!My dear unknown inquisition,!<
!When this first transcript is uploaded, the interviews are already over. All subsequent posts in the series are already scheduled to upload automatically over time in a way that cannot be prevented even by me. Should this website be brought down, similar threads will appear on larger sources such as Reddit. And… roll with it, you bastards.!<
Curiosity appears to be the critical factor in the evolution of our species.
Curiosity is also the leading cause of pain, sorrow, and death - for individuals and perhaps for the species as a whole.
Imagine yourself as a professional journalist with a decade of experience. You are in the top one percent of those who made it in your field, but not in one percent of one percent. You are careful with the risks you take and prefer making powerful friends, not powerful enemies.
Why would you agree to interview someone who is, almost inevitably, either a scam artist or a sociopathic madman?
Perhaps because he reached out to you through an exceptionally credible and reliable source. A source with considerable political and financial power, who, despite all that power, was pressured into making the introduction. A source who is scared shitless.
Why would you not walk away five minutes in?
Perhaps it has to do with the things you have felt amiss in your society’s decision-making structure. Some institutions are visible and public; some actors are fragmented and chaotic, but certain events cannot be ascribed to either. Dark planets are found by observing the irregular motions of visible ones. A boogeyman-shaped shadow may just be a shadow, but you cannot NOT stare at it.
Why would you publish anonymously to a minuscule audience?
Perhaps because the instructions made sense in light of the content and ONLY in light of the content. It is impossible to reconcile one without another. Perhaps because the real audience is certain several people, and this is the guaranteed way to get on their radar.
Why would you care?
Perhaps you realize he is neither a scam artist nor a madman.
And then, there’s Barnard’s Star.
”
Sit down.
[..]
You are not. It will be long, and I want your focus. Now that you are here, do you even think you have any choice in the matter?
[..]
Careful you. Good, and don’t bother. You will get a recording and auto-transcribed text that you will cross-reference; the recording will then be destroyed, and the text will be processed. The processing will jiggle word and sentence order, switch some words for synonyms, replace some phrases with alternatives, add parasitic words, and such. This will scramble lexical signature and render the style generic, which is good. Some key terms and all names, dates, and numbers will remain as-is because those have been carefully designed to be full of shit. Or not. The processed text will be printed out for you. That is what you will leave with. You will then edit it as you please: no reviews necessary. We will repeat this several times. You will then publish the results in due time and manner, which will be explained later.
[..]
No. You will direct freely when the circumstances are made clear. You are not in any danger as long as you stay committed to your function. I am not making a threat, merely stating the fact. Within your function, I want you to feel complete agency over the way this conversation flows. This is not intended as a manifesto; else, you would not be here.
I found myself requiring the services of someone with enough brain and skill to shape the content the right way. This someone must be mediocre enough not to be in the obvious top hundred choices. There are also other constraints, such as integrity, readiness to take risks, and ability to conform where necessary. If you please, I wanted someone who WANTS to poke a bear but KNOWS how to keep their arm intact. Finally, I wanted someone who would not pretend to take everything I say for granted. Question me every step of the way and act like it.
Call me Mike. What do you call me?
[..]
I like the patience. You are not asking the questions you expect to be answered presently. Wunderbar. Some things I will share are not exactly common knowledge. Very few people know all these things combined - low double digits.
I expect your text to be read and noticed. I expect resources assigned to attempt to identify you and, ultimately, me. They will explore options where gray-haired Mike means bald and bearded Chen or curly Matilda. Or even actual grey-haired Mike who thinks he is being devious. And if it happens that the group of suspects includes curly Matilda and bald Chen, imagine the pleasure I will derive watching them run in circles claiming ignorance. And watch I will; hell, I might even be LEADING the investigation.
But you and me, we need a point of reference. In this regard, Mike works better than “codename X” because it provides room for speculation, and that room is made by my design.
There are multiple avenues of tracing things back to their source. I have even lectured on the subject for years - or have I? Some of your peers will receive payments not that different from yours to their bank accounts. Some others will have events in their life that can be considered a form of payment. The content is intentionally misleading, the format is scrambled, and the method for you to share the results with the world is anonymous and not traceable. You have noticed the unusual way this meeting has been organized. Each next meeting will happen similarly but uniquely.
There are exceptionally few people involved, and each has a limited function. Some of them are not even aware of their role or their involvement.
You will not break your anonymity unless you do something stupid. And you will not do something stupid. Every way that could happen has countermeasures in place. The same goes for our intermediary, who will not be a part of anything that follows.
