Mora watches him advance into her territory; her kissable little mouth is closed. She sits down straddle-legged on the rug and opens the chessboard, examines it. Cassio sits down across from her. His gaze traverses her doll-like freckles, her eyelashes fluttering in the vanilla-scented mist. He says that if she doesn’t know how to play, he can teach her.
Mora informs him that she knows perfectly well how to play. Her father taught her—he’s a DAIA delegate, so they’re always playing chess. Her little skirt forms a gazebo over the organelles that, in Cassio’s imagination, are smiling in his direction.
Within a few minutes, Mora has lost a knight and her queen. Her T-shirt sags open, revealing smooth little hills, little puddings of orange and strawberry. Cassio breathes in their aroma, squints, proposes starting a new game.
Mora stares at him. She is somber, her countenance seems very anti–My Little Pony, has venom in her eyes. She says that she only kissed him because she was sure that he had a tiny dick and she didn’t want it to hurt her first time. She had talked about it with her psychologist, who’d said it was okay to do that if it helped ease her mind. There isn’t anything else to talk about, and he can go; they’ve broken up, and Sandro the doorman will let him out downstairs. (Later on, thanks to women’s magazines like Ser Única, Mora would identify her current body language—arms and legs crossed—as unattractive and best avoided.)
Though it was still summer, it was horribly cold in Buenos Aires, a city that seemed taken by surprise every single winter, a winter denial that made their equinoxes all the more humid and painful. In Cassio’s mind, the silence was atypical and terrifying. He stopped at a corner. A brightly lit convenience store, and three girls in miniskirts entering, two more coming out. Getting in, getting out, in, out, the old in-out. There must not be anything special about this topological eventuality of penetrating spaces, or things. Or people. Nothing special about it. Nothing at all.
Cassio broke off all relationships with women, starting with the ones in his house. His natural satellites, Sonia and Yolanda, mother and maid, whom he now perceived as inauthentic, united to form an incomprehensibly sadistic caste. The arc of his life coincided with the rise of women, considered a “minority,” toward equal civil rights, but his mental life moved in the opposite direction. Soon his room began to stink of pizza and Coca-Cola, sources of essential nutrients for growing young programmers. On the TV, ads showed blue liquids poured onto vaginal products “with wings,” which didn’t help in the slightest. Was this what they had inside?
Being ugly wasn’t his biggest problem; he lacked the least trace of raw animality. The meat that covered Cassio’s bones made his body a friendly ensemble: an easygoing mammal without menace. And his mind reacted poorly to the presence of emotions. Already bearing signs of the timidity that would characterize most of his life, Cassio’s latest embryonic form was missing the features of manliness indicated by the genes of his Brazilian father, and the fact that Cassio was still short, soft, and Jewish—a mother’s goiter of sorts—would send his self-esteem to the bottom of the Mariana Trench of emotions. He asked himself how it was possible that Sonia’s womb hadn’t rejected him as an enemy alien life-form. Perhaps because this hadn’t happened, Cassio had adopted the logic of survivors, renounced masculinity, and mimicked his mother instead. A theory of metabolic racism that assumed the dominance of European genes consumed the darkest hours of his mind.
Moreover, Cassio couldn’t understand the interest that Gustavo Levas aroused in his mother. Whenever he detected the man watching television in the living room, he walked rapidly past, and only saw him face-to-face at meals. Gustavo reached out to him several times by talking about computers, but the boy didn’t seem impressed. One afternoon when Cassio’s mother had gone out, Gustavo approached Cassio with a strange look on his face, and said that the research trip on which he’d met Cassio’s mother had been the darkest experience of his life. He wanted to say more, but Cassio’s eyes had gone dead, his face expressionless. Gustavo was a public employee, working on the Project at the Ministry of Genetics. “You should come learn about it someday.”
