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 communiqués 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 21st 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 communiqués. 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 only this:
I KNOW WHO HE IS.
