Dark Constellations

by Pola Oloixarac

  He answered immediately:

  Whatever time you want.

  He waited.

  Kkkkkk.

  Now she was typing something else.

  IM HOME ALL ALONE WANNA COME?

  Impressed, Karsa and Vila iterated around him in silence. A midnight text, void of meandering, stripped of civic masks, could only signify an interest both specific and sexual. Pearlescent with prestige, Cassio said his goodbyes and flew to her on his moped.

  Melina opened the door, dreamlike, wearing only a white undershirt and a thin miniskirt. She kissed him on the cheek and offered him a shot of local vodka; she asked if he had pot, and Cassio shook his head.

  “It’s so great that you came,” she said, smiling, backing away from him.

  She tripped and landed on the bed. Maybe she was overacting her drunkenness a bit, or maybe not; the flow of seductive signals continued uninterrupted. Cassio did his best to mimic her smile and state of relaxation, but the internal pressure of his liquid DNA had compromised his entire being quite painfully—he could barely breathe through the little hole at the end of his erection. The computer played Radiohead’s “Subterranean Homesick Alien” and lit their bodies with flashes of lunar light. Melina stretched out on the bed and finished her joint; her vagina, unsheltered beneath her miniskirt, flickered luminous above him.

  None of his life’s previous mental landscapes had prepared him for the microscopic spectacle of the glistening humidity gathered in those minuscule valleys. He fell to his knees, careful not to look directly at this eyeless fish, this mini–Jabba the Hut in its throne room. He opened his mouth, felt a vortex of suction twist his lips. He imagined the hypothetical ingestion of an extremely soft and airy muffin, sending his tongue in on an exploratory mission to capture a bit of filling. Melina emitted a series of strange sounds, and then her voice faded away.

  He asked if she was asleep. She didn’t answer.

  Cassio’s mouth was now numb—she had apparently applied some spermicidal lubricant. Cassio raised his eyes to her incandescent Mac, still sending its rays of light across the bed. A few days before, he’d installed the latest operating system and a few little programs to help her avoid leaving traces on the internet. He hadn’t yet checked to see if they were running properly.

  Her Facebook page was open. There were several messages from Marto, one of the actors from the musical. The little arrows of her messages curved toward his—she’d answered every one. The odds of a musical comedy actor being heterosexual were extremely low, but to judge from Marto’s photos—that bulge—and the content of his messages, it seemed indisputable that he was. Cassio made a few calculations, ones that even someone without his privileged mathematical cranial hemisphere could have managed. The data were clear: what he’d eaten was a muffin full of Marto’s genetic leftovers from, technically, just a few hours ago, a thought Cassio found thoroughly unpleasant.

  He left his moped leaned up against a light post, and entered the office without making a sound. The human beings had all dispersed, leaving only the sisterhood of machines, the blinking LED lights, and the hum of his own breathing. He was having trouble seeing the outlines, the solid spirits of things; he sat down at his desk to wait for his energy to dissipate. He rested his hands on the desk’s melamine veneer; he felt nauseous, his own magma trying to decide out of which hole to erupt. He drank a little water, tried to calm himself down.

  He imagined himself puking up Melina’s Mac, the office’s nervous system transmitting the acid to all the terminals—this scorched the circuit boards, integrating them into a stew of biological waste—and then a dry flash as each power source imploded. His elbow brushed against the trackpad of his computer, and the screen lit up. In green Helvetica the words read, “In 2020 we will either be Hackers or Serfs.” His headboard phrase, now converted into a Santi Pando mantra.

  Cassio left just like he’d come in, without turning on a light or leaving any trace. On JB Justo Avenue, the buildings howled above him. Saturn had wandered so close to the southern hemisphere that its rings could be seen from human soil with the naked eye, but the skies of Buenos Aires were clogged with huge piles of giant Angora cats. Cassio walked without seeing, his head down. He followed a well-known path: up Córdoba Avenue, then a perpendicular turn down the slope of Serrano. He went into a bar and sat down, his blue eyes hooded beneath the red lights, the lines of code printed on the floor tiles fading to null.

