An isolated operator stationed at Lagrange L73, broadcasting across the solar system. Dmitri (dMHz) transmits from a forgotten outpost — cipher blocks, ASCII noise, and a signal reaching for something that might still be listening.

1. wbknl-000001 — The first transmission. An isolated operator at Lagrange L73 sends his opening signal, hoping his old WBKNL platoon will hear him across the SOL system.

2. wbknl-000002 — Prozac, ELIZA, and the first outbound call. A 20mg pill, a dim radio room, and a long block of cipher.

3. wbknl-000003 — A week passes. The narrator remembers the НЖТИ station, its urgency codes, and listens --- in Monolit mode --- for a voice that does not come.

4. wbknl-000004 — A Monolit-level message comes through, in English. Someone elsewhere is reading Portuguese ciphered transmissions and wondering where they came from.

5. wbknl-000005 — Encryption failure. The narrator has been transmitting unencrypted, and now realizes why anyone might have been able to read him.

6. wbknl-000006 — Encryption restored. A challenge issued --- decipher this, or expect strictly confidential traffic to follow.

7. wbknl-000007 — A contingency plan, a PAUSE key pressed in exhaustion, and the first memory of the explosion on Earth.

8. wbknl-000008 — Memory of rain in a city. The man with the heavy, sorrowful gaze. And the first name --- argonn.

9. wbknl-000009 — Waking from a deep sleep. The memory of the Buzzer --- the mysterious transmission picked up with argonn at WBKNL --- and its voice reading indecipherable Cyrillic words.

10. wbknl-000010 — Insects, geeks, bugs, and 4625kHz. A delirious meditation on noise as both biological and computational defect, ending on the Buzzer's frequency.

11. wbknl-000011 — A miniature tragedy. The man who operated the Morse key at WBKNL loses the hand he used to operate it --- and, with that hand, his honorific.

12. wbknl-000012 — A biography. The narrator was once a child in South America called the sad robot, then an accountant in Moscow, then a reader of Vila-Matas, then a Russian special forces operative --- undone by Montano's Malady.

13. wbknl-000013 — Lagrange as poetry. Mallarmé, Nabokov, Nijinsky, Walser --- and the urge to die in the ice, with handwriting first becoming minuscule.

14. wbknl-000014 — The trapezoidal black-concrete bunker at WBKNL, its useless door, and the 10km tunnel to Povarovo. Solitude is the death of the living.

15. wbknl-000015 — The physics of L73. A glass rectangle of a radio room. No ionosphere --- the atmosphere is permanently ionized. Radio waves bounce like rubber balls. Only noise, and a buzzer.

16. wbknl-000016 — A short poem in German. The mid-point of the novella, written in the language of Walser and Heidegger. Ich bin und ich bin nicht.

17. wbknl-000017 — Days and nights of identical brightness. A broken rheostat, a 25×20×12cm box, and the four books that fit inside it: DFW, Pynchon, Vollmann, and a slim Williams for the long watches.

18. wbknl-000018 — When did it begin to stop making sense? Days like night, night like darkness. The story of three candidates --- argonn, the narrator, and linkfanel --- only one of whom did not oversleep.

19. wbknl-000019 — Access to the Quantum Entanglement Communicator. A corrupted Spanish fragment intercepted from a spacecraft named Alsi Lotsir --- speaking, perhaps, of being lost.

20. wbknl-000020 — The world does not exist. Markus Gabriel's argument applied to L73: there are only fields of sense, and the narrator inhabits one of them.

21. wbknl-000021 — Have I been unconscious all this time? Staring at the SDR waterfall, hoping for any modulation. Back in wbknl, life was far more eventful.

22. wbknl-000022 — The explosions at WBKNL. The SOYUZ-UBV76 spacecraft that brought him here. An insomniac's arithmetic of steps and minutes. A BEGALI Simplex Mono Morse key. CQ.

23. wbknl-000023 — The sunrise of the sunset. An imperceptible noise. And, in the corner of the radio room, a previously unseen rheostat --- turned counter-clockwise, until darkness fell.

24. wbknl-000024 — The ether's noise as heroin, the coal-blackness in which lives are made, and a book of William Carlos Williams poems before sleep.

25. wbknl-000025 — A system: each rereading begins at the page number where the previous one ended. The book is never finished. The narrator wishes he could do the same with Frank Ocean's albums.

26. wbknl-000026 — A recapitulation. Lagrange as a planet of pale neons without sun or stars. The radio crackle like a knife scraping silence. The memory of НЖТИ. The hope of any signal, even a single one.

27. wbknl-000027 — A message received. After twenty-six transmissions into the void, a reply arrives from Outpost Epsilon-12, Uplink Sigma Command --- and twelve solar minutes to confirm.

- 🛠️ about this node

©️ CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 — share with attribution, no commercial use, no remix