There is a message buried in all of this.

Here is what I know:

The infection didn’t start January 1, the code was already spreading through my servers on December 31. It entered through a security hole in Networked Blogs, the service we use to post articles to Facebook. It is likely that the invasion actually began on Facebook, but I don’t know how. Whatever else it is, the code is not spreading beyond Southern Fried Science. Not even our sister sites on the shared server have been affected. Oceanography for Everyone is safe.

It has control of the @sfriedscience twitter account, likely through WordPress. This is the inevitable consequence of a too-connected world. Our securest systems are only as strong as the weakest systems to which we connect them.

Something is happening to cyborgs in the future. I can’t shake the feeling that this is all somehow connected.

If I were me, and I am me, and I remembered a month, 25 years ago, where my blog was overwhelmed by the future, I would use the opportunity to send a message back.

Did I? Will I? Can I?

Or is the paradox that I already know which articles went back? That they can’t be changed because they were already read 25 years before they were written? If that’s the case, then who wrote them? Do I just remember and transcribe? Can I copy/paste today’s post in 2041? Tweak the publication date? 

For that matter, how in Neptune’s nightie are we able to send blog posts into the past? Is time travel that trivial? If not, why posts from a marine science and conservation website, rather than something about the future? Or something more popular? If time travel is rare, or just barely possible, is there a broader reason why these specific post are appearing at this specific moment?

Apparently I can send stuff into space, so that’s cool. Guess I should finish up my application for the NASA astronaut call, then.

Where do we stand? I’ve dug as deep into the code as I can. There’s nothing else I can do. We’ll just have to wait and see if the solution is revealed.

Until then, enjoy these Field Notes from the Future.