by Thorsten Küper
Translated by Mike Mitchell
Just pixels.
They’re just pixels.
Inquiry after scandal surrounding Chancellor Weveling’s New Year Speech
It remains unclear how a person or persons still unknown managed to tamper with the video of the Federal Chancellor’s 2011 New Year’s Speech broadcast yesterday. Horrified viewers watched for more than a minute as the Chancellor gave his speech to the nation, apparently naked and sporting a Hitler mustache. Experts described the tampering as technically exceptionally complicated …
Am I a grotesque sight? Probably I am. A lifeless body in a chair facing the three monitors on which you can see this recording: me wearing the same clothes and with the same face as the corpse on the other side of the screen. The living reflection of a dead man.
Tell me, do I have a strange expression on my face now that I’m dead? Is my tongue hanging out? Can you see the whites of my eyes? Do I already smell? I wouldn’t like that. If that’s the case, push my wheelchair out into the neighboring room. I myself would hate to have to sit next to the stinking, putrefying corpse of a complete stranger and listen to him going on and on. Then you sit yourself down in the chair by the wall behind you.
At least you’re here. That means you’ve traveled to this town, gone to the locker where you found my address and the key to my apartment. If you should wonder how I managed to inform you post mortem that I was dead, just have a look at my left wrist and the wires running down my collar. You’ve probably already worked out the principle, after all, you’ve an analytical mind like me. The sensors on my chest and wrist measure my heartbeat and pulse. Once the computer hadn’t recorded any signs of life for two hours it sent you the email with the codes for the locker and my machines. It worked because you’re here, you’ve entered the password and now you’re watching this recording.
I wasn’t quite sure when I would die. Naturally I couldn’t avoid dying, but the desire to exercise control was a fundamental element of my personality. So I wanted at least to decide on the posture in which I would cross over to the other side, as the ultimate proof of my lifelong defiance. Cowboys are supposed to die with their boots on, so men like us ought to cross the Styx sitting at a keyboard. For me that makes sense. The most important moments in my life have been spent not with people, but together with machines.
I don’t know the precise cause of my death, but at least it was a natural death. To go by the pressure and pain I felt during my last eighteen months, I would go for a tumor behind my right eye. A consequence of the radiation. Above all from monitors and display units. Diffuse X-radiation, microwaves, infrared, UV light. I’ve spent too much time exposed to them, toasted my brain. But I did it voluntarily. Do you know why? Did you ever ask yourself that question?
I can answer it for myself: we’ve never been fond of each other, the real world and I. The real world rejects my expectations, hopes, desires. That’s why I’ve always hated it and tried, as far as possible, to model it. Oh yes, there are ways and means. But to do that you have to take up a position outside the real world, leave it behind you. And that is what I’ve done. That is why I haven’t left this apartment for the past eight years.
If you wonder who put the key and the address in the locker, it was a pizza delivery boy. The guy who’s been delivering no. 12, no. 72 or no. 112 for years and who, after some research, I classified as reliable. To make sure he really did deposit the key, I got him to film the whole business, from here to the station and himself depositing the things.
That was nothing new for him. Some years ago I built a camera he could attach to his spectacles. He got it for nothing and in return he slept with girls now and then and . . . well … wore the glasses. He emailed me the films. I’m sure this revelation of my voyeuristic leanings won’t shock you. After all, pornography was one of the subjects we used to discuss regularly. That and our preference for exercising control one way or the other. And in my own mind I’m sure the two things are directly related. There were almost no real relationships at all in my life. Not for lack of opportunity, no, but because real people have a life of their own, I can’t just move them around them like characters in a story. At least not directly. That’s why I’ve always preferred artificial partners — even if they only existed on a monitor or as holograms.
Am I boring you? You haven’t come to admire my corpse or listen to my self-analysis. It’s my masterpieces you’re interested in, isn’t it? Calling them ‘mere programming’ I would take as an insult. For me it’s always been a genuine art form.
