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.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 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
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.
