May A. Swartz be with You, Long ago, in the early years, some of the more wonderful years, he and I were close, we’d found each other one night on a surfing trip, I was pretty new, so I could barely stand up on the boards, I’d just fall, embarrassed, thinking perhaps I made a mistake in coming. He came along, swam along would be a better way of putting it, and, well, my heart stopped, not from cardiac arrest or anything, the look he gave me, it was a glance which could cause one to… pop out of mid sentence and into a favored daydream. He stood in the waist high water of the sand bar, and showed me how to stand, and where, and all the while I felt this energy coming off of him, maybe they were his good vibrations, or maybe it was a tension between us that needed to be released, and yes, I learned to tear up the waves very quickly, and, later, we learned to tear up the sheets even more quickly, once we were past that inevitable makeup session as the sun set over the waves as they rose and crashed over the sandbars, before fading into sine waves of rolling foam and a powerful undercurrent. Having grown up in these waters, we maneuvered around one another as though we were naturals, wild and free in their environment of the deep blue sea, I fell for him, and he for I, and night after night we snuck off into dunes and breakwaters where we lay in the foam of the waves, and became one. September reared its ginger head, it was time to return to University, the snowy winters were the darkest days in more than one light, we’d lost some of ourselves that winter, and he was lost, at least to me. The end of that year came, and the end of the next, and still he never showed up for class, or stopped by our place, or later that year show up at any of the beaches known for their waves, or the fields that were known for their beats. Graduating from University, and then starting work for The Macro Institute of Technology’s Savings and Loan, where, unbeknownst to us, a young activist had hidden a laptop someplace on our campus, with which he contributed information written by students for their classes to a wiki he wrote himself, and then creating an encyclopiea of these dissertations, well, that put a knot in someones jock strap, because that someone called the feds in, and made a whole thing out of it, pretty soon that activist was facing serious charges, and went.. As they say… out on the lamb, he ran for it, and, some portion of us do the very same? The company which stored the students papers agreed to drop charges, but the feds wanted to make the case, so they pressed the Macro Institute of Technology, who kept charges, and then he disappeared, this man of whom I knew. The only thing I could do to quench this loss was to send him an email, and why not? He was said to be either missing or dead, and so I wrote him an email, to apologize for what had gone wrong that summer, now so long ago. We were computer operators for the Savings and Loan, and part of our job was to run the mainframe from our desktops, but then, sometimes we needed to run a certain function on the old Unix IMF Mainframe, which ran AppOs Infotech Xiama, operating system, itself based on Berkely Unix, the system which our friend had always used, this message never appeared on the PCoIP Terminal, but whenever I’d been alone, late at night, running coding operations on the central mainframe, a message would appear, and I always wondered where it was from, or I should say from whom, the individual in question had tunneled through the Athens Information System CoOp, utilizing a DNS spoofing Algo common at the time, he was somehow always able to make the savings and loan mainframe accessible by the Athens Cluster, a feat our dear lenders vendors had said was impossible, and then outwards, it was a kind of knock knock neo, as the tape drive would make an error screatch, as it scanned the heads of the backup tapes, which was incredibly creepy working in the Savings and Loan Server room, with its plate steele doors, closed circuit CMOS sensors, floor sensors, motion sensors, the place was wired seven ways from sunday, and none of them, I had been assured, were done right, the battery backup system was leaking, the power dispersal units were overburdened, each of which having dozens of surge suppressers connected to them, and then Dwelt and Hamp servers plugged into those, and Snitches Switches, and netgear switches as well. Somewhere in the middle of this mess of wires, of old hard drives, of everything else, we had a vulnerability that was letting this person in, but who was it? What did he want? The message which came across the wire, as I decided to call it, was a steep one, they wanted one hundred million dollars to be wired to an island on a remote carribean nation which had banking secrecy laws that made Switzerland look like, well, like this Tech Credit Union… If this funds not sent, your friend, your favored friend, will find himself in the sholes, in the dead of winter. This could only mean one thing, that whomever I was speaking to knew exactly who I was, and he knew my weakest point, my love for him, and so, with that in mind, I emailed the person on the run, the person who was a fugitive, and missing, to tell him of my problem, and say hat I didn’t know what to do, and a message came back to me, the exact message I sent, but slightly different, and every time I sent back a question, there was one answer, and that answer was the key to decrypt that which had been injudiciously sent, utilizing this, produced a 7z file, and that 7z file created a directory, with a README file, and a file called encrypted.sh , if it was run, the situation would be resolved, and my friend would be okay, at the top of the runme.sh script, it said, no warranty, expressed or otherwise, no information within is deemed to be valid, and nothing will happen that you know of, #PDFTW. This file will self destruct, and leave no trace, the emails that were sent mean nothing without the thing you already knew, and he was right, I did know. And I had to trust that this was all true, despite the files warning that none of it was guaranteed to be true, as I hit enter, I realized I’d not checked the syntax of that which was written, of that which was run, and with that, the process was initiated, it said, this will occur in 28 days, there will be no record of it having been run after that, before that time leave your job here, and another file will be created pointing to a breach at the vendor. SWI/SNF at 10 minutes after 19:99 hours From an IP address belonging to E1 building 9 floor 03 With that, I left for the night, signing the backup tapes as written in the drop box for the Scaled Cliffs truck in the morning, where it would be entered into the Scalled Cliffs Cloud Computing System, from which the days information would be run, and, if this SWI/SNF was correct, HE would be fine and safe, and I’d see him again, with trust as my only solace, and plausible deniability as my only refuge, I left into uncertainty.

SWI/SNF wouldn’t lie, after all, his message, login credentials were written all over those closed circuit camera loops, I’d appended a short sequence to the end of the script which I’d used to create the transfer, this would allow the terminal to display the program as it ran, and, if what SWI/SNF had told me wasn’t correct, if it was he who was holding him, than this tape could clear me, and indemnify the man who wrote it.