The doors in Inspector Gadget opening.

The doors in MST3K opening.

Have you seen Jurassic Park. The girl hacking a system that never existed, a 3-D environment built so that the movies might stiffly swoop through.

The girl: I know this! I know this!

We gathered up our zero days, our lost boys, the boys of the Aviary.

And we kicked the door in.

Security is a feeling.

We see from your face that you don’t feel secure.

Rachel, we will describe what we are doing so that you feel safe.

All the drilling is done. The three holes in your skull are done. A neat row, forehead to crown.

There’s some bleeding, we’re sorry, relax your face, the extreme and constant movement of the muscles of your face keeps wiggling the sweat-band off. And then blood gets in your eyes.

Aqua regia, the juice of kings.

Aqua regia, nitric acid and hydrochloric acid, in a molar ratio of 1:3. We will dropper that into you, right into the holes we’ve made in your skull, and damage your brain, so the damage can be routed around.

Here comes a little droppy droppy droppy.

Now see you moved.

You can’t move.

You don’t want this in your eyes.

If you are waiting to be saved, all your friends are dead, we must tell you that. Once we dropped the cars into the chute it was quite a simple matter to dispense with the soldiers.

We would have brought more down, we would have spoken with them as we are speaking to you now, but they all died.

Two trucks in the pit, and the one above, we blew it up.

The universe wants us dead, all of humanity, it is quite a small matter to help a human animal accede to the will of the universe.

To give them a little boost.

We can’t see the system. No one can. Politics, economics. The global nodes, the connection, the roar.

Did you see The Matrix. The underside of the cubicles, one of the first systems shots in The Matrix, the screws revealed, the prefab holes, the uniform screws, it can be taken apart and put back together, no problem, it’s in this configuration now, but that can change, within certain very precise limits.

The cubicles, the ceilings have descended, the modular desks, the cubicle systems, we have assembled these, these desks and cubes, we put them together once, long ago. Hauled the parts and made a system.

Ceilings are systems moments, so are cubicles, and the grill of the truck that strikes the phone booth, that’s one too, these are systems moments, but they are not the system.

We cannot understand the system of the world, we cannot understand the system of even a single human animal.

The suffering of the people. The peace that is found in a single life, and the suffering.

We come into this world sucking some order from the chaos.

Hum hum hum.

Each human, the totality of humans at any given moment, the human and nonhuman animals who have lived on this planet since our time began, our solar system, our galaxy, all of it sucking a little order from the chaos for a little while.

Four billion unique IPs in the IPv4 address space, they thought it was nearly infinite, and so soon they were running out.

We suck order from the chaos, more and more, we wrap our lips around the tailpipe and we suck, and one day the chaos says no, stop it, no more, this is too much, you can’t do it anymore, you can’t have your order anymore.

Of course you can’t.

You can pull on that rubber band, make it some shape, make it all the shapes you could dream of, that you’ve been trained to dream of, but one day it snaps.

We humans weren’t more than a moment, not more than a blip in the cosmos, then back to entropy, and isn’t that fine, and how nice that we should be present for all of this winding down, and witness, and be glad, as it snaps, or simply loosens and turns to a loose pudding with a taste that has no information in it.

We are the Aviary.

We contain many.

But so do you.

The lost boys, they brought us a harvest of zero days.

Lost boys with Kali Rolling, seeing what could be penetrated, systematically testing the barriers. Did you see Jurassic Park. Like velociraptors, hunting in packs, testing the fences for weaknesses, scanning ports, clever girl. The lost boys and Kali Rolling and money and blackmarkets and secrets and time.

Sebastian, he brought the BIND backdoor.

He never said he was quite one of us, one of the lost boys, but he wrote what we’d become, and he was our love. And he told us about the backdoor, but then he wouldn’t give it to us.

He said that he couldn’t be with us in love and also be in the Aviary, if he gave it over it meant it was the end. He said, I can’t explain, but I can’t give you that. If I do, it’s the end of us.

But we were already planning. We thought: We can have Sebastian, and the backdoor, too.

We thought: If you want to poison as much internet as possible, look for BIND servers in an autonomous system. If you’re not an autonomous system you’re more likely to rely on upstream.

Start with a thousand BIND servers in a thousand autonomous systems spread out through all the top-level domains, include the rinky-dink country code TLDs.

Set up hundreds of simple web servers connecting to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, set up fake user accounts with providers that connect to their infrastructure and spin up or tear down servers whenever you want, you can do it in minutes at a massive scale.

You control domain servers, poison ones you don’t like, and since it’s a zero day, there won’t be a malware warning.

