Josef6

 

a novella

by

Benjamin Kerstein

 

     

 

“The world will have become Tlon.”

-Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

 

 

1.

Josef6 made his first posting on the TimeLords message board at 11:36am EST on 21 October, 2000. It read as follows:

Josef6: Hi! I am a time traveler from the 2075 who is currently residing in your era. I am interested in dialogue and virtual interaction with people from your time period. I would be happy to answer any questions you might have for me. I will post further details about my journey, as well as photos and schematics of my temporal displacement vehicle, very shortly on this site. Thank you, Josef6.

 

P.S. For the purposes of anonymity, whose necessity I will explain soon, I am using the pseudonym Josef6. Its actually my military designation, but this can have no meaning for you in your time period and therefore can be safely used. You may refer to me as Josef, Joe, Josef 6, Josef Six, Josef the Sixth, or any other non-abusive variation you choose. I hope our dialogue will be a fruitful one. J6.

Immediate reaction was subdued. This is understandable. The TimeLords had been conned before.

The site itself was founded in 1998 as a free, members-only forum for discussion of time travel related issues. The topic was much in the news at the time due to the recent publication of two papers by MIT physics professors F. Lawrence Graves and Cecil Martine that posited a theory of temporal paradoxes inherent in the singularity event horizon. The professors suggested the plausibility of manipulating the energy emitted by black holes -- a phenomenon discovered by renowned physicist Stephen Hawking -- in order to engineer controlled distortions in the temporal plane of space-time. On a theoretical level, this made time travel a practical endeavor, although the technology for such manipulation did not exist and -- the professors themselves acknowledged -- might never exist. Most intriguing, however, were the authors' remarks on the theoretical existence of potentially observable particles existing at the event horizon of a singularity -- commonly known as a black hole -- capable of traveling forward and backward in time simultaneously. The existence of naturally occurring temporal paradox seemed to confirm beyond any doubt that time travel could be reconciled with currently understood physical laws.

 

Within six months of the paper’s publication, over a dozen time travel themed websites appeared. A few of them were academically oriented forums for professional physicists employed in academia and government service. They were rife with debate on the Heisenbergian implications of event horizon phenomena and Klepler’s unreliability on the question of quantum paradox, and were rendered in the mostly indecipherable scientific patois typical of specialists. The proliferation of dialects among the sciences was a lamented but little studied phenomenon of the late twentieth century, creating a daunting multiplicity of Englishes which rendered entire academic disciplines completely incomprehensible not only to the layman but to one another. This is, of course, a natural tendency of language, though these new demarcations, unlike in the past, were not based on natural, cultural, or regional differences but were entirely virtual in nature. That is to say, they did not exist.

 

The laymen’s sites were diverse and, more often than not, highly colorful. They consisted of enthusiastic amateurs, a few highly talented science fiction enthusiasts, hobbyists, casual observers and, of course, assorted lunatics, hoaxers and frauds. Of these, TimeLords.com was the most non and the least professional. As a result, it was by far the most widely trafficked. Josef6’s choice of forum could, if one were credulous, be ascribed to the understandable desire of a man with a story to tell to seek out the widest possible audience to which to tell it. The other side of this proverbial -- that is, virtual -- coin was the aforementioned credulity, something at which the denizens of TimeLords.com were particularly adept.

 

The very name of the group indicated an outlook closer to science fiction than science the banal and factual. The peril of science fiction is that it attracts the worst kind of lunatics -- those prepared to believe not only their own delusions but each others. It should be remembered that the frenzied construction of delusional architectures of thought is a fascinating talent, and one which reached its pinnacle in the late twentieth century, combining the near infinite capacities of individual human creativity with the crystalline expansion typical of the collective. The relative size of the mutually agreed upon fantasy was usually parallel to its essential comprehensibility and clarity. The latter being generally the inverse of the former. The greater a delusion’s popularity, the more simple and, simultaneously, the more dissonant it became. As a rule, the intensity of a certain architecture of belief was equal to its capacity for madness. In that day and age, however, madness was a relative term, and most people had simply given up trying to define it.

 

One can blame Mister Einstein for that, if one wishes to, but the simple physical fact of time not existing in absolute terms should not blind us to the absolute nature Einstein ascribed to the speed of light. His relativity demanded an absolute barrier. The architectures of thought, sans barriers, absolutely, are always constructed ad hoc. As needed. There is really no one to blame.

 

For its part, TimeLords.com took its name from a popular science fiction character who traveled forward and backward in time by means of an enormous vessel contained, thanks to dimensional relativity, in an English phone booth of mid-twentieth century vintage. Typically, this ironic joke, adopted as a result of budgetary restrictions, became an enduring trademark and hotly debated issue among fans. People will never lack the capacity to waste their time.

 

The first posted reaction to Josef6’s message was from elvira16, an insurance agent from Nebraska with a shocking case of eczema, who wrote:

 

i want to believe u. can you give us proof??? like can you predict an event that will happen soon??? will u post some details about your device???

 

Note the use of the term “device” and not “time travel device” or the even more appropriate “time machine”. Like discussions of sex, the subject itself is almost never mentioned. It is far too painful.

 

The second post was from eekthecat, a forty-five year old unemployed English teacher from Wisconson who somewhat resembled his namesake in appearance. He wrote:

 

pls send description of life in the future. where r u from? wht is yr job? y ru here?

 

The third, posed anonymously, simply read:

 

who will win the bears-packers game next week?

 

What followed was a deluge of similar postings that almost crashed the TimeLords server. They included questions on global warming, near-future etiquette, possible variations in the stock market and world currency rates, the progress regarding a cure for cancer, and the unknown gamma ray output capacity of a quantum micro-singularity.

 

Josef6 knew the value of silence. Nothing more was heard from him for three days. Just as posts began to appear dismissing the whole affair, he chose to astound everyone:

Hello. I’m amazed at the volume of response I’ve received. I guess I should have expected it. I’ll start with the most important questions first. Unfortunately, I can’t reveal my real name, but I can provide you with most of the essential details of my life. Since I won’t be born for another twenty years, they won’t mean anything to you in your time period.

I was born in 2022 in the Pacific Northwest, where my family still resides. In my native time period, I spend most of my time in Washington DC because of my military obligations. The world I live in and the America I live in are very different from yours. In 2012, America got involved in a shooting war with China over the issue of Taiwan. This eventually led to the deployment of nuclear weapons. As a result of the damage this caused, the American government broke down and a civil war started. Most of our major cities were destroyed, but its important to say that the Chinese suffered a great deal more than we did. There are now only five hundred thousand people living in China, which should give you an idea of what I mean. The United States is also far more sparsely populated than it is in your time period, though the civil war has ended now and the process of reconstruction has been underway for several years. The union has been reconstituted under somewhat different lines than before, with more power in the hands of state and local governments. Electricity is widely available, but is now generated by small, local grids instead of large industrial power stations. Big corporations basically no longer exist. Industrial agriculture was largely destroyed in the nuclear exchange, so people grow their own food, sometimes on small cooperative farms. Our produce is completely organic, and this caused me a lot of problems when I first arrived in your time period. I can’t believe some of the things you put in your food! Unfortunately, the lack of potable water is a major problem due to radiation and other issues, but we are making great strides in decontamination technology.

My device is a proto-singularity propulsion unit manufactured by the government at a plant in southern Virginia. I am not a physicist, but theories of quantum micro-singularities are at the basis of its operation. I will post photographs as soon as I can. I can also provide basic interior blueprints, but I think they will be mostly incomprehensible to scientists of this time period. I am happy to answer any technical questions you might have as best I can, but I have to emphasize that I am a soldier and not a scientist.

Obviously, I can’t answer all the questions posted here, but I will try to give some general, comprehensive answers. For those of you who asked about who will win the Superbowl or other sporting events: I have absolutely no idea. Memorizing fifty years of football statistics was not part of my mission training. For the same reason, I cannot answer personal questions such as when or how you will die or if you will win the lottery. I don’t see how this information would be of much help to you anyways.

As to the nature of my mission, I have been sent here to acquire a T-1175 microchip, originally manufactured by Bell Labs in the late 1960s for use on the Apollo moon lander. As a result of the war, the designs and specifications of this microchip were destroyed and its original designers are all deceased. This has had far-reaching and totally unforeseen consequences. The T-1175 was included in many of the first personal computers and was widely used by the government, especially by the Defense Department of your era. Much of this technology is still in use in my time period. However, due to a flaw in the original design, all T-1175s will crash in 2056, bringing all systems that use the chip down with them. Not unlike your Y2K bug. Since one of the imperiled systems is the US nuclear defense grid -- what’s left of it, anyways -- I was sent back to retrieve one of the original chips. The military scientists of my time believe that analysis of the original hardware will provide a solution to the problem. For this reason, my first jump was to the year 1977, in order to retrieve one of the original chips in the manufacturing phase. I have stopped in your time period for personal reasons, the nature of which I prefer not to disclose. I can say, however, that I have been spending a lot of time with my grandfather.

 

Some of you have raised the question of temporal paradox. Like, what if I went back in time and killed my own father? This is impossible due to the compound nature of space-time, a concept which I think is only beginning to be understood in this time period. Essentially, the theory of a multiple and divergent spectrum of possible time lines -- possible futures, if you like -- is correct. I don’t know this for a fact, but I believe that scientific thinking in my time period consider this spectrum to be essentially infinite. Your scientists’ current speculations about the “multiverse”, an infinite number of simultaneously coexisting universes, each with slight variations in their respective physical laws and their outcomes, is only the tip of the iceberg. This is one of the reasons why I am not worried about making contact with you or others in this time period. No matter what happens here, the “present” I return to will be essentially the same as I left it, with only minor variations due to the inherently unpredictable nature of the micro-singularity. The time period to which I will return will be only .00005 percent different from the one I left. The timeline you life out could be of infinitely greater variation. Obviously, there are many timelines which could be canceled out by temporal paradox, but since these would obviously cease to exist at the moment of paradox and be instantly replaced, they really aren’t a concern. In other words, its not like it is in the movies.

 

I look forward to continuing this exchange. I have always been curious about history and about life before the war. However, I am going to have to lay down a few ground rules. Call it the time traveler’s code of ethics. These rules are essential to safeguarding my mission and my military obligations, as well as the well being of me and my family. Some of them are also basic moral principles which I do not feel comfortable violating.

 

First, I will not give you any personal information about my family in this time period and I reserve the right to withhold whatever information I choose about my time period. Second, I will not give you predictions or any other information about possible near future events. As I said, giving out such information will not effect my timeline, but it could drastically effect yours, something which would violate my military oath of non-interference. Third, I will not give you any information which might help you get rich or otherwise increase your worldly position or material wealth -- so, no stock market tips, sorry. I consider such behavior unethical. Fourth, there may be scientific information about my device and its operation which I will be obligated to withhold from you. I ask you to respect these boundaries.

Within these rules, I am ready to answer any and all questions you may have. I am not looking for money or fame, or even for you to believe me at all. I am interested only in satisfying my curiosity and, if you like, yours as well.

 

Thanks. Josef6.

 

 

2.

If he was real, Josef6 was a fascinating individual. If he was fake, he knew his audience. He gave the people what they wanted. He diversified. He multitasked. He was something or someone to everyone who haunted the late night chat rooms and message boards in search of contact. The anarchists and libertarians loved the decentralized, syndicalist society he described. Environmentalist radicals adored the idea of an end to industrial society, particularly in the realm of agriculture, and Josef6’s apocalyptic scenario only confirmed their deeply held belief that industrialism would eventually destroy itself in a near-biblical cataclysm. The new-agers and the neo-hippies -- even some of the paleo-hippies -- found their fondest prayers answered by Josef's descriptions of the world as a giant post-apocalyptic commune, an earth-based existence free of the social confines and alienation typical of post-modern technocracy. Although Josef6 did not explicitly pander to their sexual libertinism, it was nonetheless assumed. The amateur physicists and the freaks of fringe technology were intrigued to the point of physical anguish by Josef's vague references to artificial micro-singularities and the impossibility of temporal paradox, references which aroused their fondest technological yearnings and their unwavering faith in scientific progress. Few of them could resist the temptation of thinking that the vague claims being laid before them like so many crusts of bread in the dark forest were just possible enough. There was, in other words, hope and mystery enough for all. For the technological and the anti-technological. The anarchist and the progressive. The humanist and the misanthrope. The lover of nature and the lover of science’s conquest of nature. The moralist and the libertine. The puritan and the nihilist. All that was required was a certain dissatisfaction, a certain discontent with things as they are. Legions of the discontented saw their own reflections as the ghost in the electronic architecture. 

 

It was this virtual ubiquity -- this totality of identities, of appealing, erotic selves that enraptured so many -- that was the strongest proof of Josef6’s reality. The idea that a character, a counterfeit, a lie, the false creation of some unknown artisan could possibly arouse such desperate and divergent passions among so many was unthinkable. Fakes are monotone, monochromatic, unmoving. They speak from a single facet of their creator’s self: the will and desire to lie. The great characters of literature, Don Quixote, Sherlock Holmes, Hamlet, are aggressively singular. They bear only one face. Sometimes only a single word or two: tragic madness, genius, indecision. Josef6 displayed a contradictory, chaotic series of appearances that could only be that of a living human being.

 

That this assumption was fundamentally mistaken was immediately obvious to me. It was based on a faulty premise: that human beings are inherently complicated. In fact, the very complexity of Josef6's character was the strongest hint that he was a fraud.