I was nine the first time I felt a computer keyboard under my fingers. A box with a slow processor and a clock speed well below a gigahertz. A simple machine, not much more than a toy, really. They’d given it to me because it could be used from a sickbed. I’ve spent most of my life sitting or lying down. You won’t be surprised to hear I always dreamed of driving a car. Unfortunately it was a dream I never managed to translate into reality. Nor have I ever been able to leave this country. And that I spent the last few years entirely in this apartment is not news to you.
But back to that computer. It changed my life, reprogrammed it as a virus would. From the very first I was obsessed with the keys, the clicking noise, the monitor, the bluish light that became more familiar than daylight. I started to learn, wrote programs, built simple robots, circumvented the copy protection of games and soon discovered the Internet. I was just eleven when I entered the World Wide Web for the first time — and got caught for ever in the net. Do you know what my motivation was for becoming a hacker? Apart from technical curiosity, I mean?
You’ll be disappointed. My first hacks were into porn sites. I got access to thousands. But the things I learned in my hunt for material for a jerk-off formed the basis of my later career. That and my obsession with films and novels. I love a good story. Don’t you?
My own life was part of one. It was tragic and there wasn’t much humor in it. But there were lots of very ironic moments. Sometimes I ask myself who wrote the story. It certainly wasn’t me.
I like to imagine my story as on the epic scale. A fat tome with thousands of pages. But perhaps it’s nothing more than a few lines of faulty code in a big program. Just like the faulty code in the program of my cells.
It didn’t kill me, but it did make my body all but useless. There are worse hereditary diseases than the one I suffered from. But it left me weak and unable to move, condemning me to spend a large part of my allotted term in enclosed rooms. On the other hand it is this peculiarity in my DNA that I have to thank for everything I’ve achieved in my life.
Perhaps you’re grinning. What did that old bag of bones in the chair over there think he’d achieved? Shut away in this dark room, vegetating his lonely, fusty life away. But before you laugh, just think very carefully about your own life. Come on, get closer to the monitor and listen carefully.
I’ve made history, I’ve made headlines — and I mean that literally, damn it! I thought up what must be the most immense dramas of all time and staged them. I made people dance like puppets on a string, made them into dancers and choreographed the dance.
What’s the old fool on about? you’ll be wondering.
Do you remember those long philosophical discussions we used to have about real-time simulations? The first ones came onto the market when I was still a child. You could become a medieval knight, manage a fairground, be a Roman general fighting the Teutons, or a German general in the Second World War only a few kilometers outside Stalingrad. You could have lots of new lives, always going back to the beginning again.
To restart. With more life. Quicker, stronger — healthy. That was what normal life refused me. In the games you could create miniature worlds and experiment with them, make economic cycles function as precisely as clockwork or plunge a tiny universe into chaos — just for fun. I spent whole days and nights being Napoleon, Hitler, Alexander the Great or a Greek god.
Control. That was what it was all about. I was obsessed with the idea of exercising control, with the feeling I could change destiny at the flick of a switch. Cause and effect, the old, old story.
But I didn’t want to be the slave of effect, I wanted to be the cause.
Sometime during puberty I became truly aware of my situation, realized for the first time how many things would be denied me in my life. And that made me angry. They sent me to a psychotherapist, they even set a priest on me who tried to switch my brain onto a religious track. I was sixteen and I saw clearly that the longest journeys in my life would be those to some specialist or other who saw me as a great subject for his research. And the Bible-basher had no other idea than to try and persuade me this shit was meaningful. In their professional blindness these clerical imbeciles see every misfortune, every catastrophe as serving some higher purpose — which is, of course, far beyond the understanding of us ordinary mortals. It must really be very comforting to be able to wrap yourself up in the warm fleece of that ignorant illusion.
Hacker attack on Vatican web page
On Saturday night some as yet unidentified person or persons managed to take over the Vatican website and tamper with it. For almost twelve hours online visitors to the Vatican were shown pornographic pictures and films instead of the public archives of the Catholic Church …
A few days after the priest had tried to sell me that garbage someone penetrated the Vatican website and turned it for almost twelve hours into a portal to pornography. It was called ‘We have a long tradition of body piercing too’ and had a lot of hits.
