“ I’ve never met a DAN in person! Digital Anarchy!”

On Santi Pando’s T-shirt, a young Bill Gates is smoking a joint beside a vintage computer.

“You were there when it started, right?”

Cassio’s smile stretches his lips but doesn’t show his teeth. Pando, CEO of Ship.e.bo, can’t hide his excitement:

“I didn’t really know them—well, I knew that they were super elite, but I was too young—I was probably still playing with my Playmobil while everything was going on! I might as well have been one of those little Playmobil figures, but Jako, do you know Jako? He went out with Wari’s sister, who’d been in school with Mat from DAN more or less around the time when they fucked up the main server at the IRS. Do you know Jako?”

At a nearby desk, a girl with pink hair follows the scene with interest. Bunkered down behind an enormous Mac monitor, she’s talking on the telephone and staring at the latest arrival. Cassio nods at the image of Bill respectfully, and manages one word:

“No.”

“Well, sure, I didn’t think you’d know him—shit, it’s obvious you wouldn’t—but he knew about you. What an awesome time. Dude, it’s awesome that you’ve come to work with us. Really. You’re exactly what we want—it’s, like, very aspirational for us to have you here. In the good sense of the word, obviously. I don’t want to sound like an ass-kisser, but it’s true! You know, in our line of work a criminal record’s worth more than a résumé.”

Santi Pando made a T with his hands, and flew toward the back storeroom.

It was a cute little office in “Palermo Valley,” the nucleus for tech start-ups in Buenos Aires: an old house, recently recycled, where the atmosphere was relaxed and the exposed brick contrasted with the black monitors. No one there was over the age of twenty-five. Only the one girl in sight had a Mac. There was a vintage sky-blue refrigerator, and orange chairs around a tall table holding fruit and granola bars. On one wall, the enormous mouth of a girl (not the same one) stuck out her tongue above the Ship.e.bo logo—a haphazard collage on an ad for ice cream.

Someone touches his back; it’s the girl with pink hair.

“Neese to might you,” she says, without taking the sucker out of her mouth.

The sucker forms a little ball at the base of her cheek—a GIF that would inspire subsequent skirmishes between Cassio and his gonads. Now Pando comes running back toward them, his hands full of Cokes:

“Ha. Ninja Turtles!”

Hidden behind his purple mask, Donatello waves from Cassio’s cotton-covered belly. Santi winks and holds up the Cokes.

“The team is excellent, you’ll see. We’re exactly what we look like—all we do is program. Even when we’re not here, we’re still programming, but in our minds! There’s free Cokes and chocolate and granola bars for all the programmers. I’m going to order Ninja Turtle candy! Coke Zero or regular?”

After a few experiments with David Beckham–style minicrests, among other attempts to reprocess his in-person viscosity into something a little more memorable, CEO Santi Pando had recently gone back to the bowl cut of his childhood, which complemented his thick eyeglasses and ironic corporate T-shirts. Santi was perfectly aware that he lacked a mystic element: he came from a wealthy family, a childhood of neckties in English-speaking private schools, and he’d missed out on the poetic adolescence of authentic hackers who spent their era of sebaceous explosions writing BBS posts and defying the law. In the 1990s, he and his friends had seen their houses inundated by technology; the country had just thrown open the door to foreign imports, bringing in not just computers but also the yogurt makers and other appliances that were all the rage in Argentina back then.

Santi tried to compensate for his lack of magic with an entrepreneurial style based on hyperkinesis, ayahuasca trips, enthusiasm, and anxiety. He defined himself as a devigner—half developer and half designer—a pampered, middle-class business child. He gave the very best of himself in interviews:

“What was the name of your first girlfriend?”

“Commodore 64.”

“What’s your dream?”

“To create a collective innovation platform that allows the web to attain consciousness.”

“What’s the sexiest thing about the internet? (Without mentioning porn!)”

“My favorite porn is people building Web applications—a living, breathing, creative community of geeks!”

In the photograph that accompanied the profile, Santi was dressed as a Stormtrooper. He hadn’t been able to convince Alan Rochenforr, his angel investor, to pose next to him as Han Solo. “Now that I’m an investor, I’m on the dark side, so I can only be Darth Vader,” had been Rochenforr’s excuse.

“Come here. I want you to meet Alan.”

