Trump Sky Alpha

by Mark Doten

  Look at all these poor birds. What have we done. Oh no oh no what have we done.

  Sebastian, have we told you about Sebastian. We met him after the ten-year bet, we met him online, we did, we liked his tattoos. He had a tattoo of a ship, of a burning ship, and a schematic of a ship, the same ship, and it was turned over on his body, different slices of the ship, the burning ship.

  Sebastian had the best tattoos.

  Heart heart heart.

  Oh this heart, oh Sebastian.

  We read his book, we read in the billionaire’s cell, and we loved it, more than any book we’d ever read we felt a kinship and a love, and we carried out the first heist, the DAO hack on the blockchain, seventy million worth, a smart contract bug, we were still there in the billionaire’s room, getting rich, even as the billionaire was losing his own fortune for other reasons, his start-up with the blood and boys under scrutiny, stakeholders suing him massively, the feds closing in, he said to me, I’m so ashamed, I don’t even have the twenty million for you now, and that night I carried out the blockchain heist, and I escaped from the cell in his mansion, and I put something up on Pastebin claiming credit for the attack in the name of the Aviary, and I quoted the line from the novel about it being a time of noting and binding together. I knew that night that I would make the book I loved, Sebastian’s book, a real thing in the world, and when I’d done it I’d find the author and say, What do you think.

  He had diagrams that were burning all over his body.

  There were sharp lines, and the slices of that boat, and the burn.

  Kek kek kek, do you remember kek. We said kek on date one, we met in an online space where hackers were, he talked about kek, we spoke about that.

  We said: We are pretty sure we hate that, hate the saying of that.

  He laughed, he said that he hated it too, the saying of that.

  We told him that we’d been at the bottom of the internet for a long time, give us time.

  It was all different, the way we said things then. We’re doing our best to tell you about Sebastian, of how it was said, but it was all different.

  We told him one day we were the Aviary.

  This was months after we were out, after we had begun assembling the lost boys, the men or human animals of all genders who would be the Aviary, and had made a half-dozen attacks.

  And he said he had guessed, he had wondered.

  He said everything that happens, happens twice.

  We hadn’t drilled the holes. This was all before that.

  We brought Sebastian home and we jacked off, side by side, while kissing and touching.

  Also we ate his ass, I think we ate his ass.

  And we drank wine and we did blow.

  And we fucked a little, we got in there, a little.

  And he got in there, a little.

  There was cum, yes, there was cum, on our bodies, also going in them, cum shooting into the bodies, from the bodies, shooting right up in there.

  And there were poppers, there was the smell of that, that smell like poppers, a sharp sweet gasoline, and letting go and pounding, or just lying there, but it spins.

  Kek kek kek, he said, and he laughed.

  And we were so drunk.

  And we told him we loved him, and it was still right there, right that night.

  We think of that night: how it spins. And how we said love, how had we said it.

  And he didn’t say it.

  No he didn’t say it.

  We talked about ILOVEYOU, and kek, and ILOVEYOU, the virus, and he laughed and called us crazy guy.

  We were lost in the burn.

  The burn of his ships.

  I think this was right before you met him. I think this was only a few days before.

  Here comes a droppy droppy.

  We loved him. And somehow love died.

  Did you see They Live. The glasses that reveal the messages BUY! OBEY! CONSUME! Now we could see the messages, but even these revelations were just ways of spreading the system into every nook, so those earlier signs could fall away and we could see the real message that had been planted there for humanity, and that message was DIE!

  The universe was clear on this, it said WON’T YOU DIE ALREADY! WON’T YOU DIE! DIE! DIE! And yet here we are and we haven’t died.

  There is so much metaphor. We cannot describe massive systems without resort to metaphor. Meaning is no longer centralized, it is distributed, and the metaphors must be replaced. DNS is a way to get to this, to create a practice, a protocol, that constructs meaning even as it erases itself, it’s real work, which is not fully cognizable by any one person or any one machine—hence distribution, hence metaphor.

  Protein folding at home. SETI@home, blockchain.

  What we think is: We have more in common with the loneliest man on earth than with the rest of the human race.

  We understand that there are inadmissible racial dimensions.

  Nonetheless it is what we feel, or what we felt then. For this last member of an uncontacted, or barely contacted, tribe, in what we call the rainforest, of what was Brazil.

  And it led us here, to the holes in the system, we drilled an internet of holes.

  We had a mother. Yes, of course we had a mother, we did have a mother. She was there, she was there every day, she just wasn’t there where we’re talking about.

  We’ve got all the unresting thought of humanity stuffed in our head.

  We dove to the bottom of the internet and came back with the dankest memes.

  Turn the dials the tiniest smidge on any of dozens of constants in our universe, less than 1 percent of 1 percent, there is no primordial ooze or bellowing mastodons, no TV, no duct tape, no Styrofoam or computers or us.

  Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

  We shook the tree, the poisoned tree, that’s all. What happened was the system happening. We had all kept the airplane up, the airplane of human civilization in the postindustrial neoliberal world-hum, we were keeping it up with our thoughts and wishes and now we said that the emperor has no clothes, the plane has no wings. It’s Wile E. Coyote stepping out on air, a leap from the lion’s heart. We pointed at the narrow reed Wile E. Coyote was walking on, we said This is not secure, this is not it, this is not the best thing to be walking on. And someone else took advantage of our words, and they stuck a dynamite stick in the hand of a coyote who had been expecting a bouquet meant for … for someone. And it blew, and the coyote fell.

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

  The internet sees damage as censorship and routes around it.

  Hum hum hum.

  We were always children, always—the system—in our ignorance of the lives of the people we exploited, we were like little kids, we saw the people to whom we had granted space, but to whom we had not granted life—they built their lives, they made their spaces, and they had so little to do with us. The arrogance that we could place people in this space, and then wish also to what—to be their friends. But we were kids, and we had our thoughts.

  Some soldiers just reached the lime pit. See the first one sink—his buddy has pulled him out.

  But the floor of the hallway has tipped up, and they are all falling in.

  We don’t like the choking and the screams and the fingers and arms trying to pull themselves back up, up the inclined wall of what was the floor, which is now boxing them in. We think what’s worst about the screams is there’s no noise, it’s just the faces on these little screens with the mouths and faces contorted in horror, and no noise, and you imagine the blub blub blub as they get pulled down, as the burn overtakes their bodies and they can’t keep themselves up above the surface of the lime pit.

  And they are not even in the right branch.

  A horror in their panic, but also an acceptance at last, how utterly unavoidable this is, we see that too, and that is their animal grace, right there at the very e
nd.

  Goodbye, boys, goodbye.

  The loneliest man in the world. We tried to save him, but we were his death.

  The other two groups are safe for now. There are more soldiers at the door.

  Once upon a time you could grab a spade and dig … almost anywhere. You were afraid of what. Bears or wolves or snakes. Certain other humans, from within your tribe, from without it. The whites, all the terrible whites, settler colonial genocide if you were indigenous. But still, whoever you were, you had a certain wide berth. In the broad center of humanity, you did, as a human, have a right to dig. Or not a right, not something inscribed in law. No laws applied. You just could. And then it became very difficult.

  One had to go to the middle of nowhere to find a place to dig. But private property, the theft of land from those who had worked it for centuries, where was the space.

  A colonized people, they couldn’t see it the same way—the openness of space that had been stolen, had been regulated and been the site of killing after killing. This was a discussion with Sebastian, he told us this.

  Nowhere was shrinking. The middle was shrinking. The white, imaginary middle of nowhere was gradually regulated out of existence. Barbed wire cubing up the prairie. For thousands of people the first telephone lines plain old barbed wire. It conducts. It cuts, but it conducts. Massive party lines, old whiskey bottles for insulators, voices in metal, everyone listening in and all those voices buzzing the land like excited ghosts.

  Smash cut to helicopters, high-tension power lines. Police, federal agencies. Private businesses with watching employees, with cameras whose feeds were watched by employees. The real ghosts gone, replaced by private businesses whose surveillance feeds were monitored by cheap labor in south Asia.

  Add more cameras to the chain, outsource all that watching. Consult the satellites.

  We all have a notion of these massive satellites, keeping an eye on the earth, keeping an eye on us.

  Have you seen Moonraker. Diamonds in the sky. Available to governments and private citizens both, at a certain cost. But they aren’t or don’t have to be these massive works of space architecture. Big hunks of Roger Moore’s space junk. Sputnik, remember Sputnik, remember the idea of Sputnik. Size of a basketball.

  Satellites, they’re not even that, they’re the size of the spatula that slipped out of the hand of some guy. The size of a flash drive. Somehow they point the right way. Or they point all ways equally and that’s okay.

  Closer to earth, the drones. Eight million drones sold in the US alone the year before it ended. The proliferation of drones, each with a camera. A new encircling net, taking things in, taking note. Danny Dunn’s dragonfly. Buzz buzz.

  Do you know Danny Dunn. So good. So good.

  Right here on the surface, right here among us, the proliferation of citizens who might see a man digging and take a picture.

  So back to the dig.

  For Instagram, a man in the desert digging a hole. It might suggest a narrative. We were all recruited, all our opinions were valid, a photograph posted online of a man out there simply digging—that was suggestive, that might bring in some likes, some comments.

  A white man with certain trappings could dig in many places, for a time. We’re talking land. The way it was. Public land. Land, in American space. Yes, you can dig a hole. But a hole two by three, and five feet deep. Imagine digging one of those. A system of those, a dozen, more than a dozen, twenty or more spread across a space, let’s say thirty square miles. Let’s say thirty-one.

