Time of the Octopus: Based on the True Story of Whistleblower Edward Snowden

03:29 A.M._

“Mr. Kold,” the Lawyer looked quickly at the clock. “You are a very good narrator but I’d like to ask you a couple of questions. Do you mind?

“No, go ahead.”

“You mentioned a few times that your father voted Republican. But what are your political preferences?”

Kold thought for a bit then decisively shook his head:

“I have to admit – I like the Democrats more than the Republicans, although you’re right – I am from a family which traditionally votes for the Grand Old Party. Why? Probably because I support change and the democrats are trying to change the world for the best.

“President Obama is a democrat and reformer. He indeed is trying to change the world and I want to believe that he wants to change it for the best. Did you vote for him?”

Kold chuckled.

“I read Obama’s program and familiarised myself with his biography, and I realised that this was what the United States should have had a long-long ago, back in the time of Martin Luther King. Without a black president our ‘Miss Liberty’ looked rather hypocritical, with a slightly powdered bruise and Ku Klux Klan hoods in the folds of her toga. I think you know what I’m talking about.

The Lawyer lowered his head in agreement.

“I have a good memory,” Kold went on. “Thanks to Mr. Eisenberg, who forced us to memorise the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the articles of the Constitution and the speeches of the great politicians of the past. He used to insist that brain is a muscle and needs constant exercise!

Basically, when Obama said: ‘Now, understand, it is a choice. If people like me, if most of the people in this room, can’t afford to pay a little bit more in taxes, then a lot of this stuff we can’t afford. If we’re insisting that those of us who are doing best in this society have no obligations to other folks, then, no, we can’t afford it. I want to make sure that Malia and Sasha and your children and your grandchildren, that they’re inheriting a land that has clean rivers and air you can breathe and that’s worth something to me, that’s something I want to invest in because when I’m all finished here and I’m looking back on my life, I want to be able to say, we were good stewards of the planet…’ I remembered a speech by another black-skinned politician, which was pronounced more than fifty years ago. Thanks to Mr. Eisenberg – I still remember it every word. Are you ready to listen?”

“Do you mean Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech?” the Lawyer asked.

“Exactly.”

“Yes, I’ll listen to it with pleasure.

Kold straightened, his face acquired a slightly tragic expression and he began to talk in a well-trained voice, reciting the whole of Martin Luther King’s speech faultlessly.

His voice soared as he was caught in the power of the rhetoric.

And as the speech went on, his whole body began to shake, and the sound of the American preacher’s words reverberated through the deep bunker as if they would blast it open.

“Bravo!” the Lawyer applauded. “Bravo to Reverend Martin Luther King and your fantastic memory.”

“In Barrack Obama I saw a man who also has a dream,” Kold said. “And I thought, you never know, maybe together we will be able to defeat the octopus and bring freedom back to America? Only one or maybe even two years later I realised that I didn’t have any allies in that bureau and that Obama was a politician like all the others, no better than the Bushes, Clinton and the other recent presidents. But back then, before the elections, I was seized by a real sense of excitement, and I headed to Fort Meade to meet up with the Baseball player.

I’d never had any illusions about Mr. Jenkins. I always spoke to him very formally, understand me. Of course neither Obama, nor the octopus, nor my plans were mentioned in our conversation. I just told him that I wanted to continue my work in the system as a freelancer on individual contracts. So that if my health failed due to epilepsy I could always take a break.

“But are you actually well?” the Lawyer asked then added at once: “Of course, that’s not a very tactful question but it’s my professional duty to ask it.”

“Everything’s good,” Kold nodded. “Although sometimes my legs hurt when its damp, but that’s nothing really. So I will continue…”

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IT workers – programmers, system administrators, and to a smaller extent ‘metal workers’ (Russian slang word meaning an IT worker specialising in repair, assembly and commissioning of computer hardware) and web designers – are special people. I am saying that without any hint of fascism or bolshevism, because I’m not making anything up. Everything is like it is. We are exceptional in the most unsightly meaning of the word. We are not like everyone else. We are a caste, but we’re definitely not Brahmans. People hate us and worship us. In the past only usurers and executioners were treated like that.

If electricity suddenly disappeared from the Earth and the computer isn’t needed anymore, we’ll be the first ones killed. But while these ingenious machines exist, so do we, and we do it quite well.

