Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

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, tengy@tetmail.com. 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?]