Текст книги "Book of Numbers "

The outlets that cited sources had to factcheck, but all the gotchablogs had to do was go through our trash. wwjcdo.com and jocohenspiracy.com did that literally, and the biohazard receptacles we were renting were no deterrent. He uses quilted papertowels. Flagrant. He tossed out a jar of lysine with two capsules left inside. Even this must have its meaning.

tetricity.com and tetspionage.com at least tried to cover the industry, by letting disgruntled unable to hack it exTetrateers announce forthcoming projects that either did not exist or we never intended to dev. Accuracy subordinated to rate of update, style.

But b-Leaks was different. Approx 100000 hits from approx 88000 unique IPs per day and that was just through us. Their credibility was documented, unredacted documents. b-Leaks was a dump.

Basically, the second Count of Revillagigedo, scourge of pirates and viceroy of New Spain, namesake of the inarguably Mexican archipelago, bequeathed a neighboring anonymous uninhabited island to the dukedom of Medina Sidonia, in appreciation of its having insured the voyages of Bodega y Quadra, which searched Alaska for the Northwest Passage and attempted to capture Captain Cook, though no Passage was found and Cook, who had been unable to find it himself, was already dead in Hawaii. 18th century, late.

Immediately after our purchase of the isle in 2008, Mexico contacted the State Department.

They sought to nullify the deal, by asserting that the grandees of Medina Sidonia had never held title to the property but were merely its “gobernadores,” “guardianes.” Ceremonial positions. Ruling rights and privileges neither intended nor implied. We had Myung email the deed to State, a fancy scroll expressly granting sovereignty. The specific inheriting marchioness we had transacted with had scanned it for us but insisted on holding onto the original out of curatorial sentiment. State relayed to us that Mexico had requested the original but that the marchioness had left Ibiza for equestrian season and was currently unreachable. Based on an expert evaluation of the scan, however, the deed appeared to be forged. No paper analysis required, period Spanish would never have spelled it “cuando,” but “quando.”

According to satellite, the Mexican Armada, or what can pass for it, sent two Huracáns to blockade the only usable inlet on the isle. We introduced ourselves to the head of Tetration Mexico, fired him, hired another, and then went out to a reception to help reelect Representative Eshoo for the 14th District, and to solicit the intervention of the emcee, Senator Feinstein, who had not been previously apprised of the situation and would make no guarantees.

We had Myung write a report and email it with the scan attached to the senator. The senator was never in contact. But her aide fwd:d the email to a friend who was a Congressional page, as like in the spirit of incredulity or humor, compensatory reactions to insecurity, basically. That Congressional page then fwd:d to her boyfriend, in the same inane vindictive spirit, and that boyfriend to another friend, a fellow PhD candidate in media studies at Brown, who clicked it to the b-Leaks general account, and b-Leaks posted everything.

Charges of undue influence were rampant. In exchange for assistance we would publicly endorse a cyber coordination act, which would include a stipulation that authorized an executive sequestration of online in declared states of national emergency. We would support an online infringement and counterfeit act, which would empower attorneys general to blacklist sites perceived as like fraudulent. The aide and page resigned and Senator Feinstein disclaimed ever having extended preferential treatment. Mexico took control of the island, and set up an observatory, no staff. The marchioness has yet to refund our money.

Myung wrote our statement, Kor edited. “We have never sought or expected preferential treatment.”

This was how we became familiar with Balk.

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Thor Ang Balk. The product of the inadvisable coupling of a Norwegian and a Swede. But childhood is over, and whatever he did before pressing the button on b-Leaks we missed. Virtuous hacking and masturbation, epitomizing the righteousness of the social welfare state. We heard of him at the same time you did, and saw the photos. The US beating hooded Arabs photos. We clicked, zoomed in to resolve them unblurry. Then the intel memos he leaked from Afghanistan. Renditions. Detentions. Waterboardings. Torture.