Cassio and Santi drained their Cokes, each taking the measure of the other in a moment of intense silence. Like in a Western, Santi cracked his neck joints and Cassio shifted his weight from one leg to the other. Then they climbed up the staircase at the edge of a patio whose center held a lime tree.

Alan Rochenforr was walking on a treadmill. He had his earpiece in, was on a call. He made a T with his hands.

Rochenforr belonged to the world of pure capital, which only occasionally intersected with the productive/creative world of which Santi Pando considered himself the captain. Though Rochenforr didn’t visit the Ship.e.bo office very often, he liked to keep his own desk there, with photos—blond children with braces, and a pregnant woman submerged up past her genitals in some lake in Uruguay. It made him feel close to youth and passion. Now forty-five years old, Alan Rochenforr had met every expectation for beings of his class: he had graduated from Harvard, founded a Latino copycat of an American company, managed to sell it before the dot-com crash, and could now dedicate himself to paying for his architect wife’s art courses and supervising the growth of his free-range offspring. He continued to bet on the future, and hoped that this start-up would catch hold of something as yet unnamed but already present in the world. When he invested in a company, he always asked that there be a room with a treadmill—he had one in Barracas, and one in Puerto Madero. This was how he ensured that his visits would be worthwhile at the intracellular level.

Now he dried his head and patted his hands on his shirt.

“How’s it going, man? Santi told me a lot about you.”

Alan glanced at the Ninja Turtles on Cassio’s T-shirt, and Cassio showed his teeth. Sometimes he liked to show his teeth, or pretend to be a robot, or hold someone’s gaze.

“It’s a pleasure to meet such an eminence. Welcome to the team.”

Alan dried his hand and held it out. He mentioned that on average he ran three kilometers a day during his calls. He wiped the towel across his face and paused the treadmill, then drew his face tight into something resembling a smile.

It was decidedly nontrivial that Ship.e.bo was the first video game to star a native Indo-American community. The game was highly original, an attractive option for demanding users who liked to entertain themselves during the workday by throwing endangered natives around. It was inspired by dwarf-throwing games (always set pointedly in the US, Canada, medieval France, or England), and was designed to gather a critical mass of users the company could then channel toward new offerings. This would in turn render vast amounts of user data that could later be resold to avid marketing directors at other companies.

Each native successfully thrown was converted into a donation to be sent to IRL Ship.e.bo communities—this was the touch of marketing genius that had led Rochenforr to invest in the company. Santi liked to say that it wasn’t a business, it was a movement. And now Rochenforr begged their pardon, said he had to make another call.

When they came back downstairs, Cassio looked hopefully at the reception desk. The girl with grapefruit-colored hair smiled and typed in his direction.

That afternoon, Cassio was introduced to the movement’s arcana. For example, Santi taught him the secret handshake: one hand approached another, and together they formed an undulant, snakelike S. It ended with a snap of the fingers.

The vernacular Web held other novelties for Cassio, ones that would be received enthusiastically by his timid glands. Outside of a few flings, the active life of his meaty joystick could hardly be called gregarious, propelled as it was by sessions of self-love that Cassio never allowed himself to think of as pleasure. His emotional capacities were those of an unweaned infant; the long delay of his access to female organs had contributed exponentially to his idealization thereof. The lives of overly romantic individuals are often corroded by the possibility of love; though this was not his case, he too had set the entry barrier for anyone interested in taking possession of him—in becoming the master of his will—exceptionally low.

In another time and place, a nerd like Cassio would have suffered. He would have spent his entire gray existence off to one side of the office, taking orders from inferior beings, shoved into the worm section of the ego food chain. But rumors about the presence of a hacking eminence spread like napalm: his past provided him with a top-drawer superhero cape. His disheveled look was a necessary counterpoint to his hidden magic, an inverted image of his interior worth. Much as the dream of capital had projected muscle-bound genies surging from detergent bottles and household appliances for the women of the previous century, the challenges women faced in the early years of the twenty-first century created new needs and thus new holes—new vulnerabilities into which manhood could be inserted. Girls were always having trouble with their computers. Cassio would be the domestic genius, the whiz kid who was always willing to help. He now felt the rebirth of a masculine vigor that had, strictly speaking, never been born in the first place—a starry ascent within his own sexual niche.