It was my first real hack. Oddly enough, after it I realized that the priest was right when he said there was meaning to my illness. It had forced me to live cut off from the world and thus allowed me to develop my talent in peace. A talent I now employed for my very own work: new real-time strategy games.
An autopsy instead of a music video
For several minutes a video of the English boy band ‘Fungerms’ broadcast on Channel S had pictures of the corpses of the five musicians superimposed over it. A week previously the group, together with their manager and two of their wives, had died in a tragic helicopter accident. A spokesman for Channel S expressed the management’s regret at the incident and said any employees involved would be duly punished. So far investigations suggest the images were inserted from an external source …
For example I managed to hack into the transmitter of a music channel. One of those boy bands had just been wiped out in a helicopter crash and they put on a tribute program. Instead of a video of their idols, the dear little fans had the opportunity to enjoy pictures of their autopsy which, as if by divine intervention, suddenly appeared on their screens. A nasty piece of work. That afternoon lots of little girls had tears pouring down their cheeks while I could hardly stop laughing. For some reason or other I stuck to that line and kept directing my operations against the media.
Multiple pile-ups in Munich, Berlin and Hamburg
Yesterday morning there were large-scale pile-ups in the centers of Berlin, Munich and Hamburg. How they happened is still a mystery. Eyewitness accounts all agree that the lights turned green in both directions at the same time in all three cities. The theory put forward by several commentators that some unknown person or persons had obtained access to the traffic control system was described by experts as unlikely.
Okay, so I tried my hand at the standard tricks as well and switched all the lights in the center of Berlin, Munich and Hamburg to green at the same time. But it did nothing for me. It had no real meaning, no message. Even then for me the game had satisfy artistic demands.
It was more fun smuggling doctored pictures into news broadcasts. A few years earlier that would have been unthinkable, but more and more the cameramen were sending their pictures to the agencies via the Net in digital format. If you knew how, you could plug in, capture films at junctions, then modify them and replace the correct versions on the servers with the falsified ones.
Education Minister interviewed by penis
Thousands of shocked viewers phoned or emailed TPO about a press conference by Education Minister von Hohenried they broadcast yesterday. Instead of a microphone, the Minister appeared to be speaking into an erect penis …
I’m sure you remember my old trick of making politicians speak with an erect cock in front of their face instead of a microphone. To swap a microphone for a prick was child’s play even with the software available then.
Minister of the Interior Karenbaum laments her lack of sexual intercourse
Once more an unknown hacker has succeeded in getting a doctored film broadcast. The clip had been tampered with in such a way that the Minister appeared to reveal some disconcerting details about her private life. It was later reported that Frau Karenbaum was distraught at the things that had been put into her mouth …
A variation was to put words into their mouths. A little later there was even software which allowed me to synchronize their lip movements. For example a minister who belonged to one of the conservative parties suddenly apologized to viewers for all the nonsense she’d come out with over the last few weeks. The reason, she said, was her lack of sexual intercourse. This gave an entirely new meaning to her concluding remark, which was left unchanged, namely that it represented a challenge the whole population had to take up. More than one such clip was broadcast because they didn’t realize I was mucking about with their systems. It was hugely embarrassing for the politicos who liked the sound of their own voices, and heads rolled at the broadcasting companies.
Robots create sculptures from automobile parts
An extraordinary incident occurred yesterday at the Dortmund factory of a large German automobile manufacturer. For almost an hour the robots on several of the production lines where the bodywork is welded were affected by a fault which is said to lie in the factory computer network. The management has denied reports that the machines used car parts to make sculptures which resembled a hand with the middle finger1 raised. However, for several hours now a video has been available on the Internet purporting to show one of these sculptures being produced — filmed by a works surveillance camera …
I call myself a real-time satirist — and an extremely successful one at that. Naturally I remained anonymous. A phantom that attracted imitators, though none was as brilliant as I was. Unfortunately I knew it and that made me want to show off. It also made me careless.
