Introduction LAURA CASTILLO A hole is nothing more than what remains around it. His ghost peeps through the curtains gently whispering her name. It hovers over crushed mementos trying to explain. And maybe it takes 40 years of patience swimming through the tears. Edward Ka-Spel This volume is the attempt to live with a void. It is also, after all, a love letter. But, in the interval between those two eternities, there is an editorial task: sharing a heterogeneous set of texts, united by the desire to call upon a lost tradition of bodies and minds in conflict. The words gathered here could never have been found without the infinite dedication of Circe Tabira: witch, hacktivist and dear friend to whose absent presence this publication is dedicated. I met Circe during the summer of 2012, when we were both in Mexico City for the Encuentro de CiberFeministas Contra el Fin del Mundo, she as the organizer and I as an assistant. I was spellbound as soon as the inaugural speech began: Circe spoke with the mixture of lucidity, intensity and haste of someone who has something vital to say, but she knows that the time for words is over. She spoke to all the 70 attendees packed into that old and cozy house in the Obrera neighborhood about the global circuit, about the love bonds that disturb its current, about the organisms (us, all of us) that weave those links into flowery underground networks, and about the near day when these networks will finish undermining the domination of the circuit. A couple of hours later, During her presentation, she shared her experience organizing feminist self-defense cells in fandom spaces, and reflected on the political and didactic potential of serial narratives. After the table, we talked about the events we most expected from the rest of the week: me, the presentation of an open source protocol to synthesize estrogen; she a
8 / 13
8workshop on the implementation of biodata in electroacoustic spells. That first conversation spread, diverging, proliferating, dancing on the edge of unfathomably deep abysses, for hours and hours, interrupted by new tables, snacks, and peaceful silences. We immediately became inseparable friends, we promised to take advantage of the time before the meeting ended and we returned, I to Nuevo León, she to Veracruz. The days passed between talks, shows and debates, and at night we got lost among the strobes and shrillness of the capital's night, our hands and mouths the only buoys in the sensory ocean. Sunday arrived, the closing of the meeting arrived and the time to return to our respective lands. We agreed to treasure the memory of our brief romance in a chink of the heart, and to keep in touch at a distance as friends. Over the next few years we had constant conversations, but our respective occupations prevented a reunion in person. Even so, Circe became my closest friend; we accompanied each other during moments of crisis, we shared our best-kept secrets, and we collaborated on various artistic projects from a distance. In 2016, our paths seemed close to meeting. I had spent two years of uncertainty after graduating with a degree in biological sciences from UANL. Eventually I decided to study a master's degree in artificial intelligence at the Universidad Veracruzana the following year. Circe, for her part, he had definitively reestablished himself in Xalapa after a few years of touring the country in various activist activities. The prospect of being close again encouraged us to undertake a more ambitious project than the music videos and electronic poems that had entertained us until then: we would make a video game, with a story written by both of us and with me in charge of the programming and music, while Circe would take care of the texts and graphic art. It was a tribute to the shovelware of yesteryear: those cheap compilations full of free video game samples, half anthology, half advertising.
9/13
Once the contents were explored, a conspiracy plot about the studios behind the record, long since disappeared, would be woven. At some point the mystery would become the center of the experience, but the impossibility of getting the "complete versions" of each demo would always prevent its total resolution. At the same time, unbeknownst to the player, data about their gameplay path would be sent to a centralized database online along with other players' data, from which an AI would design unique random events to alter the gameplay experience and take it to new places. We thought we'd start by designing the "Act 1" games and plot, and the AI ​​system behind "Act 2" would be my master's project. During the year before I entered UV, we spent countless hours concocting a web of corporate intrigue, experimental technologies, and secret wars. But in June 2017, the month before I moved to Xalapa, things changed. It wasn't exactly sudden; Circe had been behaving more and more erratically for some months, perhaps since March. She had always been interested in strange subjects, from UFO reports to cryptographic mysteries, but during those months a curious figure began to absorb her attention. The so-called numogram seemed like a kind of postmodern reinterpretation of the classic Kabbalah tree of life. My collaborator was convinced that in its intricate numerical circuits we could find a "robust narrative structure" for our video game. What started as a schizomath curiosity quickly turned into an obsession, by June Circe had become reclusive, paranoid, and for the first time stopped telling me what was wrong with her, arguing that it was too dangerous to get involved. My concern for Circe was growing, but I was sure that once I was in her city I could help her directly. However, at the beginning of July, when I was only a week away from my move, she stopped responding to my messages, something unusual in five years of friendship. When I got to Xalapa I went to look for her at her house, where her mother, Deianira Tabira gave me the terrible news: Circe disappeared without a trace two weeks ago. The exact circumstances were a mystery, since she had left on a trip to Chiapas without giving further explanations. Since she had spent the last few months in seclusion, Deianira left her
10 / 13
She went hoping that leaving the house would make her feel better. After all, she had always been independent and traveled frequently. However, on July 3, 2017, Circe stopped answering her cell phone, she hadn't called back since then. During the next two months, I spent as much time as possible with Circe's mother. Some days we continued the search, others we only accompanied each other in the helpless contemplation of the recently opened abyss in our lives. One afternoon she confessed to me that this pain was not new to her. She told me that her family had a long history of relentless militancy, with the usual tragic consequences: Circe's grandmothers spent years on the run in the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in the disappearance of one of them in 1982, when Deyanira was just 14 years old, the same year that a natural catastrophe expelled them from their native Chapultenango in Chiapas. She confessed to me that this had left her with a grudge against her radical militancy, which led her to channel her revolutionary impulses into the study of the law and the institutional defense of human rights. To both her pride and Deianira's concern, Circe demonstrated from an early age her grandmothers' irrepressible and violent passion for clandestine justice; her years of activism earned her the enmity of more than one influential figure. We were sure that her disappearance must have had some political overtone, but despite Deianira's investigations, there was an almost total vacuum of information. This changed a month after my arrival in Xalapa when Deyanira excitedly told me that she had found a box in Circe's room, hidden so well that she had not seen it in her previous inspections. It was a white cardboard box, little bigger than a shoebox, with the word XOG'E written in marker on the lid. Inside there was a notebook full of drawings, tables and texts in a strange code, a binder full of clippings and various photocopies, a tablet and an SD memory card. The binder had a design similar to the numogram, but much more intricate, on one of its covers, as well as the reproduction of a terrifying image from the Magliabecchi Codex on the other.