Cassio fell into bed wearing only his boxers. He stretched his arm out toward his dresser, neatly ordered in the light of its Yoda lamp. With a black marker he traced a line on his left arm, starting at his armpit and following the principal vein down to where his phalanges joined together. Then he drew the rest of his veins, until the lines were all tangled up in a helicoidal grapevine swirl. He lowered his sky-blue boxers and drew a pair of eyes on his member, which began to rise up in the glow of the cycling, multicolored lights. His old Spectrum clone, disassembled into stacks of cables and circuit boards beside his bed, would be the ship that finally took him back to his true abode: tingling, he prepared himself to enter the mother ship. His ability to disassociate convention from thought would lead to the elite skills noted on his future résumé. He would later create a series of the most violent computer viruses in the history of the country: the Argentine Malvinas.
The feeling of morning sickness always stopped the moment the light entered the window and flowed in slow, carcinogenic rays across Cassio’s body. Sometimes Leni stayed over, sprawled out on the bed reading comics and materials from Página 12’s School for Young Journalists while Cassio programmed. Relaxed after a game of Wolfenstein, Cassio and Leni would sharpen their earliest attempts at misogynist arguments, precarious trenches in the sandbox of resentment. They would later learn that Mora had started “dating” Caca Heller, who now called himself Demián.
Meanwhile, the Buenos Aires ecosystem had become infested with Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” and Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” The mucilaginous furor of “Vision of Love” (Mariah Carey, 1990) still hadn’t died down. The only true sweet goodness in the outside world was pooled in a children’s television program, El Show de Xuxa.
In a series of solitary ceremonies, Cassio connects to the web and wreaks havoc. There is an unforeseen wasp invasion, and he devotes himself to drowning them in a mixture of honey and cream cheese; he watches them sink below the surface still fighting for air, closes his eyes when they stop moving. The servers at his disposal are Ciba and Startel; no machine or human or Ninja Turtle on Earth could face down his implacable attacks on all other life-forms. He listens to the Cure’s Pornography, and to the songs of Xuxa played backward, especially “Lua de Cristal” (1990), deemed by many the carrier of satanic messages. And he wears a ninja headband.
Alert now, make the call, I’m happy now
Beautiful angel of light, I’m happy
He’s the leader of invasion, he’s the devil of love!
As Anjodaluz83, Angzt and other nicknames, Cassio Liberman Brandão da Silva would go on to unleash a series of strikes against universities, airline companies, and governmental organizations. They will all give up their most intimate gifts and secrets. A refined repugnance at the ring of asteroids framing his celestial rotations began to gestate within him, but nothing could come between him and his first passion: finding the trapdoors in the code, entering the computers of others. The better he knew them, the more thoroughly he betrayed them, and the passion birthed a motto: to know is to betray.
He’d begun his climb toward technical mastery by dedicating himself to infiltrating the computers of NASA, searching for proof of extraterrestrial life in the project begun by his supreme idol, Carl Sagan. In the sky, Venus shines through the fog, and the moon dissolves above the crepuscular trench of Buenos Aires.
An expert at leaving her mark on pop music, in the early years of the twenty-first century Madonna began erasing all traces of her time among humans with the technical zeal of a serial killer. If she spent more than five minutes in any given place, a team of people with specialized outfits and equipment arrived to sterilize the area when she left. Her DNA would never again thicken the file folders documenting all those who had bestowed minuscule pieces of skin c
aught in the concentration of dust, hormones, and sweat that we call life, devoured by the stromatolites of data. Madonna’s behavior was pioneering, at a time in which protecting one’s overflowing DNA from the drilling of metadata was unthinkable.
Madonna’s relationship to the invisible motors of evolution, the viri, was the complementary opposite of that of Michael Jackson. Madonna was concerned about the data secreted by the body; Michael, about the data lurking in the world that the body couldn’t process. Michael wore a face mask to protect himself, calling attention to the epigenetic environment: his masked appearances pointed out the mysterious trajectories of germs and bacteria, minimal lifeforms menacing the human life. How much of what one thinks, or does, is in fact the result of the sentinel action of bacteria reacting to their surroundings? he seemed to be begging to ask. A change was underway, a shift that would have repercussions throughout the planet, with brutal effects comparable to the most violent biological transformations.
