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.

Chapter Fourteen

The name under the apartment number read “Horatio Bardolf”, a name I assumed to be an alias. I took the elevator to the sixth floor and counted to doors to number 67. The building’s doors bore no numbers of their own. The elevator was dilapidated and ancient. The paint peeled in flecks and corners off the walls. This was clearly a hideaway. A false residence. A front. A place where people came to conceal themselves and not to live. I heard no noises behind the doors or in between the walls. Once a rat scurried across the corridor and disappeared. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the sonorous beeping of a large vehicle reversing slowly. The light in the hallway contained no bulb and I was forced to navigate by the time sunlight streaming through a single cracked window.

Horatio’s door was unlocked. I knew this because it hung slightly ajar, revealing the locking mechanism. I knocked anyways. There was no answer.

His living room was disturbingly akin to mine. It was covered with papers and books. A thin film of dust covered the walls and furniture. There was an ancient television set in one corner, connected by a multitude of bizarre wires to the wall. He had constructed his own cable and satellite hookup. No doubt illegally. The papers strewn across the table, chairs and ripped sofa were printouts of minute series of ones and zeros, arranged in infinite variations. Horatio, judging by the evidence, had become the first human being to sight read binary code. He had conquered the language of the machine. No wonder he lived in such astonishing fear.

I glanced into his bedroom for a moment as I passed. It was completely bare. Its walls stripped of paint. There was no bed. A mattress was carelessly thrown into one corner. The sheets had once been white, but were now a sickly off-yellow that made be nauseous to look at.

A cockroach climbed over the pillow and made its way slowly across the bare wood floor.

The kitchen contained only a few tins of tuna fish and preserved fruits. Out of the strangest of curiosities I opened his refrigerator and found a jumbo-sized plastic canister of lemonade and a half eaten chicken sandwich whose edges were slowly turning to brown. The floor was stained with brown and reddish splotches suggesting extreme carelessness with ketchup and coffee. The garbage can was overflowing with cardboard boxes from Burger King and Pizza Hut.

Here was all the evidence of an obsession. Of a kindred soul.

I found him, of course, with his machines. There were six of them. All but one were flickering intensely, running endless vertical and horizontal variations of the binary hymnal. The floor was a tangled cauldron of wires, cables, plugs and soldered ends. I had to pick my way through on my tiptoes to keep from tripping. Stacks of blank discs, stereo equipment, video editing machines, discarded satellite dishes and an infinity of other detritus of the virtual age filled the corners and walls. I saw now that my obsession was nothing. I was here in the presence of the master.

The master was seated in a revolving office chair, complete with ergonomic headrest and wheels which must have been near useless in the clutter that filled its owner’s life and fed his madness. His hands lay still on the keyboard, poised for the next entry, for the next assault on that impenetrable world of dichotomous numerology.

It must have been in that moment, the second before, that they had lifted him slightly from his seat and stove his head into the once-flickering screen. Now it was only a tangled mass of blood, cranial fluid, black plastic and distended wires. Horatio Bardolf’s skull had become a sculpture in grey matter and silicone.

He must have known. They would never have come for him otherwise. Or perhaps simple suspicion was enough. How they had breached his no doubt elaborate security precautions and discovered our brief correspondence, I could not begin to guess. But I had no doubt as to who they were. They had seen the threat that I had only dimly perceived. They knew that Josef6 could truly exist only in the unknown. Horatio Bardolf had pierced the veil which was everything they held sacred. Or he had only claimed he had done it. But this was threat enough. They could not risk the possibility that he had actually done it. It was as terrible to them as death. So they had sought him out. And they had found him.

It was then and only then that I was gripped by the sudden and unutterable fear. It was born of only this simple thought: they did not know either. They had suspected, they had thought, they had guessed, but they did not know. Bardolf had to die because he had claimed to know. Claimed to know the one thing they did not and did not wish to know. The one thing that they and the world must not know. They had killed in the name of mystery. For themselves and for all of humanity. To save it, not from the truth, but from the horrifying possibility of the real. They had gone farther, and become more powerful, than I had ever imagined.

