Having lost trust in the feminine branch of his species, for the next few years Cassio forgot about females altogether. During his final year at ORT Institute of Technology, he audited a Cellular Automatons course, where he studied ways to create tiny armies, multiple hordes whose attacks he planned one day to direct. The class was held in the exact sciences department, on the far side of an ant nest of hallways that Cassio wandered in fascination. He never spoke to anyone, but noted the vague presence of beings more or less similar to himself in the immediate vicinity. And he didn’t feel alone.

He was majoring in mathematics, but his latest passions were topology and Ping-Pong. Together they accounted for his scattered moments of leisure, the few hours of free time remaining after his eight-hour exams and his electronic submersions into what he referred to as “personal research.” When it wasn’t hard at work, his brain became lethargic, like a snake after a large meal; in the jungle, snakes live in profound anonymity, only allow themselves to be seen as they attack, then languish in supine vulnerability, and this is when their mortality rate spikes. Cassio thought about the errors that subjugate the world, and their terrifying naturalization; about the calm acceptance of evil, as if it were merely a substitute for the law of gravity. He let his hair grow down to his shoulders, began dressing all in black. When it rained he sheathed himself in a duckling-yellow raincoat; walking through the parks on campus, he looked like a huge plastic bumblebee.

Among other highlights of his nerdy life, he had an affair with numbers theory, which addressed many of the problems at the base of cryptography—his airy love—and was friendly with two Asian students, Shiro and Coco, whose Ping-Pong supremacy was overwhelming. Pavilion 1 of Exact Sciences bustled with activity, but it was rare to see the same faces around for long: the most gifted brains soon abandoned the university, as did the most desperate, which is how they caught up with the most gifted. The capital needed beings like him and his Ping-Pong colleagues, and was in a position to make them better offers.

As photophobic as any albino crab, Cassio avoided the outside world whenever he could. His lair was a third-floor laboratory on the shaded side of Exact Sciences. The world unfolded in all directions, coursed through the channels surrounding him, but never established direct contact. He hadn’t yet graduated when he was offered a position as a cryptography assistant in the computer science department—his debut as a subordinate. His boss, Héctor Skilnov, was a “Scientific Computer,” and had the diploma to prove it; the field had stopped producing his type in the mid-1980s. Scientific knowledge relies on hierarchical structures with clear chains of command; each order given is a display of attenuated brute strength. Cassio’s job, which he found both easy and enjoyable, consisted of preparing Skilnov’s classes, and giving the lectures when Skilnov didn’t show up, which was most of the time.

It was during this period that he wrote his first seminal work in natural language, “F.A.T.S.O.” (Finite Algebraic Transform Scrambler in O[log n]). It earned him waves of popularity among the most renowned nerds. His Dead Kennedys T-shirts disappeared, replaced by T-shirts bearing mathematical symbols.

Now Cassio strode ominously into the student center, hacker or serf flaring across his chest. In the café, he ordered a sandwich with no lettuce. The boy at the register bowed his head in respect.

“Ave Cassius.”

It was Maiki. He’d founded a university political organization united against political organizations; it was called NO, a sort of absolutist Trotskyite super league. Cassio first met him in Mathematical Analysis; he decided he liked Maiki. Maiki was probably even more isolated from society than Cassio was, distancing himself from his natural allies at the speed of light.

Maiki was blond and extremely pale. He spoke without moving his eyebrows, and rarely blinked; at times his hands emitted dissonant signals, parallel messages that were independent of the transmission coming from north of his neck. He spent his summers in Israel shepherding goats and collecting oranges in the occupied deserts of the Negev; he returned wearing brown jackets with the word defense written in Hebrew. Loyal to anarcho-nerd folklore, he allowed the conceptual violence of his T-shirts to impose itself on his surroundings.

