By The Rules Read online

  The irony that I was becoming as paranoid as the true believers I might or might not be investigating did not escape me. I started frequenting municipal libraries, using Internet access from the public-library computers to revisit the chat rooms I'd previously explored. The good news was that my now-anonymous forays showed nothing at odds with my previous lurks.

  My original survey had encompassed only a few days, but the longer I read, the more I perceived common patterns of discourse. I dug through the archives of several UFO chat rooms to increase my sample size. The common thread, I decided, was the influence of the skeptics. These people calmly but compellingly rebutted the many claims of close encounters, of alien abductions, of—arguing about parameter values for Drake's Equation—the mere plausibility of extraterrestrial visitors. Under the onslaught of the skeptics’ quiet logic, the community in even the most rapidly growing chat room would soon peak. Since everyone participated via alias, I could not begin to tell whether the true believers were persuaded by these arguments, or merely moved to more hospitable environs.

  I was as yet unconvinced, of course, that my new friend Kelly wasn't somehow still orchestrating the practical joke to end all practical jokes.

  * * * *

  When my mother was a girl, Rule One was “No singing at the table.” As best I can tell, there was no Rule Two. Neither Mom's musical interests nor aptitude were passed on—talent, alas, tends to be a recessive gene—but I certainly was exposed to plenty of music growing up. My tastes are a few centuries more current than my parents', but I'm enough like Mom to always be listening to something. Her musical preferences, however, lent themselves more to where I wanted to lead this conversation than did my own.

  “You know,” I began, “how some pieces of music are obviously related?” The somber, prematurely balding man across the table from me only nodded. “My musical gifts are limited, but I'm pretty good at recognizing compositions as being by the same composer. Whether I'm listening to a symphony, an opera, a sonata, or the requiem mass"—all Mom's taste, not mine, I hasten to add—"there's no mistaking Mozart.”

  My lunch companion poked unenthusiastically with a fork at his French fries. Nigel Wellman was an ex-patriate Brit teaching at a nearby liberal arts college. His field was lexical analysis, just barely close enough to discourse analysis that he had responded to my voice mail. I'd never heard of him until undertaking a literature search. We had met at a diner on the edge of his campus. “Had you mentioned wanting to discuss musicology, I would have steered you to someone else on the faculty.”

  I'd invited him to discuss overlap between our areas of research. That remained my plan. “Bear with me, Nigel.” I rapped with little success on the bottom of a catsup bottle until our waiter went away. “Music was only an analogy. My speculation, which I hope you can validate, is that a person's textual writings also have similarities, despite a variety of topics and venues.”

  In a remarkably short time, half of his cheeseburger disappeared. “Of course such similarities exist. They underlie, for example, the many assertions that Shakespeare did not write the works popularly credited to him. While the most common alternate attribution is Sir Francis Bacon, there are other credible candidates.” His voice warmed; his eyes shone. “Christopher Marlowe, for example, and Edward De Vere, the Earl of Oxford. The lexical metrics are quite fascinating.”

  “Metrics?” It was suddenly all I could do to get that word in edgewise.

  “Indeed.” My companion took a quick gulp of Coke, then launched into a lecture. That was okay—I was here to learn. “One can quantify language usage in a number of very precise ways. Average sentence length and variability of length. Average paragraph size, in both word and sentence count, and variability of same. Range of vocabulary and frequency with which synonyms are employed. Then there is sentence structure: preference for active or passive voice, degree of use of dependent clauses, rate of pronoun-for-noun substitutions.” Flourishing his fork in grand emphasis; Nigel was entirely transformed from the gloomy fellow I'd met minutes earlier. “There are many other patterns: recourse to foreign expressions, application of various figures of speech, and so forth.”

  After a long while, the torrent of words slowed. I'd long since given up trying to follow the details, instead taking comfort in the one assessment I had been qualified to perform. Not only was Nigel widely published, but his papers were frequently cited in what appeared to be the mainstream publications of his esoteric field. Sensitized by the immersion in lexical analysis, I now couldn't help but notice my flowing-water metaphors.

  “I asked,” said Nigel irritably, “about your target.”

  “My what?”

  Nothing remained in the Brit's glass but ice. He stirred the cubes with his straw. “Sudden interest in lexical analysis always means one thing: the desire to prove, or disprove, common authorship of some materials. So what axe are you grinding?”

  “Pure academic research, I assure you.”

  Nigel arched an eyebrow skeptically.

  After muttered practice for the whole drive over here, I was as prepared as I could be for this moment. In my study of Internet chat rooms, I explained, I'd sensed similarities in purportedly independent comments. “So” I wrapped up, “I've come to suspect there are people using multiple screen names. It's pretty sad to think anyone would try to bolster his arguments by hiding behind several personae. If I'm right, there would probably be a paper there—but not a paper for me. My field is sociology, not psychology ... I have no intention of producing an article about a handful of UFO skeptics with too much time on their hands.”

  We haggled over the price of a quick scan of a few chat rooms, settling on a banana cream pie to go. I took the check, Nigel took a list of chat rooms and screen names from me, and we went our separate ways.

