Chapter Three

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 14th 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. But not a single word or letter of the five hundred page document has revealed itself. With only the strange and often crude illustrations to go 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 alone, 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 knew 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. A cipher replaced a cipher. Their only differentiation was time. A differentiation that was also a perfect irony.

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 digitized letters. Was I dreaming him too? It was impossible. Because the words were there. And here, the words, the script, the signs, were instantly 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 very object of my study, was recurring before my eyes at the requisite hyper-speed of the digital, global, virtual age. There were skeptics, cynics, heretics, flagellants, chiliasts and true believers. I was watching a mystery in action. I was 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 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 an invisible crowd. Shards of him embedded in the translucent 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 deus abscondus -- an 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.

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 who were exhausted by words. They dreamed instead of The Word, and with it an end to words. They had nothing to lose. They 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 believed 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!!! 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, theres 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.

Which elicited an equally swift reaction.

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 youre 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 level, subconscious perhaps, 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 whos 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 10 January, when the images began to appear.

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.

Chapter One

“The world will have become Tlon.”
-Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

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 warp 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. This is, in fact, 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 that it was entirely plausible that manipulation of the energy emitted by black holes -- a phenomenon discovered by reknowned physicist Stephen Hawking -- could result in controlled distortions of the temporal place of space-time. On a theoretical level, this made time travel a practical endeavor, although the technology for such a manipulation did not currently exist and -- admitted the authors of the study themselves -- might never exist. Most intriguingly, however, the authors noted the theoretical exist of observable particles which existed at the event horizon of the singularity -- commonly known as the black hole -- which appeared to travel both forwards and backwards in time simultaneously. The observable presence of naturally occurring temporal paradox confirmed beyond any doubt that time travel could, on a theoretical level, be contained within the realm of 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 even horizon phenomena and Klepler’s unreliability on the question of quantum paradox, rendered in the mostly indecipherable scientific patois that was typical of specialists. The proliferation of dialects among the sciences was a lamented but little studied phenomenon of the late twentieth century. The multitude of Englishes proliferated to such an extent that entire academic disciplines had rendered themselves completely incomprehensible not only to the layman but to one another. This is, of course, a natural tendency of language, thought the demarcations were at this point, unlike in the past, based around regions which were, by definition, entirely virtual. That is to say, they did not, in fact, 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 all the non-professional sites, 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 the proverbial -- that is to say, 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. 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 capacities of individual human creativity with the crystalline expansion typical of the collective. The relative size of the mutually agreed upon fantasy is generally 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 becomes. As a rule, the affection towards 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.
TimeLords.com took its name from the designation of a popular science character who traveled forwards and backwards 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???

Notice 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 -- he wrote -- 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 form 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 broke out. 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, if this gives 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 we are well into the process of reconstruction. The union has been reconstituted under somewhat different lines than before, with more power in the hands of state and local governments and less concentration on the role of the federal government. Electricity is widely available, but is now generated on small, local grids instead of large industrial power stations. Big corporations in general 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 the radiation, but we are making great strides in decontamination technology.

My device is a proto-singularity propulsion unit manufactured by the government in a plant in southern Virginia. I am not a physicist, but the 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 also 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 to make you 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 obligations.

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.