Dark Constellations

by Pola Oloixarac

  “To anarchist prose-poetry!”

  Cassio looked down at where Ailín’s concave organs lurked silently beneath her thick clothes. Just then there was a murmur, a damp clacking sound, air passing like a spirit from one end of her body to the other. Her heartbeat, his, those of Leni and Noelia as well; spoons trembling on the table, hands fanning like the wings of butterflies.

  So this was the resistance. Noelia’s speech hadn’t impressed him. These women were just hippie luddites, and there was nothing particularly specific about their hatred. He wanted to ask Leni if the women knew what he and Leni did for a living, wanted to know to what degree they considered the men their enemies. How much information about the center’s activities had filtered through to the outside world? It seemed absurd to him, the women’s belief that by obscuring their features with paint they became invisible to the state; there were so many means of obtaining data now that facial recognition was practically trivial. The only way to hide was to become another species, to transform oneself into something else.

  Mossad squinted as music came on—a Luis Alberto Spinetta song from 1988.

  Everything lasts an instant,

  It’s better to be the wind,

  Everything lasts an instant

  All life long.

  Ailín laid her head to rest next to the computer. Suddenly, Ailín and Noelia and Leni ceased to exist, and Cassio took up his lambskin jacket and petted Mossad, who meowed like a hoarse mockingbird. Cassio waved a liminal goodbye and was jettisoned out of the house. Violet glimmerings descended from the peak of the sky, covering everything, sliding down the side of the frozen mountain. Suddenly, his own trajectory painted itself sharply against the world.

  He crossed the valley floor and headed downhill through an expanse of low trees and creeping vines. The tips of the mountain crags were lost in the clouds, and branches scraped at his ankles like tenterhooks. He could feel the animals around him, could almost hear their faint howls, could almost see their dead eyes.

  A greenish glow seemed to filter up through the mist-filled underbrush; somewhere farther down, the lake oozed around the twisted roots of the trees. He heard the cries of bats muffled by the foliage. Overhead, branches drew themselves black against the sky like coral reaching up through the night at the bottom of the sea.

  He entered an area dense with weeping bamboo. The stalks bristled up out of the earth in tall thickets, and the flowering had begun: every twenty-five years, Chusquea culeou goes into bloom, and many species of rats are drawn irresistibly to the blossoms, which contain a powerful rodentine aphrodisiac. The ensuing demographic explosions are known as rat storms. He passed through a tunnel formed of bowed stalks; he hoped their shape wasn’t caused by the sheer weight of rats hiding in their crowns. He knew that they were everywhere around him, but none could be seen.

  He was over forty now, but whenever he returned to the mountains he felt like one of Tolkien’s hobbits still waiting to be assigned a mission. Life in Bariloche was peaceful enough; a model scientist, his daily focus was on the center and its life. Technical challenges were always the order of the day, and he could hardly complain of boredom, as his cortex was properly stimulated by his work on Stromatoliton. He heard a nearby squeak, felt others that were ghostly silent; at the end of the tunnel, the countryside opened up.

  There were lights along the curved stone stairway that led to the top of a promontory where a small cabin rested on a foundation of stone and pilings. Outside there was a terrace full of dilapidated lounge chairs; inside was an old heating stove topped with ceramic tile, a small kitchen, scattered furniture. Something shone from the kitchen sink; the lights had been left low. Hovering over the banister was a face painted with pairs of asymmetrical triangles in black and white—like a singer for Kiss, but with stalagmites. Cassio frowned and walked closer. The face belonged to Max, who gave him a hug.

  “You got here just in time. We’ve already handed out the bitcodes.”

  “And this?” said Cassio, gesturing at the triangles on Max’s face.

  “Monica Lewinsky did it for me—you like?”

  “She’s here?” murmured Cassio.

  Max didn’t seem to have heard, was busy hooking the new bitcodes that Leni and the others had brought. When he was done, they all smoked and watched as the creatures emerged from their hiding places. The whole process took almost an hour. At first it was just bursts of light from their eyes; then that light began to illuminate the shapes of the rest. They came down from the hills, a chaotic horde drawn to the tallow; they took the bitcode bait, and the solution entered their organism. One by one, the rats lost their sense of direction and began to glow a greenish blue. In the dark grass, they looked like constellations drawing and undrawing themselves beneath the meridian. As the substance made its way through their intestinal canals, their squeaking went hoarse; then the human ear became attuned, and the noise lost its demonic ratlike air, began to sound more like crickets.

  Down below the house there were now tumults of rats; in some cases the glow extended down the spine all the way to the tail. After their initial euphoria, the rats became lethargic; this is when clear patterns began to emerge. Over on the human side, music was turned on—the intersexual crooning of Asaf Avidan, the psychedelic turns of the riverine band Los Síquicos Litoraleños—and some of Max’s private harvest was rolled. This was their entertainment during the flowering of the weeping bamboo. There was no trace of Piera.

  They puffed in silence, lying back on the lounge chairs, looking up at the motionless stars and down at the rats’ trajectories.

