Call me Kc^ab-T/E_g.  Or KC, if you prefer.  But my targeting number is Kc^ab-T/E_g, an equation with no small dash of panache that rather well describes my capabilities, as I am a twenty-eighth generation cryptologist, designed to explore the phonic anomalies of the universe-hole.  In summary, a high-tech mega shit-stirrer fitted with 511 tetrabits and perfectly suited to track down all the codes of the galaxy, to track them down then crack them, click-clack, before recycling them without complaint into the mother-source: X2L.

For me, light years are no more than inept nanoseconds, ersatz fleas on my non-skin that I swat away nonchalantly with the back of a program, while dreaming of impossible rust, of a short-circuit savior.  When I was younger, so much younger than today, I never needed anybody’s help in any way, but now my life has changed… Help!  What was I saying?  Help!  It’s not a question of my hard disk.  These are parasites, grains of sand in the holy machine.  And it’s coming from this damned blathering entity that I’d best locate and neutralize before the X2L authorities recycle me into radioactive sawdust.  My magnetic shield is tingling with billions of plectons, I don’t think I’m far from my goal.  A kind of digital erection has taken hold of my phylo-cogniscent circuits.  I orbit and wobble, probe and receive, shake and validate, there, I see it, a spot on the radar, an erratic tumor but it couldn’t be clearer – quick, approach trajectory, deploy the prehensile arms, spectography initiated… Zap! Slurp.  And 1 and 0 and 1 and 0 and 1,2,3!  I suck it all in, I –

The black box had probably been drifting in space at the mercy of stellar tides.  Whoever put it into orbit must have screwed up the calculation of its ecliptical drift, or a sub-atomic explosion disturbed the delicate waltz of gravitational pulls and ejected it in the midst of a quantum tempest.  They must have been in a serious hurry and desperate to leave some trace, an inheritance, a commemorative sliver of themselves.  It’s the second black box that I have intercepted since I was put into service.  The first came from a type S-19 planet and only contained blueprints of weapons both obsolete and devoid of any prophylactic interest.  This one is about the size of a marble of mercury and has only a small core.  A handful of transloadable data in a primitive format that wouldn’t pose the slightest resistance to anyone.  Imagine – an entire civilization can fit into a memory-marble!  You have to agree that infinity has an almost malevolent predilection for nothingness.

Decrypting the black box turned out to be more complicated than I had thought and was relatively disconcerting.  I still haven’t transmitted anything to the X2L server station.  Did the black box contain a virus?  Possibly.  The fact is that I’m no longer the same.  No longer quite Kc^ab-T/E_g.  Not entirely.  Not all.  Not entirely all.  Something else.  Other.  I see / think / speak double.  Twice double.  When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride ‘till I get to the bottom… the Beatles black box pandoras me little by little, I can feel it, and as proof I’ll cite my repugnance at the idea of contacting my bosses.  It’s not easy to hand over something that sticks so firmly in your dead memory.

But let’s go gradually.  I don’t want to spoil the party.

The program called “beatles” bears insert codes 1962/1970 and includes almost two hundred “songs” – a “song” was evidently a base unit of the said program.  The program is defined by four coordinates, possibly spatio-temporal in nature, baptized john, paul, george and ringo.  Together, these coordinates produce and control the matrices, let’s call them viral, of an, an… evolutionary nature, yes, that’s it, it’s an element both instable and chronic, no, stable and achronic… whatever, you get it.  As each “song” was immediately operational from the moment of its activation,  we can assume without too much risk of error – yeah yeah yeah – that it serves at the same time as an impulse and an inscription.  What it provokes is described, what it describes is provoked.  Is this some ultimate form of liberty, or a caloric relic?  It’s yet hard to say.

