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

03:55 A.M._

File 015.wav

“I was just preparing to pass the folder with documents to Greywold to be published and I was convinced that everything was progressing as it should be. Middy was away – she’d left to visit her mother in Honolulu for a couple of days.

I don’t know how the Baseball player managed to get to the island at such a late hour, although I think I might’ve heard the motor of the Coast Guard cutter.

He showed up in his usual manner – just appeared at the door and that’s it. I concealed my surprise in order not to give him any trumps, invited him to come in and turned the coffee maker on.

As first, our conversation meandered, although I guessed straight away that he had come to pressure me to return to the mainland and to Fort Meade.

I can’t remember exactly what I told him and I had an awful headache – the weather was changing – but I said something along the lines that two and two always makes four and I am a free man.

He laughed and he stretched out his hand with his fingers spread:

‘How many fingers am I showing, Josh?’

‘Four.’

‘But what if America says that there are not four but five, then how many?’

I stopped short and went silent. I felt like ice cold water had washed over me. I recognised this dialogue, I recognised this quote, and I understood where it came from.

Damn! They know everything!

Or is it yet another improvization by Mr. Jenkins, another genius psychological move by him? This man with a perpetually weather-beaten face and white-teeth smile – the most wily and cunning man I’ve ever met. Even the Serpent Tempter in paradise wasn’t as deceptive and cunning when he lured Eve.

In the meantime, he took a peach from the dish, bit off a piece greedily, wiped the juice off his lips with the back of his land and quoted Orwell again:

‘‘The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact’. As I understand our conversation will go quicker in this form, eh, Josh?’

‘I don’t like your tone, Mr. Jenkins,’ I muttered, trying to appear offended.

I finished the peach, put the wet stone on the polished surface of the side table and spun it round. The wrinkled stone looked like a human brain, spinning on its axis according to someone else’s will.

We stayed silent for about ten minutes. The wind, which had been blowing fiercely since morning, had died down. The Baseball player got up and smiled, but his smile looked sad.

‘You know, my boy, what a heavy feeling disappointment is… God forbid you from experiencing it.’

He stopped by the door, and leaned against the post. Again he quoted Orwell, but slightly altered:

“‘A single – free – man always looses. That is how it should be, because every man is destined to die and it’s his biggest flaw. But if he can submit completely, without reserve, if he can abandon himself, if he can dissolve in his job in such way that he becomes the job himself, then he’ll become powerful and immortal.’”

I stayed silent.

“You reject an incredibly beautiful future,” The Baseball player added.

“If you want to imagine the future, then imagine a boot, stamping on your face. Constantly!” I muttered, not able to contain myself.

“It’s our last conversation, Mr. Kold,” the Ballplayer sighed and began to speak in an official tone. “If you pursue a course of action aimed against the state or capable of harming the defence capabilities of the United Sates, then all enforcement measure prescribed by the law will be applied to you. Remember this. I hope you’ll have enough prudence not to make mistakes. Goodbye.”

I was tempted to utter something along the lines of ‘See you in hell’, ‘Hasta la vista’ or ‘Au revoir, mon ami’. I don’t know why, probably out of powerlessness. Technically, Mr. Jenkins was completely right: freedom, slavery – these are just words, figures of speech. During the time of Socrates and Heraclites, maybe these words had an obvious natural meaning, but now, in the era when the conventional and cyberspace merged to create a new reality, it was all out of date. Orwell died more than sixty years ago. It’s silly to live according to his philosophic calculations and political settings, and it’s even more silly to break your life and the lives of those close to you because of it.

I was sitting in the middle of the hall with my head clutched between my hands. The peach stone still lay on the coffee table, with tiny Drosophila fruit flies circling around it. ‘Everything is so simple for them,’ I thought at that moment. ‘They mate, lay eggs, have some juice, eat some rotting fruit and die, and the new generation are already coming to replace them. And it goes on without an end…’

It was a night of crystal stillness. A huge moon rose from behind the mountain and spread its wide silvered path to the dark horizon over the limpid surface of the water. The lights blazed in my house, spilling their glow onto the bushes and the spreading Araucaria by the gate. Occasionally, cars raced along the road further down. I sat in front of the open door in the lotus position with my eyes shut. If somebody with a rifle happened to be on the hillside now and that somebody wanted to make a few shots, it would be hard for him to find an easier target.

I imagined the bullet from a .338 Lapua Magnum crashing into my skull, how the cartridge opens like a brass flower, and the steel core, after breaking through the bone, enters my brain and turns it into jelly, and, after making a few swift rotations, crashes into the back wall of my skull, then pulls out a piece of the bone together with bloody clots of what just a few moments ago was a thinking substance, the most complex and obscure thing in the universe. This substance flies across the hall.

Then two days later, Middy will come here in the morning and find my cold body with glazed eyes, with the Drosophila fruit flies circling above.

And that’s it.

I opened my eyes and stared into the darkness for a few seconds. Then I jumped up sharply, threw the peach stone out of the window, shut the door, turned the lights off everywhere, and rushed to the bathroom. For a long time, at least five minutes, I washed my hands in hot water.

A day later I flew to Hong Kong without saying anything to Middy. I didn’t tell her anything because she had become very important to me. It was the tightest constraint that I couldn’t avoid while constructing the algorithm. Sometimes even a programmer must rely not on logic but on divine Providence. By leaving Middy, I took her out of the game. I hope she’ll be happy and I also hope that one day we’ll meet again.

But when sitting down in to the seat of the Hawaiian Airlines Boeing, I was completely calm. Maybe explorers and conquerors in the Middle Ages experienced similar calmness when heading into the unknown.

When your fate is in God’s hands, there’s no point in worrying, because nothing that will happen can be changed or reversed.”