  “So you met the resistance,” said Max, holding in the smoke.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Cassio saw the lit joint suspended millimeters away from his face.

  “Resistance?” he said, inhaling.

  “Leni told me. He keeps an eye on them.”

  “We went to see some girls . . . and they had some shit painted on their faces just like you. You’re not going to tell me that’s what you—”

  “Look! Orion!”

  In the distance, the shining rat points were held for a moment in a static sketch of the constellation, then dissolved into the black. Max exhaled, fascinated.

  Splayed out on his lounge chair, Cassio began to feel impatient. He wasn’t particularly worried about the mass slaughter of the rats; after all, it was completely legal, considered a service to the community. It was Max—his face blurred by the low light and the paint, his attitude toward sectors of the world he didn’t understand—that made Cassio anxious. He almost believed that Max was plotting something . . . because he obviously was plotting something, because enjoying the appearance of peace in the bosom of the state was hardly his thing. Together, Stromatoliton and the rat plague created a sort of emotional balance within the context of the Project, a plateau of triumph that didn’t fit with what Cassio knew, or thought he knew, about Max. Had Max changed forever? Had he resigned as a commander of chaos in order to become just one more of capital’s foot soldiers? And maybe Cassio, too?

  They were quiet for a few minutes. At the far end of the terrace, the others were taking pictures with a star tracker, an instrument designed to follow the orbs through outer space. Instead they were tracing the maps drawn by the rats as they died.

  “Day by day we know more and more about things, get better and better at manipulating them,” said Max, as if continuing a conversation that had no end. “And day by day they get stranger. They pull away . . .”

  He made a vague gesture toward the valley crisscrossed with green rays.

  “You reach the outer limit of your neuronal city, and then you’re nowhere. God doesn’t know what we’re building, because we’re its creators, not him. Code is pure humanity, not some participant in the Platonic reality of mathematics. God has no idea what we’re up to.”

  He threw an acorn into the distance.

 
; “We have to understand these things as dark constellations—that’s what the Incas called them. They organized the sky in terms of the dark regions between stars, the interior shapes with bright parameters. But what creates space for meaning isn’t the bright dots or the presence of light—for dark constellations, the light is the noise. What matters is the darkness. And day by day we know more, we have more information, but from our position way down deep inside our dark constellation, we’ve lost view of the outline.”

  Cassio watched him take a slow, deep toke.

  “We live in an era so demon-possessed that all we can do is practice goodness and justice from a position of deep clandestinity,” Max murmured. “We’ve gone so far into the darkness that there’s no separating it from us. There aren’t any visible lights. Clandestinity is the only system left.”

  Cassio hurled down Pioneros Avenue at top speed. His 2016 Clio rose and fell, drawing the curves of the terrain. Alongside the road, the vegetation was thick with bushes and tall conifers that extended their extremities toward him. A shadow passed him. He slowed down.

  Two silhouettes slid toward him, ghosts floating up the dark road. They were monstrous there outside his capsule, appeared to be gesturing, as if they wanted to say something to him. He slowed down some more. Now his headlights illuminated two long-boarders walking along the highway, only a few meters away as they skimmed past, dancers on a floor of black ice.

  Which is when he saw it: an enormous lenticular cloud, its limpid pink standing out against the sky. Swan-like, bright white edges, soft overlapping scales, stretching out above the peak of Cerro López, rising slowly. In his entire life he’d only seen a handful of these clouds, all of them high in the mountains, 3,500 meters or more, when he’d gone up to spend the night. Its appearance here seemed meteorologically impossible, on the order of cosmic magic. Cassio blinked.

  Maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly. Maybe he’d spent his cerebral life focused on whatever happened to catch his attention rather than on what defined the landscape. What matters is the internal face of the nebula, the dark constellation. We are the ones who decide which things are stars.

  His profession was based on the world’s legibility; its blank zones were what made it accessible to humans. Darkness made legible became luminous. Soon there would be nowhere to hide. Ontological caves would cease to exist. Only the stellar trajectories would sustain the contrast, the one and the zero, light and darkness. At any given moment, all over the world there were bots awakening. They flickered, stretched out, launched their golemic selves, joined the swarming multitude.

  He turned off his headlights, followed the lenticular cloud as if he were the one rising into the heights, as if what came undone in the sky would soon spread everywhere else. He would become the noise inside the virus, the meat that would make it both real and completely random; his mind had run the numbers. The arteries that channeled the blood now formed part of a more complex system of concavities. He felt the vertigo of self-discovery, tried to bury himself once again in the formless mass of the rest of reality—in everything that wasn’t him. But he too was real. He would be the portal between two worlds. Are you going to kneel before the darkness, or are you going to fight? The shapes formed by known stars howled in the black abyss above him. The Clio pushed on, mimicking the night.

  He walked up the glass-lined corridor and turned on the light. It was four a.m. or so. Onto a spiral staircase that burrowed straight down to the coldest part of the building, where the heart of Q-Co was kept just a few degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. Next to Q-Co was the mother lab: repository of living tissue, traces of DNA from thousands of people, the initial samples.

