Account of the Lumberyard by responding officer Luciano Moretti

    After 3 months of the BlackNet rebellion, the world’s economy had been significantly affected. The United Nations pooled together resources to create an army that would infiltrate the barren United States and locate the leaders of BlackNet using analog techniques. My name is Luciano Moretti, and I’m an expert tracker from Naples, Italy. We deployed into Washington DC on a cargo ship with vehicles, weapons, and supplies. We broke up into 50 groups of about 50 men each and each searched one of the states. I was assigned to Virginia which was considered by most to be the most likely place to find Lothian and his lair. I started at the prison he had escaped from and let my platoon outward in a circle from there.
    “Sir! take a look at this!” one of my men called to me. In the thick of the woods was a large lumber warehouse. We found a secret entrance in the floor and eased our way in quietly.
    The smell was overbearing. The room was lit by about 200 computer screens and nothing else. We located the main room and found a man dead with a deep knife wound. Across the room was Lothian. He was soaking in a pool of his own blood with wrists slit vertically from the wrist to the elbow. Two women cowered in the corner of the room. They were malnourished and terrified. I raised my gun to them and told them to stand and move to the middle of the room. They did as I instructed and told their story. They were simply prisoners of Lothian’s. He had gone insane just days into the rebellion and began behaving erratically and violently. I searched the bodies and came across a small, analog tape recorder on the man with the knife wound. Inside it I found detailed accounts of how this act of terrorism was carried out.

August 14, 2042

A summary of casualties from the weeks following the BlackNet rebellion of 2042:

1 highly ranked member of BlackNet killed by knife wound in their HQ.
14 guards and 33 prisoners die in the Fairfax prison the night Travis Lothian escaped.
21 Highly Trained military personnel die revisiting the mountain cabin where Travis was originally captured. It had been rigged with explosives.
453 reports of suicides from across the country in the hours immediately after the shutdown.
Over 3,000 dead across the country from lack of medical necessities such as medicine, ventilators, etc.
4,000 dead in riot related casualties such as looting and panic.
346 people die in 8 separate plane crashes resulting directly from inability to access in-flight technology.

    Travis Lothian sits in his lair cleaning his fingernails with a hunting knife his father gave him. Next to him are two young girls. Looking detached like they were under water. I walk in to update him on the progress of sustaining control of the internet.
    “Travis, we still have control of the main servers, but we are sensing the interference. They have the best scientists in the world working agains----” He cut me off.
    “Which one of these girls would you rather fuck?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “You heard me. Which one of these girls would you rather fuck?”
    I looked at them with my hands up as though to say “I’m sorry”. He was tweaking. His eyes were red and he looked awful. I recognized one of the girls as the waitress from Wild Ginger a few weeks before. The one with the pigeon tattoo.
    “I don’t think they appreciate us speaking about them that way.”
The next thing I knew I heard the girls scream and I felt warm blood running down my thighs and Travis’ breath in my face.
    “Thanks for helping me take over the world,” he whispered. “Your services are no longer needed.”

http://philospiders.blogspot.com/2012/10/summer-and-spring-east-and-west.html

June 22nd, 2042

June 22nd, 2042:

It’d been over three years since Travis was taken. Three years since we posted anything. Three years since we’d found the document that got our leader jailed. The stories never made the papers, but the bombings also didn’t happen. We may have been invisible to the public, but in private we were working. We were discovering new ways to secure the internet that were revolutionary even to us. We’d learned about taking down servers and disabling connections. We learned, in essence, how to privatize the internet with no one’s authority. We knew what our next move would be.

         Travis was in an isolated cell in a federal prison in Fairfax, VA outside of DC. We’d been able to communicate the exact time and date on which we would disarm the locks, shut off the lights, and give him the chance to escape. June 23rd, 2042. 10:15 p.m. The plan was for a few BlackNet officers to wait for him a half mile south car that would drive about 12 miles west to where one of our junior members lived. He would have access to a lumber warehouse. Underneath it was a dug out area stocked with water, food rations, and a server. We’d even sent some books to help keep everyone sane. I’d sent Travis my personal copy of Resurrection Man. The warehouse would serve as a functioning headquarters. No one would be able to come after us anyway because at 10:15 on June 23rd, 2042 we would completely disable the government and private sector’s access to the internet. Tracking devices would become paperweights unless BlackNet enabled them. We were going to be in sole possession of the most powerful technology in the world.

June 23rd, 2042
10:12 p.m.: I turn on music to ease the tension. One of my dad’s favorite old records by LCD Soundsystem. “New York, I love you, but you’re bringing me down...” starts to play. I can’t help but switch it up in my mind. “New York, I love you, but I’m bringing you down.”
10:15 p.m.: Power grid disabled.
10:16 p.m.: Federal servers infiltrated and wiped.
10:16 p.m.: civilian internet seized.
10:16 p.m.: GPS technology shutdown.
10:17 p.m.: Banks, Hospitals, Credit Card Companies, Airlines disabled.
10:27 p.m.: Travis Lothian reaches rendezvous and heads toward Lumber Warehouse.
10:33 p.m.: Message from Travis Lothian received by New York Headquarters “Good work Blacknet.”
10:45 p.m.: white male 24 years old climbs to the top of the statue in Columbus Circle and does a back flip off it. His friends say he thinks he is dreaming.