For Maiki, revolutions were possible, but required a specific diagnostic of the system’s bugs. Cassio agreed that the university (known to others as the universe) was running on diseased software. Maiki had managed a few small subversive attacks. He’d had salami pizza delivered to the homes of professors, from different pizza joints, delivery pizza version of a DDoS attack; during a conference in the Aula Magna, he’d sent small homemade drones fitted with dildos traversing through the air. Ridding the world of senior management wasn’t enough, he said—but it was necessary.

Maiki ended up shaken by exchanges like this, his eyes shining in a way that was not quite normal; the passage of language through his body left him exhausted. Cassio returned to the problems of his thesis, and Maiki withdrew toward his inner hominid, in search of solace.

Cassio was working on the design of a constellation of autonomous agents: sleeper cells, latent, perfectly invisible, scattered throughout public third-party servers all over the world. It would be impossible for anyone to know what the cells were waiting for; that is, no one could possibly guess which of the universe’s signals would provoke something similar to a behavior. Cassio’s thesis project had a number of innovative features, and made him an extremely favorable prospect for a doctorate in cryptography. It described a set of algebraic transformations whose properties permitted the conception of a new type of algorithm based on public key encryption, a form of computation that could be used to hide complex processes on public servers under the very noses of their users. When the moment came and the proper set of signals was sent, the encrypted algorithms on the dark side of the globe would begin to execute their code, setting off on the mission they’d been built to carry out.

The method shared similarities with several emerging biological mechanisms wherein the sudden appearance of a key—an enzyme, an extremely specific temperature, the presence of a natural enemy—sets fundamental processes in motion; in some cases, the process involves the leap to a new formulation of existence. This was the idea with which Cassio had begun his personal research, back when he was playing with the notion of experimenting with the new generation of robust, powerful algorithms designed to penetrate security systems at critical moments without human intervention—algorithms that could learn from their own mistakes, abandoning paths as necessary in order to try others. His billions of data drones could carry on with their algorithmic lives without ever revealing the secret programming they held within; strictly speaking, they could dedicate themselves to normality as they awaited the call to begin the superordinate procedures for which they had been created.

It was an extremely beautiful idea. The algorithms were like golems, their bodies hidden in the high grass of data, awaiting the key that would turn them into something monstrous, potentially beyond control. Cassio spent hour after hour looking for any errors he might have made—future vulnerabilities against which to innoculate his creatures. Then he went to see Skilnov, his immediate superior.

Cassio—the cotton T-shirt that covered his sweaty torso still shouting, hacker or serf—corralled Skilnov in the elevator. He gave Skilnov a general sketch of the idea, then poked around a bit, inspecting the man’s facial barricade. Cassio knew that his army was perfect, that his technique was flawless and brilliant. The intensity with which he breathed into Skilnov’s face could well indicate that he sought human confirmation of his status as a prodigious crypto-eminence, but in fact, more than anything, he was just looking for someone to talk to. He thought of a Borges poem, of the part where the rabbi gazes fearfully, humanly, at the golem:

 

The Rabbi looked at it with tenderness

and a bit of horror. How, he asks, could I

have begotten this pathetic child,

abandoning my source of sanity—my idleness?

 

Skilnov’s vague reply takes him by surprise; the man doesn’t seem to fully understand. He makes a few incoherent suggestions, which Cassio, a bit impatient, dismisses without pretending otherwise. But the graft doesn’t take long to germinate, albeit in other directions. A few days later, Lara Müller, an assistant professor, asks him to meet her for coffee at Selquet.

The bar’s mirrors surround undulant lacquered furniture. The decor hasn’t changed since 1975—a warm penumbra, transmitter of intimacy. Cassio was the only one there wearing a T-shirt; he appeared to float through the seductive low light like a fat kid with a case of ostranenie. Lara was wearing a tight, navy blue sweater that showed off her form. The waiter came quickly to take their order.

“A beer,” she said. “You too? My treat.”

