Dark Constellations

by Pola Oloixarac

  One movement works as the surface, where visible change occurs; the other movement is the structure, hidden beneath the flow of mortal life. The two movements—hippie/randomizing and financial/conservative—share a disdain for industrial corporations and factories, the former because industry embodies the values of their parents, which they are obliged to reject, and the latter because industry entails a theory of value that competes with the absolute liberalism that the poetic flight of capital (Viz. ever more distant from the gold standard) seeks for itself. And both movements endeavor to rise beyond the guiding industrial paradigm of progress. Their hearts bear the mark of technology.

  “ I’ve never met a DAN in person! Digital Anarchy!”

  On Santi Pando’s T-shirt, a young Bill Gates is smoking a joint beside a vintage computer.

  “You were there when it started, right?”

  Cassio’s smile stretches his lips but doesn’t show his teeth. Pando, CEO of Ship.e.bo, can’t hide his excitement:

  “I didn’t really know them—well, I knew that they were super elite, but I was too young—I was probably still playing with my Playmobil while everything was going on! I might as well have been one of those little Playmobil figures, but Jako, do you know Jako? He went out with Wari’s sister, who’d been in school with Mat from DAN more or less around the time when they fucked up the main server at the IRS. Do you know Jako?”

  At a nearby desk, a girl with pink hair follows the scene with interest. Bunkered down behind an enormous Mac monitor, she’s talking on the telephone and staring at the latest arrival. Cassio nods at the image of Bill respectfully, and manages one word:

  “No.”

  “Well, sure, I didn’t think you’d know him—shit, it’s obvious you wouldn’t—but he knew about you. What an awesome time. Dude, it’s awesome that you’ve come to work with us. Really. You’re exactly what we want—it’s, like, very aspirational for us to have you here. In the good sense of the word, obviously. I don’t want to sound like an ass-kisser, but it’s true! You know, in our line of work a criminal record’s worth more than a résumé.”

  Santi Pando made a T with his hands, and flew toward the back storeroom.

  It was a cute little office in “Palermo Valley,” the nucleus for tech start-ups in Buenos Aires: an old house, recently recycled, where the atmosphere was relaxed and the exposed brick contrasted with the black monitors. No one there was over the age of twenty-five. Only the one girl in sight had a Mac. There was a vintage sky-blue refrigerator, and orange chairs around a tall table holding fruit and granola bars. On one wall, the enormous mouth of a girl (not the same one) stuck out her tongue above the Ship.e.bo logo—a haphazard collage on an ad for ice cream.

  Someone touches his back; it’s the girl with pink hair.

  “Neese to might you,” she says, without taking the sucker out of her mouth.

  The sucker forms a little ball at the base of her cheek—a GIF that would inspire subsequent skirmishes between Cassio and his gonads. Now Pando comes running back toward them, his hands full of Cokes:

  “Ha. Ninja Turtles!”

  Hidden behind his purple mask, Donatello waves from Cassio’s cotton-covered belly. Santi winks and holds up the Cokes.

  “The team is excellent, you’ll see. We’re exactly what we look like—all we do is program. Even when we’re not here, we’re still programming, but in our minds! There’s free Cokes and chocolate and granola bars for all the programmers. I’m going to order Ninja Turtle candy! Coke Zero or regular?”

  After a few experiments with David Beckham–style minicrests, among other attempts to reprocess his in-person viscosity into something a little more memorable, CEO Santi Pando had recently gone back to the bowl cut of his childhood, which complemented his thick eyeglasses and ironic corporate T-shirts. Santi was perfectly aware that he lacked a mystic element: he came from a wealthy family, a childhood of neckties in English-speaking private schools, and he’d missed out on the poetic adolescence of authentic hackers who spent their era of sebaceous explosions writing BBS posts and defying the law. In the 1990s, he and his friends had seen their houses inundated by technology; the country had just thrown open the door to foreign imports, bringing in not just computers but also the yogurt makers and other appliances that were all the rage in Argentina back then.

  Santi tried to compensate for his lack of magic with an entrepreneurial style based on hyperkinesis, ayahuasca trips, enthusiasm, and anxiety. He defined himself as a devigner—half developer and half designer—a pampered, middle-class business child. He gave the very best of himself in interviews:

  “What was the name of your first girlfriend?”

  “Commodore 64.”

  “What’s your dream?”

  “To create a collective innovation platform that allows the web to attain consciousness.”

  “What’s the sexiest thing about the internet? (Without mentioning porn!)”

  “My favorite porn is people building Web applications—a living, breathing, creative community of geeks!”

  In the photograph that accompanied the profile, Santi was dressed as a Stormtrooper. He hadn’t been able to convince Alan Rochenforr, his angel investor, to pose next to him as Han Solo. “Now that I’m an investor, I’m on the dark side, so I can only be Darth Vader,” had been Rochenforr’s excuse.

  “Come here. I want you to meet Alan.”

  Cassio and Santi drained their Cokes, each taking the measure of the other in a moment of intense silence. Like in a Western, Santi cracked his neck joints and Cassio shifted his weight from one leg to the other. Then they climbed up the staircase at the edge of a patio whose center held a lime tree.

