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by Gary Frinchas

Paulo Pinto’s w3bK3rN3l radio outpost is a cyberpunk novella that takes the form of twenty-seven radio transmissions sent, between 2020 and 2024, to the Cosmic Voyage collaborative science-fiction network — a public-access Unix system whose users write stories as crew aboard ships, colonies, and outposts spread across a shared stellar diaspora. The novella’s premise sits squarely inside that universe: a single operator, stranded at the Lagrange point L73, transmits in obsolete military encryption (KG-84, MIL-STD 188-110B) to a SOL system from which no answer ever quite arrives.

What looks at first like a thin science-fiction conceit turns out to be a vehicle for something stranger and more durable: a meditation on memory, language, mental disintegration, and the literary canon — written by a Portuguese amateur radio operator who is, in his off-hours, both a polyglot intellectual and a serious reader of the late twentieth-century maximalists.

The narrator is a former operative in a Russian special forces unit known as WBKNL, stationed inside a black-walled, trapezoidal bunker in Povarovo — the real Moscow Oblast settlement that, in the actual world, is associated with the Russian shortwave numbers station UVB-76 (known to listeners as The Buzzer). After what the narrator calls “the explosions at WBKNL”, he boards a spacecraft, the SOYUZ-UBV76, and is sent to Lagrange L73, a remote relay post one light-year from Earth, where he is the only human being. From there he sends transmissions back into the void, encrypted with the obsolete hardware he carried out of Povarovo in his luggage.

Across the twenty-seven transmissions, the novella unfolds three interlocking arcs:

1. A technical-procedural arc, in which the narrator maintains, troubleshoots, and despairs over his equipment: a broken rheostat that keeps the lights at a permanent middle setting, an SDR with a waterfall display, a BEGALI Simplex Mono Morse key, an atmosphere so thoroughly ionised that radio waves cannot leave the room and instead “bounce like rubber balls” until they “come to rest in some corner.”

2. A confessional-biographical arc, in which the narrator, in fragments, sketches his life: a South American childhood under “clean, oval-shaped mountains, with no sharp peaks capable of puncturing balloons or dreams”; a sad adulthood as a furniture-company accountant in Moscow; a fascination with Vila-Matas that turned into the diagnosis of Montano’s Malady; an enlistment in Russian special forces as escape; and, finally, the decision to accept the L73 posting because “humanity is not a flower one would care to smell.”

3. A literary-philosophical arc, in which the narrator reads, reflects, and progressively reframes his situation through Mallarmé, Nabokov, Nijinsky, Robert Walser, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, William T. Vollmann, William Carlos Williams, Frank Ocean, and the contemporary philosopher Markus Gabriel. By chapter 20 he has effectively rebuilt his ontology in Gabriel’s terms — there is no world, only fields of sense — and declared his own existence in those terms: I exist as a human being in WBKNL-Radio, in the field of sense that is L73.

The novella is structurally closed: chapter 1 announces a first message sent in hope of being heard; chapter 27 closes with a message finally received from a SIGMA Command outpost. In between, twenty-five transmissions speak into a silence the reader cannot quite measure.

What makes the novella unusual on the page is its constant code-switching between registers that, in any conventional novel, would be cordoned off.

Each chapter opens with a near-identical technical envelope — a header naming the KG-84 cipher and a paranoid epigraph from unnamed “theorists” claiming that the transmission is a covert station for a secret society. The body slips between Portuguese (the dominant narrative register), English (in chapter 4 and 5, where someone else is briefly speaking back; and again in the final chapter, where the official reply arrives), Russian (in fragments and chapter headings), Spanish (in chapter 19, as a corrupted intercept from another ship called Alsi Lotsir — Ristol Isla reversed), and German (in chapter 16, a single short poem). It closes with the [#$ --> noise] glyph, the EOT and END OF ENCRYPTION markers — the small ritual signoff of a transmission ending.

