Monty and the Malware Genius: Chapter Three
The Troll
The first time that Monty had ever hear of a troll was when he was a little boy. There was a story he’d heard, more than once, of three little billy goats trying to get past a bridge, and a troll got in their way. Now, as an adult, Monty didn’t remember the story, where he had heard it, or how it turned out, but he remembered that he had liked the story, presumably because the goats won out over the troll’s interference.
Now, as an adult, the story had come back into his life in the person of one B. E. Elzebub, an online troll who had interfered with his first big assignment as a detective for the Semiotic Bureau of Investigation, an agency of McLuhanville, the Global Village.
Monty was a real detective, albeit quite an unusual one, and McLuhanville was a real global village, one in which all the inhabitants of the planet earth were the villagers. True, there really was no government of McLuhanville as such, only (as far as Monty knew) the SBI, the agency for which he worked; but Monty knew that the global village and the SBI really existed because he had been paid for his first assignment in real money.
Real money? Yes. Real money. Not dollars, not euros, not renminbi, not pounds sterling, but yes, real money. He, up to now had received his rather generous pay in Etherium, which he was then able to convert to dollars to be credited to his bank account.
He could write real checks from his bank account, or have the dollars transferred via electronic payments from credit cards and even from his Apple Watch. The money was real, so Etherium must be real, so the Semiotic Bureau of Investigation must be real.
Monty, like most others living in the Global Village, knew that they were living in a real global village. It had become obvious. Yes, they were also living in a world governed by competing governments and non-govermental organizations, and for that matter by cartels and hush money and grants and forgiven loans and all kinds of other skulduggery and chicanery. For some of those inhabitants, the Global Village was only a metaphor, and a messy one at that, but for Monty, it was a real village and it was really global.
And also, his work had been subject to interference by a real (Internet) troll, and the name of the troll had been B. E. Elzebub, resembling the ancient name of the Canaanite demon Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies. That is why, when a well-crafted emoji of a housefly with red eyes had shown up in Monty’s text messages, he could not let it drop. No, he couldn’t delete it, which would have been prudent since it certainly looked like a scam or a hacking attempt, but Monty couldn’t even bring himself to block it or mute it. In fact, he had, rather rashly perhaps, phoned the number from which the fly emoji had been sent, only to get a recorded message which was of very little help in the satisfaction of Monty’s curiosity.
But Monty was, yes, a detective, and his detective instinct told him that he would have to continue his pursuit of this troll, this B. E. Elzebub, this “Ed” who was never at home when he called, until he got to the bottom of the mystery.
It was only a few years after Renatus had connected with his science-loving friend Beeckman that Renatus had his three dreams. Weird dreams. But most dreams, or at least many, are weird, right? Life-changing dreams: perhaps that was what made Renatus’ dreams so important. Yes, they actually did change his life.
Still, everybody had weird dreams every once in a while, don’t they? So what was the big deal about the dreams Renatus had? Even if they did change his life. After all, he could have ignored them and gone on with his life as before he had the dreams. Probably most people who have weird dreams do just that.
Renatus’ dad, who was a lawyer, wanted Renatus to become a lawyer, and in fact, Renatus went to law school and finished law school, but he still never became a lawyer.
And when he had met Beeckman in Breda, Monty was a young soldier living in a barracks, and he kind of liked the life of a soldier, even the possibility that he could fight against Spanish Catholics, even though he, Renatus, was in fact a Catholic himself. He’d seen battle, the Battle of the White Mountain, and he was learning military engineering, which meant, if you did it right, you could get a cannonball to land exactly where you wanted it to land. So, for Renatus, soldiering was a good life.
Until he had his dreams, that is.
And then, everything changed.
What were, in fact the three dreams that completely changed the life of this young soldier? That is an interesting question, and an interesting story in itself. Here it is.
Renatus, given his circumstances, and his very excellent Catholic high-school level education, wrote everything in Latin. After all, he was living in Breda, in the Netherlands, and the Battle of The White Mountain was near Prague, where they spoke Czech. Renatus, being French, of course spoke French. Did he speak the local form of Dutch in Breda? Probably. They didn’t even call it Dutch in those days. Even today they probably don’t call it Dutch in Belgium. They call it Vlaams or something. So, of course, Latin was the way to go.
So Renatus, after completely changing his life after his three dreams, wrote down the dreams in great detail. In Latin.