11 / 13
11 The binder's materials included what appeared to be copies of police records, notebooks, photographs, and reports on a wide variety of topics. The common thread was an antediluvian artifact/text connected to enigmatic and coveted lost technologies. Although the documents looked real, their contents were so fantastic that my first impression was that Circe had secretly advanced the development of our game, taking his story to unexpected places. This suspicion grew when exploring the contents of the tablet and SD memory, which consisted of multiple text files in what appeared to be some esoteric programming language, as well as spreadsheets with mesmerizing patterns. In the case of the remains of our project, and in order to have something, ‒whatever it was‒to remember my friend, I asked her mother for permission to keep the box. She agreed, and I spent weeks exploring her contents, neglecting everything else, clinging to the idea that if she never came back at least I would always have this little piece of her. The comforting video game theory didn't last long. The box's contents were too consistent, its appearance too legit. Surely no one would perfectly falsify a 1968 police report just to include it as an easter egg in a game. My suspicions grew when I finally managed to decipher a page in the notebook and found what appeared to be a work journal for a project whose nature was still unclear to me. The following months I plunged into the labyrinth left by Circe. I read obsessively about the Mexican Institute of Experimental Education and its bloody repression; about the fossil books of the Xog peoples and about the lives that have rediscovered them throughout the eons; about Felipa de Algol and hers coveted Treasure of stellar wisdom of hers. The more I discovered, the more mysteries opened up before me and the less safe I felt: people I had never seen before were discreetly watching me on campus, a car without license plates started circling regularly near my house. Deyanira, for her part, flatly refused to believe me when I explained that she was sure that Circe's disappearance was related to having investigated these strange facts. In her defense, there was no evidence outside of the box's own contents and paranoid sightings. After a bitter argument in which she accused me of obsessing over childish fantasies, Circe's mother kicked me out. As if that were not enough, that night I arrived
12 / 13
12th house to find the door open and footprints on the floor. Terrified, alone and ashamed, I decided to suspend my master's degree and return to Nuevo León. Back in my homeland, I loaded myself with every possible activity in an attempt to get away from myself. I supposed that Deianira was right, in order to explain the absurd tragedy of my friend's disappearance, she had lost touch with reality. Months passed and I somehow managed to continue living while the white box filled with dust under my bed. However, in October 2018, while I was looking for a book on horizontal genetic transfer in the library of the Alfonsina Chapel of the UANL, an impossible finding brutally returned me to the maze: among the shelves, without any label, there was an old copy of On xog perception and translation between sensory systems by Eva de León and Teodora Lombardo. When the book and my backpack were stolen from my car the following week by glass, I realized I had to get to the bottom of it before it was too late. The attempts to trace the ideas that Circe embodied in her notes led me to an article by Lucía Morales, published by Página Salmón, in which the author mentioned the decimal numogram. Surprised, I followed the trail that Morales traced towards a group of English authors dedicated to reviving the so-called Lemurian tradition. Hopeful for this new line of investigation, I tried to contact Lucía by mail, but it was unsuccessful: her response, two months after my initial message, he limited himself to a photograph of a sleeping cat, after which his mail began to bounce all subsequent messages. Faced with this secrecy, I decided to communicate directly with the editorial coordinator of the site, Ximena Jiménez. After explaining the events surrounding Circe's disappearance and my desire to bring the information to light, she was astonished by my mention of the numogram and the name of Teodora Lombardo, founder of IMEX. She explained to me that they had just received a text on these subjects signed under the pseudonym Tzitzimiyotl. Taking it for a piece of experimental fiction, they planned to publish it in its review and essay section as a small exercise in literary obfuscation. However, the material in the box seemed to validate the facts described by Tzitzimiyotl,
13 / 13
13A few weeks after our conversation, Ximena contacted me again, as they had received a new pseudonymous text, which included files that eerily matched the contents of the tablet. In addition, some concepts mentioned in the few pages she had managed to read from the encrypted notebook (such as retrochronality, demonic agencies, and the ferocious tzitzimitli) echoed in Lucía's otherwise academic articles. Intrigued by the coincidences that were woven in front of my eyes, I proposed to Ximena to gather these three very disparate sources in a single space and share them, hoping to find people with more pieces of the puzzle, but also as a way to honor the memory of Circe. What sustains these texts beyond ghost words? They fill a void, or at least allow us to live on its shores. Circe's texts are fragments that I have managed to decipher from her notebook, assembled thematically as interludes between the rather theoretical texts of Lucía Morales and the improbable reports of Tzitzimiyotl. Taken together, these texts paint a fragmented picture of lives swimming against the current of reality, struggling to be. All of us gathered here (me, Circe, Tzitzimiyotl, perhaps even Lucia, in her silence) write on the brink of an absence, looking towards the bottomless darkness as at a starless sky. But what is important is not the void, but what remains around it: remains and traces of what we were for an instant,