There are a lot of us, but of course far fewer than there are plumbers or bankers. And they – along with housewives, accountants, owners of investment companies, policemen and even tax inspectors – all look the same, all have the same lamer’s face, the face of a person who understands nothing about computers, and doesn’t want to understand,. They all want just one thing: ‘It needs to work!’. And they don’t care why or how it happens. All of it is our headache, our job and our guarantee that we were, are and will be a treasure as precious as the lotus flower, because the modern world can’t exist without us – and will slide into chaos without us.

I won’t go overboard about our caste, since it’s basically professional snobbery which even sewage workers have, and others don’t have to know it.

But to make it clear how we differ from other people, here are a few IT jokes, which made me laugh like mad:

Every admin has to be a practicing gamer. Otherwise their conditioned save/load reflex will atrophy, which leads to interesting quests like ‘how to restore the server’s state this morning by having back-ups from last week’.

Or here’s another one:

‘Have you been to Acapulco? Then why did you come back so pale?’

‘Because there was wi-fi in the hotel but not on the beach…’

Though that’s more about internet addiction.

Then here’s another one: If you find an error which is too time-consuming and tedious to fix – then just include it in the list of features”.

Or here’s another one, very childish:

A dog went missing. The dog’s special features: Shift+2. Reward: Shift+4.

Did you get any of them?

And for dessert, an IT worker’s prayer:

‘God, give me a button to restart this world!’

So why am I saying all this? That’s because a true IT specialist, even if he’s just going to brush his teeth, never thinks about it like all other people: I’ll just brush my teeth and then go to sleep.

No, a true IT specialist breaks down the whole process straight away into smaller pieces and creates and algorithm in his head: bathroom – door – basin – faucet – water – shelf – toothbrush – toothpaste… and so on and also inside this algorithm there’ll be another one, the so-called sub-algorithm: shelf – toothpaste tube – lid (to toothpaste tube) – toothpaste – toothbrush – lid – toothpaste tube – shelf.

Humour is humour, but the harsh truth of life for me was the fact that IT specialists weren’t just faithful servants of the octopus, no. They themselves were the octopus; they were living cells of its organism. And in order to defeat them I had to remember everything I knew and everything I could do.

That is why, in preparing for my fight with the octopus, I naturally began by creating an algorithm of actions for myself. Strategy, plan, projects – it is blah-blah-blah and lyrics.

Everything was precise and clear in my algorithm, and no disruptions were expected. Of course, I also input unexpected circumstances, the so-called force majeure, and also completely improbable situations best formulated in the tips for one of the earliest versions of Microsoft Office: that which suddenly disappears can appear by itself again.

In creating the algorithm, I used the general thesis that the octopus is a system: in other words it’s ‘a plurality of elements that are in relationships and connections with each other, and which form a certain integrity or unity’.

To defeat a system one needs another system, plainly. But one mustn’t forget the law formulated by one of the first IT specialists, professor William Ashby. This law, which deservedly bears his name, says: ‘When creating a problem-solving system, it is necessary for the system to have more variety than the variety of the problem being solved, or to be able to create such variety.’ The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it can compensate.

In other words, it was possible to defeat the octopus only by countering each of its tentacles, each of its information channel, by an even a larger number of channels.

In my imagination it would be as if the octopus crawling in the dark, muddy underwater cavern was suddenly brilliantly illuminated by countless bright beams of light, shone by countless lanterns at the same time.

In situations like this an octopus will draw in all its tentacles, try to hide, and crawl into some crevice or a hole, or change its color to mimic stones or seaweed. If the illumination of an octopus’ dwelling is prolonged, then the cephalopod can die from stress or hunger.

And that was exactly what I was hoping for. In the opposition of two systems, or more precisely, of the system and the antisystem I was going to create, the information rays would kill the octopus, like the light kills the darkness.

I won’t say more about the algorithm I created. It has yet to run its course, and disclosing any more could harm me and the whole campaign for the octopus destruction. But I will tell you a few more things.

I initiated the first stage of my algorithm back in Fort Meade. For some reason the journalists who now write about me think I was copying secret information on something like disks or flash drives and then carrying them out of the NSA building in my anus.