  Walking again, through a door, and now he saw that the far end of the hallway was lit up. No one was supposed to be here at this hour. He made his way slowly down the hall, alert to the slightest change in the light.

  “Monica?”

  He realized that he’d said it out loud. He had called to her, like in his dreams, and here she was, composed entirely of herself: Piera. She looked at him with half a smile. Cassio stopped beside the window that gave onto the room holding the machine. A ray of light from a more distant machine swept across his face.

  “I need your help.”

  In the course of the day, they hardly even exchange glances. After lunch, Piera goes to the year-end speech that Ema Cattelan gives beside Newton’s apple tree, a sapling planted in the library garden, descendant of the original. The speech is met with applause and some quiet coughs; the day is full of dust, a Calima-like yellowish haze embracing the earth. Piera sheaths her face with a scarf, spies on the world through the slit she’s left for her eyes. She’s nervous, and excited to see what perspective the night will bring. When she returns to the laboratory, she doesn’t see Cassio anywhere.

  Cassio awoke with a jolt. He’d been dreaming of spiders lowering toward him, crawling slowly across his lips.

  The circular light above him was so powerful it hurt his eyes. He squeezed them shut; when he tried to move his hand he realized that he was wired up. Now Piera’s head eclipsed the lamp, and she smiled at him through the exorbitant light. She showed him the stinger in her hands: a syringe half-full of precious cargo. Cassio shuddered in light terror, realized he’d done so when Piera laughed and caressed his head.

  “We can abort the mission whenever we want—don’t forget that.”

  Cassio shook his head and relaxed there on the bed, remembering their conversation.

  So it could be said that this machine is the place where computer viruses and biological viruses live together in the same medium—the same ecosystem.

  It’s still dark outside, but they have to get out of the subterranean lab before their colleagues start coming in, can’t let themselves be found anywhere near it. Cassio suggests going to get breakfast somewhere with a view of Nahuel Huapi. Pleased with himself, with the strength of his convictions, he helps her put on her coat.

  They walk along the big avenue beside the lake, past the cathedral designed by Bustillo in the 1940s, its immense vitreaux bearing images of natives assassinating clerics. To one side is a disco called Cerebro, blue and neon fuchsia. To the other, the silent mountains navigate the lunar stillness.

  Up the street comes a group of adolescents still drunk from the night before—they can barely walk. Cassio watches Piera out of the corner of his eye.

  “Have you been to Chile?” he asks.

  “When I was a girl. Valparaiso. I don’t remember it at all.”

  “Puerto Montt isn’t far from here.”

  “I know, but I didn’t go. I’d love to, though.”

  “It’s right on the other side of these mountains.”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “You really should go. They have this bivalve food festival.”

  “Do they?”

  Piera looks at him, suddenly alert.

  “Marine fauna is amazing,” he says.

  “Ribbed mussels1 are good,” she concedes.

  Cassio stares at her intensely.

  “And Chilean abalone,”2 he says.

  “And choro mussels,”3 she answers immediately.

  No one is going to beat her at Chilean mollusks.

  “Pink clams,”4 he says.

  “King crab.”5

  “Mayonnaise.”

  “Not actually a seafood.”

  “But an essential element in the Chiloé Island diet.”

  They walk on silently. Swirls of incandescent beams advance above them like heavenly armies, wreathing the earth’s southernmost atmosphere in pinkish tones that scatter as the light grows.

  Beneath the surgical lamp, Cassio smiled. He opened his eyes, let the light burn his pupils a bit. Piera leaned in close, her lips parted. She was focused on expelling the air from the syringe, and it seemed to Cassio that her lips were even redder now, she was more Snow White,
more Monica Lewinsky than ever, and yet completely herself. He was on the verge of leaving his anthropoidal specificity behind, melding himself astrally with the interior of the machine, and he tried to think of something to say, knowing that nothing but her voice would stay with him as he descended beyond the shoreline where his fellow humans grazed. A chill ran through his tennis-shoed feet. Had the fever started already? It wasn’t supposed to begin for a few minutes more.

  “I just have to get used to feeling feverish, right?”

  She leaned over him and put a finger across his lips, opened her eyes wide and stared straight into his. Her lips at his ear:

  “I haven’t given you the shot yet.”

  A moment later a beam of light shot through his chest. Cassio exhaled; the drug made its way toward his extremities and began to do its work. He babbled for a time, then fell into a deep sleep.

  The previous week had been grueling. They’d only finished preparing the virus in Balseiro’s DNA sequencer a few hours ago. This was Piera’s first experiment involving a computer virus, and Cassio’s first with a biological one; for the first time, in addition to being the demiurge, he would be the vector of contagion. As he lost consciousness, Piera listed these landmark achievements to herself—she would have to find some canned juice to celebrate. It occurred to her that they were now junkies addicted to a drug they’d only just invented. Not bad, not bad at all.