Lara looked into his eyes and smiled. Her hair fell to her collarbones, which disappeared at the edge of the blue wool. Blonde, gray eyes, she’d be eight years or so older than him; a friendly and intelligent face, which only the gray academic surroundings could ever have blurred. Lara belonged to the aristocracy of Argentine science: her parents (young male professor, gifted female student) had met in a physics university classroom, both with patents of their own, and she had proceeded brilliantly up the tunnel that connects the Nacional Buenos Aires to the mathematics department. Cassio, unfortunately, lacked the instincts and self-esteem necessary to perceive the very real possibility of carnal insertion there before him.

Their mugs of beer arrived, with a plate of salty snacks and olives; Cassio entertained himself building little peanut pathways. A number of unaccompanied men looked over at them from time to time, but Lara didn’t seem to notice, focused as she was on the conversation. She told Cassio about a new fellowship that had just opened up; with his grades and a recommendation from Skilnov, this coming year he’d be eligible for a research post at CONICET. He could work in numbers theory; she could take him on as a research assistant, she added with imploring eyes. It would be a first step toward setting the shape of his life for the coming decades. He would have time to do personal research as well, as the overall workload would never overwhelm an intellect like his; and, who knows, he could soon become the head of a research team; without a doubt, getting Skilnov’s recommendation in the bank would be worth the trouble.

It was Cassio’s turn. He talked for a bit about his thesis, explained the implications of his bot army and the advantages for humanity of full encryption; his troops would spread out around the world, silent, infiltrating everything, would form a vast field of distributed execution for code yet to come—infinitely malleable, an encyclopedia of virus species, each with its specific mutational capabilities. Cassio envisioned his tiny dark armies permeating every interconnected object within the numeric universe, every machine that humans use to interface; his creatures would exceed anything people thought of as real, or even as possible. Born in computerized environments, they would be capable of penetrating biological ones; nothing could stop them from taking on new forms and heading in new directions. Given the profile of his forces, he could establish whole new fields of analysis, could program systems that would extend his troops’ capacity for shadowy destruction far into the coming decades.

Cassio had talked a great deal without really taking stock of what he was saying, and something about Lara’s rigid lips projected a sense of fear. They were quiet for a few moments. Eventually Lara offered that his thesis project sounded extremely promising. Cassio finished eating his peanut pathways, and looked directly into her gray eyes. They radiated a blurred density, like a fluorescent coral reef on the ocean floor.

They walked out of the Selquet and headed up La Pampa, past the privet hedge of a love hotel. As far as Lara was concerned, sex with Cassio would be a completely benign experience; even if they ended up working together, it would never become uncomfortable, as she belonged to the set of people who had no trouble disassociating from their bodies, and would find life unimaginable on any other terms. Her hand now brushed against Cassio’s, and he felt the full discharge of the electric prod of passion. He closed his eyes, became a fistful of retinas; the idea that a woman would offer herself to him was on the order of science fiction. Once the shock had passed, Cassio steadied his stride and returned to the topic of his thesis. But he didn’t dare look at her, and Lara was hardly going to drag him anywhere.

Cassio now brought maniacal focus to his writing. He was stalked by an enormous wave of tedium, a tsunami of disdain for everything around him; the coarse voice of darkness had returned to descend upon him. He had to fend off the tenebrous particles that swept across the swamp of his mind in flurries of black emptiness, much like the terrifying advent of Nothing in his favorite film, The NeverEnding Story (W. Petersen, 1984). In the film, Atreyu has to save his world from destruction by defeating the most formidable villain imaginable. And like Atreyu, Cassio was working against the clock.

But even under the virulent reign of Nothing, the world of Cassio was still, like the subject of his thesis, a springtime of possibilities. As Cassio explained to Harpo, his turtle: “I want to partition my brain, let part of it compile other things, work on my personal research. But I clearly have to participate in life in some way.” One option was to take a position as chief hacking officer at some obscure digital organization, make thirty thousand dollars a month, and move to Dubai as a young professional within the New World Order. (He was still far from imagining the uses to which his talents could be put as part of the LatAm project.)