Of course, it’s complete nonsense. As an employee of the agency, I had high level access to classified information and access to databases and documents related to BRISM and many other projects. I was also able to use communication channels which completely encrypted content. So of course, I never risked using portable media devices.

So after resigning and becoming a consultant in a few companies working with the NSA and the CIA, I began to proceed with my algorithm. Hawaii came into the picture not because I liked it there, but more because it was a nice bonus.

Everything was essentially prosaic. The International Airport of Honolulu was the quickest stopover for Hong Kong, and that was an important part of the algorithm. Why? Very simple: China is also a system and I was going to use its potential in fighting the octopus.

But I met Middy by an accident. No, that’s not quite right. I met her in line with the algorithm, but specifically by chance. I would’ve never made contact with a person who showed an interest in me. I have worked in the agency long enough and I wasn’t that naïve to catch bait thrown at me.

I’ve already told you about the honey trap – so where was the guarantee that it wouldn’t be used on me? This would’ve been a very easy way to hold their former employee on a short leash. The whistleblower doesn’t just watch him but sleeps with him in the same bed.

At the same time, I needed a woman, a girlfriend – and not just for legitimizing my presence in Hawaii. After all, where else would a couple in love go. Not North Dakota!

As I’ve said, my relations with women have not so much problems as certain issues. Meeting on a street, in a café or a bar is not my thing. A few attempts to find myself a girlfriend through dating websites came to nothing. All contenders turned out in real life to be completely impossible – and one even turned out to be a man. Indeed, apart from prostitutes, only women with issues unable to arrange their personal life off-line seem to come to meet people on the internet.

When I went to Honolulu to find myself a little house with a view over the sea – not as fashionable as the bungalow at the foot of Mauna Kea, but still decent – that’s when my legs began to ache awfully.

Maybe it was to do with some change in the air. I often react to the weather. I can stay awake all night before a thunderstorm. And if there’s a tornado somewhere nearby, my head feels like it’s about to crack like an overripe pumpkin.

I’d forgotten about the broken legs until then, although back in the hospital the doctor had told me that in time the healed bones may ache. That’s normal and I should be prepared for it.

Anyway, I was looking for accommodation, meeting with realtors, estate agents and other intermediaries. Typhoon Ivica was circling in the Pacific Ocean, and although storms are rare on the Hawaiian islands, I got ‘lucky’ and the typhoon’s damp breath had spoilt my life for a few days.

In search of salvation I went to a clinic, but they just prescribed me sedatives and painkillers. I’m not really a fan of pharmaceutical treatments because I think that nowadays there are enough chemicals in our food, water and air, and to stuff yourself with it in medication too is a step too far.

Still, struggling with the pain, I wandered through Downtown Honolulu. It was a warm, sunny day. Doors and windows were flung wide, and ‘He Mele No Lilo’, children’s laughter and ringing bells were coming from somewhere.

I was already on my way back to the hotel to ask the receptionist to help me find some kind of a doctor-physiotherapist when I saw at the end of the street a sign saying: ‘Massage Room ‘Flexible Nene’. All types of massage. Pain relief. Yoga for beginners’.

The nene is the Hawaiian goose, a symbol of the state and the islands’ business card. It’s everywhere here: on shop displays, on cards, on advertisement booklets and posters. I couldn’t quite imagine this goose being flexible so I headed to that massage room full of curiosity and hoping to get cured of my ailments.

A pleasant-looking but very plump Hawaiian woman with the indispensable floral lei necklace on her high breasts greeted me. She asked me for a long time what kind of massage I was interested in, but in the end just spread her arms helplessly.

‘I’m sorry, mister, but we can’t help you. We don’t cure this kind of issue.’

‘And how long did you have these pains for?’ said a pleasant female voice behind me.

I turned round and saw a slim, you could even say thin, girl of about twenty-five, with huge eyes and prominent cheekbones. She didn’t look like Hawaiian or hapa. In fact, she looked entirely European, with white skin, which was odd considering the local sun.

She was wearing a red dress with a deep neckline that showed off her figure well. I only looked at the girl for a few seconds – but judging from her posture and the way she held her head, I guessed she was a gymnast or a dancer.

