Dark Constellations

by Pola Oloixarac

  Then a document on the flash drive caught her eye. She opened it, and at first glance she couldn’t tell what it was, but it was handwritten, saved in digital form for posterity. It was signed by Max Lambard; the words looked like groups of hunched homunculi. It didn’t fill the page the completely, the document broken on the screen, her broken brain. It was a poem. And it wasn’t the only poem. Apparently he wrote poems periodically, whenever he felt inspired by the discreet pleasures of natural language. This one summarized the vision of the company in bullet points:

  Every human action has consequences in physical space.

  Like the waves that a stone creates as it falls into a pond, the consequences of human actions spill out over the world. They are perceptible long after the stone has sunk.

  (If they did not have consequences, they could not aspire to be called actions, as it is indisputable that they would not be acting upon anything.)

  Millions of stones per second falling into a pond generate waves that intermingle, intersect, interfere with one another, much like the waves formed by meteorites raining into the primordial swamp.

  For someone watching the pond, it would be inconceivable to try to distinguish the effects of one particular stone amongst all the others.

  Attempting to reconstruct the precise location where each stone struck the water an instant ago would be likewise unthinkable.

  Nonetheless, what has occurred lives on in the pond. The actions of men live on in the space of the world as effects spilling out within a system. They survive their actors in time, and represent them.

  These are the fundamental principles of Stromatoliton, the fount of its knowledge and the origin of its power.

  Until that moment, most of what Piera knew about Stromatoliton—aside from the Kanban board and some photographs of Sector 4—came from graphic stories that occasionally flooded the media for months at a time. She also knew, thanks to a few of Max’s comments during the interview process, that reverse engineering metabolic paths—her specialty—had a central role to play at the company. Now she saw that there were still other documents on the flash drive. Filmed materials on the history of Bariloche (originally Chilean territory), recommended restaurants, a mountain trail guide, the telephone numbers of some hiking lodges. She’d heard that Max encouraged these kinds of expeditions, that once a month he took off to spend the night at a hiking shelter high in the mountains. There were also maps of the labyrinth of tunnels that connected the underground site beneath the Balseiro Institute to Huemul Island, and of abandoned railroad tunnels that cut straight through the Andes.

  Piera had taken the job in a rare upsurge of pro–Latin American sentiment that was strengthened by the fact that she was sick of San Francisco, and of life in the United States in general. According to her friends in the area, there was a difference between the burnouts, as they called the crack-addict zombies that turned circles in the Tenderloin near the hotel where she lived, and those who were simply poor. The poor were nothing but slag, because they didn’t achieve what they should have, didn’t work hard enough—they were traitors to the American dream, and as such an affront to the American species. The burnouts, on the other hand, had chosen marginality, and thus liberty. In San Francisco itself, according to her friends’ arguments, there were no real poor people, only burnouts.

  In Piera’s opinion, living in a place where you could fall to the ground half-dead and no hospital would treat if you if you didn’t have the money to pay for it was the very definition of hell, of systemic disdain for humanity. Soon, she would start to see the cool bohemian past of the city as a cautionary tale of the pointlessness of American liberals. Despite the young talent connected to the area, it was a fairly conservative place: personal enjoyment was not a relevant endeavor, and those who pretended to seek it moved to LA. As for the rest of it, in the United States, technology had entered too quickly into its normal phase, in the Kuhnian sense: given the constant evolution of laws that sought to encircle it, technology was no longer free to continue developing. Regulation killed the fun, the experimentation. The lawyers and the innovators were both predators, competing with one another for the right to transform their shared territory. The biological cycle of technology required a different type of ecosystem altogether. (Piera didn’t think of Google as real technology, of course—it was more an excuse for regulation, and its rate of innovation was far too low given its potential.) It was Piera’s deeply rooted belief (deduced from a luminous paragraph in Neuromancer—she thought of Gibson as her guru scribe) that for technology to develop in all its splendor, it must do so in a context of anarchy, with as little regulation as possible. This was never going to happen in the United States.

  The Stromatoliton proposal intrigued her enough that although the setup looked for all the world like a subsidiary of a state-run organization, she agreed to work with Max in spite of her principles. The digital spy scandals in Germany, Brazil, and Bolivia had accelerated her decision. The Regional Reorganization Plan enabled Latin American governments to decline the services of American megacorporations subject to the Patriot Act and thus required to surrender user information (genetic and otherwise) every time an agency with a three-letter acronym requested it. The Workers’ Party in Brazil had taken the initiative by repatriating its inhabitants’ online data; other governments in the region soon joined the choir. Further centralization of this data led to the creation of a strategic genetic reserve for each country’s citizenry.

