Before the world

Here's a concise synopsis of both volumes: BEFORE THE WORLD — Exodus ES Volume 1 & 2 Synopsis Volume 1 follows Roque, an Argentine inventor who in 2012 signs a covert agreement with the Pentagon, surrendering his blueprints for a consciousness-transfer technology in exchange for $600,000 paid in installments — though he secretly keeps the true method locked in his mind. Five years later, with his family financially stable and a converted Mercedes bus as his mobile laboratory, Roque assembles his team: Naoki "Ñoqui" Ramos, a cryptographer of Japanese descent operating out of a makeshift server room in the Palacio Barolo; and Cristian, a crystallographer whose mastery of optical storage becomes the physical backbone of the project. The four are joined by Valentina, a distinguished atomic scientist recruited at the Bariloche Atomic Centre after a chaotic missed appointment that ends in uncontrollable laughter. Together they travel south through Argentina, developing the theoretical framework for Éxodo — a system capable of encoding human consciousness into vacuum-compressed quartz crystals — with each stop along the route deepening their bond and sharpening their ideas. Volume 2 opens with a revelation: the Éxodo project has roots Roque never anticipated. A recurring dream about a lion, a goose, and a Nordic giant in a yellow raincoat turns out not to have been a dream at all — it was a premonition. The giant from the dream is Ipos, a demon and Grand Prince of Hell, who appeared to Roque months earlier at a roadside bar and sealed a pact through a bottle cap. Ipos, it turns out, is not a villain but a distributor of fate who has been quietly backing the project from the shadows. Fourteen months after assembling the team, Éxodo achieves its first successful consciousness transfer — a dying elderly man whose mind is captured in the Cognitive Gestation Prism moments after his clinical death, his voice emerging from the crystal to the stunned grief and wonder of his family. The triumph is immediately shadowed: Ñoqui, in the emotional chaos of celebration, tries to call his mother and learns she has been dead for seven years — a temporal fracture caused by MNEMOS, a second and more mysterious force whose interventions Roque is only beginning to understand. In the aftermath, Roque meets Gemma — identified as the demon Gremory — during a morning run along the Buenos Aires waterfront. She hands him a rutilated quartz and confirms that multiple entities are watching Éxodo's development with deep interest. Ipos reappears during a rainstorm to walk Roque through a philosophy of angels, demons, and a God who loves creation but cannot perceive its suffering — a framework that recontextualizes everything Roque thought he knew about the forces around him. Woven between these events are memories: the day money first felt real, a childhood visit to a circus where eight-year-old Roque slipped past a lion tamer to press his nose against a lion's, and his earliest lessons in injustice, loyalty, and what it means to speak when no one wants to listen. Both volumes together establish Éxodo not merely as a scientific project, but as something with metaphysical stakes — a technology that has drawn the attention of forces beyond the human, and that carries consequences no laboratory prototype could have anticipated.