Note: I originally wrote this story in March or April 2015 and then emailed the story to my brother and sister, who haven’t quite commented on it. This is the earliest account of the story after I remembered it in the last few days of February 2015, but it’s not complete. I left a lot of stuff out because it was so dark, which is why I was so concerned with the events.

Also, please note that I’m not claiming this to be true. In fact, I would love for my version of events to be compared against that of others who were involved because I’m very, very confused about this whole ordeal. That should be fairly simple, but it seems that no one wants to talk about what happened, even though so many people have indicated they know. The following is the original text from the email.

So I used this story as an answer on my YCombinator application. I’d love to publish this story but I’m not sure Tatiana would really like that. There’s a ton of hilarious details I left out to keep things brief. She introduced me to Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence (i think) as well as the guy from Hunger Games. And possibly George Lucas, but I didn’t recognize him if it was.

Please tell us about the time you, dcunit3d, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

So I’m going to tell you a story. It’s one that I could literally spend hours talking about, but I’ve tried to keep it brief. It’s pretty much the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me. I actually might write a book about it, though I’d need to obfuscate the details. I hacked the system in several different ways, but also got hacked myself. It’s totally worth your time to read, I promise.

I also hacked my own brain and repressed my own memories, providing myself with a key to unlock them later. Total CIA-Manakin-style. Seriously, it’s hilarious – I’ll get to that part in a minute. I only remembered all of this about a month ago. I’ve been wanting to blog about it, but since it involves a celebrity, I’d rather not post it publicly.

So it’s May 31st 2013 in Denver. I’d just gotten off the bus from Boulder and I was getting ready for Hack 4 Colorado. I really wanted to go to Denver Comic Con, which was also going on at that time, but I felt that I should go to Hack4CO for the networking and to give back. It was a Friday afternoon and I had been up all night at this point, working on getting things ready for our teams entry to the hackathon.

I was chilling at Leela, my usual spot in Denver – they serve lattés 24 hours a day. I’m about to order a mocha, when this girl comes up from behind me and says “I’d like to buy you coffee,” – in a British accent, no less. Score! I was speechless, trying to figure out what bizarro universe I had fallen into, where girls are so forward.

So we’re sitting outside and it’s me, her and her friend. When I ask them where they’re from, they replied, “Toronto,” which seems a bit weird because of their Brittish accents. She tells me that she speaks 4 languages and I’m amazed. I immediately fall in love with her and we start talking about Duolingo and French. Then, she switches to a Russian sounding accent, to which I say “Wow, you’re pretty good at that.”

Then, she and Jordan drop the accents altogether and she tells me her real name, Tatiana Maslany, which I promptly start making fun of, lightly of course. I also made fun of Canada, which she was really defensive about. She quizzed me on Canadian provinces and I named like 10 out of 13. Finally, she tells me she’s an actress. Probably the most successful blind date ever – we ended up spending like 6 hours together that weekend.

She mentioned that she never wanted to be famous and I acted like I didn’t believe her. Tatiana and Jordan almost left at this point. I was really just trying to test to see if she was serious about not wanting fame – and she was. So then I started talking about how I struggled with jamskaters who wanted fame, were willing to do anything to get it and how that nearly ruined my life. I told her I was almost barely famous as a jamskater and how I struggled with it. I gave her lots of life advice, most of which she probably already knew. I also mentioned Dale Carnegie’s book, as well as 48 Laws of Power. I explained why she should inoculate herself against many of the tactics in 48 Laws of Power.

Here’s one place I hacked the system and utilized my business smarts. I determined that, as an actress, she has an image that she has to maintain. She probably has to tell people the same things repeatedly to build that image. And while she likely enjoys her work, she talks about it all the time – boring. But because she probably loves what she does, we should talk about other people’s movies and etc, which seemed to work really well.

She started telling me about her show, Orphan Black, which is about clones. And I jokingly tell her, “Yeh, I’m part of a top secret experiment and there’s clones of me everywhere.” I continue to tell her about all the doppelgangers in my life and how I even got in a fight with one of them.

Tatiana tells me they’re at the Denver Comic Con to get ready for the San Diego Comic Con, where the Orphan Black cast is doing a panel. She asked me to come up with some questions so she could practice. After one generic question, I came up with a really good one: “Which one of the clones would be best prepared for the Zombie Apocolypse?”

We continued talking about all the things: linguistics, philosophy, post-structuralism, movies, etc. We talked about the Singularity and it’s implications for society. I told her about mass NSA surveillance about a week before the Snowden story broke. We talked about using 3D filming techniques in 2D films. She told me about scenes coming up in “The Wolf of Wall Street” and asked several questions about quaaludes, lol.

