Covert conversation

My friend Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster taught me how to adjust my biorhythms so I can estivate.  This is the best summer I've ever had, lying in the cool sand under a rock. 

But my slumber was disturbed last week when the airwaves came alive with the promise of a telepathic bonanza.  I speak of course of the two-hour secret conversation between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.  Knowledge of the contents of that conversation might help answer the question tormenting everyone: What is Trump doing?

The excitement that woke me from shaded bliss began in what I used to consider my private ethernet, where I communed with the souls of non-telepaths at will, before I discovered that I share this space with a few of my kind, surviving remnants of a telepathic culture that once, before the age of language, stalked the earth in great numbers.  These days we teles get by as best we can, playing coffee houses and clubs- or, if things get desperate, cruise ships- so when an opportunity like the Trump/Putin Secret Meeting pops up, we jump on it!

The Monday meeting was announced on Sunday.  I only had one day to get in shape for the epic hack.  I spent all Sunday practicing advanced techniques, like Intereferometric Selection Relay, and Integral Diffraction Disambiguation, which had served me well in the days when I had to match the NSA's continually evolving defenses (keep reading).

I and my colleagues did not know what sort of defenses to expect in Helsinki.  We probed and found credible reports of a new Russian weapon that could turn the immediate space enclosing Trump and Putin into a black hole, from which no information could escape, leaving even telepaths with nada.  This method would of course destroy the two leaders as well as contain all information, but the Russians, so we gathered,  have discovered something they call Molecular Rebound Reintegration, which will, they believe, throw back in time- to the original point of origin of its pre-black hole reality- simulacra of the two leaders, visible and seemingly real to everyone, which will operate in local time, saying and doing everything that the originals would have said and done had they not become subatomic soup.  At this time we have insufficient evidence to confirm that Putin and Trump have been replaced by simulacra. 

As an aside, to help me get ready for the challenge, I consumed double my daily intake of spinach, which, for reasons I'm still working on, makes me feel like Popeye.

So on Monday at 2:00 p.m., Hottern' Hell Western Time, I and most of the world's surviving telepaths focussed our vestigial talent on the matter at hand, barely needing CNN droning in the background or similar prompts for guidance, because the two leaders were clearly delineated in space and time by the worldwide attention itself, which gave us a sort of GPS route to them, as if the need for attention that drove these men had become their greatest weakness.

As anticipated, we encountered an impenetrable field as we attempted to track Putin and Trump when they entered the room for their private conversation.  The field did seem of black hole strength, judging by the nothing that came out of it.  Fortunately one of our newly reunited group (a high school physics teacher from Visalia) had a brilliant idea.  He may explain it in a journal someday; I'll just note that he called his technique Reverse-Echo Anticipatory Manifestation (REAM), which, he explained, "captures" interactive simulacra from the molecular rebound and (before they revert to quark stew in .006 of a nanosecond) induces them to reveal their future dialogues.

The resulting readout was distorted by several fields it had travelled through on its way out of the black hole, garbling some parts, which I've filled in using context.  More intriguingly, at least one of the fields seems to have operated as a sort of cosmic editor, taking the original meanings and converting them into analogues from the deepest mythologies of the human or possibly reptilian mind. You be the judge.  This transcript should keep us guessing for a long time.

Enjoy your summer!  Harry the Human

Transcript of the secret conversation between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday, July 16, 2018:

T: Sweet tidings, Putey, from the land of abandon!

P: Greetings, Donny!  Did you do your history homework?

T: Yes, Putey!  Russia without a tsar is like a village without an idiot- Haw Haw!

P: Indeed, Donny!  A tsar without Russia is like a balding man with half a wig!

T: Touche! No one can beat you, Putey, my man!

P:  We are such stunning successes, Donny!

T:  I could tell you stories, Putey...[unintelligible]...and they stand at the gates, howling.

P: Let them howl, Donny!  They have been out-thought.

T: We out-thought them, didn't we, Putey?  We out-think everybody, every time.  We are two-three steps ahead!

P: It is a joy; I shall bring an offering to the Female Creator of the Universe to show no hard feelings...[unintelligible]....

T: They howl at the gates.

P: Yes...I hear them.

T: Let them howl!  For we know, Putey, that in one week the reasons for the howling and the very howling itself will be remembered only, if at all, as mere passing sound, like someone in another car honking at someone, like someone's thought blending into the wind.

P: You are a poet, Donny, my friend!  Imagine, a world run by poets!

T: Would everything have to rhyme?

P: They howl at the gates, Donny.

T: Then come, let us show them....

P: Yes, let us show them....

T: ...that we are two-three steps ahead and we don't care who howls.

P: Your bard said it best: "He who laughs last laughs loudest," great words though they don't rhyme.

T: We laugh last, Putey!

P: Yes, Donny, after entropy's final gasp, one sound will ring out: our laughter!

T: Damn, Putey, you are a poet!

End of transcript