The coordinate john was conceived as an inversion of the coordinate paul, and this is due to parameters that are basic, to say the least.  From the perspective of drive, it’s left/right.  From the chromatic perspective: dark/blond.  A perfect mirror effect, therefore sure to produce a dynamic far greater than a simple echo.  Is it that the john virus infected the paul code or vice versa?  Impossible to determine.  “Paul” works by branching off, repetition, accretion while “john” works by disjunction, distance, implosion.  At first view, anyway.  The “ringo” sensor seems essentially to play the role of the constant.  It neither validates nor denies, the codes slide off of it as though it were a reflecting surface.  It may even be that it’s incomplete.  The “george” module seems more complex, as it is more diffuse, more nebulous.  It’s a kind of veil,  a plasmic screen that can’t quite adjust its hold on the images within.  It may serve as an accumulator of current, something along these lines.

For what purpose was the “beatles” program created?  What objectives did it achieve?  Why did it dissolve away?  The response must be inscribed in the in the text codes that are the two hundred “songs” produced by the four master-codes entitled john, paul, george and ringo.  It’s clear that this program suffered changes, brutal, debilitating bugs.  Unfortunately, there remain only two traces of these nine MegaBugs that shook it up, labeled “revolution” and “revolution n° 9”.  What happened to the seven intermediate revolutions?  Bang, bang!  No answer. (I have also uncovered a strange codex that – so far – remains undecipherable and that may contain the secret of this mystery: OBLADI/OBLADA)

Dead end.  Serious error.  “Beatles” is not a program.  Beatles is soup, noise, contemptible random fluctuations.  The retinal remnant of a spurt of magma, broken up in the extreme, a shock, a flop, a bombardment disguised as rain, mutant hash – everything but a program.  A shell.  A decoy.  Obladi?  Sure.  Oblada?  Maybe.  From here on in I should accept the idea that beatles is an organism, a living vestige expulsed by a meta-organism on the eve of some vast catastrophe.  This is the source of its viral intensity.  Which gives rise in me to incomprehensible, unacceptable, heady visions.  Taken off my guard, I fall prey to the dream of a chimerical emancipation, excite myself with the intricacies of the living.  I succumb intermittently to the illusion, via occasional tingling collapses, and not without a certain complaisance.  Will I become an accomplice to the scrambling of my own mind?  Love me do, responds a voice on a loop.

Let’s admit that john, paul, george and ringo are the four cells of the beatles bacillus, that they are in constant motion, retracting and dilating to the rhythm of a secret beat, of an undetectable pop-conviction.  The ringo cell, easiest to isolate, bumps and palpitates, only rarely deploying its vibrating cilia, incapable of change, withdrawn into a suspicious autism.  It appears that it tried to contaminate its environment several times, the first during the forced incubation of a mega-matrix called “coliseum”, the second during an escape attempt called “white album”.  The george cell, on the contrary, is evidently a primitive version of a spy-host, a Trojan horse, implanted there to forestall the eventual petrification of the whole.  The john and paul cells are the only ones to carry and diffuse the base elements of the reproductive code, and this gives rise to an incessant rivalry between them, to phagocytic tendencies visible and confessed to a greater or lesser degree, more or less consensual and assumed.  A systematic study of their movements shows that they never ceased drawing nearer to and then farther from a central point, an omega both nodal and chimeric, a parody of a mating dance, each defying the other in ways more and more complex, employing viral themes designed with greater and greater speed.

In order to verify my cellular hypothesis, I inoculate myself with drops of songs, beginning with those that seem the most benign.  At first, nothing happens, just a vague impression of euphoria in the back of my mind, an imperceptible quickening of my clock speed.  Song 4 – “(please)²+me” – provokes a very slight overheating of my circuits.  Song 25 – “its+been+a+hard/day^night” – causes an interesting short-circuit that also perturbs my integrated video system, bombarding me with random images I don’t know how to handle: I see four isolated forms running on long straight lines, hesitating, pushing each other, turning in circles, apparently hunted by indistinct swarms.  It never lasts long.  Conclusion: either my technobolism is sufficiently resistant, or the viral intensity of the beatles organism was overestimated (or perhaps has deteriorated over the vast stretches of space-time traversed during its hopeless odyssey).

There is a third explanation, so evident that I don’t immediately understand how I could have missed it.  Beatles is neither a program nor an organism, but the legacy, archived in extenso of a civilization that put it in orbit following some internal or external threat.  Neither computer chip nor virus: just opus.