We also talked about jamskating and how the rollerskating industry was dying. And we talked about the show Parks’n’Rec, which is ironic because 3 months later, Tatiana shot not one, but two episodes of Parks’n’Rec that featured rollerskating – s6e5 & s6e6.

At one point, we were talking about improv comedy and impersonations. I had been doing accents and impressions, even though I suck at acting. She tried to convince me otherwise, but I wasn’t buying it. Anyways, I suddenly had a burst of inspiration and exclaimed “OMG i have a brilliant idea for an app!!” She asked me what it was, but I wouldn’t tell her. I had just thought of the idea for Voxxel, but I would forget it for nearly two years bc I didn’t write it down.

Eventually, around 7:00, I had to leave to get to the hackathon. Walking to the Hack4CO venue, I was pretty bummed out about falling in love with this amazing girl that I had no chance with, especially since she had a serious BF anyways. So I decided to forget about everything. That way I wouldn’t have to deal with losing her, lulz. I decided it wouldn’t be too hard because I had been without sleep for so long anyways.

While I was at the hackathon, I got a phone call from a friend from Leela’s asking me to come back down. It sounded kind of urgent, like i would totally miss out on something amazing. I wanted to stay, but a few minutes later, my team decided we should work from Leela.

While we were working at Leela, I kept meeting these amazing girls that seemed to be so interested in me. The whole time, I’m thinking “Wow – what am I doing right here?” As I discovered two years later, it was Tatiana acting as each of her clones and I had no idea that it was the same girl.

Around 3:00am, I’m working alone on our team’s project. I’m still awake and had decided to stay up all night. This girl with dreadlocks comes up and asks me if I want to smoke a joint with her. I’m still thinking “Damn! She’s cute! That’s two in one day. What am I doing right here?!” but I tell her no, since I’m working and need to focus on that. She comes back in 2 minutes and asks again and I’m like “OK, I can’t tell this girl no twice. Besides she seems like she could be amazing.”

So she asks me to roll the joint. I smell the weed and realize it’s Blue Dream – by far my favorite strain and something I’d mentioned to Tatiana. While I’m doing that, we’re discussing biotechnology and all of these amazing sciency things that I love to talk about. We also talked about the time my college roommates and I built an igloo – just to hotbox it. Pretty much immediately, I fall in love with Cosima – who is actually Tatiana – as she could hang with me on Bioinformatics, Epigenetics, Medicene and all these amazing topics! Of course, I botched the joint completely, lulz.

This is where I had the system hacked against me. I started talking about how I fell in love with this amazing girl Tatiana Maslany. Cosima (Tatiana) asked me why and I said “She’s so smart. She speaks like four languages and her mom’s a translator and we talked about all these amazing things … Oh yeh and she’s an actress, so I have no chance with her,” and started telling her how I was planning on forgetting everything. She didn’t believe it would be possible. I convinced her that it was, but that if I ever watched her show, Orphan Black, that I would remember. It would be like the key that unlocked my memories.

Tatiana had told me the show would be streaming in early 2015 on Amazon. And based on this fact and knowing that I never watch TV, I told Cosima that I would I would probably remember in February or March 2015 – which was amazingly accurate. Accurate within a month. It’s amazing how I projected how my life would be in early 2015 (and a little depressing).

I asked Cosima where she was from and she said “Toronto, but I go to school in Minnesota.” I thought it was a strange coincidence, but just a coincidence. But since she was from somewhere so far away, I thought I could tell her whatever and it didn’t matter, since I would never see her again … so I talked about all the things, like all the problems in my life. Like the fact that I have social anxiety around girls because I had been single for 6 years and … allll the things. To be fair, Cosima wasn’t exactly leading me on and even tried to stop me.

At certain points, Cosima made some statements and I thought maybe I was talking to Tatiana’s sister or cousin, which made me feel like crap since I had just divulged all the things. And then Cosima said she knew the girl I was talking about and that she would be at Leela the next day. Sure enough, Tatiana showed up and we spent some time drawing and stuff.

I was so thoroughly convinced that Cosima was a different person that, for months, I had hoped to run into that dready bioinformatics chick in Denver again (I forgot she was from Toronto). But of course, I never did. And I suppressed the memories of Tatiana, which was one of the hardest things I’ve done. I even deleted tweets and text messages, so I wouldn’t remember if I accidentally viewed them.

The hardest part was when I saw Tatiana for the last time. It was on Sunday, I think. She asked me if I would go to San Diego Comic Con with her in July 2013 and I had to turn her down. I told her I would run out of money at that point.

