He crossed the valley floor and headed downhill through an expanse of low trees and creeping vines. The tips of the mountain crags were lost in the clouds, and branches scraped at his ankles like tenterhooks. He could feel the animals around him, could almost hear their faint howls, could almost see their dead eyes.

A greenish glow seemed to filter up through the mist-filled underbrush; somewhere farther down, the lake oozed around the twisted roots of the trees. He heard the cries of bats muffled by the foliage. Overhead, branches drew themselves black against the sky like coral reaching up through the night at the bottom of the sea.

He entered an area dense with weeping bamboo. The stalks bristled up out of the earth in tall thickets, and the flowering had begun: every twenty-five years, Chusquea culeou goes into bloom, and many species of rats are drawn irresistibly to the blossoms, which contain a powerful rodentine aphrodisiac. The ensuing demographic explosions are known as rat storms. He passed through a tunnel formed of bowed stalks; he hoped their shape wasn’t caused by the sheer weight of rats hiding in their crowns. He knew that they were everywhere around him, but none could be seen.

He was over forty now, but whenever he returned to the mountains he felt like one of Tolkien’s hobbits still waiting to be assigned a mission. Life in Bariloche was peaceful enough; a model scientist, his daily focus was on the center and its life. Technical challenges were always the order of the day, and he could hardly complain of boredom, as his cortex was properly stimulated by his work on Stromatoliton. He heard a nearby squeak, felt others that were ghostly silent; at the end of the tunnel, the countryside opened up.

There were lights along the curved stone stairway that led to the top of a promontory where a small cabin rested on a foundation of stone and pilings. Outside there was a terrace full of dilapidated lounge chairs; inside was an old heating stove topped with ceramic tile, a small kitchen, scattered furniture. Something shone from the kitchen sink; the lights had been left low. Hovering over the banister was a face painted with pairs of asymmetrical triangles in black and white—like a singer for Kiss, but with stalagmites. Cassio frowned and walked closer. The face belonged to Max, who gave him a hug.

“You got here just in time. We’ve already handed out the bitcodes.”

“And this?” said Cassio, gesturing at the triangles on Max’s face.

“Monica Lewinsky did it for me—you like?”

“She’s here?” murmured Cassio.

Max didn’t seem to have heard, was busy hooking the new bitcodes that Leni and the others had brought. When he was done, they all smoked and watched as the creatures emerged from their hiding places. The whole process took almost an hour. At first it was just bursts of light from their eyes; then that light began to illuminate the shapes of the rest. They came down from the hills, a chaotic horde drawn to the tallow; they took the bitcode bait, and the solution entered their organism. One by one, the rats lost their sense of direction and began to glow a greenish blue. In the dark grass, they looked like constellations drawing and undrawing themselves beneath the meridian. As the substance made its way through their intestinal canals, their squeaking went hoarse; then the human ear became attuned, and the noise lost its demonic ratlike air, began to sound more like crickets.

Down below the house there were now tumults of rats; in some cases the glow extended down the spine all the way to the tail. After their initial euphoria, the rats became lethargic; this is when clear patterns began to emerge. Over on the human side, music was turned on—the intersexual crooning of Asaf Avidan, the psychedelic turns of the riverine band Los Síquicos Litoraleños—and some of Max’s private harvest was rolled. This was their entertainment during the flowering of the weeping bamboo. There was no trace of Piera.

They puffed in silence, lying back on the lounge chairs, looking up at the motionless stars and down at the rats’ trajectories.

“So you met the resistance,” said Max, holding in the smoke.

Out of the corner of his eye, Cassio saw the lit joint suspended millimeters away from his face.

“Resistance?” he said, inhaling.

“Leni told me. He keeps an eye on them.”

“We went to see some girls . . . and they had some shit painted on their faces just like you. You’re not going to tell me that’s what you—”

“Look! Orion!”

In the distance, the shining rat points were held for a moment in a static sketch of the constellation, then dissolved into the black. Max exhaled, fascinated.

Splayed out on his lounge chair, Cassio began to feel impatient. He wasn’t particularly worried about the mass slaughter of the rats; after all, it was completely legal, considered a service to the community. It was Max—his face blurred by the low light and the paint, his attitude toward sectors of the world he didn’t understand—that made Cassio anxious. He almost believed that Max was plotting something . . . because he obviously was plotting something, because enjoying the appearance of peace in the bosom of the state was hardly his thing. Together, Stromatoliton and the rat plague created a sort of emotional balance within the context of the Project, a plateau of triumph that didn’t fit with what Cassio knew, or thought he knew, about Max. Had Max changed forever? Had he resigned as a commander of chaos in order to become just one more of capital’s foot soldiers? And maybe Cassio, too?

They were quiet for a few minutes. At the far end of the terrace, the others were taking pictures with a star tracker, an instrument designed to follow the orbs through outer space. Instead they were tracing the maps drawn by the rats as they died.

“Day by day we know more and more about things, get better and better at manipulating them,” said Max, as if continuing a conversation that had no end. “And day by day they get stranger. They pull away . . .”

He made a vague gesture toward the valley crisscrossed with green rays.

“You reach the outer limit of your neuronal city, and then you’re nowhere. God doesn’t know what we’re building, because we’re its creators, not him. Code is pure humanity, not some participant in the Platonic reality of mathematics. God has no idea what we’re up to.”

He threw an acorn into the distance.

“We have to understand these things as dark constellations—that’s what the Incas called them. They organized the sky in terms of the dark regions between stars, the interior shapes with bright parameters. But what creates space for meaning isn’t the bright dots or the presence of light—for dark constellations, the light is the noise. What matters is the darkness. And day by day we know more, we have more information, but from our position way down deep inside our dark constellation, we’ve lost view of the outline.”

Cassio watched him take a slow, deep toke.

“We live in an era so demon-possessed that all we can do is practice goodness and justice from a position of deep clandestinity,” Max murmured. “We’ve gone so far into the darkness that there’s no separating it from us. There aren’t any visible lights. Clandestinity is the only system left.”