Cassio—the cotton T-shirt that covered his sweaty torso still shouting, hacker or serf—corralled Skilnov in the elevator. He gave Skilnov a general sketch of the idea, then poked around a bit, inspecting the man’s facial barricade. Cassio knew that his army was perfect, that his technique was flawless and brilliant. The intensity with which he breathed into Skilnov’s face could well indicate that he sought human confirmation of his status as a prodigious crypto-eminence, but in fact, more than anything, he was just looking for someone to talk to. He thought of a Borges poem, of the part where the rabbi gazes fearfully, humanly, at the golem:
The Rabbi looked at it with tenderness
and a bit of horror. How, he asks, could I
have begotten this pathetic child,
abandoning my source of sanity—my idleness?
Skilnov’s vague reply takes him by surprise; the man doesn’t seem to fully understand. He makes a few incoherent suggestions, which Cassio, a bit impatient, dismisses without pretending otherwise. But the graft doesn’t take long to germinate, albeit in other directions. A few days later, Lara Müller, an assistant professor, asks him to meet her for coffee at Selquet.
The bar’s mirrors surround undulant lacquered furniture. The decor hasn’t changed since 1975—a warm penumbra, transmitter of intimacy. Cassio was the only one there wearing a T-shirt; he appeared to float through the seductive low light like a fat kid with a case of ostranenie. Lara was wearing a tight, navy blue sweater that showed off her form. The waiter came quickly to take their order.
“A beer,” she said. “You too? My treat.”
Lara looked into his eyes and smiled. Her hair fell to her collarbones, which disappeared at the edge of the blue wool. Blonde, gray eyes, she’d be eight years or so older than him; a friendly and intelligent face, which only the gray academic surroundings could ever have blurred. Lara belonged to the aristocracy of Argentine science: her parents (young male professor, gifted female student) had met in a physics university classroom, both with patents of their own, and she had proceeded brilliantly up the tunnel that connects the Nacional Buenos Aires to the mathematics department. Cassio, unfortunately, lacked the instincts and self-esteem necessary to perceive the very real possibility of carnal insertion there before him.
Their mugs of beer arrived, with a plate of salty snacks and olives; Cassio entertained himself building little peanut pathways. A number of unaccompanied men looked over at them from time to time, but Lara didn’t seem to notice, focused as she was on the conversation. She told Cassio about a new fellowship that had just opened up; with his grades and a recommendation from Skilnov, this coming year he’d be eligible for a research post at CONICET. He could work in numbers theory; she could take him on as a research assistant, she added with imploring eyes. It would be a first step toward setting the shape of his life for the coming decades. He would have time to do personal research as well, as the overall workload would never overwhelm an intellect like his; and, who knows, he could soon become the head of a research team; without a doubt, getting Skilnov’s recommendation in the bank would be worth the trouble.
It was Cassio’s turn. He talked for a bit about his thesis, explained the implications of his bot army and the advantages for humanity of full encryption; his troops would spread out around the world, silent, infiltrating everything, would form a vast field of distributed execution for code yet to come—infinitely malleable, an encyclopedia of virus species, each with its specific mutational capabilities. Cassio envisioned his tiny dark armies permeating every interconnected object within the numeric universe, every machine that humans use to interface; his creatures would exceed anything people thought of as real, or even as possible. Born in computerized environments, they would be capable of penetrating biological ones; nothing could stop them from taking on new forms and heading in new directions. Given the profile of his forces, he could establish whole new fields of analysis, could program systems that would extend his troops’ capacity for shadowy destruction far into the coming decades.
Cassio had talked a great deal without really taking stock of what he was saying, and something about Lara’s rigid lips projected a sense of fear. They were quiet for a few moments. Eventually Lara offered that his thesis project sounded extremely promising. Cassio finished eating his peanut pathways, and looked directly into her gray eyes. They radiated a blurred density, like a fluorescent coral reef on the ocean floor.