Our conversation lasted barely half a minute. I said that in the past there was no pain, and she, with a very serious expression which looked quite comical, told me that things like this happen with a change of climate. It is linked to a cessation of circulation of earth energy in the legs, because I was torn from the energy system my body is used to. But a few yoga sessions under her direction and a relaxing massage with special ‘Parachute’ oil would solve my problems.

I knew quite a bit about yoga, but I’d never tried to do even the simplest exercises, suspecting that you should really have a competent instructor.

And it looked like fate had sent me such a person in this delicate girl with big eyes. I had no worries she was a spy sent from the agency or the CIA, because I ended up in Flexible Nene by accident, and not a single special service in the world, including Mossad and the FSB, would’ve been able to predict that. And of course I really wasn’t going to tie my life to this masseuse! We just agreed on the first session, I paid an advance payment to the Hawaiian and then I asked the girl her name.

‘Middy.’ She offered me her hand. I introduced myself, gently squeezed her warm thin fingers – and got struck by a buzz of electricity.

She was emitting such energy that I at once began to sweat as if it was fifty outside not twenty-five. A wave of heat rolled through me, making me blush to the roots of my hair.

Middy noticed and smiling said:

“Your Kundalini is being restrained. Your Sushumna is blocked, and the seventh chakra in the top of your head is not receiving internal fire. But you have a good karma and great potential, Mr. Kold.’

‘Joshua,’ I said looking in her eyes. ‘OK?’

It happens. You meet a completely strange person, talk to them for a few minutes and understand that this meeting has been arranged by the higher powers. This person becomes close to you.

That is exactly what’s happened with Middy. Just a week later we went together to Kauai Island to see my new house and a month later she left her job at Flexible Nene and moved to my place.

…It was an odd bond. During the day I worked, spending six or seven hours at my computer. In the evening I learned the basics of yoga. During the night, I burned in the flame of Middy’s love. Oh that girl, who had been studying yoga for ten years, can love like no other! And during my rare hours alone I was improving my algorithm, trying to exclude all unwanted or even fatal surprises.

Mostly, I was selecting my ‘agents of influence’ through which I was planning to publish the materials to expose the octopus.

Of course, my first and main candidate might have been Cassandzhi and his Mikiliks platform, but the sad fate of Banning persuaded me to reject this option. I couldn’t take the risk, so I didn’t even consider whether it all happened accidentally or whether Banning had become the victim of a very well thought-out provocation.

After studying a lot of materials and newspaper articles, I chose Greywold, attracted by his reputation as a socialist and his anti-system sensibilities.

‘Indeed,’ I thought, ‘A man is living in the jungle in Brazil, in a huge bungalow over a waterfall. He swims every morning in a mountain lake, walks out with his nine dogs and two red cats, while a parrot and a few lovers are waiting for him at home. There’s not a single security guard. And yet he publishes incriminating material which hurt the careers of more than one politician… Surely, he will gladly take a role of the octopus’ denouncer, and the journalist’s reward will be enough.’

I wrote a careful letter to Greywold and sent it using a closed channel with encrypted text.

There was no answer. I waited in vain for almost a month until I realised that this kind of method will not work with someone like Greywold. He thought too much of himself and his place in the world of information battles to pay attention to anonymous messages. I had to look for other ways. That is when I thought about Boytras.

Of course, Boytras was a heroic woman.

She had filmed five completely anti-system documentaries, including ‘The Oath’ – about the horrible fate of the Guantanamo prisoner Salim Hadam. For that she was chased and harassed across the world and searched in airports, as they attempted to compromise her and even kill her a couple of times. But Boytras went on fighting. She was like a small but toothy seahorse, which bravely attacks the octopus’s tentacles.

And she replied to me!

Then the algorithm went into action, and soon Middy and I were on our way to Hong Kong – as if for a trip. I still feel very guilty that I used Middy as a cover. From outside the situation looked very simple: a couple in love are flying to see Asia’s economic wonder and have fun. Middy, of course, had no idea I had planned a meeting in Hong Kong with Boytras and Greywold.

The Hotel Mira, where I’d booked a double room in advance, looked from outside like a super-modern tomb of Chinese emperors – firm lines, tinted glass, dark polished stone and sterile cleanliness.