  * * * *

  “My results,” Nigel had insisted, “merit a steak dinner.” He would say no more about those findings over the phone. The good news was I could buy our steaks at the grocery—he had a raft of hardcopies he wanted to show me, paperwork strewn across his apartment.

  He shoved my bag unexamined straight into his refrigerator, extracting, while he was there, a beer. That cold bottle was for me; he took a warm one from the pantry for himself. Then he led the way to his study, whose decorating scheme was dead trees and pastel highlighter.

  “What's up?”

  Nigel waved me into the den's only chair. “You wondered if there were fewer skeptics than screen names.” He fairly bounced on his toes.

  “And were there?”

  “Most definitely.” My original list of aliases was pinned to a wall, a check mark beside every entry. He rapped it for emphasis. “A lot fewer.”

  As he walked me through a collection of printouts, replete with highlighting, underlinings, circled phrases, and marginal scribbles, I struggled to understand. “You're saying one person is inventing all these chat rooms-worth of dialogues? Why would someone do that?”

  “That's not what I'm saying. The exchanges are quite real. In your terminology, there are many true believers, many debunkers.” There was tapping and rustling as Nigel aligned his papers into a neat sheaf. “But of calm, dispassionately reasoning participants, those you call the skeptics, in several of these chat rooms more than half of relevant screen names map to a single person.”

  The statement was so astonishing, that I set it aside for later analysis. “Anything else?”

  “For one, your friend isn't a native English speaker.” I must have started at the phrase your friend, because he clarified, “Your quarry. Fascinating.” From a file cabinet emerged more papers, replete with other annotations. The more excited Nigel became, the more enigmatic grew his elucidations.

  “Nigel? In words of one syllable or less?”

  He took a deep breath. “My apologies. In a nutshell, the language usage is too formal—the always-correct grammar that is the classical sign of an educated non-native speaker. Most everyone else's dialogue is full of s
pelling errors that no plausible typo can explain, of slang and abbreviations. Our guy didn't use a single dangling participle or split infinitive. Surely you noticed how stilted that material reads.” He accepted my nod and was off again. “This was so intriguing that I expanded the experiment a bit. Naturally, there are UFO-related chat rooms in many languages. I'm moderately fluent in French, German, and Japanese, and I found similar patterns there.”

  “Similar patterns.” I was reduced to parroting, never a good sign.

  “Chat rooms in each language in which the prevalent voice of reason disguises itself behind multiple screen names. One non-native speaker.”

  There was no denying the obvious question. “The same person across languages?”

  Nigel canted his head thoughtfully. “English, French, and German, certainly. Japanese, I'm not qualified to say. But if I were a betting man, I'd say yes, there, too.”

  * * * *

  What is the meaning of someone who is fanatical about being calmly reasoning? Before anyone began posing that riddle about me, I had other matters to attend to. If I expected renewal of my fellowship, I simply had to show progress on my dissertation.

  My approved topic dealt with religious transformations in early medieval societies. More specifically, I was using discourse analysis in the context of long-ago royal conversions, assessing the impacts on the subject populaces. In those days, when the king converted, everyone else was expected to. I was looking for shifts in world view, how day-to-day routines and rituals were affected ... those sorts of thing.

  My research involved mining contemporaneous literature for evidence. The work necessarily involved an indirect approach, of course, since only the writings of the elites were available. In the Middle Ages, who but the elites could write? I could go on and on, but the topic matters more here than the details.

  State U. owned, curiously enough, thorough resources on the baptism of Clovis and the consequent mass conversion to Christianity of his people. I was poring over an English translation (Gregory, sixth-century Bishop of Tours, had, of course, written in Latin) of the History of the Franks when a dissertation-irrelevant question occurred to me. Were there chat rooms of a religious nature? I'd never looked.

  A second set of Internet communities soon stunned me. Phenomena that in other venues I'd seen presented as proof of alien visitations or time travelers became, in this new context, signs of miracles or angels or visitations by the Virgin. Once again I encountered true believers, skeptics, and debunkers. These skeptics were as stubbornly persistent as any in the UFO realm. Some argued that unexpected manifestations were personal religious experiences, not to be analyzed. Others opined that these revelations were unavoidably suspect, associated as they were with fasting and sleepless vigils on solitary retreats.

  With a flash of insight, I saw that the pattern was exactly the same as in the UFO scenarios: discrediting supposed strange events of any kind. I shivered as traditional content analysis confirmed what my gut already knew: these skeptics’ themes of objectivity, isolation, and the uniqueness of mankind paralleled the UFO conversations.

  I was entirely unsurprised when, soon after, Nigel Wellman completed a second lexical analysis. The same prolific skeptic frequented the religious chat rooms as the UFO chat rooms.

  * * * *

  “Will you get that?” I yelled from my bedroom/office. Kelly was in the living room, and closer to the knock. I'd invited her over to split a pizza.

  “Are you expecting anyone?”