 

In his favor, however, was the inherent plausibility of the science underlying his tale. Unlike previous claimant Chester Bernstein, who made a mockery of the Buckley-Fermati paradox and thus revealed himself as a second year physics student with delusions of grandeur, there were no immediately recognizable flaws in the few tantalizing fragments of hard science offered by Josef6’s enigmatic communiques. The existence of micro-singularities had already been proven and the theoretical possibility of their artificial manipulation was developing largely along the lines Josef6 had described. His occasional references to temporal paradox were even more telling. The multiverse theory had been a topic of speculation for well over a decade in the field of cosmology, and was already pulling ahead of its competitors as the most likely explanation for the apparently designed structure of an ostensibly random universe. The multiverse scenario was infinitely strengthened by the rising threat of a theological cosmology based around the concept of Intelligent Design. The possibility of infinite universes containing infinite variations on the basic laws of physics, many of them collapsing at the instant of their creation, annihilated by their own mathematical impossibility, existing, perhaps, for a micro-second before collapsing back into the void, elegantly negated the need for a Creator. Josef6 had raised a fascinating variation of the multiverse theory: that each of these infinitely variable universes would require its own infinitely variable series of futures, presents and pasts. The possibility of universes existing in minute variation from ours, so minute as to be barely distinguishable from our own, and the possibility of our multiple -- perhaps infinite -- existences on an infinite series of space-time variations, was an unprecedented but nonetheless inevitable conceptual leap forward. It hinted at a spectrum of universes and a quantifiable series of variations between them. The implication being that space-time could be crossed horizontally as well as vertically, it shifted the nature of the universe from one of light years to one of fractional differentiations in the temporal stream.

 

What gave this theory, and its anonymous theoretician, the erotic air of prophecy was its postulation of a knowable but nonetheless malleable future. Like Nostradamus, John of Patmos, and other prominent seers, Josef6 described a possible and even probably future with the essential caveat that it might not happen that way at all. Besides its obvious practical applications as a prognostitory insurance policy, this concession compromised the intoxicating seed of possible hope. Prophecies of apocalypse merely excite despair in one’s audience. And despair inevitably gives way to indifference. A reaction that no prophet can afford to entertain for very long. By inviting the possibility, in fact the inevitability of variation, Josef6 had ensured that his audience would pay close attention, and by paying this attention, to take their destiny into their own hands. The passive act of listening, of receiving, thus became an act of cosmic proportions. The first task of any messiah is to make himself indispensable.

 

To digress from theological pretensions, there were thoroughly practical reasons for the effectiveness of Josef6’s testimony. Political, regional and racial divisions had been growing in the United States for decades. The financial and psychological cost of supporting the aging baby boom generation was proving untenable. The environmental movement had been slouching towards apocalypticism since its inception, but the global warming issue was driving it to an increasingly desperate surety that the end times were approaching more swiftly than anyone had previously imagined. China’s growing economic power and its bellicosity on the issue of Taiwan was beginning to dominate the news media to the exclusion of all other international issues. Extremist militia movements were already well into their third decade of active organization, and despite their numerous divisions and sub-divisions, they overwhelmingly coalesced around the issue of state’s rights and resentment of an ever-larger and encroaching federal government. Millennial cults had somewhat died away after the uneventful passing of the year 2000, but the passion engendered by the essentially random and coincidental shift in the epochs of the Christian calendar still lay heavy on the neurotic capabilities of the zeitgeist. The atmosphere, in other words, was laden with secular apocalyptic and messianic pretensions of all kinds.

 

Josef6 would have been a footnote, or would simply never have existed at all, were it not for an entirely new and unprecedented form of human life: that of virtual existence. The internet, among is other attendant effects, reduced everyone and everything on it to a series of binary patters. Everything became virtual, that is, illusory, pixilated, distorted by the electronic veil. That which was real was real because it claimed to be real. Simply to exist at all in virtual terms required a suspension of belief. Given the nature of his chosen medium, Josef6 was as virtual and as real as anyone else. There was, in effect, no differential of the real within the shadow realm of the virtual ether. With one exception: there was at least the possibility that Josef6 was lying.

 

 

3.

It was during the second year of writing my graduate thesis on the history of the Voynich Manuscript that Josef6 made his appearance.

 

The Voynich Manuscript is an obscure anomaly in the history of human literature. Tentatively dated to the early 14^th century, it is an illuminated codex written in an unknown and thus far indecipherable script. Despite seven centuries of obsessive effort on the part of linguists, cryptographers and expert medievalists, the manuscript remains a complete enigma. Theories ranging from micro-writing to substitution ciphers to artificial alphabets concealing a known scholarly language such as Greek and Latin have been posited and discarded. Not a single word or letter of the five hundred page document has revealed itself. With only the strange and often crude illustrations to by, most researchers believe the book to be a codex of botany or medieval herbalism. This conclusion is suggested by the copious depictions of plants and flowers. Some of them containing real or mythical medicinal properties. Why a seemingly innocuous guide to seven hundred year old fauna should be hidden behind a unique and incomprehensible series of signs remains a complete mystery.

 

To cross from one enigma to another is not a difficult feat, but it was more complicated than the simple fascination with mystery so common to the human mind. I saw in Josef6 a creature of an identical nature to the one I was seeking. For months I had pictured the writer in my mind. The unknown writer of the Voynich Manuscript. This strange, virtual figure, crouched over his parchment, quill in hand, his face and body a mere collection of shadows. Slowly forming the signs that he along, of all the men who have ever walked the earth, would ever understand. A haunting vision. Not because of its mystery, but because of its one aspect which was devoid of mystery: he did exist. Someone had known. Some hand had formed those inscrutable letters. One man, this unknown author, had known the secret, and he had chosen to torture seven centuries of other men by revealing it only in the act of concealing it forever. I had long since dismissed the theory that the script was nothing but a meaningless babble. I know that its regularity, its recurring symbols, its careful rendering upon the page, could only be the product of meaning. A meaning that fascinated us because to us it meant nothing.

 

Yes. I admired him. I admired his courage and his probable madness. The barely comprehensible urges that must have driven his extraordinary act. And as the events of the present began to unfold, this object of my fascinated admiration began to be replaced by the equally unknowable image of Josef6. The cipher replaced the cipher. In a perfect irony, their only differentiation was time.

 

They were not, of course, identical. Josef6 was hidden in plain sight. He admitted everything. The only question was whether he existed at all. He was equal and opposite to my unknown author, of whom nothing could be certain except his existence. Nonetheless, it was the same intrigue. Someone was there, hunched over his keyboard, concealed behind the digitized symbols. Was I dreaming him too? It was impossible. Because the words were there. Instantly present and comprehensible. The only unknown was the author. The author I could not stop dreaming.

 

I began to frequent the TimeLords message board, hoping for more glimpses, more reactions, more believers and disbelievers. The process of seven hundred years, the object of my own ascetic study, was recurring before my eyes at the requisite hyper-speed of the digital age. There were skeptics, cynics, heretics, flagellants, chiliasts and true believers. The great horde was gathering again. I was watching the mystery in action, privileged to witness and to wait patiently for the inevitable moment when the mysterious reaches terminal velocity and violates the very fabric of the world.

 

I did not expect, however, that the phenomenon would reach beyond the realm of the virtual. When it did, I realized, to my surprise, that it was not only my dream, but the dream of millions of others. A shared dream. A collective unconscious conscious only of Josef6. This was a true phenomenon of the mass age. The immediate and total fragmentation of information into complete and yet dissonant parts. Josef6 was a grenade waiting to explode in the midst of a virtual crowd. Shards of him embedded in the invisible surface. They were left shining for the seekers to discover, to receive, to contemplate, to grasp and refashion at their will. The exegesis of Josef6 became it own event, separate and independent of its unknown creator.

 

The first sign that the thing had become an entity of its own was the t-shirts. I have a permanently non-submersible memory of walking down a busy city street and seeing a young girl wearing a white shirt on which were emblazoned the letters: WWJ6D? On the back was scrawled the cumbersome phrase, spelled out in letters large enough for a child to read: What Would Josef6 Do?

 

What? Why? Who? How? All such questions pertaining to the phenomenon were impossible for me to answer. I knew only that it had occurred and was occurring. Somehow, Josef6 had passed from the beleaguered status of cipher-prophet and become some manner of absent god. A narrator who hides his face. The proof was in the phrase itself, WWJ6D, lifted directly from the lexicon of evangelist exultation: WWJD, What Would Jesus Do? The temptation of the identical initials was nothing compared to the temptation of identical phenomena. Only a single letter required enumeration. Small variations are cheap and easy to produce, but the threshold must be reached before they are even conceived. The thing had somehow become a statement of faith.

 

But there is an essential distinction in that small enumeration. It was clear at first sight. The division was that between the obscure and inscrutable, between prophecy and transubstantiation. The infusion, and then the annihilation, of the flesh by the divine. Because Josef6 required no resurrection. He was already something like a spirit. He had no face. No body. No voice. He had only words. He was only words. There is no great distance between words and The Word. There were so many of us then who were exhausted by words. They dreamed instead of The Word, and with it an end to words. They had nothing to lose, so decided to take a chance.

 

The essential attribute of any god is strategic silence. The divine must hide its face to avoid become part of this firmament. The faceless author of the Voynich Manuscript was immune to mockery. We could curse his name, but our hate only magnified his power. Our frustrated loathing was the source of his immortality. He was safe forever. Gods are nothing more than unnamed authors. Like a god, we could know only what he was not. He was not illiterate. He was -- in all likelihood -- not an aborigine huntsman. He was not a crysthanthemum. From the side of not, from the wasteland of negation, the possibilities were endless. Infinite. It was into this infinite that the vermin swarmed.

 

He must have known. Because Josef6 did not speak again for over a month. During this time, traffic on the TimeLord’s discussion board quadrupled. A new web server was installed to avoid a full scale systems crash. As should have been expected, people began to take sides.

 

Those who believed Josef6 a fraud were a distinct minority from the beginning. The epic schisms took place between the believers. The most passionate of these was between those who believed Josef6 to be hiding the nature of his true mission and those who took him at face value. The primary spokesman for the former, ewallis_heins explained:

 

Clearly, Josef is not just some poor grunt sent back through time to find an obscure microchip. That may be his cover story, but think about it: why would a society that has mastered time travel be incapable of just debugging its own computers? That’s certainly a smaller task than mastering the quantum output of micro-singularities. C’mon people, think!!! Why give us so many details about the future in the first place?? Why tell us about the disasters of the future when he could be explaining the nuts and bolt of time travel??? He’s trying to warn us!!!! And why here? Why now? Personally, I don’t buy all that bullshit about his family and wanting to spend time with granddad. This is his mission priority??? Give me a break! He’s here to follow orders! And those orders are to make an attempt -- only an attempt -- to prevent us from making the mistakes in this timeline that caused all the bad shit in his timeline. Isn’t that the first thing you would do in a post-apocalyptic society if you discovered time travel? Try and prevent all the bad shit from happening?! For all we know, there's thousands of these guys crawling around the multiverse or the time spectrum or whatever the hell it is!

 

There was an almost immediate response from prettycrazygirl

 

OK, ewallis, calm down… I know you’re excited, but take a valium and try to relax. Nothing you say makes any sense. First of all, it would violate everything Josef has told us about his mission parameters, which he seems to believe in very strongly. Not to mention that the chances of actually affecting our timeline, according to Josef’s own description of how time travel actually works, would be very small. And why is it so difficult to believe that a small computer glitch could cause huge problems? Chaos theory! Ever heard of it? You know, the butterfly effect! Y2K! And what is so weird about wanting to be with your grandfather? Just because you have a lousy relationship with your family doesn’t mean everybody does!!

 

The speed with which the virtual became the personal was typical of the medium. As was the inherent presence of severe grammatical error. Response, of course, was quick in coming.

 

Well, obviously your more crazy than pretty, if you aren’t some fifty year old transvestite getting his jollies.

To which she replied

 

Nice, ewallis, really nice. Maybe you should answer some of my questions instead of describing your fantasies to us.

 

The voice of reason was sounded by eekthecat:

 

Play nice, kids! There’s no need for personal insults. Lets remember that we don’t have enough information yet to reach any conclusions about Josef or his mission. Lets try and hold off the craziness until we know some things for sure. Personally, I think you're both right. Josef may have been sent back on a relatively routine mission, but he obviously has some emotional need to contact us. I don’t buy the whole “curiosity” excuse either. Maybe on some subconscious level he is trying to warn us about the troubles of his time period so we can prevent them from happening. That’s what I’d do if I was in his place. And he’s trying to do it in a way that doesn’t violate his mission parameters or his military obligations. Let’s try and keep some perspective on this until all the facts are in.

 

The only truly dissenting voice belonged to drmuskrat_md:

 

I think its amazing that I’m the only one here with the guts to say that this guy is obviously some wingnut who's taking you all for a ride.

 

This post met with remarkably little notice, except a short missive from jennieruptha:

 

Lets do our best to ignore the trolls, shall we? Kiss kiss.

 

Jennie’s advice was taken to heart, and the debate continued on mostly civil terms until January 10th, when the images began to appear.

 

 

4.

The first image consisted of a series of interlocking lines arranged in spiral formation around two isosceles triangles which met at their lower right and left corners, creating a tetrahedron. It bore some resemblance to Hindu fertility symbols. Underneath, Josef6 had written:

 

This is my military insignia. It is standard issue for all officers involved in time displacement missions. I will post again shortly.

Josef6.

 

For roughly twelve hours, there was only a stunned silence, as fingers paused on keyboards and eyes stared in attempted cognition of the enigmatic lines and bizarrely simple but nonetheless disconcerting angular formations.

 

Jennieruptha was the first to seize the moment

 

I think this clearly has some kind of spiritual significance. The triangle, as Whitley Strieber has written, is one of the most ancient symbols in human mythology, and has represented the idea of balance and integration since the beginning of time. The square formed by the interlocking lines symbolizes that stability and creativity are a product of balance, and the outgoing, curvaceous lines indicate an outgoing creative force. There is a strong feminine aspect to the lines because of their curves, which echo ancient fertility statues from the pre-patriarchal era of human civilization. Josef may be indicating to us that, even in the military, the age in which he lives has developed a greater appreciation of the feminine and the ideal of wholeness.

 

Prettycrazygirl answered in kind

 

Wow. Jennifer is definitely on to something.