Melina had studied musical comedy. She changed her hair color every week, dressed in eye-catching outfits that she designed herself, and took care of her administrative tasks with relaxed efficiency. From Monday to Friday she was the only woman in the Ship.e.bo office; on the weekends she took part in sporadic performances of indie plays on off-off-Corrientes. When she first met Cassio, the work in question was Vampires on Facebook: The Musical.

At an office party thrown to celebrate Ship.e.bo’s five thousandth user, Cassio stood at the bar as if clinging to the edge of the deep end of a swimming pool. The rest of the programmers socialized around him. And the universe found itself in an advanced state of affairs: there were several girls at the party that he’d never seen before.

“Your name is Casio, like the watch?”

“But with two Ses.”

“And you give the time?”

“I’ll give it to you if you want.”

When Melina mischievously extends the secret handshake in his direction, Cassio moves in counter to the vertigo he feels, and kisses her on the cheek. In his mind he works through the key teachings of his friend Jeipi, who has the most experience with women of anyone he knows: even in a cabaret, surrounded by prostitutes, it’s crucial not to show the slightest interest. A woman’s self-esteem can only be stimulated through her vanity—Jeipi had underlined this in the air. Minimize your actions; make sure all responsibility for the scene ends up on her shoulders. It was the only thing Cassio had ever learned about feminism, and it was enough.

Melina smiles publicly:

“And aside from giving the time, what else do you know how to do?”

“I can create languages. I can derail banks. I can create invisible armies unlike anything modern computers have ever experienced. And I can give you the time.”

Still holding a slice of lemon in her mouth, Melina laughs, and whispers something in his ear; Cassio doesn’t catch it but doesn’t ask, focused as he is on the viscous gurgling around his corpus cavernosum, watchtower and lighthouse for the human night. Melina is practically hanging all over Cassio the Stoic. Then a friend of hers shows up, and the two women head off to the bathroom. They come back out smiling, their arms around each other’s shoulders; they head out to the street and hail a taxi. They laugh too loudly and their hair is a mess, but none of that matters to them at all. Cassio keeps thinking that he should jot down the car’s license plate, but instead he just memorizes it; another girl talks to him, yet another girl kisses him, and the night is shattered by invisible asteroids.

The following Monday, in the office bathroom, Cassio’s hands advance like interstellar capsules across Melina’s mammary terrain: Mariner I and II, launched simultaneously to capture samples of the Venusian atmosphere. With her blouse half-open, Melina breathes heavily against the tile. In a fit of passion, Cassio nibbles at her neck through the collar of the jacket she’s wearing. She responds by ensnaring him with her legs; her fuchsia panties come into brief contact with his belly button and the tentacular hair below. He does his best to focus on Diego Armando Maradona so as not to finish too soon.

After a couple of weeks of surreptitious encounters in the bathroom and after work—they can’t meet on weekends, when Art requires her presence—Cassio invites Leni to join him at the Abasto to see Vampires on Facebook: The Musical. Melina appears onstage, and Cassio takes a deep breath; Melina opens her mouth to sing (Radiohead’s “We Suck Young Blood,” accompanied by a ukulele), and Cassio clutches at the armrests. His heart (because he has one, almost as present and porous as what throbs farther down) stops. She is without a doubt the play’s most beautiful vampire, a fact that must not have escaped the cognitive apparatus of the director, because her character takes off all her clothes, twice. This bothers Cassio, who can’t stop obsessing over what must go on during rehearsals. Leni declares himself “amazed” because the play is “competitively terrible,” a nontrivial fact not because most plays are terrible but because at a certain point it becomes difficult to distinguish one degree of awfulness from another. Cassio looks at him, his eyes full of hate. He grumbles a little, but without much conviction.

Outside the theater exit, willows hang like stage curtains across Humahuaca Street. Leni and Cassio crouch down behind some cars, peering through the branches. The door spits out batches of people in costumes; Cassio’s mouth fills with saliva. On that urban tundra, Melina looks like a ghost, her eyes painted red and black. The long green leaves, the streetlights, the flying cockroaches: everything conspires together to make her even more painfully beautiful. What was he hoping to accomplish? He decides to become his own Voyager, bearer of an incomprehensible message launched into outer space.