His residence was Copenhagen, but Denmark had no grounds to prosecute him, and extradition was not an option. He had not broken any laws. He was a naturalized EU citizen, he had never even visited the contiguous 48. Still, enough other countries with militaries in the region or just with violations of the Geneva Conventions to conceal were angry or feeling the pressure, so he went fugitive. Rather there was a warrant out for his arrest for something sexual, nasty sexual. The consensus was confusing. He had raped someone, or he had not and the charges were trumped up. He was a free speech hero or international threat or both and either being persecuted for that or a pervert. Point is, he shopped around and got asylum. At present his residence is a compquipped closet in the Russian embassy in Iceland.

This is nothing new to you.

Balk not.

[What’s your take on him personally?]

Transpaque, oparent. So transparent as like to be opaque, we cannot tell what he is made of, if anything at all. Gray noise. So loud and quiet at once, ideology becomes a substitute for mood. Point is, if it had not been him, it would have to be another. It still will be, even with mirror servers and AES256 bit key encryptions. b-Leaks is not a person but an organization, and not even that, but a brutalist .org, a discipline of releasement. Upload shame, download liberty. A coordinate to confide in. A platform for all spills. Imagine a shrink practicing group therapy on the UN. Imagine if your wife and mother collaborated on a blog. In complanguage, Balk himself is merely a statement, a conditional. If then else and else if then. Representative of the modern choice. Whether to disclose yourself to no one or to everyone, exclusively.

We have avoided being so principled all our life. Balk lives shut into what would have been a luxury cell at the Lubyanka, eating consulary blini and drinking vodka without ice, waiting for soldiers and diplomats and intel and military contractor types to get bored or depressed and blow their whistles. They are his friends, as like penpals. They are his only friends. Along with his intermediary and hausfrau, Anders Maleksen, his laptop, a treadmill. Sometimes Balk works on the laptop while working out on the treadmill. Sometimes he even uses our site. We have no such information about Anders Maleksen.

[That’s your take or the official Tetration line?]

The official Tetration line we are through with. Our terms of service we are through with. We Work 4 Free. But we do not. Balk does. For him there is no platinum parachute retirement.

Balk is basically open and we are basically closed. As like Kor says, “Open is not what open does. Closure is for closers.”

Throughout 2010, Cull and Qui were deving Autotet. This would be their last contribution to the business. We worked on it as like an advisor only. Comptrasted with them we felt as like the old dude.

Both our CoFos had married and reproduced, yet we were the ones getting draggy. Juncle Josh, their kids would climb all over our stacks, we were Juncle Josh. A graybeard wandered out of the Bible. Out of their Bible for Children ebook.

Basically, Autotet is an app that searches without having been instructed to find, collecting terms from Tetmail and Tetset, from all our products and services, and then generating a unique online experience for each user, by directing them to pertinent sites they have never before and might never otherwise have visited. It has what you want/need before you need/want it, delivering you in advance.

Such a thing can only be used transactionally, to sell and buy, we were all clear about that, Qui and Cull were.

In Tetmail or Tetset you used to ask your mother how her pottery had been going, and an ad immediately appeared to the side asking you to buy some vases, or two for one, but always something massproduced, commercial. Tetrating “spouse/user with online addiction disorder” would get results alongside counseling offers covered by Kaiser Permanente. But that was in the past. Before gays could marry widely and Afromericans could be President.

With Autotet, each tetration has a secondary function, or dreamlife. The terms you pick become the accidental expressions of an automated dream. Say that you once typed in a chat or mentioned even on a call having enjoyed “chain bookstores in Paris and London.” On any subsequent visit you pay to Charing Cross Road your pda will ask, “Remember Foyles?” or the next you are shopping for clichés on the Rue de Rennes it will ask, “Remember FNAC, only .6 miles ahead?” but in French, if you prefer, or Basque, in which the distance would be .96 kilometers. The display would announce a sale on select stock of the langue anglaise section, “Act in the next 20 minutes and get an additional 10% off,” and it would even do this in celebrity voices, or yours, which you have instructed the semantic sampling feature to reproduce just by calling normally. You will be able to remind your greatgreatgreatgreatgrandchildren to get a parka, if ever again the temperature falls below a preset 42° F/5.5° C.

Autotet predicts what you will do based on what you have done. Not predicts, but determines. Destines, fates. Entraps your future in your past.

This doubling, this doubling was also his nightmare. Moe, we mean, it would have been. His hope for recursion. For reversibility. Input to output to input again. The only entropy the intel we have accrued on you. Per lustration. Posterous.