 

Saintmobius was less enamored

 

I want to say something real quick about jennie’s comment. As a professor of syntactic structures I do a lot of work on the basic underpinning symbologies of primitive art and language. Her statements about the triangle are true, to an extent, but while the triangle is one of the most basic shapes in human history, it is not the only one. The circle, for instance, appears somewhat earlier. However, the equation of the curve with the feminine is not necessarily uniform. The cave paintings at Tertaux, for instance, use the curve to indicate the legs of horses and the bending of the hunters bow. In the same way, the triangle can represent the traditional arrowhead or spearhead. In other words, the attribution of a feminine essence to the symbol in question is not necessarily accurate. The use of the triangle and the curved lines could just as easily be basic symbols of the warrior ethos. This seems very likely due to Josef’s open admission that the symbol is military in nature. More to the point, the return to basic primitive symbology makes sense given the post-apocalyptic nature of the future Josef describes. I’m afraid that masculine domination of the psycho-social paradigm is quite typical of primitive societies, which would be more or less the state of any society which has broken down socially and technologically.

 

Jennieruptha was quick to take exception

 

“saint” mobius is typical of the patriarchal revisionism that destroyed the feminine essence of the original human societies. Apparently, the very possibility of a return to the feminine after the inevitable self-destruction of the patriarchal system is too much for some males to handle. Everything about the society which Josef describes, the return to subsistence farming, the lack of a central power structure, the end of mass, corporate industry, indicates that the structure of domination on which patriarchal power and oppression bases itself has been destroyed and a return to a Gaianic principle of Mother Earthism has taken its place. Maybe “saint” should try to be a little more open minded before he shoots his mouth off.

 

This was more than saintmobius could take

 

While I’ve gotten used to being abused by self-appointed internet experts. I was expecting something a little better from a forum such as this. We’re all involved in a guessing game here and there’s no need for abuse on the part of anyone. All I did was state my opinion on a subject about which I have some expertise. I’m sorry if this offends you, but that’s really not my problem.

 

Prettycrazygirl was determined to keep the peace.

 

OK guys! Chill out! Isn’t it up to Josef to tell us what all this means? On his own schedule??? I think jennie’s take is really cool, but I don’t KNOW if its true or not, and neither does mobius or anyone else. The only thing we can do is wait for Josef to clarify things. Lets try and keep our heads together! This is something of historical significance and we’re not going to figure it all out in one day.

 

Jennie took exception.

 

That is such typical submissive-female bullshit. Some guy comes in and shoots his mouth off and all you can do is lie down and take it. You probably love being date-raped too.

 

Mobius:

 

Are you comparing me to a rapist?

 

Jennie:

 

You ARE a rapist!!! Reactionary patriarchists like you are the reason that the female principle has been ignored and erased in establishment anthropology and linguistics. Your phallicism has not only led to the genocide of matriarchy but to war, oppression and the rape of this planet’s natural resources!!! Josef is trying to tell us that a better future is possible and of course that’s just TOO much for you to take! The violence of penetration expresses itself in every facet of patriarchal anthropology and your attempted rape of Josef’s message is no different!!!!!

 

Saintmobius did not reply. Nor did he ever post again on the TimeLords site. Discussion of the gender implications of Josef6’s post effectively ended.  The general exegesis of Josef's insignia, however, was taken up by bourbonstreet5.

 

Jennieruptha has brought up something very important. I think we can use the general information given to us by Josef along with the symbol in question to draw certain inferences about the conditions of his time period and how we can help to prevent them. Obviously, this will not necessarily help us to change our own timeline, as Josef has pointed out. The problems of temporal displacement are obviously an issue about which our time period knows almost nothing and we won’t be able to deal with them without more information from Josef himself, should he choose to give it. However, IMHO, he’s actually given us quite a lot to work with. He’s told us, for instance, that the civil war will be set off by a general nuclear exchange with China over Taiwan. Obviously, this is a major issue RIGHT NOW, in this time period. Accordingly, those of us who have been made aware of the implications of this issue by Josef can lend our time and energy to PREVENTING hostilities between us and China over the issue of Taiwan. The peace movement is already on top of this one, but they don’t know what we know. Our knowledge, whether we want to reveal its source or not, gives us an edge that others lack. WE KNOW what the stakes are! WE KNOW what will happen if we fail to prevent war between the US and China on this issue!!! What this means is that WE CARE MORE THAN EVERYONE ELSE!!!! In politics, caring about the issue is the most important thing. The great enemy of political change is apathy, and we know -- thanks to Josef -- that we can’t afford apathy.

 

Jennieruptha was gracious in victory.

 

Thanks bourbon! Its nice to see a smart male in this forum for a change.

 

Here, she typed a smiley face.

 

I’m totally with you on the advantage that Josef has given us in revealing these things. Makes you think it might not be a coincidence, doesn’t it? Well, time (wink wink) will tell…

 

A new arrival, survivor69, went even further

 

I don’t know about you all, but I think there’s a lot more here than just macro-political issues. There’s a lot we can do on a local, even personal level. Like the song says: “inch by inch, row by row.” We don’t have to influence geopolitics to make a serious change in the world. It has to begin with us. For instance, Josef talks about the return to subsistence farming. Well, that’s something anyone can do! Where I live, all our food is grown in our greenhouse, totally organic, without any dependence on the agribusiness corporations that are destroying the world and -- as Josef tells us -- will eventually be destroyed themselves. Josef also mentions that the biggest problem in his time period is a lack of potable water. So, start stocking up! I’ve been storing the water from our well in cisterns of my own design for over ten years. Which isn’t to mention what you can do if you build a distillation apparatus to process rainwater. It’s easy and requires no electricity if you use natural compounds like phosphorus and zinc. Another thing: Think about the implications of what Josef has told us in regards to the economic system. Obviously, nuclear war is going to seriously shake up the stock market. So cash out now!!! Where’s the safest place to put your money? Gold! Gold has been a means of exchange since the beginning of civilization. Its easy to store and it cant degrade. Sell the 401K and invest in Krugerrands. And even if all monetary exchange breaks down, you’ll still have the food in your greenhouse and the water you’ve stored to barter with. That’s survival! There’s no time to waste!

 

Jennieruptha, once again, took exception.

 

While I’m in complete solidarity with the previous posters re: peace and organic farming, I’m not sure this is the true interpretation of Josef’s message. If Josef’s only intention was to get us to change our politics or our behavior, he wouldn’t have sent us this beautiful symbol. I think Josef is trying to influence our consciousness. He’s trying to get us to think about the future on a spiritual level, so the corrosion of our souls which caused all the death and chaos in his time can be healed. The only real way to change humanity and the future of humanity is on a spiritual level. Josef is not talking to us about organic farming, that’s just a detail. He’s trying to tell us about the feminine wholeness of all things, the birth-giving essence of the earth and ourselves as children of the earth. If we allow ourselves to heal spiritually, we won’t have to worry about the details.

 

Prettycrazygirl was deeply moved

 

Wow! I think I get why you were so angry before. Your beautiful post just makes me wish that the president and all the generals and governors could read Josef’s message and come to the kind of understanding you’re talking about. I never realized that beneath all the doom and gloom that Josef is talking about, its really a message of hope! I mean, if there wasn’t any hope, why would he bother to talk to us at all???

 

Josef6 had become hope.

 

 

5.

The blueprints appeared on May 22, 2001, uploaded from an unknown IP address and consisting of two high resolution .jpg files. Two photographs appeared twenty-four hours later.

The blueprints showed an oblong object in three divided sections. The front section, which sat at the top of the sketch, was the cockpit or a variation thereof. The second contained the two micro-singularity generators and the plutonium-based power source, divided from the cockpit section by a lead barrier of considerable width and stamina. The back section was an exhaust chamber or sorts, but rather than venting the radioactive waste from the vessel the chamber apparently stored it in isometric tubes at a temperature of negative 562 degrees Celsius so as to avoid any possible contamination. The notes at the bottom of the image claimed that the vessel’s waste was slight in comparison to its output and the material was reused when the vessel returned to its initial time period. The entire structure was roughly the size of an average four-door automobile.

 

The blueprints were, of course, largely unintelligible to the layman and thus caused only a slight consternation among those who were eagerly awaiting new revelations. The possibility of micro-singularity generators and the practical implications of liquid nitrogen storage tubes for plutonium byproducts were issues of interest only to specialists and the professionally skeptical. Because of this, it was the photographs that drew the most concentrated and sustained attention.

The first purported to show the control panel and pilot’s seat of the vessel. It resembled a car dashboard and was a light navy blue. The control stick, or what appeared to be a control stick, was covered with yellow and black stripes. It is a well known fact that the most striking of all color combinations is that of black on a yellow background. There appeared to be no window, windshield, portal, or other means of directly viewing the outside world. The size of the cockpit was impossible to gauge due to the lack of any reference for scale. If one judged its dimensions by comparison to the blueprints, however, it appeared to be considerably smaller than the cockpit of an average jet airplane. None of the screens, dials, buttons, or other assundry diodes and unknown switches were alight or in the process of manipulation, so the general effect was one of surprising banality. One could easily be looking at the dashboard of a small car.

 

It was the second picture which was truly astounding.

 

It also showed the cockpit of the vessel, but this time it was only background, and glimpsed through an opening in the side of the vessel which seemed to be the means of entrance. In the foreground was an unidentified hand which protruded from a navy blue sleeve. It was wrapped in a thick woolen glove of a distinctive matte black coloration. The gloved fingers gripped a small, flashlight sized object.

 

The object emitted a long stream of red light, clearly translucent, which shone into the interior of the vehicle. As it crossed the threshold of the vehicle’s hull, it bent in a slow arc until it was a monochrome rainbow disappearing at the bottom of the frame.

 

Underneath the photograph was the following text: The effect of the artificial micro-singularity generators on a beam of light. The hand is my own.

 

I cannot express the degree to which this single photograph annihilated any possibility of anything except objective, absolute truth in the minds of everyone who saw it. For the first time, Josef6 was corporeal, concrete, ecstatically alive. He had stopped being a cipher and had become a disembodied hand. And not only a hand. A hand capable of manipulating light itself. Of moving the primordial creations of nature according to his will. That simple phrase, those tiny words, elegantly plain, made for us a world: The hand is my own. A collective, electronic gasp burst across the binary synapses. Here was the unmoving hand and the bending wave. The very particles of the universe bowed before Josef6.

 

They were, at last, convinced.

 

They had appeared convinced before. They had acted as if convinced. They had written as if convinced. They had worn the masks of true believers. But this belief, in truth, was an expression of hope. An expression of love. They needed the belief because they feared their unbelief. They lived in terror of the emptiness without faith. Their gods had all abandoned them. Here was the promise of a fresh revelation. Impossible to disappoint, because it promised so little. Promised, at best, apocalypse itself. Here was hope without risk, love without pain, worship without death. Where and how far could they go? Only as far as the binary ether would take them. Only to the borderless hinterlands of the virtual itself. In the virtual was the possibility of infinite masks and infinite revelations. Of infinite mes blasting out into the unknown. Seen by a billion anonymous eyes. Recognized by no one. They were on the same sea as Josef6. They sensed that he had made himself extraordinary by announcing himself as extraordinary. There was no proof required to be extraordinary. There can be no proof of the extraordinary. There mere fact of the eyes, of those watching and reading billions who knew and knew not simultaneously, was enough. A billion minds in simultaneous cognition of something. The cognition was real. Undeniable. Impassable. Concrete.

 

And yet. And yet there was always the knowledge that madness can speak. That men can hear madness and become mad themselves. Humans can share their dreams as easily as they can share their waking life. Another’s brazen windmills become the arching passion of a multitude. The Holy Grail. The Philosopher’s Stone. The Unspeakable Name of God. The Voynich Manuscript. Truths buried under avalanches of time and memory. They were tortuous because of their possibility. Because of their discreet promise of their opacity, their resistance to touch, the dusty odor of the lost thing. Could this too be lost forever? Could this too be another promise which would be buried in a tomb of no one’s making? Except this time the sediments would be made not of dust and sand and time and death, but of the inchoate pulses of information which formed the surface of the invisible world. Time had stopped. Ages now passed in a microsecond. A single transistor held wisdom greater than all the libraries of Alexandria. The quest, once lost, would be impossible to find again. Under sands, there is the possibility of a momentary shift in the wind and the firmament. The chance movement of tectonic powers that pushes the past up through the ruins and into the unforgiving light. There to be dissected, reduced and reappropriated for a separate, heretical age. But this. There was no hope for this. It was here for this moment, for this instant in the global deluge of pixels and codes. A moment lost, and it was gone forever. A thousand times more fragile and weightless then the most ancient of artifacts. Such was the threat, the menace that existed behind their desperate hope for Josef6. Their despairing, tender belief in his purity and the beauty that sprang from his purity. He was virtual, and thus, not mortal. He was more delicate than flesh. If he left them, there would be no bones, no remains, no marker to proclaim his passing. Everything would be lost. And they needed him to tell them that it was not so. That there was weight behind their exultations. That somewhere there was a body with arms, with hands, with fingers that could wear sleeves and wrap themselves in black gloves. A creature who, like them, required protection and disguise. A creature who manipulated machines and allowed machines to manipulate him. A creature who was opaque, and reflected light, and was resistant to touch. Here, in the digital mosaic, they finally saw him.

 

There were a few doubters, still. They came and went early. They noted that the photos in and of themselves proved nothing. The objects glimpsed in the cockpit indicated no specific use and could easily have been constructed of spare parts. The hand with its bending light could be doctored with the greatest of ease. There was no point in belaboring the issue. The evidence presented was simply no evidence at all. It was of no scientific value and was therefore worthless. They had many questions for Josef, but thus far he had declined to provide any substantive answers. They would reserve judgment and maintain their skepticism.

 

They were almost entirely ignored.

 

The most popular reaction to the new postings was, as usual, typified by jennieruptha.

 

Oh. My. God.

 

Prettycrazygirl responded in kind.

 

Ditto.

 

Even the relatively sober eekthecat was thunderstruck.

 

Wow. Well, all I can say is that if this is a fake it’s the best I’ve ever seen. I’ve always said we should wait and see what Josef has to show us. Looks like he has.

