Trump Sky Alpha

by Mark Doten

  Day after day, year after year, the screaming exiles off at the horizon, the surface on which all is calm, all is bright.

  It wasn’t a thousand, we think. Maybe dozens or hundreds. We just don’t know. It happened. It’s as blurred out as everything else. We had fathers.

  There were fathers.

  Were they Trump. Who were they.

  Do you understand that at age eight, we had such a cultivated sense of … we had an exquisite self-hating inside of us.

  We broke toys and sipped on Drano—just wet our lips in front of our mother. We jumped up and down on grates.

  Ah gug gug gug.

  The car was another space. Inside and outside. He would kiss us. On the lips. In front of the school.

  There was the life with our father, then a job in computers, then our ten-year bet, then the holes and Sebastian, then the end of the world. And now we’re here, Rachel.

  The universe fine-tuned.

  The internet has given us wisdom. All that the unresting thought of man has created in the ages is compressed into a small space in our brain.

  We know that we are wiser than all of you.

  Some soldiers just reached the electrical current snapping through the air room. There are so many soldiers in so many rooms, we cannot keep updating you. No one is safe now. There are too many lions. There are too many guns. There is electricity everywhere. There are more soldiers at the door.

  Treating children like meat. We do not mean as we were treated, arms and legs maneuvered, touched, handled, the pliable child we were, without concern for the thought of the child, who was meat. We mean in our ten years in the billionaire’s cell. At the bottom of the internet, people literally treated children like meat, images and videos of children who were being prodded, torn, torn apart, children trussed and sliced and done up, and like all human endeavor, the untimate shittiness of it—these people are going for the supreme aesthetics of Hannibal, the loin with a Cumberland sauce of red fruits, kidney pie with yellow beets and chèvre, the famous roasted ortolan. They reach for that, and end up with the opposite.

  Have you seen Cake Wrecks. That was what the little children looked like. You had a child. And a cannibal has made of your child a cake wreck. Which would be worse, we wonder. To have your child prepared with elegance, plump and succulent, well lit, drizzled with sauce, perfectly photographed in HD, or to see your child as a cake wreck.

  Have you seen Smiley’s People, how a woman is what breaks it all, how it’s always that way in these scenarios.

  We’re talking about protocol, diplomatic protocol, and it’s showing the whole system, and it needs … what. It needs a crazy woman, it needs a plot point, and it’s a crazy woman. But why can’t we just show the whole system without that crazy woman.

  We’re going to put in a little drop now.

  Your screams and thrashings are loosening your tape and you know what that means.

  More tape. More tape, more tape. Wrappy wrappy.

  A woman breaks or a mulatto breaks or a faggot breaks—there’s the whole history of art. But why should they be the ones to break.

  We met a Filipino coder poet and we fell for him. We fell in love. We got high and played Wii. He had written a book that we’d made in the world. Then we took him to our holes.

  But see the soldiers, see what they’re doing. Even when the soldiers are in the right branch and subtrack, and the right sub-subtrack, there is still so much left for them. Door that’s a bomb, door that’s a wall, door that reverses you, door that shrinks down when you touch it, door on a door on a door.

  Stairs to windows, stairs to dirt, stairs to the creatures that live in the dirt, window to wall that’s in fact a stair to a window to a wall that’s in fact a stair to a window to a wall.

  The sharks! sharks! room, the poison foam room.

  How does China control a government. Pays a ton of money for resources, not direct political intervention. State- and non–state-controlled companies, no one makes money without the Communist Party, all the leaders and all their families deeply involved in this.

  Microsoft with open standards, embrace, extend, destroy.

  Imagine your genitals being chewed at by fire ants. What would you do. You can’t rip it off, that can’t be done, and the ants can’t stop eating, they will never be destroyed, and they are chewing on your butthole, too, going up in there and chewing.

  Our butt hurts, our whole body does ah gug gug gug gug.

  Okay we feel … we feel better now.

  About ourself but not the system.

  But you are here, we are talking to you, the system, that is what we should talk about.

  Let us get some wires in these birds. Get the juice flowing. It’s a different drill bit of course, very delicate. We’re going to change the drill bit.

  You hear them getting close. You are jumping and choking. You should stop that.

  Here’s a droppy.

  Ah gug gug.

  Have we mentioned the decade we spent in the rich man’s basement. He bet us twenty million dollars we couldn’t spend a decade in his basement, nothing but the internet to keep us company. He came down hauling his blood helper boy, blood flowing from the boy to him, a boy in a hospital gown, pale and silent, the rich man looking in on us. Of course we could spend a decade there. We left the day before the bet’s end, we had made the Aviary, we had carried out the blockchain heist, we didn’t need his money, we didn’t want it.

  But why didn’t we free the boy. Or boys.

  Surely we looked back to his mansion and said, Hey boys, the ones who help with blood, surely we said to them, Boys, let’s get out of here.

  But we were, we think we were the sole survivor.

  We built a distributed network of people who believed in undoing the network, or holding it back. And we had our small victories. We met Sebastian, and we were in love, then love was over. Trump was elected president. We said fine, it’s fine, we will stop, it doesn’t matter, we will stop. And one day we saw a mother in the airport, and we said no.