At some point between 120 and 190 million years ago, a few cockroaches started to form colonies, began to specialize in the rites of art and war, formed groups devoted to specific tasks such as defending the colony, finding food, and reproducing. Little by little, each group began to generate physical correlates to their given task. Eventually a few colonies learned to domesticate certain types of mushrooms, and started cultivating extensive fungal gardens with which to feed themselves; in this way, new arthropodal forms evolved, and eventually the first super-organism appeared, a bulwark preserving all of the species’ varied phases. Later, both humans and insects would create civilizations based formally on the principles of caste—queens, soldiers. And thanks to the LatAm Genetic Data Unification Project, the human population of said zone was able to conceive a new form of existence: united through the traces they’d left, they saw their pasts glow beneath a common light.
The emerging processes that determine the course of history are the product of interactions among immense numbers of individuals, and are themselves shaped by earlier historical variables that are difficult to quantify. Like species united against oblivion, the leading teams of the Genetic Data Unification Project and the Ministry of Genetics worked together on the two known forms of immortality: first, the war of keeping memory alive, transmitted genetically; second, the legacy transmitted through culture. During the Anthropocene, the two forms had become intertwined. Nourished by the gene banks established during the presidency of Raul Alfonsín in Argentina, implemented to help search for those who disappeared during the 1976-1983 dictatorship, the Project helped develop a singularly splendid genetic library.
Like an animal, the human hides in the forest, but it isn’t long before it’s found.
Having lost trust in the feminine branch of his species, for the next few years Cassio forgot about females altogether. During his final year at ORT Institute of Technology, he audited a Cellular Automatons course, where he studied ways to create tiny armies, multiple hordes whose attacks he planned one day to direct. The class was held in the exact sciences department, on the far side of an ant nest of hallways that Cassio wandered in fascination. He never spoke to anyone, but noted the vague presence of beings more or less similar to himself in the immediate vicinity. And he didn’t feel alone.
He was majoring in mathematics, but his latest passions were topology and Ping-Pong. Together they accounted for his scattered moments of leisure, the few hours of free time remaining after his eight-hour exams and his electronic submersions into what he referred to as “personal research.” When it wasn’t hard at work, his brain became lethargic, like a snake after a large meal; in the jungle, snakes live in profound anonymity, only allow themselves to be seen as they attack, then languish in supine vulnerability, and this is when their mortality rate spikes. Cassio thought about the errors that subjugate the world, and their terrifying naturalization; about the calm acceptance of evil, as if it were merely a substitute for the law of gravity. He let his hair grow down to his shoulders, began dressing all in black. When it rained he sheathed himself in a duckling-yellow raincoat; walking through the parks on campus, he looked like a huge plastic bumblebee.
Among other highlights of his nerdy life, he had an affair with numbers theory, which addressed many of the problems at the base of cryptography—his airy love—and was friendly with two Asian students, Shiro and Coco, whose Ping-Pong supremacy was overwhelming. Pavilion 1 of Exact Sciences bustled with activity, but it was rare to see the same faces around for long: the most gifted brains soon abandoned the university, as did the most desperate, which is how they caught up with the most gifted. The capital needed beings like him and his Ping-Pong colleagues, and was in a position to make them better offers.
As photophobic as any albino crab, Cassio avoided the outside world whenever he could. His lair was a third-floor laboratory on the shaded side of Exact Sciences. The world unfolded in all directions, coursed through the channels surrounding him, but never established direct contact. He hadn’t yet graduated when he was offered a position as a cryptography assistant in the computer science department—his debut as a subordinate. His boss, Héctor Skilnov, was a “Scientific Computer,” and had the diploma to prove it; the field had stopped producing his type in the mid-1980s. Scientific knowledge relies on hierarchical structures with clear chains of command; each order given is a display of attenuated brute strength. Cassio’s job, which he found both easy and enjoyable, consisted of preparing Skilnov’s classes, and giving the lectures when Skilnov didn’t show up, which was most of the time.