Then Melina comes walking up the line of cars.

“Hey, what are you guys doing?”

His invisibility cape dissolves.

Their shoulders still hunched, Cassio and Leni come out of their hiding place. They exchange a brief look, but since they’ve already been exposed as idiots, they can now relax. Melina plants kisses on their cheeks, takes Cassio by the hand; her other hand tenses in her pocket. Leni follows along behind.

“They came to see the play!” she announces to her cohort.

The silence lowers gloomily from the trees. The actors stare at Cassio’s midsection, where a Ninja Turtle is making a “V for Vendetta” sign.

“Our next play should have Ninja Turtles,” says one of them.

Another half stifles a derisive laugh. Melina introduces Cassio as “a friend,” and he murmurs something that isn’t quite hello. The actors disperse, only to regroup farther away. Cassio decides that the problem isn’t just that they are actors—a synonym for loathsome, according to Leni—but also that he doesn’t like them at all.

Cassio had recently begun cultivating a project involving homemade microdrones with a pair of cronies he’d met in his Cellular Automatons course, Karsa and Vila. The three of them gathered in a borrowed garage on Rosetti Street in Chacarita. Proof of the feasibility of minuscule flying machines was abundant in the form of insects; affixed with cameras and microphones, the drones’ potential within the world of espionage was obvious. He’d thought of testing them out on some pretty neighbor, but wasn’t sure he had any; in any case, that was a minor problem compared to the technical challenge in question.

As noted, in times past Cassio found projects set in the real world to be irredeemably vulgar. The microdrones were his first attempt at creating physical machines relegated to sharing space with humans: he’d just dropped out of his mathematics program, and had started to feel the physical necessity of building things with his hands, to hear the call of the empiric emanating from deep inside.

Just then the phone in his pocket began to vibrate. Cassio stared at the screen:

hey what time is it?

 

He answered immediately:

Whatever time you want.

 

He waited.

Kkkkkk.

 

Now she was typing something else.

IM HOME ALL ALONE WANNA COME?

 

Impressed, Karsa and Vila iterated around him in silence. A midnight text, void of meandering, stripped of civic masks, could only signify an interest both specific and sexual. Pearlescent with prestige, Cassio said his goodbyes and flew to her on his moped.

Melina opened the door, dreamlike, wearing only a white undershirt and a thin miniskirt. She kissed him on the cheek and offered him a shot of local vodka; she asked if he had pot, and Cassio shook his head.

“It’s so great that you came,” she said, smiling, backing away from him.

She tripped and landed on the bed. Maybe she was overacting her drunkenness a bit, or maybe not; the flow of seductive signals continued uninterrupted. Cassio did his best to mimic her smile and state of relaxation, but the internal pressure of his liquid DNA had compromised his entire being quite painfully—he could barely breathe through the little hole at the end of his erection. The computer played Radiohead’s “Subterranean Homesick Alien” and lit their bodies with flashes of lunar light. Melina stretched out on the bed and finished her joint; her vagina, unsheltered beneath her miniskirt, flickered luminous above him.

None of his life’s previous mental landscapes had prepared him for the microscopic spectacle of the glistening humidity gathered in those minuscule valleys. He fell to his knees, careful not to look directly at this eyeless fish, this mini–Jabba the Hut in its throne room. He opened his mouth, felt a vortex of suction twist his lips. He imagined the hypothetical ingestion of an extremely soft and airy muffin, sending his tongue in on an exploratory mission to capture a bit of filling. Melina emitted a series of strange sounds, and then her voice faded away.

He asked if she was asleep. She didn’t answer.

Cassio’s mouth was now numb—she had apparently applied some spermicidal lubricant. Cassio raised his eyes to her incandescent Mac, still sending its rays of light across the bed. A few days before, he’d installed the latest operating system and a few little programs to help her avoid leaving traces on the internet. He hadn’t yet checked to see if they were running properly.

Her Facebook page was open. There were several messages from Marto, one of the actors from the musical. The little arrows of her messages curved toward his—she’d answered every one. The odds of a musical comedy actor being heterosexual were extremely low, but to judge from Marto’s photos—that bulge—and the content of his messages, it seemed indisputable that he was. Cassio made a few calculations, ones that even someone without his privileged mathematical cranial hemisphere could have managed. The data were clear: what he’d eaten was a muffin full of Marto’s genetic leftovers from, technically, just a few hours ago, a thought Cassio found thoroughly unpleasant.