  In Argentina, every individual was obliged to have a national ID card thanks to a law promulgated under one of the military dictatorships. Beginning with the first infant born in 2012, the government gathered biometric information including fingerprints and digitalized face scans from all newborns in a Ministry of Genetics database that quickly grew to encompass millions of individuals. Data from network technologies involving cellular phones, credit cards, and public transportation usage were later added, creating “life trajectories” warehoused at both the center and the headquarters of the ministry. By this point, the Regional Reorganization Plan had been adopted throughout Latin America, creating immense repositories of “persons in a state of trajectory”—that is, alive. Then the exhumations began, yielding collections of brains that offered a genetic context for the demographic past. In order to analyze this massive flood of information, however, a number of technological leaps were still required, and this is where Max Lambard and the Stromatoliton team came into the picture.

  The Patagonian tech hub centered on the Balseiro Institute had come into being thanks to the digital arms race and the laxity of local laws. The enthusiasm with which the governments of Brazil and Argentina signed agreements on shared biometric analysis was held up as a demonstration of the region’s geopolitical strength. While the DNA reproduction centers in Iquitos played a decisive role in establishing the overall configuration of power, the Balseiro Institute worked more closely with the duty-free bioelectronic development zone in Manaus, which was dedicated to the massive incubation of data analysis companies; one of the largest DNA databases off of which Stromatoliton fed was located there. And as was confirmed from political pulpits throughout the continent, the defense of regional DNA databases was the final bastion of nation-state power in the twenty-first century.

  Piera wondered how Max had first been drawn to the Project. She imagined him calculating his approach, emotionless, tuned with the parameters of his ambition. In his early press conferences, he referred to the importance of redefining history in terms of experiments; he emphasized that he’d first been attracted to the Project’s experimental components, and their potential for innovation.

  Untainted by the concerns of the establishment, he had dedicated himself to building out his dream. He passed through all the key universities, dropping out shortly; he studied in the department of exact sciences in Buenos Aires just long enough to meet Riccardo, with whom he would form a trailblazing company in t
he particularly complex new field of IT security. A polyglot in terms of scientific notation, his ability to understand what was being said to him in various languages allowed him to establish immediate bonds of trust with other brilliant young minds, and occasionally he could provide the overarching vision they lacked. At the moment we met him, his destiny was asserting itself through the elite technocratic lobbying he undertook to influence the decisions of the G-22.

  Lambard foresaw that, given the exponential adoption pattern of sequencing and processing technology, information permitting a company to locate individuals in genetic-temporal space, to geolocalize the specificity of their persons, to re-create their vital trajectories on the world’s newly unfolded map, would be of incalculable value. Up until the year 2015, social networks found themselves merely in possession of the elements of which each individual is constituted, as defined by the reductive parameters of their social and familial relationships, their interests and preferences and consumption patterns, their education and secret Web searches. This enormous amount of data represented a new world to be discovered, but the senses—the touch, the vision—required to make sense of its labyrinthine nature did not yet exist. A Leviathan built of techniques for apprehending and interpreting the data would have to be assembled, but the computing power necessary to calculate individual trajectories, to identify individual signals amidst the noise of all others, was still out of reach. Max Lambard’s quantum leap consisted precisely of betting on the low-cost creation of technology that didn’t yet exist but would soon result in cheap quantum computers with specific functions. This ambitious move allowed him to generate a wave of prestige that guaranteed him eventual access to the data; it was also strategically brilliant, as it paved the way for him to monetize the construction of his parallel project, the one that really mattered to him: Stromatoliton.

  He’d borrowed his idea for Stromatoliton from one of the oldest living structures on Earth. Stromatolites—literally, “stone carpets”—are dynamic structures that expand through the stratification of particules effected primarily by cyanobacteria. Some of these small stone-like formations are more than a billion years old, and they can be found throughout the most inhospitable deserts on the planet—a fossilized invasion of terrestrial coral reefs, an extremophile culture of small round cacti made of stone. According to Max, the structure of human history closely resembles that of stromatolites: a multitudinous colony’s petrified characteristics, with some residual action on the surface; a vitreous foam made of the past, codified by a given species; a living expansion determined, in practice, by calcified foundations built of their own excrement. It wasn’t a romantic vision, or a prophetic one. He limited himself to considering human actions as physical elements, a category of things within an alternate space with its own temporal rules and chemical laws.

  The regional DNA databases made the public at large party to the silent revolution under way. Once available for analysis, the data showed genetic trajectories, a living public portrait of the concrete but typically opaque lives of individuals. Each trajectory functioned as an informational stand-in that could be consulted without involving its conscious human vector—as a political substitute that wouldn’t interfere with naked life but that reflected it in all its quantifiable aspects.

  Piera was aware of Max’s reputation, and knew that there had to be a B side to this history, but until now she hadn’t seen any traces of it. For the moment, her own personal interest in an up-close look at the sensorial apparatus producing such unbridled biometrics was sufficient. For her, it was only in crevices like this that science found a propitious growth medium for reproducing and advancing. She didn’t know why she felt so strongly that she had to be present for something so openly sinister; perhaps her need to see it in person was just the result of her own morbid scientific curiosity. (When she’d notified her manager, Jeremy, that she was quitting to go back to Argentina, his mind had filled with horses on wide plains—the typical Texan fantasy of a healthy, sinful life of massive cuts of beef and moral laxity. “Patagownia! Awesome. I envy you, and not so secretly.”)