 

Survivor69 went directly to the source.

 

Ok, Josef, you sold me. All I want to know now is what your specific recommendations are regarding survival in the conditions of your time period and a vague idea (no specific dates necessary) of how long we have to plan and prepare. I know you mentioned problems with potable water supplies and the need for subsistence farming skills, but that’s got to be just scratching the surface. I don’t think you’ll be violating your ethics if you help a few fellow human beings to maintain their existence in the face of what’s coming.

 

There was no immediate reply. Wwj6d45, clearly already an avid fan, was on hand to fill the gap.

 

I’ve been studying all of Josef’s previous posts, and I really don’t think we should be demanding anything of Josef right now. He’s taking a big chance showing us this stuff and I’m sure he’s watching our reactions and thinking about whether to contact us again. I think it’s obvious from his prior communications that there is something much bigger going on here than just friendly exchange of information and the search for an old computer chip. I think ewallis was on the right track, but we can’t know that for sure yet. Maybe Josef is here just to find out about the past, but it looks to me like he’s recruiting. He’s trying to find the right people to entrust with the knowledge of what’s going to happen in the future and how to prevent it from happening. Now, he’s mentioned some pretty heavy things, but he hasn’t given us much detail or any real advice on how to deal with it. I think he’s throwing this information out there to find out who he can trust and who can handle it in a mature, open-minded, creative way. He’s looking for people who will be able to UNDERSTAND and MAKE USE of this information. Hang tight, guys! Its gonna be interesting!

 

Ewallis was magnanimous in victory.

 

Thanks for the kudos, ww! I hope were both right! Even if we aren’t, just being able to interact with Josef and see these amazing images is reward enough!!!

 

Bourbonstreet5 was not satisfied.

 

I share everyone’s happiness and excitement about this incredible stuff we’ve just been handed, but this is no time for sitting down and waiting!!! We’ve just been given THE DEFINITIVE PROOF people!!! We can’t ask for anything more! We KNOW that what Josef has been revealing to us is a very real and possible future for us and this planet! We ALSO KNOW that we have very limited time to act on this information!!! Political and social change is a slow process. I’ve been in the activist game for years and you have to start early and KEEP AT IT to get anything done. We have to START NOW, with what little we have, and let Josef guide us as his communications (hopefully!!!) continue. If we sit on our asses and do nothing, we’ll be sending our world right to the place that Josef is trying to steer us away from!!! We know we have to make a change and the change must begin with US!!!!!!!!!!

 

Bourbon’s impassioned plea did not fall on deaf ears. Although Josef6 himself remained, for the moment, silent, jennieruptha picked up the gauntlet within forty-eight hours.

 

This is a message for any and everyone who wants to meet and discuss Josef and his message. A group of us from the San Francisco area are getting together at six o’clock on Friday evening at…

 

Here the name of a local YMCA was mentioned.

 

…in order to meet, organize, and put together a plan of action. All people who are interested and concerned about Josef’s message are invited. We hope to see as many of you as possible!

Love,

Jennie

WWJ6D

 

And that, of course, is how all the trouble started.

6.

Someone once wrote that men would rather be equal as slaves than exist in a hierarchy of free men. Accordingly, we sat in a semicircle. Each of us looking into each other’s eyes as though our gaze were egalitarian. In fact, each one of us all dutifully surrounded jennieruptha. Or Jennie Ruptha, as she was in the threadbare world of the non-virtual. Jennie was resplendent in her cascading dreadlocks, her unshaven armpits, her braless sagging breasts. When she spoke her lips pulled at the ends of words as nails tear with slow derision into black graphite. Two enormous hoop earrings, each in the shape of an Egyptian ankh -- the talisman of a long dead fertility cult -- distended her earlobes. When she turned her head the red flaps of skin hurled themselves in the opposite direction and the cartilage at the bottoms of her ears turned to corpse white.

 

She began by revealing to us that her name was not her name. She had been born Virginia Peasley in East Waukheegan, New Jersey, but had escaped in search of adventure, love, beauty and the meaning of life. Adventure was tiring, love was fleeting, beauty was fading, and the meaning of life had thus far eluded her. She was sure, however, in the power of those who took other names. Of those who placed upon themselves a literate symbology of their essential selves and merged with their presence as a word. She had a faith in words she herself did not recognize. It was unconscious. Unconsidered. As are all true faiths. And all the truly faithful.

 

She sat cross legged in a high backed wooden rocking chair. A pink shawl was wrapped around her neck, as an executioner might wrap a lover’s noose. As one might engineer the most adoring act of autoerotic asphyxiation. When she spoke, the vivid pink fabric would vibrate to the tremor of her vocal cords.

 

We were all here, she told us, because of Josef. And because of what Josef had to teach us. Josef was from a different time. But a time that could be ours. A time that was ours. It only waited for its moment to come. For us to reach the essential median between the past and the future. The dying moment of the present that never exists.

 

I paraphrase. She was incapable of such poetry.

 

All oneness, she suggested to us, was achieved by the realization of oneness. Josef was teaching to us that the unity of all thing was not only of the now. Of the hear and now. Of the day to day which is the fetish of all decadent spiritualists. It reached across time. It taught us that time was one. That the oneness of existence reached across time. Asian faiths, she told us, revere their ancestors. In this way, they fulfill a responsibility to the past, to the dead. Now there was an even more extraordinary prospect. The fulfillment of our responsibility to the future, to the not yet born. And this fulfillment was not longer mere sanctimonious moralizing on the holiness of children. It was real. It was here now. Talking to us. We were no longer required to relegate the future to the abstract, over against the unbreakable concrete of the past. The future was speaking to us through Josef6, and it was carrying dire portents. There was no longer any need to predict. Now we knew. We knew the possible outcome of our everyday movements. The plenitude of sins we were daily committing against the innocents of Josef’s time. We had to believe that this voice which was whispering to us from across the quantum spectrum was here for a reason.

 

The tyranny of the gathering was at the height of its powers.

 

A bespectacled man with a trimmed beard and a semi-castrato voice expressed his sympathies with Jennie. He began to talk about the exigencies of his upbringing. His insoluble conflict with his father. The necessity of finding wholeness in a world driven by consumerism. This led to an earnest exchange regarding organic farm products.

 

I felt the conversation was drifting from its original intent.

 

That was when Riverrain spoke up. Riverrain was the scion of a commune dedicated to the healing possibilities of primal scream therapy. She barely spoke above a whisper. Her jet black hair was pinned backwards with a violence which was shocking in its chastity. Black eyeliner encased the sockets in her skull, the flesh of which was rendered a porcelain white through the fervent application of powder and foundation.

 

She was born, she told us, in late 1977. Given the confluence of dates, she was certain that Josef6 was actually her father. It explained, she told us, everything.

 

This was the low point of the evening. But it served, at least, to lead us back to Josef6.

 

Jennie announced that we would go around the circle and announce our opinion of why Josef6 was here and what we should do about it. A few people twisted uncomfortably in their seats, but the totalitarian presence of others was enough to coax a reply.

 

The bearded man wanted to work for peace and harmony.

 

Riverrain wanted to file a palimony suit.

 

A black woman who was roughly three hundred pounds overweight was sure he was Jesus.

 

A white woman whose body was made up entirely of toothpicks covered with ulcerating flesh believed he had come to teach her how to eat again. Halfway through her three sentences she coughed and blood was glimpsed on her lower lip.

 

A young man in a black bandanna was deeply enthusiastic about the anarchistic possibilities presented by Josef6’s prophetic statements. He was of the personal opinion that nuclear war could present a magnificent opportunity for human freedom.

 

A portly accountant in a suit and tie announced his intention to become a ballet dancer.

 

Jennie looked disapproving. Which was eminently understandable. To her credit, the exquisite veneer of perfect calm never left her face. Her eyes, however, did grow slightly wider. And at one point her pupils were clearly dilated.

 

After the confessionals were finished, she looked down at the floor for several minutes in complete silence. My studies had long since convinced me that this was a regular and generally successful practice for gurus in training. The calculated use of silence, or any such premeditated manipulation of inscrutable or disconcerting behavior, was essential to focusing the attention of the otherwise easily distracted. In order to bring the imagination to bear on the state of lucid dream required by the semi-mystical experience, it is first necessary to disturb the cognitive expectations of the initiate. This is accomplished by the use of bizarre or confusing patterns of behavior which confound the standard mores of human interaction. The classic case being the Buddhist master who leaves his student to sit outside in a driving rainstorm and only admits him into the monastery when he has stripped himself completely naked and spent several days squatting in a peat bog.

 

Jennie, it was clear, was a natural.

 

When she raised her head after a long interval, it was to suggest that we all say a prayer of her own composition. Each of us stood and took the other’s hand. The raw discomfort of personal contact simultaneously bonding us together and causing us to loathe the very sight of our opposite. Several people were clearly deeply unhappy with the partners with which coincidence had presented them. Shifting one’s position in the circle was, of course, impossible by this time. It would be an unequivocal statement of rejection which, in the face of all these watching eyes, would probably cause irreparable damage to the recipient.

 

People, generally speaking, only refrain from being cruel out of shame. This is, I suppose, one of the advantages of collectives.

 

Not that this motley collection that constituted ourselves was anything but a cursory attempt. A brief and barely comprehensible sketch of a collective. Nonetheless, there we were, all of us in each other’s hands and in the hands of Jennie Ruptha, who, for the first time that evening, smiled something that resembled an expression of genuine happiness and contentment.

 

The smile, through sheer chance, fell on Riverrain, who blushed so intensely that the crimson could be glimpsed under her layers of whiteface. Those paying close attention no doubt also saw the indulgent expression of compassion and affection which crossed Jennie’s face and allowed Riverrain to regain her composure without public remonstrance. It was a generous act on Jennie’s part. If her hair had caught fire and burned the top of her scalp to a black crispy mane of bubbled flesh I doubt Riverrain could have been more embarrassed. There are certain people who retain a default position of embarrassment. An all purpose capacity for mortification. It has only one setting, and eliminates completely the possibility of embarrassments of varying magnitude. It is, I suppose, a fairly effective defense mechanism. Although it contains, of course, the ever present threat of profound overreaction. The inevitable price, I suppose, presented by the possibility of indifference to infinitely more horrendous traumas.

 

With this momentary expression of compassionate exchange finished with, Jennie bowed her head and spoke in an assumed baritone drawl. Her prayer was as follows:

 

Josef, grant us the wisdom to perceive the present, to erase the past, and to bring a more beautiful and united future. Give us the strength to change and to commit change. Make a gift of your wisdom to those of us who believe and want to believe. Heal those of us in pain. Feed those of us who are hungry. Make peaceful those of us who are at war within ourselves. Make one the world and the world one. Amen.

 

After we had all intoned the benediction in a low, somewhat dissonant drone, there were smiles on all the faces and a profound look of peace in several sets of eyes. People shook hands, exchanged numbers, made brief conversation, and then left with their heads held slightly higher than when they came. A few took their exit together, their heads turned towards each other in energetic conversation.

 

I took my leave alone, to return to my studies and my twin unknowns. As I did, I paused in the door and looked back.

 

There, under the migrainic fluorescent lights, were Jennie, the bespectacled man, and a smiling Riverrain, their mouths moving swiftly and their heads nodding in obvious and even blissful consensus.

 

 

7.

On 15 July 2001, Josef6 broke his silence.

 

Hi! -- He wrote -- I can see there’s been a lot of talk and speculating about my last posting. Unfortunately, issues relating to my mission and certain family issues have rendered me unable to respond as I would have liked to. I can say that I’m very gratified and kind of shocked at the outpouring of interest in what I’ve posted here. I guess its understandable and I should have expected it, but its sometimes difficult for me to keep in mind that things which are commonplace -- or at least accepted as fact -- in my time period are completely unknown in your time line.

 

I want to say a few important things right off the bat: first of all, some of you are placing a spiritual or moral import on these things which are totally unintentional. Its not that I’m not flattered, but I’m not a prophet or a guru and definitely not a messiah. I’m just a soldier doing his duty. Believe me, I’m really not that interesting. I don’t know much more about this technology than you do, and in some ways its equally impressive to me too. I think somebody once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to the primitive mind -- not that any of you have primitive minds, don’t take me the wrong way -- I’m just trying to bring a few of you back down to earth where all of this is happening. Sorry to burst your bubble, but its just physics! Nothing magical or divine is happening here. I actually believe in God in a sort of vague, non-formalized way, like a lot of people in my time period, we’re more religious but less dogmatic, but I can assure you that no spiritual intervention was necessary to get me here and wont be necessary to get me back to where I came from.

 

The second thing is very important to me personally, and has been causing me a lot of conflicted emotions over the past few months, which is one of the reasons why I haven’t been in touch with you. Some of you have expressed the opinion that I am here to warn you or to push you towards actions which will change the future to which I will return. I think I made it pretty clear that any changes you could or would make in this time period would be unlikely to effect the outcome in my time period, unless there are serious unknown factors in terms of the compound nature of the multiverse, which is definitely possible. In any case, the possible outcomes of your timeline are as infinite as any other, so both you and I are basically powerless to influence the course of events in either continuum.

 

Having said this, I have been forced to reconsider some of my assumptions regarding my mission. It’s a pretty accepted theory in physics that just by observing certain phenomenon you change them, and I’ve done much more than simply observe all of you. I thought at first that I could engage myself anonymously with your time period through the medium of the internet while maintaining a safe distance. Now, I think that might have been a way of evading responsibility. I’ve been wondering if I have certain ethical responsibilities towards you as much as to my mission. For better or worse, I’ve made contact with you, and now I have to accept certain moral consequences just as you do.

 

The point I’m getting at is that even though it is probably pointless to reveal things to you about the future, it may not be. I’m not sure I have the right to withhold certain information from you if there’s even the possibility that it could change things for the better. On the other hand, I have to balance any information I might give you with my military and ethical responsibilities to my time period.

 

So, I’m going to confine myself to a few simple words of advice. I can’t reveal anything more than this, so please don’t ask me to.