Our room was wonderful and, having given the bed what it deserved, Middy and I separated for a while. She needed to top up her stock of eastern incenses, and there was a whole shopping district in Hong Kong where the materials of various esoteric practices were sold.

I stayed in the room with the excuse that I had some urgent work to do. To be frank, I was a little scared to tease the geese. Outside the hotel, I could’ve easily fallen in a trap. Anyway, I can’t say I find modern Chinese cities like Hong Kong or Shanghai that pleasant for a stroll.

Maybe that is because I see China – the modern China, the PRC – without any piety or illusions. This is a totalitarian state with a quite specific socio-economic system and a strange ideology. They have their own special Big Brother and even when in other countries, Chinese people are still terribly frightened by it.

There were a few boys and girls from the PRC studying in my college – and they never went out anywhere, never took part in anything, not in pp fax wars, not in parties, because they were afraid that when they go back to their homeland, it will be known that they were spending time not studying but having fun.

Yet whatever the modern realities are, China has strength, power and incredible prospects. It seems like there are no heights which a modest Chinese genius, multiplied by Asian hard work and Eastern dedication, cannot reach, or won’t reach in the near future.

‘Showcase capitalism’, built in China, has become effective and successful because of the local mentality. When studying Taoism, Confucianism, and various Buddhist practices still used by the Chinese, I was always amazed how they managed to refract these moral and sometimes highly moral teachings into their social consciousness and even married Marx’s doctrine with the philosophy of Confucius.

At the same time, the main mass of the population – one and a third billion people! – live on a modest income. Even now many Chinese homes do not have a TV and in many distant agricultural areas owning a car is, if not exotic, then a rarity.

But Chinese do not seek personal enrichment. They are not that interested in the material side of life in the same way that Europeans are, let alone we, Americans. A different system of values allows the Chinese to be much freer in this sense. To put it simply, they do not depend on objects and objects don’t have power over them. Sadly, it’s the other way for us Americans.

I was thinking this way. With its own independent politics, China in its hypostasis is an aggressive but wise dragon and will tear the American eagle’s tail with its talons with pleasure if suddenly people from the NSA or the CIA tried to prevent my meeting with Boytras and Greywold.

It was also easier for them to defend their right to freedom of meetings here rather than, say, in Latin America, where the level of corruption among officials is sky high and you can easily be sold like a pedigree bull.

In China, officials are shot for corruption in stadiums in the presence of a huge number of people. I abhor cruelty and violence, but in this case the ferocious manners of the Chinese Themis were good for me.

I had arranged a meeting in the restaurant on the third floor of the hotel. Rolling baoding balls in my hand, these ones, would be a straightforward sign Greywold and Laura could easily identify.

The original plan for the meeting was more ‘spy-thriller.’ At an agreed hour in the entrance hall not far from the elevators, Greywold was supposed to ask loudly:

‘Where can I get something to eat?’

I was supposed to be waiting around the corner and then hearing his voice come out and walk past him, holding a Rubik’s cube. Greywold and Boytras would’ve followed me to my room, where our conversation would’ve taken place.

But at the last moment I cancelled this plan – partly because of Middy, who could’ve returned at any point, and partly for reasons of secrecy. Nobody has stopped bugging Chinese hotels rooms, but restaurants where people are constantly changing are normally only bugged when it is known that a certain person will be there – Steve taught me this back in Zurich.

Greywold was exactly as I imagined from the images of him on the internet – an arrogant intellectual, hiding a lot of insecurities, phobias and vices behind his snobbery. But Mrs. Boytras made a very good impression on me. She was a lively, direct and funny woman, absolutely convinced of her own correctness and righteousness of what she was doing.

We spoke for no more than forty minutes and during that time drank two pots of tea. Greywold had a cake, and Boytras smoked a few cigarettes.

I told them:

‘You can’t wait for someone else to act. I was looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership means being the first one to act. I don’t consider myself a hero – because I am acting in my own interests. I don’t want to live in the world where there’s no privacy and there’s no place for intellectual researchers and creativity. That’s it.’

We discussed communication methods and actions for the next period and they left. Nobody tried to cut across them, nobody tried to stop, grab, handcuff them. Everything worked in line with the algorithm.

And a few days later, Middy and I returned to Hawaii.”