Today, I have a very special and very weird edition of the newsletter for you.

Last week, a mystery dropped through my mail slot. It came in the form of a tiny book—2,001 words and 15 or so hand-drawn tweets—written and published by some anonymous entity. The book is called Iterating Grace, and it tells the story of Koons Crooks, a dot-com boom/bust foot soldier, who goes searching for enlightenment in startup culture. It's really quite a brilliant little thing.

"[Crooks] was tall and muscular, with a square jaw, olive complexion and thick, wavy hair just long enough to tie back in a ponytail—and yet, several friends told me, he still always managed to look distressingly unhealthy. He was, as on acquaintance put it, 'fully post-meal,' inserting pieces of food into his mouth at regular intervals while he worked," we read. "A worker remembered Crooks moving through an entire bag of frozen shrimp gyoza in a single morning, raising and lowering his left hand hypnotically, and gumming each dumpling until it softened enough to be chewed and digested. Occasionally, he could be heard saying, very quietly, a single word: 'Yum.'"

The distribution strategy has been just as inspired. The book went out to more than 10 (and presumably less than 140) people, mostly in the San Francisco media world. And some of them received the book in envelopes that implied that I sent them. My own copy of the book came with a note thanking me for sending out the texts. But, of course, I knew nothing about the project until the artifact arrived in my house.

Since I started figuring this all out, I've been hellbent on figuring out who wrote and distributed the book. Not just because I want to know who the brilliant author is. Not just because they enlisted me in the distribution of the work. But also because this is a very elaborate game someone has set up—and I want to make the next move.

In my one contact with the author, via an anonymous email address, he/she/they urged me to share the text with my networks. So, I've digitized the whole thing for you to read. Maybe you can even help me solve the mystery.

This isn't dark-arts marketing, at least not for a tech company. That I'm 99.999% sure of. The writing is too good. No, this is old-fashioned technoliterary weirdness! So, today, all five links are to entities and places mentioned in the book.

1. The main character has a fleece from Pixelon, an infamous dot-com era flameout.

"Paul Ward, chief executive of Pixelon.com, which makes software for viewing videos over the Internet, thought it was a joke when a friend showed him a ''most wanted'' poster from Virginia with the face of his company's founder, Michael Fenne. Mr. Fenne, it turns out, was a dot-com leader of a different sort. Mr. Fenne -- real name David Kim Stanley -- turned himself in to Virginia authorities on April 12. Accused of defrauding elderly churchgoers in Virginia and associates in Tennessee of $1.25 million, he had pleaded guilty in 1989 to 55 counts of fraud. But before repaying, Mr. Stanley disappeared, resurfacing in Southern California."

2. Crooks communes with vincuñas in the mountains of Bolivia. Their wool is among the rarest and most expensive textiles in the world.

"Now, the silky wool sits at the nose-bleed-high pinnacle of tailored luxury. Each year, only 13,000 to 17,500 pounds of vicuña become available to Loro Piana, a major purveyor of vicuña garments—a fraction of the 22 million pounds of cashmere the company works with annually. The Italian tailoring house Kiton makes only about 100 vicuña pieces a year; an off-the-rack sport coat costs at least $21,000, while the price of a made-to-measure suit starts at $40,000. A single vicuña scarf from Loro Piana is about $4,000. Ermenegildo Zegna produces just 30 vicuña suits a year. Each is numbered, and the most affordable model goes for $46,500."

3. Crooks handbuilds a satellite-Internet wifi hotspot, so he can read and meditate on the tweets of venture capitalists. These Outernet guys have done something even more ambitious.

"Outernet takes the best of the web and broadcasts it from space for every human on Earth. The content we broadcast is determined by anyone who chooses to vote on the most important things to share with humanity. Outernet repurposes broadcast satellite tv equipment and we offer instructions on how to build a DIY-receiver. Once a receiver is configured, Outernet’s content can be accessed by any WiFi-enabled device."

4. Crooks takes James Nestor's book Deep with him into the Bolivian highlands. Here's Nestor talking about freediving.

"Once you get down past 30, you know 35 feet, the gravity reverses, and you’re sort of pulled down, it’s just a free zone. You can just do whatever the hell you want. You can just sit there, upside down, right-side up, vertical, horizontal; it doesn’t matter, and you can just sit there and watch things pass by…It’s the closest thing to interstellar travel that I’m every going to experience. This is outer space — it’s another universe and everyone has access to it."

5. Crooks posts up on Uturuncu, which turns out to be the fastest growing volcano on Earth.

"Since monitoring began in the 1980s, Uturuncu has held steady as the fastest-inflating volcano on Earth. On average, it grows by one centimeter a year, says Shanaka de Silva, a volcanologist at Oregon State University and a contributor to PLUTONS. That inflation is from magma being pumped into a belowground magma chamber. But unlike many volcanoes — where a rapidly inflating magma chamber often indicates an impending eruption — this one is remarkably stable and shows no signs of erupting any time soon. 'We’re trying to understand whether the rapid rate has something to do with the supervolcanic complex or if it’s just a rapidly moving normal volcanic system,' de Silva says. 'Eventually, we’d like to have a better understanding of the rate at which magma is accumulating under Uturuncu and the geometry of that inflation.'"

1. nytimes.com 2. wsj.com 3. outernet.is 4. thescuttlefish.com 5. earthmagazine.com

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