I began to tremble. Now I too, of all people, was a threat to them as well. If they had reached Bardolf they could reach me. I whispered a silent, prayerful thanks to my deceased ally for sending his invitation through a non-virtual medium. It was now time to flee into that world. To escape into the concrete. The real which I had forsaken was now my only defense against him and what he had created. Against the deathly hand which reached towards me out of the electronic maelstrom.

Chapter Thirteen

The ominous speed with which events were now moving became even clearer the next day, three days before my appointed meeting, when Josef6 stunned us all for the final time.

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.

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

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 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.

Chapter Twelve

I had no doubts about the meaning of these enigmatic words. They were as empty and as obvious as any communiqué from Josef6 himself. I hesitated for two hours before replying. Finally, I sat at the keyboard and typed out a message of equal and opposite enigma.

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’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.

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?

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.

Chapter Eleven

In recounting this tangential phenomenon, I do not wish to imply that Josef6 was silent throughout this time. He continued to post and to respond to questions. Moreover, he seemed determined, despite the efforts of his followers, to deter any attempts to make him into the object of spiritual or political fascination. In response to one query as to whether he was sent by God, he responded:

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.

Chapter Ten

Following the early history of the FPCJ6 is not exactly an easy task. It requires both fortitude and patience. Even given my extensive research into the subject, enormous gaps remain in the historical record and are likely to remain so. Quite often, the origins of a thing are counted from the moment of their eruption into the world. But this is never the beginning. There is always the further back, the shadows were the thing took shape. Gestated. Began to become itself. This begs the question, of course, of whether there is actually a thing at all, or merely what we make of it. Is the thing there, or do we create it? This is elementary philosophy for college freshman, and yet no one has thus far provided us with an entirely satisfactory answer. I have no pretensions of my own in this direction. Like the Voynich manuscript, I decided the thing was what it was and proceeded from there.

What is clear, however, is that from the very beginning the San Francisco chapter of the FPCJ6 was the largest and most influential congregation, with its neighbor Berkeley coming in a close second. Indeed, for most of its early years, the FPCJ6 was a completely Californian phenomenon, with coincidental offshoots in Seattle, New York City and, surprisingly, Austin, Texas.

It was no surprise, therefore, that within two months of the founding ceremony the High Priestess Guinevere, nee Jennie Ruptha, nee Virginia Peasley, moved herself and the central ministerial committee to San Francisco and established the national headquarters for a religion which, at the time, barely existed.

At this point, records become extremely sketchy, though a slow and measured rise in membership seems clear. Within a year, the number of chapters had grown from four to eight, a sizable increase percentage-wise, but remained primarily based in northern and central California. The members were generally educated and relatively affluent. What is most remarkable about these early statistics is the age range of the members. Most new religious movements -- what detractors refer to as “cults” -- are largely composed of people under the age of 35, usually tending towards the lower end of the age spectrum of 20-35. In the case of the FPCJ6 there was a remarkably even distribution across the age spectrum. The largest group was within the expected 20-35 range, but only by one or two percentage points. In the case of some congregations, even less than this. Participants between the ages of 45-60 made up fully 38% of the national membership and there was a sizable percentage of senior citizens as well, particularly in the San Francisco chapter. The broad appeal of Josef6’s message, or the message of his interpreters, would appear to be statistically quantifiable in this case. However, one must make allowances for the fact that, at this point, one is still dealing with a movement which numbered barely over two thousand members.

The real action, at this stage, was in the virtual arena. This was to be expected. The influence of the FPCJ6 extended well beyond its membership due to the swiftness with which it monopolized the virtual exegesis of the Josef6 phenomenon.

The official FPCJ6 website, which was operational within six months of the founding ceremony, was something almost unprecedented: an electronic codex dedicated to the enigmatic recitations of a single, unknown figure. Its homepage consisted of a series of links through which one could connect to a compendium of Josef6’s original messages, including the images and the astounding moment of prophetic revelation regarding 2010, arranged according to date, subject and perceived importance. These in turn led to a series of related pages. Some of them were simple theoretical expansions on Josef6’s missives. Others involved detailed scientific speculation on the actual workings of the Traveler’s craft, based on “the latest in theoretical physics” and the indistinct clues teased out of the copious original texts. Some of these included quotations or transcriptions from recent scientific papers on the subject of quantum manipulation and the space-time effects of artificial micro-singularities. Most of these were, by common consensus, totally incomprehensible.

