Preferring terse elegance to ostentation, Ema separated the engineering brontosauri from all real areas of corportate influence. (Suddenly, the center was being referred to as “the company.”) She thought it important to diversify their research, and encouraged the rapid development of patents on which new tech firms could be based. Quickly and silently, she expanded the budget and invested in start-ups all over the Southern Cone, creating alliances with the tech hubs in Manaus and Iquitos, facilitating agreements that leap-frogged the center’s bureaucracy on their way down the corridor of BRIC banking initiatives.
The atomic center was now partnering with companies it had helped to create. The new model infuriated the board, because it had been developed behind their backs, and even more because of its simplicity and efficiency. Perceived as unfamiliar with the workings of the machine, the two women had created a blueprint for its reform; from the point of view of César, who’d been “promoted” to senatus, it was clearly the work of two Yoko Onos undermining the center’s legacy.
It took Piera a week to tour all of the center’s intricately entwined units and laboratories. At last she was taken underground to see the clean room, where most of the genetic material was stored. The quantum heart of Stromatoliton was found on the next floor down, accessed by a dedicated staircase that was separate from the workaday maze of hallways and pass codes.
The first time that Piera saw Cassio standing upright, he was coming out of the elevator, his backpack like a hump high on his back. He looked like a six-year-old boy with a rare case of acromegaly, floating against the wind in a heavy jacket. At the moment they were walking side by side, their hands in their pockets.
In the debriefing videos, Cassio had noticed that Piera looked a bit like Snow White, lover of dwarves; his inner dwarf now noted a slight resemblance to Monica Lewinsky as well. Monica had disconcerted him as a child. He remembered her interrogation with independent counsel Kenneth Starr, and her declaration: “I want to make it clear that I was the first one to have an orgasm.” Cassio pushed the image away—he didn’t want to become aroused.
Piera stopped at one of the windows that gave onto a white laboratory. Her mouth went back and forth between a smile and something else.
“You were here in the beginning, right?”
Piera kept her Monican eyes on him. That the mythic intern should have saved the dress stained with her lover’s semen—that she manually preserved the DNA—that’s what made her a visionary. Finally part of Cassio’s brain was activated for speech:
“The theoretical foundation required to build Stromatoliton was already in place back in 2011. And the computational power that we needed already existed in nature—it’s straight physics. But we didn’t have the ability to channel it, and we didn’t have the data. Are you plugged in?”
Piera shook her head.
Cassio had read that the story (the crime) began when Monica lifted her short skirt to surreptitiously show her thong as she left the Oval Office. An infantile gesture, irresponsible, so twentieth century, when human behavior was controlled by nothing but mental machinery. He blinked several times before deciding to continue:
“Okay, so then you’re not emitting anything at the moment, but everyone who’s plugged in is constantly transmitting personal data, and at the same time, each person becomes an informant on everyone else, because their position in the web gives away the positions of everyone in their node—when an individual data stream dries up, the node informs on whoever is missing. All the information captured by the sensors of everyone who’s plugged in is sent to the Ministry of Genetics. Thanks to the deal that Max set up, from there it’s sent to Stromatoliton, where for the first time ever we have the capacity to process it.”
(Piera was amused by the fact that when confronted with the task of describing technology to neophytes, beings like Cassio always adopted a phony didactic approach. She herself wasn’t immune to the tendency. A few days before, while walking through downtown Bariloche in search of a vegetarian restaurant with a small group of programmers, she had caught herself pointing out Bionoses haloed in pink light beneath the security cameras mounted on most of the light posts and traffic lights they passed. She’d learned a great deal while working on the Bionose project, and was particularly proud of what they’d accomplished. As one of the top thirty or so employees of the global Bionose team, she had worked at the local office of the UN’s Biological Weapons Monitoring Commission. The noses were installed in every city in the world; they sniffed the air in search of tiny fragments of DNA, sequenced them in real time, and sent them to a centralized data bank. There they were compared to known pathogenic agents, and simulations were run to determine their interactions within a variety of generic systems. The growing ease with which DNA could be sequenced had put the ability to produce and distribute lethal viruses within reach for absolutely anyone, at least in theory. Well aware of the threat of tsunami-like epidemics, WHO was leading the drive to develop a shield: an artificial immunological system covering the surface of the Earth. For the moment it was only creating a genetic map of the world, but the next step would be to equip the noses themselves with DNA sequencers and counteragents capable of inoculating the local population immediately against known threats. Cassio had been observing her openly while she talked: the hiking boots, the thermal underwear, the fluorescent North Face jacket with its hood, the fading blue strands of hair across her forehead. He’d had several questions, but didn’t ask them; instead he’d nodded in the direction of Covita, the vegetarian restaurant on Bustillo. The owner, one of the Institute’s prodigal daughters, said hello with a faint bow of her head.
