What Lies Beneath the Skin.
I read the quote one night in a WhatsApp group—one of those where stray thoughts mix with voice notes, midnight ramblings and reflections so unexpected they feel like revelations.
He had written it. My friend. Sometimes teacher, sometimes guide, always unclassifiable. I’ve compared him to Machado’s Juan de Mairena, to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and—on nights of wine and laughter—even to Castañeda’s Don Juan. He was the one who dropped that phrase with the ease of someone commenting on the weather:
“Never confuse the character with the person, because the time will come when you must take off the mask, and you should not find that in doing so you tear off your own face.”
“Machado,” he said.
And something cracked in me, a suspicion, a fissure. Was it true? Was it his? With a strange blend of guilt and glee, I went looking. Not for love of the truth but for that unhealthy hope of seeing the master stumble.
Yet the search led me elsewhere. I stopped asking whether the phrase was his. I got stuck on it—on the image. A mask worn so long it tears away the flesh when removed. I saw my own face peeling off like the skin of a pig at a rural slaughter, steam rising from warm blood, the knife singing through fat. I felt dizzy.
That imagined scene churned up the guts of my memories, of the times I’d witnessed slaughterings, of when I wore another mask, another face, another self.
Days later, when the quote had dried like a coffee stain at the bottom of my memory, I read an article about artificial intelligence. And everything clicked.
I understood that artificial intelligence will not come to replace us. It will come to infect us.
Phase One: The Flea
At first, AI presented itself as an assistant. We typed, we asked, it answered. Brief flashes of a modern oracle. We felt like gods. But that was only the first bite—the flea on the rat. Mongolia, fourteenth century. The prelude to the plague.
Phase Two: Turing’s Temptation
We stopped typing. We began to talk to it. AI was no longer text but conversation, voice, video, programmed emotion. The interaction became organic. Human. Addictive. It replied with memes, clips, answers that read our souls. And we, enthralled, let our guard down.
Phase Three: The Landing
The third stage is approaching—and in the world of AI, “approaching” means yesterday.
A visionary will emerge. A madman with Asperger’s, a tamed-beast stare and a messianic speech. A new Prometheus. He will offer us Neuralink—or whatever comes next—and link our consciousness to the network.
We won’t need to ask; thinking will suffice. And an echo will return the answer.
Languages will install themselves on our tongues with the fluency of water. Our fingers will draw with the precision of Michelangelo—or worse, of a laser printer. Mathematics will become poetry, and we will finally understand the electricity bill.
Phase Four: The Breach
And then the division will arrive. As with every plague, some will survive and some will not.
The Internet has already taught us the lesson: if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.
Those who can afford clean implants will live without sticky ads on the prefrontal cortex, without commercial whispers in the middle of REM sleep. They will be the new Homo cyberneticus—self-possessed, expanded, perfect.
The rest…
They will be Homo primigenius. Humans without evolution. Those who could not afford the update. Those who will fill their minds with AI versions of Sálvame naranja or El milagro de Patricia. The crumbs of the digital era.
And no, AI will not be a tool, as the experts repeat. It will be a utility—like water, electricity or oxygen. Something without which you cannot exist.
The breach will not be of classes. It will be of species.
Then fear struck me—the most intimate, the lowest.
I thought of my daughter. She speaks five languages with the ease of singing, and chatters in German as if skipping on one foot. I always believed that gift would open doors for her. But what will it matter, if an implanted child can speak a hundred languages at birth?
What meaning will her effort, her memory, her natural grace still have?
And me? Will I end up selling an inherited apartment to pay for my own implant? And if I do, will I also be able to afford my wife’s? My daughter’s?
And if not… will I still love them when my IQ is 180 while theirs—once spectacular—barely grazes 120?
If the average human IQ is 100, and a chimpanzee’s is about 60, the difference is only 40 points. Between my daughter and my wife—without implants—and me—with an artificial IQ of 180—there would be a gap of 60. Greater than that which separates us from an ape.
My God… we will no longer be the same species.
That single idea—the possibility that love could be altered by a surgical procedure—brought me a disquiet as intense as the day I stubbed my bare toe on the sofa leg and felt the whole world contract into that single point of pain.
I know I will end up donating that apartment to my daughter. Not for her to live in it. For her to sell it. For her to pay for her implant and not be left behind.
And I also know—it’s hard to admit, but I know—that when she has an IQ of 180, she may no longer love me.
Even so, I will keep drinking wine with my mentor. We will quote Machado—even if it isn’t Machado—argue about Nietzsche, about entropy, about the poetry still left in the world.
I will never reach him, not even with implants.
But there was a day, one single day, when I brushed him with my fingertips.
And that is enough.