6
Any passenger staring out the window of a bus heading from the Plaza de Mayo to La Noria bridge would have seen them gesturing as they walked along Rivadavia Avenue; that passenger would promptly have looked away. Pabst spoke nonstop, and from time to time he gave a little hop to keep from tripping on sidewalks under repair. Murmuring gravely, Kamtchowsky lurched alongside him, her gaze fixed on the ground, like a bird alert to Fate’s key details. They were arguing, not for the first time, about a certain mode of poisoning.
They came to an alley leading off of Campichuelo Street, near the train tracks. An older woman opened the front door and said only that her son was in the basement. As they headed down the narrow staircase, Kamtchowsky almost stepped on a fat but sufficiently agile cat. The two guests stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
–Cartman, get down!
Q grabbed the cat with one hand, and gave a tight-lipped smile. He had dark hair parted to the side, and big bright green eyes; the compressed facial features of adolescence would soon begin to space themselves out. He was wearing a duckling-yellow sweater and River Plate soccer shorts. The cat wore a little green hat like that of a certain South Park character, but not the one named Cartman.
–That’s Kyle’s hat, Pabst observed.
–Yes, but the cat is Cartman.
Kamtchowsky and Pabst made their way through the chaos of loose cables and dilapidated computers on the floor, and sat down on stools near their host’s monitor. Despite the disorder, the room itself was clean and tidy, though some of the walls were starting to lose their paint, and bore craters ten to twenty centimeters wide, as well as several small holes that appeared to have been dug out. Kamtchowsky stood staring at the holes. Q assumed that her silence was a sign of powerful analytical capabilities.
–Impressive, right? I’ve had it like this for a couple of years. I told the girl who lives next door that I’m actually Superman. I told her a bunch of times, but she didn’t believe me. So then I invited her over to see the holes in the walls that Superman makes when he masturbates. The proof is undeniable.
–Some of the holes are kind of high up, commented little Kamtchowsky.
–Precisely.
Standing beside his handiwork, Q crossed his arms.
–Superman’s semen is capable of reaching supersonic speeds, and strikes with incredible force. The strength with which semen is ejaculated is entirely involuntary in the human male, and in all other earthly forms of life, but it would be illogical to expect Kryptonians to have the same limitations. With a body like Superman’s, the spermatozoa blaze out like bullets from a machine gun. I’m still young, so my jizz has limited strength; when I get older, I’ll probably be able to hit the ceiling. By that time it’s extremely likely that I’ll know more girls and be living somewhere else, but I can still show them pictures.
Q was delighted with the effect this had on Kamtchowsky, who at least looked girl-like. Ever knowledgable, Pabst calmly added:
–You ripped that off from Larry Niven’s article about Kryptonian ejaculation. But I’ll admit it’s an excellent reference, and you’ve chosen an appropriate field of application.
–Just be careful where you aim, whispered Kamtchowsky, exchanging a meaningful look with Cartman, who mewed weakly.
Q was still staring at Pabst. Just then, his mother came down the stairs with a tray of cookies and chocolate milk. She spread the coasters out on top of the empty CPU case that Q used as a table, and left the room.
–Your mom is so cool! said Kamtchowsky.
–She knows she doesn’t have any choice, answered Q.
He took a drink of chocolate milk; it left a little brown mustache on top of his own scant facial hair. He dropped the topic of ultra-powerful sperm and returned to his computer. He’d seen the online video of Kamtchowsky getting plowed, but had lost all memory of the impression, and wasn’t capable of connecting it to anyone of flesh and blood. In fact, if anyone had asked for his opinion, Q would have affirmed that objectivity is merely a function of pixel resolution. He wiped his mustache away with his hand, and without looking away from the monitor, he said:
–The attack has to be orchestrated as a series of carefully coordinated steps. It’s based on principles we’ve known for years; basically, they involve design flaws in the structural protocols of the Internet, flaws that can’t be fixed unless you replace the entire architecture of the web with something more anarchical, more horizontal, and it’s not at all clear when that’s going to happen. The trick consists of infiltrating the Domain Name System, which translates all Internet names and addresses.12 By poisoning the DNS with false information, it’s possible to make all of the Google Earth server connections that come out of Buenos Aires pass through a server we control.
Q closed the many chat windows that chimed out here and there on the screen, then opened Google Earth. Kamtchowsky looked at the back of his neck, at the tiny hairs standing straight out from his soft white skin. She thought of all the teen movies in which the oppressed class known as nerds rises up and triumphs over the dominant factions composed of young men far more gifted than the nerds at producing fluids and exchanging them with the opposite sex. The defiance of a single heroic nerd manages to jolt (cf. shake, milkshake, shag) the foundations of the stratified hierarchy: he affirms himself as an auto-regulating producer of pheromones and fluids by breaking the established class system apart. The ensuing assault on nerd heaven results in the nerds obtaining precisely that which is most desired by the most powerful class. The nerd’s love for The Girl sets the male masturbator/female redeemer plot into motion; technology and know-how triumph over the privileges of birth and class. The vanguardist gesture of the rebel nerd is soon mimicked by other nerds who, seeing that they have nothing to break but their chains, are quickly infected with a desire for freedom and begin their march toward final conquest—“conquest” here maintaining the geopolitical connotation implicit in sexual appetite—as can clearly be seen in classics of the genre such as High School U.S.A. (1983), Revenge of the Nerds (1984), Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987), and Can’t Buy Me Love (1987). All of these teen movies are organized around the essential narrative of the onano-emancipatory epic, wherein technical knowledge and initial oppression result necessarily in an advance on the warm core of sexual acceptance.