Cassio and Piera turned up the hallway, walking side by side. Two men in white lab coats were walking toward them. They said hello, but stiffly—a collateral effect of Piera’s presence. Cassio waited for them to disappear around a corner before continuing:
“When the grid is complete, we’ll have the ability to cross-reference each person’s trajectory with the traces collected by the specific cameras and noses located at every business, in every public facility, on every road that falls along that individual’s space-time line. Of course, calculating even a single trajectory used to take huge amounts of time and an unheard-of processing capacity. But with Stromatoliton, we have the ability to trace the trajectories of entire populations all at once. Millions of people. We always knew that taken together, genetic background and consumption patterns and space-time lines would offer an objective history of each individual, but the data wasn’t readable by any machine. That is, the algorithms could read the lives, but we couldn’t read the algorithms. The data was there, like in the genome, but we still had to sharpen the tools that could make it legible.
Cassio could barely contain his enthusiasm.
“And now we can. It’s as if we’ve created an invisible and incredibly powerful animal that is ours to train.”
The animal of the state unleashed, thought Piera.
“And are you plugged in?” she asked.
“No. I belong to the other side. Like you.”
Piera looked in through the windows at the immaculate containers that held the mysterious genetic deposits. Then she turned back to him. His face was different, as if the room in the light had dimmed.
“But everybody already knows all this,” she said.
Cassio was calmly startled, but the situation itself didn’t make him uncomfortable; he liked having her eyes on him. He concentrated on not blinking. And now Piera softly squeezed out the words:
“I think you brought me here to tell me something else.”
This disconcerted him. The blue T-shirt visible beneath his lab coat neither rose nor fell. Piera waited to see if he’d say something that wasn’t in the script.
He knew that there were others watching, infesting the white hallway walls; once discovered, they disappeared into the labyrinth. The two of them were now alone. How coul
d a few dozen kilos of protein, fat, bone, and feathers be so sure of herself, so out of the ordinary, instead of simply being, like most things? Monica. Cassio stared at her, his hand flat against the glass.
“When we finished building Q-Co, the quantum computer, and began processing the data that we received, nothing made any sense. We couldn’t draw any constellation of facts against the background noise. The data was intermixed, and the universe of possibilities was gigantic; for the first time ever we could explore it in its entirety, but no single story emerged as more probable than any other.”
Piera pushed her hair back, listening carefully.
“It took us a while to realize that we didn’t have the criteria to establish the proper limiting conditions. Now we know what we have to do to take advantage of the data—to make it, shall we say, an informant.”
He looked at her Monican eyes, saw that he was there too, cuddled in the reflection of her glasses like a goldfish in a white romper.
“Can I see it?” she asked.
Cassio guided her to the end of the hallway. He opened a door, and they heard the peculiar hiss of air escaping from a pressurized room. The clean room was equipped with a series of filters to prevent contamination, and its air pressure and temperature were kept within established parameters.
Piera found herself standing before a seemingly infinite repository of living tissue. Small test tubes, each with computer-controlled valves, filled row after row of storage freezers; the tubes were petri dishes, their contents codified according to biological engineering protocols that every student was obliged to repeat over and over ad nauseam until they’d learned them by heart. It was clear at a glance that the underground freezers were full of traces of DNA; the codes on the labels confirmed that it was all human DNA. To judge by the number of test tubes per freezer, the number of freezers per row, and the number of rows, she was looking at the genetic material of no fewer than two hundred thousand people.
Cassio directed her back out into the hallway and closed the clean room door. He looked at her attentively, waiting. Then he spoke slowly:
“As we searched for the right limiting conditions to filter out the noise, we started feeding the machine with sequences of DNA taken from the exhumed cadavers of just a few individuals, picked more or less at random. And then everything began to make sense—the process really started to work. Certain parts of the story became clear, well-defined, and we understood that this was the path that would lead to a functional Stromatoliton. We don’t know exactly why it works, or if it’s going to work at scale. But Max made a deal with Bionose to start sucking in data from all over the country; the idea is that we’ll turn that cloud of information into the densest possible definition of inhabited territory.”
Piera thought for a few seconds. At first she spoke toward his hands, then raised her eyes.
“The thing is that with each human DNA sample, you’re also taking in DNA from all of the other organisms of which the donor consists. The dust mites on the skin. Intestinal flora, phages, bacterial growths in the mouth . . . The human genome represents only ten percent of the cells that occupy our body space; the other ninety percent comes from the genomes of fungi, bacteria, protozoa. Like they say, percentage-wise, ‘I’ is mostly ‘them.’ And that’s without even counting the epigenetic characteristics that influence the expression of different proteins. A plant—a flower, for example—will develop different modes according to its environment and the genetic content of its soil. Sun, rain, the minerals in the ground, but also the fungi, microbes, and insects that live alongside its roots and develop relationships with the plant. It’s the same with humans. Which explains the results you’re getting; you’re taking expanded samples from what is assumed to be a human history, but you’re misreading the bacterial elements, and the samples are then subject to a temporal sequence—”
A voice interrupts:
“Hey. What are you guys doing?”
Leni Waskam is coming up the hallway. Piera and Cassio don’t react right away.
“I don’t have a freezer in my house, so I keep my food here in Tupperware. You want some? It’s couscous with meatballs.”