  Alan Rochenforr was walking on a treadmill. He had his earpiece in, was on a call. He made a T with his hands.

  Rochenforr belonged to the world of pure capital, which only occasionally intersected with the productive/creative world of which Santi Pando considered himself the captain. Though Rochenforr didn’t visit the Ship.e.bo office very often, he liked to keep his own desk there, with photos—blond children with braces, and a pregnant woman submerged up past her genitals in some lake in Uruguay. It made him feel close to youth and passion. Now forty-five years old, Alan Rochenforr had met every expectation for beings of his class: he had graduated from Harvard, founded a Latino copycat of an American company, managed to sell it before the dot-com crash, and could now dedicate himself to paying for his architect wife’s art courses and supervising the growth of his free-range offspring. He continued to bet on the future, and hoped that this start-up would catch hold of something as yet unnamed but already present in the world. When he invested in a company, he always asked that there be a room with a treadmill—he had one in Barracas, and one in Puerto Madero. This was how he ensured that his visits would be worthwhile at the intracellular level.

  Now he dried his head and patted his hands on his shirt.

  “How’s it going, man? Santi told me a lot about you.”

  Alan glanced at the Ninja Turtles on Cassio’s T-shirt, and Cassio showed his teeth. Sometimes he liked to show his teeth, or pretend to be a robot, or hold someone’s gaze.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet such an eminence. Welcome to the team.”

  Alan dried his hand and held it out. He mentioned that on average he ran three kilometers a day during his calls. He wiped the towel across his face and paused the treadmill, then drew his face tight into something resembling a smile.

  It was decidedly nontrivial that Ship.e.bo was the first video game to star a native Indo-American community. The game was highly original, an attractive option for demanding users who liked to entertain themselves during the workday by throwing endangered natives around. It was inspired by dwarf-throwing games (always set pointedly in the US, Canada, medieval France, or England), and was designed to gather a critical mass of users the company could then channel toward new of
ferings. This would in turn render vast amounts of user data that could later be resold to avid marketing directors at other companies.

  Each native successfully thrown was converted into a donation to be sent to IRL Ship.e.bo communities—this was the touch of marketing genius that had led Rochenforr to invest in the company. Santi liked to say that it wasn’t a business, it was a movement. And now Rochenforr begged their pardon, said he had to make another call.

  When they came back downstairs, Cassio looked hopefully at the reception desk. The girl with grapefruit-colored hair smiled and typed in his direction.

  That afternoon, Cassio was introduced to the movement’s arcana. For example, Santi taught him the secret handshake: one hand approached another, and together they formed an undulant, snakelike S. It ended with a snap of the fingers.

  The vernacular Web held other novelties for Cassio, ones that would be received enthusiastically by his timid glands. Outside of a few flings, the active life of his meaty joystick could hardly be called gregarious, propelled as it was by sessions of self-love that Cassio never allowed himself to think of as pleasure. His emotional capacities were those of an unweaned infant; the long delay of his access to female organs had contributed exponentially to his idealization thereof. The lives of overly romantic individuals are often corroded by the possibility of love; though this was not his case, he too had set the entry barrier for anyone interested in taking possession of him—in becoming the master of his will—exceptionally low.

  In another time and place, a nerd like Cassio would have suffered. He would have spent his entire gray existence off to one side of the office, taking orders from inferior beings, shoved into the worm section of the ego food chain. But rumors about the presence of a hacking eminence spread like napalm: his past provided him with a top-drawer superhero cape. His disheveled look was a necessary counterpoint to his hidden magic, an inverted image of his interior worth. Much as the dream of capital had projected muscle-bound genies surging from detergent bottles and household appliances for the women of the previous century, the challenges women faced in the early years of the twenty-first century created new needs and thus new holes—new vulnerabilities into which manhood could be inserted. Girls were always having trouble with their computers. Cassio would be the domestic genius, the whiz kid who was always willing to help. He now felt the rebirth of a masculine vigor that had, strictly speaking, never been born in the first place—a starry ascent within his own sexual niche.

  Melina had studied musical comedy. She changed her hair color every week, dressed in eye-catching outfits that she designed herself, and took care of her administrative tasks with relaxed efficiency. From Monday to Friday she was the only woman in the Ship.e.bo office; on the weekends she took part in sporadic performances of indie plays on off-off-Corrientes. When she first met Cassio, the work in question was Vampires on Facebook: The Musical.

  At an office party thrown to celebrate Ship.e.bo’s five thousandth user, Cassio stood at the bar as if clinging to the edge of the deep end of a swimming pool. The rest of the programmers socialized around him. And the universe found itself in an advanced state of affairs: there were several girls at the party that he’d never seen before.

  “Your name is Casio, like the watch?”

  “But with two Ses.”

  “And you give the time?”

  “I’ll give it to you if you want.”

