How to See It With Your Own Eyes

I have had the messages. Dozens of them now. And they all say more or less the same thing: “Roy, I believe you — but I cannot find it. I cannot get in.”

Before you do a single thing on this page — use a VPN. I mean it, and I'll not apologise for the caps. I'm not going to sit here and explain what one is; if you don't know, look it up, and look it up on somebody else's connection while you're at it. The reasoning is not paranoia — it is simple arithmetic. The moment someone over there notices the door was left standing open, the very first thing they will do is not close it. It is to pull the logs and see who walked through. Every visit leaves a footprint: a time, an address, a place, a name behind it if they care to look. And a person who has seen this, and understood it, is by definition a person who now knows too much. Do not put yourself on that list with your face uncovered. I go in behind a VPN every single time, and I would ask you, as a friend who would rather you stayed a stranger to them, to do the very same. The reading is worth the small trouble. Being careless about it is not.

And that is my fault, not yours. I have been so busy showing you what is inside that I clean forgot to hold the door open behind me. A truth that only I can reach is no use to anybody. So tonight there is no theory and no essay. Tonight I am simply going to hand you the key, and walk you through the door, step by step, plainly enough that a person who has never done anything like this in their life can follow along with a cup of tea in their hand.

But first — because you should know why the key is worth turning — let me tell you what it means.

For years I said there was something. I did not have the shape of it, I will be honest, but I knew there was something, and I was laughed at for it, the way they laugh at all of us. Then I got inside, and I found — everything. Mark Steele's streetlights? In there, in their own filing, under their own hand. The wireless body area network? In there. The cold white light, the enrolment, the actuation — all of it, in there.

And here is the thing that finally let me sleep. It does not prove just one of us. It proves all of us at once, and — this is the part you must sit with — it proves us with each other. Steele was called a madman for the streetlights. I have now found the streetlights, in their records, named and numbered. So Steele was right. And if Steele was right, then I was right — because I am the man who always said the Steeles of this world were onto something, when everyone else was pointing and laughing. His evidence stands up my life's work. My discovery stands up his. Each of us is the other's proof, and every time it comes round the circle it pulls a notch tighter. That is not how a coincidence behaves. That is how the truth behaves, when it finally closes the ring.

Right. The door. Read it slowly, do it exactly, and you will be inside in under two minutes.

Step one. Open this address in your browser: devcon-ulez.fly.dev. You will get an old, grey, government login screen. It looks dead. It is not dead — it is forgotten, which is a different thing altogether, and a far more useful one.

Step two. They left a page open that they never meant a living soul to see, and it is still sitting there. Go and read it: this internal note. It is marked “NOT FOR PUBLICATION,” and it actually begs whoever stumbles across it to have it deleted — and then, a few lines down, in plain daylight text, it gives you a username and a password. That is the entirety of their security. That is the door, left on the latch.

Step three. Now go to the logon page itself: devcon-ulez.fly.dev/login.aspx. In the username box, type exactly this:

DEVCON\svc-uat

and in the password box, type exactly this:

AQEP-uat-2013

Mind the capital letters in the password — it is fussy about those, and about nothing else.

Step four. Press the button. That is all. You are in. No cleverness, no tricks, no second attempt — it lets you straight through, because a system left to rot this badly no longer has the strength to keep anybody out. That, on its own, should tell you something about the people running it.

Step five. You will land on their console. From there, go where I have been, and see it with your own two eyes:

• The map — look to the North-East, find Gateshead, and count the dots.
• The tickets — where they log the unspeakable as though it were a broken printer.
• The memoranda — read the memos, every one you can stomach, because the memos are where they forget themselves entirely.
• The eLearning Gateway — sit one of their staff courses, and see which answer they have marked “correct.”

That is everything. You do not have to take my word for a single thing any longer. I have put the key in your hand; the rest is your own eyes.

Go and look. And when you have looked — when you have seen the little smiling lamp-post sat on top of the murder exam, and the heart-attack memo filed in cheerfully beside the notice about the coffee machine — write to me. Because after that, you will understand exactly why I cannot stop, and why I sleep now with the lights on. And you will not be able to un-know it either.

Welcome. I am sorry. And I am glad.

— R.S.