Inside that envelope, three voices alternate:

- A technical-bureaucratic voice — close to Pynchon, who in Gravity’s Rainbow runs entire pages of fictional ballistics calculations and corporate memoranda. Pinto’s narrator does the same with his insomnia: For days now I have not been able to sleep more than 236 minutes. As many as the steps I take every night to fall asleep. Perhaps if I walk 300 steps, I’ll manage to sleep for 300 minutes. Working the numbers out properly, in order to sleep the number of minutes necessary for my sanity, I would have to walk the equivalent in steps — which would take until daybreak. The absurdity is internal to the procedure, not external to it.

- An elegiac-lyrical voice, especially in chapters 8, 13, 18, and 26. Here the prose lets go of the cipher and reaches for image: the man with the heavy, sorrowful gaze; Russia is eternally cold; days that are the night, and night that is darkness; the sky is a gradient of pale neons, without a sun, without stars. These chapters are written in the cadence of Sá-Carneiro, Pessoa, and the Portuguese tradition of nocturnal melancholy; they sit inside the cyberpunk frame like illuminated manuscripts inside a hard drive.

- A discursive-philosophical voice, audible in chapter 12 (the autobiographical confession), chapter 13 (the meditation on Mallarmé and Walser), and chapter 20 (the application of Markus Gabriel). This is the voice of someone who has read enough to know exactly what he is doing.

The novella’s strangeness, and a good deal of its quality, lies in the way these voices interrupt each other without explanation — the way a serious reader’s mind actually moves, especially under conditions of isolation and stress.

A real listener of shortwave radio will recognise that the novella is, at every level, anchored in the lore of UVB-76 — the Russian numbers station that has broadcast a continuous buzzer tone on 4625 kHz since the 1970s, interrupted at irregular intervals by Cyrillic-coded voice messages. The fictional WBKNL is described as a trapezoidal bunker outside Povarovo (the location, in the real world, of the UVB-76 transmitter until 2010). The narrator and his colleague argonn picked up a mysterious continuous signal there which they christened “the Buzzer”. The transmitter craft is the SOYUZ-UBV76. When the narrator tunes his radio at L73, he tunes to 4625 kHz — and hears only noise, and a buzzer.

This is not decoration. The premise of UVB-76 — a station whose transmissions are continuous, encrypted, and whose function is unknown even to those who study it — provides the formal model for the novella’s entire structure. Each chapter of w3bK3rN3l radio outpost is a small unit of broadcast into uncertainty; the cipher is part of the texture; the question of who, if anyone, is listening, is unanswerable from inside the transmission. Pinto has, in effect, written a novel that does to the reader what UVB-76 has been doing to listeners for half a century.

The author the narrator names with most frankness is Enrique Vila-Matas, whose 2002 novel El Mal de Montano (Montano’s Malady) describes a literary critic so thoroughly infected by his reading that he can no longer distinguish his own life from the books he loves. In chapter 12 the narrator admits: shortly after starting work on my first novel, I came down with what is known as Montano’s Malady. It was at that point that I decided to leave the furniture company and enlist in the Russian special forces.

This is the novella’s most important auto-confession. Everything that follows can be read as Mal de Montano in progress — a narrator whose interior life is increasingly transacted in literary citation, whose memory of Earth is filtered through writers he has read, whose moments of greatest stylistic intensity are also his moments of greatest dependency on other people’s prose. The story of the Telegraphist in chapter 11 — the operator who loses his right hand in a road accident and, with it, the honorific Mister — is not just a darkly funny anecdote about military communications; it is a parable about Mal de Montano itself, where the loss of a faculty produces a quiet, communal adjustment of language. We adjust honorifics because we cannot adjust bodies.