[You’re gloomier than Balk, then—you’re saying we don’t even have to be surveilled, because with proper incentive we all bare ourselves voluntarily?]

Biochemically, neurologically, confirmative. We want to see and be watched, to listen and be heard, and even a cave needs to be famous, if only among caves, or to the fighters it hides, to the fighters who storm it, if only to itself. Our appetite for secrets is our appetite for fame. How many we keep is how much we lack. Then we divulge around the fire. Then we only have others to live for.

The exposure of bombing targets and dronestrike locations merely reveals, by the inaction inspired, how alienated we have become from our governance. Balk is just facilitating the inevitable breakdown of yet another system we were forced to respect, however fraudulent it is, or was. He is ultimately just proving arithmetic, the arithmocracy. That what happens to us happens to you, our institutions, all things civil.

The desert, octalfortied.

Imagine all the grains, the tribimillion grains that make up the ergs, the barchans, the dunes. Imagine the dune on which Arabic numerals were first traced. Not ////, killed, but 4, murdered. We have always had the suspicion that this abbreviating method was invented because of the wind, because of our brief time before everything is blown away from us.

[So Kor—I assume we’re avoiding Kor because of this. He wouldn’t be pleased that you’re putting this on record, would he?]

Confirmative.

[But if Kor himself were telling his side, that would be OK with you, even though you’d disagree with it?]

Let him provide his own account. Better that he does before the law compels it out of him.

[What do you mean?]

That we will not be around to testify. With all respect to the shareholders of this and any other court, by then we will have been assigned to another judge.

[Does that mean what I take it to?]

Difficulties. Extenuations.

Except Myung. We were never involved.

Let her determine her own involvement. No. Let her decide her own pseudonymity. No.

Leave everything, trust nothing, and as like D-Unit would say, may you always be able to convince everyone but yourself.

[Of what?]

All.

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Tibet was next. Recall Tenzin Gyadatsang, the dissident.

[Gyadatsang? Wasn’t he a poet, though, also?]

Is. Poet, playwright, activist.

Persecution does not always come with a job description.

            The past is the well

            the future is the bucket

            the present is the rope

            we have taken to hang ourselves.

[Next you’re supposed to say it rhymes in the original.]

or

            the present is the rope

            reappropriated to the gallows

[All dissident verse is the same.]

All oppression is too.

[And all roses are red? All violets are blue?]

A FedEx arrived at La Trovita Lando, mailed from generic LA. All it contained was a book, xuan paper, corrugated covers, staplebound, limited edition, #168/200, Editions Nirvanasa, Varanasi, India, 2010. That frontmatter was all we understood of it. The language of the rest appeared to script in Devanagari but turned out to be Tibetan. We were typing everything into Tetrans, whose Tibetan is now fluent. “Rope Poems” had to be the title because “Tenzin Gyadatsang” was a bad title. Though “Rope Poems” was such a good name for a poet that we were considering taking the name “Tenzin Gyadatsang” to mean “Upholder-of-Buddhist-Doctrine Enemy-of-the-Chinese,” aliases both. “Nirvanasa” did not mean what we assumed it did, but “exile.”

We even typed the poems out into Tetrans. We got their meaning, but their significance eluded.

            we are srivatsa srivatsa

            we are our border

            we eye and ear and knot and knot!

            we pray for an equality of not independence!

            knot mouth

            mouth knot

[So what’s the explanation?]

Nothing. We got treemail all the time. Fan portraits of us in acrylics and oils. Fan R&B operas of our life. We researched Tenzin and he was poetry famous. There had not been a note. He had not requested us to write a foreword, or afterword, or note. We put it aside.

But were haunted by it every time we went past it to the toilet. So we went to another toilet.

[What does this have to do with Balk?]

A week or even month later, which are just %ds, or placeholders for the true integer/interval, poetry was making news. After the jump and keep scrolling, there was a link under the Global rubric, UPI, or Reuters.

Tenzin Gyadatsang, the alias of poet Lhundup Jamyang Tenzin Gyatso, had been in Hungary. He was attending a Writers of Conscience summit to accept a citation, a consolation type Nobel.