There is danger. It’s not immediate, and it’s avoidable. The proverbial gun to your head is a nuke, and it’s too ridiculously overpowered to be scary.
I will now answer any questions you have about our rules of engagement.
[..][..][..]
Good. As a side bonus, we have established that I really am an arrogant, sick old fuck. At this moment, then, you’re in control of the flow. Let’s have it.
[..]
Other than sick fuck, you may also describe me as G-Man on the board of G-Man Directors.
In one of the classic toy soldier agencies, I would be Command Sergeant Major, Deputy Director, General, or some other meaningless combination of words.
I am one of the senior members in a certain outfit that was nicknamed Syndicate decades before me, and that stuck. I used to work the field and, on rare occasions, still do, but I have given this outfit my whole life, and as you may have guessed, I am now mostly the brain of things, not the legs.
Our outfit is an entirely public agency - of Healthcare Transportation, Agrarian Education, or Meteorology Development, take a pick or take them all. We deliver literally what the sign on the building says; the other 99 percent of our time and funding goes to solving problems in a space that is not publicly recognized to exist.
[..]
We stripped these words of their true meaning. Pop culture aliens, ghosts, and demons are not a thing: they are imaginary frenemies and punchbags for the collective human ego.
The real existential threats are not preventable by human efforts. We are not the dominant lifeform on this planet. Hell, we may not even be in the top ten. We are entirely powerless but luckily also entirely ignorant.
The house we live in we did not build; we are not its designers or residents. We are not even the pets of residents. We are not vermin. We are not vermin’s food.
We are the food of the vermin’s food. We are mold in the corner of the attic.
Our outfit does occasionally act to contain some fringe event. Still, even in those rare cases, we usually do cleaning, not policing.
But the core of our job is keeping the human species under the radar.
We prefer Lovecraft to imagine Necronomicon rather than find the material to actually write one.
We prefer naive idiots sending radiowaves every which way, which will deteriorate to noise in a couple of light-years. Instead of looking for other means of the long-range broadcast screaming “we are here.”
We prefer other idiots adapting AI for speech recognition and self-driving cars instead of fucking with AI the wrong way.
We can act on that in ways simple and mundane. In the media, a superhero uses his mind to throw things around. In reality, a minuscule offset in the enemy brain would do the job more discreetly and at a fraction of the cost. Proper leverage is founded on proper knowledge.
[..]
Our successes are, by definition, unknown to the public. Our critical failure would be apparent to everyone but for a very short time. Even our relative successes and failures are usually covered up. In these interviews, I will tell you about as many of them as you imagine to ask. From the top of my head, though, here’s one.
There was an event we labeled Pied Piper, which by our estimates, first arrived somewhere in the late 12th century. It was dormant for a long time, but in the early 20th, it went into a feeding frenzy. Several thousand people literally died of unstoppable need to laugh, scream, run, or convulse; we could not cover up all of them. It was highly contagious and even made its way to official public records.
The problem was two-fold: location and mechanics.
It took us a few decades to realize the thing is literally not here but orbits the Sun on the same trajectory as Earth, albeit at a different speed and opposite direction. Its orbit didn’t intersect ours every time, too. We understood that by mapping the date and time of reported effects: some came in pairs, like an entry and exit hole a bullet leaves in an apple. We then used the model to find events with no reports and went to check, and voila - confirmed. From that moment, we knew exactly where it would hit next and when and had cleanup teams on the ready.
No wonder that was not understood before us, when both celestial body mechanics and outburst notifications were a problem. The stable orbit gave us hope because it implied intelligence: smart enough to arrive and adjust to the shifting orbit of Earth. Hopefully not too smart, though.
The gentleman who figured it out deserved a Nobel Prize at least, and when the dust settled, we made sure he got it for something else, although his field was not even on the list at the time.
Mechanics were an issue because a thing that does not manifest physically cannot be interacted with physically; however, if something follows an orbit, then it does follow at least some physical laws. Thanks to our new knowledge of when and where we could now place some equipment to measure any deviations. That did not work at first; the thing passed through insanely fast. Thankfully, it was big - an eight-mile radius on our first reading, give or take. After some attempts, we finally found out the good news: we could measure its presence. The bad news was that we now confirmed it was growing.