The literary canon that the narrator carries with him is selected with this disease in mind. In chapter 17 he tells us he was allowed a box of books measuring 25 × 20 × 12 cm, into which he fit exactly three: David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and William T. Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels. The choice is not innocent. DFW’s title essay is about confinement inside a luxury cruise ship — a closed environment, total surveillance, the loss of agency — which is exactly the narrator’s situation. Pynchon is the maximalist of paranoid systems, of communication-as-conspiracy. Vollmann’s first novel is a maximalist war between humans and insects, which retroactively explains the apparently delirious passage in chapter 10 in which the narrator declares that the insects are fighting to liberate the world. The reading list is not flavour; it is the operating system.

Later, in chapter 24, the narrator falls asleep over a book of poems by William Carlos Williams — the minimalist counterpart to the three maximalists. The descent from DFW/Pynchon/Vollmann to WCW corresponds with the novella’s late turn toward minimal forms. In chapter 25 the narrator confesses an obsessive habit: every time he rereads one of his three books, he renumbers the pages in pencil to continue from where the previous reading ended. If the book ends on page 423, when I read it again, page 1 is renumbered as 424, and so on. In this way, mentally, I never let the book be finished. He wishes he could do the same with Frank Ocean’s albums.

This is Mal de Montano arrived at its most refined state: not the inability to stop reading, but the active construction of techniques to make reading never end. It is also, of course, a perfect description of what w3bK3rN3l radio outpost itself does as a form — twenty-seven transmissions that are never quite a finished book, because the broadcast medium is incompatible with completion.

The author the narrator identifies with most poignantly is Robert Walser, the Swiss writer who spent the last twenty-three years of his life in a psychiatric asylum and who, in his final years of writing, produced thousands of Mikrogramme — texts written in pencil at letter heights of one to two millimetres, in handwriting so small that critics required decades after his death to decipher them. Walser died on Christmas Day 1956, frozen, on a solitary walk in the snow outside the asylum.

In chapter 13, the narrator names the project: to die in the ice, like Robert Walser — without my writing first becoming minuscule too, almost imperceptible. He frames this as a fear, but the novella reads it as a programme. From chapter 13 onward the prose progressively shrinks. Chapter 11 is two short paragraphs; chapter 16 is a brief German poem; chapter 21 is three small paragraphs that announce the narrator’s own renewed silence; chapter 25 fits an entire idea into three paragraphs and lets a single name (Frank Ocean) close the chapter. In chapter 22, after twenty-two transmissions of elaborate cipher, the narrator’s transmission is reduced to the two-character Morse signal CQ — the most elementary call of the amateur radio operator: anyone listening?

The novella’s whole movement is from expansive transmission (chapter 1) to minute compressed signal (chapter 22) to lyrical recapitulation (chapter 26) — Walser-like compression, Mikrogramme-style, played out across the dramatic arc.

In chapter 20 something unexpected happens: the narrator does not get sadder. He gets clearer. After twenty weeks of depression, paranoia, and obsessive insomnia, he turns to Markus Gabriel — the contemporary German philosopher whose 2013 Why the World Does Not Exist argues that the concept of “the world”, understood as the totality of everything that exists, is logically incoherent. Gabriel’s positive thesis is that what does exist is a plurality of fields of sense (Sinnfelder) — local ontological domains, each with its own rules of intelligibility, that overlap but cannot be subsumed into a single all-containing reality.

Chapter 20 is the narrator’s word-for-word application of Gabriel’s argument to his own situation:

| If the world exists, it must contain all things. Therefore the world must contain the world which must contain the world, and so on. The world does not exist! It cannot exist. There are infinite fields of sense. L73 is one such field of sense, and WBKNL-Radio is a thematic domain. So: I exist as a human being in WBKNL-Radio, in the field of sense that is L73.

This is the novella’s structural fulcrum. The narrator has been calling out to a “world” — to Earth, to his comrades, to the SOL system — and receiving no answer. Gabriel allows him to drop the assumption that the world exists at all. He need not be heard by the world. He need only exist in his field of sense. The pivot is purely philosophical, but it is also, in narrative terms, the moment at which suicide stops being an option.

