Dark Constellations
Page 16
Within a few weeks, the shadows of guilt had dissipated around him, and in time the charges were dropped. The act of democratizing the data had stripped away the value of the company he’d just sold, sending its share price into a dramatic dive. On the other hand, it was impossible to trace any action against the interests of the company back to him.
All such actions had been caught on film, and the company promised that it would deal internally with those responsible. When Max was given those tapes, he didn’t care to play them. He’d seen them already, as they were taking place; he’d thought of sending Cassio surveillance footage, with the label “something to play at the wedding,” but Cassio’s location was untraceable, or at least Cassio thought he was, deep in the dark, becoming everything that moved, the beginning of an end and the end of something too. He saved it. Perhaps one day he’d post it online, in the middle of the ocean Web, like a song of baby whales who grew up together and recognize their voices. The world was so small, even if shattered. He knew where to find him.
Already on the mountain path, Cassio sent a text to Piera. He wanted to revel in his heroic sabotage, to tell her about the epic ideals he had never truly renounced. They had birthed the disaster together, and by now news of it would have reached circles that included Max Lambard. But Cassio couldn’t say all these things, not in a text. Via darknet he sent her a picture of Cuento del Mar, a seafood restaurant in Puerto Montt that looked out over the Pacific. And if he ever saw her again—Cassio hoped that was still a possibility—he was thinking about proposing that they work together, maybe build their own laboratory.
By the time he learned that the company had changed hands, Cassio had already made his way over Cardenal Samoré Pass. At the customs office there, he’d been sniffed by a Chilean Bionose. He’d closed his eyes, concentrating on the sensation of floating out beyond the reach of all authority, on transmissions unimagined by earthly powers, but felt nothing out of the ordinary. He’d taken a deep breath and walked on.
The story of the epic but uneven battle between Cassio and Max, of clashing egos and monstrous betrayal, would dissolve into underground history within a few weeks. The virus, meanwhile, intersected with a substantial reservoir of advantageous DNA located in Jinquan, a prefect in the Gobi Desert. A prolific provider of DNA analysis to hospitals and laboratories worldwide, the Jinquan facility led the market for outsourced sequencing services. They were able to handle countless queries at once, and could provide any desired correlation from among the human avatars they had processed over the past decade, including some particularly fascinating mutation indices. Their decision to accept outsourced work had yielded unexpected fruit: they now possessed the world’s largest genetic database, first and last names included. The only factor their clients cared about was price. When asked about the potential risks involved with handling such data and their strategy of using outsource contracts to increase volume, one company official commented that there was nothing to fear, that it was “best to think of us as inoffensive migrant workers” doing underpaid work—their triumph was so complete that they had the luxury of irony.
Cassio’s virus found the perfect host there in Jinquan. It had been programmed simply to seek computational nodes that would enable it to grow ever stronger; while not implausible, it would have been difficult to foresee that in the course of its unfolding, the virus would happen across the world’s richest source of genetic data. This final infection completed the protocols necessary to match genetic information to personal trajectory. The two multitudes—one living publicly on the surface of the skin, the other privately inside human organs—finally merged. The monster had reached its final phase.
And it went all but unnoticed. Cassio’s strategy for distributing Stromatoliton’s capabilities was so perfectly designed that open access to Jinquan’s data reduced the value of the information it generated only momentarily. The world’s stock markets, controlled by algorithms built for high-frequency trade, took just a few microseconds to relativize, to recommodify, to make the necessary adjustments. The market collapse was shocking, but lasted only a fraction of a millisecond; in that tiny lapse, a substantial amount of money changed hands so that everything else could stay exactly the same. A war had erupted inside the economic machine, and nothing had changed.
Outside, a meteorite shower was shattering the sky.
The emergence of new castes of beings is a common thread throughout the transformations. The process entails successive metamorphoses: primordial peoples traverse various modes of existence before reaching their current form. Along the way, bodies are built and unbuilt, with extreme permutations involving interspecific corporeal forms. These forms often incorporate artifacts and body parts that were once corporeal forms in their own right. The conversions involved therein imply technological acts on the part of demiurgical creators.