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 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?
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 who he claims to be.
I await your answer.
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.