So we shot it. It took years, and we ended up prematurely distributing nuclear weapon tech through the world, but persistent resulting EMPs did the job. No, we did not kill it, of course, but we ruined its appetite and made it shrink considerably. We were banking that it would not recognize intelligence in our behavior and would simply imply our apple spoiled. We had to hit every single time just to be safe. In the early seventies, it finally changed course. It wiggled for a while but finally committed to a new course, which we mapped to find the new destination. We were about to lose track of it from Earth, but certain measures were taken way ahead of time to resume tracking on arrival.
In the early nineties, it entered the orbit of Jupiter’s moon Europa and started adjusting to its orbit. Now, Jupiter has several moons, but we expected that exact target for… another reason. We took every measure to follow it and monitor things as close as we could. It took a couple of years to align completely, high speed opposite direction yet again, which was just another proof of not just intelligence but predator strategy. Then it finally connected and went inside Europa… and never emerged again. We are not sure if that’s a good thing.
Pied Piper was unique and hopefully will stay unique. That is the most common case, which leads us to the assumption that we are not in a shark den but rather in a shooting gallery, small enough not to be a target for the rest of the Pied Pipers.
By our assumptions - and I had worked on these models when I was young - were we not to predict it and persuade it to leave, we were looking at a civilization-ending event.
We managed to clean up most of the mess it did, but we royally fucked up in the ways our counter-measures cascaded. The congested information flow of the time helped the cover but impacted the speed of arriving at the solution, which means we had to rush and make mistakes.
[..]
Not at all. If anything, things have become much more manageable. Look at your most prized inventors real careful and tell me I am wrong. Look at the content the media offers for consumption. Look at the wild abundance of bullshit data that masks any credible report. The best way to mask any conspiracy is to make more of them, and you can thank me for the Flat Earth later.
What’s best of all is that today everything ends up reported fast. Such reports can be filtered with keyword search and user history analysis and easily drowned in the garbage when necessary.
To your Zoom remark, there is nothing out of the ordinary when a group of boring bureaucrats discusses the shortened life span of grain culture in Nebraska and the pest exterminator team to be assigned on the job. The words we use can take different meanings based on the context we share, and we are not even the ones who invented such doublespeak. We rarely use encryption because we rarely say things that need it.
Today, shit is hidden in plain sight, one blade of grass in the field.
[..]
Everything is global nowadays. If the federation of yoga is global, or Pikachu fan club is global, or Apple has offices in Shanghai, why not us?
Think of it as a network of outfits that at some point decided to work together. The merged Syndicate is not even that old - it started forming after the imbecile fuck up that was Ahnenerbe mid-20th century. We do not smoke cigars in dark rooms and do not control the world’s governments; we merely give things right nudges at the right moments. There is no secret undercover war, just careful pre-emptive castration of some ideas. And we are savvy about it, too.
[..]
No, definitely not the current one and definitely not the previous one. I would not let these muppets babysit my grandkids. Our network reaches the house and the Pentagon, but both are so full of holes that you can make colanders. And more importantly, neither is the place for actual decision-making. You must be a drooling simpleton to believe any intelligent power would reside in such obvious targets.
[..]
Ultimately, the stakeholders who can pull the budget in from elsewhere. Rarely actual billionaire investors; we stay away from these fucks because they treat everything like a business, and we are not. They want control, and they want a return of investment, and we neither obey nor return regularly. We sometimes obtain unique information. In rare cases, we even get our hands on something tangible. It always has the same utility to us as a microchip would have to a goldfish, but people kill for a spot on a waiting list to play with something of this type.
But we are not a factory producing either information or gadgets. This way, an auction is more fitting. The people allocating the money flows often act at their own risk but do not presume for a moment that they are all altruistic.
Of course, we have multiple layers of bullshit versions of our activities. We ourselves struggle to piece our findings into a cohesive scheme that makes sense to the human mind. For those on the outside, we invent something with structure and predictive capability because, frankly, that is what they need.
[..]
Well, which law are you talking about exactly? US, UN, EU? Look, the democratic politicians go through a revolving door and are mainly obsessed with prescribing oil embargoes and measuring cucumbers. Their scope of planning rarely goes above four-five years into the future. Dictators have a more extended planning horizon, sure, but most of them are simpletons. They are savvy, sure, but they are nothing but narrow-minded scum who killed their way to the throne. We work with all of them when we can or around them when we cannot, and sometimes we plow through, but even they do not obey the laws they prescribe for the general population.
The scope of issues we resolve far outspans any specific country, and sometimes the solution we design takes decades to implement.
So to some, we present as law-abiding bureaucrats with little power. To some, we present as ruthless, sadistic madmen who stop at nothing. But we mainly operate in the gap.
[..]
