Antón has a theory about hard drives: that all the information tucked away inside them in digital form, all those ones and zeros, will never decay, no matter how often the drives are formatted. Rather, during the time a drive is not in use, a spontaneous process takes place, the information materializing as a physical substance—quite thick and yellowish blue—that he calls “informatine”: pure informational chemistry with its own peculiar DNA. And given that information is never created or destroyed, it only changes form, and given, too, that the barnacle is the single living creature that grows on a violent frontier, constantly receiving information from the union of all the natural processes [hence its musculature, hence its intense flavor], Antón dreams of transferring all the “informatine” he gathers into the barnacle, thereby redoubling the flavor and making it grow in size, without losing the original marine tang. A dream of transmuting the zeros and ones of a Photoshopped family photo, or of a bad poem drafted in Word, or of an Excel account spreadsheet, into pure edible muscle.