Before his genetic trajectory began to delineate itself like a laser—before the fringe activities that would catapult him to underworld glory amongst the primeval hacker groups—Cassio revealed himself to be a really good kid. He was interested in the things of the world; he liked reading newspapers, liked Página 12. He was fat, soft, and pale, and he was capable of detecting the pain of others, and once he had localized it, was able to show interest in ameliorating it. The phase of enjoying control over other living beings wouldn’t manifest itself until much later.

Every afternoon his grandfather would take him to the botanical garden in Palermo: small shady green hills, zigzagging trails, and old greenhouses of iron and glass. The Botanico was the green space closest to his house, and home to the largest community of cats in all of Buenos Aires. When Cassio learned that the felines had adopted the area as their permanent residence, that they were in fact his neighbors, the thought fascinated him to the point of stupefaction. He watched them cavorting in the sun, chasing one another around or simply depositing themselves like pastry buns in the grass; at times he threw himself down in the gravel and extended his fat little fingers toward them. The cats watched him impassively, or fled, leaping like rabbits.

He wasn’t sure how it all began, didn’t know how his mind had begun to fill with thoughts of nocturnal patrols, couldn’t trace the origins of the mysterious process by which his mind had penetrated the darkness for the very first time. But a few blocks from his house, the reverse of the city was undergoing spasms of malignant behavior. Cats young and old were stuffed in bags and loaded into trucks, which took them to unknown locations, quagmires beyond the reach of law and morality. The police reports couldn’t confirm the whispered rumors: that the cats were taken all the way out to the Warnes shelter, thrown onto the heap of trash at the bottom of an empty elevator shaft. Gasoline and human cruelty did the rest.

It was later learned that the Warnes shelter had been demolished to make room for a Walmart. But the story of the kidnapping and disappearance of felines had made its way from the mouths of doormen and old ladies to the vegetable stands and newspaper kiosks, where the children were infected; the image of the kittens mewing desperately, scratching out one another’s eyes as they tried to escape, sent Cassio into action. He took a ream of white paper and a thick marker; on each page he wrote no to the feline holocaust and added a drawing of Toulouse, Marie, and Berlioz, the main vectors of tenderness in The Aristocats (Disney, 1970). He pasted the posters up on the walls of his school, the prestigious Scholem Aleichem, and quickly organized a protest amongst his little classmates.

The principal couldn’t comprehend the redemptive nucleus that moved Cassio and his henchmen to action, and threatened them with suspension for making jokes about the Shoah. The young protestors didn’t balk; their sobs and screams were explosive missiles directed at the adult nervous system, and they began a sit-in “of indeterminate duration” to commemorate the dead animals. It was Cassio’s idea to make cat silhouettes, drawing profiles on the school patio like the chalk outlines of murder victims. Without realizing it, he had both deduced and put into practice one of the most resoundingly effective PR strategies of the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a movement that protested the government-run kidnapping of children under military rule previous to the country’s return to democracy. The chalk cats filled the patio in a variety of colors.

To calm him down, Sonia gave Cassio an actual kitten. It was a tabby, with yellow and orange tones morphing subtly into black stripes. From a distance it was a bit of a redhead, like Cassio himself, who baptized it with the name of Axl Rose. He quickly indoctrinated it in the concepts of goodness and mercy; in the language of felis catus, these are rendered as steady purring and conscientious licking.

However inadvertently, Cassio was moving counter to the instincts of other children his age, wherein ferocity walks hand in hand with the discovery of hatred and physical strength. Terrified hamsters dangled out over balconies and gerbils saddled with firecrackers are of course often the first witnesses to youthful experimentation with fury. Crouched in the swimming pool at the KDT club, where Sonia had sent him to learn how to swim, Cassio watched kids playing Submarine—the larger children attempting to drown the smaller ones.

He had read about aliens who came to Earth to be born among humans, anonymous beings inoculated against the drama of mankind. Some of this had been confirmed by Donatello, the Ninja Turtle with the purple mask. Donatello was the engineering genius among Cassio’s favorite chelonians, adoptive sons of Splinter, an extremely intelligent mutant rat who had learned the techniques of his ninjitsu master—his beloved human—and returned to live among his own kind. The secret of the turtles’ mutations made them part of an enlightened, shadowy caste, but in one terrible episode, Splinter, who had taught them both science and combat, was forced to submerge into the depths in search of Donatello. Hypnotized by the evil enemy, Donatello rejected him, calling him, most painfully, a rodent. Born rebels, the Ninja Turtles and their leader lived happily in the sewer system until their mission was finally made clear, and they at last made contact with the world above.