Unfortunately, the original record of the dreams which Renatus wrote down disappeared. Lost forever. Fortunately, however, someone who had read them in Latin translated the Latin into French and the French version became available for dream scholars and Renatus scholars.
Dream scholars? Do I mean like Sigmund Freud?
Yes, I do. Even Sigmund Freud, who wrote about the three life-changing dreams of Renatus to a colleague centuries later after Renatus had dreams the dreams.
So what?
Who was this Renatus, anyhow? (You’ve probably guessed it, but maybe not.)
Renatus is quite important to the story of Monty and the Malware Genius. If you keep on reading you will find out why.
For now, let’s stick with what we know about the dreams starting with the first.
Here’s a very rough account of what happened in the dream. Very rough. After all, the Latin version, which we could assume is much more accurate, would tell us more.
“In the night, where everything is fever, storm, and panic, phantoms arise in front of the dreamer. He tries to get up to go after them, but falls back, ashamed of himself, sensing a great weakness on his right side. Suddenly, his bedroom window opens; overwhelmed, he feels carried off by the gusts of a wind which spins him around on his left foot. Dragging along and staggering, he finds himself in front of his old junior high school. Making great effort to enter the chapel to pray, he encounters passers-by and wants to stop them. One of them carries a melon. (Yes, a melon.) But a violent wind pushes him back towards the chapel.”
A cool dream, eh? Well, Sigmund Freud himself thought that it was a cool dream, and so did other intellectuals who studied these dreams after Renatus became famous.
They key thing here is that the dreams did indeed change Renatus’ life. He did not become a lawyer, and he quit the army. (Maybe that was easier in those days.) Instead, he started writing a lot in Latin.
And he became famous.
Trinity Cablui was a Cyberpunk and a Cypherpunk. She did not become a famous Cypherpunk like her friend Judith “St. Jude” Milhon, who died in 2003, but Trinity did become a Cypherpunk.
Cypherpunks might actually be more important than Cyberpunk, though Cyberpunks are probably more famous.
So, what exactly is a Cypherpunk, one might ask. Better start with Cyberpunks, actually.
Or, actually, it might be best to start with plain old punks. It’s ancient history, which took place in the 1970’s because now in the Twenty-First Century the 1970’s are indeed ancient history.
Yes, rock ’n’ roll music was big in the 1970’s, and would be rockers and rollers started bands in their garages, and these garage bands acquired the label of “punk rock.”
Now, bear in mind that Philip K. Dick was cranking out science fiction stories at the very same time that punk rockers were making punk rock in their garages.
And something else was going on in garages. Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak were creating computers in Steve Jobs’ garage. They founded Apple Computer in 1976.
So what happens when you combine science fiction and very early, primitive computers, and garages? (Never mind the punk rock music. That might be irrelevant.)
Right. You get Cyberpunk.
Yes, Blade Runner is considered an early Cyberpunk movie, derived from a Philip K. Dick novel.
But what about Cypherpunk?
Better start with cyphers, also spelled ciphers, which basically mean secret codes. A famous World War Two example of a cypher was the enigma machine, a mechanical device used successfully by Nazi Germany to encode their messages so that the Allies couldn’t get at them.
It was just a matter of time that computers began to be used to create secret codes which hide (encrypt) the content of material which can be transmitted from one computer to another.
And therefore it became possible for some cyberpunk geniuses to become cypherpunks.
One of those geniuses was St. Jude Milhon.
Geniuses in those days had a big libertarian streak. In fact, many of them probably still do today.
Libertarian? What does that mean?
In general, a libertarian is someone who doesn’t like to be told what to do.
Little kids, most of the time, don’t like to be told what to do. So, are little kids libertarians? Maybe.
But it’s the big kids who are more important, and the Cypherpunks were big kids.
Of course, in the eyes of people who try to control them, a libertarian might be an anarchist, or a criminal, or a kingpin of organized crime; or, in the case of a little kid libertarian, a brat.
But let’s cut to the chase: Cypherpunks didn’t like being told what to do with their computer skills, and developed ways of protecting their privacy.
And now, in the Twenty-First Century, cryptocurrency like the Etherium in which Monty the detective is paid, is the result of the pioneering work of the Cypherpunks.
But that’s not the end of the story. As Winston Churchill said, “it’s not even the beginning of the end, but it may be the end of the beginning.”
Actually, it’s not even the end of the beginning.