  We said it’s time now.

  Hum hum hum.

  It is so simple. To request three specific and highly unusual domains in a row, and that kicks open a back door on a BIND server. Three domains that had never been requested in the history of BIND, or they had, and no one had known, no one had known the power of requesting them in that order.

  Request these three domains in a row from a thousand BIND servers at once and that gives access. That one can ask all upstream and downstream, when infected, script, Morris worm–style that helps it spread. Kicks open a door. Gives you root or superuser control over a BIND server.

  You could scan every AS out there and map what their servers are, then try to query them all at once. The hacking is happening in the same channel as DNS resolution, so it’s hard to stop, because you can’t shut off DNS resolution—that would stop the hacks, but would itself break the internet.

  We are explaining because we want you to know, to understand.

  Google has its own name server. We knew Google would be tough, Google tried to keep domain name infrastructure running as everything else blew up. Anyone can use the Google server, ask it for name info—three-fourths of people, the BIND users, had phone books that were complete gibberish, but Microsoft and Google had phone books that still worked.

  If you have the right DNS servers in the hierarchy you don’t need to get all of them. If we don’t know an answer, we ask upstream. So as long as an exploited BIND server is upstream, eventually we’ll get there, and bad servers are also querying downstream.

  You need certificates, and that’s hard. But we got certificates. We bought them, we stole them, the lost boys got a harvest of certificates.

  Compromise a top-level certificate vendor, think of the DigiNotar attack, Google certificates fooled every browser in world, except Chrome, because Google is Chrome’s mom.

  Rush off to a suborned provider, gin up a certificate, slap it on in time to get a
response, while also grabbing the CNN page—everyone would find the internet very slow, but only the first time they visited the site.

  Distribute further, there are scripts to spin up proxy servers, each server a printing press for certificates without sending too much traffic back to the certificate authority. And it’s hard to fix, you need a browser patch, because browsers trust the certificates.

  Uh Rachel are you listening.

  You seem to have passed out and we need you.

  Ah gug gug gug gug.

  We would like to trust you with the password.

  The acid is working in your brain, productive of damage, clearing and generative damage. Perhaps a drop more. Perhaps more tape, you are flailing and ripping so hard.

  A bit more acid. Now you can’t do that, you have to hold still. Now you see the acid eats right into your skin.

  Let us take our knife, your holes are clogged and clotted.

  There now there, and now more acid.

  It won’t eat up your brain. Not all of the brain.

  Huge botnet, you can use it to attack anything. You can use any of the computers to spread malware, they can all spread email with malware, attempt to attack other computers, try to harvest all the passwords on all the computers, but if going for stuff that happens fast, shut down the internet by DDoS attacks.

  Huge botnet, and it all falls down.

  Little pigeons, paper rolled on the leg, it’s just code, that’s all it is, that’s all it could ever be, all these centuries, all these scratchings, all of writing, all of speech, the stuff we’re made of, DNA and its replication, subatomic agitation, it’s just code, just instructions, that’s all it is, all it ever could be, you could fit it all on pigeon legs, given birds enough and time.

  Then the end comes, and it’s the age of gold.

  It’s all there in the documents of the time, the last speech of the last president aboard his zeppelin.

  Given birds enough and time.

  So now it’s birds, in the last world, we said: No birds. Here we say: No, birds.

  Do you understand.

  An internet of birds, it’s possible, it’s what we’re working on, it’s what’s next.

  We heard a man once speaking of an internet of trees, that’s possible, an internet of trees, we really do think it might be true, but we said, Why not start with an internet of birds.

  Look at all these birds, they’re not an internet yet, no not these birds, but there are so many birds.

  We wish these birds were feeling better, they don’t seem to be feeling well, but it’s out there, it’s already out there, our internet of birds.

  We felt liquid sliding out of our left eye. It was not tears, or not crying, it was simply a liquid flow. And in the right eye, twitching, a crazy beat, like the heart of a trapped mouse stretched over the right side—for our point of view—on the upper eyelid. You could touch it and feel it. And we, we felt distant. Our eyes were doing things, and perhaps we were a bit sad, a bit tense, but that wasn’t it. The board our eyes were plugged into didn’t seem to be our board.

  We drilled into our skull and reset the motherboard.

  But the world was ending.

  We drilled into our head, and then we shook the tree.

  The doors in Inspector Gadget opening.

  The doors in MST3K opening.

  Ah gug gug gug gug gug gug.

  We like a substance abuse, we like a fresh substance abuse inside of us.

  We have our reasons.

  Some systems are highly controlled, within us, some are distributed.

  Some things get locked in, very controlled, in the body of a human animal, and others move far away—the control, the system, living apart from trauma. And the internet, emerging from the trauma of recent wars, the threat of nuclear wars, the need to find survivable modes of communication, just as a body that has been assaulted and threatened with assault will find ways to make its communications survive.