  This was Mundo Bizarro, his favorite dive back in his peak hacking days. Here he had shared recreational beverages with the comrades who’d participated in that era’s most renowned exploits. At the time, the computational elite was too self-sufficient to bother evangelizing in search of new recruits.

  It was all so familiar: the Satanist kitsch and the toy psychodelia; the skinny woman who owned the place, and Piñata, the ancient bartender. At the far end of the bar sat the usual coke dealer. The air rang with the Cramps’ “Cramps Stomp.” And the screen that took up an entire wall was showing the original Planet of the Apes.

  The battle-hardened apes gesticulated as if from outside a giant window; here inside, people moved their lips without creating meaning. There were people his age, about to summit the Everest of their cerebral power, perhaps wasting their synaptic lives as idiotically as he was. Most great mathematical discoveries burst up out of one’s mental swamp before the age of twenty-five; now twenty-four, Cassio was already a veteran of the numbers wars, even if only he and the other members of his tiny brotherhood could still see them revarnished in glory there in the violet zones of the ample mind to which they all belonged. Cassio was hardly on the verge of seeing his name affixed to any cryptographic laws, and no one was breaking ground for any Brandão da Silva Square—he simply hadn’t used his powers to do anything epic for society.

  The past life of his mind distanced itself from him like an octopus, wriggling away behind a cloud of black ink. In a biography of Nikola Tesla—the only gift from his father that he still had—he’d read that “the inventor is generally misunderstood and unrewarded. His true recognition lays in knowing that he belongs to an exceptionally gifted class, without which the human race would have lost a long time ago the fight against the elements.” He ordered a beer and a shot of Glenlivet, knew that his body wouldn’t be able to take it, prepared himself for the numbness to come. He would let the alcohol oxidize his terminals, let his mind dwindle like some weary supernova collapsing into a blue or white dwarf star, millions of years condensed into a couple of hours (the human era on Earth) on his way to a serene depression that would leave him in bed for weeks.

  A flash distracted him from his thoughts. The enormous eyes of the simians were staring at him. Several seconds passed. Now he blinked. Tall, blue eyes, elongated facial features: it was Max Lambard, illuminated by the LEDs.

  Cassio remembered each and every detail of each and every time he’d seen Max, and everywhere he’d heard that Max had been. The first time, at MendozaConch, a hackers’ conference in a bar on the corner of Maure and Luis María Campos, when Cassio was barely a human fungus, maybe thirteen years old. Max and his minions had formed TLO, Tetrakis Legomenon, the group responsible for some of the most distinguished cataclysms of the 1990s. Countless strikes from the shadows had been attributed to them, but they’d never been caught—they were a legend of sorts. That night, watching the TCP/IP championship, Cassio hadn’t been able to talk himself into joining the competition, but he had tried tequila for the first time. The resulting state of emotional catatonia took him by surprise.

  The members of TLO controlled parts of Satanic Brain, but in the outside world they maintained the strict anonymity befitting such an elite organization; only inferior entities were traceable, legible, vulnerable to law enforcement mendacity. They were a few years older than Cassio, thought of his group (DAN, Digital Anarchy) as upstart insects, referred to them as “Digging Anally.” Compelled by hatred, DAN tri
ed to hack Satanic Brain and take control of the TLO computers, with no demonstrable success. TLO’s response to DAN’s trench warfare was impermeable disdain. Later, in the Exact Sciences department, Max (who studied physics and biology for a couple of years before dropping out) had beat him at Ping-Pong several times. Cassio had never dared to reveal his identity. He’d wanted to think that Max Lambard knew exactly who he was, that his previous contempt was just a juvenile phase of a more omniscient, universal esprit de corps.

