Dark Constellations

by Pola Oloixarac

  Cold phrases descended from the adults around him, geysers of tar streaming from their mouths, gestures that signaled nothing but condescendence in the face of death. Something of his relationship with the world, of his confidence in the human race, was lost forever. How had no one yet hacked the problems of evil and death? And why should one respect the present order if its leaders hadn’t even noticed these problems—of if they had, were incapable of solving them?

  Young Cassio’s existential urgencies did not lead him to a love of lyrical theology. They did not place him at the center of the universe, equipped with anguish and voice. They did not turn him into an orphan of becursed lineage, nor did they land him on a densely overgrown islet in the turbid shadow of a personality; strictly speaking, his new powers didn’t require that he engage in any particular behavior. The same urgencies that could have turned Cassio into another young Werther merely left him at a certain cognitive distance from other people, an armored eye with which to observe the world. The human sphere, much like the feline one, was full of suffering and pain that flowed down from the sky in black waves, awaiting the right moment to drown him.

  An illness hastened the distancing process. His cheeks became gaunt and yellow, and his eyes sunk in their sockets, their lids tinted violet. Cassio couldn’t remember exactly how the information he needed had reached him; he knew television had no part in it. It felt like it had always been part of him.

  Sonia panicked at the sight of that shadow beneath her son’s eyes. At the time, Gustavo Levas was staying at their house, which made her all the more sensitive to memories of the trip to Brazil; she still had nightmares about the horrible rashes on Rattachi’s body when it was brought in. Cassio detected her moment of vulnerability, and rapidly executed the command, making clear that “no” was not among the viable responses. Sonia obeyed immediately, and little Cassio finally had the desired package, one whose enchanted geometry he had conjured up during the early fevers brought on by Koch’s bacillus.

  His IBM XT came with two joysticks, 128 kilobytes of memory, and a DOS reference manual. His incursions into Wolfenstein constituted his first soundings of the depths of immortality. With the manual’s help, he learned to alter the machine’s internal parameters, designing ploys that would multiply his lives within the game and create super-powerful bombs. He played with fierce seriousness. Somewhat later he would begin exploring the world of juvenile delinquency, in perilous numeric adventures where he would meet his future henchmen and business partners: Jony and Mat, Luck and his doppelganger Wari. By the time Cassio was fourteen, he had written a program that exploited a vulnerability at the National Bank, and had impassively, even disdainfully, confronted several nation states and their laws. He’d hijacked computers at the Pentagon, and taken control of various local networks in Argentina and Brazil. The university’s engineering department and the newspaper Clarín had the most powerful servers, so he made them his slaves, having come to the realization that the illnesses of living systems created perfect opportunities to penetrate them.

  In the early months of 1993, Cassio managed to assimilate a few features of masculinity that had previously eluded him. His body stretched out a bit, promoting him from chubby to “big-boned”; he committed to heavy use of pine-scented cologne. He walked around with a skateboarding cap on backward, which attenuated the explosion of thick curly hair. Dead Kennedys T-shirts floated about his body until they disintegrated, with pride of place going to “Too Drunk to Fuck” and “California Über Alles.” He was partial to Pink Floyd and the Beastie Boys, and spent his afternoons watching MTV Latino, wherein a long-haired Mexican guy introduced different varieties of metal to the pimply audience sitting in the dark.

  Traces of his mother remained in the products he used—the semiotic smell of anti-lice shampoo still flaring around him. But his mind was too busy with more fundamental issues to dedicate itself to cutting every namby-pamby element out of his life. He considered getting a Smurf-blue tattoo of Satan (a synthesis of his opinions about the lie of religion), but the soft feel of his pale, slightly flabby flesh inspired a feeling of self-compassion. By this point, his research had become clandestine.

  He gained access to the knowledge that would change his life just before his hormones began to overwhelm him. Data flowed over him, tidal surges of information and wonder. Back then, the internet was still an archipelago of small isolated groups, elite excrescences growing around BBS servers, staring out at the ocean that would soon flood their existence.

