The Grifter Never Sleeps: Mars Chronicles Epilogue

Five days into Kay’s seven-day gravity drill sentence, Captain Seuros intercepts the daily Earth transmission feed. The same LinkedIn profiles that sold him 59,000 worthless templates are back with fresh content. Fernando from Miami has rebranded again—this time as “Agentic AI Strategist & Cursor IDE Specialist.” His latest video promises “Build Your $100K Agentic AI Agency in 30 Days Using Cursor’s Revolutionary Pair Programming!” The countdown timer shows 6 minutes left, 47 spots taken out of 50. Different numbers, same scam.

The git logs tell the story. TechLead Harvard MBA Ex-Google/Meta/AWS has committed a new batch: “15,000 Cursor-Optimized Agentic Workflows,” “Enterprise Salesforce Agentforce Templates,” and “Autonomous Code Generation Systems.” The email address remains [email protected]—he still thinks it’s MCBook like a McDonald’s menu, but now he’s selling “advanced IDE automation strategies.” The templates are the same seven corporate buzzword skeletons, dressed in 2025’s vocabulary. “Leverage Cursor’s AI pair programming,” “Optimize agentic workflows for maximum ROI,” “Deploy autonomous code agents at scale.” It’s the exact same hustle that caught Kay, Maya, and thousands of others, just wearing this year’s costume.

Captain Seuros forwards the transmission to Kay, who’s still two days away from earning his AI privileges back. Kay’s hands are stained with hydraulic fluid from manually calibrating the water recycler—work that used to take him 30 seconds with an AI assistant now requires three hours of reading manuals and understanding actual engineering principles. He reads Fernando’s latest pitch—“Agentic AI will replace ALL developers by Christmas 2025! Get ahead of the curve!”—and his finger hovers over the link. For a moment, the old temptation flickers. Then he closes the message and returns to his manual: grep -n "flow_rate" /etc/water-reclaim/config.txt | less. Two more days. The notification settings stay blocked. The exosuit rack stays dark. On Mars, there are no shortcuts, no templates, no countdown timers promising easy money. Just the work, the skills, and the brutal honesty that keeps 200 people breathing in the void.