  In fact, they’d only talked once, at a Defcon after-party back in 1999 or so. That year, Cassio and Luck had won two combat series: “Core Wars,” where programs fight one another for control of a computer called MARS, and “Capture the Flag,” the military strategy classic—their trophies were shards of a chip from Defcon’s main console. That night, Cassio and Luck had worn the fluorescent shards on lanyards, walking around the party and savoring the status that those splinters of the conference conferred in the eyes of their peers. It was the peak of all known glory—this was before the Defcon pool parties started filling with girls in bikinis and other identifiably female beings. The Argentine hackers all met up, drank beer with Canadians, Slovaks, Russians, and Yankees from both coasts. The global context and the end of the millennium had brought the many different hacker races together in this same melting pot, and peace was sealed between the legendary TLO and the triumphant DAN.

  Max was there with Wari, who wore a T-shirt bearing the SSH intrusion code, and Riccardo, who had blue hair. Cassio remembered their conversation word for word: Code is law, because code determines conduct, but what happens if we start writing code that we’re incapable of reading? Algorithms are like a new adaptive species, a breed that is potentially superior to all others, because they acquire the form of truth very quickly, and blend themselves in with it. They are both the medium and the message, perhaps comparable, in terms of overwhelming power and attributed virtues, to the written word in the Biblical past. They are capable of becoming more and more real, reaching a point where they govern the reality of others. But if they’ve been designed and executed with sufficient brilliance, it’s only fair that they be allowed to live independent lives.

  At that point the conversation was derailed, shifting to tasteless jokes about abortion and made-up profiles of future eco-activists who support the right to algorithmic life. Then it dissolved altogether. A few meters away, some hired girls were dancing with Hula-Hoops.

  The following day, Cassio and Max ran into each other in the Defcon hallways. Max was wearing a Blade Runner T-shirt, and as it happened they were both crazy about the final scene, Rutger Hauer contemplating the destruction of his world. Cassio mentioned that the actor himself had improvised those lines; he was pleased to learn that Max hadn’t known this.

  Max’s face is rather inexpressive, except for his big blue eyes, which bulge slightly, and can turn on or off according to the dictates of shadowy internal processes. Theories about his recent whereabouts had circulated unevenly: that he had moved to Burma; that he’d married an exotic dancer; that after a dose of ayahuasca he’d gone years without speaking to anyone, then begun communicating exclusively through numbers. That he’d made money in derivatives during the banking crisis and had gone to Thailand to get paid, but it turned out that he didn’t like the beach, or at least not as much as he had thought, and that around that same time he’d taken up a strain of libertarianism, that sought to configure a better world for workers outside the system of nation-states, with offshore platforms beyond the reach of tax authorities and centuries-old laws; that he had been working on neuronal simulations in nematodes, and that his first incursions into biology had taken place in an unsterilized garage in the Villa Urquiza neighborhood of Buenos Aires. It was also rumored that he had millions of dollars’ worth of stock options (hence his interest in avoiding the tax authorities), and that he had begun building certain machines, both theoretical and practical, in order to “test a few things.”

  And now Max seemed to remember something:

  “Are you still working with viri?”

  “No, I quit building viruses a while ago.”

  “It got too simple.”

  “Yeah, something like that. The structure is fairly trivial. Sometimes I get the feeling that the world hasn’t fallen apart just because it has too many good people. At this point, systemic noncollapse can only be explained by postulating an ethical majority working in defense of the species.”

  “Ha, yeah, that’s a good theory. What are you up to these days?”

  Cassio tried to dodge the question, drowning it in his shot of single malt, but he ended up telling Max about his abandoned thesis, his incursion into the working world, Ship.e.bo. It was like a documentary of some recent war—his life as an arsenal of resources gone to waste, the hills of possibility now buried in fog. It had been a while since he’d had a personal conversation with anyone: his overexcitement spoke for him. In the end, he talked about everything except Melina.

  Max listened attentively, sipping his beer. Two girls dressed in lace bodices climbed up on the bar to do an erotic dance. It was a fairly soft-core affair, done almost as a joke—they were friends of the house.

  “One and zeroes, holes and poles,” said Max.

  He’d spoken somberly, now turned to Cassio, talked as if through a dreamlike mist.

