To: FadedNoel
Ampersand
dawg
check this shizzit out
[url] (1)
why isnt it here?
Emily
Hey L. Did you see this? [url] (2)
(1) a blog called Turingtopia its graphics a hatchet job made to look like ms paint and on this blog a magic eye picture (go ahead try to make that image come to life) ugly and 90s internet and beneath the magic eye picture scroll and scroll a link to L. Marshall's Bio* and a link to L. Marshall's Theory of the Essential Fallacy of Impulse** and a link to my old site follow the hypertext rd***
* L. Marshall lives by the mountains. By the mountains lives L. Marshall. L. Marshall goes to school. The school goes to L. Marshall. L. Marshall knew Richard Cory(3), Richard Corey knew L. Marshall. L. Marshall wrote The Turing Test [link]. L. The Turing Test is writing L. Marshall. Open source the physical world. The physical world is open source. L. Marshall is a Libertarian and a Vegan and L. Marshall is watching you right now because you have jacked in to L. Marshall's sentence. L. Marshall has been sentenced to be The Turing Test. L. Marshall does not like cats. The Cat in the Hat is a X_X Cy-Borg Zombie. L. Marshall does not write. L. Marshall is the only unbreakable code: already broken.
** L. Marshall's Theory of the Essential Fallacy of Impulse is one of those slick minimalist sites that looks like somebody somewhere thinks it's the cuttingest edge of webdesign and if it's not user friendly fuck it. There are wav-files and midi-files hidden throughout it. They have names like the egypt game and the sea hitler codex and imitate the machine mirror remix.
*** it is a link to Grace's site. The one she knows.
(2)
A collection of her self-published-on-her-website stories apparently for sale on Amazon published as a pdf, along with an obnoxious description that claims that books should be burned but only before the grid is taken out and darkness settles across the world like a balm and there are no words because there is nothing to know unless a price can be paid. Weird.
(3)
An old poem.
Richard Cory
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
'Good-morning,' and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich - yes, richer than a king -
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
dawg
check this shizzit out
[url] (1)
why isnt it here?
Emily
Hey L. Did you see this? [url] (2)
(1) a blog called Turingtopia its graphics a hatchet job made to look like ms paint and on this blog a magic eye picture (go ahead try to make that image come to life) ugly and 90s internet and beneath the magic eye picture scroll and scroll a link to L. Marshall's Bio* and a link to L. Marshall's Theory of the Essential Fallacy of Impulse** and a link to my old site follow the hypertext rd***
* L. Marshall lives by the mountains. By the mountains lives L. Marshall. L. Marshall goes to school. The school goes to L. Marshall. L. Marshall knew Richard Cory(3), Richard Corey knew L. Marshall. L. Marshall wrote The Turing Test [link]. L. The Turing Test is writing L. Marshall. Open source the physical world. The physical world is open source. L. Marshall is a Libertarian and a Vegan and L. Marshall is watching you right now because you have jacked in to L. Marshall's sentence. L. Marshall has been sentenced to be The Turing Test. L. Marshall does not like cats. The Cat in the Hat is a X_X Cy-Borg Zombie. L. Marshall does not write. L. Marshall is the only unbreakable code: already broken.
** L. Marshall's Theory of the Essential Fallacy of Impulse is one of those slick minimalist sites that looks like somebody somewhere thinks it's the cuttingest edge of webdesign and if it's not user friendly fuck it. There are wav-files and midi-files hidden throughout it. They have names like the egypt game and the sea hitler codex and imitate the machine mirror remix.
*** it is a link to Grace's site. The one she knows.
(2)
A collection of her self-published-on-her-website stories apparently for sale on Amazon published as a pdf, along with an obnoxious description that claims that books should be burned but only before the grid is taken out and darkness settles across the world like a balm and there are no words because there is nothing to know unless a price can be paid. Weird.
(3)
An old poem.
Richard Cory
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
'Good-morning,' and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich - yes, richer than a king -
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
--------
[Grace is especially weirded out about the mention of cyborg zombies, as this is straight from a conversation that she and Gadfly had once about the actual zombies in Denver. That, and all the partially true things being written about her, and the vague threats means she's going to check it out and check it out carefully. It almost looks like something Gadfly might make, so this could also be an attempt of his to super-secretly contact her. It piques interest it does.]
First thing she will do is search for L. Marshall online (from school) to determine if the Amazon link comes up, or the blog link, or the Essential Fallacy link, and if any more imitators show up. For example, does this other L. Marshall have a YouTube account? Are they on Facebook? is there a link to any email addresses, is there any more data on this that Google can find?