On his way back to Tibet, the Chinese detained him. He had been flying, of course, through Beijing. The trial was over before lunch. He was in prison just after lunch. He missed lunch. No lunch since for Lhundup Jamyang Tenzin Gyatso.

He was being accused of having abused the privilege of travel abroad by plotting, alongside EU resident Nepali citizen subversives who had visited him in Budapest, to undermine the Party if not to overthrow The Great Firewall of China itself, through the staging of illegal performance art and lhamo flashmobs in Ngawa. To mark the second anniversary of the 2008 Tibetan Unrest, which resulted in %d jailings, and %d definite deaths. There was no mention of the evidence against him, no mention of how that evidence had been obtained.

[What about who sent the book?]

We preferred to regard it as like a coincidence, as like someone organizing some Free Tibet gala had misjudged our tolerance for unintelligible sherpa verse.

[Why?]

That was the question, booley. Because if in fact it was not a coincidence, then only why would answer who.

[A hint?]

We had been sent the book as like a notice. That whatever happened to Tenzin Gyadatsang, we would be responsible. Us. That, at least, was our translation of the translation.

[But what cause would anyone have to blame you?]

In the beginning it was casual. Clandestine, no chalance. North Korea, Russia, and China especially were always gambiting with us. The Liberation Army had agents stationed at the factories we had then in Shenzhen snarfing viruses into our circuits directly. Unit 61398, the advanced persistent threats, the APTs, Chinese cyberwar special forces. They targeted us and Symantec and decontractors as like L3 and SciApp and ComPsyience, basically everyone who has ever loaded Minesweeper or done over $20 billion of business with the last Department of Defense, with that hardcore softconfig management attack that just seclused itself as like an SSL, minesweeping the sourcecode, reprogramming the sourcecode, immense infectious worms from Shanghai wriggling their havoc from the Valley to the Beltway.

Or pick a country. Any country. Iran. They will not let Tetration in, they will let Tetration in but the president wants only certain features. The Majlis, which is parliament but also for all practical purposes the directorship of Telecom Iran, wants certain other features. Nobody is being more specific or can be more specific until the ayatollah farts, meantime fucking South Korea is demanding users register for all our services under their legal names, fucking Russia is demanding we remove all content that purportedly glorifies homosexuality, suicide, and drugs or face the prospect of getting interdicted, and here in the Emirates they are insisting we not just block the amateur dickpics or vids but also immolate their posters, and we will not even try to account for the presumed offenses to Mohammed that lately result in up to a dozen other nations rioting in our lobbies and flipping us on and off all switchy.

But no matter what it was, the government, by which we mean the American, would help. That was why we paid all that tax we did not dodge. The Department of Homeland Security CERT, the Computer Emergency Readiness or Reaction, we cannot recall which, Team, would fund groups of independent techs who otherwise would never have swiveled on the same transport layer together, to crack a rollback or reneg, to crush the red hackers, the black hats, the pointy sabots, the Baltic and Balkan hacktivists, the Trojan horses and the elephants of Carthage. Even State, which did not have to do us any personal favors after our tantrums over what was not Mexico, what never was Mexico, would regularly intervene for Tetration abroad.

In return we complied with requests. A government or agency, by which we mean the courts, would petition a tetrequest panel to crook a set of Tetmail or Tetset msging activity or tetraffic from a particular IP within a range of geolocations and/or dates. Whatever they served us, a subpoena, order, or warrant, would determine what they would get. Might determine. Requestwise, say we received approx 4000/month, approx 48000/year, involving between 30000 and 32000 accounts, approx 80% of the requests domestic, we would comply with approx 60% and contest the rest. Anything too broad we would challenge and narrow, and any users affected would be informed unless we were explicity gagged. Internationals had similar recourse. Dependent on reciprocity agreements. Treaties of mutual aid. Say that Monday an identity went astray in Jerusalem and wound up associated with another #tet, on Tuesday the investigating detective filed a request with the Israel Ministry of Justice, which went Wednesday to the US Department of Justice, on Thursday a US attorney went to a judge, and Friday they got in touch, we disabled the account and surrendered its deets, the wicked were punished, the lost identity restored, and then it was the Sabbath and we rested. This was our patriotism. This was the cost/benefit of success. Legal required its own tower at the Tetplex, and a single nerve fiber between our prefontal cortex and temporal lobe. We had doctors for everything else.

