Since the reception system expelled her for the third time from a house that promised protection and ended up giving her abandonment, she had been surviving between subway stations, public libraries, saturated dining rooms and corners where no one looked twice at a skinny girl with a jacket too thin for December. Sometimes I found a half-eat sandwich in a clean bucket. Sometimes a lady would give her a warm coffee and an old donut. Sometimes I couldn’t find anything. And on those occasions, he survived with water from public sources and the fierce custom of moving forward even if the body asked otherwise.
But Harper wasn’t just a hungry girl.
It was a burning mind trapped in a life that never had time to notice its light.
Since childhood, before even understanding well what words such as abandonment, precariousness or institutional neglect meant, I had already felt fascination with the machines. Not because of the expensive toys he never had, but because of the real mechanisms of the world: ATMs, electronic locks, control panels, discarded phones, old computers that people threw away as if nothing. When other children were entertained with drawings, Harper stared at the ventilation slots of buildings, door sensors, or cables visible behind a broken TV, wondering how the machines thought, how they decided, how they defended themselves, and how they were wrong.
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