They walked out of the Selquet and headed up La Pampa, past the privet hedge of a love hotel. As far as Lara was concerned, sex with Cassio would be a completely benign experience; even if they ended up working together, it would never become uncomfortable, as she belonged to the set of people who had no trouble disassociating from their bodies, and would find life unimaginable on any other terms. Her hand now brushed against Cassio’s, and he felt the full discharge of the electric prod of passion. He closed his eyes, became a fistful of retinas; the idea that a woman would offer herself to him was on the order of science fiction. Once the shock had passed, Cassio steadied his stride and returned to the topic of his thesis. But he didn’t dare look at her, and Lara was hardly going to drag him anywhere.
Cassio now brought maniacal focus to his writing. He was stalked by an enormous wave of tedium, a tsunami of disdain for everything around him; the coarse voice of darkness had returned to descend upon him. He had to fend off the tenebrous particles that swept across the swamp of his mind in flurries of black emptiness, much like the terrifying advent of Nothing in his favorite film, The NeverEnding Story (W. Petersen, 1984). In the film, Atreyu has to save his world from destruction by defeating the most formidable villain imaginable. And like Atreyu, Cassio was working against the clock.
But even under the virulent reign of Nothing, the world of Cassio was still, like the subject of his thesis, a springtime of possibilities. As Cassio explained to Harpo, his turtle: “I want to partition my brain, let part of it compile other things, work on my personal research. But I clearly have to participate in life in some way.” One option was to take a position as chief hacking officer at some obscure digital organization, make thirty thousand dollars a month, and move to Dubai as a young professional within the New World Order. (He was still far from imagining the uses to which his talents could be put as part of the LatAm project.)
Mundane pleasures populated the path of computerized evil. Jeipi, one of his old comrades in arms at Satanic Brain, was nowhere to be found in any legal or fiscal database. He hijacked the botnets of others and administered his own: he had hundreds of thousands of zombie computers under his control, and activated them a few hundred at a time or all at once according to the dictates of his masters. He carried out the mass infections—gonorrhea was one of his most contagious hits—from the comfort of his own home; by night he worked on his next virus at the latest fashionable dive bar, and turned into moth bait.
Others, like Phil, had chosen to become a different sort of ghost. Originally from Montpellier, Phil lived outside a village deep in the French countryside, in a house with no internet connection. He looked after his goats, which he’d named after the players on France’s 1998 World Cup championship team, and sold their cheese online—down in the village there was a boulangerie with Wi-Fi. He made different varieties of Pélardon using truffles that he grew himself, and each variety came in a package decorated with a pixelated portrait of one of the goats; Zidane and Trezeguet were among the most popular. The technique required for each new attack developed silently in his mind over time; when the idea matured, became inexorable, he rode his bike into town, and in an hour or two had wreaked havoc. He then bought a few freshly baked rolls, and rode back to his house and his cheeses. He was impossible to trace, and often donated credit for his attacks to Anonymous—a modus operandi that would lend identity and vigor to that group in the years to come.
And what sort of ghost should Cassio himself become? Spirit captain of encrypted insects,
or phantom demiurge of maniac bots? Financially speaking, any version of the ghostly hacker life had its complications: a far more pressing issue than those raised in ethical disquisitions was the fact that it’s hard to get paid on the path of evil. It was essential to establish trustworthy relationships with the golden circles of the digital underworld, which implied close proximity to the practical aspect of illegality, which had never interested Cassio precisely because of his purist pretensions. Hacking was a brilliant endeavor because the act of developing perfect bombs for spaces occupied by mistakes was itself brilliant. Mocking corporate armies, spitting on the sense of security felt by those who believed themselves to hold power—subjecting them, in sum, to a new reality principle wherein beings like Cassio reigned—all this was crucial by definition, was the purest societal endeavor his brain had ever undertaken. Lowering himself to industrial espionage, to contacting “interested parties” in pursuit of financial gain, would inevitably be tinged with vulgarity. Much as in the classical definitions of art, the notion of utility defiled one’s actions, tearing off the halo of purity that signified their depth and beauty. It was therefore not a matter of moral principle that kept Cassio off the path of evil, but rather a certain aesthetic intuition similar to the one that had led him to reject applied forms of mathematics, such as physics: it seemed intolerable to him that things could only be thought to exist within the world of objects, and according to its rules; that they could only be considered true if they resided within that particular sphere of human possibility; that their theoretical perfection alone wasn’t enough to make them real.