Mundane pleasures populated the path of computerized evil. Jeipi, one of his old comrades in arms at Satanic Brain, was nowhere to be found in any legal or fiscal database. He hijacked the botnets of others and administered his own: he had hundreds of thousands of zombie computers under his control, and activated them a few hundred at a time or all at once according to the dictates of his masters. He carried out the mass infections—gonorrhea was one of his most contagious hits—from the comfort of his own home; by night he worked on his next virus at the latest fashionable dive bar, and turned into moth bait.

Others, like Phil, had chosen to become a different sort of ghost. Originally from Montpellier, Phil lived outside a village deep in the French countryside, in a house with no internet connection. He looked after his goats, which he’d named after the players on France’s 1998 World Cup championship team, and sold their cheese online—down in the village there was a boulangerie with Wi-Fi. He made different varieties of Pélardon using truffles that he grew himself, and each variety came in a package decorated with a pixelated portrait of one of the goats; Zidane and Trezeguet were among the most popular. The technique required for each new attack developed silently in his mind over time; when the idea matured, became inexorable, he rode his bike into town, and in an hour or two had wreaked havoc. He then bought a few freshly baked rolls, and rode back to his house and his cheeses. He was impossible to trace, and often donated credit for his attacks to Anonymous—a modus operandi that would lend identity and vigor to that group in the years to come.

And what sort of ghost should Cassio himself become? Spirit captain of encrypted insects, or phantom demiurge of maniac bots? Financially speaking, any version of the ghostly hacker life had its complications: a far more pressing issue than those raised in ethical disquisitions was the fact that it’s hard to get paid on the path of evil. It was essential to establish trustworthy relationships with the golden circles of the digital underworld, which implied close proximity to the practical aspect of illegality, which had never interested Cassio precisely because of his purist pretensions. Hacking was a brilliant endeavor because the act of developing perfect bombs for spaces occupied by mistakes was itself brilliant. Mocking corporate armies, spitting on the sense of security felt by those who believed themselves to hold power—subjecting them, in sum, to a new reality principle wherein beings like Cassio reigned—all this was crucial by definition, was the purest societal endeavor his brain had ever undertaken. Lowering himself to industrial espionage, to contacting “interested parties” in pursuit of financial gain, would inevitably be tinged with vulgarity. Much as in the classical definitions of art, the notion of utility defiled one’s actions, tearing off the halo of purity that signified their depth and beauty. It was therefore not a matter of moral principle that kept Cassio off the path of evil, but rather a certain aesthetic intuition similar to the one that had led him to reject applied forms of mathematics, such as physics: it seemed intolerable to him that things could only be thought to exist within the world of objects, and according to its rules; that they could only be considered true if they resided within that particular sphere of human possibility; that their theoretical perfection alone wasn’t enough to make them real.

The idea of a world of rational actors motivated by romantic/cerebral ideals and fulfilling their potential by exploiting weaknesses was what inspired the euphoric baroque phase of utopian liberalism in the 1990s; Cassio formed part of this world in intimate if marginal ways. The central imperative was to find the error, the crack through which to enter; doing so ensured him access to zones which only a very specific elite were skilled enough to transit. The alleged normality of the world had never been on his side, so why start honoring it now?

In spite of his aesthetic misgivings regarding both the path of evil and the illicit activities carried out in certain parts of the exclusive zones to which he had entry, Cassio did make occasional exceptions. For a time he entertained himself by building digital security systems for Comando Vermelho, the czars of the underworld in Rio de Janeiro. With their extremely white tennis shoes, their Ithaca shotguns, and their child-stoner faces, he thought of them as angels from Mars. He invented a way to communicate with them through the game of Doom: when they found him in the labyrinth, he gave them an email address that would self-destruct in twenty-four hours; outside the game, there was no way for them to reach him. And when they were jailed for trafficking as part of the government’s drive to clean up the city, it was easy for Cassio to disappear like smoke.