At that time I was out to get a particular firm which was screaming its head off for people on welfare to be sent as forced labor to their factory. I did a little research and found out that the firm had been in existence during the Third Reich. And back then it had employed forced labor.
Hacker arrested
Yesterday a twenty-year-old man from Berlin was arrested in connection with a hacker attack on the German firm of Syberg-Hetzler. He was accused of having obtained unauthorized access to the company’s central computer network. During the attack all the lights in the building were put out, apart from those in around fifty rooms, which had been chosen in such a way that the illuminated windows formed a swastika. As well as that he sent, from email accounts belonging to the company, a million emails quoting the words above concentration camp gates: ‘Work makes free’. Nothing is known about the reasons for the attack; it is possible the man was politically motivated. The accused suffers from a severe muscular disease and a police spokesman described him as ‘psychologically unstable’ …
They caught me shortly before my twentieth birthday. It was my weak point that brought it about. I had to work from my apartment, I couldn’t hide my identity by going on the Net from public terminals, as other professionals would have done. They couldn’t put me in the can, but they did send me to a hospital for convicts. I spent fourteen months in there, cut off from my usual environment and from my beloved computers. It was pure hell. I was surrounded by scum. You know what they say about what happens to eggheads like us in jail. The truth is even worse.
So I retreated even farther inside myself, buried myself in books, read everything I could lay my hands on. The result was a seething cocktail of ideas in my head which went far beyond anything I’d previously planned. The prison hospital was a kind of reaction vessel and the books enzymes setting off a chemical reaction in which I was developed, transformed. Whatever.
Have you ever seen the high-resolution pictures from surveillance satellites? Simple geometrical images giving a bird’s-eye view of buildings and streets and troop movements? In a picture like that a nuclear warhead consists of just thirty-eight pixels.
Thirty-eight pixels added to the computer as if by magic where the CCDs of the camera lens have never seen any. Do you really believe thirty-eight pixels would be a serious challenge for someone like me? I was the man who had made the Chancellor give his 2011 New Year’s speech naked and with a Hitler mustache.
Are you wondering whether I put my idea into practice? Are you trying to work out which military conflicts of the last few years, triggered off by the search for supposed weapons of mass destruction, were staged by me?
Perhaps it was a good thing I’d come to their notice. That talent scout appeared the day before my release. With him everything ended. Or began. Even today I can’t quite say which.
He wanted me to do ‘it’ for him. That’s exactly how he put it and he wasn’t even aware of the ambiguity. By ‘it’ he meant modeling, manipulating reality. He was a big shot at one of the big broadcasting companies and he wanted me to put the skills I’d used against them at their disposal.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you if you imagine I’m a rebel who stuck to his principles. Young and vain as I was, I felt flattered rather than bought and did precisely what they wanted. In return I got the latest technology, giving me opportunities that were previously unavailable to me. Of course I didn’t have an office, nor did I figure on their list of employees since they didn’t want their name to be connected with unjournalistic and inauthentic pictures. I produced films for them that were not the way they’d been shot and in doing so I learned how valuable images are. Especially when they do not correspond to the truth.
Party leader resigns
Werner Gilgenforst has announced his resignation. The reason was the suspicion still surrounding him, but the step should not, he insisted, be seen as an admission of guilt. It was a decision taken in the best interests of the Party, whose success was more important to him than his personal desire to stay on as its leader. Even after experts had proved that the video showing Gilgenforst accepting an attaché case was a fabrication, the rumors that he might be involved in some kind of illegal payments refused to go away. Chancellor Weveling expressed his dismay …
My job was to create explosive footage that could be used in current affairs and news programs. They could happily broadcast everything I fabricated by declaring it was from a ‘dubious source’ but still broadcasting it. More than once a politician had to go, even though experts assured the public that the film showing them accepting money was not authentic. The damage to their reputation from the fuss was enough to ruin their career. The rules of the game in such a superficial society are simple and harsh.
