Second Sunday of the month, Antón makes his way directly to the recycled computer stall that can always be found beneath the feria awnings. Back again, Prof? It’s been a while, says the young man there, a sound card in his hand. Hey, Felix, yes, it has been a while … What have you got for me? Well, I’ve kept this batch of 386s, 2 of them, a Pentium I, and 5 of these 286s I got for a good price from the hospital in Santiago. Get in! I’ll take the lot, I don’t need to look at them. He gets in his car and goes back up the mountain road, ever more overgrown because of the increasingly long periods in which he has not been leaving the house. Apart from a strip of a sweater with a red and green lozenge pattern, all that is visible inside the Ford Fiesta is a mound of PCs. Back at his house, installed in his workshop, he dismantles the CPUs, removing just the hard drive from each and throwing the casings on a pile. Taking the hard drives—compact, rectangular black parts the size of pocket diaries but containing thousands of millions times more information than pocket diaries—he drills a small hole in one and threads it with a fishing line, attaching one end of the line to a small stone. Carefully laying this conjunct drive-stone on another pile on the floor, next to the kerosene stove, he repeats the operation with the 7 remaining drives. Then he sits down at the PC to check on the progress of the Omega Man download. Soon he hears Eloy, his barnacle-collecting colleague, calling outside his window: What are you up to, Antón? Nothing, I’ll be right down! Fuck’s sake, enough playing, Prof, let’s get the stuff together! On the way to Eloy’s house they take a shortcut Antón claims to know well, hidden between some clumps of gorse growing beneath a handful of eucalyptus trees. After a few minutes, Look, says Antón, look, there’s the ant nest I was telling you about. A needle, 5 meters high, made of very fine earth, ant spittle, and dust from the surrounding scrub. Jesus, says Eloy, look at all those holes. He picks up a stone and hurls it. No! says Antón. Don’t destroy it, fuck’s sake! Upon impact, a hidden life-form is revealed, an undulating network of black points that responds to the shock by expanding outward, vibrating at a steady rate. Eloy walks away. Antón stands watching for a few moments.