Her reply made it clear that she wasn’t interested if I was just going to stick to my story that the postings of ‘Zarathustra’, ‘SelfishMeme’ and ‘Diceman’ were nothing to do with me. In a way, that made things easier. It was obvious she didn’t believe me – so if I really wanted to stop her going into print, there is no point in trying to brazen it out. A different strategy would be required.
We arranged to meet in a café not far from my flat. Originally it had been a typical greasy spoon-type place, but the new owner had replaced the shiny, moulded plastic chairs and formica table-tops with lots of stripped wood and upholstery with a vaguely ethnic theme. Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to be attracting much new business and for most of the day, the place was usually three-quarters empty. This time, I was the only customer. The owner, a large woman in her forties, smiled and tried to engage me in conversation. I felt sorry for her, but I wasn’t in the mood for small talk.
I retired to a table near the window and tried to read a newspaper, but I couldn’t concentrate on any of the articles. I kept going over what I planned to say to Susan, fretting about whether it would work and looking back over the short script I had written myself. Occasionally I wondered whether to go ahead with it at all. But it was too late to back out now; I had to go through with it.
She was about twenty minutes late. As she approached, I hurriedly folded up my notes and shoved them into my pocket. She was more casually dressed than before and wasn’t wearing her glasses. Without them, she had lost that slightly severe, bookish air; beneath the fringe of dark brown hair, her face looked softer, more sympathetic. In different circumstances, I would have found her quite attractive.
She apologised for being late and I went to order her a coffee. The owner promised to bring it over when it was ready, clearly delighted at this one hundred percent increase in her custom. When I got back, Susan had put her notepad and pen down on the table and was toying with her mobile phone. I noticed that it had a “Disney Princess” sticker on the back, a girly touch that didn’t fit with the mental picture I had formed of her as a hard-nosed hackette, doggedly chasing after her story. I started to wonder if my first impressions of her had been completely mistaken. But it was too late to do anything about it now. I forced myself to put it out of my mind and took a deep breath.
“Look, I owe you an apology. I lied to you last week about those postings on novotnik.com. You caught me completely off guard, so I just panicked and said the first thing that came into my head. But your hacker friend is right – I have been logging on to the site under various aliases. And those postings you mentioned are from me.”
She tilted her head to one side, looking unconvinced.
“OK, so why did you do it?” she asked, folding her arms.
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Try me.”
“Well, it’s fair to say that I’ve never been a ‘true believer’ – I’ve always been more of an agnostic really, although I’ve kept my doubts to myself. I started doing the site because that’s what Pete had asked me to do. It was just after he died, so I felt that I couldn’t really ignore his request. I was amazed by the reaction it got. I’d never realised there were all these people out there who seemed to hang on his every word. And the books sort of followed on from that – I’d had various requests for hard copy, so at first I self-published them. But once the initial print run had sold out, I was able to get a publisher interested because they could see that there was a market for it.
“At first I quite enjoyed the attention. The true believers really seemed to appreciate what I’d done and that made me want to try harder to please them. So I made sure that most of the commentary on the site was giving people what they wanted to hear. But I’ve always felt that the general tone of the messages was a lot darker than most people seemed to think. To begin with, I just tried to hint at this in some of the commentary. The trouble was, that didn’t seem to make much of an impression on people. They only saw what they wanted to see in the messages – which is basically all that optimistic stuff about how the Overmind is going to bring about the Singularity and so on.
“After a while, it really started to annoy me. I felt that they were blinding themselves to any alternative viewpoint. I invented those alter egos as a way of getting these feelings off my chest. And once I’d started doing it, I found that I quite enjoyed provoking them – so the postings became more and more confrontational. At the time, I didn’t think it would do any harm, but now it feels like it was a pretty stupid thing to have done. Worse than that, I feel I’ve betrayed the people who use the site. I’ve thought about handing it over to someone else, but over these past few days, I’ve come to realise that it means a lot to me – and I’m not sure I’m ready to let go of it yet.
“Anyway, I’ve decided that honesty is probably the best policy. I’m thinking of making a full confession – but I feel it would look a lot better if it came directly from me. So I was wondering if you could hold off writing the story until I’ve worked out what’s the best thing to do. But if you don’t want to – well, I can understand that. I probably don’t deserve it.”