Tens of millions die each year, and if some of them die in noble sacrifice to save the countless billions, should we not praise that?
I’m just messing with you. We don’t see any sacrifice in death, just possible utility. We try not to overdo it, but there is no philosophy or justification other than the means to an end. An ultimate end justifies all ultimate means, of course, so why even play the silly moral game.
Don’t be hypocritic here; you only care for the lives of those you personally know. Two hundred thousand die each day; how many do you read about? You don’t even know their names. So don’t pretend to care.
[..]
Ah yes, of course; it’s the potential. If there is an entity that could kill YOU or those YOU love at any point, THEN you care. But even from that angle, we are far less deadly than a heart attack or diabetes.
Let’s have a ridiculous scenario: a real-life zombie situation. The moment of the first public bite, start a clock. Ten to thirty minutes later, we are aware and acting. Anywhere between fifteen minutes and two hours since the event, the situation is contained, one way or another. In that time, we check and choose the proper countermeasure, anywhere between a bullet to the head and a missile strike.
You surely would not like to be nuked, but if the zombie bite happens five states away or on another continent, would you feel any different? Would you kindly choose between the lives of the million people of Marrakesh and the lives of everyone else?
[..]
We do not deal with fairness, but you’re right: this is a classic choice we always provide. A choice you do not actually have to make because it has been made for you. We did not arrange for so many weapons of mass destruction to be built worldwide for something as stupid as a nuclear holocaust: a tiny fraction of them would suffice. We needed coverage: we want to be able to put the shoe down anywhere in the world within minutes, and if that happens, we are OK with the collateral. All the numbers have been run before you and even before me and found acceptable.
To completely answer your question about “any innocent man, woman, or child.” Yes, any number of them. And if the alternative to losing the whole of humanity is killing 99% of it, we will take it to save the few.
Death is not important. Life is important.
[..]
Sure, and would you blame us? Or, if you had to choose, would you prefer a surgeon over your kid? But to be completely frank, the choice is not really there even for us. We are talking about the ultimate scenario that must most likely be implemented instantly.
[..]
Yes, I do, and yes, I would. We are people, and we have families; otherwise, we would be easy to spot. But we avoid even a chance of an impossible choice for anyone. If I were not ready to do that, I would not be in charge of such calls.
Hard questions must always be answered in advance. And the truly hard questions are very practical and urgent; time cannot be wasted on contemplating all aspects of psychological dilemmas. Action must be pre-planned for anything we can imagine. A simple strategy must be pre-conceived for anything we cannot imagine. A ruthless and immediate strategy.
[..]
The reason is more simple than you may think.
You may have wondered about who the real audience is for this.
It’s not the common people looking to be entertained - the material is just sub-par compared to the carefully cooked bullshit they can get on Netflix. They have no power, anyway.
It’s not the rich and powerful decision-makers because they respond to different types of stimuli and receive actionable information by other means. And they have no power, as well.
The real audience is Syndicate, as many of us as possible. At the moment, the very few of our top rank are facing a case where our pre-conceived strategy is inadequate.
I believe it’s catastrophic. Unlike most cases, we have some time to make the call. We must not rush it because it will be irreversible.
I am in the minority.
This is not a battle I can win internally, so I am not even trying.
Imagine, however, a case where certain things are made known to the majority of Syndicate itself. Not to the Internet plankton, who much prefer romantic stories of sparkling vampires until they vomit popcorn. Not to the egomaniacs who are much too busy choosing where to wiggle their imaginary stock. Not to senile generals who care more about fishing than their daily paper shuffle, let alone actual responsibility. Not to president who cannot keep his shit together, whether on Twitter or purely physically.
No. To the people who are ruthless. To the people who can apply different types of pressure and who know the exact spots where to apply it.
An investigation of a leak of this magnitude is inevitably going to involve substantial resources. Not necessarily to contain it - it’s easily drowned in millions of other spooky stories. To identify the defector because his next steps are unpredictable.
This action is designed to get on the Syndicate’s radar. The inquisition that will follow will inevitably share information with the others - it is public access, after all. And we will bring up past cases many can relate to but will be surprised to find out more.
At some point, the majority of Syndicate will be aware of things currently restricted to its minority. And one thing in particular.
They will know to take it seriously. They will have no other option because they will find out about some secrets they know and some secrets they have never heard of. The confirmation is in the message itself; it cannot be faked.
They will know how to act. They will read my offer right here, between the lines.
We will talk about many things over the next sessions. But it will all come back to one key component.
Barnard’s Star.
”
[to be continued]