C00LeS WaReZ UNiON MeMOiRS: cHApTER #0x9E

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0x9E  -  Kuopio  -  dArK sTuFfEr  -  1999-12  -  187 lines
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The CWU meetup blew up the group -- perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently. First to go was wArlord, incensed that all CWU members did not intend to join the military. And shortly after, DaRK FuCKeR and DiCKiNSTASiA also decided not to share a group with "draft-dodging faggots."

The decision from the latter two came about on our return trip from Helsinki to Savonia. We hitched a ride with a driver who took us as far as Lahti and peppered us with questions along the way. We told him about our high school friendship, our demoscene activities, the CWU meetup, and the discussions that led to us losing the ride back home with Masa. Then, out of the blue, he latched onto the topic of military service and began defending it as a civic duty. This propaganda somehow landed with both DaRK FuCKeR and DiCKiNSTASiA with unsettling effectiveness.

After the propaganda session, the driver dropped us off at the Lahti train station and generously gave DiCKiNSTASiA enough money for a train ticket, on the condition that he promise to join the military. Having made the promise and with the driver gone, they both started to berate me for ruining the CWU meetup by being a "traitor to the fatherland". The absurd assaults continued all the way to the departure of the Kuopio train. I continued my own journey by hitchhiking.

At that point, I was still certain that they would both come to their senses within a few days, but that didn't happen. Instead, both left CWU and immediately exited the group's IRC channel upon arriving home, and they haven't returned since.

Due to the internal crisis, I've also had to find a new place to watch Babylon 5 at. DiCKiNSTASiA no longer wants "anti-war agitators" watching a series that has war in it. Luckily, there are several B5 fans at my school, and I've managed to negotiate the matter with them. It paid off, as the final episode of the fourth season, "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars," restored my faith in the series' grand, millennia-spanning philosophy. These are timescales where national states and the decisions of random citizens amount to nothing compared to what great thinkers and other super-individuals do.

Having lost contact with wArlord as a result of the group's dissolution, I also stopped dialing to Frontline BBS -- the last BBS I actively called anymore. My phone-modem-based BBS sessions also ceased permanently late in the autumn, as I decided to disconnect my landline and switch to KPY's new "Komeetta" cable modem service. I decided to communicate with my parents, Taisto and Tarja, solely through postal mail, without phone calls.

When I've missed the BBS world, I've missed it in its form from a few years back, not the current one. The current BBS culture simply doesn't have anything I couldn't find on the Internet in a far more satisfying form. Furthermore, today's BBS world is increasingly tainted by a stench of stagnation and conservatism, further exacerbated by wArlord's radical centre-wing posturing.

My own DECREPiTUDE BBS had been practically dead for at least half a year, but I decided to give it one last shot by connecting it to the Internet. It didn't help much -- there were a few curious "calls", but no new regulars. About a week later, I declared the experiment a failure and announced its shutdown on the North Savo occultists' mailing list. The occult scene had already moved on from BBSes, transitioning to mailing lists and IRC.

DECREPiTUDE had been running on the Amiga 1200 our group received as a gift from cULT oF pOWER, and I switched it off for the first time in months. I also decided to hold a weekend-long "fast", during which I'd keep my Linux PC turned off as well. The uptime loss wasn't a concern, as the kernel needed an update anyway. It was unsettlingly quiet at night without the hum of the PC's power supply, and especially on the first night, I woke up several times to various inexplicable clangs.

During the "fast", I became convinced that I needed to prioritize preparations for the millennium-shift disaster. I had already selected a spot on a secluded slope in Neulamäki, and I began digging a spacious sleeping hollow there. After digging the hollow, I lined it with various materials gathered from the cardboard and paper recycling boxes. I covered the opening with a lid made from salvaged plywood and covered it with moss. I had also invested in a winter-grade sleeping bag, which I tested as the weather grew colder.

