Trump Sky Alpha

by Mark Doten

  And now destroyers were in charge, floor-shitters and fascists, failsons and large adult sons deconstructing the administrative state.

  We think of the collision management of the ALOHAnet, the primary masters and slave servers of BIND.

  We think of RFC 1149, the birds who would be made to serve, who would carry the information on their legs, through the 3-D ether space.

  The universe was fine-tuned for Trump to become president, just as it was fine-tuned for him to end civilization as we had known it here on this planet, this little bit in the universe.

  What you are feeling, what your body is revealing in your face, we can’t tell you what to do, but we think: Don’t do that.

  Stop squirming. We don’t like the rattling chains. We don’t like them, all those chains that are rattling. We don’t.

  RFC 1149, IP over Avian Carriers. There is no outside to the internet. In this network of networks, even the birds will work.

  We think there are parts of you fighting right now that are no longer useful parts.

  And we understand. They probably protected you, when you were a child, these good parts.

  And how do you feel to them.

  And can you ask them to step back.

  It’s okay if they won’t step back, but struggling now won’t help, we can’t give you our information while you are struggling.

  Or we can, but we can’t be sure that the parts that have to take it in, all the information we have in our mind, our mind free at last of the old blockages and entanglements, will be heard and processed and remembered by the parts of yours that need to do that.

  But perhaps we have to simply trust those parts, yours and ours.

  We wish you would take a moment to breathe, to understand your breathing.

  It is not what your body’s used to, being bound up in tape and suspended from the ceiling by chains, but real calm and deep breath is possible in this position.

  Damage is growth, or can be. We will damage your brain so it can grow. All the tools are right here.

  We have gathered birds, you see the birds throughout this room, we do operations on birds, and now on humans, on you, a human, just like we did on our own head, we’ll do one. We’re making an internet of birds, little wires, little chips, new protocols, new ways of being, a sort of freedom, it’s all new.

  Avian carriers, it was a joke, but shouldn’t the internet survive us. Shouldn’t it be turned over to the birds. And this time the birds lead the way. We drill into them, but only so they can lead us, and we at their service.

  What will you miss. There is nothing much worth missing.

  We remember Kool-Aid Man in Second Life, the toading of Dr. Jest, faggots and cucks, Shill4Hill, the collision-avoidance systems of the ALOHAnet, the shitlords of Kekistan.

  We remember the blue-pilled and the red-pilled, Ivanka’s side hustles, christfags and MAGA and a new home of the mind.

  We remember the glorious subtweets of the deep state.

  We remember …

  We remember …

  What do we even remember.

  We remember Sebastian, our love Sebastian, the love we lost, and we remember the dead birds in our pockets.

  And we remember …

  Hum hum hum …

  The rarest Pepes.

  Yes we remember them best of all, the Pepes, the ones that were so rare, how rare they truly were, how good to be alive in a time of such rare Pepes, all of us in our places, but unseen, we and the Pepes, waiting among the weary giants of flesh and steel for the life of the world we knew was nearly here.

  All that’s back there somewhere and gone.

  The internet was designed to survive an attack from multiple points. Nothing can survive an attack from all points at once.

  Rachel, it is so good to see you.

  We will drill into your head and give you the new world.

  We are Birdcrash in the age of gold.

  Enveloped in some screams I felt a gasp building. The chains said no, and there was rattling, and a letting go that couldn’t be sustained, because to release the core, to relax my midsection and let it fall, would arc pain into the lower back so it felt my spine would snap, and I had to pull back up, pelvic floor locking as though it were itself becoming ungainly steel.

  I tried to take in the space I was in, to understand what was happening.

  There were floating stairs leading down into the dark hall from the floor above. Brushed steel steps in the walls of a black enamel. Birdcrash pressed a button on a remote and the stairs retracted into the wall.

  There were dead birds scattered around the floor, small songbirds and crows and two herons, necks curled around each other. The air was alive and thick with decomposition. His voice, when it came, came from a distance, an underwater sound burbling and self-satisfied. And he moved as though he was not a creature of the land. He was extraordinarily tall and slender, and he moved in slow motion, loose limbed and almost cartoonish, rocking from side to side as he spoke, and he would hold the drill over his head, and pump the trigger, make it whir, to punctuate what he was saying. His skin was pale and glistening. The eyes were huge, golder than any I’d ever seen—sprung, and rolling. Tufts of hair stuck out, and there were big round scabs on his forehead.

  Then his arm was around my neck in a headlock and he was drilling, boring through the broad bones of my skull, a shrilled sharp pain that lit me up, my whole system, it rattled my teeth down into my pelvis and seized my legs and feet, my body shot through with shattered teeth.

  The doors in Inspector Gadget opening.

  The doors in MST3K opening.

  Have you seen Jurassic Park. The girl hacking a system that never existed, a 3-D environment built so that the movies might stiffly swoop through.

  The girl: I know this! I know this!

  We gathered up our zero days, our lost boys, the boys of the Aviary.

  And we kicked the door in.

  Security is a feeling.