The next exegetical level was concerned with a careful extrapolation of future conditions as described by Josef6. This included theories on the political, religious and economic systems of the post-cataclysmic future, visual reconstructions -- some drawn, some computer generated -- of the post-nuclear landscape, extrapolated population figures based on government estimates of survival rates following a nuclear exchange, and estimations of crop and power output in a sustainable, non-corporate based agricultural economy. One dedicated disciple even posted a theoretical constitution for the revised United States deduced from Josef’s occasional hints at totally non-centralized government.

From here, the commentators left the future and returned to the present by way of the past. Building on survivalist ideologies and environmentalist practice, they constructed a body of recommendations, advisories, and systemic practical applications to be followed by the concerned citizen of the present who sought to emulate the Traveler in the here and now rather than in the later or never. These included lengthy missives on organic farming, water storage, solar power, gun maintenance and safety -- for the more aggressive survivalists -- canned foods, the effectiveness of do it yourself bomb shelters, methods of minimizing the deleterious effects of radiation, iodine treatment of contaminated water and numerous other real world solutions to the virtual world problems presented by Josef6.

Inevitably, these musings on the practical gave way to the political. The primary cause of the FPCJ6, its members and its non-denominational followers, the charge given them, they believed, by the Traveler himself, was to prevent the catastrophe and the future it would bring. It was, in effect, the cause of erasing the Traveler himself. Josef6 may have been the first prophet who called upon the people to make his own existence impossible.

The primary cause to which the Traveler’s disciples attached themselves was total nuclear disarmament. Since the weapons had been, or were to be, the instrument of the cataclysm, this was entirely understandable. The FPCJ6 site contained a multitude of links and information urging involvement in the disarmament movement. It presented a calendar of events -- demonstrations, petitions, protests, civil disobedience -- some of them organized by the FPCJ6 themselves, and exhorted the concerned and the faithful to take part. It presented detailed lists of political candidates to support -- some of them from very obscure minor parties -- and organizations, movements and issues with which to be concerned and committed.

Secondary to the disarmament issue, certain specific topics were addressed. Most notable among them was the necessity of rapprochement between the United States and China over Taiwan. According to the disciples, the independence of a small island nation, artificially created by now obsolete geopolitical considerations, was not worthy of nuclear Armageddon. It was necessary, so it was said, to choose the lesser of two evils, and the lesser was unquestionably a Chinese takeover of Taiwan. The handover of Hong Kong, after all, had not proven to be much of a disaster. There was no reason to expect any different in the case of Taiwan. To risk nuclear war over such an issue was, in the opinion of the disciples, psychopathic and evil.

Beyond this, there were, of course, the usual urgings towards anti-globalization, anti-industrialized agriculture, and anti-militarist political stances, although the presence among the disciples of a considerable number of survivalists limited the extent of the movement’s pacifism. Several “Traveler’s militias”, organized -- though officially disavowed -- around the FPCJ6, clearly exerted considerable influence in this regard.

It is my belief that it was through these tangential connections to broader political issues that the FPCJ6 first began to receive some measure of public recognition. The participation of the San Francisco chapter in a pro-disarmament demonstration, nearly a year after the founding ceremony, managed to garner some considerable attention from the local media, concentrating particularly on the bizarre sect which believed it had been shown the future by an internet prophet. The FPCJ6 represented an exciting -- “sexy” is, I believe, the professional term -- departure from the usual drab and aging Woodstock refugees who generally populated such occasions. Although the tone of most of the reports was skeptical leaning into outright mockery, it provided an invaluable boost to the church’s profile. Picked up by national affiliates and then by talk radio programs specializing in “paranormal” or bizarre phenomenon, the story became something of an underground sensation in the second year of the church’s existence. A cause celebre, or at least a celebre, just barely under the radar of the mainstream press.

The primary cause of this trend was the High Priestess herself. Jennie never lacked for talent in performance, and her sincerity, not to mention her bizarrely convincing fashion sense, gave her a charisma which proved essential to the growth of the sect she had founded.