After chapter 20, the novella becomes elegiac in a new way: not because the narrator has resigned himself to non-existence, but because he has accepted the small radius of his existence. The later chapters — the rheostat that finally turns off the light, the William Carlos Williams book, the renumbering of pages, the recapitulation of all the imagery — are written by someone who has stopped expecting his prose to escape the room. They are written for the room. Without it, darkness. But darkness is not always evil.

Chapter 27 ruins, in the best sense of the word, everything the novella has been building. After twenty-six transmissions into silence, a message arrives. It comes through the same KG-84 envelope the narrator has been using; it is addressed to him by name (W3bK3rN3l); it identifies his location (“Lagrange Station between [UNKNOWN SYSTEM] and Planet Lagrange”); it confirms that his encryption is still effective; and it gives him twelve solar minutes to confirm with a fallback channel and a code (-δμ).

The Russian exclamation блин (a euphemism for an obscenity, roughly damn) and the line Я получил сообщение — I have received a message — open the chapter with the first jubilation in the entire novella. I feel truly in ecstasy.

But the message itself is ambiguous in a way the narrator either does not see or refuses to articulate. It says he is in [UNKNOWN SYSTEM], not in SOL where he believed himself to be. It places him in orbit around a Planet Lagrange never mentioned before in the novella. It speaks of covert communication networks and hostile reconnaissance — the paranoid framing he had filed away as madness in earlier chapters is, suddenly, the framing of his command. Worst of all, the very last line of the transmission is INTEL STATUS: RESTRICTED. The reader is not permitted to know what the message means in full.

In structural terms, this is a remarkable mirroring of chapter 1: the narrator there sent a transmission in hope of being read; here he is read, finally, but the price of being read is that the reader (us, on the outside) is reduced to RESTRICTED status. The novella ends with the narrator inside the field of sense he can finally inhabit — but with the reader pushed out beyond its perimeter.

Whether the message is authentic, the encryption is sound, the unit is friend or foe, and whether the narrator will respond within the twelve solar minutes — all of these remain open. w3bK3rN3l radio outpost refuses to resolve any of them. It is a finished book that performs unfinishability, which is exactly what the renumbering trick of chapter 25 predicts.

What kind of book is this, in the end? It is published in twenty-seven discrete units on a small, public-access Unix system, freely licensed under Creative Commons. It is written by a Portuguese radio amateur (callsign CT1ETE) who is also a graduate in Artistic and Cultural Studies and an active member of the IndieWeb. It is multilingual without being translated. It refers, by name and by quotation, to writers as distant as Mallarmé and as recent as Frank Ocean. It models its formal architecture on a real Cold War-era numbers station whose existence has never been officially explained. It applies a 2013 philosophical argument to its narrator’s situation in a single paragraph and then moves on. It contains real Morse code, real ham-radio equipment, real geographic coordinates, real military encryption nomenclature, real Russian place names, and one entirely fictional planet.

In other words, it is a particular kind of contemporary work: small, distributed, multilingual, citational, technologically literate, philosophically serious, and uninterested in the publishing industry. It belongs to a category that does not yet have a settled name — the digital-garden novella, perhaps, or the tilde-published longform fiction — and it does what such a category should do: it produces an artefact you could not have got from any other arrangement of writer, platform, and audience.

It is also, more straightforwardly, very good. The voice is consistent without being monotonous. The structure is tight without being mechanical. The literary references are deployed by someone who has read the books, not by someone who has read about them. The cyberpunk frame is held lightly enough that it never overwhelms the human predicament inside it. The emotional arc — solitude, depression, philosophical recovery, dimmed light, a single received message — earns the ecstasy of its final chapter. And the politics of the form — public domain, IndieWeb, freely licensed, multilingual — match the politics of the content, which is about communication that resists the conditions of communication.

w3bK3rN3l radio outpost is, in the most exact sense, a novella you have to listen for. It rewards listening.