Dark Constellations

by Pola Oloixarac

  However, a species that can only relate to itself will over time create monstrosities that could lead to its extinction. It was thus imperative to enhance the relevant sexual behaviors so that lubricious desires could regain the path of protecting and exalting the desired form of the human project.

  But as I stood there at the border of the precipice prepared for me, these faun women with their heads hanging down toward the earth, suspended in hammocks that the breeze hardly moved, a garden designed to propagate their insensate species, I had the premonition that within the dazzling light of the armored moon there was the tint of one prurient, evil ray: that here in this place I could easily be made one of those who breathe without seeing, could be added to his ring of corollas, could become another soldier in this motionless platoon of delicious parts. With only that thought in mind I let myself fall into what some must have perceived as unconsciousness, though in truth I had simply relinquished my powers. One of the women looked at me without speaking, and guided me to a small European-style greenhouse of iron and glass. I told them my name and looked around me. There was a map of the region showing which tribe had seized power in a given zone, which tribes were currently at war, which ate members of other tribes, and which territories belonged to beings who had never resigned their divine status and even now cut through the jungle like ferocious beasts. In the center of the map was the only thing that still commanded the respect of all involved: the great divide, the river, mesmerizing, deadly, serpentine.

  The rat had been a member of one of the first squadrons formed in the darkness of the jungle. The Portuguese, expert travelers, had established amorous relationships with both their slaves and the natives, and whenever they resorted to torture, their hearts forced their eyes to close; their chests ached even as they raised the whip. The two elements that united them all were love and the jungle—the abundance of paradise.

  Niklas and Tartare saw that the rat possessed several characteristics that were, in a veiled way, human. And in the smoothness of his long-fingered hands, in his refined manners, in the light gesture with which he gracefully thanked a servant, there was something distinctly feminine. He liked to wander the depths of the crater until he was no longer sure where he was; it reminded him of his early days here, when he swayed in the soft foliage and let his dreams lead him through the shiny slabs of mica that surged up through the soil like diamonds.

  “Of course, for Portugal, submitting to Brazil was a logical impossibility, much as it was for Brazil to continue submitting to Portugal,” he said philosophically, with the air of one who has taught himself to resemble his new brethren.

  They didn’t really know who he was; they referred to him as the Japanese man. The jungle closed in above me each time I tried to focus on him, to keep his outlines clear with the inner eye of my soul. I returned to wandering along the river, like part of a spell in which the most intimate material of my self was colluding with that being. Thinking about that bond, I felt myself collapse. At that moment he stretched out his arm, and I saw his gaunt hands clearly, a sickly pink shade. He gestured toward the jungle, the estuary, the boat, the river. His horrible rat teeth shone as he spoke, sealing his pact with the face of darkness under his command. I then thought that his life as a rat was only an instrument, a way to show us, like an emissary of light, the hidden evil, the death that stalks us, the shadows of the human heart.

  I knew in that instant that I was going to work for him. There was no other way to remain here, and the rat promised survival.

  The sun sweeps over all beings with a ruthless ferocity, and they hide from its terrifying gaze, because they know it to be a killer of creatures and men.

  As for the rat himself, according to the story he told, he’d arrived in Rio de Janeiro just a few years before the Emperor moved his residence there from Lisbon; in short order, Hoichi had built his own small empire. Fascinated by the species in the area, he had established himself with the idea of studying them; soon, however, his home was destroyed by thugs who’d been organized as a force of order by some local inhabitants. There was nothing left in his house when he arrived: not his gowns, not the precious lenses he had hoped to mount in his laboratory, the magnifying glasses and other instruments that were so rare in this part of the world. Hoichi the Rat had to re-arm, but didn’t know exactly how; he was a student of nature, and the interpersonal relationships that commerce demanded of him were hardly his strong suit. He went out walking, hoping for a providential idea. Perhaps Rio de Janeiro found his presence loathsome, but how to know for sure if he’d barely had a sniff around? He let himself wander down the streets that led to the beach, then followed a line of stele-like trees up to the bluffs. He laid down to rest beside a stream; it wasn’t long before hunger and desperation closed in on him, and not a single idea had alighted upon him.

  Returning to the jungle, he slept for weeks. In the course of his deep slumber, he wandered through areas whose existence he’d never even inferred: places where nature grows dense underground. He found a sort of labyrinth beneath the trees, the vestiges of a structure that dated back centuries, eaten away by rain, the jungle, and the rats. The discovery felt predestined, as if he’d spent his whole life moving forward between the light and the darkness of his existence for the sole purpose of descending into the hidden crater—as if burying himself in its depths would make him master of this inverted cathedral, where a god of catastrophe, an enemy of Heaven, might dedicate himself to delirium.