Second, she's going to ask her fanmail people where they found it. In case that answer is different, or in case she can't find these links herself using normal means. If their answer is different, she will investigate that source (like, if they say they found it on a forum).
If this isn't okay by you, as it might drag another person into the story, that's cool also and we can just pretend that it didn't happen. Basically, she at least wants someone else to know what's going on when she goes off and does something potentially dangerous. She's not expecting Kalen to try to hack with her. No, bad idea that. (If you'll allow it, I'll send IC email to Ix tomorrow!)
As with everything computery-investigation-wise that she does, the first stop is to go wardriving. This is, essentially, driving around until you find some unsuspecting, unprotected wifi, and using that as your internet connection. This ensures that any trace somebody does will lead back to the poor person running that wifi, and will not lead back to your own personal home internet connection, which would be bad.
The second thing that she will do is run TOR (The Onion Router) which is another security thing that routes your encrypted internet traffic through a very long and winding road with lots of dead ends (to use a metaphor) so that tracing becomes even more difficult.
In other words, she really does not want anyone knowing that she's doing this.
And again, as with everything comperty-investigation-wise that she does, she starts with the legal and works from there. First off, checking the registration of L. Marshall's Theory of the Essential Fallacy of Impulse to see which company/person owns the site. She's expecting it to be something like some freebie hosting deal, but who knows, that might actually bear fruit -- i.e. she finds out where this person works or perhaps they're hosting it themselves, in which case -- jackpot.
Next is something a bit more tricky. She's going to look at the stuff that's posted on the blog and the site and see if she can't trace it to somewhere else. For example, are those .midi and .wav files elsewhere on the web, and where? Is the strange text elsewhere on the web? (like, say "X_X Cy-Borg Zombie" or the various quotes about book burning and the like). The idea here is that if she finds another place (any social network-y place, site, etc.) where these same elements are used, she can use that to further figure out who this other L. Marshall might be.
And I'm going to stop here, because that is a LOT OF TEXT. Also, the results of all that influences what she does next. She's not actually expecting to come up with much, so she'll likely choose to go on a hacking spree of the Essential Fallacy website next, which is a whole nother can of worms.
Or you might interrupt me in the middle of all that careful preparation and sneakiness with DOOM and stuff, that's also possible! But in the absence of DOOM, this is what she would do.
-----
First things first.
Her google search of L. Marshall looks a lot like this:
About 156,156,156 results (0.56 seconds)
L Marshall Music
L Marshall's Fallacy
[a password protected forum]
L Marshall | Facebook
[appears to belong to a middle-aged woman in Houston, Texas]
True Stories: L. Marshall: 978somethingsomethingsomething
[url to the self-published amazon affair]
L Marshall | Facebook
[appears to belong to a 16 year old boy who really wants to be cool]
[L Marshall [whatever the name of Grace's site is]
[www.whatevergrace'ssite'surli
turingtopia | l. marshall's blogspace
SciFi Reviews
[review of the anthology L. Marshall's Turing story is in]
Incognito
[dead url]
[finding an older cache of the url finds a page with the words
i'm watching you are you watching me
floating in the middle of nothing; it is a link, and clicking the link does nothing]
Second things second.
Ampersand gets back to her pretty quickly, writing:
somebody i know mssged me the link dunno how they found it they just know i follow yr wrds and were like lol look at this shit
o she says she doesnt remember how she found it but haha
o now she says plagiarism is a crime no shit sherlock if y. let the law define yr crimes and also good luck
Emily doesn't reply at all, not that first day.
Third things third.
Grace lets Kalen know what's up. When she looks back at the site, perhaps when she goes to C&P the bio, her Awareness goes off, this lingering sense of protean, andshattering, like little stars going boom behind her eyes, and that sense of something slightly uncanny creeps up under her skin most strongly when and if she returns to L. Marshall's Theory of the Essential Fallacy, when she runs her cursor or highlights watching you right now because you have jacked in to L. Marshall's sentence, when she reads the word 'sentence.'
Fourth things fourth.
The registration of L. Masrhall's Theory of the Essential Fallacy of Impulse. The site appears to be owned by a company called zythernautics, and there's not much information on the company at all. An address in Houston, but further investigation into that turns up a series of dead ends. If one is patient and clever, eventually one turns up an address for an office in Houston. There is a phone number and a p.o. box, but nobody answers the phone number, ever. It looks like a cardboard storefront for a patent troll company.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, the tricky bits!