For several weeks thereafter he followed the news closely. He accompanied the twilight of his former Carioca colleagues by creating depressive user profiles and using them to leave violent commentaries on videos that celebrated these men as armed saviors; the men seemed even more infantile to him now than they had before, which in turn made the universe of law feel ever stupider and more worthy of disdain. Nature is horrifying precisely because it bears witness to the vileness of humankind; it waits, arms crossed, for our extinction. And if the men’s brains managed to survive their jail sentences, at least they’d find their money waiting for them on the far side of the labyrinth Cassio had so lovingly built, its exit path leading to a safety deposit box in a bank in the British Virgin Islands.

He started swimming every day. He’d arrive at the gym in Belgrano with his sky-blue Adidas bag, put on a checkered bathing suit one size too small, and walk like a giant in flip-flops past the immense window of the gym where women in tight sports outfits and ponytails drank Gatorade. Cassio positioned his toes perpendicular to the edge of the pool and imagined a tall building, the wind, death’s power to absorb. He let himself fall headfirst, his arms rigid at his sides, and the red numbers of the clock on the wall dissolved in the chlorinated water that took him in, protecting him from the shifting clouds of cologne and aftershave above. A few meters away, barracuda schools of children added their liquids to the pool. Little by little he lost his human form. Sometimes, underwater, he saw strange shapes, as if he were swimming in a placenta full of monsters, the way life must have felt in the blue fields where he squirmed and floated before being born.

In general he preferred to swim late in the day, when the only other swimmers were older ladies and groups of pregnant women, cretaceous amphibians gamboling about as he watched from beneath the surface, their bodies iterating over and over for hours. He imagined seaweed twisting around elongated, toeless feet. Sometimes the image persisted beneath his daily thoughts until well into the night, and he woke with an invisible knife in his hand.

When he returned to the world’s surface, the sun avoided direct contact with the subcutaneous irruptions on his face, those silent aspartame distillates of his organism, fruit of the modified feces of E. coli. Movement on the surface connected to movement in the depths. His orifices opened and his senses enlarged. He could feel the motors of cars several blocks away as they sped up or slowed down, and the rumble of the kiosk freezers, and the whisper of the stacks of air conditioners that climbed the sides of the towers; he saw the entire world as if it were submerged. Shoals swimming across Soldado de la Independencia Street, crossing Santa Fe Avenue and Pacífico. Clouds of krill drifting down Maure Street; eels tangled up at the moss-green lights; the sky covered with sheets of plankton. It was a world of slow, insensate beings.

Each night advanced its refutation of the light, and Cassio put off going home. He would walk up and down along Báez and Chenaut, occasionally finding himself on the far side of Libertador near Bolivia Square. The shadows of those smoking dope with their hoods on, and the glint of eyes looking up at him from ground level: these were transmissions in Morse code, to which the nerdity of his fluorescent skin responded intermittently in the dark. One night he found some broken dolls, glimpsed movement and nudity behind the bushes, but wasn’t able to see any organs that interested him.

It was with a certain yearning that he caressed the possibility of dedicating himself to speculative computing—of devoting himself wholly to the creation of digital armadas that were ever more singular and complex. He and his creatures could all take shelter beneath the university’s mantle of invisibility, could circulate with impunity in the mode of possibility. But the idea of having to talk to Skilnov again, of most likely having to depend on the man’s acquiescence, was just too depressing. Maybe Maiki was right: maybe the whole world had to be hacked—and of all possible worlds, he would have to find one worth the trouble of hacking.

Cassio didn’t want to be alone with just his computer and his turtle; part of him was desperate for the touch of other beings. He knew that Shiro and Coco had left the university to work at a gamer company, and that the company was looking for more programmers. He sent an email. Without even interviewing him, they offered him a job. And he accepted.