece phone, it’s easy. Nothing to distract me.”
“The parents’ group chat from school was the worst. ‘Do they have homework for tomorrow?’ ‘Noa’s feeling sick.’ ‘The preschool class has lice.’ ‘My daughter came home with a blue jacket—is it anyone’s?’ It was kryptonite. It sucked the life out of me. Some of the moms would post pictures from their vacations. Or from their weddings. Don’t you people have friends? Why would I care? One of them even livestreamed her liposuction.”
“From the hospital?”
“From the operating room. Sweet gesture from her husband. You could actually see the fat coming out through the tubes.”
“Jesus.”
“I nearly threw up.” She laughs. “I’m also the youngest mom in the group, so there’s a lot I just can’t relate to. Luckily María, one of the other mothers, texts me if there’s anything important. And hardly any dads are in the chat, by the way. As if the day-to-day stuff wasn’t your department. Today’s gym class—send him in sports clothes. Halloween’s coming—buy the killer clown costume. He’s got a fever—give him Apiretal. How many milliliters for his weight? You men seem to think women are born with some kind of chip implanted in our asses that already contains all that information. We’re not. Nobody taught me any of it. I had to learn.”
“It’s evolutionary.”
“Evolutionary?”
“Women are superior beings when it comes to logistics,” I joke.
Lucía looks away.
“No, seriously. I get what you’re saying,” I add quickly. “You’re partly right. But for thousands of years men went out hunting with little spears while women stayed in the cave with the kids. That leaves an evolutionary imprint. You don’t erase that in two generations.”
“You’re calling the fucking patriarchy an evolutionary imprint?”
“When you put it like that, I sound like some old fossil.”
“Classic evolutionary moment: trying to fix what you just said. And yes—you do.”

(…)

“As you can see, I’m a cliché. No TV show would ever cast me. I’m too boring.”
“I couldn’t pull off the lead either. Supporting character, maybe.”
“The nerd?”
“The damaged guy haunted by his past.”
“Another cliché.”
“The damaged weirdo always gets good ratings. Want to come to my dungeon and find out for yourself?”
“What am I supposed to do with my son?”
“Didn’t you solve that when you called the babysitter?”
Lucía stares at me.
I guessed right.
I hold her gaze. The back of my neck tightens. The alcohol sends a warm tingling through me.
“Come to my place. I’m not going to try anything.”
“You sure?”
“There’s no chemistry between us. It’s freezing. I’ll just be your electric blanket.”
“I don’t know… There’re a lot of creeps out there. Besides, it’s not even that cold.”
“No ice picks hidden under the bed. I promise.”
“I don’t know you.”
“That’s one way to fix it.”

(…)

We take a sleepy taxi back to my apartment.
We kiss at every red light, at every blind corner, as though each one might be the last.
The moment the front door closes behind us, everything falls apart.

RUNNER

Chapter 15: Sebas

It’s 6:15. I arrive at Plaza España right on time. Next to one of the Venetian Towers, I spot Sebas waiting for me. After a quick nod, he makes his rules clear before our first workout.

“If you think I’m going to teach you something that isn’t on the internet, you’re wrong. I’m not going to tell you anything new. I’ll tell you what you already know, but structured. In my own Cro-Magnon style,” he pauses. “Discipline and pain. Always remember that: discipline and pain. You learn through pain, not despite it. Pain has value. People avoid it nowadays, and that’s a mistake. In training and in life, pain always comes. You have to learn what it’s telling you and how to face it. Then it leaves. It always leaves. And when it disappears, if you’ve held on, progress arrives. That’s why we work the threshold. We don’t force it. We raise it bit by bit, workout by workout. No bullshit, no shortcuts. Discipline. Discipline saves you when you’re about to fail. It holds you up when you think about quitting, when you tell yourself you’re a piece of shit, when you can’t find a single reason to keep going. If you know what you want and you chase it, discipline will help you achieve it. Is that clear?”

“Clear. Discipline and pain. And Cro-Magnon style.”

Sebas doesn’t find my joke funny.

“Listen up, kid. I’m from Hospitalet—the Birmingham of Barcelona. And no dickhead fucks with me.”

(…)

Sebas announces we’ll finish at the Magic Fountain of Montjuïc. But before we get there, he takes a right turn.

Standing before us are the 200 steps of Passeig Jean Forestier, each step embedded with blue and gold tiles. We start together. Sebas takes the lead from the very first stair. On both sides, the fountains murmur. Halfway up the stairs, my breathing breaks and my legs begin to give out. I slow my pace. Sebas, already near the top, fires:

“This is when it counts, when it hurts.”

I keep climbing, my pace dropping. My legs feel twice as heavy. From the top:

“Don’t look for excuses.”

I walk the last third. Every single step requires convincing myself to take the next one. When I reach the top, Sebas says nothing. He watches me for a moment and starts walking away.

BIG TECH/ AI

Chapter 1: I Know Who You Are

The KORE offices are stranded in 22@, Barcelona’s tech district, where startups and business accelerators drop anchor and venture capitalists prowl. The company spans six floors of a steel-and-glass building silhouetted against the Mediterranean Sea. Ping-pong tables, pool, a terrace with a view, hammocks, beanbags… they all dress up the interior of an office designed to retain its engineers. The brightest ones cost a fortune and are hard to come by. But beyond the six-figure salaries, the gourmet food, and the free massages and gym memberships, nothing keeps them loyal like selling them a mission that feels more moral than corporate. A mission screamed out at every turn by the slogans carved into the walls.

(In a defiant typeface:)

Don’t dream someone else’s future, create it yourself

Tomorrow is too late, we want it today

Artificial Intelligence to improve the real world

How could you not feel important when you’ve been chosen to save the world? Artificial Intelligence is our God—all-knowing, all-creating. An explosion of creativity to blueprint an unprecedented future. It’s the faith that redefines the very concept of impossible, making a brand-new Eden possible, forged by bots and algorithms. That’s what they drill into us at KORE. We are the chosen ones. The new Prometheuses of technological development. The devout computer geeks. We are here to improve the species, to spread our culture, to touch eternity. And by constantly repeating these apocalyptic-fever ego boosts, most of the engineers end up buying into it. More agnostic ones like me just pretend to buy into it—as long as the fat paycheck keeps dropping at the end of the month, future stock options are on the table, and there’s a corporate ladder left to climb.

Suspense

Chapter 4:  The Cat and the Mouse

Before turning onto Carrer de les Carretes, I brake. A guy is cutting the lock off a road bike. He glances around and spots me. He hops on and takes off. Yielding to a sudden impulse, I lock onto his rear wheel. He looks back. Now he gets it. I’m coming for him. He takes a sharp turn at the next corner. I stay right on him. On the straights, he pulls away; on the turns, I gain ground. I push harder.

Catching your prey requires precision and patience. Sticking to a plan. It’s crucial that your prey knows that even if they are faster, you’re not going to give up. It’s crucial they know you won’t stop until you catch them. It’s crucial they know you have a strategy, but they can’t guess what it is. I know the Raval like the back of my hand. If he reaches the wide avenues of the Eixample, I lose him. As long as he stays in these filthy arteries, he’s mine. With only a few turns left for him to escape, I force him to veer into the heart of the neighborhood. I want him to burn out, lose hope, despair. I want him to make a mistake. To crash. To be at my mercy.