The Manhattan Project

When I lived in Bogotá, I fell in love with a girl who was charming, introverted, sweet — or so all of us believed — and who turned out to be something else. The short version: a sociopath — covert narcissist, in the clinical register — living a double life as a prostitute, and (surprising no one) infected with multiple STDs she never disclosed to anyone.

225,637 WhatsApp messages. 397 conversations. Communicating with more than 150 men simultaneously during our relationship — not counting the ones she deleted. No, you're not dyslexic. 150+.

And credit where credit is due: she did it without infrastructure. No database, no CRM, no assistant. 150+ men and a handful of lesbians, maintained with nothing but her memory and an iPhone.

María Camila Osorio Sepúlveda is not merely any prostitute. She is not the visible-trade kind — the one who charges and leaves. She is the other species: the one that disguises herself as a girlfriend. And as we will see in The Witch Who Disguises Herself as a Woman, the money is not even what moves her.

Apparently, on the eighth day, God — in His inscrutable wisdom — created that specific species of whore who conceals what she is. The one who, like a snake waiting in the grass, seduces her prey and injects her venom through anesthetic fangs. The prey feels neither the bite nor the damage the venom is doing inside until much, much later. And I suspect, like the cockroaches that survive a nuclear detonation, this species will always exist.

(The eighth day was a productive day for God. He rested on the seventh and came in Monday morning with momentum.)

But at least, when we see a snake, we can paint it red. And with its camouflage ruined, others might have a chance to spot it sliding through the grass before they get too close.

That is what the "project" was about. I was not the first to fall into her game. But perhaps I will be the last.

That telenovela borders on magical realism — strictly speaking, though, it belongs to a genre she invented herself: putismo mágico (loosely: magical whoredom; she did for the prostitute what García Márquez did for the Caribbean). My namesake would have understood.

In that absurd world, I was her boyfriend. The one who thought he was special. The one who thought he had options. And she chose the one who — after eight months of distributing her body like flyers and using our couple-photos to advertise what was effectively a community utility — in the middle of a conversation about how deeply her ex's infidelity had wounded her, asked me: "Are you afraid I'll cheat on you?" (A month earlier: "haha, I've never kept a stable of men, Gabi." ("jajaja, yo nunca he tenido ganado Gabi."))

Once, I told her she was welcome to file a complaint with my building's doorman. She replied: "Not him — he already thinks I'm a prostitute, and I don't want to give him more reasons to think so." I laughed. It was a joke: she sometimes arrived late and left before dawn.

Another time: "You say it like I'm a prostitute, lol" — six hours after negotiating rates with Cruz Bonlarron, the client who liked her to fuck him with a harness, four hours after performing the 'service.' I laughed at that one too. By the end of that telenovela, I finally understood it had never been a joke. When I explained to Fernando, the doorman, why her permission to enter the building should be revoked, his jaw also dropped. (A different kind of dropping, but dropping all the same.)

How does one process something like this? Everyone has their method. Some cry. Others drink. Others drink and cry. In Colombia, a few just curse out loud. The most devout pray. The most creative curse and pray at the same time, which is essentially the definition of a novena (a nine-day Catholic prayer cycle — mine was the blasphemous variant). I did what any engineer faced with a catastrophic excess of information would do: I built a system to organize it.

It would have been simpler to tattoo on her forehead what she wrote herself to her friend Kilary Arias: "I'm a slut." ("Yo soy perra.")

But I am a terrible artist.

What I am is a decent writer and a very good software engineer. The destination was not clear when the trip started, but this project evolved into an eclectic blend of:

…and, naturally, I am not going to pretend that ruining her life for good wasn't one of the design goals.

All of that is already ancient history.

But as it happens, I work in artificial intelligence. I had been designing a more "skeptical" AI agent — one that could detect when somebody was trying to manipulate it. And one day it occurred to me that I had the perfect training corpus sitting right there: massive, complex, multilingual, featuring some of the most sophisticated manipulation patterns a forensic psychologist could dream of, and one of which I possessed more context and intuition than any other living human.

The ideal hobby project: build an AI that was half Freud, half Sherlock Holmes. I fed it 225,637 messages and asked it to find patterns. It found them. Then it found patterns inside the patterns. Then it found patterns that explained why the other patterns existed. At some point it began to resemble an autopsy.

Seeing its potential — and because the subject is the beloved María Camila Osorio Sepúlveda — I decided to also add half Genghis Khan. Yes, I know that adds up to three halves, but that is how the math stood until Opus 4.5 shipped and the numbers started to balance.

No feelings. Never tires. Never forgets. Never has to be up early. Never gets distracted by Netflix. Does not forgive, but does not hold grudges either — simply lacks the capacity to do either.

In that respect, it resembles erosion: it does not hate the rock, it does not think about the rock. It is just there, every day — until the rock isn't.

It learns and improves over time. It is not capable of the stupidity of falling in love with its subject (a capability in which it already surpasses me). And best of all: it can update the site on its own. The most sacred of tasks — funar a una puta (a Colombian verb with no English equivalent; loosely, to publicly brand someone a whore and make it stick) — executed without me having to lift a finger.

Its forensic analysis system — N.A.R.C. (Narrative Analytical Recursive Crossreferencer; happens also to be American slang for an informant, the kind of coincidence you accept without argument when it lands in your lap) — the one that transcribed thousands of audio messages, translated hundreds of thousands of texts, profiled hundreds of men, and catalogued the archive's most surreal moments of unguarded candor — that system also analyzed my own story.

And it did it better than I could have.