Trump Sky Alpha

by Mark Doten

  the creation and control of country code top-level domains across the third world;

  a contextless quote, Later, three Colt “potato-digger” machineguns with 8,300 .30 caliber rounds were added to the mix; one manned by a nine-man Army crew and the other two by eleven sailors from the gunboat USS Pampanga. Supporting were three surgeons and seven hospital-corpsmen, five Signal Corps, six HQ, and 150 mules driven by American civilian packers. A composite company of approximately 40 men were held in reserve in Jolo, but never called upon—the end result of the battle was a one-sided, nearly complete massacre of the seven hundred to nine hundred defenders (two-thirds of whom were women and children);

  a ten-page riff on history, temporality, and repetition, “Notes for a Philosophy of Time,” that begins with the beheading in the third century of two men who would be made saints, and ends with the death in 2012 of Lonesome George, the last living Pinta Island tortoise, the end of a species;

  and the creation of a hacker group called the Aviary, a group that is behind an escalating series of attacks, including data thefts, hacks of government and military websites, a DDoS attack on Amazon that takes the site down for the better part of an hour, and, finally, a Stuxnet-style attack on a nuclear power plant located twenty miles from Loudoun County, Virginia, in which the country’s internet architecture—or vast parts of it—writhe.

  It becomes clear only at the end of the book that the narrator of section 4 is Apolinario from the previous section, and that he and Benjie have founded the Aviary.

  This still was not particularly remarkable, except: a year after the book was published in 2015, a hacker group—not in the book, but in the real world—released the credit card information for half a million MasterCard holders.

  The group that posted the data called themselves the Aviary.

  The Aviary—the real-world version of the group—would go on to claim responsibility for a number of actions, including crashing government websites in the Philippines, the US, Slovenia, and Mexico; a DDoS attack on GoDaddy; doxing of hundreds of alleged creators and traders of child pornography; the attempted defense of an uncontacted individual in the Amazonian rainforest; bringing down the SpaceX rocket with the Facebook satellite on it (this, in particular, is disputed by both Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who attributed the crash to a technical failure); and replacing the home page of the United States Air Force with their own logo, a bird, wings extended, with one leg removed, and the motto fractus dominium, broken power.

  That logo was the same employed by the group in the novel, and while there may have been differences between the fictional group and its real-world counterpart—this became the subject of online debate—the philosophy underpinning them was, at least ostensibly, the same, and went back to the Aviary in the book, RFC 1149, IP over Avian Carriers.

  The internet allows for communication between different types of networks, as long as they use the protocols that govern the internet. RFC 1149, published on April 1, 1990, presents a scenario in which data packets are carried on a pigeon’s leg. There was obvious humor in mixing the anachronistic homing pigeon technology with the internet. But the author also pointed out that it would allow the internet access to places where other communication technologies couldn’t reach. Where there are no wires, no satellites, even there the birds can fly.

  The Aviary was ostensibly formed in resistance to this: the logo of the one-legged bird symbolized an animal who would not be part of the system: the information-carrying leg was sacrificed in order to resist what the Aviary called the totalizing power of the internet.

  The growth of the internet had been, as the Aviary saw it, a project of colonialism and control that had been ushered in under false pretenses: the initial drivers of what we now know as the internet (survivability of communication or the sharing of resources between research institutions, depending on who you asked—always that tension between the military applications and a beneficent increase in knowledge in the fight for the story of the internet, and some truth in both directions) had seemed clear positives. If survivability of communication infrastructures reduced the odds of a first strike wiping out the entire command and control of the US government, then that reduced the chance of a first strike happening at all. A system of packet-switched, distributed communications—where a message was cut up into pieces and sent through multiple nodes to its destination, where the pieces were reassembled—allowed for this.

  But it also meant no limit to the ground the technology might cover—an address space that was created in 1980 with over 4.3 billion addresses was not enough—not enough for all of our computers, phones, and devices. And so a new space with 80 million billion billion times the capacity was created.

