A Joke or a Threat?

Potpourri

Putting this under Potpourri because it doesn’t really fit anywhere else. A few days ago I received an email at an old address of mine that hasn’t worked for maybe years. The subject block said “To Mr. R. F. Laird, Personal and Urgent”. Probably shouldn’t have, but I opened it. The text was abrupt, directing me to an Attachment, which was in the form of a letter signed by one Henry Elders.

“Dear Sir,” it began. Here’s an excerpt:

I am by trade and avocation a cryptographer, currently rebranded by technology as an encryption specialist. Years ago I became aware of your works and have followed them at a discreet distance ever since. I am no critic. That’s not my interest. Lately I have also become aware that something large appears to be underway involving your various media productions. My initial suspicion was that it was a plan being orchestrated by you. As I dug into the scraps of information I could locate on the Internet, I developed an alternate theory, that someone is using your print and Internet products as the basis for coded communications with what may be a violent resistance movement of some kind. One consistent declaration I find in the recovered materials is that you, R. F. Laird, do not exist, that you are yourself a fictional character created quite deliberately for use by some community of others. My own research suggests that no one has laid eyes on you in years, you have no financial identity, you have a phone number that is never answered when rung and always spills over to a voicemail box thst is too full to accept new messages. You are to all intents and purposes a phantom, Mr. R. F. Laird, though your name appears as the author of any number of works in print or on the Internet. If you do in fact exist, I believe this should concern you.

Have you ever been stalked across the Intertubes? I have been, which is why I was concerned with what “Henry Elders” was telling me, even though it had all the earmarks of a joke. Playing to my writer’s ego, coming in all darkly mysterious, and hinting at machinations I was obviously not privy to.

About the stalking thing. People who read me on a Facebook know that I reported a curious discovery on my iPad some months ago. There was a buried folder called “For You,” in which I found more than 200 short videos (a minute or two long at most) created by a third party who clearly had access to my own image files, including photos, graphics, and videos. New files had been arriving on a regular basis long before I discovered them. Each was some kind of musically scored sequence of my private files, usually contiguous, but sometimes compiled from various dates through time. They were immediately recognizable as having been chosen by clumsy, insensate algorithms and included ugly work in process images being used to build finished graphics not shown, as well as sequences of images that made sense because they were part of the same project on a particular date. The music scores were always junk electronic Muzak. Just for fun, and for an FB post on a slow day, I edited some excerpts of these videos together because they had been assembled with more powerful software than I possess, including zooms, tricky dissolves, and some collage effects beyond my freeware capabilities. Here’s that re-edited video, just to prove that this is no fiction (as I am not either, btw):

I didn’t show you the original because it interrupted the cemetery portion with an anomalous photo of a Grand Prix car, the Muzak was annoying, and the transition from the cemetery was to newspaper photos of Philadelphia’s 1985 MOVE catastrophe, too violent for censors hither and yon these days. My edit should at least demonstrate that I live in a real place. I still can’t answer the question of why these AI-dumkopf videos were compiled in the first place.

Why I read more of what the email said. I had tried not to read anything sinister into the stream of videos with content hijacked from my device, but perhaps I was being naïve. If I had thought that the letter writer was some kind of casual spammer pretending a familiarity with my work he did not possess, the next passage I’ll quote put the kibosh on that hope:

If you do not exist, Mr. Laird, who does? Who generates your books and blogs and graphics and video/audio files? Are they not like a file cabinet of purloined letters, showing themselves in the names of your presumably fictional characters? Are there real people with the names Insect Brain, Johnny Dodge, Daniel Pangloss, Frank Frelinger (and son), William Traylor, Boz Baker, and how many others parading through your works? What might they be up to, in concert, that is cleverly disguised as figments of imaginary action? Is there a real entity that calls itself the Shuteye Train? If you know, will you admit it? If you are there at all?

I won’t share the rest of what he had to say, not just yet, because I want to study the riddle he posed on my own for a bit. His bottom line seemed to be that I was an important line of inquiry and my existence or my possible “nonperson” status were obviously relevant to his investigation. The idea that some well camouflaged others might be using my work to perpetrate some act or acts of violence at some future date were his main preoccupation.

My own hole card was that the name Henry Elders is also a fiction made up by me years ago. That character would be pushing 80 now, quite a bit older than I am, so I’m not personally, physically afraid of that personage if he stays true to character. Cryptographer would have been excellent description of my Henry Elders.

Two final things I’ll show you. The first is a movie trailer for a John Carpenter horror film. Elders simply asked if I had seen it. I have now. It’s called In the Mouth of Madness, and in this context seems a kind of taunt. Just click on the title to watch it.

The last thing is what Elders purports to be a file found, like those videos I told you about, on my own personal device. I have a project involving papers I’m collecting from something called the Vennich Manuscript. The claim is that this is the back side of a page I’m very familiar with, because it begins with text declaring, “The manuscript is rewriting itself. The manuscript is rewriting itself. The manuscript is rewriting itself…” Et Cetera. Here’s what Elders says is printed on the back of that page.

That’s all I want to say for now. If I have further thoughts or experience further developments, I’ll let you know. Maybe.