I always dream about the same room. The room is on the upper floor of a house, but there are no doors leading into it, and no staircase. The only visible way to get in is by climbing up to a hole at the top of the wall. In my dream, I climb by a route that only I know. It’s the perfect refuge, and the mere idea of reaching it is enough to leave me shaken.
I thought: the internet is the perfect place to hide. I thought: the only way they won’t find me is if I maintain a constant state of flight, at least until I reach my refuge. I thought: the best way for a woman like me to escape from everyone who’s looking for her is to get those very same people, without their even realizing they’re doing it, to commission her to go as far away as possible; and I don’t know any place else so close that is so far away.
And so I signed up as an explorer, and went off to spend two years in the net.
On the internet there is no day and night, but it is possible to tap into the code so that every explorer can experience the interface they prefer. My partner Irina and I are like owls and larks. She’s an early-morning type; I’m better suited to the night-time. I would rather wake up when it’s getting dark and explore in the calm of the half-light. She likes to chat; I like to listen to her. In this place there’s no need to eat, though we do it anyway just so as not to go crazy; every once in a while we put our equipment down on the floor and have lunch. Irina tells me what life used to be like when reality was complete, before the great reset: all the animals and plants and machines in a natural context, she says, and not in these junk zoos. I admire her bravery: a big woman like her in an environment she despises but where she forces herself to go. And yet, she is unable to see the brutal beauty of these storage landscapes; and the fact that at this point the internet itself is also a natural surrounding, and that above all it, too, is unpredictable.
Of course, Irina knows nothing of my flight; still less of the house with the room.
Today she said to me: I am here because everyone else is searching for comfortable things instead of true things. She was looking out at the horizon, at the volcanic peat into which the statues of unknown gods were gradually sinking. Our task was to put them into storage before they were lost for good. One statue had all but disappeared, except for its head: the god’s eye sockets were empty. I put my finger into the left-hand hole and pulled out a gelatinous substance: probably the nest of some hybrid animal. Irina went off in tears, and I knew it must have been something she had projected.
What is it that we do, exactly? We search the archives of the internet for everything that has been lost in our world and we put it into storage so that it can be restored to reality. We are like metal prospectors, but our scope is infinitely greater. One of each extinct species, yes, but also historic objects, works of art, precious stones, ordinary stones, books that are sometimes distorted. Our detector has a handle with a gauge, a padded armrest and a long shaft that ends in a plate that is interchangeable depending on whether we are looking for objects that are alive, dead, inert or mechanical.
The biggest problem is that here on the internet emotions also materialize. Each visitor brings mental baggage that can contaminate the environment we are visiting. Hybrids, impossibilities, alien structures: the substratum of mythical creatures that inhabit the tales of our parents. We mustn’t transport those things that do not exist in reality, so we have to be very careful about which objects we store in our devices so as not to contaminate our world when we finally return.
Careful with the wild animals, Irina said the first time we met, the pain is the same. Careful with unstable domains. And careful with the viruses from our emotional deposits. If you ever bring back one of those, I’ll kill you. I imagined my corpse, abandoned on some data dune, still clinging to my device. Ever since then, I’ve done a health check on my equipment every night before bed.
The biggest difference between Irina and me: her concern is only for the side we have come from, the side from which I am escaping. She believes too fervently in the official line: Soldiers, bring everything back home! It’s time to repopulate reality! Whereas for me, the internet itself is my country. This is where my home is, even if I won’t ever find it, even if it’s really only the idea of a home.
Cities on the internet operate like an archive: a way of ordering its information, the enforced attempt to endow meaning to a source of incoherent data. As if the networks had dreamed about their own downloads and out of this a digital environment had eventually formed. The topological solidification of information.
Amid all the cities there is one in particular I am looking for. I don’t know what it’s called, but in any case, most have no name. They have only levels: you need to pass through one to reach the next. What with their being nameless, our job must include describing them. For example: the aquatic city, the cloud city, the paper city … I’m already quite clear that to get to where I’m going it’s necessary to pass through all the other levels to reach degree zero.