  Cassio wandered alone through the estuaries of unknown file extensions and reports on alien beings, of conspiracy theories (back when the magnitude of evil was still in doubt), and, most valuable of all, of tutorials showing how to hack ever more complex systems. It wasn’t easy to gain access to the Satanic Brain BBS, the Mecca for larval hackers like him. Neophytes had to prove their worth, negotiate hostility and a series of tests, cross through a forest strewn with sharpened stakes and deep black holes, before they were allowed to learn the secrets of the armory.

  The introductory screen informs him that he has to work his way through a question tree in order to enter. After several attempts, he reaches a screen that reads, you are with virus. Cassio jumps up, turns off his computer. He waits a few minutes, then connects again.

  Hello? he types. The word virus blinks, an underscore next to it like the protruding foot of an animal in hiding.

  Hello appears in tiny letters. Cassio gasps. He has just found his way into Satanic Brain; Virus is a person, and potentially a friend.

  He would later learn that Satanic Brain was run from the shadows by Azeta, then an adolescent just a few years older than him. When they finally met at a bar in Almagro, AZ didn’t stop talking. He told Cassio that one of his archenemies in the viri world, Fubu, had coined the phrase, “A wounded virus is a wounded animal,” and had managed to spread it throughout the civilian world, where it had appeared in several print media outlets. The phrase obsessed AZ, and appeared to infuriate him. “A virus is an animal that never dies!” he said, pure mystic certainty. He set his Coke down and looked over; Cassio took a sip of his own through a straw and nodded.

  That night, Cassio got a message: Your face reminds me of Walter, my new lizard embryo. See you around. AZ lived with his mom and played his evil-computer-kid role extremely well. The arc of his life, of his journey of self-discovery, was just beginning to define itself; it would later lead him to cover his body with tattoos and fill it with food.

  Even before learning that AZ collected embryonic lizards, that Luck could phreak with nothing but his voice, mimicking the melody of electronic pulses to avoid paying for telephone calls, that Mat controlled several satellites, which he used to hack other satellites, so as to create a dark fleet in the sky—that is, before his new friends revealed their wondrous true forms—Cassio was witness to another series of revelations, those of beings whose nature as humans he wouldn’t have been able to confirm.

  In pornographic films, the climax of each individual scene consists of the money shot; eventually the scenes converge in the narrative climax of the orgy, the cephalopods built of human flesh. A series of monstrous transformations ensued, and attention shifted from hole to hole, creating groups of beings that were progressively more complex, whereby a single surface covered unseen interior spaces. Double and triple penetration of the female was a common theme, multiple aggregations into tense muscular cumulous clouds. Cassio sometimes shot the magma of his being into the nearest Coke can, gathering these remains of himself. The human cephalopods confirmed a deep intuition: that everything could be penetrated, opened, rebuilt in the purest of terms—terms native to a machine whose form was still foreign to him, but that he, advancing obsessively step by step through his environment, would eventually come to know and control.

  The little predator had been born within him. This wasn’t the first time he’d felt it move.

  The next few years—the new
moon of his training, preparation for his first mission—saw his fascination with the machine solidify. He was a firsthand witness of one of his era’s key periods: the birth and reproduction of early computer languages, specific and porous, variegating like species of plants. He studied low-level programming in C and Assembler, and thus drew closer to the machine, to its most intimate commands, with one objective: to learn how to take advantage of the flaws and vulnerabilities that would allow a hypothetical attacker (and, to the extent it was possible, a real one) to turn an automobile, or any other apparatus capable of receiving signals, into an explosive device.

  In the year 2020, as part of the team that built the software for Stromatoliton at the dawn of the LatAm Genetic Data Unification Project, Cassio would remember with fondness these embryonic hours of his professional career. In interviews he gave about the Project, he speaks of the childlike eagerness that persists in his research, uniting each successive phase of his mind into a precise, concise staircase. A certain air of innocence remains in his chubby, as yet unaltered face, and daily pimples only smoothen the crests of his megalomania.