  And then he saw them. A group of native women, each one a Venus of the stream. They were combing their hair in the water, and their audacity was so joyful, so completely lacking any form of discipline, that they seemed less like women than some species of local plant. It wasn’t difficult to convince them to spend several days each week in the depths of his palace, drawn there by the allure of his Crissia pallida potions. Other women came—exquisite women with excellent dispositions, including Venetia d’Adda—and spent long afternoons conversing about modified species. For any man arriving for the first time, the sight was unheard-of: the women lay in hammocks in the dim light, completely naked and open like flowers. Most of them had lost consciousness, were submerged in a pleasurable stupor that lasted for several days. The men could go in and out as they pleased. In the anteroom, they could admire the orchids—Zygopetalum, Noctilia pubescens, Bulbophyllum dentata, Brassavolas virginalis, Maxillarias draconii. Technically, it wasn’t even a brothel; Hoichi referred to it as a garden, a laboratory. He allowed the men’s juices to accumulate inside each woman, then personally inserted pollinia, and gelatinous substances taken from the orchidian anatomy. He let them repose long enough for fecundation to take place, then extracted the altered juices together with the orgasmic fluids of the women. In a concrete sense, the women’s bodies were themselves the laboratories, and he observed the behavior of the insects involved, researching, in a way, the mystery of mimesis.

  Tartare understood immediately that I had to remain here in this place. I never saw him again. I still think about the woman, Lou, my Cerberus at the gates of darkness, whom I once saw disappear from the house of Tartare d’Hunval. Here I found her, and my body seemed to hurtle forward, transformed into electricity . . . and I thought, I should stop writing, I should linger here above her.

  With Hoichi as host, the garden became a salon, a favorite gathering place among libertine scientists. It’s clear that this is where Niklas got to know Lou; she often spent whole weeks naked and open, flowerlike. But Niklas was not content with the “slight contrasts within the human world at that time, the maelstrom of humors and vanities.” He went to live in an austere house amongst the trees, and couldn’t tolerate the company of anyone but women; he hired female servants so as to be surrounded by their aroma at all times. They agreed readily to his demand that they not bathe; from his writings, it’s unclear whether or not he entered into sexual contact with them. He visited the garden obsessively, did research for Hoichi, no longe
r referred to him as “the rat.” He stuck his tongue into a Bulbophyllum, and his tongue went numb for several hours. The underwater labyrinth of the mangrove swamps, and the coral formations that continue that labyrinth out below the obsidian mirror that separates human lives from those of the undersea world: all of this is present as illusion in his friend’s salon.

  All (the flowers) display themselves, and they emit something, something extra, an ether, the equivalent of the ether of past centuries, but this does not explain their movements. The orchids appear to have the ideal form, in the sense that there is no limit to the form they can take. How do species go about distinguishing the signals from the spectral noise of the jungle? We too must name the space in which emissions take place. Here the foliage grows thick and anything can happen.

  The delicate balance that his mind required was lost: Niklas began to obsess over the nocturnal visits of hybrid beings. He no longer made cameo appearances in the diaries of others, no longer filled piles and piles of journals—or if he did, he left them somewhere safe from the eyes of the future. The idea of contemplating hybrid beings close up was so powerful that it soon consumed the rest of his research. He came to believe that he’d spent his whole life doing nothing but wading along the outer edges of the areas that surround the most exquisite, the most hidden of natural truths. Before leaving, he ran his fingers across Hoichi’s, and then across Lou’s, but she was lost in the vapors of Crissia pallida.

  Max set his roller-ball pen down beside his notebook. Back in the early years of the company, he hadn’t slept much. Now he had to take pills to sleep at all. He stayed motionless for a few seconds; he was facing a crucial moment in his research, in his life. He had finally found the formulation he’d been searching for, but it signified an incipient numbness, one that could last months, or years. He knew all too well the abstinence syndrome that afflicted his brain whenever his environment was anything but demanding, life-threatening. It wouldn’t overtake him all at once, and he would be able to analyze each phase as it came; he would still be capable of aggregating certain functionalities, addressing certain complexities, entertaining himself by angering massive groups of people. But the work itself was done.

  History is the history of symbiosis.

  Human history is the history of the organisms and bacteria that inhabit us. The human phase of history’s trajectory—its mendacity and its ethos—is a simplification that can be defined in epigenetic terms without denying the existence of ethical acts performed across the historical surface of the facts.

  Max had a few buyers lined up—a sufficient number to create a bidding war behind closed doors. He was waiting for a text message from his preferred bidder, Markus Lenz, who managed a Chinese holding company specializing in big data, with substantial technological investments in Brazil. Max was about to get into the sauna when the message came through. He hadn’t said anything to his colleagues, except for Riccardo, who was the only one who knew that Stromatoliton was up for sale. Max turned off the sauna, sat back in his armchair, ate a few almonds. Stromatoliton, processor of the traces of beings, eye/brain machine that recreated the natural world’s entire memory in a single location, would, in forty-eight hours, cease to belong to him.

  Cassio bit his lip, tense with excitement. He knew that this was the equivalent of suicide, that he was destroying something beautiful, something he had helped to create; the taste of betrayal intensified his sensations. He grabbed a piece of paper and wrote:

  I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

  C-beams

  glitter

  dark. Time to die.