  We see from your face that you don’t feel secure.

  Rachel, we will describe what we are doing so that you feel safe.

  All the drilling is done. The three holes in your skull are done. A neat row, forehead to crown.

  There’s some bleeding, we’re sorry, relax your face, the extreme and constant movement of the muscles of your face keeps wiggling the sweat-band off. And then blood gets in your eyes.

  Aqua regia, the juice of kings.

  Aqua regia, nitric acid and hydrochloric acid, in a molar ratio of 1:3. We will dropper that into you, right into the holes we’ve made in your skull, and damage your brain, so the damage can be routed around.

  Here comes a little droppy droppy droppy.

  Now see you moved.

  You can’t move.

  You don’t want this in your eyes.

  If you are waiting to be saved, all your friends are dead, we must tell you that. Once we dropped the cars into the chute it was quite a simple matter to dispense with the soldiers.

  We would have brought more down, we would have spoken with them as we are speaking to you now, but they all died.

  Two trucks in the pit, and the one above, we blew it up.

  The universe wants us dead, all of humanity, it is quite a small matter to help a human animal accede to the will of the universe.

  To give them a little boost.

  We can’t see the system. No one can. Politics, economics. The global nodes, the connection, the roar.

  Did you see The Matrix. The underside of the cubicles, one of the first systems shots in The Matrix, the screws revealed, the prefab holes, the uniform screws, it can be taken apart and put back together, no problem, it’s in this configuration now, but that can change, within certain very precise limits.

  The cubicles, the ceilings have descended, the modular desks, the cubicle systems, we have assembled these, these desks and cubes, we put them together once, long ago. Hauled the parts and made a system.

  Ceilings are systems mome
nts, so are cubicles, and the grill of the truck that strikes the phone booth, that’s one too, these are systems moments, but they are not the system.

  We cannot understand the system of the world, we cannot understand the system of even a single human animal.

  The suffering of the people. The peace that is found in a single life, and the suffering.

  We come into this world sucking some order from the chaos.

  Hum hum hum.

  Each human, the totality of humans at any given moment, the human and nonhuman animals who have lived on this planet since our time began, our solar system, our galaxy, all of it sucking a little order from the chaos for a little while.

  Four billion unique IPs in the IPv4 address space, they thought it was nearly infinite, and so soon they were running out.

  We suck order from the chaos, more and more, we wrap our lips around the tailpipe and we suck, and one day the chaos says no, stop it, no more, this is too much, you can’t do it anymore, you can’t have your order anymore.

  Of course you can’t.

  You can pull on that rubber band, make it some shape, make it all the shapes you could dream of, that you’ve been trained to dream of, but one day it snaps.

  We humans weren’t more than a moment, not more than a blip in the cosmos, then back to entropy, and isn’t that fine, and how nice that we should be present for all of this winding down, and witness, and be glad, as it snaps, or simply loosens and turns to a loose pudding with a taste that has no information in it.

  We are the Aviary.

  We contain many.

  But so do you.

  The lost boys, they brought us a harvest of zero days.

  Lost boys with Kali Rolling, seeing what could be penetrated, systematically testing the barriers. Did you see Jurassic Park. Like velociraptors, hunting in packs, testing the fences for weaknesses, scanning ports, clever girl. The lost boys and Kali Rolling and money and blackmarkets and secrets and time.

  Sebastian, he brought the BIND backdoor.

  He never said he was quite one of us, one of the lost boys, but he wrote what we’d become, and he was our love. And he told us about the backdoor, but then he wouldn’t give it to us.

  He said that he couldn’t be with us in love and also be in the Aviary, if he gave it over it meant it was the end. He said, I can’t explain, but I can’t give you that. If I do, it’s the end of us.

  But we were already planning. We thought: We can have Sebastian, and the backdoor, too.

  We thought: If you want to poison as much internet as possible, look for BIND servers in an autonomous system. If you’re not an autonomous system you’re more likely to rely on upstream.

  Start with a thousand BIND servers in a thousand autonomous systems spread out through all the top-level domains, include the rinky-dink country code TLDs.

  Set up hundreds of simple web servers connecting to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, set up fake user accounts with providers that connect to their infrastructure and spin up or tear down servers whenever you want, you can do it in minutes at a massive scale.

  You control domain servers, poison ones you don’t like, and since it’s a zero day, there won’t be a malware warning.

  If you have a backdoor in BIND, you can do it, sure you can.

  They think they’re at CNN.com, they go to a site that looks like the error page or it mirrors CNN, but they’re served a web page that is designed to trip an exploit in IE or Chrome or Firefox, in OS or Android or Windows 10, Windows 9, Windows 7, Windows XP. You’d need a harvest of zero days, and we did have a harvest of zero days, but it is ultimately only a handful of operating systems that are 90 percent of users.

  Our lost boys brought us zero days. Or we bought them with the money from the blockchain heist.

  It came from Sebastian, from his backdoor to BIND, after the end of us. It came from zero days we bought, and other zero days that came to us through our network of lost boys, all the lost boys of the Aviary.