The .midi and .wav files are nowhere else on the web, with one exception:
the_secret_oroborus_
That one seems to pop up quite a bit on forums that laud chiptune music as the best music or forums full of anime fans or roleplayers looking for themes, but sometimes it pops up on personal blogs and seems to have a bit of a go-around on tumblr (an impressive go-around on tumblr) and to have been used for a youtube fanvideo, though if she clicks on the fanvideo she will see lots of comments about how the audio isn't working and she will get no Awareness ping.
X_X Cy-Borg Zombie has left its digital footprints elsewhere. Somebody who calls themself Ghost Wheel rants about X_X Cy-Borg Zombies, the main ghist being that's what happens when the transition to transcendence gets bogged down by meat-space phantasmagorias and they are bad bad bad and they are hidden and they will stultify the world man fucking stomp it into bits. X_X Cy-Borg Zombie also comes up in a rarely updated webcomic with some pretty black humor, main character a zombie dog who ate his best friend and is now on the road to repentence, and has been taken in by a hot cy-borg chick who likes 1920s fashion. They fight crime! through time. The comic's artist is super elusive, except on twitter. There's a lot of twittering going on, but poking around reveals they've never showed up to a con as the same person, though they've showed up as 'different' people now and then. Lost some fans. Gained some fans back. That kind of shit. X_X Cy-Borg Zombie is also mentioned in a complaint on an old Mush mailing list which was smacked up on a website way back when and has stuck around forever to be preserved site to site, even as some sites die when their servers disappear.
The creepy bio book burning quotes don't seem to be duplicated exactly anywhere, and hunting that thread down just leads to what you'd usually expect to find looking up creepy book burning quotes. Creepy people who want to burn books. Nothing about the grid andd darkness and the world like a balm, though.
(Grace)
(Grace)
Response Via Ginger: It's likely going to be pretty boring with me sitting in the car for hours typing on my laptop...
If you want to come with and eat Lebanese, you can. There will likely be nothing to hit with a stick though. I don't expect that kind of fight. Maybe no fight. That would be nice.
(Kalen)
Response (still on Ginger): I bet it won't even be the strangest thing I do this week. I'll bring my logic textbook. And extra coffee. I'll get your current location once I have gathered all appropriate supplies.
Call if anything comes up and you need me sooner.
--------
So Kalen gets Lebanese and picks up Grace. And since Kalen is Kalen he also brings the following:
Coffee (both in thermoses to drink from and a coffee reserve because reasons)
Minimal coffee fixings: milk/cream/raw sugar cubes
Astronaut ice cream
9mm (w/silencer)
Staff
Zip ties
First aid kit (like a serious business one)
Backpacks with clothes for each of them (plus toothbrushes/toothpaste/small first aid kits/map of Denver/flashlights/disposable phone/folding knife/water/random food/Grace's has 300$ cash and spare keys to his car AND ALSO AN ADORABLE LITTLE ROBOT ZIPPER PULL because it does).
Yes. Really. He has an emergency bag for Grace already packed and waiting. Because this was bound to be useful eventually. (Just be glad he hasn't broken into her place while she's in class so that he can find out what kind of toothpaste she uses....)
Astronaut ice cream
9mm (w/silencer)
Staff
Zip ties
First aid kit (like a serious business one)
Backpacks with clothes for each of them (plus toothbrushes/toothpaste/small first aid kits/map of Denver/flashlights/disposable phone/folding knife/water/random food/Grace's has 300$ cash and spare keys to his car AND ALSO AN ADORABLE LITTLE ROBOT ZIPPER PULL because it does).
Yes. Really. He has an emergency bag for Grace already packed and waiting. Because this was bound to be useful eventually. (Just be glad he hasn't broken into her place while she's in class so that he can find out what kind of toothpaste she uses....)
Thanks to Kalen, Grace has never before been so prepared to go drive a whole few miles out to Aurora for a few hours so she can go hacking. Still, she looks fairly concerned when he arrives. "It's not some random weirdo," she says, when safely ensconced in the car. "I definitely felt something just from reading the words on one of those sites. We may be being watched."
The process they'll follow next, is intended to be a ruse for her target. And the process is that they drive around in a non-shifty way, looking for unsecured wifi. Aurora works well. Basically, the more she can disguise who she is the better, and part of that is not giving her target a direct link back to her apartment or the Warehouse, or (fuck no) the Chantry.