Q, his glass of chocolate milk in hand:
–That way, Google Earth’s images of Buenos Aires will be replaced with whatever images we want; with a little reverse engineering, we can get our server to act exactly like the original, making the swap-out undetectable. When our server receives requests for information pertaining to specific coordinates in the city, it will respond with the materials we provide. To put it more technically, you could say that our DNS Cache Poisoning attack takes advantage of vulnerabilities in the authentication procedures of server responses to DNS protocols, by contaminating the temporary repositories with arbitrary information. This is possible because within the DNS question messages, there is a 16-bit number, allegedly chosen at random, which is used to identify the answer associated with a given question. An attacker capable of determining that number can cut in line, and get his own answer in before the authorized answer arrives from the domain in question, such that his answer will be cached instead. There are several vulnerabilities in the pseudo-random algorithms that computers use to simulate true randomness; these vulnerabilities allow the attacker to figure out the number that identifies the questions. Of course, that kind of crypto-analytical capability might not even be necessary: a 16-bit number represents only 65,536 distinct possibilities, and an attacker could design a program that tried them all in a matter of milliseconds.
Kamtchowsky had a stunned look on her face. Q’s little speech had turned him into the cutest boy she’d seen since Michael J. Fox as Alex on Family Ties (1982-89). Eldest child of a pair of ex-hippies seeking to raise their children to value tolerance, freedom and progressiveness, Alex becomes a precocious admirer of Ronald Reagan, and a reader of the Wall Street Journal; he wears a shirt and tie in his own home, sticking his hands in his pockets from time to time. The pilot was particularly illuminating: Alex puts on airs as he prepares to accompany a girl named Kimberly (haughty, snobbish, perfect) to a dance at a restricted club; Alex’s parents are afraid that he won’t “fit in,” and try to convince him—beg him to understand—that it’s important to be honest and down-to-earth, that what truly matters is invisible to the human retina. In the end, Alex goes, conquers, has the entire gathering in the palm of his hand—the kid knows the worth of his assets. But the insidious father has nothing better to do and follows him to the party, horrifying everyone there, especially Alex.
Kamtchowsky imagined taking Q to the dentist to get his teeth fixed—that was the only defect she could see in him. He was such an infant that showing him a single nipple should be enough to make him jump her bones—mammarial and sexual hunger can so easily be confused. But how to go about getting him to love her a little, too? Kamtchowsky opened her mouth to speak, and nothing came out.
Pabst took Kamtchowsky’s elbow, distracting her from her meditations:
–I’ve got it! We’ll call it the Pornography of Space and Time.
–You’ve got the photographs?
–Yes, Mara’s handling it, just a few more details to take care of, said Pabst, fascinated by all the possibilities he saw before him.
Q typed something into the computer and pushed back from the desk. He lifted Cartman up onto his River Plate lap, tightened one hand around the cat’s neck, and looked his friends in the eyes, deadly serious:
–If you guys throw a party or whatever, with older girls, can I come?
Pabst nodded vigorously; Kamtchowsky looked down and smiled. Q laughed, the first time they’d heard the sound. His teeth really were a mess.
–Excellent, he said. Can I bring a friend?
12 “Every computer connected to the Internet is assigned a unique IP address, an eight-bit set of four numbers, e.g. 192.168.0.1. For two computers to communicate with one another, they have to know each other’s IP addresses. There is also a system of names used to refer to the computers connected to the Internet; the DNS (Domain Name System) translates easy-to-remember names (www.google.com) into IP addresses (64.233.161.99) and vice versa. It’s a system of hierarchically organized domains: a site’s position in the hierarchy is represented by the periods, and should be read from right to left. Thus, a generic root domain called “.” includes a domain named “.com”, which in turn includes a sub-domain called “.google.com”, where a specific computer answering to the name “www.google.com” has a given IP address. The process of translation is conducted by a protocol (a series of ordered steps) consisting of successive questions and answers; each domain and sub-domain has a specific server with the authority to answer questions relevant to that server’s place in the hierarchy. According to this protocol, each time a computer initiates a connection with another computer, the two computers must exchange several sets of questions and answers; in order to limit the number of such exchanges, and thus take advantage of all available bandwidth, there is also a system of temporary repositories holding pairs of names and addresses. These repositories are known as caches, and that’s where the poisoning takes place.” [Note from Q.]