Cassio hurled down Pioneros Avenue at top speed. His 2016 Clio rose and fell, drawing the curves of the terrain. Alongside the road, the vegetation was thick with bushes and tall conifers that extended their extremities toward him. A shadow passed him. He slowed down.

Two silhouettes slid toward him, ghosts floating up the dark road. They were monstrous there outside his capsule, appeared to be gesturing, as if they wanted to say something to him. He slowed down some more. Now his headlights illuminated two long-boarders walking along the highway, only a few meters away as they skimmed past, dancers on a floor of black ice.

Which is when he saw it: an enormous lenticular cloud, its limpid pink standing out against the sky. Swan-like, bright white edges, soft overlapping scales, stretching out above the peak of Cerro López, rising slowly. In his entire life he’d only seen a handful of these clouds, all of them high in the mountains, 3,500 meters or more, when he’d gone up to spend the night. Its appearance here seemed meteorologically impossible, on the order of cosmic magic. Cassio blinked.

Maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly. Maybe he’d spent his cerebral life focused on whatever happened to catch his attention rather than on what defined the landscape. What matters is the internal face of the nebula, the dark constellation. We are the ones who decide which things are stars.

His profession was based on the world’s legibility; its blank zones were what made it accessible to humans. Darkness made legible became luminous. Soon there would be nowhere to hide. Ontological caves would cease to exist. Only the stellar trajectories would sustain the contrast, the one and the zero, light and darkness. At any given moment, all over the world there were bots awakening. They flickered, stretched out, launched their golemic selves, joined the swarming multitude.

He turned off his headlights, followed the lenticular cloud as if he were the one rising into the heights, as if what came undone in the sky would soon spread everywhere else. He would become the noise inside the virus, the meat that would make it both real and completely random; his mind had run the numbers. The arteries that channeled the blood now formed part of a more complex system of concavities. He felt the vertigo of self-discovery, tried to bury himself once again in the formless mass of the rest of reality—in everything that wasn’t him. But he too was real. He would be the portal between two worlds. Are you going to kneel before the darkness, or are you going to fight? The shapes formed by known stars howled in the black abyss above him. The Clio pushed on, mimicking the night.