  When Melina mischievously extends the secret handshake in his direction, Cassio moves in counter to the vertigo he feels, and kisses her on the cheek. In his mind he works through the key teachings of his friend Jeipi, who has the most experience with women of anyone he knows: even in a cabaret, surrounded by prostitutes, it’s crucial not to show the slightest interest. A woman’s self-esteem can only be stimulated through her vanity—Jeipi had underlined this in the air. Minimize your actions; make sure all responsibility for the scene ends up on her shoulders. It was the only thing Cassio had ever learned about feminism, and it was enough.

  Melina smiles publicly:

  “And aside from giving the time, what else do you know how to do?”

  “I can create languages. I can derail banks. I can create invisible armies unlike anything modern computers have ever experienced. And I can give you the time.”

  Still holding a slice of lemon in her mouth, Melina laughs, and whispers something in his ear; Cassio doesn’t catch it but doesn’t ask, focused as he is on the viscous gurgling around his corpus cavernosum, watchtower and lighthouse for the human night. Melina is practically hanging all over Cassio the Stoic. Then a friend of hers shows up, and the two women head off to the bathroom. They come back out smiling, their arms around each other’s shoulders; they head out to the street and hail a taxi. They laugh too loudly and their hair is a mess, but none of that matters to them at all. Cassio keeps thinking that he should jot down the car’s license plate, but instead he just memorizes it; another girl talks to him, yet another girl kisses him, and the night is shattered by invisible asteroids.

  The following Monday, in the office bathroom, Cassio’s hands advance like interstellar capsules across Melina’s mammary terrain: Mariner I and II, launched simultaneously to capture samples of the Venusian atmosphere. With her blouse half-open, Melina breathes heavily against the tile. In a fit of passion, Cassio nibbles at her neck through the collar of the jacket she’s wearing. She responds by ensnaring him with her legs; her fuchsia panties come into brief contact with his belly button and the tentacular hair below. He does his best to focus on Diego Armando Maradona so as not to finish too soon.

  After a couple of weeks of surreptitious encounters in the bathroom and after work—they can’t meet on weekends, when Art requires her presence—Cassio invites Leni to join him at the Abasto to see Vampires on Facebook: The Musical. Melina appears onstage, and Cassio takes a deep breath; Melina opens her mouth to sing (Radiohead’s “We Suck Young Blood,” accompanied by a ukulele), and Cassio clutches at the armrests. His heart (because he has one, almost as present and porous as what throbs farther down) stops. She is without a doubt the play’s most beautiful vampire, a fact that must not have escaped the cognitive apparatus of the director, because her character takes off all her clothes, twice. This bothers Cassio, who can’t stop obsessing over what must go on during rehearsals. Leni declares himself “amazed” because the play is “competitively terrible,” a nontrivial fact not because most plays are terrible but because at a certain point it becomes difficult to distinguish one degree of awfulness from another. Cassio looks at him, his eyes full of hate. He grumbles a little, but without much conviction.

  Outside the theater exit, willows hang like stage curtains across Humahuaca Street. Leni and Cassio crouch down behind some cars, peering through the branches. The door spits out batches of people in costumes; Cassio’s mouth fills with saliva. On that urban tundra, Melina looks like a ghost, her eyes painted red and black. The long green leaves, the streetlights, the flying cockroaches: everything conspires together to make her even more painfully beautiful. What was he hoping to accomplish? He decides to become his own Voyager, bearer of an incomprehensible message launched into outer space.

  Then Melina comes walking up the line of cars.

  “Hey, what are you guys doing?”

  His invisibility cape dissolves.

  Their shoulders still hunched, Cassio and Leni come out of their hiding place. They exchange a brief look, but since they’ve already been exposed as idiots, they can now relax. Melina plants kisses on their cheeks, takes Cassio by the hand; her other hand tenses in her pocket. Leni follows along behind.

  “They came to see the play!” she announces to her cohort.

  The silence lowers gloomily from the trees. The actors stare at Cassio’s midsection, where a Ninja Turtle is making a “V for Vendetta” sign.

  “Our next play should have Ninja Turtles,” says one of them.

  A
nother half stifles a derisive laugh. Melina introduces Cassio as “a friend,” and he murmurs something that isn’t quite hello. The actors disperse, only to regroup farther away. Cassio decides that the problem isn’t just that they are actors—a synonym for loathsome, according to Leni—but also that he doesn’t like them at all.

  Cassio had recently begun cultivating a project involving homemade microdrones with a pair of cronies he’d met in his Cellular Automatons course, Karsa and Vila. The three of them gathered in a borrowed garage on Rosetti Street in Chacarita. Proof of the feasibility of minuscule flying machines was abundant in the form of insects; affixed with cameras and microphones, the drones’ potential within the world of espionage was obvious. He’d thought of testing them out on some pretty neighbor, but wasn’t sure he had any; in any case, that was a minor problem compared to the technical challenge in question.

  As noted, in times past Cassio found projects set in the real world to be irredeemably vulgar. The microdrones were his first attempt at creating physical machines relegated to sharing space with humans: he’d just dropped out of his mathematics program, and had started to feel the physical necessity of building things with his hands, to hear the call of the empiric emanating from deep inside.

  Just then the phone in his pocket began to vibrate. Cassio stared at the screen:

  hey what time is it?