  “There was a time when we were navigating unexplored areas in the dark, but we had instruments that were better than maps, and the owners of those spaces didn’t even know they existed as spaces, much less how to find the access tunnels. For us it was like taking a stroll. And every human rite of intelligence is based on the same thing, on bonfires in the darkness, because nobody ever really knows . . . but now, no matter where you go, the sun’s right there like some surgical lamp. People have decided that they want pre-industrial values, village life, the epiphanies of diets that reawaken the Neanderthal inside . . . An interconnected set of beings, an emerging society in need of new ways to adapt to the world. But the most interesting thing is that they’ve already decided that computers—and the software that is their blood—can perfectly well be combined with their own human bodies.”

  The conversation soon spilled over into personal research projects. Max was fascinated by informational processes in living tissue, with theories and applications that Cassio had never even heard of. He told Cassio about the latest analytical approaches to mitochondria, new theories about change and mutation that had been left out in the cold by both classic and modern Darwinism: namely, that mitochondria may have originated when a type of virus first attached itself to certain simple organisms, turning them into machines capable of metabolization and storage. And as for how certain processes originally began—say, photosynthesis—there was talk of early forms of retrovirus infecting a population of prehistoric algae. Chloroplasts capable of metabolizing the products of photosynthesis might well be the result of those ancient molecular invasions. In sum, an organism was invaded, and all the cells who failed to enter into a pact of submission with the invaders would die. The only successful population was that which internalized the virus, bowing to the invader and incorporating its DNA; the invading virus lived on inside the organism in all-but-invisible traces, without ever abandoning its own genetic load.

  Cassio watched Max talk, every movement he made; his nausea had been replaced by another sort of dizziness, one that bordered on euphoria. He was participating in a personal conversation, and yet somehow it felt entirely natural. Now Max hummed as he fiddled with his glass, his voice vaguely metallic. He signaled to the bartender, ordered a cheeseburger. In the red glints of light, his face was clear and precise.

  “All the scientific fields with exponential capacity have reached a point where they can no longer be regulated. True technology can never be fully regulated. When an elite trades on the future, it’s her responsibility to move the edge of time, so that the others can never catch up. Which is
why it’s ridiculous to follow the rules rather than break things apart, to pay homage to hierarchies that no longer matter . . . I mean, they don’t matter because they don’t exist. They are literally inextant. It’s as if they resided in another dimension, one that has no point of contact with the world of real technology.”

  Max’s glass floated there on the bar in front of his nose, half its base resting on empty air. He peeled the damp label off of his beer bottle, stuck it beside the glass, and Cassio imagined a multidimensional surface that ran through everything, that moved about in absolute space; he felt it spin, turning in circles around him, beams of dark matter bearing it unstably. He didn’t know what he thought anymore, and didn’t catch the beginning of Max’s next sentence, but even more powerful than his intuitional visions was the feeling that the music of Max’s argument was approaching its logical conclusion.

  The little erotic dance was over, and the two girls were now French kissing; a few people came up, applauded, ordered more drinks. Max set his empty bottle on the edge of the bar and carried on. Strictly speaking, he said, all of them were witnesses to what was going on. Everything on the web devoted to entertaining us, it was all just the festive phase of the bellicose as absorbed by the social. The renovation of the military-industrial complex consisted of this mix of entertainment, espionage and civilian lives entangled as friends and enemies. In fact, it couldn’t even really be said that what programmers built was technology—the challenges that most Web-based endeavors dealt with consisted in making things ever easier, simpler, making their use ever more trivial.

  A fresh beer appeared on the bar, a movement so quick it seemed agent-less. Max shrugged.

  “Of course . . . there’s nothing wrong with all that. It’s not like I’m saying the apps are stupid. I mean, of course they’re stupid, but that’s not the point . . . The point is that the whole thing is a bit too soft for the type of human the species needs. The target just offers itself up for dissection, puts sensors all over itself—the products it consumes, the spaces it chooses to inhabit . . . The white empire dedicates itself to whitening the world until everything is completely transparent. And the ones that used to be on our side are now our enemies . . .