The distance provided by the virtual was the key to her success. In person she was disconcerting, ponderous, bizarre and slightly frightening. Over the air waves she was appealingly different, articulate, quirky, sometimes touching and deeply sincere. Her obvious goodwill contained none of the oppressive religiosity exuded by her physical presence. In a space once removed from the real, she was charming, even slightly lovable, even if -- sometimes especially if -- one was convinced that she was utterly deranged.

It was during this period that the FPCJ6 truly established itself. Within two years of its founding it had formed coalitions with over a dozen anti-war, environmentalist and specifically pro-disarmament groups, which is not to mention the mostly unspoken connections it maintained with various survivalist militias which, while skeptical about organic farming, were more than interested in the idea of de-centralized government. Because of this energetic networking, the church began to achieve a measure of local political influence, particularly the San Francisco and Berkeley chapters. Their growing membership, coupled with their obvious sympathies towards some of these communities’ most treasured political goals, made them a small but at times indispensable source of manpower and authority. While no politician went so far as to publicly court their endorsement, the local FPCJ6 chapters were capable of easily turning out disciplined and enthusiastic cadres of believers to man phone banks, canvas voters, request donations and all the other uncomfortable and thankless tasks essential to local political victory. When Pervis McElvoy, a former assistant professor of peace studies and fervent advocate of disarmament, won the chairmanship of the Berkeley city council, it was widely rumored that the foot soldiers of the FPCJ6 had been instrumental in his victory. Although not a word was spoken publicly, it was assumed that favors would be forthcoming. Despite this fact, it went unnoticed by the press when, six months later, the FPCJ6 won local tax exempt status in both Berkeley and San Francisco. A victory the church would soon repeat on a national scale.

By the third year of its existence, the church had doubled its membership yet again, and small chapters had begun to spring up across the East Coast of the United States as well. It proved particularly successful in New York. Rumors also swirled about several prominent Hollywood stars who may or may not have been sighted -- behind the obligatory dark glasses and baseball caps -- at local recitations of the Traveler’s Benediction.

It was this final development that most likely prompted the massive publicity coup that marked the end of the church’s third year of existence. Namely, the High Priestess’s appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show.

The most surprising thing about this appearance, in retrospect, is its relative banality. However, this is not difficult to explain. By this time, the talk show genre had already run the gamut of the bizarre, the strange, the paranormal, the perverse and the outright appalling. Winfrey’s previous guests had included psychics, child molesters, psychotic serial killers, men who hated women and the women who loved them, and an infinity of other greater and lesser psychopaths, all of whom were accepted with the modicum of decorum expected of a national television audience. Admonished with the unspoken admonition to keep an open mind, and provided with the perfectly credible insurance policy that it was all entertainment anyway, there was no particular reason -- and there remains none -- why the High Priestess and her oddly compelling tale of perfectly scientifically plausible visitation should be greeted with anything but a respectful hearing and the most copiously observed official niceties.

And this is precisely what happened. To mark the occasion, the High Priestess forwent her white robes and instead appeared in jeans and a t-shirt emblazoned with the now immortal “WWJ6D?”. She and Oprah laughed together about their busy schedules, discussed various lamentable developments in national and international politics and culture and looked sympathetically into each other’s eyes while the High Priestess recounted a handful of sad, and one tragic, anecdotes from her days as Virginia Peasley. At one moment, viewers swore that they could see a mutually shared tear crossing the faces of the two women. The cameraman, unfortunately, did not exploit his opportunity for a close up and the tale must remain, therefore, apocryphal.

The highlight of the show was, of course, the High Priestess’s retelling of the visitation, the message of the Traveler, and her belief that it represented hope for a better and more peaceful future. This led to a long discussion of the only real issue at hand: him. Who was he? What was he like? Was he, perhaps, in the audience right now?

When this question was asked, the cameraman turned his lens upon the assembled audience, and all heads turned towards each other and themselves, each person seeking Josef6 in the face of the person next to them. It was electrifying television. Those eyes roving the stands. The stage momentarily forgotten in the search for the cipher, the phantom, the hidden presence who might be concealed in plain sight. Seen by millions. Recognized by no one.

With her unerring instinct for spectacle, the High Priestess rose from her seat and said that if the Traveler was present, would he reveal himself to the faithful at last?

There was a long and completely unbroken silence. Then they cut to a commercial.