Chapter Two

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 everybody 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 cataclysmically destroy itself. The new-agers and the neo-hippies -- even some of the paleo-hippies -- found their fondest prayers answered by the post-apocalyptic vision of a communal, earth based existence free of the social confines and alienation typical of the era. Although Josef6 did not explicitly pander to their sexual libertinism, it was nonetheless assumed. The amateur scientists and physics freaks were intrigued to the point of physical anguish by the vague references to micro-singularities and the impossibility of temporal paradox. References which aroused their fondest technological yearnings and their unwavering faith in scientific progress. The vague hints 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. For the lover of nature and the lover of science’s conquest of nature. For the moralist and the libertine. The puritan and the nihilist. All that was required was a certain dissatisfaction, a certain content with things as they are. Once given, they all found themselves in Josef6. In the tale of Josef6. In the reality of Josef6. In the Josef6 they created in their own image. The Josef6 possessed only by them. there was no other Josef6. Not until the next words appeared at the will of the cipher. The ghost in the electronic architecture. The architecture and Josef6, the ritual that demanded Josef6, were one and the same.

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 of 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 presumed something obviously false: that human beings are inherently complicated. In fact, it was the very complexity of Josef6 that hinted most strongly 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 immendiately recognizable flaws in the few tantalizing fragments of hard science offered by Josef6’s enigmatic communiqués. The existence of micro-singularities had already been proven and the theoretical possibility of their artificial manipulation had developed 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, comfortably 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.