Kevin was surprised when I called. I usually sent him an e-mail telling him to call me, because it’s easier to phreak from the US.
‘Hullo, Kevin. Am I interrupting?’ I said to him in English.
‘I was working on Reptiles,’ he answered.
‘What’s it like?’ I asked him.
‘Get a load of this. You have to manœuvre a lizard through landscapes constantly shifting between two and three dimensions, and choose your best options as you go. If you put your 2D lizard in a 3D landscape, it can slide under a door or survive a steamroller, but it can’t go up stairs; likewise, a 3D lizard can avoid being captured in a photo or dragged along by the wind like a dead leaf or interlocked in an infinite mosaic of identical lizards, but will splat against a flat landscape like a bluebottle against a windscreen,’ Kevin explained to me excitedly, clearly still in the throes of his Escher period. His passion was for counterfactual worlds where everything was contrary to experience or indeed reason: objects stood out sharply in the dark and disappeared in the light; it was possible to walk on air and fall through cement; a sudden gesture would break down into more and more detailed planes without ever being completed, and hurrying would only increase the distance to be covered; the lightest brush, on the other hand, could knock down whole buildings if you weren’t quick enough to make it violent. An egg could be concave outside and convex inside, containing the universe on its surface; cubes with different-sized faces, labyrinths that led you straight to your goal and straight lines that forced you into interminable detours were the norm. Empty space was as dense as mercury, yet you could grasp interstices with your hand; the faintest of shadows inevitably crushed anyone approaching them, and the densest of bodies could be traversed like early-morning drizzle. Kevin’s games deployed a succession of worlds created according to incompatible rules that altered as soon as you got the hang of them, and you had to have quick reflexes and a mind capable of processing mountains of information to survive such extreme shifts. His ultimate goal was to design virtual worlds that could be inhabited.
‘This is real anarchism, buddy,’ he told me. ‘Anyone can dream of changing the laws of society, but the laws of reality … well now, that’s a whole different ball game! Don’t you think it’s a criminal waste what simulators do? Corporations want to restrict their use to imitating the real world, when they know perfectly well they were invented to replace it. We’re ready for a new existence outside time, outside the body, and they want to keep us prisoners in here! When personal virtual reality exists, we’ll all be able to live in any world we like and write its laws. Only then will we be free!’ he concluded and fell silent, perhaps anticipating the kind of canned applause you’d expect from a cheesy US sitcom.
‘What is it?’ I asked him, envying the altered state he was in.
‘Piracetam and choline. What are you calling for?’
I gave him a general picture of the situation and a more detailed idea of my plan, including specs.
‘So I have to have an almost perfect video game in three days max. Any ideas?’
‘Breaking the codes to any war game’s gonna take forever; you know how well protected they are,’ he said discouragingly. ‘But I think I have what you need. Sega are bringing out a series of DIY video games and they’re kicking off with a war game. They’re apparently based on military intelligence programs, with all those guys here in California who lost their jobs after the Cold War …’
‘I want that!’ I said, unable to believe my luck. ‘That one!’
‘They haven’t finished it yet. It’s supposed to be a total secret. Cloning it won’t be easy.’
‘How much.’
‘Five grand now, five grand later. Cash.’
‘Make sure you write a counterfactual world where you don’t need money to get things,’ I snarled after agreeing to his terms, and I could hear the electric sparks of his laughter before he answered ‘What would be the point of writing them then?’ and hung up. Ah well, Tamerlán had promised to take care of the eckies.
It might be a while before the game arrived and in the meantime there was something else I needed to do before I got down to work, but I had to move fast if I wanted it by today. I got out of my smart interview clothes and, munching on a swiftly microwaved sausage and half a boiled egg, I donned my war veteran’s uniform from the Malvinas campaign, which I’d bought a few years after getting back in the subway at the junction of Avenida 9 de Julio and Corrientes (I never learned the fate of the one I wore over there). The subway-stall owner was one of us and always managed to find some that were virtually identical. I threw on a long overcoat to cover it on my way to the Association and stepped out into the cold of the small hours.
* * *
The offices of the Argentinian Viceregal Association occupy two rooms on the third floor of an early twentieth-century building on Calle 25 de Mayo. You reach the first floor of business offices via a long, curved marble staircase; from there you go up some more-conventional straight stairs to the second floor; the ascent to the third floor is made by negotiating the loose, uneven boards of a little winding wooden staircase that leads on all the way up to the roof. The Association was originally founded with the aim of restoring Argentina’s national borders to the historical boundaries of the Viceroyalty of the River Plate (for which it proposes, among other things, the reconquest of Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay, and the invasion of Chile and Brazil), but had gone into serious decline in these rather unepical early ’90s, and, to finance its minimal costs, it runs courses on national history, national politics, national folklore, national music and any other discipline they can slap the adjective on. They have an agreement with ex-combatants whereby we’re given free courses (certificates and all), and everyone from the group was taking them for the third time around, except me.
As I snuck in, trying not to be noticed, Prof. Citatorio, who single-handedly taught all the courses, had got to the bit about the Serpent’s progress around the Mediterranean, from which I deduced that it wouldn’t be long before he’d be finished. I waved at Ignacio, and tried to attract Sergio and Tomás’s attention, but they were so busy whispering that all I got was a furious glare from the Professor, so I sat down by the door to avoid making things worse, while he picked up the thread of his disquisition.
‘The Serpent was born in Palestine in the year 909 before Christ, and its cradle was the Temple of Solomon, although some scholars quite rightly trace its origins back to the Serpent that tempted Woman with the First Sin and brought about our Fall. There, with that patience typical of the Landless Race, it grew fatter and stronger until it was ready to strike out. Far from being the result of persecution, as they would have us believe, the Diaspora was the signal for Hebrew armies to embark on their conquest of the world. The Serpent accomplished its first stage in Greece in the year 429 before Christ, where, with the help of traitors like Pericles, it managed to impose democracy in order to undermine the foundations of the cradle of our civilisation. The second stage …’