  Your body is not a body, your body is a distributed network, some pieces communicate the end of the universe back to you, so many hops, but their messages still arrive, eventually, the packets inside of you, the messages will arrive someday at their destination, they are out there in the network, moving, looping, trying different routes, but they find their way home.

  This is of course a metaphor, you can’t see the system, can’t truly see or know a single object, a single atom, but there are objects and atoms, they are embodied, and it is only by metaphor we can get there.

  Every thought is a metaphor, every idea is a metaphor, every image we see a metaphor, the image and the thought, they refer to things that are real, but we can’t get at them, we have no access, but if you want to shed a few layers, make it almost immanent, you can drill the holes.

  You can at least see the images, the metaphors, for what they are, and they are bad actors.

  Every person you see, every idea you’ve ever had, it’s a bad actor, a trauma actor, a crisis actor. They say that every film is a documentary of the actors in it, and the actors are all bad, in every movie, they have always been bad, in the documentaries where we see them for what they are, they are paid crisis actors trying to fool us, and their payment comes with death, to die, to be freed from the role, that’s the payment.

  But grasses are much better, more natural, than the paid crisis actor, the birds are better, and the trees, though they often move too slow for us to truly take in what good actors they are. This is why they try not to shoot actors in fields of grass, because the authenticity of the grass, the naturalness of its movements, make the actors ridiculous, and in real life, too, we increasingly avoid fields of high grass. A woman went on a long vendetta against the grass, she called the police repeatedly, to get rid of marsh grass in a park, she said that women were being stalked there, that they would be raped, and this you understand was in a highly manicured urban space with a very small patch of marsh grass, a swath of tall grass ten feet long and half that wide, but it was the grass she hated, and she triumphed over the grass, they mowed it down.

  They are near now. The soldiers. They will be here any minute now. We can’t be here forever with you, though a part of us would like it.

  Our childhood, our childhood, it was so many doors opening, and yet one we can’t see or remember closed tight.

  To make your peace with protocol, to accept distribution, and also the most rigorous protocol, a contested zone, rules, freedom, and yet it’s not talked about.

  And you just roll over for it.

  Because it’s how you make a system, how else can you make a system.

  You just roll over for all the protocols you can’t see, or that you have allowed yourself not to see.

  Some soldiers just reached the lime room. Ooh, the front guy is falling in. Ooh, the others are retreating.

  But the floor of the hallway has tipped up, and they are all falling in. And they are not even in the right branch.

  But others are almost just outside, or they are up another stair and around, and it’s windows of brick they’ll see, and feathers, and a deep calm.

  We don’t know, we really can’t know, where they are, they seem to have cut it, the cables to the screens, we have the light here, we do, because we have the generator here, but out there it’s dark, it really is.

  It really really is.

  What finally made up our mind.

  We saw Trump and we said okay.

  We said okay, this is what the universe wants.

  We said we would leave our mansion, we wired it up with bombs and we went to the airport, we would go somewhere else, another country, we would leave behind everything we thought we might do, we would abandon the plan for the big attack, the harvest of zero days, the months and years of planning, the internet of birds, we would get on a plane, go to another country, leave all that behind.

  We saw a woman at the airport. She’s playing I Spy with My Little Eye—and her voice, you understand, her voice is really much too loud, i
t doesn’t have to be pitched this way for her son, but they’re playing, and she says, I spy with my little eye something red. And the boy finds something. Something with lots of circles, I spy with my little eye. And it’s really aggravating, this performance—this performance of motherhood, it’s obviously a performance, it’s outwardly directed, and it is going on and on, and you understand why the boy won’t stop shrieking and crying when his mother stops talking, his mother has acclimated to this as the norm, and this is her default, this terrible woman hollering about the color red and a soccer ball and a drill, a tool, all the things she spies with her little eye. And we look around and we see the other mothers, they’re giving a bit of side-eye, so we know it’s not just us, they’re put out as well by this self-aggrandizing performance of motherhood. And we realize, it’s not just a performance, it’s not just trumpeting her own mothering skills, the fact that she’s building her son’s neural connections as we speak, stimulating him, forcing him to learn, it’s actually something more than that, she’s bullying us, the others in line, this is an aggressive act, an attack, but one that you simply can’t call her on, she knows she has immunity, and she’s glorying in it, she’s picking more things, glasses on an old ugly face, the face ducking down, turning, hiding itself, then it’s a brown bag, and the brown bag is falling apart, it’s an old suitcase, the suitcase of a poor person, and she calls it out, this bullying white woman, dragging along her son. And we realize what she’s actually saying is I spy with my little eye structural racism. I spy with my little eye white impunity. Because imagine it. Imagine if she was black. How that would change things. If she was Asian, a Chinese American mom loudly educating her children on the backs of everyone in that line. A Latino woman. Think of it. Two femmy gay guys, two big dykes. Because part of the problem, in truth, was the nonreaction. Plug them in, one by one, imagine. That’s white privilege, that space of utterly obnoxious performance that also somehow gaslights the whole culture, that makes criticism impossible—criticize that woman with her kid, and suddenly you’re the crazy one. But we weren’t.