This work brought in loads of money. And I really enjoyed doing it, believe me. But if you’re selling news, you’re selling an ordinary product that’s only in demand when it’s unique and, as far as possible, exclusive. News has a value which depends on the speed with which it’s brought into circulation. That raises two problems: in the first place you never know when something’s about to happen and in the second there are long periods when nothing happens at all.
I was twenty-two when I called the guy who’d come to the prison hospital to offer me the job. I had a proposal — something so completely out of the ordinary that would revolutionize the media. I managed to persuade him to arrange a secret meeting with the top management. I remember it was in an old monastery of all places with an incredibly large open fire crackling in the grate.
‘Putting it crudely, there are two stages in manipulating the news,’ I told them as they listened with large glasses of wine in their hands. ‘You are at the first stage, gentlemen; you manipulate images, that is, the result of an event. The second stage would be when you manipulate the cause of an event.’
The three guys showed no reaction. One forced a smile that was either mocking or embarrassed, I couldn’t say. But at least he went on to ask how I proposed to manipulate the causes of events.
I must have looked pretty pompous and arrogant when I said, ‘By triggering them off myself.’
Then I showed them the pictures of the pile-ups in Munich, Hamburg and Berlin, explaining that they were the result of someone hacking into the traffic control systems. Naturally I didn’t say that I was the hacker, but I assume the idea would occur to them.
Their response was by no means as enthusiastic as I had hoped. Hacker attacks, they protested, could be traced back and, anyway, arranging an accident like that was beneath the dignity of a responsible journalist. They didn’t take me seriously, so they hid behind principles which were totally alien to them. But before they could leave I switched on a computer animation. What they saw at first was just swarms of tiny little dots of various colors making their way through a maze and concentrating at one particular spot. At that point they probably did think I really was mad, but when I explained what they were watching in a simulation and what I was suggesting, the atmosphere in the room changed.
Serious disturbances in Berlin, Bonn and Duesseldorf
There were serious disturbances in the city centers of Berlin, Bonn and Duesseldorf last Sunday. Unauthorized demonstrations organized by extreme right-wing groups collided with rallies of the extreme Islamist 2015 Jihad. In the course of the ensuing clashes four people were killed and several hundred demonstrators as well as forty police suffered injuries, some serious. Two people have since died from the injuries they sustained, a further twelve are still in a critical condition. Initial estimates put the damage to shops and vehicles at over twelve million Euros.
I consider myself an individualist, an egocentric and an eccentric. I believe self-determination is possible, at least within certain limits. But I am also convinced that most people are incapable of behaving independently. Their actions are subject to statistical laws comparable to the physical equations describing the flow of a liquid.
The real-time strategy games I played as a child were a by-product of research into artificial intelligence and simulations which could extrapolate the development of a society. In recent years that has led to social sims which claim to be able to predict the behavior of large groups of people. Among other things, they are used to test out on computer models the effectiveness of escape routes in large buildings. The police use them to work out the best way of shepherding rival groups of football hooligans to and from the stadiums. As well as critical points on a preset street map, these programs also provide estimates of possible damage and the number of victims. Basically there was no difference between them and the games I played as a child. So I played with them. With the one difference that the games were no longer only played out on a monitor.
As well as the great mass of mindless hangers-on hurling abuse, every extremist grouping in the world has an intellectual core. And just as moths are attracted to the light, the elite of these movements are attracted to the modern media. Did you know that the webspace taken up by fascistic material is twelve times that of the Catholic Church? Thousands of terabytes of fascistic ideas are buzzing round out there. Only pornography takes up a greater proportion of the volume of data.
Extremists coordinate their operations through their websites. They announce assembly points and starting times for their demos on their websites, send plans of their operations by email. None of it particularly securely. Religious fundamentalists aren’t much different.
Take the Neonazis, for example. All you have to do is manipulate their websites so you can spread rumors about a coming demo and slip in a few provocative bits of ‘inside information’ about the fuzz wanting to ban it. You do the same to the other side — let’s say Islamic fundamentalists — and with a street map and a social sim you can develop a couple of wonderful scenarios by working out the critical points where the two streams of hotheads will collide in a seething maelstrom of aggression. It allows you to find the points where bringing the two sides together will produce the most violent result. You then announce the times and places on their websites and in their chat-rooms so that they all see them, but too late for one of the genuine organizers to scream, ‘Hey, that’s not something we planned.’