He left his moped leaned up against a light post, and entered the office without making a sound. The human beings had all dispersed, leaving only the sisterhood of machines, the blinking LED lights, and the hum of his own breathing. He was having trouble seeing the outlines, the solid spirits of things; he sat down at his desk to wait for his energy to dissipate. He rested his hands on the desk’s melamine veneer; he felt nauseous, his own magma trying to decide out of which hole to erupt. He drank a little water, tried to calm himself down.

He imagined himself puking up Melina’s Mac, the office’s nervous system transmitting the acid to all the terminals—this scorched the circuit boards, integrating them into a stew of biological waste—and then a dry flash as each power source imploded. His elbow brushed against the trackpad of his computer, and the screen lit up. In green Helvetica the words read, “In 2020 we will either be Hackers or Serfs.” His headboard phrase, now converted into a Santi Pando mantra.

Cassio left just like he’d come in, without turning on a light or leaving any trace. On JB Justo Avenue, the buildings howled above him. Saturn had wandered so close to the southern hemisphere that its rings could be seen from human soil with the naked eye, but the skies of Buenos Aires were clogged with huge piles of giant Angora cats. Cassio walked without seeing, his head down. He followed a well-known path: up Córdoba Avenue, then a perpendicular turn down the slope of Serrano. He went into a bar and sat down, his blue eyes hooded beneath the red lights, the lines of code printed on the floor tiles fading to null.

This was Mundo Bizarro, his favorite dive back in his peak hacking days. Here he had shared recreational beverages with the comrades who’d participated in that era’s most renowned exploits. At the time, the computational elite was too self-sufficient to bother evangelizing in search of new recruits.

It was all so familiar: the Satanist kitsch and the toy psychodelia; the skinny woman who owned the place, and Piñata, the ancient bartender. At the far end of the bar sat the usual coke dealer. The air rang with the Cramps’ “Cramps Stomp.” And the screen that took up an entire wall was showing the original Planet of the Apes.

The battle-hardened apes gesticulated as if from outside a giant window; here inside, people moved their lips without creating meaning. There were people his age, about to summit the Everest of their cerebral power, perhaps wasting their synaptic lives as idiotically as he was. Most great mathematical discoveries burst up out of one’s mental swamp before the age of twenty-five; now twenty-four, Cassio was already a veteran of the numbers wars, even if only he and the other members of his tiny brotherhood could still see them revarnished in glory there in the violet zones of the ample mind to which they all belonged. Cassio was hardly on the verge of seeing his name affixed to any cryptographic laws, and no one was breaking ground for any Brandão da Silva Square—he simply hadn’t used his powers to do anything epic for society.

The past life of his mind distanced itself from him like an octopus, wriggling away behind a cloud of black ink. In a biography of Nikola Tesla—the only gift from his father that he still had—he’d read that “the inventor is generally misunderstood and unrewarded. His true recognition lays in knowing that he belongs to an exceptionally gifted class, without which the human race would have lost a long time ago the fight against the elements.” He ordered a beer and a shot of Glenlivet, knew that his body wouldn’t be able to take it, prepared himself for the numbness to come. He would let the alcohol oxidize his terminals, let his mind dwindle like some weary supernova collapsing into a blue or white dwarf star, millions of years condensed into a couple of hours (the human era on Earth) on his way to a serene depression that would leave him in bed for weeks.

A flash distracted him from his thoughts. The enormous eyes of the simians were staring at him. Several seconds passed. Now he blinked. Tall, blue eyes, elongated facial features: it was Max Lambard, illuminated by the LEDs.

Cassio remembered each and every detail of each and every time he’d seen Max, and everywhere he’d heard that Max had been. The first time, at MendozaConch, a hackers’ conference in a bar on the corner of Maure and Luis María Campos, when Cassio was barely a human fungus, maybe thirteen years old. Max and his minions had formed TLO, Tetrakis Legomenon, the group responsible for some of the most distinguished cataclysms of the 1990s. Countless strikes from the shadows had been attributed to them, but they’d never been caught—they were a legend of sorts. That night, watching the TCP/IP championship, Cassio hadn’t been able to talk himself into joining the competition, but he had tried tequila for the first time. The resulting state of emotional catatonia took him by surprise.