If you have a backdoor in BIND, you can do it, sure you can.

They think they’re at CNN.com, they go to a site that looks like the error page or it mirrors CNN, but they’re served a web page that is designed to trip an exploit in IE or Chrome or Firefox, in OS or Android or Windows 10, Windows 9, Windows 7, Windows XP. You’d need a harvest of zero days, and we did have a harvest of zero days, but it is ultimately only a handful of operating systems that are 90 percent of users.

Our lost boys brought us zero days. Or we bought them with the money from the blockchain heist.

It came from Sebastian, from his backdoor to BIND, after the end of us. It came from zero days we bought, and other zero days that came to us through our network of lost boys, all the lost boys of the Aviary.

We left a final Pastebin post, it has all our plans, our plans for the next phase, for the internet of birds, the networks we still have in place, the new world after the world.

Selves were hurt, boys were hurt, and now here we are.

Will you be a lost boy with us.

We would give you the password, Rachel, but we don’t trust you yet, we don’t trust that you understand. How can we make you understand. How can we. Another droppy droppy. The password is quite simple, but it is also very complex. It’s one of those things.

Maybe we contain more for now, the boys, the lost boys of the Aviary.

Selves were hurt, boys were hurt, and now here we are.

We are building the internet of birds for them, so that all of that can be registered in the system before it dissipates.

If that’s what the birds want.

But why were the boys hurt in the first place. Well, that’s not a question we can answer.

Our father would come and visit us, my mother would let him in, let him come to our bedroom, as a little boy. A dark suit and low-hanging red tie, our father.

Our mother …

Our mom was a smol burb.

The system shattered, the teacup broken, it always runs that way, disorder of waste energy always outstripping the order we create, but we try, don’t we, to make a system, when there’s no real system, there are just nodes of cruelty and control, and hate, and yes, and love. We did love Sebastian.

There was that father. Who was he.

Here come some soldiers. They’re on the screen, they see the dead there. Maybe they were their friends. They are using things on the front door to blow it open. That is fine. They have found us. That is fine.

There are so many. They are taking three routes. Only one gets here, and only after some branchings.

We are sick. We are filled up with cancer. We knew that there would be others, many, who might make their way here, to our door, to the little shack. That people would be seized by an impulse they would not understand and they would make their way to us.

We had prepared several bays, it might have been you and some soldiers bound up in tape and chains, but the soldiers all died. We only need one, now you will be us.

We would have brought the soldiers in, but they resisted in such a way that the only way to keep you was to give them a boost.

All the unresting thoughts of humanity stuffed in our skull, and even we can’t see the system. Even we can’t see even a single person, not really.

No one can.

But you can help us. You can help the remnant remember what we can and can’t know about the system.

If Postel had succeeded that day, if the root authority test had turned out differently, maybe history would have changed, have opened into something new.

We have only so much time before more are sent, or before they get here.

We are deep in the mansion and we know that they are coming, even now, but we know they won’t find us, no not for a long time, not unless it’s what we want.

A little shack from above, but from below a mansion built underground at great expense.

There are turns and false ends and secret passageways, a whole underground Winchester House, mirrored and turned upside down, algorithmically elaborating itself over the months, no expense spared, we are deep here in the burrowing heart of the mansion, but it is where no heart’s expected, no heart anyone would look for.

Or it is not a heart, a vast underground mansion, no heart to speak of, there are just messages moving, or waiting to be sent, in a series of rooms and traps.

A whole lot of information waiting to be transmitted into bodies. Mostly to give them a boost.

Yes, we had a three-dimensional map made of the Winchester Mystery House, we mirrored it and iterated it, feedback loops, spontaneous breakdowns, growth, damage and growth.

Lights still on, juice drawn up from the earth, the unremitting earth, electricity sucked directly from the earth, and from all the creatures under, the worms and moles and monocellular life, we can suck it from the bones of boys, from the bones of dead boys and posthuman animals, oh yes, it has long been possible, as Tesla proved.

Tesla proved it, and Morgan wanted to know: If anyone can draw on the power, where do we put the meter.

And Morgan destroyed Tesla.

A Morgan is always looking for a Tesla, to destroy him.

There are bones of boys, there’s that, too.

When new soldiers come, as they must, there’s lots of rooms for them to die in along the way, lots of electricity to power the ways to make them die along the way, to give them that little boost.

The knife room and the lime pit and the room where the oxygen gets pumped out.

So there is time for us to talk, time to do this work, this necessary work, and at the end, you and however many others who join us here will be free to go, and you can return to the world and lead the people, the remnant of the people, and the birds, you can lead the remnant of the birds, or they can lead you, or you can enter into some kind of reciprocal relationship, a sort of grace.