Back then, Cassio was experiencing his own precocious submersion: he had discovered the Viking and Voyager space missions, whose photos and documentation he obtained by writing letters to NASA. His missives were simple but heartfelt, scribbled and rescribbled until he’d managed a legible draft—his handwriting was deeply deformed. The 1990s phase of the Clinton Pax Americana had not yet begun, and the Reagan administration spared no expense creating propaganda to foment the cosmic anti-Communist dreams of children all over the world. The reports arrived in a language that he didn’t understand very well, so he focused on the mission photographs, which could have been taken straight out of Cosmos, Contact, and Comet, the three burnished masterpieces of his hero, Carl Sagan. His constant companion, little Axl, served as a feline Buddha amongst the posters of outer space.

Several years later, onstage to receive top honors at the Interscholastic Mathematics Competition, Cassio would stammer through a remembrance of his furry companion, who was always between one thing and another, licking himself or simply incarnating a form of intermittence; Schrödinger demonstrated that he’d understood something important about felines when he decided to involve them in his illustration of quantum physics. If Cassio focused on his memories of the prize ceremony, he could see it all again—everything streaming down at him, the anxious parents and bespectacled teachers, boxes of croissants and clusters of children, each entity fitted into its spatiotemporal slot—and was once again certain he’d been surrounded by robots. This feeling had solid foundations: he’d also begun to sense the presence of spectacularly sordid powers nesting in his very being, a sensation his instinctual prudence counseled him to keep secret.

His mother hadn’t let him take Axl Rose along to the school, and poor Axl, whose reproductive apparatus had already been rendered inoperable, got used to a life of stalking scraps of paper and peeing on the plants on the balcony of their neighbor in 5B, and he got away with it for a couple years, until the cat was fatally poisoned. He spent the final hours in agony beneath an armchair, and that’s where Cassio found him, already stiff. The wake Cassio held consisted of Appetite for Destruction played at top volume: for three days the music was audible five floors down and out into the street, but not even those songs at that volume could hide the thunder of his sobs.

Cold phrases descended from the adults around him, geysers of tar streaming from their mouths, gestures that signaled nothing but condescendence in the face of death. Something of his relationship with the world, of his confidence in the human race, was lost forever. How had no one yet hacked the problems of evil and death? And why should one respect the present order if its leaders hadn’t even noticed these problems—of if they had, were incapable of solving them?

Young Cassio’s existential urgencies did not lead him to a love of lyrical theology. They did not place him at the center of the universe, equipped with anguish and voice. They did not turn him into an orphan of becursed lineage, nor did they land him on a densely overgrown islet in the turbid shadow of a personality; strictly speaking, his new powers didn’t require that he engage in any particular behavior. The same urgencies that could have turned Cassio into another young Werther merely left him at a certain cognitive distance from other people, an armored eye with which to observe the world. The human sphere, much like the feline one, was full of suffering and pain that flowed down from the sky in black waves, awaiting the right moment to drown him.

An illness hastened the distancing process. His cheeks became gaunt and yellow, and his eyes sunk in their sockets, their lids tinted violet. Cassio couldn’t remember exactly how the information he needed had reached him; he knew television had no part in it. It felt like it had always been part of him.

Sonia panicked at the sight of that shadow beneath her son’s eyes. At the time, Gustavo Levas was staying at their house, which made her all the more sensitive to memories of the trip to Brazil; she still had nightmares about the horrible rashes on Rattachi’s body when it was brought in. Cassio detected her moment of vulnerability, and rapidly executed the command, making clear that “no” was not among the viable responses. Sonia obeyed immediately, and little Cassio finally had the desired package, one whose enchanted geometry he had conjured up during the early fevers brought on by Koch’s bacillus.

His IBM XT came with two joysticks, 128 kilobytes of memory, and a DOS reference manual. His incursions into Wolfenstein constituted his first soundings of the depths of immortality. With the manual’s help, he learned to alter the machine’s internal parameters, designing ploys that would multiply his lives within the game and create super-powerful bombs. He played with fierce seriousness. Somewhat later he would begin exploring the world of juvenile delinquency, in perilous numeric adventures where he would meet his future henchmen and business partners: Jony and Mat, Luck and his doppelganger Wari. By the time Cassio was fourteen, he had written a program that exploited a vulnerability at the National Bank, and had impassively, even disdainfully, confronted several nation states and their laws. He’d hijacked computers at the Pentagon, and taken control of various local networks in Argentina and Brazil. The university’s engineering department and the newspaper Clarín had the most powerful servers, so he made them his slaves, having come to the realization that the illnesses of living systems created perfect opportunities to penetrate them.