The members of TLO controlled parts of Satanic Brain, but in the outside world they maintained the strict anonymity befitting such an elite organization; only inferior entities were traceable, legible, vulnerable to law enforcement mendacity. They were a few years older than Cassio, thought of his group (DAN, Digital Anarchy) as upstart insects, referred to them as “Digging Anally.” Compelled by hatred, DAN tried to hack Satanic Brain and take control of the TLO computers, with no demonstrable success. TLO’s response to DAN’s trench warfare was impermeable disdain. Later, in the Exact Sciences department, Max (who studied physics and biology for a couple of years before dropping out) had beat him at Ping-Pong several times. Cassio had never dared to reveal his identity. He’d wanted to think that Max Lambard knew exactly who he was, that his previous contempt was just a juvenile phase of a more omniscient, universal esprit de corps.

In fact, they’d only talked once, at a Defcon after-party back in 1999 or so. That year, Cassio and Luck had won two combat series: “Core Wars,” where programs fight one another for control of a computer called MARS, and “Capture the Flag,” the military strategy classic—their trophies were shards of a chip from Defcon’s main console. That night, Cassio and Luck had worn the fluorescent shards on lanyards, walking around the party and savoring the status that those splinters of the conference conferred in the eyes of their peers. It was the peak of all known glory—this was before the Defcon pool parties started filling with girls in bikinis and other identifiably female beings. The Argentine hackers all met up, drank beer with Canadians, Slovaks, Russians, and Yankees from both coasts. The global context and the end of the millennium had brought the many different hacker races together in this same melting pot, and peace was sealed between the legendary TLO and the triumphant DAN.

Max was there with Wari, who wore a T-shirt bearing the SSH intrusion code, and Riccardo, who had blue hair. Cassio remembered their conversation word for word: Code is law, because code determines conduct, but what happens if we start writing code that we’re incapable of reading? Algorithms are like a new adaptive species, a breed that is potentially superior to all others, because they acquire the form of truth very quickly, and blend themselves in with it. They are both the medium and the message, perhaps comparable, in terms of overwhelming power and attributed virtues, to the written word in the Biblical past. They are capable of becoming more and more real, reaching a point where they govern the reality of others. But if they’ve been designed and executed with sufficient brilliance, it’s only fair that they be allowed to live independent lives.

At that point the conversation was derailed, shifting to tasteless jokes about abortion and made-up profiles of future eco-activists who support the right to algorithmic life. Then it dissolved altogether. A few meters away, some hired girls were dancing with Hula-Hoops.

The following day, Cassio and Max ran into each other in the Defcon hallways. Max was wearing a Blade Runner T-shirt, and as it happened they were both crazy about the final scene, Rutger Hauer contemplating the destruction of his world. Cassio mentioned that the actor himself had improvised those lines; he was pleased to learn that Max hadn’t known this.

Max’s face is rather inexpressive, except for his big blue eyes, which bulge slightly, and can turn on or off according to the dictates of shadowy internal processes. Theories about his recent whereabouts had circulated unevenly: that he had moved to Burma; that he’d married an exotic dancer; that after a dose of ayahuasca he’d gone years without speaking to anyone, then begun communicating exclusively through numbers. That he’d made money in derivatives during the banking crisis and had gone to Thailand to get paid, but it turned out that he didn’t like the beach, or at least not as much as he had thought, and that around that same time he’d taken up a strain of libertarianism, that sought to configure a better world for workers outside the system of nation-states, with offshore platforms beyond the reach of tax authorities and centuries-old laws; that he had been working on neuronal simulations in nematodes, and that his first incursions into biology had taken place in an unsterilized garage in the Villa Urquiza neighborhood of Buenos Aires. It was also rumored that he had millions of dollars’ worth of stock options (hence his interest in avoiding the tax authorities), and that he had begun building certain machines, both theoretical and practical, in order to “test a few things.”

And now Max seemed to remember something:

“Are you still working with viri?”

“No, I quit building viruses a while ago.”

“It got too simple.”

“Yeah, something like that. The structure is fairly trivial. Sometimes I get the feeling that the world hasn’t fallen apart just because it has too many good people. At this point, systemic noncollapse can only be explained by postulating an ethical majority working in defense of the species.”