  His reading at the time consists of Gibson and Lem, but he mentions The Little Prince as a favorite for its two crucial lessons: a) that what is essential cannot be seen from the surface (because we can only find the vulnerabilities in software by submerging ourselves in it), and b) a boa truly could swallow an elephant (because anything is possible). Then he shrinks back, and his chin trembles a little; a burst of weakness reveals the child of yesterday (his allergies acting up as he breathes in a bit of mildew) in the scientist of today. The interviewer asks again about how he got started. Transported by early memories, his pride returns.

  Even back at the beginning, he knew that he had the technical gifts to achieve frightening levels of mastery, but he was missing the most essential thing: a nickname, a personal banner. This was no trivial matter. It put him face-to-face with transcendental questions. Should his handle provoke terror (Satan666, Chucky) or wisdom (Obi-wan, Yoda)? Should it be something private and cryptic (asdfgh) or a cultural marker (bladerunner, hobbit)? He wasn’t a unicorn or a centaur or even an elf; what he had in common with these beings was that he didn’t really exist either.

  One day Sonia rushed into his room, a human cyclone. Some men were at the door asking for him. Cassio couldn’t find his glasses, observed the men through fog.

  He was being accused of penetrating the computer systems of the Botanic Garden branch of the Bank of Boston. Sonia was furious. But when the men realized that a twelve-year-old kid had made a mockery of their system’s defenses, their primary reaction was embarrassment. In exchange for a report on weaknesses in the bank’s network, the matter would be dropped; when they invited him to use their servers on the condition that he help them patch their domains, young Cassio Liberman Brandão da Silva chewed down on his smile of victory. His hobby had become an asset. Sonia, however, had other plans.

  Cassio couldn’t just spend all day at the computer, she decided; Saturday classes at the School for Little Inventors couldn’t be his only time out of the house. Malevolent and prescient, she coordinated logistics with Susy Waskam, a neighbor there in the building.

  Prodded along by their mothers, the irritated boys emerged into the outside light. His head covered with dark tufts of hair, Leni had the physical aplomb of Kermit the Frog’s first cousin, and like that character, he preferred a certain sartorial seriousness—polo shirts and glasses that gave him a gravitas rarely found in Anura neobatrachia. He and Cassio had run into each other several times in the building’s elevator, and both had shared harrowing rides with the albino twins from 7C. Cassio never looked directly at them; he merely watched them in the elevator mirror, which hardly softened the ferocity of their psychotic gaze. Leni lived on the eighth floor. Manuel, his hamster, had once fallen onto the twins’ balcony. They had an iguana, and had let him touch it: Leni slid his hand along the scaly body of Joaquín, who kept his eyes closed for as long as the contact lasted. The heroic hamster, meanwhile, had not only survived the adventure but opened the door to the lair of the albinos, who, like Leni and Cassio, lived with their single mother, no permanent male adult in sight.

  Leni sidled up to Cassio and spoke slowly to him: they were clearly still too young, he said, for creatures of the feminine sex to be throwing themselves at them, begging to be penetrated. It just wasn’t going to happen. He didn’t mean to be overly blunt, but, just in case Cassio hadn’t ever considered the question, he had to ask: What was the point of going to the club? There just wasn’t any reason, concluded Leni. He’d been studying the matter.

  Cassio looked at the subtly scaly skin of his new friend. He checked his Star Wars Swatch and looked at the sky; it was lewd with light, heavy with heat. It was nine a.m., the workday barely begun in the world of men. Leni was right. But the time would come.

  This same bus would drop them off at home at six p.m., the end of the workday for children. Cassio and Leni sat up front; every so often their meatworms stiffened in alert, smelling the possibility of spread buttocks. Then Mora appeared.