There will be a major event on the east coast of the United States in 2010. You might want to be elsewhere.

If at all possible, acquire a water purification system and start storing your own water supply.

Learn how to shoot and maintain a weapon. I know this may be difficult for some of you, and I hope it wont be necessary, but if your timeline does end up following mine, it will be an absolute necessity, both for hunting your own food and defending your property.

I would get out of the stock market by 2003 at the very latest.

That’s all I can comfortably tell you right now. I’m keeping a close watch on certain developments in this time period -- mostly considered unimportant by your media -- and if I think it becomes necessary I may reveal more. For the moment, this will have to do. I hope you appreciate the dilemma I’ve been facing and the reasons I have for withholding -- for now -- any further information.

J6

The first response was, as should have been expected, from survivor69, and read as follows:

I TOLD YOU!!!!!!

Jennieruptha was on it a moment later.

Josef, I just want to speak for those of us who care about and admire you that we totally understand the soul searching you must have been going through over the past few months, and we appreciate your taking this chance. You did a really beautiful and amazing thing today and we won’t let you down.

Bourbonstreet5 was conciliatory but triumphant.

Its nice to be vindicated, but I want to express my apologies to Josef if he felt in any way pressured by some of the things I posted here. I was wrong in assuming that he was really here to warn us in order to change his time period. I see now that the situation is much more complicated. I hope Josef will forgive me if I contributed to any conflicted feelings he might have had recently on this subject and thank him for this incredibly altruistic act. NOW ITS UP TO US PEOPLE!!!

Prettycrazygirl sounded the only note of concern.

Obviously, I’m as astounded and moved as everyone else about what Josef has told us. But we should remember that this is pretty scary stuff, folks. Stay away from the entire east coast in 2010? I don’t think we can have any doubts about what that means. Its the date of the Chinese nuclear attack. Everything else he’s telling us is how to survive after it happens. Is it inevitable? Are we totally helpless? What can we do to stop this before it happens? I think I speak for a lot of people here when I say that I’m more confused and frightened after reading this message than before it. I know Josef is only trying to help, but how can we even begin to deal with this kind of information? And according to him, its only the tip of the iceberg? Can you imagine if we knew everything he knows?

Jennieruptha was, as always, on hand for reassurance.

I understand, pretty, but remember, he’s telling us this because he thinks this may have a positive effect. In other words, he thinks this may be enough for us to make some real changes for the better. We can work with this. None of the terrible things Josef has told us about and warned us about have to happen. That’s exactly why he’s telling us these terrible things. I believe that if we band together and believe that we can change things for the better, we’ll succeed. This is the only thing that has ever changed things for the better. Josef knows this too. That’s why he’s taken such a risk in revealing these things. We should be grateful, not frightened, that he trusts us and believes in us enough to take that chance.

Jennieruptha, you see, was sure that she could read the mind of God.

 

 

 

8.

The first note of dissension was sounded shortly after this in the person of Doctor Allen Remington, PhD of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who signed on to the TimeLords board as DocRem85. Whatever his words, the fact that a distinguished professor of theoretical physics had descended into the depths of the virtual abyss to render his opinion constituted a bizarre and fitting acknowledgement on the part of the established institutions of knowledge that things were beginning to get very out of hand. In this regard, of course, Remington was ahead of the curve.

Its difficult for me to believe -- He began -- that a group of ostensibly intelligent and well informed people could fall for such obvious pseudo-scientific nonsense. It would take far too long to list all the scientific problems with “Josef6”’s supposed time machine, but I will simply mention that there is no proof that a micro-singularity even exists in nature, and to artificially create one would -- even in theory -- require an energy input roughly equivalent to a supernova. The idea that this could be contained in a vehicle the size of a minivan is completely absurd. The minute such a device -- which is impossible anyways -- were activated it would destroy the earth and most of the solar system along with it.

This is not even to mention the so-called “compound nature of space-time” for which no proof exists whatsoever. Even in advanced theoretical circles, no one even entertains this notion with any seriousness. The multiverse theory involves multiple universes but not multiple timelines and -- since each of these universes would not share the same physical laws as the others -- it would be completely impossible to travel between them using the physics of a single, specific universe. The multiverse theory is, in any case, only a theory, and the idea that a practical device for traversing it could be created and put into practical service within seventy years by a post-nuclear apocalypse society in which there is no central source of funding and power and which, apparently, cannot even fix a century old computer glitch simply boggles the mind. In other words, it couldn’t happen and it didn’t happen. Yes people, he made the whole thing up.

Even giving “Josef” the benefit of the doubt, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and Josef has given you absolute nothing that even remotely resembles any evidence at all. You have two very easily doctored photographs and a set of blueprints which describe -- as I stated before -- a vehicle which would be impossible to operate without destroying itself and everything else for several million miles around, even if it were possible to build such a device at all, which it isn’t.

I would have thought that the fraudulent nature of “Josef’s” story would have been obvious to you the minute he handed down his list of “time traveler’s ethics”. Every single one of these is clearly designed in order to give him an excuse to give you no specific predictions or other facts which might prove him to be a fake. In other words, Josef6 is unfalsifiable, which according to basic scientific doctrine makes the truth of what he says impossible to prove or disprove. Given the extreme nature of his claims, the proper response should be skeptical disbelieve unless presented with absolute and definitive proof of the truth of his statements. As I’ve said, not only has none of this proof been forthcoming, but he’s been very careful to present you with a series of “ethics” which preclude the possibility of him ever having to do so. In real scientific circles, this is proof positive of fraud. Yes, that’s right, your time traveler is a fraud and nothing more. He’s probably a bored grad student who’s having a good laugh at your expense. Whatever he is, he certainly isn’t what he claims to be.

Doctor Remington should have known better. The believers were upon him almost immediately, and they had strength in numbers.

You call yourself a scientist -- Said one -- aren’t scientists supposed to keep an open mind about knowledge and the world? Aren’t they supposed to investigate every aspect of the universe and not simply dismiss it out of hand. They probably laughed at Einstein too, at first, and Josef certainly isn’t claiming to be Einstein.

Another took issue with the Doctor’s historiography:

You say that Josef has presented us with nothing but unfalsifiable statements, but you yourself claim that his statements about the artificial micro-singularity is falsifiable. Not to mention Josef’s recent statements about near future events, especially on the east coast in 2005. We can definitely wait and see whether that comes true or not. In fact, most of what Josef has told us has been pretty exact and, while a little out there -- as any future technology would be -- isn’t beyond the realm of the possible. As he said, anyone coming with future technology is going to sound pretty out there describing it. How do we know that scientists in the future haven’t solved the problem of micro-singularity energy output. Even Josef himself admits that he doesn’t know how it works! You just set up a bunch of straw men and knock them down, exactly what you accuse Josef of doing! You seem to me like a very close minded and angry man.

A more succinct message read

If Josef is so obviously a fraud, why are you even bothering to post here? Why do you even care? Maybe because deep down you know he just might be the real thing?

This, at least, got the good Doctor’s attention

Typical. You seem consider the fact that people are offended by frauds and lies to be some sort of compliment. The reason why I “care” about things like this is because, as a scientist, I am a believer in the idea that reason and logic can arrive at objective truth. When I see people abusing other people’s credulity and using scientific principles to do it, I am offended. It really that simple. And no, deep down I am quite sure that your friend Josef is a liar and a fraud. I also think he’s thoroughly enjoying himself.

Prettycrazygirl considered the entire affair distinctly tragic.

I just want to say that I think its really sad that Josef has to suffer these kind of attacks. He’s behaved towards us with nothing but generosity and, I think, love. Its too bad that some people are too mean-spirited and close minded to see the beauty of his message. I guess some people will just never get it.

And that was all. Doctor Remington refrained from further comment and his artfully thrown rhetorical grenade was quickly buried under a plethora of exegetic speculation as to the prophecies of his target. In all likelihood, he realized the Quixotic nature of his task and simply lost interest.

 

As for Josef’s primary disciples, Doctor Remington’s attack elicited no response whatsoever. This initially bizarre silence extended even to Jennie Ruptha who, as we later discovered, was far to busy to pay it any attention.

 

 

9.

The First Parrhesic Church of Josef6 opened its doors in September 2001. The event was largely lost in the tragic storm of that tumultuous month. There was no media present, and not a word was written about the organization for the better part of a year. In the face of fire, death and the trace of Armageddon emitting from the bowels of Manhattan, no one even noticed the most significant event of the coming decade.

 

They would have been disappointed. The opening ceremony of the FPCJ6 was not auspicious. Only fifty-five people attended, and the central ministerial committee consisted of only three individuals: Robert Burgundy, who thanks to the miracle of ophthalmologic laser surgery, was no longer bespectacled, Riverrain, who was now known as Butterflyhope the First, and the inevitable Jennie Ruptha, who would now and henceforth be known as the High Priestess Guinevere. Those who attended were handed a white slip of paper upon which the following was clumsily Xeroxed:

The FPCJ6 is dedicated to fearlessly speaking the truth which has been revealed to us by the Traveler, Josef6, who came to our time in order to rescue us from the dark future in which he lives. We bless and sanctify his sacrifice and his bravery and seek to build our lives through his extraordinary story and teachings. We believe that by changing ourselves we can also change the world. Our beliefs, based upon the messages of the Traveler, are these few, basic, human truths:

1. The Traveler speaks the truth.

2. The Traveler has made his journey for a reason. There is no such thing as a coincidence. The revelations of Josef6 are a gift to this time period and must be honored.

3. In order to honor Josef6 and his courage, we must seek to change both our own lives and the lives of others in our time period by heeding his message and his warnings.

4. The existence of nuclear weapons and the use of war as an instrument of policy must be forever abolished if the future of the Traveler is to be avoided.

5. The political and spiritual leaders of our time have not fulfilled our political and spiritual needs. We look to the Traveler for guidance and not for the outdated and corrupted institutions of our time, which are leading us into the dark future which the Traveler has described to us.

6. We call upon the Traveler to reveal and make his presence known to us, his believers. If he chooses not to do so, we understand that there are reasons we cannot know or comprehend for his refusal and will continue to follow his teachings.

7. We support organic farming, sustainable economics and peace. We reject war, industrialism and social injustice.

8. We believe in the power of organized and dedicated people to make a real change in the world. We seek to make this change through teaching, love and faith in the words of the Traveler.

9. All people, time periods and universes are one and simultaneous. We are responsible not only for ourselves, our time and our universe, but for all the others to whom we are connected. We are them and they are us.

The event was held in a white tent in a public area, with organic vegetables and steel kegs of well drawn water served for refreshments. High Priestess Guinevere gave a short speech and recommended that the assembled purchase the new self-published book by the central ministerial committee. Entitled “The Traveler: the Revelations of Josef6”, it was a crudely bound softcover with Josef’s military insignia emblazoned in black against white under the title. The cardboard box containing one hundred and seventy five copies was empty by the end of the ceremony.

Following her speech, High Priestess Guinevere, newly christened, urged the congregation to join hands and recite her self-composed benediction, which had now been retitled “The Traveler’s Benediction”.

 

Only a single photograph remains of this founding moment. It was taken by Butterflyhope in the moments before she joined the assembled circle, bowed her head, and intoned the post-modern hymnal.

 

It shows a blissful group of perfectly ordinary people captured in a moment of transition. They are rising off their chairs, leaning awkwardly towards their neighbors, reaching out towards outstretched hands. They are dressed in the motley, disintegrated collage of styles so typical of the age. Jeans, dresses, scarves, blouses, shoes of all shapes and sizes, it was the amalgamation of the transcendent ordinary that is in frozen movement in this strange, ominous image. The only anomaly is the High Priestess herself, dressed completely in white, her strangles of brunette hair drawn back and tied in a bun above her forehead. The virginal robe touching the toes of her bare feet. She is already looking downwards, her eyes closed, her arms outstretched, palms turned upwards, prepared to receive the tentative fingers of her flock. Behind her is a raised dais assembled of stray, industrial stands liberated, perhaps, from the storeroom of a government welfare office or dissipated public school. Above it hangs a blue placard with yellow lettering. It reads: “WWJ6D?” in enormous red letters.

 

I obtained this photograph from the TimeLords message board itself, where the High Priestess had happily posted it along with a brief missive describing the elegant and moving proceedings. Many of her fellows posted their approval, along with frequent praise of the spiritual and aesthetic content of the ceremony she had described.

 

For myself, I relegated the image to the innards of my personal computer. To rest among the static electrons of the billion transistors, alongside my hundreds of files on the Voynich Manuscript. Pulsing in the silicon emptiness that was the perfect shadow of our own memories. Fragile and transient, there was no longer need for them. These blurred and unknown figures, reaching for each other around the impassive High Priestess, were stored forever among the atoms, waiting for the moment when they would be called upon again. To be gazed at in all their candid, deformed, inscrutable virtualness. While the rest of the world was examining, in the minutest detail, down to the anatomy of Armageddon itself, the wasteland of destruction ripped through the urban fabric, I was content with these strange, dancing ghosts.

 

It was two days after this initial meeting that the High Priestess posted again, informing the virtual assembled that the FPCJ6 were currently in negotiations for non-profit status and were applying for government recognition as a religion, or, as she put it, “legitimate spiritual movement.

 

Underneath her message was a link to a newly established website. Those who followed through the tear in the electronic architecture found themselves at a single page of text, showing various details and instructions for obtaining the soon to be self-published pamphlet: “Join the Travelers! How to start an FPCJ6 chapter in your community.”

 

 

10.

Following the early history of the FPCJ6 is not exactly an easy task. It requires both fortitude and patience. Even given my extensive research into the subject, enormous gaps remain in the historical record and are likely to remain so. Quite often, the origins of a thing are counted from the moment of their eruption into the world. But this is never the beginning. There is always the further back, the shadows were the thing took shape. Gestated. Began to become itself. This begs the question, of course, of whether there is actually a thing at all, or merely what we make of it. Is the thing there, or do we create it? This is elementary philosophy for college freshman, and yet no one has thus far provided us with an entirely satisfactory answer. I have no pretensions of my own in this direction. Like the Voynich manuscript, I decided the thing was what it was and proceeded from there.