What I had told her contained elements of truth – but it gave a completely false impression of the confession I have been working on. It obscured the real reasons for my actions by attributing them to imaginary, better-intentioned motives. As for wanting to carry on with the site – that was an outright lie. I would like nothing better than to rid myself of it. But I want people to read this account first. And I can’t do that if some journalist exposes what I really think before I’ve had a chance to say it in my own words.
She didn’t reply for a few moments. She just looked at me as if she were expecting me to say something else. My carefully rehearsed mea culpa had been intended to clear the air and allow me to gain her trust. But the longer the silence went on, the more it started to look as if my opening gambit had fallen flat on its face. Then she said:
“Well, I’ve got to admit I’m surprised. That wasn’t what I’d been expecting at all. But what you’ve said makes a lot of sense to me. I’ve read some of your commentary and I had this feeling that you weren’t as fully signed up to it as most of the people logging onto the site.”
“So, do you think you could hold off writing about it for bit?”
“I can’t give you a definite yes or no right now,” she said, leaning back in her chair, “but I’m prepared to think about it. I was going to use it as part of a longer piece about E-Gnosis and some other internet-based cults. I have a couple of features editors who are interested, but they want to see some more detail before committing themselves. So it’s really more of a long-term project. I’ve even been wondering if I could get a book out of it – you know, one of those ‘gee whizz, look at the wacky things people get up to on the internet’ kind of things. But if an editor were to ring up right now and say ‘Susan, get me some copy by close of play!’ – well, I’d have to think about whether I had enough material to be able to pass up on your story.”
This was going much better than I had dared hope. I decided to press on:
“I understand. I’m a freelance writer myself, so I know it’s a bit hand-to-mouth sometimes. I wondered if we could do a deal.”
As soon as I said it, I could tell from her expression that I had made a tactical blunder. Maybe I shouldn’t have made the offer at all. And by rushing into it, I had completely undermined the effect of my opening speech. I cursed myself for not having planned out this second stage of my strategy more carefully.
“I’m not the ‘News of the World’, you know,” she said, frostily. “I might buy you another coffee and maybe a biscuit, if you’re lucky, but that’s about it. I certainly won’t be offering you a five figure sum to spill the beans about a bunch of technology-worshipping nerds. You know, I was starting to feel just a little bit sorry for you there, but now I’m not so sure.”
“Look, it’s not about money,” I said quickly, wondering how I could recover the situation. “That’s not what I meant at all. I was just talking about sharing some information that might help you.”
I offered her some of the material that I had put together for the biography of Pete. She was reticent at first; my clumsy offer of a “deal” must have made her suspicious of my motives. But as I ran through some of the material I thought she could use in her article, I could see that she was interested. She laughed at the picture of Karl attempting to hug one of his steroid-enhanced pigs (the animal was so big that Karl’s arms barely went half way around its neck).
“Do you think he’d let me use that?”
“Well, he’s not exactly publicity shy, so I shouldn’t think it’d be too hard to persuade him,” I said.
I asked why she was so interested in E-Gnosis. At first, she explained, it was because she thought there were certain similarities between E-Gnosis and the Japanese Aum sect. Both had a strong emphasis on meditation practices and a keen interest in technology. They also displayed a degree of paranoia about non-believers. And then there was the involvement of people like Karl in “direct action,” such as the raid on the lab. Although this was clearly wasn’t in the same league as Aum’s gas attacks on the Tokyo underground, it was enough to get some editors interested, excited by the prospect of another apocalyptic cult out to destroy the world. But once she had done some more research, she came to the view that E-Gnosis was fundamentally different.
“In Aum,” she explained, “the big idea was to renounce the outside world, so they all went to live together in these closed communities – which is classic cult behaviour. It also provided the perfect conditions for dominant individuals to persuade weaker ones to do crazy things – like taking a bag of liquid sarin gas onto an underground train and puncturing it with the tip of an umbrella.
“The thing is, we just haven’t seen that level of socialisation with any of these internet-based cults – at least not any that I’ve come across. No one is setting up any separate communities where this kind of classic cult behaviour can take place. Instead, it’s all being done over the internet, where it’s much more difficult to exert the same degree of psychological control.”
“But who’s to say that one lone individual, sitting at his computer, won’t take it into his head to do something crazy?” I asked, starting to feel mildly annoyed that she seemed prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.
