An expert at leaving her mark on pop music, in the early years of the twenty-first century Madonna began erasing all traces of her time among humans with the technical zeal of a serial killer. If she spent more than five minutes in any given place, a team of people with specialized outfits and equipment arrived to sterilize the area when she left. Her DNA would never again thicken the file folders documenting all those who had bestowed minuscule pieces of skin caught in the concentration of dust, hormones, and sweat that we call life, devoured by the stromatolites of data. Madonna’s behavior was pioneering, at a time in which protecting one’s overflowing DNA from the drilling of metadata was unthinkable.

Madonna’s relationship to the invisible motors of evolution, the viri, was the complementary opposite of that of Michael Jackson. Madonna was concerned about the data secreted by the body; Michael, about the data lurking in the world that the body couldn’t process. Michael wore a face mask to protect himself, calling attention to the epigenetic environment: his masked appearances pointed out the mysterious trajectories of germs and bacteria, minimal lifeforms menacing the human life. How much of what one thinks, or does, is in fact the result of the sentinel action of bacteria reacting to their surroundings? he seemed to be begging to ask. A change was underway, a shift that would have repercussions throughout the planet, with brutal effects comparable to the most violent biological transformations.

At some point between 120 and 190 million years ago, a few cockroaches started to form colonies, began to specialize in the rites of art and war, formed groups devoted to specific tasks such as defending the colony, finding food, and reproducing. Little by little, each group began to generate physical correlates to their given task. Eventually a few colonies learned to domesticate certain types of mushrooms, and started cultivating extensive fungal gardens with which to feed themselves; in this way, new arthropodal forms evolved, and eventually the first super-organism appeared, a bulwark preserving all of the species’ varied phases. Later, both humans and insects would create civilizations based formally on the principles of caste—queens, soldiers. And thanks to the LatAm Genetic Data Unification Project, the human population of said zone was able to conceive a new form of existence: united through the traces they’d left, they saw their pasts glow beneath a common light.

The emerging processes that determine the course of history are the product of interactions among immense numbers of individuals, and are themselves shaped by earlier historical variables that are difficult to quantify. Like species united against oblivion, the leading teams of the Genetic Data Unification Project and the Ministry of Genetics worked together on the two known forms of immortality: first, the war of keeping memory alive, transmitted genetically; second, the legacy transmitted through culture. During the Anthropocene, the two forms had become intertwined. Nourished by the gene banks established during the presidency of Raul Alfonsín in Argentina, implemented to help search for those who disappeared during the 1976-1983 dictatorship, the Project helped develop a singularly splendid genetic library.

Like an animal, the human hides in the forest, but it isn’t long before it’s found.