 

What is clear, however, is that from the very beginning the San Francisco chapter of the FPCJ6 was the largest and most influential congregation, with its neighbor Berkeley coming in a close second. Indeed, for most of its early years, the FPCJ6 was a completely Californian phenomenon, with coincidental offshoots in Seattle, New York City and, surprisingly, Austin, Texas.

 

It was no surprise, therefore, that within two months of the founding ceremony the High Priestess Guinevere, nee Jennie Ruptha, nee Virginia Peasley, moved herself and the central ministerial committee to San Francisco and established the national headquarters for a religion which, at the time, barely existed.

 

At this point, records become extremely sketchy, though a slow and measured rise in membership seems clear. Within a year, the number of chapters had grown from four to eight, a sizable increase percentage-wise, but remained primarily based in northern and central California. The members were generally educated and relatively affluent. What is most remarkable about these early statistics is the age range of the members. Most new religious movements -- what detractors refer to as “cults” -- are largely composed of people under the age of 35, usually tending towards the lower end of the age spectrum of 20-35. In the case of the FPCJ6 there was a remarkably even distribution across the age spectrum. The largest group was within the expected 20-35 range, but only by one or two percentage points. In the case of some congregations, even less than this. Participants between the ages of 45-60 made up fully 38% of the national membership and there was a sizable percentage of senior citizens as well, particularly in the San Francisco chapter. The broad appeal of Josef6’s message, or the message of his interpreters, would appear to be statistically quantifiable in this case. However, one must make allowances for the fact that, at this point, one is still dealing with a movement which numbered barely over two thousand members.

 

The real action, at this stage, was in the virtual arena. This was to be expected. The influence of the FPCJ6 extended well beyond its membership due to the swiftness with which it monopolized the virtual exegesis of the Josef6 phenomenon.

 

The official FPCJ6 website, which was operational within six months of the founding ceremony, was something almost unprecedented: an electronic codex dedicated to the enigmatic recitations of a single, unknown figure. Its homepage consisted of a series of links through which one could connect to a compendium of Josef6’s original messages, including the images and the astounding moment of prophetic revelation regarding 2010, arranged according to date, subject and perceived importance. These in turn led to a series of related pages. Some of them were simple theoretical expansions on Josef6’s missives. Others involved detailed scientific speculation on the actual workings of the Traveler’s craft, based on “the latest in theoretical physics” and the indistinct clues teased out of the copious original texts. Some of these included quotations or transcriptions from recent scientific papers on the subject of quantum manipulation and the space-time effects of artificial micro-singularities. Most of these were, by common consensus, totally incomprehensible.

 

The next exegetical level was concerned with a careful extrapolation of future conditions as described by Josef6. This included theories on the political, religious and economic systems of the post-cataclysmic future, visual reconstructions -- some drawn, some computer generated -- of the post-nuclear landscape, extrapolated population figures based on government estimates of survival rates following a nuclear exchange, and estimations of crop and power output in a sustainable, non-corporate based agricultural economy. One dedicated disciple even posted a theoretical constitution for the revised United States deduced from Josef’s occasional hints at totally non-centralized government.

 

From here, the commentators left the future and returned to the present by way of the past. Building on survivalist ideologies and environmentalist practice, they constructed a body of recommendations, advisories, and systemic practical applications to be followed by the concerned citizen of the present who sought to emulate the Traveler in the here and now rather than in the later or never. These included lengthy missives on organic farming, water storage, solar power, gun maintenance and safety -- for the more aggressive survivalists -- canned foods, the effectiveness of do it yourself bomb shelters, methods of minimizing the deleterious effects of radiation, iodine treatment of contaminated water and numerous other real world solutions to the virtual world problems presented by Josef6.

 

Inevitably, these musings on the practical gave way to the political. The primary cause of the FPCJ6, its members and its non-denominational followers, the charge given them, they believed, by the Traveler himself, was to prevent the catastrophe and the future it would bring. It was, in effect, the cause of erasing the Traveler himself. Josef6 may have been the first prophet who called upon the people to make his own existence impossible.

 

The primary cause to which the Traveler’s disciples attached themselves was total nuclear disarmament. Since the weapons had been, or were to be, the instrument of the cataclysm, this was entirely understandable. The FPCJ6 site contained a multitude of links and information urging involvement in the disarmament movement. It presented a calendar of events -- demonstrations, petitions, protests, civil disobedience -- some of them organized by the FPCJ6 themselves, and exhorted the concerned and the faithful to take part. It presented detailed lists of political candidates to support -- some of them from very obscure minor parties -- and organizations, movements and issues with which to be concerned and committed.

 

Secondary to the disarmament issue, certain specific topics were addressed. Most notable among them was the necessity of rapprochement between the United States and China over Taiwan. According to the disciples, the independence of a small island nation, artificially created by now obsolete geopolitical considerations, was not worthy of nuclear Armageddon. It was necessary, so it was said, to choose the lesser of two evils, and the lesser was unquestionably a Chinese takeover of Taiwan. The handover of Hong Kong, after all, had not proven to be much of a disaster. There was no reason to expect any different in the case of Taiwan. To risk nuclear war over such an issue was, in the opinion of the disciples, psychopathic and evil.

 

Beyond this, there were, of course, the usual urgings towards anti-globalization, anti-industrialized agriculture, and anti-militarist political stances, although the presence among the disciples of a considerable number of survivalists limited the extent of the movement’s pacifism. Several “Traveler’s militias”, organized -- though officially disavowed -- around the FPCJ6, clearly exerted considerable influence in this regard.

 

It is my belief that it was through these tangential connections to broader political issues that the FPCJ6 first began to receive some measure of public recognition. The participation of the San Francisco chapter in a pro-disarmament demonstration, nearly a year after the founding ceremony, managed to garner some considerable attention from the local media, concentrating particularly on the bizarre sect which believed it had been shown the future by an internet prophet. The FPCJ6 represented an exciting -- “sexy” is, I believe, the professional term -- departure from the usual drab and aging Woodstock refugees who generally populated such occasions. Although the tone of most of the reports was skeptical leaning into outright mockery, it provided an invaluable boost to the church’s profile. Picked up by national affiliates and then by talk radio programs specializing in “paranormal” or bizarre phenomenon, the story became something of an underground sensation in the second year of the church’s existence. A cause celebre, or at least a celebre, just barely under the radar of the mainstream press.

 

The primary cause of this trend was the High Priestess herself. Jennie never lacked for talent in performance, and her sincerity, not to mention her bizarrely convincing fashion sense, gave her a charisma which proved essential to the growth of the sect she had founded.

 

The distance provided by the virtual was the key to her success. In person she was disconcerting, ponderous, bizarre and slightly frightening. Over the air waves she was appealingly different, articulate, quirky, sometimes touching and deeply sincere. Her obvious goodwill contained none of the oppressive religiosity exuded by her physical presence. In a space once removed from the real, she was charming and slightly lovable, even if -- sometimes especially if -- one was convinced that she was utterly deranged.

 

It was during this period that the FPCJ6 truly established itself. Within two years of its founding it had formed coalitions with over a dozen anti-war, environmentalist and specifically pro-disarmament groups, which is not to mention the mostly unspoken connections it maintained with various survivalist militias which, while skeptical about organic farming, were more than interested in the idea of decentralized government. Because of this energetic networking, the church began to achieve a measure of local political influence, particularly the San Francisco and Berkeley chapters. Their growing membership, coupled with their obvious sympathies towards some of these communities’ most treasured political goals, made them a small but at times indispensable source of manpower and authority. While no politician went so far as to publicly court their endorsement, the local FPCJ6 chapters were capable of easily turning out disciplined and enthusiastic cadres of believers to man phone banks, canvas voters, request donations and all the other uncomfortable and thankless tasks essential to local political victory. When Pervis McElvoy, a former assistant professor of peace studies and fervent advocate of disarmament, won the chairmanship of the Berkeley city council, it was widely rumored that the foot soldiers of the FPCJ6 had been instrumental in his victory. Although not a word was spoken publicly, it was assumed that favors would be forthcoming. Despite this fact, it went unnoticed by the press when, six months later, the FPCJ6 won local tax exempt status in both Berkeley and San Francisco. A victory the church would soon repeat on a national scale.

 

By the third year of its existence, the church had doubled its membership yet again, and small chapters had begun to spring up across the East Coast of the United States as well. It proved particularly successful in New York. Rumors also swirled about several prominent Hollywood stars who may or may not have been sighted -- behind the obligatory dark glasses and baseball caps -- at local recitations of the Traveler’s Benediction.

 

It was this final development that most likely prompted the massive publicity coup that marked the end of the church’s third year of existence. Namely, the High Priestess’s appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show.

 

The most surprising thing about this appearance, in retrospect, is its relative banality. However, this is not difficult to explain. By this time, the talk show genre had already run the gamut of the bizarre, the strange, the paranormal, the perverse and the outright appalling. Winfrey’s previous guests had included psychics, child molesters, psychotic serial killers, men who hated women and the women who loved them, and an infinity of other greater and lesser psychopaths, all of whom were accepted with the modicum of decorum expected of a national television audience. Admonished with the unspoken admonition to keep an open mind, and provided with the perfectly credible insurance policy that it was all entertainment anyway, there was no particular reason -- and there remains none -- why the High Priestess and her oddly compelling tale of perfectly scientifically plausible visitation should be greeted with anything but a respectful hearing and the most copiously observed official niceties.

 

And this is precisely what happened. To mark the occasion, the High Priestess forwent her white robes and instead appeared in jeans and a t-shirt emblazoned with the now immortal “WWJ6D?”. She and Oprah laughed together about their busy schedules, discussed various lamentable developments in national and international politics and culture and looked sympathetically into each other’s eyes while the High Priestess recounted a handful of sad, and one tragic, anecdotes from her days as Virginia Peasley. At one moment, viewers swore that they could see a mutually shared tear crossing the faces of the two women. The cameraman, unfortunately, did not exploit his opportunity for a close up and the tale must remain, therefore, apocryphal.

 

The highlight of the show was, of course, the High Priestess’s retelling of the visitation, the message of the Traveler, and her belief that it represented hope for a better and more peaceful future. This led to a long discussion of the only real issue at hand: him. Who was he? What was he like? Was he, perhaps, in the audience right now?

 

When this question was asked, the cameraman turned his lens upon the assembled audience, and all heads turned towards each other and themselves, each person seeking Josef6 in the face of the person next to them. It was electrifying television. Those eyes roving the stands. The stage momentarily forgotten in the search for the cipher, the phantom, the hidden presence who might be concealed in plain sight. Seen by millions. Recognized by no one.

 

With her unerring instinct for spectacle, the High Priestess rose from her seat and said that if the Traveler was present, would he reveal himself to the faithful at last?

 

There was a long and completely unbroken silence. Then they cut to a commercial.

 

 

11.

In recounting this tangential phenomenon, I do not wish to imply that Josef6 was silent throughout this time. He continued to post and to respond to questions. Moreover, he seemed determined, despite the efforts of his followers, to deter any attempts to make him into the object of spiritual or political fascination. In response to one query as to whether he was sent by God, he responded:

No. I believe in God, but he didn’t send me.

This missive was largely ignored by the growing number of participants in the virtual pageant, who were tending more and more towards the spiritual exegesis put forth by the High Priestess with each passing day.

 

This may have been the reason that Josef6’s communiques began to take on a sharper and more irritated tone as time wore on. He seemed to be becoming more and more impatient with both his believers and his detractors. In response to one critic, who believed his story but accused him of founding a religious cult, he wrote:

Listen, I can’t help it if people misinterpret my words or draw the wrong conclusions from them. As I said in the beginning, I am looking for interaction and dialogue. I am not urging anyone to buy anything or do anything. I am not interested in giving you life advice or political advice or guiding your spiritual path -- or whatever you want to call it. I have made one exception to this for altruistic reasons and it is a decision I am beginning to regret. You are all free and intelligent people and I leave it to you to make up your own minds about me. If this leads some people down a spiritual path, or if they think I’m some kind of messiah, they’re completely wrong and they’re allowed to be wrong. Whatever they think, it isn’t my fault and it isn’t my problem.

His interlocutor seemed satisfied with this, or at least satisfactorily intimidated, because there were no further communications from this particular naysayer.

 

Josef was also beset with people seeking all manner of practical advice, from how to construct underground cisterns to whom to vote for in the next presidential elections. To the more innocuous inquiries, Josef generally steered them towards the available literature. Towards others, however, he evidenced a noticeable tendency towards frustration.

For God’s sake -- He wrote in response to one request for political advice -- make up your own minds. I’m not here to do your thinking for you. I’m here to tell you about me and where I come from to the extent that I am permitted to do so without violating my military oath or my own personal ethics. You can’t possibly be so ill informed that you would base your vote purely off of what some guy says on the internet, whoever he is! I’m not any different from you are! Make your choice based on your beliefs and your life experience, not mine! You live in this time period! You are far better qualified than me to decide your own political or social questions. I’m just an observer, not a seer! I have nothing to offer you that you cannot find within yourself.

This particular admonition was followed by a regretful apology from the questioner. Several other posters, however, did note that Josef may have overreacted. A fact which Josef later acknowledged and made a brief apology. This did not, however, in any way salve Josef’s increasingly obvious dislike of his new, exalted position.

 

This was most obvious in his relationship to the FPCJ6 and its leadership. For the most part, he declined to talk about them at all. When he was finally forced by weight of inquiries to respond, he simply said

I do not endorse them and I am not connected to them in any way. I support some of their positions, especially regarding organic farming and other similar issues, but I am not a part of their movement nor do I have any special contact with them. If they take positions with which I disagree and claim that my words justify this, I will say so. Until then, I would prefer not to talk about them. They are totally irrelevant to my life and my mission.