And I never realized that I had met the other clones either. I thought they were all different people. Helena, the crazy clone, spilt a beer on me and walked off. Rachel was rude and stuck up, so I pretty much told her to $#@! off. I told Alison, the suburban housewife clone, that she reminded me of my sister-in-law – before I’d seen the show of course lol, though there are still some similarities.

When watching her show, I didn’t remember anything until the last episode of the first season, which she had told me about. Even then, there was only a vague familiarity about her characters. It wasn’t until midway through the second season that I started to completely remember everything. And finally, I figured out that all the other girls were actually Tatiana too.

So I basically fell in love with the same girl multiple times in a single weekend without realizing it. And now I feel like it’s a race against time to chase her down before she gets married. Basically, my life has turned into the plot for a romantic comedy movie – or the Great Gatsby. lol jk

But even if it’s not going to happen – and it’s probably not – just remembering that this happened is probably the best thing to happen to me since meeting her two years ago. Two years that were particularly bad, starting a few weeks after we met. So it’s become a kind of raison d’etre. Even if we don’t end up together, it’s so amazing that this happened, that it gives me hope that maybe something like it could happen again, which provides me a reason for bettering myself. I’ve seriously been laughing about this for like a month now.

None of this would have happened if Tatiana weren’t such an amazing person. As someone with high-functioning autism and anxiety, I’m often not the most social person. She looked past all that and took the time to get to know me, discovering the amazing person that I am on the inside. Regardless of whether she felt the same way I do, she spent considerable effort being kind and boosting my confidence. I’m surprised that she never broke character as Cosima. If I had known it was Tatiana and still said the same things, I’d expect her to have walked off.

By the way, I met several famous people that weekend. I met the entire cast of Orphan Black, as well as the co-creators. I also met Emma Stone, who talked with Tat and I for a bit. I may have also met George Lucas … without realizing who I was talking to. LMAO. If it really was George Lucas, we talked about the Disney/Star Wars deal and why Lucas didn’t actually ruin episodes 1, 2 and 3.

Seriously though, if you ever want to hack the system with celebrities, don’t recognize them – they love it when people don’t know who they are. I’m not saying to act like you don’t know who they are because that’s lame. Plus, they’re actors, they’re good at picking up on acting – you’re not going to beat them at their own game. Many celebrities don’t like solely being known for their work and their characters, since fans who recognize them for that are less likely to recognize them for people they actually are. And that’s why I’m never watching TV again.

That’s It … Not Really Though

There’s so much other stuff within this story that’s unbelievable. This already sounds unbelievable, yes. However, I’ve left out some parts that add several more layers to this experience. There’s a lot of stuff I left out. It’s so strange that something so emotionally impactful was unavailable to my mind until twenty months later. Sometimes, I suspect that I really might have had an authentic religious experience. I can’t explain it…

I’m not sure how it would be possible, but I think I got ghosted. As in, “Ghost in the Shell,” where someone has false memories implanted or incepted in them … somehow. Sounds crazy, right? I’ve been dealing with this ever since I remembered it in early 2015, with absolutely no way to verify. One point to emphacize is the number of strongly anachronistic content! Most of this consists of things that would be easy to predict in late 2014, but difficult to predict in spring or summer 2013! Furthermore, there are many strong anachronisms.

This isn’t some random set of delusions. It’s easy to distinguish random information from non-random information – see some of [Claude Shannon’s work in crypto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory) as an example. This adds a very interesting dimension to things. Why would delusional memories include information about topics I know nothing about? Why would they seem to nudge me in a specific direction or lead me by the nose? Someone has been toying with me like a ship in a bottle and I thought it was very cute at first because OMG did you read that story above?! Who would question that?

There are many family and friends who asked me about this stuff before who won’t talk about it now. They indicated knowledge of specific people in this stories before I remembered. There are hundreds of people who’ve indicated knowledge of details, topics and even specific phrases/quotes. It’s very strange. I’m sure I’m actually incorrect about most of those, but out of hundreds of people …. c’mon give me a break!

Since I “remembered,” people have also indicated a strong aversion to talking about it. I’m very good at reading people and some of these people are afraid to talk about it. They won’t affirm it, but they don’t actively deny it either. They act like it’s non-sense and not important. And there are many people who have indicated knowledge of it, who won’t talk about it directly.

Here’s Some More Notes on What Happened

These are some images of notes I kept on a flash drive for some time. I compartmentalized the fact that I had thrown this drive away so that I wouldn’t slip up and mention it to anyone. Keep in mind that I’m not 100% sure that any of this even happened, though I would love for someone to verify. That sounds strange, I know, but just hear me out.