  He left the scrap of paper in front of Max Lambard’s computer, knowing that its camera was present, framing the text for future reference. He had always been careful not to look at any camera directly, as doing so triggered the feedback parameters of algorithms designed to locate one’s eyes, to track the passage of the gaze across the crust of things. Now he lifted his face, smiled without showing his teeth.

  Hours earlier, he’d sent an encrypted message to Phillipe, in France, and to JP, at some undisclosed alpine location, one that, given the time of year of the endless winter sports season, would be somewhere up north—Whistler, maybe Banff. At eight p.m. EST, they would be awaiting his signal. With JP’s help, Cassio had accessed a few hundred thousand computers distributed throughout the world, and had used them to launch an attack on several hundred thousand more potential victims. He’d installed a group of encrypted autonomous agents on each of the computers he’d hacked—the staggered process took much less time than he’d imagined. Each agent contained a line of code that would be triggered by the presence of a different set of stimuli; each set was unique, the result of a nontrivial compilation process that only the handful of academics who’d read his unpublished, undefended thesis would be in a position to understand, and even they wouldn’t be able to decode it. No one would suspect that the origin of the key governing the system was biological. Together, the agents would function as a distributed database, where the keys needed to access all of the information collected by Stromatoliton remained latent; anyone could make use of them, but they couldn’t be erased or modified. An algorithm within the encrypted code would connect the agents to the control libraries for each known quantum computer prototype: this is how the agents would distribute the constellations of data collected by Stromatoliton. Cassio’s dark army had entered a new life. The agents would program each computer they accessed to seek out new traces with which to feed the database, thus weaving Stromatoliton’s power into the very texture of the web. Access to the human trajectories Stromatoliton recorded would no longer depend on the viability of any given site; so long as the agents kept reproducing and the web retained computing power, Stromatoliton itself would continue to exist, but would reside beyond the reach of any given entity, including the state. And its behavior would remain encrypted, such that no one could know exactly what it was doing or where its parts were located; a mantle of opacity would spread out over the hostage data.

  At the same time, imbedded in each agent was the portal’s veiled nucleus. His beautiful fractal virus would stretch out its extremities and make contact with millions of bots. So long as a single agent continued to function, the entire infrastructure could be rebuilt, and access to Stromatoliton’s results would remain public. No one could end the attack without destroying every single agent at exactly the same time.

  It was Cassio’s final heroic act as a hacker; in fact, it would be his final visible action, after which he would disappear forever into the jungle of anonymity. He thought about writing or calling Max, explaining the reasons for his betrayal, but each time he considered it, Max appeared in his mind to affirm that in the world of technology, betrayal is a contradiction in adjecto. Technology itself is a form of betrayal, forsaking its own nature in order to become something else. And this time, the very ability to disappear was at stake.

  He left at dawn, carrying only his little backpack. He walked up the flagstone path without touching the grass. He crossed the empty parking lot, and the distant guard waved. The dancing ghosts of his breath froze in the air around his face, but he wasn’t cold. On the contrary: he felt a constant inner boil, the result of either his excitation or his undiminished fever.

  He walked directly to the first Bionose along his path, one on Bustillo Avenue, in front of the alpine rescue station. To a civilian, it would look no different from a regular security camera. He climbed up to it, knowing that in doing so he would attract attention, and also that his movements would be unintelligible. When he was right up next to the little holes, he blew a breath loaded with his genetic material. And the infection—the community to come—began to grow.

  The virus wasn’t discovered until several days after the company had been sold. By the time the money transfers were complete, it had been disseminated to each of the world’s main botnets—the distributors of real content. Secure contracts
in the blockchain made sure that the incentives were kept in check by a distributed army of willing ledger holders. When it reached a given computer, the virus created for them a crypto wallet; a few lines of code alerted the user to its own viral presence, adding that accepting the infection would give the user access to the data of the Stromatoliton universe. A lattice of secret trustholders and agents of mischief would form the collective self of the culprit. The cryptocurrency meant infection, which meant money: hence the incentives were aligned.

  Cassio would not go down in history as a doer of any type; in fact, he wouldn’t go down in history at all. Only the elite hacking circles would learn of Angzt’s final blow, though his old time nickname was never typed in anywhere to be found.

  Rumors about Stromatoliton’s situation soon began to spread. The main one: that the maneuver sabotaging the recently sold company had taken place at the highest levels, which pointed to Max Lambard as its most likely author. When questioned by the press, Max worked actively to clarify the situation—he was still a shareholder in Stromatoliton, after all, albeit a minority one. He maintained a coherent, cooperative discourse with the ongoing investigation, explaining that the distribution attack had used keys that were encrypted years before, keys to which he never could have had access given that he wasn’t the one who’d programmed them in the first place. Finding a private encryption key amidst the chaos of the world—“the preterite chaos which we have committed ourselves to organizing and making useful for everyone, a commitment to which we will remain dedicated through successive waves of technology”—was like looking for a needle across a manifold haystack of haystacks, when all of the haystacks except one held a plausible but inaccurate version of said needle. “At the moment, the computing power necessary to find the one true hash is unavailable,” Max had said, smiling but stripped of all smugness.