Chapter Sixteen

In the end, they could not wait for time to take its course. They took the future into their own hands, just as Josef had told them to. How they acquired the device remains unknown, but their militia connections must have been essential. The plan itself appears to have been undertaken shortly after the founding of the church. FBI reports have placed it within the six months that followed the initial ceremony, and when I read of this I thought back to those three faces nodding in a silent ceremony of affirmation. But they were not content with mere affirmation. Instead, they pushed the present into the future in a single moment.

The effect of a small nuclear device on a major urban area is impossible to imagine unless you have seen the photographs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nothing but an amateur dress rehearsal, and the cataclysm of the autumn of 2001 was a mere taste of the future the followers had to offer us. The annihilation of Manhattan took only a second. But this second will live above all the other seconds which compose the past. Even as it recedes, it merely gives birth to more and more infinite futures. Each one more horrendous, more destructive, more obscene than the last.

I have seen all of the pictures. I have stared at them until their lines turn to abstract shapes and the pixels collapse into kaleidoscopic shades of black, white and grey. The shattered buildings. The incinerated bodies. The infinite inferno. And the crater, the hideous aberration, like the invasion of another world on to our blue planet, the violence of some black and eviscerated world visited on our own, blasted into the center of the metropolis. Even as the initial reports were coming in on the evening of January 1st, even as the helicopters with their stupefied witnesses hovered over the Atlantic coast, watching the mushroom cloud dissipate into the upper atmosphere, I knew it was them. It could be no one else. I no longer believe in coincidence.

By another horrendous irony, the day that millions were vaporized was the day I was saved. I discovered this on January 4th, when the FBI raided Singularity, the long-rumored Arizona compound of the FPCJ6. What they found there matched massacre for massacre.

Alongside the copious proofs -- computer files, diagrams, mathematical formulas, traces of plutonium, improvised detonators -- of the congregation’s responsibility for the slaughterhouse in Manhattan, they found the guilty themselves. The High Priestess’ diary of events, “The Traveler’s Testament” as she called it, gave information enough for the investigators to reconstruct events.

On the night of 31 December 2009 the congregation gathered in the enormous communal prayer room. They joined hands in a circle, just as they had done every day since that first initiation, and recited the Traveler’s Benediction. Then High Priestess Guinevere took the stage and made a brief statement. What she said remains and will always remain unknown. Because afterwards the ministerial committee took the weapons they had acquired from their survivalist allies and, one by one, shot their compatriots to death. Each of the victims appeared to have submitted willingly to their execution. They were killed in a kneeling position, with a single shot to the back of the head. There is enough evidence to conclude that the parents shot their own children before consenting to death themselves. When the massacre was complete, the ministerial committee turned their weapons on each other, leaving only the High Priestess to suffer the ignominy of suicide. Even in this final, frenzied moment of madness, her flair for the dramatic did not fail her. She was the only member of the church not killed by a firearm. Instead, she took a heavy butcher’s knife from the communal kitchen and carved Josef6’s military insignia into her forehead. Then, she cut open her jugular vein and bled to death among the corpses of her followers. When the device went off at 7am on 1 January 2010, and the cataclysm the Traveler had prophesied came to be at the hands of his followers, all those who had engineered the destruction of the present in the name of the future were already dead.

They died, I think, because they had accomplished their mission, just as Josef had previously accomplished his. The blow was indescribable. Manhattan and its boroughs will be uninhabitable for a century. National politics has been thrown into a maelstrom of recrimination and chaos. International standing has dropped and China has already announced its intentions to annex Taiwan. In its current state of shock and disarray, it is unlikely that there will be any resistance from the United States. Already people are abandoning the cities for fear of another attack. The survivalist and militia movements are exploding with new followers. The stock market crash that followed the event has almost demolished American industry. People are returning to the countryside and to the land. Subsistence farming is the country’s only growth industry. Josef6 is coming true. His world is invading ours as we watch, unable to stand against the catastrophe of time.

I sometimes wonder if this was his plan all along. The future must hate and despise the past, as a child grows to hate his parents. The future must feel ensnared, trapped, violated by the past. The past cancels all will, all choice, all possibility. It makes us helpless prisoners of the psychosis that is history. We are aliens to ourselves and our world. Orphans cast astray in a madness not of our own making. Perhaps Josef6 was the future’s final vengeance upon us: the past. Perhaps he feels some measure of contentment now that his future is, at last, upon us.