It’s all mathematical and very scientific. People become twitching colored splodges on a display before they become twitching red splodges on the asphalt. The great thing is that the social sims provide remarkably good information about where to set up your cameras to film the whole thing.
That is precisely what my friends from the management decided to do and they were very satisfied with the results. Their sensational footage of a mini civil war in our country immediately propelled their station to the top of the European TV league. And this time the pictures were authentic. Not doctored, not tampered with, not manipulated. The effect was genuine, though the cause wasn’t. We’d reached the next stage of the manipulation of news. The disturbances had been brought about by tiny alterations to some fanatics’ information network. A small cause which produced a huge effect. We hadn’t simply applied a light to a powder keg, we had thought up the incidents, worked them out in advance. We had shaped an event. I’m not sure, but I’m probably the first event designer in the history of the modern media. At least the first to call himself that.
Do I feel guilty because people died? There were four, though the social sim had estimated the number at twenty. No, I do not feel guilty. We just gave them the time and place. What they made of it was their affair. They could always have stayed at home and watched the show on TV.
Opposing gangs of hackers turn computer networks into virtual battlefields
It seems certain that the train collisions in Hannover and Stuttgart as well as the plane crash in Dortmund and the collapse of the power supply system in the Ruhr are the direct result of the activities of German hacker groups. According to an eighteen-year-old student arrested in Duesseldorf yesterday, there is at the moment a bitter power struggle going on between rival groups involved in computer crime. Unconfirmed reports from inside the hacking scene suggest there is a new trend: using hacker attacks to set off disasters in which opponents are eliminated not only at the computer, but in person. A spokesman from the Federal Criminal Investigation Agency described such speculation as pure panic-mongering …
My first success had at least demonstrated the enormous potential of designer events. The basic principle was simple: a small, extremely inconspicuous cause producing the greatest possible effect. The important thing for my paymasters was to know the when and where so they had a head start in reporting these effects.
The game had a whole host of variations. Some months before a project was carried out warnings were placed in current affairs programs of the danger of this or that group that was being set up or restructured: militant opponents of genetic engineering who preferred Molotov cocktails to arguments; sects trying to buy up small towns and clashing with the inhabitants; gangs of youths and children engaged in bitter struggles for territory; animal rights extremists who wanted to liberate infected laboratory animals. Things almost always turned out the way the journalists had warned months previously.
The problem was that my paymasters, for all their initial hesitation, were soon straining at the leash. The wanted more and more projects, they demanded I ‘think big’ and they offered me immense sums of money.
Young, stupid and vain as I was, I went along with them. At a further meeting in the old monastery I gave a presentation of my latest project. Again they had large glasses of wine in their hands. This time it looked like blood.
We called it Project 38.
How much attention have you been paying? If you’ve been listening properly you already know what Project 38 is. Don’t you?
Thirty-eight pixels. That’s all. Thirty-eight pixels. A tiny cause. I took the money and did it. But the feeling wasn’t what I’d expected.
Another night of heavy bombing in El Herain
As on previous nights, the city of El Herain was once more subjected to heavy air raids yesterday. According to the US, the attacks were directed solely at military targets. However, the fact that the stream of refugees heading for the southern frontier has almost doubled every day suggests that is not the case.
As was revealed only today, on Wednesday night US helicopters fired on a convoy of refugees which in the dark was erroneously taken for a military transport. According to American sources there were around twenty-five dead; local Islamic groups put the numbers at several hundred …
You can’t hack into the connection between a satellite and the earth station. To that extent the system is safe from attack. But the data’s not evaluated straight off the dish, it’s sent on more or less unexamined. Along supposedly secure cables, with supposedly secure encryption. Their image analysts are in a quite different place. If you know where and if you’ve cracked the encryption method, you can cut in and change the images.