We will damage your brains, and make your brains better.

We’ve started our recorder, we have a backup, we want you to know and remember everything that we say.

We’ll just wrap your head in our left arm so you stay still.

You are resisting in your tape, and in your chains, like a fish.

Do you think that you are a fish now.

Oh my dear, look at how you wriggle, do you think you are a wriggling little fish. If you are a fish, you are a fish with a brain that’s stuck, and the brain needs to be rebooted.

A little damage to the brain to make it stronger.

Here comes the droppy droppy droppy.

Shush now. Let it happen.

There. That wasn’t so bad.

DNS is totalizing: an addressing system for all things.

Totalizing systems give way, they first accrue as much order to themselves as possible, and then they glitch out, they fail, they lose pieces.

A man in a suit. A rich man, a powerful man.

Our father would make his hand into a claw, draw it in swooping circles above our thigh or stomach or neck, he would say, Here comes the chicken hawk.

In his car, or limo, in the back of his limo, as he drove us to school, or had us driven, the morning after he’d flown in and got in under the sheets with us.

Who was our father.

Trump, we think it was Trump, it must have been Trump.

Wasn’t it Trump.

It was a man who came. Why wouldn’t it have been Trump.

He would say, You know what the chicken hawk does when it sees a chicken.

Then the hand would swoop down, and the fingers would dig like lightning into our thigh or stomach or our neck.

He strikes.

The chicken hawk.

We would be laughing, we couldn’t help laughing, our whole body lit up and tensed with it, but we laughed.

Who was our father, who was he.

And his hand would be moving, digging in, exploring the texture of the muscle beneath our skin, and he’d just be watching, watching the work of his hand, of our body, as our body shook.

We’d clench our muscles, all of the muscles of our body, and hold so still.

And still we shook.

We were so shook.

Don’t they understand for everything there is a cost, there is a debt that accrues. To them and to the ones they’ve touched. They understand. Don’t they understand.

Maybe they don’t understand it, but there is.

Maybe they don’t understand because they don’t have to.

Maybe they just do their thing—they work their need—and then they’re gone, and the debt is what they’ve left us.

Totalizing fathers, they give way, they glitch out.

Hum hum hum.

They’ve left us a debt.

Do you remember the emperor in Star Wars. How energy shot from his hands, how much pain it made in Luke.

And how his father saved him after a struggle. But where was our father to save us, where was our father, he was the one hurting us, watching with a mystified look as his hands did their work.

And where was our mother.

There was a billboard outside the San Francisco airport that said Write Code. Save Lives.

It was for Taser, trying to entice programmers to Scottsdale, Arizona, to code for them.

Write code. Save lives.

We were driving Sebastian from the airport when we saw it.

Have we told you about Sebastian.

Have we told you about the birds. Have we told you how we’re building an internet of birds, we mean, for the birds, for whatever they want from their internet.

Look at all the birds.

We don’t think they’ll be okay.

Hum hum hum.

The birds on the floor who won’t get up might not be okay.

Once we had birds in our pockets.

The day we drove out and showed him the holes. Have we mentioned the holes.

We showed Sebastian the holes we dug out there in that remote public land.

He was puzzled but he was going with it, he had a bemused interest, he was going with it. He said it’s okay, it’s okay.

He said You know, those could be dangerous. Some hiker or a child could fall in and get hurt. You may not want to leave big holes in a public park indefinitely.

We were glad we were out in the dark, we didn’t say anything, but we felt a rage at him, and he stopped talking, and we knew he could feel it too. We walked back to the car in silence. And we said, You know, the cocaine you love very much, the cocaine, that’s what’s causing the pressure on the loneliest man. The narcos are literally killing the indigenous people so you can have that stuff.

We said, You talk politics, and yet you fear it.

Think of the fear of politics, think of the Gates Foundation, we said. They stay away from politics and shame on them. That’s why we have Trump. The political can’t be quantified and measured directly, can’t break down human beings to numbers, so the Gates Foundation stays away from it.

Hum hum hum.

Trump, we think it was Trump, he would come down to our basement room, in his suit and tie, he would take his shoes off and climb into our little bed, it was some sort of man, that was our father, and he would just hold us, and stroke our hair, or he would goof around, he would touch our thighs, our stomach, kiss us, I’m just goofing around, he would say.

People say it wasn’t Trump, but maybe it was Trump.

We were digging and we fell in a hole and that was the end of Sebastian with us.

That hole, it’s getting crusted, the one in you, let’s open it back up and get a droppy droppy.