Sometimes I dream about the room, other times I dream about the house, but I always dream about the city where the room and the house are to be found. I could recognize it anytime: the walls protecting it, the contours of its terrain, the rolling shape of its harbour. Whenever the dream reappears, the city grows: a new cafe, a new pool hall, new nooks and crannies. The more complete it is, I think, the safer my refuge will be. Then I really will be able to take a rest, not least from the work the dreaming causes me.
I encountered Irina’s anger for the first time. It happened after I had made a mistake. We were in a public library piled high with cars, one on top of another. I climbed from car to car till I had gained enough altitude: on one of the upper shelves there was a scorpions’ nest. I checked to see whether the species was registered, and it was. But all the same the creatures frightened me, and I just stored the books as best I could: books are always much-appreciated loot for helping to recover what has been lost. This time they were mostly corrupted texts, meaningless characters, undoubtedly the result of a poorly executed conversion. It never occurred to me that this illegibility might be the result of an emotional contamination, but it was, and it was Irina who realized this. You’ve been checking over my files, I said, accusingly. What of it? she replied, the only thing that matters is that reality is kept stable, and you put that at risk. She made me return the books to their places. Why can’t we just leave them somewhere else, I asked, if basically there’s no order here? But Irina was inflexible, and we made our way across the dunes back to the library. My humiliation vanished when I looked down from on top of the cars and I could see tracks that hadn’t been there before.
I think: there are other teams of explorers in the internet, but I don’t know them and I’ve never come across one. Is the net really that big? Or is it we who create the cities with our own leavings, as we proceed on our way? The act of seeking changes the surroundings until we are transformed into prisoners of our own trash: the more we seek, the more we hide what it is we wanted to find.
Irina always stops to feed the cats. A useless task, since they don’t need to eat, and we no longer need to store them. Our digital inventories are already full of every feline species, big and small. It’s a method I use when I have trouble sleeping: going over inventories to check what we do have and what we’re still missing; the canids, for example, are still incomplete and there’s always some coyote or other that gets away. But she finds them, abandoned to the rain and the cold, and she can’t help giving them shelter.
Today’s cat had a torn nose and a tail that curled into a circle whenever Irina stroked it. Later I noticed she had scratches on her arms, new marks I couldn’t identify as coming from any of the previous days’ cats. After we had set off again, on our way to city level seven, I invented some excuse to go back to where the cat was. I saw it close-up: the pads of its paws were made of rubber. It was a hybrid, obviously. I grabbed a stone from the path and killed it with two blows. I covered it over with snow, and hurried to catch up with her. I don’t know if she knew or guessed what I had done, but she did look extremely relieved. She laughed and patted me on the back. Come on, then, explorer, still a couple of years to go before we reach level zero, eh?
It was only later, as we were finally coming down the mountain, that I thought of all the creatures projected by my own emotions that Irina must have killed. The skeletons under the snow, under the sand, in the drawers of wardrobes, a dying trail of my fear, of my permanent escape. Perhaps the house I dream about is a projection, too, and when the other explorers find it they’ll set fire to it because it doesn’t belong to this world.
I think: Irina doesn’t just check over my inventory, she also checks over my dreams, and most likely also my browser data. I’ve come from so far away only to have them follow me from so close by. But then I think: if she really is keeping an eye on my flight, why doesn’t she arrest me? Or perhaps all these projections, this work, this constant flight are my prison and Irina my warder. My head’s in chaos; it’s my own city, filled with incoherent information.
I decide to tell her. We are in a sheet-metal shed on level two, during a download storm in the middle of the countryside. It’s night-time, at least according to my interface; the downloads shine like meteorites just before crashing down onto the dark grass. She looks like her mind is far away, an expression I’ve been seeing more and more often. Irina, I know everything. She remains still for a few seconds longer, as though interrupted in the middle of a dream. Very well, she says, it was too much weight anyway and I’m carrying too much already.
The shed has no walls, a sheet-metal roof that only barely serves for shelter. But we see it approaching. It looks as much like a man as it’s possible for an animal to look. It walks hunched slightly forward, arms tattooed like a dictionary with its pages jumbled. It follows me wherever I go, says Irina. I never got round to killing it when it was small and now it’s too late. Will they let me bring it back?
We waited together till the storm ended, with the man curled like a dog at the entrance to the shed. When it stopped raining we resumed our endless walk towards the final level – never early enough, yet not definitely late: back and forth, like rocking.