[Which was what exactly? Not cancer but neurological?]

Judicial, strictly judicial. Stay focused.

Because even allies hack, and if China can take a shit in our systems, cadging an individual account is just a wipe.

If the Tibetan winner of the 2010 Poetry Wreath of the City of Szombathely amasses approx 8660KB of data while on his winning trip, even the mistresses of the Politburo will be able to access it, be sure of it. Images of ruined impregnable castles and the beautiful blue Danube. Threads of seditious txt. All of which had only been sent to other Tetmails.

The account we had tetrated and were snooping through had been opened with us just recently, as like the week before in Hungary recently, [email protected]. It had not been accessed by anyone outside Hungary up until four days before the arrest. Then there was a guest ostensibly from the Philippines. A blatant Chinese hab.

Though even if we had been broken into that still did not explain how we had become a dedicated reader of stanzas about wells and buckets without pulleys, prior to the arrest.

Sitting at La Trovita Lando, turning pages, it was as like all that white space surrounding the incomprehensible strained to fill us in.

This had to have been a bilateral hack, we realized. The Chinese had to have broken into the account of the poet, but then another party, either already ensconced in our systems or ensconcing itself through its pursuit of the Chinese break, must have confirmed this and decided to alert us by posting us this poetry.

Which was not the least explicable aspect of it all. Because the least explicable aspect of it all was that despite having access to our systems, this party did nothing to try to crash or even change them, according to the Soviets.

Meaning that whoever did this was pure, was Moe pure. Meaning political, religious, truther.

Balk.

[Then what? Suddenly the migraines came back and you were vomiting blood?]

182 days in prison, to date, one hour outside every two nights in an exercise yard 12 × 12 m², 1100 calories/day, 1 liter of water/day, no phone, no email, no writing materials, no books or even Chinese media of any type, two one hour conjugal visits every six months, 44268 signatures on eight petitions, 3468 days left in his sentence. cn, the Not-People-Way however you pinyin it, disproportionate, unfair, Bu Ren Tao, not any way to treat a homicider let alone a weibos junkie, a lurker at an obfsproxy tor to the Forbidden City. A poet. Tenzin.

“We have always evaluated access requests on a case by case basis, forever endeavoring to be of service to our nation, while remaining convinced that our best service consists of protecting the privacy of our users worldwide.” Ladies, gentlemen, Kori Dienerowitz.

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[Can you recall a time the government filed a request with Tetration and you didn’t cooperate? You refused?]

Next. Felix Ranklin. @clitmechanic, #clitmechanic1992. None other.

[You wouldn’t hand over his what? Did they threaten to contempt you?]

You misunderstand. We had no inkling of this Ranklin even as like a user. We had never come into contact with any clitmechanic, 92 or not. He did not exist to us, least of all as like human.

Anyway final decision regarding contesting requests falls to Kor. The government just settled the case.

[Did they? Am I that out of touch?]

The countersuit. No one can discuss.

[You can?]

Also 2010, last year. Just at the break of spring US citizen Felix Ranklin was apprehended at the condo he shared with his paraplegic widowed mother in Dover, Delaware, the FBI barging in and custodying the pimplepopper and impounding his as like decrepit Gopal Pro. They summarily charged him, an 18 year old fryer at a reststop Burger King, with a count each of conspiracy to support/inflict terror, and asserted that his computer had been surfeited with plans for the DIY recreation of Kinepouch and Kinestik, basically binary explosives of ammonium nitrate/nitromethane, blank applications for materiel, unsubmitted queries for shocktubes, blastingcaps, and the jetfuel hydrazine, for commercial/industrial purposes. But instead of reporting that among all that there were no logistics even circumstantially interpretable as like indicating achieved capability nevermind an impending attack, the agents chose to grossly emphasize other sites he had visited regarding Asperger syndrome, subthreshold pervasive development disorder, dyslexia, and “macroclitorides,” which are female sex organs whose protruding tips have been so naturally or artificially engorged as like to resemble “micropenises.”