Cassio stares at him intently, hoping that Leni will suddenly become infected with some recently revived strain of smallpox. Leni smiles and chews with the air of a friendly alien.
“Not for me,” says Piera. “I’ve got work to finish, but thanks.”
She turns back to Cassio, her eyes bulging slightly.
“Let’s continue this some other time, okay?”
“Should I go with you?”
“No thanks, I know how to get there.”
They watched her go, her white lab coat dissolving in the light cast by the fluorescent tubes. For a few more seconds, Cassio stayed frozen in place. Leni ate very slowly, chewing his infinitesimal slices.
A few hours later, Cassio and Leni rebooted their friendship at the house of some friends of Leni’s—Noelia and Ailín. They are the resistance, he’d murmured as he introduced them to Cassio. Ailín had dark hair, thin lips, a multicolor wool vest. Both she and Noelia painted their faces with black and white lines, disfiguring their features so they could go outside without being recognized by the ubiquitous cameras.
“The people of Bariloche are asleep,” said Noelia. “Totally. Don’t you realize that?”
Mossad, the black cat of the house, lifted an inquiring gaze.
Cassio had heard the same story over lunch: the previous day, the authorities had discovered the rat-eaten body of a climber who’d gotten lost on his way down from Laguna Negra. The rats had caught him alone. His face was still recognizable, but they had burrowed into his body with unusual voracity and thoroughness. He’d died of internal bleeding.
This type of event always incited Noelia to return to her obsession with moral decadence: the Earth was tired of our presence, and had certain strategies for dealing with us. The rats were one of those strategies. Didn’t we see that all these calamities, all these crises, held messages for us?
“Guys, I can’t explain the messages to you. Either you see them or you don’t. They don’t show themselves to just anyone.”
Bovine and tranquil, Leni listened, pretending to be precisely the incisive, timid, visionary observer that he wasn’t. Noelia went to the kitchen, brought back mugs of tea. She raised her mug toward Cassio, who returned the gesture. She invited them to try the gluten-free, salt-free food; she recycled everything, and you could smell the compost pile from the living room. Now she was telling Leni about the UFO she’d seen the previous night.
“You truly do have to keep your mind and heart open. Because the aliens are tired. Tired of us.”
She offered him a bowl of garbanzo paste. Mossad swung his weight over against Cassio, who caressed him compassionately; Leni and Noelia exchanged glances and grimaces. Ailín looked at Cassio, smiled, blinked several times. Completely at ease, as if his pristine intentions had finally yielded some respect, Leni decided he was ready to assume a more masculine role: he offered to make more chai, and to bring in wood for a fire. The firewood proposal caused streamers of good humor in Noelia, though his plan had a serious flaw—the fireplace formed part of Mossad’s feng shui circuit, the series of mysterious urinary mandalas with which he fought against alterity.
Noelia’s mode of conversation dug its own tunnels without ever slowing down. Suddenly, it dove into her past as a puppeteer, back when she was studying arts and letters in the capital; moody Mossad had already become her companion.
“Were you in Buenos Aires in 2015?” she asked Cassio.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Where did you live?”
“Caballito.”
“Near Puán?”
“Not too close. Where the J line comes through.”
Her face lit up.
“So you must have seen it!”
�
��Seen what?”
“We’re the ones who did it.”
Leni interrupted:
“Noelia was part of the group that burned all those cars.”
“. . .”
“La Paternal, Caballito . . . You didn’t read about it?”
Noelia seemed disappointed. Ailín stared at them, looking a bit like a rabbit.
“No, I never heard anything about it,” said Cassio, fondly remembering his moped. “I guess I just didn’t notice—maybe because I didn’t have a car, or any emotional attachment to cars.”
Noelia couldn’t hold herself back any longer, stretched out her arms and recited:
“A public, visible attack: burning cars as an offering to the ecosystem. You burn, but will you spurn? Will you spurn if you burn? Burn once and you’ll yearn to burn! Alienated car owners, people the streets with your armed potential. Survive the catastrophe! Salvation through outrage, armor, and abandonment. We’re betting on the madness of both flames and flamettes. Fear is the only thing that doesn’t burn. We are our own fury, the fury of the universe set alight: we are the motor of the astral plane!”
Mossad snuggled right up against Cassio and gave a soft, lost mew. Leni, on the other hand, still felt completely at ease. Sprawled out in the cane armchair, he winked at Noelia emphatically, but she was stirring pollen into her tea and didn’t notice. He waited patiently as the fire monologue dissolved into a short elegy to water, which became a description of the Lagos del Sur aquifer, where the women would soon be headed—the location of earthly salvation. He was sure that this discourse on the humidity of things would end in some nondescript anarcho-ecologist cul-de-sac—the logos of nature, the reproductive cycle, the body as the giver of life and light. Then, perhaps, the metaphors would be replaced by what they represented; Noelia would take off her clothes and Leni would close his eyes and lick her body uninterruptedly until the time came to insert himself. He lifted his mug:
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