In the early months of 1993, Cassio managed to assimilate a few features of masculinity that had previously eluded him. His body stretched out a bit, promoting him from chubby to “big-boned”; he committed to heavy use of pine-scented cologne. He walked around with a skateboarding cap on backward, which attenuated the explosion of thick curly hair. Dead Kennedys T-shirts floated about his body until they disintegrated, with pride of place going to “Too Drunk to Fuck” and “California Über Alles.” He was partial to Pink Floyd and the Beastie Boys, and spent his afternoons watching MTV Latino, wherein a long-haired Mexican guy introduced different varieties of metal to the pimply audience sitting in the dark.

Traces of his mother remained in the products he used—the semiotic smell of anti-lice shampoo still flaring around him. But his mind was too busy with more fundamental issues to dedicate itself to cutting every namby-pamby element out of his life. He considered getting a Smurf-blue tattoo of Satan (a synthesis of his opinions about the lie of religion), but the soft feel of his pale, slightly flabby flesh inspired a feeling of self-compassion. By this point, his research had become clandestine.

He gained access to the knowledge that would change his life just before his hormones began to overwhelm him. Data flowed over him, tidal surges of information and wonder. Back then, the internet was still an archipelago of small isolated groups, elite excrescences growing around BBS servers, staring out at the ocean that would soon flood their existence.

Cassio wandered alone through the estuaries of unknown file extensions and reports on alien beings, of conspiracy theories (back when the magnitude of evil was still in doubt), and, most valuable of all, of tutorials showing how to hack ever more complex systems. It wasn’t easy to gain access to the Satanic Brain BBS, the Mecca for larval hackers like him. Neophytes had to prove their worth, negotiate hostility and a series of tests, cross through a forest strewn with sharpened stakes and deep black holes, before they were allowed to learn the secrets of the armory.

The introductory screen informs him that he has to work his way through a question tree in order to enter. After several attempts, he reaches a screen that reads, you are with virus. Cassio jumps up, turns off his computer. He waits a few minutes, then connects again.

Hello? he types. The word virus blinks, an underscore next to it like the protruding foot of an animal in hiding.

Hello appears in tiny letters. Cassio gasps. He has just found his way into Satanic Brain; Virus is a person, and potentially a friend.

He would later learn that Satanic Brain was run from the shadows by Azeta, then an adolescent just a few years older than him. When they finally met at a bar in Almagro, AZ didn’t stop talking. He told Cassio that one of his archenemies in the viri world, Fubu, had coined the phrase, “A wounded virus is a wounded animal,” and had managed to spread it throughout the civilian world, where it had appeared in several print media outlets. The phrase obsessed AZ, and appeared to infuriate him. “A virus is an animal that never dies!” he said, pure mystic certainty. He set his Coke down and looked over; Cassio took a sip of his own through a straw and nodded.

That night, Cassio got a message: Your face reminds me of Walter, my new lizard embryo. See you around. AZ lived with his mom and played his evil-computer-kid role extremely well. The arc of his life, of his journey of self-discovery, was just beginning to define itself; it would later lead him to cover his body with tattoos and fill it with food.

Even before learning that AZ collected embryonic lizards, that Luck could phreak with nothing but his voice, mimicking the melody of electronic pulses to avoid paying for telephone calls, that Mat controlled several satellites, which he used to hack other satellites, so as to create a dark fleet in the sky—that is, before his new friends revealed their wondrous true forms—Cassio was witness to another series of revelations, those of beings whose nature as humans he wouldn’t have been able to confirm.

In pornographic films, the climax of each individual scene consists of the money shot; eventually the scenes converge in the narrative climax of the orgy, the cephalopods built of human flesh. A series of monstrous transformations ensued, and attention shifted from hole to hole, creating groups of beings that were progressively more complex, whereby a single surface covered unseen interior spaces. Double and triple penetration of the female was a common theme, multiple aggregations into tense muscular cumulous clouds. Cassio sometimes shot the magma of his being into the nearest Coke can, gathering these remains of himself. The human cephalopods confirmed a deep intuition: that everything could be penetrated, opened, rebuilt in the purest of terms—terms native to a machine whose form was still foreign to him, but that he, advancing obsessively step by step through his environment, would eventually come to know and control.

The little predator had been born within him. This wasn’t the first time he’d felt it move.