The idea of a world of rational actors motivated by romantic/cerebral ideals and fulfilling their potential by exploiting weaknesses was what inspired the euphoric baroque phase of utopian liberalism in the 1990s; Cassio formed part of this world in intimate if marginal ways. The central imperative was to find the error, the crack through which to enter; doing so ensured him access to zones which only a very specific elite were skilled enough to transit. The alleged normality of the world had never been on his side, so why start honoring it now?
In spite of his aesthetic misgivings regarding both the path of evil and the illicit activities carried out in certain parts of the exclusive zones to which he had entry, Cassio did make occasional exceptions. For a time he entertained himself by building digital security systems for Comando Vermelho, the czars of the underworld in Rio de Janeiro. With their extremely white tennis shoes, their Ithaca shotguns, and their child-stoner faces, he thought of them as angels from Mars. He invented a way to communicate with them through the game of Doom: when they found him in the labyrinth, he gave them an email address that would self-destruct in twenty-four hours; outside the game, there was no way for them to reach him. And when they were jailed for trafficking as part of the government’s drive to clean up the city, it was easy for Cassio to disappear like smoke.
For several weeks thereafter he followed the news closely. He accompanied the twilight of his former Carioca colleagues by creating depressive user profiles and using them to leave violent commentaries on videos that celebrated these men as armed saviors; the men seemed even more infantile to him now than they had before, which in turn made the universe of law feel ever stupider and more worthy of disdain. Nature is horrifying precisely because it bears witness to the vileness of humankind; it waits, arms crossed, for our extinction. And if the men’s brains managed to survive their jail sentences, at least they’d find their money waiting for them on the far side of the labyrinth Cassio had so lovingly built, its exit path leading to a safety deposit box in a bank in the British Virgin Islands.
He started swimming every day. He’d arrive at the gym in Belgrano with his sky-blue Adidas bag, put on a checkered bathing suit one size too small, and walk like a giant in flip-flops past the immense window of the gym where women in tight sports outfits and ponytails drank Gatorade. Cassio positioned his toes perpendicular to the edge of the pool and imagined a tall building, the wind, death’s power to absorb. He let himself fall headfirst, his arms rigid at his sides, and the red numbers of the clock on the wall dissolved in the chlorinated water that took him in, protecting him from the shifting clouds of cologne and aftershave above. A few meters away, barracuda schools of children added their liquids to the pool. Little by little he lost his human form. Sometimes, underwater, he saw strange shapes, as if he were swimming in a placenta full of monsters, the way life must have felt in the blue fields where he squirmed and floated before being born.
In general he preferred to swim late in the day, when the only other swimmers were older ladies and groups of pregnant women, cretaceous amphibians gamboling about as he watched from beneath the surface, their bodies iterating over and over for hours. He imagined seaweed twisting around elongated, toeless feet. Sometimes the image persisted beneath his daily thoughts until well into the night, and he woke with an invisible knife in his hand.
When he returned to the world’s surface, the sun avoided direct contact with the subcutaneous irruptions on his face, those silent aspartame distillates of his organism, fruit of the modified feces of E. coli. Movement on the surface connected to movement in the depths. His orifices opened and his senses enlarged. He could feel the motors of cars several blocks away as they sped up or slowed down, and the rumble of the kiosk freezers, and the whisper of the stacks of air conditioners that climbed the sides of the towers; he saw the entire world as if it were submerged. Shoals swimming across Soldado de la Independencia Street, crossing Santa Fe Avenue and Pacífico. Clouds of krill drifting down Maure Street; eels tangled up at the moss-green lights; the sky covered with sheets of plankton. It was a world of slow, insensate beings.