  That’s what we needed. That’s the land we needed to find.

  Let’s say in the Bay Area. Now that’s hard. Where do you do it. In farmland, grazing land, public parks. A regional park or a state park. Where can you dig.

  The boundaries. Their erasure and re-creation. The regulation of space.

  Hum hum hum.

  At first it was going to be just one hole. That’s what we told ourself. But we also said: We need to do our own hole, but in a space where we can imagine our way to twenty holes, thirty holes. We wouldn’t dig them. But we needed to know there was that potentiality.

  Of course once we’d dug the first, we needed to do a second, a third. It was very hard, very hard to stop in the space we had conceptualized, it was hard to just hold the virtual holes in our head, and not take our spade and dig them.

  BIND 9. BIND 9 is everywhere. It’s been through the wash.

  The obfuscation, C++.

  The internet of things, that was part of it.

  Do you know how hard it is to dig a hole in America. How hard it was, when America was in its last form.

  Some soldiers just reached the dynamite room. Ooh, it’s all blowing up. And they’re in the right branch, but not the right subtrack. And there’s the way that their limbs are.

  Their limbs that are something else now.

  The other two groups are safe for now. There are more soldiers at the door.

  Hum hum hum.

  We made our fortune in a famous blockchain theft, like a heist in film, but consider it as a Lucite bank, completely clear, and every motion legible. And all the depositors outside: they are there, looking in, if this has caught their attention, and they can see it. But they can’t move. They can’t move to the bank. They can talk to each other about the rules of the bank, as their money is being stolen, carted out, and it becomes clear that this is a rule of the bank, that this can happen, and the only thing they can do, standing out there, is change the rules. But there’s not time. And so it’s others who come in, the good guys, the white hats, to steal the money that’s left, to keep it safe, to return it to the rightful owners before we can steal it, and we’re all racing. The money is still pouring out, gym bag by gym bag. The good guys, the bad guys, taking this money that everyone can see.

  We thought about the Aviary, about the book of Sebastian, and what we might do with it, and so we said it was: the Aviary. That that’s who had done the theft. And there were so many more things that followed, all as the Aviary.

  We stole from Sebastian, from his book, before we ever met him we made his book real.

  Fractus dominium.

  We’re not getting the order right.

  You need a droppy droppy.

  We were digging and we killed the internet and that was the end of the world that used to be.

  Let’s start with how we fell in a hole we dug. All that year we had been digging holes, because we wanted to understand the loneliest man in the world. His thing had become our thing. The loneliest man in the world, in Brazil, uncontacted but pressured, hunted, all alone, last of his tribe. He dug holes.

  We dug holes too. We fell in one. We had just broken up with Sebastian.

  Let’s start with love, the end of it.

  We had been in love with Sebastian, and he had wondered where we went at night. At last we drove him to the holes out there in the countryside. We explained the holes, and the connection to the loneliest man in the world. We expected Sebastian to freak out.

  It would have been right of him to freak out.

  But he accepted. He said, Okay. Well, I hope you’re careful. I guess it’s exercise. He said, It’s okay, it’s okay.

  We realized we were screaming at him, and he was saying, It’s okay.

  We hadn’t expected this, no we had not. We hadn’t wanted this.

  We were out at night digging holes on remote public lands, and he was saying it was okay. We screamed and threw the keys at him and told him to go home, to pack his things, to leave us. We would call an Uber later, we said, he should just go.

  He didn’t understand. This was our secret and he treated it like it was nothing and we got very angry.

  It was unbearable, the electricity buzzing through us because he just wouldn’t understand.

  Maybe we said other things, and maybe he did too, we can’t remember.

  We hadn’t, you see, we hadn’t processed things. We made mistakes. Our brain was still jammed up. We had dug holes, but
not the right ones. The right ones were the ones we’d drill not dig. We’d drill them right in our own skull and then we’d see and process everything, all at once. We’d reboot our brain and see how to reboot the system.

  When we had first started seeing him, he had wanted to know were we always attracted to Asian guys, why were we with him, what did we want, what was inside of us that drew us to him. And we didn’t know, we couldn’t tell him, we tried to be honest, we couldn’t say. But his anger had been comforting, had kept us in a place we found comforting, a place of reason, a place of understanding that he was angry, irrationally so, and it wasn’t our fault, but we could understand, we could communicate that.

  Here we wanted anger and we got acceptance.

  We were a couple and what we needed was anger, but we got the wrong thing.

  We stomped around in the dark after he left and we fell in a hole. We tripped and fell headfirst in a deep and narrow hole and we were a quarter mile from the road and we injured ourselves. We thought we were paralyzed, we thought our back was broken, we fell in and we were folded up like a billfold, somehow both our head and our feet were at the bottom, face pressed to ankle, no room to move, no adjusting, deep in a hole, body folded over, butt up, dirt and worms falling all around our face, and little ants.