Because no matter how l33t you think you are, there's always someone better. And if that someone can infect words with purpose... Well, the chances that they are better are pretty high.
Grace eventually finds the perfect host for their little party, and has Kalen pull over. After that, it is much as she described -- lots of sitting around while she types and occasionally stares at the screen for a while and grabs a kafta kebab or dehydrated ice-cream or what have you.
And then, it's time to put that preparation into Work.
"Okay, so I'm going to try to see if they have... whatever that was still going on me," she says, and tilts the screen in case Kalen wants to watch. Because who wouldn't want to watch?
Her laptop's screen is a bright white, until it's black, and then the Code filters in. She's got some form of color-coding on it now, red for the blood of life, blue for the folding unfolded mind, spatial data is yellow, but like this, it's hard as hell to understand. Doable, she's done it before, going cross-eyed at raw bits as they somehow just make sense to her, but not tonight. She types a bit and it all turns yellow. Then, she types a bit more and the Code gets rendered. On her screen is a perfect (perfect) replica of Kalen's car, the road, the grass outside, all in grey monotone shades. And if there is something else to be seen, some eyes in the sky where the Code has been altered, she'll see that too.
Whether or not there is anything to see that is not placid suburbia (and something shifting, something electric sitting in a car together) she'll move on to the next in series. This time, the Code turns blue when prodded, and when rendered it is like no earthly shape. It doesn't look like a brain, because a brain is not a mind. It glows and movesand folds in on itself in mathematical precision, like a 5th dimensional snowflake. It's as if a two-dimensional screen is just not enough to display a thing that keeps shifting between them. A bit more typing and she'll be comparing this current to the baseline, to determine if anyone is fucking with it.
Finally, it's back to that glowing snowflake again, to put a wall around it. Her fingers fly across the keys then, typing in illogical equations, dead ends, encrypting her senses so that hopefully just reading a word won't be enough to jack in anymore. And even if it fails to work? Well, you try your best.
-----
(relevant rolls)
Noel @ 8:43PM
[Correspondence 1 - Diff 4 - 1 (taking time) Spending WP = Is someone spying on me!?]
Roll: 1 d10 TN3 (8) ( success x 2 ) [WP] VALID
Noel @ 8:45PM
[Mind 1 - Diff 4 - 1 (taking time) Spending WP = Mental diagnostics -- they messing with my head here?]
Roll: 1 d10 TN3 (6) ( success x 2 ) [WP] VALID
Tithe: The Witnessification @ 8:46PM
[stamp of witnessification]
Noel @ 8:46PM
[Mind 1 - Diff 4 - 1 (taking time) Spending WP = Firewall that brain up, just in case!]
Roll: 1 d10 TN3 (10) ( success x 2 ) [WP] VALID
Tithe: The Witnessification @ 8:47PM
[stamp of witnessification again!]
[Kalen Rolls:
ixphaelaeon @ 2:44PM
Private Message to Tithe
[Nightmares! (Because I have to know)]Roll: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 5, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 3 ) VALID
ixphaelaeon @ 2:45PM
Private Message to Tithe
[Perception/Awareness]Roll: 6 d10 TN6 (2, 6, 8, 8, 10, 10) ( success x 5 ) VALID
ixphaelaeon @ 2:45PM
Private Message to Tithe
[+10s]Roll: 2 d10 TN6 (6, 7) ( success x 2 ) VALID]]
IN PROGRESS
---
---
Kalen pulls over. He has a number of attractive places to pull over. That house's driveway or that house's driveway or that house's driveway or that kerb or that kerb or that alley where the snow-melt and black ice is at a premium and neither the neighborhood or the city pays for plows or there's that house which looks like the one that probably the neighborhood kids say a witch lives in or there's behind that truck which is parked really poorly with a certain eau de teenage negligence wafting from its positioning. He can pull over by the pushes or he can pull over by the trees. He can pull over by the stop sign or he can pull over by a mailbox that looks like a duck.
Placid Suburbia. Pax Suburbia. Quiet inside the car except for Kalen turning pages and Grace at work. Grace at Work.
And so
--
For Grace:
The Code gets rendered. And isn't it full of information? Isn't it an informative code? Isn't the Universe (open source [liberated]) free when you know how to ask? There are certain anomalies in all that yellow and, once again, a clear signature on it -- for a relative value of 'clear.' Because the signature is protean, ever-changing, fluid; because behind that mercurial resonance is this sense to her of shattering, little explosions, not the explosion itself but what the explosion will do to glass, to preconceptions, to -- whatever. And what can Grace spy those fingerprints on when she looks at the code for spatial data of now?