I myself cannot say. Because I cannot claim to know him. I can claim only that I know him no better than any man knows himself. But I am beginning to understand him at last. I am beginning to see the true outlines of his vengeance. I can see clearly now the coming end of the world. The architecture of Armageddon slowly takes shape as I continue to ponder the past that draws me back, always back, in its singular direction, towards that day ten years ago when I first signed on to the TimeLords message board and told them that my name was Josef6.

END

Chapter Fifteen

Josef6 also escaped. There were no more messages. The promised photographs and video never materialized. As the weeks and then the months passed the faithful began to dissipate. Each of them taking with them that Josef they had most desired and most needed. Whether they continued in their belief or embraced disillusionment is impossible to say. Within a year of Josef6’s disappearance, the TimeLords message board shut down for lack of traffic. One of the last postings was from the High Priestess herself, who was, perhaps, sensing the end of an era.

We can work only with assumptions -- She wrote -- and faith. With the assumption that Josef has now left us and the faith that his words were true and his message remains alive. It is now our duty to work towards the better future for which he taught us to strive, and to prepare for the coming of 2010, the Year of the Traveler. Whatever disaster is coming in that prophetic year, we will be ready for it, and the truth of the Traveler’s words will, at last, be clear for all to see.

With that, the FPCJ6 ended its presence on the web. Its site shut down. Its publications ended. Its local chapters closed. With the same sudden ferocity with which it had appeared, the congregation of Josef6 disappeared simultaneously from the virtual and the real. There were occasional rumors, among those who cared, of a compound in the Arizona desert, of weekly ritual invocations to the Traveler, of unexplained disappearances among the east coast faithful, sometimes in couples, sometimes in dozens, leaving all their material property behind and vanishing from the two worlds.

In my own way, I too disappeared. I made good on the realization that came to me as I gazed upon the thing that Horatio Bardolf had become: that sickly, viscous compound of carbon, flesh and circuitry. My name has been erased. My connections have been severed. My IP addresses, my site nicknames, my browsers and servers, the endless tentacles with which I reached out into the electronic architecture have all been destroyed. In a single, fiery act of virtual suicide I annihilated my virtual self. Through total destruction, I blocked all the avenues through which they could hope to make their fatal contact.

But I knew this was not enough. I moved to another city. I took another name. I found a different position at a different institution and dedicated myself once again to the Voynich Manuscript. Thus far, I have solved none of its mysteries. It remains a comforting, effortlessly existent enigma. I am content with this.

They may yet find me. Horatio Bardolf’s fate may yet be my own. They know, or they must have guessed, that he had contacted me by other means in order to convey his location. They do not know, they cannot know, that in that singular communication he told me nothing. They can only guess at what I know. Their fear of me must be terrible. Perhaps there are squadrons of them scouring the face of the earth in search of me. Teams of assassins dispatched at regular intervals from the sanctuary in the desert. Pouring over mailing lists, bank statements, rental invoices, the innumerable detritus of paper that a human being leaves behind as he moves through the non-electronic architecture. I can be ironically thankful that the virtual has now overwhelmed so much of that which once was real. To hide from the virtual is now to hide -- almost -- from the world entire. If they succeed in finding me, I will salute their skill and perseverance even as their assassins strike me down. On some days, when I am alone with my mystery and my dreams, I think that I would welcome such an end. I live now as a perpetual foreigner in this electronic age. There are indeed moments when I long for that indelible end. Or pray for the coming of 2010, and for the final proof that the Traveler was a truth or a lie. But I know that even this will not silence the faithful, nor dissuade them from their life’s work: the eternal protection of him and his mystery.

He is still with me too. His face as shadowy and concealed as it has always been. He and my unknown author of the Voynich Manuscript remain at my side in this new and alien existence I have built to preserve my life. On some nights I still dream them. Sitting side by side, one with his quill, the other with his keyboard. Sketching the outlines of their devices of torture. These things that would pain mankind for the rest of his existence on this earth. I watch them in my sleep, as they formulate their infinite unknowns. As they prepare their poison chalices for the faithful and the heretics. I can only do as they do. As all of us do who were captured by the ineffable enigma. As I and my enemies do. I wait, and I hope, for the Year of the Traveler.