“Ha, yeah, that’s a good theory. What are you up to these days?”

Cassio tried to dodge the question, drowning it in his shot of single malt, but he ended up telling Max about his abandoned thesis, his incursion into the working world, Ship.e.bo. It was like a documentary of some recent war—his life as an arsenal of resources gone to waste, the hills of possibility now buried in fog. It had been a while since he’d had a personal conversation with anyone: his overexcitement spoke for him. In the end, he talked about everything except Melina.

Max listened attentively, sipping his beer. Two girls dressed in lace bodices climbed up on the bar to do an erotic dance. It was a fairly soft-core affair, done almost as a joke—they were friends of the house.

“One and zeroes, holes and poles,” said Max.

He’d spoken somberly, now turned to Cassio, talked as if through a dreamlike mist.

“There was a time when we were navigating unexplored areas in the dark, but we had instruments that were better than maps, and the owners of those spaces didn’t even know they existed as spaces, much less how to find the access tunnels. For us it was like taking a stroll. And every human rite of intelligence is based on the same thing, on bonfires in the darkness, because nobody ever really knows . . . but now, no matter where you go, the sun’s right there like some surgical lamp. People have decided that they want pre-industrial values, village life, the epiphanies of diets that reawaken the Neanderthal inside . . . An interconnected set of beings, an emerging society in need of new ways to adapt to the world. But the most interesting thing is that they’ve already decided that computers—and the software that is their blood—can perfectly well be combined with their own human bodies.”

The conversation soon spilled over into personal research projects. Max was fascinated by informational processes in living tissue, with theories and applications that Cassio had never even heard of. He told Cassio about the latest analytical approaches to mitochondria, new theories about change and mutation that had been left out in the cold by both classic and modern Darwinism: namely, that mitochondria may have originated when a type of virus first attached itself to certain simple organisms, turning them into machines capable of metabolization and storage. And as for how certain processes originally began—say, photosynthesis—there was talk of early forms of retrovirus infecting a population of prehistoric algae. Chloroplasts capable of metabolizing the products of photosynthesis might well be the result of those ancient molecular invasions. In sum, an organism was invaded, and all the cells who failed to enter into a pact of submission with the invaders would die. The only successful population was that which internalized the virus, bowing to the invader and incorporating its DNA; the invading virus lived on inside the organism in all-but-invisible traces, without ever abandoning its own genetic load.

Cassio watched Max talk, every movement he made; his nausea had been replaced by another sort of dizziness, one that bordered on euphoria. He was participating in a personal conversation, and yet somehow it felt entirely natural. Now Max hummed as he fiddled with his glass, his voice vaguely metallic. He signaled to the bartender, ordered a cheeseburger. In the red glints of light, his face was clear and precise.

“All the scientific fields with exponential capacity have reached a point where they can no longer be regulated. True technology can never be fully regulated. When an elite trades on the future, it’s her responsibility to move the edge of time, so that the others can never catch up. Which is why it’s ridiculous to follow the rules rather than break things apart, to pay homage to hierarchies that no longer matter . . . I mean, they don’t matter because they don’t exist. They are literally inextant. It’s as if they resided in another dimension, one that has no point of contact with the world of real technology.”

Max’s glass floated there on the bar in front of his nose, half its base resting on empty air. He peeled the damp label off of his beer bottle, stuck it beside the glass, and Cassio imagined a multidimensional surface that ran through everything, that moved about in absolute space; he felt it spin, turning in circles around him, beams of dark matter bearing it unstably. He didn’t know what he thought anymore, and didn’t catch the beginning of Max’s next sentence, but even more powerful than his intuitional visions was the feeling that the music of Max’s argument was approaching its logical conclusion.

The little erotic dance was over, and the two girls were now French kissing; a few people came up, applauded, ordered more drinks. Max set his empty bottle on the edge of the bar and carried on. Strictly speaking, he said, all of them were witnesses to what was going on. Everything on the web devoted to entertaining us, it was all just the festive phase of the bellicose as absorbed by the social. The renovation of the military-industrial complex consisted of this mix of entertainment, espionage and civilian lives entangled as friends and enemies. In fact, it couldn’t even really be said that what programmers built was technology—the challenges that most Web-based endeavors dealt with consisted in making things ever easier, simpler, making their use ever more trivial.