Each night advanced its refutation of the light, and Cassio put off going home. He would walk up and down along Báez and Chenaut, occasionally finding himself on the far side of Libertador near Bolivia Square. The shadows of those smoking dope with their hoods on, and the glint of eyes looking up at him from ground level: these were transmissions in Morse code, to which the nerdity of his fluorescent skin responded intermittently in the dark. One night he found some broken dolls, glimpsed movement and nudity behind the bushes, but wasn’t able to see any organs that interested him.
It was with a certain yearning that he caressed the possibility of dedicating himself to speculative computing—of devoting himself wholly to the creation of digital armadas that were ever more singular and complex. He and his creatures could all take shelter beneath the university’s mantle of invisibility, could circulate with impunity in the mode of possibility. But the idea of having to talk to Skilnov again, of most likely having to depend on the man’s acquiescence, was just too depressing. Maybe Maiki was right: maybe the whole world had to be hacked—and of all possible worlds, he would have to find one worth the trouble of hacking.
Cassio didn’t want to be alone with just his computer and his turtle; part of him was desperate for the touch of other beings. He knew that Shiro and Coco had left the university to work at a gamer company, and that the company was looking for more programmers. He sent an email. Without even interviewing him, they offered him a job. And he accepted.
The albino crabs begin to migrate, pursuing the sun. The massive grayish gathering could be seen from an altitude of thirty kilometers—the darkness from which the crabs came had changed; they could no longer breathe inside it. Movements on the surface connect to movements in the depths. Those on the surface are accompanied by invisible contrary forces, each with its own vectors and subterranean aims. Given the finite nature of the human era, eventually they come to dominate the culture as brutally as the ravages of nature.
In the 1960s, a group of young people tries to randomize their actions: they aim to separate their existence from the masses, the mainstream. They are known as hippies, their collective attempt is to ignore the laws established by their parents. But how to break a law inherited en masse? Their rebellion consists of inserting moments of chaos
into established patterns of conduct; they call these randomizations “liberty.” A plan to become unique by generating an unrepeatable life pattern modulates their behavior; the noisy surface of the 1960s and ’70s moves erratically through the cities and insists on its “revolutionary” status.
At a deeper, more silent level, another group of brilliant and impatient young people is giving birth to a more silent eclosion: a turn toward abstraction. They lay no claim to revolutionary status: they are in fact conservative, even square. Though they do have a precise sense of lifestyle, their chosen battlefield has nothing to do with musical tastes, political tendencies, sexual habits, or fashion. It will be the conservatives that will lead an insurrection ascendent and long lasting in the fundamental makeup of capital.
In the following decade, the obscure conservative heroes of this generation will begin by disassociating money from its backing in gold. Little by little, paper currency will draw for itself a curve that grows ever more distant from its reference—a tendency shared by abstract and conceptual art. At the center of these tendencies, a new legal and theoretical structure will slowly come into being, one that will lead to the financial revolution of the 1980s, and in the years that follow, will allow for contortions and iterations at greater and greater levels of abstraction, building one on the next, consuming themselves as they go, until capital is virtualized into what it was always meant to be: a self-generating ouroboros of bits.
The movement’s early resonant hits will sing of the rise of Wall Street—of the decline of traditional economic resourcefulness in favor of corporate restructuring and junk bonds. But Wall Street will be just a rite of passage: the separation of money from its backing in gold will reach new highs and lows with the securitization of debt and derivatives and the collapse of September 2008. Only a few days after the fall of Lehman Brothers, in October of that year, the phoenix of capital would begin to rise again with the publication of “Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system,” and the legend of Satoshi Nakamoto will birth the blockchain. Completely void of any connection to anything real, money will find its true Hegelian self in cryptocurrency. A consciousness of its own.
Dark Constellations Page 6
