Introduction: Lorena and Tech

I've had this idea for a screenplay for a while, and finally deciding to share it. This would be an introduction to the story, and I hope to continue developing it over time to see it become a film or limited series

It was inspired by personal experiences, gathering from my time in the tech industry and the many friends and stories I collected. I knew about Silicon Valley since middle school, I was friends with talented engineers that developed their own game engines and had impressive international clients; finally moving there in 2013 was a dream come true. For a few years, there was venture capital going everywhere and infinite growth seemed inevitable, but beyond the money I was attracted to the potential to change the world

At one of my early jobs we basically invented telemedicine, fighting with governments and video compression to reach as many people as possible, today, the dream feels long gone, when AI companies are avoiding regulation to finance themselves with circular deals and build massive data centers that harm our communities while everyone doom-scrolls in addictive platforms and legalize betting for children

This is a story of resistance and hope

Lorena used to believe in roadmaps, not the kind product managers argued over every Monday morning, but the invisible one everyone inherited: study hard, work harder, volunteer on weekends, mentor the next generation, stay loyal, and eventually the world would remember your name

For twenty years she helped build software that quietly reshaped the lives of billions. Features shipped under impossible deadlines. Midnight incident calls. Airports. Performance reviews. Stock refreshers. Diversity committees. Panels about women in technology. Saturdays teaching teenagers to code because someone once did the same for her

She believed every hour counted

Then one Tuesday morning a fifteen-minute calendar invite informed her that none of it did

The press would call it "a strategic restructuring." Investors applauded. Executives spoke about efficiency, resilience, and the future. Months later they would blame artificial intelligence, but everyone inside knew the truth: the layoffs had begun long before AI became the perfect excuse. The purpose wasn't innovation. It was gravity. A reminder that labor could be replaced, reorganized, frightened, and made grateful for whatever remained

The organizations that once promised community quietly disappeared. Budgets evaporated. Conferences lost their sponsors. Friends vanished from Slack overnight, leaving behind little gray circles where smiling faces used to be

Twenty years collapsed into a cardboard box and a severance package, she cried exactly once, then she booked a flight home

Because Lorena grew up in Cali, Colombia, where people learn early that survival is rarely elegant. Cities teach different philosophies. Some teach certainty. Cali teaches rhythm. When life corners you, you dance first and figure out the rest later. You improvise. You build family from strangers. You laugh so maniacally that your fears become afraid of you

The few days of rest, turned into weeks of failed job applications, rejections, mockery, venting with other affected friends, seemingly no way out. Finding a job as a engineer with experience used to be a breeze, with Amazon on your resume there was no need for applications; with Google cloud experience there used to be a community you could reach out to; being a mentor in prestigious non-profits meant that anyone would answer your emails

Not anymore, tech companies aren't techie anymore, the MBAs in the executive role can barely manage their own phones and now they're pretending to know what a system reliability engineer does and how is it different from developer operations

The isolation and the time abroad created distances from her old friends, but she knew something needed to happen. So she decided to find answers the way that caleños do and went on a weekend bender with her cousins

Waking up Tuesday afternoon with a massive hangover she felt she had it inside to keep fighting, and just needed a new idea, a new goal to build towards; knowing it wasn't gonna be found humiliating herself for a job she remembered her early startup days, how fun it was to spend all week in the office debugging a race condition with her coworkers, and the lovely walks along embarcadero with her product manager, she knew she had to start something new

To start a new product, she knows, one begins with customer research, so she started reaching out to similarly affected friends, see if they had some new ideas to work on; Ernesto, a Venezuelan engineer who had spent a decade building cloud infrastructure at Google would be a good start

Together they gather a mighty team of disgruntled tech workers, even some who had remained employed but still feared any sudden company reorganization and disliked being a part of what the industry had become

Meeting in borrowed coworking spaces, cheap diners, camping trips, dusty warehouses hosting underground raves, and music festivals, they wanted to return to the roots, hackathons, hacking hardware and meeting with community leaders to design the next generation of tech

Lorena never needed permission for anything, she clawed her way into a hostile industry once, and was ready to do it again, this time, also fueled by revenge; knowing it wasn't enough to see the empire fall, it would only be over once their new empire was raised in their ruins

This is their story