Of course, this only increased the fervor of the FPCJ6 themselves. The reluctant prophet is a staple of human myth, and Josef’s persistent refusal to engage with his most energetic followers served to provide them with a goal towards which to strive. Josef6 became a Holy Grail for the FPCJ6, something physically existent but fundamentally mysterious and impossible. They were trying to find him and he did not want to be found. His refusal to part with his mystery made them adore him all the more.

 

And there were those individuals who simply wanted to know more. Who had endless inquiries into the where the how and the why of the predicted apocalypse. To these heartfelt and often slightly desperate requests, Josef always responded in precisely the same way.

I cannot say any more than I have already said. To do so could have serious consequences for both you and me. I think I’ve bent the rules as far as I am able. I will simply repeat what I have already said: there will be a major event on the East Coast of the United States in 2010. You may want to be elsewhere when it happens. That is all I have to say.

And this was all he had to say. Throughout the rest of the next year, responding to hundreds of questions and challenges, Josef never revealed anything more about the event he had so ominously prophesied.

 

I do not know if it was clear to Josef that this was, in effect, handing himself over to those he accused of hijacking his message and his identity. In his silence, the FPCJ6 and their followers could formulate whatever they wished, and their websites began to fill with all manner of speculation, from plagues to bioterror to the nuclear exchange between the US and China which had absorbed so much of Josef’s early messages. A literature of Armageddon was growing up around Josef6 and yet he appeared to be oblivious to it. Perhaps, as one of TimeLords’ denizens once joked, he had really been sent back to make a study of group hysteria in the early 21^st century. This was amusing in so far as it was so obviously true. For Josef’s self-appointed disciples, 2010 was taking on a millennial significance, and there were already reports of east coast chapters making plans for mass evacuations. A necessity which was becoming more and more onerous as the church membership skyrocketed and its profile ever higher.

 

Fueled by discontent over the Iraq War and embraced by seekers and pilgrims from every corner of godless modernity, the FPCJ6 had seized on something. Its basis in scientific plausibility and absolute pacifism made it the perfect refuge for the materialistic and terrified zeitgeist of the age. As its popularity grew, as it became the subject of 60 Minutes reports and celebrity endorsements, as it began to be openly embraced by state and even the occasional national politician, the object of its worship became ever less relevant. By the time the mass pro-disarmament demonstration of 2007 descended on Washington DC, the FPCJ6, despite being one of the largest represented groups in the crowd and its organizing committee, said little or nothing about its anointed prophet. They had their own Josef6 now, and little need of the original.

In some ways, only I remained Josef6’s true chronicler. My hard drive was filled to capacity with his communiques. Stacks of paper on which I printed hard copies of every one of his posted messages filled my drawers and spilled out on to my tables and chairs. My desk was a mass of research materials and carelessly scrawled notations, all relating to the Traveler and his mission. My work on the Voynich Manuscript remained indefinitely suspended. The fact that I was meeting, face to virtual face, with the same phenomenon -- the unknown writer -- not in the distant and emasculated past, but here in the living now, was too much for me to resist. They had created Josef6, but I knew him. Or, I knew him as much as it was possible to know him. Since, for me as for all of us, he remained a stranger.

 

It was a few days after the 2007 demonstration had blanketed the news and the administration had announced the formation of an independent study group to assess the possibilities of its implementation that I received the message.

 

It appeared one morning in my Inbox. It had arrived sometime in the early hours of the night before, long after I had switched off the cortex-warping screen and gone to dream my own dreams. It was from a bbsturgen117839 and contained no text whatsoever. Its subject line, in broad capital letters, was its only content. I read it before giving it a second thought. It said this:

I KNOW WHO HE IS.

 

 

12.

I had no doubts about the meaning of these enigmatic words. They were as empty and as obvious as any communique from Josef6 himself. I hesitated for two hours before replying. Finally, I sat at the keyboard and typed out a message of equal and opposite enigma.

Who are you? How did you find me? Why me? Who is he?

For a day and a half I waited. During this time, for the first time in months, I did not venture into the diaphanous, other, electronic world. I sat at my kitchen table. I drank my coffee. I watched the sunlight slink across the linoleum tiles. As the shadows lengthened, I felt a dark and terrible violence gathering in the dusk.

 

There was no response that night. I could not sleep. I paced my study. I tried to watch television but I had no more patience for the virtual. The concrete had invaded and I was defenseless before it. Finally, shortly after midnight, I drew out my notes on the Voynich Manuscript and spent the remaining hours until dawn contemplating a more ancient unknown. One which could be grasped, on coarse and crumbling paper, between my two hands.

 

It came at ten o’clock the next morning. My hands did not shake as I manipulated the keys. This time there was a text. It answered none of my questions. But it was enough to satisfy me for the brief time required until I would know.

I can’t answer your final question -- It began -- at least not yet. I don’t want to tell you my real name either, not through this medium. They are watching and reading everything we say. I must emphasize, I have taken a considerable risk in contacting you, and the vagueness of my message and my answers is no coincidence. We will have to meet in person for you to know the truth. I will have to see your face and hear your voice. Nothing virtual is safe from them.

I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about. You obviously understood the intent of my message and therefore are aware of the dangers I have undertaken. I did not find you. I chose you. The medium over which we are communicating is my business, my passion and my talent. There is nothing going on in the virtual world which I do not know about, and which I cannot trace back to its origins. In the case of our mutual subject -- our mutual obsession, perhaps? -- I simply put my skills to work. The IP address was encrypted and the origins of the messages was difficult to ascertain, but a bank of PCs working twenty-four hours a day in cycles found the cipher key in a little over a month. From there, it was a matter of geographical location, checking on the likely abodes of those with the requisite technological knowledge and ideological predilections, and then some substantial guesswork. All of this required only time, and it has taken me that time -- several years altogether -- to come to a conclusion. But there is no doubt about the matter. I have found him. What matters now is those who do not want him to be found.

I’m not sure how long we have, but it will require some time for them to trace the search back to its source, and by that time everything will already be revealed. For this to occur, however, I need an ally, and I have chosen you.

Why? That answer is easy. I have been following this particular phenomenon since the day it first occurred. I have complete records of the original messages and everyone who has questioned, answered or read them. I know the intimate details of every one who has ever logged on to the TimeLords message board. Of the 86,000 regular users who have read every single message left by our subject, you are the only one who has never written anything in response. I concluded from this that you, like me, are an observer, and therefore can be trusted. A brief check into your background only confirms my belief. You are an academic, a researcher. Your methods and the institutions to which you have been connected are known and trusted. I am strange enough to be disbelieved. But they will have to listen to you. When we reveal what I have to reveal, they will not be able to stop us.

If you are willing to undertake this task with me, please answer in the affirmative, and I will contact you as soon as possible. I make only one request: that we have no further communication in this medium. If I have access, others have it as well.

As to your final question, at the moment I can say only this: HE IS NOT WHAT HE CLAIMS TO BE.

I await your answer.

I sat for several minutes in silence. For the second time, I had encountered an unknown author. And yet this one made no pretensions of unreality. He wanted to be known in the concrete world. He would accept no other arrangement. I did not know what to think about his suspicions, his terrors, his obvious paranoia. The man was clearly half insane. His delusions of persecution were extraordinary. And yet, there was logic enough in what he said. More logic, perhaps, than in the strange missives of Josef6, the name my perspective ally dared not speak. Could a man so terrified actually be the bearer of truth? Could the bearer of truth be anything other than a man terrified?

 

One thing was clear, he knew who I was. And he was correct. I had spent my entire virtual life on the TimeLords message boards as an observer. As a pure watcher. A pure reader. I had contributed nothing. The chronicle which was now metastasizing across every surface of my apartment was for me alone. I had never involved myself. That he had reached me even across this non-participatory distance, across my silence in the electronic architecture, was proof enough of his skills. And the methods he claimed to have employed were not impossible. They were dedicated, obsessive, but no more than my own. No more, even, than those of the legion of frustrated geniuses who had labored over the Voynich Manuscript.

 

And there was something even more terrifying and enticing in the message from my unknown ally: the possibility that he really did know. And that, soon enough, I would know. All it required was a brief affirmation on my part, and I would be the co-discoverer of a great secret. The silent enigma would cease to exist. Josef6 would be forced into the concrete. Could this be tolerated? Would the legions of the disillusioned take up arms against us? Perhaps he was correct in his terrors. What nightmares could I conjure up out of the loss of such a mystery? What wilded dreams would dance up out of this rupture in the electronic architecture? In this new revolution? This reconquest of the virtual by the real?

 

I knew only that I had been offered something unique in human history: the chance to know something thought to be forever unknowable. Something believed to exist only in the amorphous domain which never took shape. Was never required to burst forth into the withering light and face its prosecutors stripped of the veil of pulsing electrons. The unknown author of the Voynich Manuscript would remain forever unknown to me. But Josef6, this enigma I had dreamed along with a million others would not.

 

I knew then that I would say yes.

 

My message was brief. It consisted of only two words: I agree.

 

I received no further messages from across the pixilated depths.

 

The letter arrived two days later by special courier. It was a rectangular envelope. Slightly off white and sealed with glue. Inside there was only a small card upon which was printed an address, an apartment number and a date. Both the address and the date were of disconcertingly close proximity.

 

The appointment had been made.

 

 

13.

The ominous speed with which events were now moving became even clearer the next day, three days before my appointed meeting, when Josef6 stunned us all for the final time.

My friends -- His missive read -- this has been a long and strange adventure you and I have taken together. But now it has almost come to its end. I told you when these communications first began that my presence in this time period was only temporary. The time has now come for me to return to my rightful time period. My mission is complete and has been complete for a long time. I have put off my departure thus far because of personal reasons and because of my fascination with you and your time. I have learned so much from you -- much more, I assure you, than you have learned from me. As hard as that is to believe, it is true. You have taught me about the willingness of human beings to believe, their willingness to trust, their willingness to accept others and their stories no matter how strange and fantastic. I have said it doesn’t matter to me if people don’t believe my story, and it doesn’t. But it does touch me deeply -- much deeper than I imagined -- when people do believe it. In my time period, it is easy to become disillusioned with human nature. I and those I love have seen every kind of human cruelty and suffering. You have shown me that a better world did once exist and might exist again. I leave that up to you. You must decide your own fate and your own future. Don’t leave it up to others. Not priests, politicians, prophets, or me.

This is the only wisdom I can leave you with. Maybe it’s a disappointment for those of you who have placed so much hope and faith in me. But I have always said, and say again now, that you must look within yourselves for the future. That is the only place you will ever find it.

Accordingly, in one week’s time, I will be making my return jump. I promise that I will tell every one in my time period who will listen about this extraordinary and unique dialogue we have had. Perhaps the things I have learned here and the things you have taught me will help to change my own time period for the better. For a long time, we have felt like prisoners of a past we did not create. Now I understand that it is up to all of us, in whatever time period, to create our own future.

This will be my final communication to you. I leave with more sadness and regret than I ever thought I would. And this I owe to you. It is my hope that my family will be able to record my jump on camera or even on video. If this is possible, they will -- anonymously, of course -- do their best to post it on this web page. Maybe this will convince some of the doubters out there who have taught me so much about the limits of human thought. I am more concerned with those of you who have been generous enough with your minds and spirits to believe me. It may give you some final reassurance that you were not fooled, and I am as real as I claim to be.

I leave you with love, hope and resolution. Never think that the future must be. The past belongs to the dead. The present to the living. And the future will be your creation.

May you face this future as hopefully and courageously as I do, and with the same love in your hearts. I’m sure you will, because these are the gifts you have given me.

Farewell and Godspeed on all your journeys.

Josef6

The response was exactly as should have been expected. There were those who begged him to stay, others who expressed their sympathies with the necessity of his departure, there were some who wrote delicate testimonies about how profoundly he had changed their lives. Most of them, however, experienced a stoic regret and sadness matched with a deeply emotional gratitude for Josef’s generosity of spirit. No one, I think, had been expecting that Josef’s final message would be a valedictory to them and not to himself. They felt, suddenly, that they had forgotten, in their awe at the grandeur of his journey, the simple humanity of Josef6 himself. He was, after all, only another human being like them, or so he claimed to be. He was a stranger in their midst. Someone who had been dislodged from his proper place. Someone whose time had been deliberately wrenched out of joint. It was he who had been enlightened by them. It was he who had been lost all them time, and they had found him. They had provided a lonely traveler -- the Traveler -- with a home during his long stay in a distant and frightening world that was utterly unlike his own. They felt, at last, that they were special. And their sense of mystery remained, even as they realized that behind the mystery was a frail and beautiful human being much like themselves. Each and every one of them, and all together, wished him farewell and Godspeed in return.

 

This was truly the first and only time in the long dialog with Josef6 that something like a pure, collective emotion was felt. There had been wonder, agitation, awe, worship, fear, insatiable curiosity and fascination, but there had never been a single, utterly childlike feeling which had captured all the singular hearts who were yearning towards the flickering screens. Who had sought the simple love of another through the ones and zeros. This, I think, was Josef’s real final gift to his friends and admirers. To those who did not know his face, nor he theirs. He caused them, at last, to feel.

 

For myself, there was only the gathering certainty. The slowly coagulating surety that something was about to happen. At not merely in this divorced and distended world of the virtual in which Josef6 was making his final benedictions. No. Something in the fiber of the real was beginning to shift. I did not know if my anonymous ally knew what he claimed to know. I did not even know he was sane. Everything he had written indicated otherwise. And yet for the first time I had ceased to believe in coincidence. A stranger had contacted me with the message that he knew a terrible and dangerous secret. Now the object of that secret was removing himself from the world. Removing himself from the only world in which he had ever existed. Truth or lie, Josef6 was beginning the process of ceasing to exist.