  As for the atomic center: as Leni Waskam soon informed her, its past tied straight into the nation’s own. Ronald Richter—a disciple of Heisenberg in Germany, and one of Kurt Tank’s cronies—had successfully mutated from citizen of the Third Reich to inhabitant of Rio Negro. He built a secret laboratory on Huemul Island, a rocky promontory of bushes and steppes in the middle of Nahuel Huapi, with the objective of harnessing the energy of atomic fusion to build a hydrogen bomb—a project the Germans hadn’t managed to finish before the Americans ended the war. The decision to build the lab was the result of a synaptic quantum leap on the part of General Perón, who had trained as a soldier in Mussolini’s Italy, was an age-old ally of the Axis powers, and wanted to join the market of global nuclear powers.

  Magnificently enriched during the European wars, the Argentine leadership had at its disposal an army of machines, materials, and specialized personnel to support Richter’s odyssey. He pursued his research amidst absolute secrecy, as befitted a supreme technology of war. He surrounded the island with security agents he knew personally, ordering them not to allow anyone to approach the island.

  Alarmed by the excessive secrecy and the expenses involved, a physicist was sent out to investigate. The report that José Antonio Balseiro turned in was a death sentence for the Project; he testified to the fact that there was no evidence of successful atomic fusion. Richter’s star fell, together with that of Perón, and the new military government banished the previous regime. Peronism was now thought of as a malignant hallucination, and Richter had fed that hallucination with the help of the public purse. Faced with ensuing chaos, a group of Argentine physicists led by Balseiro decided to make use of the personnel and technological structures already in place. Locating the atomic center in Patagonia would provide it with a healthy autonomy from the public universities, which were subject to the typical ups and downs of local power. Bariloche thus played a vital peripheral role in the fundamental madness of the twentieth century; that the Argentine technological village had been founded by a Nazi made its reality all the more palpable. In fact, having a Nazi involved in the birth of the Project’s program to analyze the genetic content of Latin America’s inhabitants wasn’t a historical irony—it was, rather, a perfect inevitability, according to Ema Cattelan, the center’s new director.

  The Stromatoliton group was a novelty within the Balseiro Institute. Understood as a new phase of Max Lambard’s megalomania, it had captured the attention of the flamboyant Cattelan. Tall, attractive, much younger than the senatus members who made up most of the board, she had been given a hand up by César Rábida, who saw her as a competent administrator whose ambitions—necessarily bracketed, he thought, by the fact of her young family—would make her an ideal proxy, a perfect means for keeping his own power intact.

  After three decades of professional obsession, César wanted, for the first time in his life, to be a bourgeois scientist: one with ample free time to indulge his Patagonian hobbies of seven-hour lamb roasts and sailing excursions across the frigid waters of Nahuel Huapi. He wasn’t willing to abandon the monarchical/granular style with which he had run the center, but he was sure that Ema would let him take the wheel for important decisions. There was a tacit pact within the golden circle of senior leadership: they would maintain control until the bitter end, an end that the center’s measured entry into “new maturity” wasn’t meant to hasten. They had seen the country rise from its own ashes several times, and had accumulated all the knowledge produced by a pair of scientific revolutions, the nuclear and the computational. For César, the country’s scientific course never stopped being a personal matter. His peak was accompanied, however, by a few surprises: the golden circle was spinning down some unexpected paths.

  Long gone were the days of L’Electrón Fou, the nightclub inside the atomic center where students and eminent scientists danced
spastic Twists in the craziest nights that Bariloche could remember; long gone was the secret uranium enrichment project begun in the late 1970s during the Dictatorship. Now that they averaged sixty years of age, the pastimes of the leading engineer team were the same ones they had as teenagers. Pacho and Raúl, members of the golden circle leading the center’s most intimate maneuvers, had both become enamored of backstreet drag racing. They went out at night to race on Avenida Bustillo or the road to the airport, covered by dark; even now, the road to the local airport had never installed public lighting. They gathered in their mansions, away from their wives, and staged competitions between malbecs and cabernets from Cuyo and Cafayate. They reminisced about their epic rise from physics students to unequaled scientists; their lives unfolded more pleasurably in a state of nostalgia. And once the men were again half-unconscious with drink, a friendly driver took the guests to their respective homes.

  Shortly after she was named to the post, Ema Cattelan dedicated herself to reorganizing the center. A summer thick with board-member vacations gave her the opportunity to create distinguished new titles for the members of senior management who “had reached the height of their uselessness,” as she commented at an informal breakfast with Max. (She’d learned the phrase from César.) With the help of Sofía Ronell, César’s former secretary, Ema matched the starting date of each new post to the end of the relevant board member’s time off. The two women took pleasure in striding together up the hallways of the center: Sofía, a perfumed being with high heels and net stockings that were destabilizing in the rural/scientific context of the center; and Ema, dressed more modestly, little given to displays of any sort, wearing ultralight mountaineering sunglasses that made her all the more mysterious.