“Well, it’s possible,” she said, tossing her hair back, “but I think it’s pretty unlikely. You see, the whole idea with Aum was to renounce the impurity of the outside world. So trying to destroy it was entirely logical for them. But for E-Gnosis, the material world – in the form of technology – represents their salvation. Trying to destroy the outside world would go against the very essence of what they believe.”
“So you think the true believers are just a bunch of harmless cranks?”
“Harmless? Yes. Cranky?” She frowned. “I don’t know. They’re certainly over at the extreme end when it comes to theories about the Singularity. But there’ve been times when I’ve pooh-poohed their ideas and they’ve come right back at me with a point I just couldn’t answer. So who am I to say they’re just a bunch of cranks? I suspect ninety-eight per cent of it will turn out to be total nonsense – but there may be something in that last two per cent. And that’s what interests me about them – that underneath all the pseudo-religious stuff, they may actually be onto something important.”
I felt irritated – and slightly betrayed – that she seemed prepared to give these people the time of day. The trouble is, I can’t forgive the true believers any more than I can forgive Pete for what he did. He was not a harmless crank and their posthumous adulation of him puts them in the same category, as far as I’m concerned. But I couldn’t tell her this; it would be completely out of character for the role that I was supposed to be playing.
“What about you?” she said, as if she had guessed at my thoughts. “You said you were never really a true believer. But you’ve kept the site going all this time. Why?”
I decided that I would have to tell some more lies:
“You’re right, I’ve never been fully signed up to E-Gnosis. But before he died, Pete and I used to spend ages batting ideas back and forth – and that’s really what I was trying to keep alive when I set up the site. The problem for me is that a lot of the users aren’t interested in new ideas any more. They must’ve been interested at one stage – but now that they’ve found something that seems to satisfy that yearning, they’ve closed their minds to anything that doesn’t fit with their viewpoint. That’s what made me do all those stupid postings.”
I hoped that I looked suitably contrite. In fact, my motives for setting up the site were entirely selfish and I have never felt anything but contempt for the true believers. I had the impression that Susan was less than satisfied with my answer. She was toying with her mobile phone, as if planning her follow-up question. In a rather desperate attempt to change the subject, I said more or less the first thing that came into my head:
“This is going to sound a bit strange, but why do you have a ‘Disney Princess’ sticker on the back of your phone? You don’t really strike me as a Disney Princess kind of girl.”
She smiled. “No, you’re right, I never really went in for all that awful princessy stuff, even when I was little. My niece stuck it on. It’s so we can ring up her fairy godmother. Then we have to pretend that we’re dressing up in fabulous gowns, going to the ball and marrying the handsome prince. Well, actually no, that’s not quite right – she’s usually perfectly happy to dance with the handsome prince but when we get to the bit in the story where he asks her to marry him, she always says no and runs off laughing. So everyone gets to live happily ever after – except the handsome prince, who’s fallen madly in love with my niece and remains miserable for the rest of his days.”
“I think I know how the prince feels,” I said. I don’t know what made me say it. It was a lame, self-pitying thing to say.
“Well, maybe you should spend less time in front of your computer and get out more,” she said, brightly. I wasn’t sure whether she meant it kindly or was just humouring me.
We chatted for a while about freelance writing, exchanging grumbles about how useless publishers were – how they always expected you do things by yesterday, but seemed to regard themselves as being in a different part of the space-time continuum altogether when it came to their own schedules. Now that we were off the subject of the website, I found myself rather enjoying her company. Then it was time for Susan to go (she had an urgent, publisher-imposed deadline to meet).
“Oh – one last thing,” she said. “What am I going to say to my hacker friend if he asks?”
I had thought about this and had an answer ready. “Just tell him what I told you at first – that my computer had been hacked into and someone else was using it to post abusive messages on the site. Tell him I’ve put some new security in place so it won’t be happening again.”
“OK, fair enough. Let’s hope he buys that explanation. In the meantime, your secret is safe with me.” She got up from the table, clutching her mobile. “Well, it was nice to meet you. Maybe we could meet up again sometime.”
“To be honest, I don’t know if I’ve got much more to tell you,” I said, anxious to avoid a more detailed cross-examination.
“Oh, I didn’t mean that – I just meant go out for a drink together.” Registering my look of surprise and bewilderment at this offer, she smiled and said: “Don’t look so worried. I promise not to run off laughing, like my niece. So give me a call.”
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