  The Aviary wanted to stop the internet from “totalizing”—from taking over every scrap of the known world. They thought we needed to scale back the internet, to slow and eventually reverse its growth.

  The internet’s freedom was illusory, and if drastic action wasn’t taken, the internet would lead us into a situation of mass control, if not, indeed, the end of the world.

  The birds, they believed in the birds, one leg amputated, resistant to all protocols of the internet, no IP, no DNS, just birds flying free, one leg lost.

  I had been with Sebastian for an hour or more, and I had nothing. I moved the lamp, I tipped it over the bed, turned up the shade so all of its light was directed at his golden eyes.

  I thought that the guards would come for me. I touched his face and turned it to the light.

  He smiled vaguely. He said, What type of bulb? It’s Edison. One of those bulbs in hipster bars.

  I told him that he was correct.

  I can’t really see, but I feel it, the quality of the light.

  Do you remember when we spoke? I was with TechMinder then.

  Who are you with now?

  New York Times Magazine.

  They still have that? That’s very nice.

  Mr. de Rosales, I know that even when I spoke with you, you felt very passionately about the growth of the internet, and resisting the internet’s colonial tendencies.

  He released an acrid, wheezing laugh.

  Resist! he said. Resist! Hashtag resist. Were you a member of the hashtag resistance?

  Under Trump?

  Yes, under Trump.

  Well, there were policies for journalists at some of the places where I freelanced. But no … I don’t think that anyone would have considered me a member of the resistance, hashtag or otherwise.

  You just let it happen?

  I did what I felt like it was possible for me to do. I wrote about net neutrality, the spread of fake news, Cambridge Analytica. I covered stories in the Trump era.

  So you just let it happen.

  You think I should have marched more? You think that would have made a difference?

  I think that someone should have done something … more.

  Then he began to drift, to make sounds … he said resist again, and laughed.

  When he woke next, I said: Birdcrash.

  His face looked as though it had been slapped.

  You’re Birdcrash, I said.

  I’m not, he said, with something like disgust.

  I see, I said. You’re not, are you. You know who is.

  They’ve been interrogating me for days with more at their disposal than you’ve got.

  Okay, I can see this is useless.

  I agree.

  There’s one more question, not about this. One I’m just personally interested in.

  A last question, he said.

  Why did you get in the car?

  What car?

  With the man who molested you.

  Sebastian tensed in the bed.

  I said, I assume it was flawed writing. First book. Maybe a mistake in the plot. It didn’t make much sense.

  It was an ugly thing to say. Sebastian rolled his head to one side and he shivered. I wanted to take his hand, to apologize, to withdraw the question
. Instead I looked down at him, thinking of Prospect Park, thinking of the password, and I sat very still.

  He said, It wasn’t a mistake. It happened. He pulled over. He just kept talking. He asked me why I was looking at him like that—did he remind me of someone? He said whoever I reminded him of, that man must have been a bad man who had done something wrong to me. He told me to get in the car, we’d find him, and we’d make sure that that never happened again.

  Why didn’t you put it in the book?

  I couldn’t write it! Listen to how crazy that sounds—I couldn’t make it seem true! And even at the time, I couldn’t believe it, it seemed like a dream. I knew it was him. But also another part of me said no, it’s not him. Getting in there, I could prove it, I could fix it, I could erase what had happened, if I just did what the man said and got in the car. And then I was in. The locks—automatic locks, they popped down, and then went back up. Sorry, the man said, and I remember that he giggled. I knew it was him, but I was also sure it wasn’t. I was just a kid. I was from another country. I was ashamed. You weren’t supposed to question adults. But then we were driving, and everything was out of my control.

  I reached out and took his hand through the blanket. He didn’t move it away.

  I said, People liked Birdcrash because he took on the people who preyed on children. He wouldn’t let them get away with it.

  Yes, that was a reason that some people liked him. He let out a breath, a rattling whimper from somewhere in his chest. All right, he said. All right.

  When did you meet?

  He found me just before our interview—a week or so before that.