Even a good hacker couldn’t manage that. Not with the technology available to him. But I had two mainframes working for me alone. The latest encryption and decryption technology. And I did the thirty-eight pixels for them.
CNN gained its leading position through its reporting on the Iraq war. That was what my paymasters wanted. All they needed was a suitable war. And I put together a suitable cause for it.
Thirty-eight pixels.
No more than that.
They’d done a deal with the military dictatorship of El Herain. If there were to be a military conflict, our journalists would be allowed to stay in the country and continue reporting unhindered. When the evil dictator signed the contract he could have had no idea that war would break out only a few months later. But he stuck by the contract, not least because there was a juicy sum in it for him and the rent for large villas in countries with no extradition treaties aren’t exactly low. So some top reporters became embedded journalists, but not with the Americans, where all the big agencies had people. No, this special group worked among the ranks of the enemy and for the first time showed the world the bad boys’ perspective. To be honest, I would never have thought they would find anyone stupid enough to run away from US elite units holding a camera. But my paymasters found almost a couple of dozen such lunatics.
The pictures were fantastic. Among other things was a convoy of refugees American helicopters had torched. But there was still enough to be seen. The charred bodies. These weren’t fanatical idiots like the Nazis or the 2015 Jihad people or those moronic pseudo-hackers. They were old men, women and children. Now little more than lumps of cinder.
Just pixels. It’s just pixels on my TV.
For five minutes I tried to persuade myself of that, then I spewed up over my keyboard and spent the next twenty hours sobbing and trembling. Too bad I hadn’t realized I had a conscience. And it wasn’t exactly gentle in the way it announced its presence.
Two days later I donated almost all my money to some aid organizations. I would have loved to donate my guilt as well, but they let me keep that. That and the knowledge that I was the first man ever to have set off a war all on his own.
I think they’re still looking for the weapons of mass destruction that never existed.
Are you wondering what kind of weed the dead old bag of bones in front of you must have been smoking to come up with an ego-trip like this? Or have you taken the next step and started asking yourself what all this has to do with you?
The fact is, I’m dead and you’re here. The question is, what are we going to do about it?
Let me put it this way. I’m a pigheaded guy, so pigheaded that I refuse to let even my death stop me from setting things up.
Have you been reading the papers in the last few weeks? The tension between China and Taiwan has been mounting, mounting so much that American and Russian aircraft carriers are worryingly close to Taiwan. Not too close, of course. No, I’m not trying to tell you I had a hand in that. It’s nothing to do with me. It’s something quite different I’m after.
People have become accustomed to this kind of situation. Conflicts like this keep cropping up, though the last war was almost ninety years ago. This generation has no idea how quickly these things can escalate. But I’ve spent most of the last few years working on my models and simulations. I’ve done a simulation of this conflict among others and in recent months it’s turned up a few pretty nasty scenarios. Let me put it in one word:
Boom.
Perhaps my simulations are wrong. Perhaps they’re not working correctly because they’re trying to extrapolate the behavior of completely different cultures and societies in a conflict situation. The data they’re based on goes back to the Second World War and lesser military crises of recent years. But if they are right, I wouldn’t be surprised if the lights don’t go out all over the world soon.
If we want to stop them getting at each other’s throats we’ll need to think up something pretty special. Something to divert their attention away from each other. Even better would be something to compel them to collaborate instead of wasting their time on their petty disagreements.
It must be something large-scale and very frightening. Something that scares them shitless and throws them into each other’s arms.
Shall I tell you something? I’ve got an idea. Actually it’s not even one of my own, but I think I’m the first and only person who could put it into practice. If it wasn’t for this thing behind my right eye. A side effect of my life’s work, so to speak. The tumor’s done done a good job and killed me.
Which means someone else will have to do it.
Someone who’s good enough.
Someone who’s like me.
Someone who is me.
You.
Now you’re wondering what the old bag of bones wants you to do? The faceless stranger with whom you spent whole nights talking about philosophy, politics, physics, pornography and real-time strategy games. Who gave you tips about hacking. With whom you’ve absolutely no connection apart from words exchanged via a monitor.