 

But I knew -- and my strange ally must also have known -- that such a thing was impossible. Josef’s permanent silence would only bequeath him to another world. A world in which the virtual would become the virtual and give birth to another structure upon the structure. The binary reality owned Josef6. It would never let go of him. Once the virtual had been deformed, it was more durable than the real could ever be. It would continue to give birth to Josef6, to an endless continuum of Josef6s. If we proved him a lie, the lie itself would become the subject of this infinity. Our quest, our mutual resistance to mystery, was Quixotic in the most tragic possible way. We had already lost. there was nothing and no one who would listen to us. And if they did listen, it would only be to add us into that shadow world. To transform us into immortal, ever-pulsing electrons. In seeking to destroy Josef6, we would only lose ourselves to the thing that had created him and which he had used to create himself.

 

For the first time since I had begun my observations, I began to feel despair. Not at Josef6’s departure, but for myself. My fascination was now ending. It was reaching inexorably towards its climax. Whatever I would know, whatever he would tell me, I would never be the same. I had made my life into the chronicle of a madness. A singular madness. With its own unstoppable logic. Its own visions. Its own passions. Its own ethics. Its own contours. This madness -- true or false -- was collapsing around me. People were knowing. People were finding out. Or people were resigned to the mystery. Either way, my obsession, born of my ambivalence, my indifference, to the question of whether he was real or unreal, was dying. I did not contemplate this death with anything approaching joy or relief. Over the past years I had lived a vertiginous existence. Each message as it came to me had lit the skies anew. I had no more dark nights. My thoughts had been cleansed. My actions were wholly given over to my singular fascination. To let it go, I realized, would be to let go of myself entire.

 

Nonetheless, I could not stop myself. I had begun my mad journey with Josef6 out of the desire to know. Now I was going to know. It was a terrible thought. But I could not turn away.

 

When the day came, I did not hesitate. I arrived at the appointed time.

 

 

14.

The name under the apartment number read “Horatio Bardolf”, a name I assumed to be an alias. I took the elevator to the sixth floor and counted to doors to number 67. The building’s doors bore no numbers of their own. The elevator was dilapidated and ancient. The paint peeled in flecks and corners off the walls. This was clearly a hideaway. A false residence. A front. A place where people came to conceal themselves and not to live. I heard no noises behind the doors or in between the walls. Once a rat scurried across the corridor and disappeared. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the sonorous beeping of a large vehicle reversing slowly. The light in the hallway contained no bulb and I was forced to navigate by the time sunlight streaming through a single cracked window.

 

Horatio’s door was unlocked. I knew this because it hung slightly ajar, revealing the locking mechanism. I knocked anyways. There was no answer.

 

His living room was disturbingly akin to mine. It was covered with papers and books. A thin film of dust covered the walls and furniture. There was an ancient television set in one corner, connected by a multitude of bizarre wires to the wall. He had constructed his own cable and satellite hookup. No doubt illegally. The papers strewn across the table, chairs and ripped sofa were printouts of minute series of ones and zeros, arranged in infinite variations. Horatio, judging by the evidence, had become the first human being to sight read binary code. He had conquered the language of the machine. No wonder he lived in such astonishing fear.

 

I glanced into his bedroom for a moment as I based. It was completely bare. Its walls stripped of paint. There was no bed. A mattress was carelessly thrown into one corner. The sheets had once been white, but were now a sickly off-yellow that made one nauseous to look at.

 

A cockroach climbed over the pillow and made its wall slowly across the bare wood floor.

The kitchen contained only a few tins of tuna fish and preserved fruits. Out of the strangest of curiosities I opened his refrigerator and found a jumbo-sized plastic canister of lemonade and a half eaten chicken sandwich whose edges were slowly turning to brown. The floor was stained with brown and reddish splotches suggesting extreme carelessness with ketchup and coffee. The garbage can was overflowing with cardboard boxes from Burger King and Pizza Hut.

 

Here was all the evidence of an obsession. Of a kindred soul.

 

I found him, of course, with his machines. There were six of them. All but one were flickering intensely, running endless vertical and horizontal variations of the binary hymnal. The floor was a tangled cauldron of wires, cables, plugs and soldered ends. I had to pick my way through on my tiptoes to keep from tripping. Stacks of blank discs, stereo equipment, video editing machines, discarded satellite dishes and an infinity of other detritus of the virtual age filled the corners and walls. I saw now that my obsession was nothing. I was here in the presence of the master.

 

The master was seated in a revolving office chair, complete with ergonomic headrest and wheels which must have been near useless in the clutter that filled its owner’s life and fed his madness. His hands lay still on the keyboard, poised for the next entry, for the next assault on that impenetrable world of dichotomous numerology.

 

It must have been in that moment, the second before, that they had lifted him slightly from his seat and stove his head into the once-flickering screen. Now it was only a tangled mass of blood, cranial fluid, black plastic and distended wires. Horatio Bardolf’s skull had become a sculpture in grey matter and silicone.

 

He must have known. They would never have come for him otherwise. Or perhaps simple suspicion was enough. How they had breached his no doubt elaborate security precautions and discovered our brief correspondence, I could not begin to guess. But I had no doubt as to who they were. They had seen the threat that I had only dimly perceived. They knew that Josef6 could truly exist only in the unknown. Horatio Bardolf had pierced the veil which was everything they held sacred. Or he had only claimed he had done it. But this was threat enough. They could not risk the possibility that he had actually done it. It was as terrible to them as death. So they had sought him out. And they had found him.

 

It was then and only then that I was gripped by the sudden and unutterable fear. It was born of only this simple thought: they did not know either. They had suspected, they had thought, they had guessed, but they did not know. Bardolf had to die because he had claimed to know. Claimed to know the one thing they did not and did not wish to know. The one thing that they and the world must not know. They had killed in the name of mystery. For themselves and for all of humanity. To save it, not from the truth, but from the horrifying possibility of the real. They had gone farther, and become more powerful, than I had ever imagined.

 

I began to tremble. Now I too, of all people, was a threat to them as well. If they had reached Bardolf they could reach me. I whispered a silent, prayerful thanks to my deceased ally for sending his invitation through a non-virtual medium. It was now time to flee into that world. To escape into the concrete. The real which I had forsaken was now my only defense against Josef6 and what he had created. Against the deathly hand which reached towards me out of the electronic maelstrom.

 

 

15.

Josef6 escaped too. There were no more messages. The promised photographs and video never materialized. As the weeks and then the months passed the faithful began to dissipate. Each of them taking with them that Josef they had most desired and most needed. Whether they continued in their belief or embraced disillusionment is impossible to say. Within a year of Josef6’s disappearance, the TimeLords message board shut down for lack of traffic. One of the last postings was from the High Priestess herself, who was, perhaps, sensing the change of an era.

We can work only with assumptions -- She wrote -- and on faith. With the assumptions that Josef has now left us and the faith that his words were true and his message remains with us. It is now our duty to work towards the better future he taught us to build, and to prepare for the coming of 2010, the Year of the Traveler. Whatever disaster is coming in that year, we will be ready for it, and the truth of the Traveler’s words will, at last, be clear for all to see.

With that, the FPCJ6 ended its presence on the web. Its website shut down. Its publications ended. Its chapters closed. With the same ferocious suddenness with which it had appeared, the congregation of Josef6 disappeared simultaneously from the virtual and the real. There were occasional rumors, among those of cared, of a compound in the Arizona desert, of the continuing weekly invocations to the Traveler, of disappearances among the east coast faithful, sometimes in couples, sometimes in dozens, leaving all their material property behind and vanishing from the two worlds.

 

In my own way, I too disappeared. I made good on the realization that came to me as I gazed upon the thing that Horatio Bardolf had become: that sickly, viscous compound of carbon and circuits. My name has been erased. My connections have been severed. My IP addresses, my site nicknames, my browsers and servers, the endless tentacles with which I reached out into the electronic architecture have all been destroyed. In a single, fiery act of virtual suicide I annihilated my virtual self. I blocked all the avenues through which they could make their fatal contact.

I was not content with this. I moved to another city. A took a different position at a different institution and dedicated myself once again to the Voynich Manuscript. Thus far, I have solved none of its mysteries. It remains a comforting, effortlessly existent enigma. I am content with this.

 

They may yet find me. Horatio Bardolf’s fate may yet be my own. They know, or they must have guessed, that he had contacted me by other means in order to convey his location. They do not know, they cannot know, that in that singular communications he told me nothing. They can only guess at what I know. Their fear of me must be terrible. Perhaps there are squadrons of them scouring the face of the world for me. Teams of assassins dispatched at regular intervals from the sanctuary in the desert. Looking through mailing lists, bank statements, rental invoices, the innumerable detritus of paper that a human being leaves behind as he moves through the non-electronic architectures. I can be ironically thankful that the virtual has now overwhelmed so much of that which was once real. To hide from the virtual is now to hide -- almost -- from the world entire. If they succeed in finding me, I will salute their skill and perseverance even as their assassins strike me down. On some days, when I am alone with my mystery and my dreams, I think that I would welcome such an end. I live now as a perpetual foreigner in this electronic age. There are indeed moments when I long for that indelible end. Or pray for the coming of 2010, and for the final proof that the Traveler was a truth or a lie. But I know that even this will not silence the faithful, nor dissuade them from their life’s work: the protection of him and his mystery.

 

He is still with me too. His face as shadowy and concealed as it has always been. He and my unknown author of the Voynich Manuscript remain with me in this new and alien existence I have built to preserve my life. I still dream them, on some nights. Sitting side by side, one with his quill, the other with his keyboard. Sketching the outlines of their devices of torture. These things that would pain mankind for the rest of his existence on this earth. I watch them in my sleep, as they formulate these infinite unknowns. As they prepare their poison chalices for the faithful and the heretics. I can only do as they do. As all of us do who were captured by the ineffable enigma. As I and my enemies do. I wait, and I hope, for the Year of the Traveler.

 

 

16.

In the end, they could not wait for the future to take its course. They took the future into their own hands, just as Josef had told them to. How the acquired the device remains unknown, but their militia connections must have been essential. The plan itself must have been undertaken shortly after the founding of the church. FBI reports have placed it within six months following the initial ceremony, and when I read of this I thought back to those three faces nodding in a silent ceremony of affirmation. They were not content with mere affirmation. They had pushed the present into the future in a single moment.

 

The effect of a small nuclear device on a major urban area is impossible to imagine unless you have seen the photographs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were merely a dress rehearsal. The cataclysm of the autumn of 2001 was a mere taste of the future the followers had to offer us. The annihilation of Manhattan took only a second. But this second will live about all other seconds which compose the past. Even as it recedes, it merely gives birth to more and more infinite futures. Each one more horrendous, more destructive, more obscene than the last.

 

I have seen all of the pictures. The shattered buildings. The incinerated bodies. The inferno. The crater, like the invasion of another world on to our blue planet, the violence of some black and eviscerated world visited on our own, blasted into the center of the city. Even as the initial reports were coming in on the evening of January 1, as the helicopters with their stupefied announcers hovered over the Atlantic coach, watching the mushroom cloud dissipating into the upper atmosphere, I knew it was them. It could be no one else. I no longer believe in coincidence.

 

By another horrendous irony, the day that millions were vaporized was the day I was saved. I discovered this on January 4^th, when the FBI raided Singularity, the long-rumored Arizona compound of the FPCJ6. What they found there matched massacre for massacre.

 

Alongside the copious proofs -- computer files, diagrams, mathematical formulas, traces of plutonium, improvised detonators -- of the congregation’s responsibility for the slaughterhouse in Manhattan, they found the guilty themselves. The High Priestess’ diary of events, “The Traveler’s Will” as she called it, gave enough information for the investigators to reconstruct events.

 

On the night of 31 December, 2009 the congregation gathered in the enormous communal prayer room. They joined hands in a circle, just as they had done every day since that first initiation and recited the Traveler’s Benediction. Then High Priestess Guinevere took the stage and made a brief statement. What she said remains and will always remain unknown. Because afterwards the ministerial committee took the weapons they had acquired from their survivalist allies and, one by one, shot their compatriots to death. Each of the victims appeared to have submitted willingly to their execution. They were killed in a kneeling position, with a single shot to the back of the head. There is enough evidence to conclude that the parents shot their own children before consenting to death themselves. When the massacre was complete, the ministerial committee turned their weapons on each other, leaving only the High Priestess to suffer the ignominy of suicide. Even in this final, frenzied moment of madness, her flair for the dramatic did not fail her. She was the only member of the church not killed by a firearm. Instead, she took a heavy butcher’s knife from the communal kitchen and carved Josef6’s military insignia into her forehead. Then, she cut her jugular vein open and bled to death among the corpses of her followers. When the device went off at 7am on January 1, 2010, and the cataclysm the Traveler had prophesied came to be at the hands of his followers, all those who had engineered the destruction of the present in the name of the future were already dead.

 

They died, I think, because they had accomplished their mission, just as Josef had previously accomplished his. The blow was indescribable. Manhattan and its boroughs will be uninhabitable for a century. National politics has been thrown into a maelstrom of recrimination and chaos. International standing has dropped and China has already announced its intentions to annex Taiwan. In its current state of shock and disarray, it is unlikely there will be any resistance from the United States. Already people are abandoning the cities in fear of another attack. The survivalist and militia movements are exploding with new followers. The stock market crash that followed the event has almost demolished American industry. People are returning to the countryside and the land. Subsistence farming is the country’s only growth industry. Josef6 is coming true. His world is coming true as we watch. Unable to stand against the catastrophe of time.

 

I sometimes wonder if this was his plan all along. The future must hate and despise the past, as a child grows to hate his parents. The future must feel ensnared, trapped, violated by the past. The past cancels all will, all choice, all possibility. It makes prisoners of us all. We are aliens to ourselves and our world. Orphans, cast astray in a madness not of our own making. Perhaps Josef6 was the future’s final vengeance upon us, the past. Perhaps he feels some measure of contentment, now that his future is, at last, upon us.

 

I myself cannot say. Because I cannot claim to know him. I can claim only that I know him no better than any man knows himself. But I am beginning to understand him at last. I am beginning to see the true outlines of vengeance. I can see clearly now the coming end of the world. The architecture of Armageddon slowly takes shape as I continue to ponder the past that draws me back, inexorably back, towards that day ten years ago when I first signed on to the TimeLords message board and told them that my name was Josef6.