As she looks, she can see an inactive sort-of Working, like an eye [a yellow-coded whorl] that appears but isn't open yet. A connection that exists but isn't active. A connection that didn't exist before or perhaps shouldn't exist. She can probably deduce that it owes its existence to those sites she visited and a few more touches of the keyboard will reveal the Effect wormholing in a braid with blue code [Mind], also dormant unless Triggered, through those sound files, through the word sentence, although there's something complicated there her current senses aren't enough to read.
The mind shield was probably a good idea. Grace can feel its reassuring solidity: nobody's gonna be breaking through that easily.
But as she completes that precaution, if she's still keeping an eye on the rest, that 'eye' -- that dormant, inactive connection --
snaps [no: Shatters] open and widens and widens as if to take in the entirety of the scene.
For Kalen:
He has bad dreams, doesn't he, Kalen does. He has bad dreams about: what? The people he's lost? The darkness that wanted to eat him make him Nothing? The home he lost? Maybe he has bad dreams about the knowledge that's lost. Maybe his bad dreams are a mixture of all of the above. They hate him. They taunt him. They're as inextricably a part of him as his heart, aren't they? Doesn't it sometimes seem like that? Like they're never going to leave. Like sleep is no relief because eventually a dream'll come probably and maybe and in the morning it takes willpower to not let those insidious visions (true visions, my pet?) drag him down.
Today's a good day.
Today he's firing on all cylinders. Today he's on. He's aware of Grace beside him: shifting, shifting, tear-down-walls even as she puts-walls-up Grace, magickal signature conjured up by the takka takka of fingers on keys, and he can just sense something sleeping, just get this prescience Awareness of something [Eyes, he might think, in a moment of clarity - thousand-eyed, hundred-eyed, iridescent, Seraph-eyed, Peacock-eyed. This is not a spirit. This is a moment of vision. Of understanding, behind-what-is], feel the sleeping-inactive presence of some other Mage's rote when he goes onto the pages Grace links him (if he does) or when Grace goes on those pages.
Another Will-worker, certainly. Or Will-workers. This signature shifts and transfigures itself transforming constantly changing changing [Protean] while in the moment that [Grace's Mind shield goes up: little shift from her as she Works, and then-] the signature becomes live active
snaps
open
[peacock tail
eye]
the feel of this other Will-workers magick is like a shatter of glass.
--
Grace finishes the mental firewall just as that protean eye-in-the-sky flashes open. I can see you, can you see me? Yes.
--
Grace finishes the mental firewall just as that protean eye-in-the-sky flashes open. I can see you, can you see me? Yes.
She points to her eyes, points towards the place her computer says it is (with a middle finger for extra special emphasis) though her mouth has this wicked quirk upwards. She's playing. With fire perhaps, but playful nonetheless. "We have company, over there, you see?" she shows Kalen the screen with the swirled eye.
Afterward, she hides all programs and sets up a simple text editor. Because surely, they are being watched.
"Perhaps you could tell me what all this is about?" she types. "I'm not mad, just curious. What do you want?"
--
Kalen's attention drifts to the resplendently colored eyes. Swirls of eyes. Swarms of eyes. False jewel-toned turquoise and sapphire shimmering in a peacock's fan. The golden, ever-watchful eyes of the fiery ophanim. For a few precious seconds he does not prepare to fight or to flee but tastes this new presence.
Military strategy does not overlook the value of allies, and for all that he may have been wary and half feral for considerable portions of his life, Kalen knew the value of a trusted ally before the Order began any formal training in that regard. He was chosen for his intuitive, fluid adaptations to circumstances that let him survive them. History and hand-to-hand combat and perfect aim are all easily enough learned.
For a Flambeau, he is a terrible shot.
But a fantastic diplomat.
And so he looks at the screen Grace is showing him, his eyes moving to it even a second before his fingers move to rest lightly on the gun. Words before weapons, today.
Not everything demands a violent response.
Some days are full of peaceful dreams and the lasting ghostly impression of being brushed by the tips of the wings of doves.
Perhaps that can be today.
Soft feathers and golden light and the rich scent of of peaches.
If not...there is always the crackling-cold taste of ozone and the sudden roar of loosed bullets. He is at peace with those days, Kalen. They simply are not the days that he lives for.
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