It was during this period that he wrote his first seminal work in natural language, “F.A.T.S.O.” (Finite Algebraic Transform Scrambler in O[log n]). It earned him waves of popularity among the most renowned nerds. His Dead Kennedys T-shirts disappeared, replaced by T-shirts bearing mathematical symbols.
Now Cassio strode ominously into the student center, hacker or serf flaring across his chest. In the café, he ordered a sandwich with no lettuce. The boy at the register bowed his head in respect.
“Ave Cassius.”
It was Maiki. He’d founded a university political organization united against political organizations; it was called NO, a sort of absolutist Trotskyite super league. Cassio first met him in Mathematical Analysis; he decided he liked Maiki. Maiki was probably even more isolated from society than Cassio was, distancing himself from his natural allies at the speed of light.
Maiki was blond and extremely pale. He spoke without moving his eyebrows, and rarely blinked; at times his hands emitted dissonant signals, parallel messages that were independent of the transmission coming from north of his neck. He spent his summers in Israel shepherding goats and collecting oranges in the occupied deserts of the Negev; he returned wearing brown jackets with the word defense written in Hebrew. Loyal to anarcho-nerd folklore, he allowed the conceptual violence of his T-shirts to impose itself on his surroundings.
For Maiki, revolutions were possible, but required a specific diagnostic of the system’s bugs. Cassio agreed that the university (known to others as the universe) was running on diseased software. Maiki had managed a few small subversive attacks. He’d had salami pizza delivered to the homes of professors, from different pizza joints, delivery pizza version of a DDoS attack; during a conference in the Aula Magna, he’d sent small homemade drones fitted with dildos traversing through the air. Ridding the world of senior management wasn’t enough, he said—but it was necessary.
Maiki ended up shaken by exchanges like this, his eyes shining in a way that was not quite normal; the passage of language through his body left him exhausted. Cassio returned to the problems of his thesis, and Maiki withdrew toward his inner hominid, in search of solace.
Cassio was working on the design of a constellation of autonomous agents: sleeper cells, latent, perfectly invisible, scattered throughout public third-party servers all over the world. It would be impossible for anyone to know what the cells were waiting for; th
at is, no one could possibly guess which of the universe’s signals would provoke something similar to a behavior. Cassio’s thesis project had a number of innovative features, and made him an extremely favorable prospect for a doctorate in cryptography. It described a set of algebraic transformations whose properties permitted the conception of a new type of algorithm based on public key encryption, a form of computation that could be used to hide complex processes on public servers under the very noses of their users. When the moment came and the proper set of signals was sent, the encrypted algorithms on the dark side of the globe would begin to execute their code, setting off on the mission they’d been built to carry out.
The method shared similarities with several emerging biological mechanisms wherein the sudden appearance of a key—an enzyme, an extremely specific temperature, the presence of a natural enemy—sets fundamental processes in motion; in some cases, the process involves the leap to a new formulation of existence. This was the idea with which Cassio had begun his personal research, back when he was playing with the notion of experimenting with the new generation of robust, powerful algorithms designed to penetrate security systems at critical moments without human intervention—algorithms that could learn from their own mistakes, abandoning paths as necessary in order to try others. His billions of data drones could carry on with their algorithmic lives without ever revealing the secret programming they held within; strictly speaking, they could dedicate themselves to normality as they awaited the call to begin the superordinate procedures for which they had been created.
It was an extremely beautiful idea. The algorithms were like golems, their bodies hidden in the high grass of data, awaiting the key that would turn them into something monstrous, potentially beyond control. Cassio spent hour after hour looking for any errors he might have made—future vulnerabilities against which to innoculate his creatures. Then he went to see Skilnov, his immediate superior.
Dark Constellations Page 5