Fall, we flew to DC. The Smithsonian. We were being fêted. Again we were working for free. Doing a favor for the homeland. At Smithsonian request we had donated our earliest server unit to them, the rig from The Clingers and later from Grupo Escudo, but scoured of its stuck gum and nosepicked patina. They had requested our attendance too. Kor required our attendance. You give them a server, they give you a banquet. The ante is upped and you have to reciprocate with a $2 million contribution, deductible.

We had not appeared in public in six months or even spoken to Kor in two, approx. We had been having trouble eating. Our weight was down to levels totally pre IPO. The blogs, ratetion.com, jculate.com, speculated a theological relapse. They wrote we had gone Brahman again or were changing our gender. We were studying the Zohar with a talking donkey at the gates of Dagestan.

Other intuitions were closer.

We had to be photographed, Kor said. In public, he said.

Also there was a new Congress to meet. There is always a new Congress to meet.

We stayed at the, we feel the urge to say the Watergate, at the Mandarin Oriental. Überproximal. Our skin was dry, our mouth was dry, we had nausea and the swells. We were only trying to get away with not wearing a tie and so were experimenting with other neck adornments as like a deluxesize button or bolo but the swells, the neck, and then we cut ourselves shaving but never healed.

Kor was arriving from fill in the blank. Again. We had not been in touch. From Orlando, why not, native city of the Ranklin mother.

We supposed it was him at the door, Kor. We flushed, rinsed, and opened, towel to our chin. But it was Myung, and Jesus and Feel, and with them was another man the proportions of all of them. He was built as like IKEA. Faelid, dalofaelid furniture. White laminate. With blonde and blue. Anders Maleksen, the msging face and adjutant hausfrau of Balk.

Maleksen had just approached our detach, which had directed him to Myung who had directed him to us. He would only speak to us. They would only let him speak to us if escorted. As like it would take all of them to keep us from being accosted by a 220 lbs 6′4″ home gym colder than the Arctic Circle.

If Maleksen had said anything, he would have had an impenetrable accent. He left a bulging manila envelope on the bed, and left. No answering our questions, no regards. No purpose but ensuring our possession of the envelope.

Inside was a Russian model of external solidstate hybrid drive, essentially a nextgen Sapp. It reminded us of a detonator or gaming buzzer.

We dismissed our detach. We never travel with a computer but we always travel with Myung. After she set us up with her computer we dismissed her too. She was about to shut the communicating door, but then we must have been a mess, because she warned us as like we were a n00b about viruses and timeline, slammed. We were due to leave for the event, imminently. With Kor or without.

We plugged, loaded. The drive was split into tranches. One just contained a .pdf of the Ranklin indictment. The other was a double, a carboncopy of the Gopal Pro the FBI had seized. Felix Ranklin, the defendant at that very moment on trial, had duped a clone, a backup not just of files or whatever but of histories too. Either that or b-Leaks had done it for him, filching his browsing, his cache, off the Hoover racks.

A Korean American, Myung, had loaned us a Taiwanese Tetbook, unfolded a Japanese chair, a cherrywood tatami zaisu, and left us alone with the Ranklin desktop.

Everything except the suite and the city outside was Oriental, Mandarin.

Bottomline, nothing stored on the Ranklin computer pointed to his manufacture of dynamite, or plotting of massdeath. Not anything in Tetmail, which he used to email his instructors at Dover High, re: assignments. He was stupey diligent. Not anything in his Tetset squares, which registered only his participation in the Robotics Team, Variety Show, Escoffier Club, Anti-Bullying Initiative. He was stupey active. Not in his .docs, which were all school reports labeled as like How_Controlled_Burning_Aids_Forests.doc.

But with all the visits to all the sites of the demolition and blasting services firms, firecrackers and fireworks suppliers, tunneling and quarrying listservs, thousands unique, and tens if not hundreds of thousands multiple, Ranklin had never downloaded anything. Maybe he sensed it was wrong. At least maybe wronger than the glansular XXX. Which he did download. Lots of macrohard clitorides, microsoft penises. But in terms of smoking guns we found nothing. We found nothing besides an application for dynamite purchase, and the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. Both only half completed.