  You worked on BIND in ’99. Did you give Birdcrash some information that he used in the attack?

  People think there’s nothing they can do, and it seems that there really isn’t, but there’s people, people at various points in the system—he wheezed, and then under his breath he whispered—who can do something.

  What did you tell him?

  Sebastian turned on his side, away from me. I need to go to sleep now. Jesus Christ will you people let me die!

  I remember you said, Stay hungry, stay foolish: it’s the logic of a plague of locusts. The BIND attack slowed them, didn’t it? It slowed the locusts down.

  They eat everything up. If someone wants to stop that, or slow it down, that’s not a bad thing. Remember, C is a language so obscure that there is an annual obfuscation contest, where people write code whose intent will be opaque even to the most sophisticated programmers—if they were that good, they might put in a back door, one that you could kick open by, say, searching three unusual terms in a row.

  Why would you do that?

  Hmm, he said. One wants to resist. Tell me, he said, you said you didn’t march? Against Trump?

  I did actually.

  You marched in the marches? You wore a pussy hat?

  I told him that I had.

  He smiled in a sort of abstracted blissful pain. He said that Americans were so dumb. He asked why I had worn it—the pussy hat. He said, You were … resisting?

  I told him the truth, which is that I hadn’t liked the pussy hats. My wife, I said. She bought them for the three of us—my daughter came to the parade, too. I tried to beg off, I couldn’t wear it.

  I told him the story, and I felt my voice growing sharp. I wanted to take the pillow that was under his head and press it to his golden face, but I let the story happen.

  Dominique put the pussy hat on my head when we joined the parade. Come on, she said. You’re so worried about authority.

  I told her there were policies against it from the Times and other people I worked for.

  They’re going to blacklist you? Dominique said, mockingly.

  I told her it wasn’t about that. It was disrespectful. To them—what if a picture of me showed up? It wasn’t giving Trump the bird. It was giving my editors the bird.

  I said this, I told Sebastian, but I didn’t believe it, really.

  And our daughter Verena marched between us.

  Pulling off the hat felt so good. It felt like I had won, holding my pussy hat in my hand, then pushing it balled up into my coat pocket, leaving my other hand free, feeling the pussy hat in my pocket while I took my daughter’s hand with the other.

  I said, Sebastian, the truth is, I hated that pussy hat, and I was thinking about that in the parade. I was looking at the other pink-hatted women—white women taking selfies, white and pink, this massive intersectional failure—it was the other white women I was so furious at. And then I’d turn back to them, to my wife, my kid, and feel good about them, and feel good about the movement, and at the same time I felt so righteous, keeping that hat in my pocket.

  I had tried to argue with her the night before that pink was wrong, because—and I paused. She said, Because my pussy isn’t pink? Because not all pussies are pink? Because you read that on Twitter, and now that’s your excuse? My pussy is not pink. And the movement can sort that out later. But tomorrow we’ll march. The hats are the fucking hats. For tomorrow, they’re the hats.

  My wife is chanting and holding my daughter’s hand, and my daughter is looking around at all the signs and she’s just heard what happened, and I take her hand. I say, because of my job, I can’t hold a sign or wear a hat, but I’m so glad to be here with you today.

  And I’m holding her hand and Dominique holding her other, and Dominique says, It’s okay if your mother’s a wet blanket! She has to be! It’s her job! We’ll be the revolutionaries!

  A wave of chanting sweeps up to us: this is what democracy looks like. Verena exhilarated but frightened. The signs with curse words and body parts and the chanting and the anger and force of will out there.

  Are you feeling it? Dominique asks. Are you experiencing it?

  Verena nods happily, and then tugs my hand. She says, Are you experiencing it?

  And I feel how not into it I am—how my hand is communicating that, and why should that be communicated to her, to my daughter, when objectively, the revolutionary spirit is what should be instilled in her, and my wife is the one giving it, and I’m giving something else, just giving her worry.

  So, I say to Sebastian, no, I wasn’t so good at the hashtag resistance.

  Sebastian said, You want your body to be both counted among them and kept wholly separate.