  We left a final Pastebin post, it has all our plans, our plans for the next phase, for the internet of birds, the networks we still have in place, the new world after the world.

  Selves were hurt, boys were hurt, and now here we are.

  Will you be a lost boy with us.

  We would give you the password, Rachel, but we don’t trust you yet, we don’t trust that you understand. How can we make you understand. How can we. Another droppy droppy. The password is quite simple, but it is also very complex. It’s one of those things.

  Maybe we contain more for now, the boys, the lost boys of the Aviary.

  Selves were hurt, boys were hurt, and now here we are.

  We are building the internet of birds for them, so that all of that can be registered in the system before it dissipates.

  If that’s what the birds want.

  But why were the boys hurt in the first place. Well, that’s not a question we can answer.

  Our father would come and visit us, my mother would let him in, let him come to our bedroom, as a little boy. A dark suit and low-hanging red tie, our father.

  Our mother …

  Our mom was a smol burb.

  The system shattered, the teacup broken, it always runs that way, disorder of waste energy always outstripping the order we create, but we try, don’t we, to make a system, when there’s no real system, there are just nodes of cruelty and control, and hate, and yes, and love. We did love Sebastian.

  There was that father. Who was he.

  Here come some soldiers. They’re on the screen, they see the dead there. Maybe they were their friends. They are using things on the front door to blow it open. That is fine. They have found us. That is fine.

  There are so many. They are taking three routes. Only one gets here, and only after some branchings.

  We are sick. We are filled up with cancer. We knew that there would be others, many, who might make their way here, to our door, to the little shack. That people would be seized by an impulse they would not understand and they would make their way to us.

  We had prepared several bays, it might have been you and some soldiers bound up in tape and chains, but the soldiers all died. We only need one, now you will be us.

  We would have brought the soldiers in, but they resisted in such a way that the only way to keep you was to give them a boost.

  All the unresting thoughts of humanity stuffed in our skull, and even we can’t see the system. Even we can’t see even a single person, not really.

  No one can.

  But you can help us. You can help the remnant remember what we can and can’t know about the system.

  If Postel had succeeded that day, if the root authority test had turned out differently, maybe history would have changed, have opened into something new.

  We have only so much time before more are sent, or before they get here.

  We are deep in the mansion and we know that they are coming, even now, but we know they won’t find us, no not for a long time, not unless it’s what we want.

  A little shack from above, but from below a mansion built underground at great expense.

  There are turns and false ends and secret passageways, a whole underground Winchester House, mirrored and turned upside down, algorithmically elaborating itself over the months, no expense spared, we are deep here in the burrowing heart of the mansion, but it is where no heart’s expected, no heart anyone would look for.

  Or it is not a heart, a vast underground mansion, no heart to speak of, there are just messages moving, or waiting to be sent, in a series of rooms and traps.

  A whole lot of information waiting to be transmitted into bodies. Mostly to give them a boost.

  Yes, we had a three-dimensional map made of the Winchester Mystery House, we mirrored it and iterated it, feedback loops, spontaneous breakdowns, growth, damage and growth.

  Lights still on, juice drawn up from the earth, the unremitting earth, electricity sucked directly from the earth, and from
all the creatures under, the worms and moles and monocellular life, we can suck it from the bones of boys, from the bones of dead boys and posthuman animals, oh yes, it has long been possible, as Tesla proved.

  Tesla proved it, and Morgan wanted to know: If anyone can draw on the power, where do we put the meter.

  And Morgan destroyed Tesla.

  A Morgan is always looking for a Tesla, to destroy him.

  There are bones of boys, there’s that, too.

  When new soldiers come, as they must, there’s lots of rooms for them to die in along the way, lots of electricity to power the ways to make them die along the way, to give them that little boost.

  The knife room and the lime pit and the room where the oxygen gets pumped out.

  So there is time for us to talk, time to do this work, this necessary work, and at the end, you and however many others who join us here will be free to go, and you can return to the world and lead the people, the remnant of the people, and the birds, you can lead the remnant of the birds, or they can lead you, or you can enter into some kind of reciprocal relationship, a sort of grace.

  We will damage your brains, and make your brains better.

  We’ve started our recorder, we have a backup, we want you to know and remember everything that we say.

  We’ll just wrap your head in our left arm so you stay still.

  You are resisting in your tape, and in your chains, like a fish.

  Do you think that you are a fish now.

  Oh my dear, look at how you wriggle, do you think you are a wriggling little fish. If you are a fish, you are a fish with a brain that’s stuck, and the brain needs to be rebooted.

  A little damage to the brain to make it stronger.

  Here comes the droppy droppy droppy.

  Shush now. Let it happen.

  There. That wasn’t so bad.

  DNS is totalizing: an addressing system for all things.

  Totalizing systems give way, they first accrue as much order to themselves as possible, and then they glitch out, they fail, they lose pieces.

  A man in a suit. A rich man, a powerful man.

  Our father would make his hand into a claw, draw it in swooping circles above our thigh or stomach or neck, he would say, Here comes the chicken hawk.