A fresh beer appeared on the bar, a movement so quick it seemed agent-less. Max shrugged.

“Of course . . . there’s nothing wrong with all that. It’s not like I’m saying the apps are stupid. I mean, of course they’re stupid, but that’s not the point . . . The point is that the whole thing is a bit too soft for the type of human the species needs. The target just offers itself up for dissection, puts sensors all over itself—the products it consumes, the spaces it chooses to inhabit . . . The white empire dedicates itself to whitening the world until everything is completely transparent. And the ones that used to be on our side are now our enemies . . .

The arrival of the hamburger extended the ellipsis. Cassio prayed that Max wouldn’t say it, wouldn’t pronounce it out loud, because he’d already made it clear: Cassio had chosen a life that was an insult to his brain, to the homunculus in whose true heart resides the vital notion of dignity. The drinks were no longer wetting his throat—it felt like he was suffocating. Max let mayonnaise drip methodically onto his plate beside his French fries (“Honestly, mayonnaise is intolerable except in the company of potatoes”), and after a few large, calm bites, he continued:

“It’s as if no one really understands what’s happening or what’s at stake”—he lowered his voice—“when you’re dealing with technology designed to transfer and analyze information on a level and scale that can’t be replicated any other way. There’s a race going on between technology and politics, and it’s obvious which side is best equipped to win.”

He couldn’t say much more about the Project, not yet, but it was clear to Cassio that Max was in command of some new technology that was both exciting and entirely unknown to the rest of the world. Cassio wasn’t used to working with live tissue, but from an engineerable perspective, the Project opened up a unique research space, with a quantum leap’s worth of advantage over other analytical ventures. In Max’s words, it “could redefine all existing relationships with information.”

He had convinced the Balseiro Institute, which was part of the Bariloche Atomic Center down in Patagonia, to let him use their laboratory. Balseiro owned a very small stake in Max’s company, had no real veto power on the board, but their involvement was helping to accelerate the whole process. He admitted that what he really wanted was to set up his own lab. It was crazy to have to depend on the university system or the state; he’d rather associate himself with some sadistic idiot, though that was basically the same thing. Serious technology should be built somewhere free of all outside demands, he said, so that innovative potential was the only thing determining what made it into the portfolio of priorities.

Max broke off, began humming, tried to peel the label off his latest bottle. This one didn’t come off so easily. Cassio understood perfectly. Max had had to move fast, which is why he’d cut a deal with the center—there was no need to justify anything.

“We’ve got an advantage of a year or two, no more. The odds are bad. But it’s possible.”

They kept talking until the bar closed, then walked through the dark streets to El Galeón, a place down on Santa Fe y Gurruchaga that was open all night. When they parted ways at seven a.m., the doormen were out washing down the sidewalks. It had been a while since Cassio had last seen a sunrise or smelled the odor of damp clothing that results from alcohol in the blood dehydrating the brain. A very light breeze parted his bangs, one final whisper of fresh air; the solid heat of summer was gathering force above the city, and its arrival was imminent. A subterranean current of new blood was flowing beneath the asphalt. In the early light, objects seemed to be covered by a sticky patina, as if the terrors of the world had been appeased, sprinkled with color, and brought back to life just for him.

His sense of unease had completely disappeared; he felt lucid, at peace. When he entered his room, Harpo the turtle lifted his snout; lately his movements had slowed considerably. Cassio caressed the glass and emptied a little packet of food into the morbid water. He knew that little turtles didn’t live very long. He couldn’t take Harpo to Bariloche—the laws of the province prohibited the entry of foreign pets. He imagined a greenish cloud of tiny turtles rising above the rocky shore of Lago Gutiérrez, finding new life in the nearby trees. Harpo swam a little, then floated in place, hovering there in the water. Maybe Cassio could take him as contraband, put him in a plastic tube like the ones architects use to transport their blueprints.

He closed the blinds in his room, leaving it completely dark. He took off his socks and lay down on his bed. From the far end of the bed, his toes appeared to be looking at him, awaiting a reaction on his part. He took up his laptop, opened it on his chest, and bought a one-way airplane ticket to Bariloche.