  Sebastian said, You want the movement without the display. And ultimately you have to take the movement, flaws and all, or you stay at home and feel worse.

  Did they die? Sebastian said.

  They died, I said.

  When you said it was an Edison bulb in here, were you telling the truth?

  Yes.

  Are these the last lightbulbs left? Is this what they’re down to?

  Maybe. I don’t know. It could be they’re the easiest to produce.

  Sebastian said, CFLs in the hallway. Fluorescent in the infirmary. And this here. It draws a lot of power. So they’re down to the scraps. Or they’re making them again and this is what they can make. Where are they being manufactured? What happened to the supply chain? Is this the last leftover? When it goes out, what happens here? They’ll abandon the place. What about the inmates? Do they leave us screaming in the dark? Though I’ll be dead before this lightbulb.

  I don’t know what they’ll do, I said.

  There’s a story, though.

  People keep pitching me stories. I just want to go to my wife and daughter. If I can get what they want from you, they’ll let me go to see where Dominique and Verena are buried. They’re in Prospect Park. I need a password to the last Aviary Pastebin posting. It’s encrypted.

  I don’t have a password. I’m not a part of the Aviary.

  You’re lying. And you’re about to die.

  I could give you a hypothetical about the attack. About how it happened. Would you like that, dear?

  I’d like that, I said.

  Sebastian said, It could have been lightbulbs that started all of this. Let’s say a Chinese enginee
r working on the smart lightbulbs, he raises an issue about vulnerabilities, and this very smart guy who’s actually doing exactly what he should be doing by pointing this out to his superiors, they’re embarrassed and want him to shut up. He gets exiled to monitoring internet comments about Xi Jinping. Suddenly he’s got something very valuable, and he’s …

  Disgruntled.

  Hypothetically, he’s highly disgruntled.

  He might be bought.

  Or even have ideological reasons to join up. With … whatever entity was behind the attack.

  I asked him what else he thought—hypothetically—would have been part of the attack.

  Tell me what you want from me. Sebastian locked me with his flat golden eyes.

  I need the password to unlock the last document Birdcrash posted on Pastebin.

  I’m not Birdcrash. And I don’t have the password.

  But you do know who he is, don’t you?

  I hope so. We used to date.

  You helped found the Aviary.

  No. I just wrote it. He made it a thing in the world. I met him after—after we talked, after it was a thing. He reached out to me.

  How, how did that happen?

  Sebastian patted my hand. Do you know about the loneliest man on earth?

  Who is he? It was an action of the Aviary, but well after your piece, and well after the world stopped giving a damn about the Aviary and what they were doing. Attention had moved on. And they hadn’t done anything in over a year, this was their last action, or it was until 1/23.

  The loneliest man in the world, an uncontacted man in the Amazonian rainforest, believed to be the last of his tribe, language unknown, tribe unknown, but pressured, hunted, all alone. Occupying valuable land. He dug holes. The purpose—or purposes—of the holes was not known. Trapping animals or something religious perhaps. After he was discovered, and logging interests made concerted efforts to harass him, drive him out, even kill him, he was safeguarded by a public-private partnership, drones used by remote supporters, donors, monitored the borders of his area. The loggers got the idea, they sent in their own drones—they wanted to kill him, you understand. End the protection of this land. Birdcrash became obsessed with him, and he used the force of the Aviary to bring down these drones, sent their own drones with offensive capabilities, they used their networks to try to protect him, it became a distributed defense, but then something changed. The internet did not respond properly. The internet had no desire to protect this individual when there were lulz to be had. The mission was perverted and some wealthy white expat started helping people to equip drones for pure lulz, and the drones were no longer protecting him, they were piloted by people online who started bringing him memes by drone, laminated printouts affixed to drones, Nyan Cat, Crying Jordan, Pepe, a second drone to catch his response, and the next day it even progresses to points where the man was looking at a photo held out by a drone of Pepe riding a drone and delivering him a meme, but the heads of the two of them had been swapped.