At least we have one thing in common. We’re passionate about games.
I could never accept that I had only one life in this great game. And such a limited one as well. No, I wanted the full version, I wanted to be able to start again from the beginning as soon as the big ‘Game Over’ appears. I was young and I thought no end of myself; I thought I was a kind of god and I had enough money. My paymasters had good connections and were ready to grant my every wish, no matter how out-of-the-way it was.
All I had to do was jerk off into the beaker. The rest was done by some biotechnology freaks. Finding a surrogate mother was no problem.
How is she, by the way? Have you heard from her lately?
No, to be honest I’m not really interested.
Perhaps you still haven’t got the message? No, I very much doubt that. You have my analytical talent, in fact the map of our brains is identical: you’re my clone. A copy of me.
I’m the ‘Game Over,’ you’re the ‘Restart’.
You have doubts about my story? Have a good look at me. Not my double chin or gray beard. Don’t you recognize my eyes? They’re the same eyes that look at you every morning out of the mirror. Gray-blue. And there are more similarities, aren’t there? Our hands, our faces, our physique, our tendency to corpulence. Are you still resisting? You’ll lose out in the long run, believe me.
And if outward appearances don’t convince you, then perhaps our inner similarities will. Our intellect, our tendency to withdraw into ourselves. Our fear of open spaces, which has made you as isolated as me over the last few years. And our shared predilections.
You are me. Only twenty-eight years younger.
The disease, you say? What about the disease? When I was born no one even knew there was a gene that caused my illness, never mind looking for it beforehand. But in the year before you were born, they found a way of eliminating the bad gene. Only then were you possible.
You don’t need to call me Pop. I’m more like a long lost twin brother.
But that’s enough family nostalgia.
You have two minutes from now to make up your mind. If you press ‘enter’ you will have access to all my software and all the information about my project. Let’s just call it Project 39.
If you don’t press it, all the data will be deleted, all the disks reformatted and all my knowledge will be lost. You’ll leave the future to chance — at least that will save you from an immense responsibility. It’s not a bad alternative, though I’d have chosen the other one.
Of course, the fact that you are a copy of me doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll act like me.
Perhaps I should express my regret that we never met personally? I haven’t because it would be a lie. Things have taken the course I foresaw. You are here, therefore I am dead. I don’t need to add that I’m not a hundred percent happy with that.
Let’s leave it at this: I wish you all the best with the choice you make.
Make more of it than I did.
PRESS ENTER
ESA confirms reports of an object beyond the orbit of Pluto
At a press conference yesterday the European Space Agency announced that American, Russian and Chinese observation satellites as well as space telescopes had located an object beyond the orbit of Pluto which emits strong energy pulses in the x-ray range. Suggestions by experts that the pulses had the character of signals have since been confirmed, though this fact should not automatically be taken to mean the craft is controlled by intelligent beings.
Russian astrophysicists have gone so far as to claim their space telescopes have detected, in the optical spectrum of the object, indications of processes which suggest an emission of plasma consistent with a power module.
Despite the tense political situation there is at the moment an active exchange of information between Russian, Chinese, American and other international experts. Even the faint possibility of first contact with an alien life form renders any earthly conflict insignificant, the US Secretary of State declared, a response which the Chinese leadership endorsed …
Just pixels. They’re just pixels.
Thorsten Küper, also known under his Second Life alias Kueperpunk Korhonen, was born in Herne in 1969. He is a physicist, writer, blogger and citizen of virtual worlds. He has published stories about virtual reality, surveillance, media and technology in magazines such as c’t, Gee, Exodus or Nova and various anthologies. He has also written numerous satiric short texts that he likes to perform live as well as articles about science, virtual reality and art, among others in Telepolis. Together with his wife Kirsten Riehl aka Zauselina Rieko he is well-known for organizing literary events in the virtual world of Second Life. His first story collection Belichtungszeit was published in 2023 by the Cutting Edge imprint of InterNova’s host publisher p.machinery.