March 17th, 2039

       

2

   

           My name is (redacted) and I’m a member of an internet society known as BlackNet. The group was formed in 2022 when I was 12 years old. I registered my account in 2017 as a “Plebeian”, the lowest level user. Now at 29, I’m one of 300 Elite Officers who represent the second tier of authority. We began, innocently enough, as a prank group. We liked to highjack cooperate contests that asked for consumer participation. Coca-Cola asked users to select an artist to design the new logo to be featured on the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Havana, Cuba. The group was able to accrue 79% of the vote for little Bailey Bradley, the 2 year old son of one of our Elite Members who does the cutest finger paintings. The Wall Street Journal published an article called "The Youth of Our Country and Their Increased Monetary Awareness" which we linked here to this 27 year old blog. Once for an entire month we hacked into Fox News’ server every morning at 7 a.m and changed all the images to .gifs of kitties doing something silly. We left the text perfectly intact.
           My personal favorite is when we released a search history to the media of Senator Willard Thomson (R- South Carolina) after giving a haunting and condemning hate speech to the Senate asking for the repeal of gay marriage which had passed in 2014. Several party, family, and church members were shocked just to read the words “straight guys sucking cock” in print.
           It all started out in good fun but, a few years into it, things got more serious. BlackNet became a voice for those who had none. We felt we had the unique opportunity to empower the common citizen. We started releasing financial documents in 2030. It was mostly stuff that was supposed to be public record anyway but somehow got “lost” or “destroyed” when requested. We were nerds, hackers, security experts, ex-military, comedians, chefs, public servants, teachers and students. For years we remained a thorn in the government’s side, but there was no real way to make us stop what we were doing; until February 2029 when we officially became listed as a terrorist organization.
           Our Hacking and Security Breaching Team, which had grown 10 fold in both talent and numbers over the last 8 years, had discovered something that changed the entire landscape and made our mission clearer than ever. I’m sure there were members of BlackNet who wished they’d never seen what they did, but once it had been found we had no choice but to release it.
           A secret document written from the US Defense Secretary to the President explicitly outlined a plan to purchase and develop trillions of dollars worth of nuclear explosives. The order was pretty standard based on the ones we’d monitored before, but the usage notes for this one were disturbing. The highly secret plan was to drop a Uranium bomb on Telaviv, Israel, and smaller bombs on the outlying parts of the nation. It was to be done in mock Palestinian air crafts in utter secrecy. It was the United States government’s version of conflict resolution. Blow up your ally, make it look like your enemies fault and you’re able to seize funding the war. The letter also described in detail how they would pin the attacks on a Palestinian group whom the US already held in custody.
           Our leader, Travis Lothian, who founded the group, was to travel to our secret headquarters in the mountains outside Denver to release this information to every news outlet source possible. The rest of our higher ups including 22 in the New York City area were to remain stationed and in contact by email. I’d received an email at 9:55 p.m that Travis had released the information to our own site and sister sites.  9:57- The New York Times. 9:58- CNN and FOX. 10:00- BBC. We’d remained in group chat reflecting on the magnitude of what we had just done. Around 10:23 Travis abruptly signed off. After that we all just sort of sat. We knew what had happened. The house had been stormed and he'd been taken off in a Gov Hov. So we did the only thing we could do. We crawled into the earth and disappeared. We'd make them think they'd won this war, and we'd strike them when they least expected it.

Chapter 1: June 23rd, 2042

Note to archivist: This information was found on a POD personal storage device in the rubble of a demolished apartment building in Long Island City, Brooklyn on July 9^th, 2087.

1

June 23^rd, 2042:  I had decided to take the day off from my restaurant job as a sous chef to enjoy my favorite things about the city. I walked down the Long Island Expressway into Brooklyn and stopped at Sweetleaf for a cup of coffee. I sipped on my iced coffee which was sweating worse than I was. I stopped at PS1 where the guard told me I couldn’t have my drink. I looked him in the eyes as I gulped it down and threw it in the trash. Inside the museum, photos of naked women with frightened looks stared at me, and I felt unmoved. Various electronic art installations hummed and flashed blue frames on the walls.

            I walked through Bushwick, Greenpoint, and into Williamsburg which was now nothing more than a Manhattan-esque commercial center that tourists felt brave for visiting. I still loved Bedford Ave. despite the fact that families from Kansas, Nebraska, and Bum-Fuck wherever else liked to stare at kids with tattoos, partially shaved heads and backless shirts like they were in a zoo. The kids never stared back or acknowledged that the families existed.

            I went into my favorite restaurant, Wild Ginger, a vegan pan-Asian place that had the best gyoza I’d ever tasted. I couldn’t help but notice my waitress and wonder if she was smiling at me for her job or because she wanted to. She looked like the kind of girl who only did exactly what she wanted to. She had wide hips, wild brown hair that lay on her back in loose curls. She was wearing big glasses and had a tattoo of a pigeon on the inside of her arm. I didn’t stare, but I smiled for what felt like the first time all day.

            It was important for me to keep my wits about me today. The sun was setting now and in less than 6 hours BlackNet was going to open up a prison where our founder was being detained and seize complete control of the internet from the government.