It would be crucial to include some kind of a "time capsule" in the bunker, containing memories of CWU's existence -- essentially, the C00LeS WaReZ UNiON HiSToRiCaL mEmOiRZ texts. However, since there were no versions of any kind of the files documenting the events of our last Lietevesi year, I decided to get them finished before the millennium shift, even if I had to do it alone. Any collaboration on the matter would have been fruitless: when I mentioned it to mR.mEgAsTuFf, he adamantly refused to "release" any unfinished versions and didn't want to participate in reminiscing about that painful era. I decided to continue the project in secret.

Before the meetup, we had decided to number the memory files in hexadecimal, so that the first file (the founding meeting of CWU in July 1994) would be 0x00, and the last file (the departure from Lietevet in July 1997) would be 0x8F. The story would naturally be divided into nine "chapters" according to the upper nybble of the file number. The last somehow drafted text was numbered 0x71, and I needed to finish up to 0x8F before the new year.

Having completed the bunker, I spent practically the entire rest of the year at my computer, aside from the most essential school attendance and grocery shopping. I ate a lot of cheap canned goods cold, along with porridge flakes and macaroni swelled in cold water, so I wouldn't waste any extra time cooking. When I wasn't writing the memory texts, I tried to use my time as efficiently as possible on the Internet.

I followed all sorts of Y2K disaster preparation mailing lists, newsgroups, and IRC channels, absorbing as much information as possible. I compiled the most important and memory-worthiest information into concise "cheat sheets".

I also searched for all available research on the multiversal nature of reality and brought the subject up in all the discussion groups I found dealing with Chaos Magick and other effective forms of occultism. If a Y2K disaster were to happen in this parallel reality, there would surely be realities that avoided it, and it might be possible for me to shift into one of those with the right techniques.

In one discussion about the multiversal nature of reality, I was told about the German researcher Jürgen Schmidhuber, who has reportedly stated on some mailing lists that he is developing what is called an algorithmic theory of everything. According to him, the best model for reality would be one where reality runs all possible computer programs simultaneously, and the universes presented by those programs would all exist factually. I find this theory extremely inspiring, and it gave me a kind of obsession despite me not figuring out how to apply it to concrete parallel realities.

I've been captivated by how even popular culture has begun to awaken to the possibility of reality's multi-layered and multi-dimensional nature. For example, the films Matrix and Thirteenth Floor that are inspired by virtual reality. I managed to see both films at DiCKiNSTASiA's place already in the summer, as pirated copies. I've also started to appreciate Star Trek again in a new way, as it is far more speculative than B5 regarding reality.

Despite all possible scientific and artistic perspectives on the multiverse, I still haven't formed a valid theory about what happened in Pirttimäki in the summer of 1997. And despite all my Internet contacts, I haven't found similar anomaly zones anywhere else. It's therefore quite possible that, after the disaster happens, I'll have to embark on a journey towards Lietevesi and Pirttimäki. If the Pirttimäki zone won't resolve the problem, I could visit the Öökkölä area, where cULT oF pOWER claims another similar anomalous zone has formed. And if shifting to a parallel reality won't work there either, I could move to live to Lietevesi. The survival conditions are at least better there than in the Neulamäki forests, and if OH7MO would still be alive, his practicality and resourcefulness would surely be beneficial.

At the beginning of the last week of the millennium, I went to the university to print the memory files, and I'm about to seal them in a waterproof and airtight package. I'll also include some of these personal journal entries so that any finders of the texts will get some idea of our experiences during the years 1997-1999.

It's December 31, 1999, and the time is 9:49 AM. The millennium would change on the easternmost islands of Kiribati at 12:00 and in New Zealand at 13:00. I will need to head towards the bunker soon so I can protect myself before the worst possible scenario.

Since I haven't convinced any of my group members of the need to protect themselves, I may well be the only CWU member left alive next week. It's also possible that I shall be dead as well, and the only memory of CWU left in the destroyed world will be this collection of printouts.

I'm about to close the papers into their time capsule and then start cycling towards Neulamäki with my sleeping bag. The other gear, such as the canned food, iodine tablets, the bow, and the twig burner, are waiting for me in the bunker.

Hopefully, nothing catastrophic will happen. But if it does, hopefully someone will find these texts, even if not for hundreds of years. I don't want our lives to remain completely without historical significance.