  Mora Baum: whatever it was that she secreted, it intoxicated the girls as well. She had chestnut hair and eyes that ranged from nebulous Neptune to a phosphorescent green (specifically, that of the algae that sometimes floated offshore, visible from the Costanera—a rare lime green that people said was brought on by the biological experiments that were taking place on the Martín García Island, a few hundred miles from Buenos Aires). She lived in the Luis María Campos y José Hernández Tower, climbed onto and off of the bus followed by a comet tail composed of variations of herself, little crowds of girls that Cassio couldn’t tell apart. Sometimes she wore a crown of flowers, and other days she dressed entirely in pink; a genuine alpha female, Mora was venerated and feared by her followers. Even the idiotic madrijs, the club’s chaperones, were accomplices to her halo of impunity; they looked the other way during the treasure hunts, pretending not to see Mora and her friends systematically spying on those who were hiding the treasure.

  With Mora leading the way, the girls had colluded to induce Judith Gugelkorn’s brother to admit something under duress: The only thing boys want is to stick it in. The girls weren’t stupid, had already realized this, and Mora made the doctrine her own, forcing him to download the charts of the natural law of sex right there in front of her little friends.

  For most of that summer, the little masculine elements at the Hacoaj Country Club were condemned to wander in circles in the desert of disaffection just like their Mosaic ancestors thousands of years before. While “Caca” Heller and their other enemies tended to gang together and cuss, thereby highlighting their most unpleasant features, Cassio and Leni decided to ignore the girls completely. They would never honor a hierarchy based on petulance, unratified by any sort of logic. To prove this, one day Cassio penetrated the herd of girls and invited Mora Baum herself out for ice cream. To the stunned surprise of her friends and the idiot madrijim, Mora accepted.

  And it was Mora herself who, under the willows of Hacoaj, took hands-on interest in the contents of Cassio’s trousers. She looked at him steadily as she slid her hand down, the movement a bit brusque, which made him jump. With her other hand she took off his glasses, and then she kissed him, her lips softly parted. Cassio unclenched his fists and reached out; something in her responded to his touch like an alert reptile. He put his glasses back on, and concentrated on Mora’s bra, on the goose bumps that spread beneath her blue Hacoaj sweater.

  The feeling that she had recognized his true self glowing like a golden beast in the dark jungle, that everything else was a parody for the benefit of noninitiates—those incapable of reading the true code behind the aggressive payload—produced a devotion so strong that for a time he oscillated far from the deconstructed computers and logical fields that were his natural habitat. He was enthralled by the lilac light that pulsed from Mora’s body, his little divine su
pernova. Every so often he allowed himself to collapse into a chair beside Leni for a quick Wolfenstein tussle, but the deadly reality of the game was only a copy of a copy; he only became fully absorbed at the end of each match, gripping his joystick tightly.

  In the mornings, the bus gently rocks the surreptitious erection that writhes like a worm in his pants. Would he run into Mora? Would he feel her candied touch? Perversely, the club’s summer session ends when school begins. Cassio decides to take the bull by the horns.

  He lifts the lamb’s-wool collar of his jean jacket, combs his hair straight back. The mighty tower rises at the corner of La Pampa and Luis María Campos, the tinted glass crests of its roofline slashing at the sky. The glazed door slides open. The security guard is watching a soccer match on a tiny screen; focused on his destiny, Cassio ascends in the mirrored cube. The elevator’s metallic plates open onto a luminous carpet. There are two lions painted gold. Diana stands erect between them, likewise beautiful, bearer of the chromosomic secret of his beloved.

  “Morita, you’ve got a little friend here to see you,” she calls.

  She winks at Cassio, and he clenches his teeth.

  “Come in through here. It’s the room just past the mirror.”

  Cassio lets himself be led along the blond carpet. The lavender furniture makes the room glow pink. On a small bookshelf there is a row of My Little Ponys. “Hi,” he says, and unsheathes his portable chessboard.