  “Just the pizza guy,” I lied. I'd ordered on-line; the pizza wasn't due for another thirty minutes. My eyes were glued to four inset windows on the screen of my PC, two for the wireless webcams I'd hidden in my living room and two more for those in the hallway. Who knew I would ever get so involved with experimental methods? One of the webcams had a side view of Nigel Wellman waiting outside my front door, his cheeks and lips working in what I assumed was whistling. Another camera viewed the apartment door over his shoulder. Side and rear views of Kelly appeared in the final windows as she approached the door from its other side.

  She swung the door open as Nigel's hand came up to knock again. My eyes stayed on the screen. Set-up had taken me a while, but I had clear shots of both of my guests’ faces. I saw no surprise, no recognition. They did not know each other.

  I couldn't tell whether I was relieved or disappointed.

  “Nigel, Kelly.” I ushered the two of them to my dining room table. “The pizza I promised is coming—only a bit later than I mentioned. Until then, I want to bring you both up to date.” They took turns looking amazed as the full story of my recent chat-room obsessions unfolded. The pizza arrived as I was finishing.

  “So this is your story? There's one person generating half or more of the analysis and argument in all of these chat rooms.” Kelly tore at the pizza as she spoke, the slice she'd selected trailing long strings of molten cheese. “You want me to write software to find more signs of her.”

  “That's right. Will you?”

  “Nice try.” She deftly snapped stretchy cheese tendrils with a finger. “Some of us aren't that gullible.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I helped your friends get you. You're playing a return prank. No sale.”

  Nigel grimaced at his cold beer. I'd forgotten to let some warm up for him. “I've looked at several chat rooms on my own. Brian had nothing to do with my studies, or with which rooms, or even the languages I chose.”

  Kelly hoovered down the rest of her first slice before answering. “I was recruited in the practical joke on Brian. I don't question him having an accomplice.”

  It had never occurred to me Kelly would question my motives. I'd been reduced to buying webcams I couldn't afford to convince myself she wasn't still getting me. Then the benefit of my paranoid delusions struck me. “Come see what else I've been up to.”

  * * * *

  The amateur spy set-up, uncomfortably beyond-my-means confirmation of my own continuing suspicions, succeeded where my honest protestations had not. The webcams convinced Kelly that Nigel and I weren't co-conspirators in a counter-prank; she agreed to work with him on a program. Many lexical-analysis algorithms had long ago been committed to code; what I wanted Kelly to do was to take the standard tools Nigel used and embed them in a real-time search program. I needed to know—and by now my new friends were almost as curious—just how pervasive was our unseen skeptic.

  Three days later, reconvened this time on Kelly's living room sofa, I watched in fascination as Nigel went over a collection of hardcopies strewn across a Salvation Army-sourced coffee table. These dialogues had been snagged by his/Kelly's science project. He circled phrases, highlighted text, muttered to himself. The conclusion: new chat rooms, new screen names, even new languages ... and still more appearances of the same skeptic.

  “That's not even the most interesting thing.” A mouthful of popcorn muffled Kelly's words; she made a show of chewing faster as she deposited a fresh stratum of paper. “I altered the program a bit to search chat-room archives. Observe the dates.”

  The dates went back to 1995—soon after the birth of the commercial Internet. Who had the time and persistence?

  * * * *

  Looking around, I couldn't help but remember the Island of Lost Toys from a perennial Christmas television special. There was every variety of cast-off PC, going back, if the tags could be believed, to 386 boxes. Several of the newer systems had been pressed into duty for tonight's happening. My mind's ear had rejected a more definitive label, like experiment. Whatever the evening's activity might prove to be, I didn't think it would turn out to be science.

  Why was I so obsessed with this?

  “Ready, guys?” Kelly was manic. She was clutching one of the many cell phones in her computer-filled apartment. The phones were bought-with-cash throwaways; I felt vaguely like a mob boss. The disposables seemed like prudent precautions until we had some idea what kind of obsessive-compulsive we were dealing with. (Some
one like me, my inner self whispered.)

  She nattered on about her preparations. My head overflowed with buzzwords, with little grasp of the telecomm set-up she'd masterminded. Six chat-room sessions had been established, accessed through a like number of aliases, Internet service providers, web hosting services, and untraceable cell-phone links. Our county is flat and sparsely populated, meaning the cell-phone towers were few and are far between. Anyone hacking the mobile-phone system could gain only a very approximate idea of where we were. (In the state of lunacy, my inner voice volunteered.) The latest version of Nigel's and Kelly's lexical-analysis software monitored every chat session.

  Kel inundated me with technotrivia about mechanisms supposedly further hiding us: network address translators, encrypted links, firewalls, dynamic host control protocol, spoofing. She could have imparted an equal amount of insight with much less effort by simply invoking BFM. That's black and that's magic; you can fill in the middle word.

  It took a punch in the shoulder to rouse me from self-hypnosis. “What, Nigel?”

  “Our wizard says we're ready, Brian.”

  I studied the area once more. Flashing icons on six monitors confirmed that the Skeptic—he had graduated to a proper noun—was active in every chat room, behind yet more pseudonyms. The Skeptic was, in fact, active in far more than six dialogues, but we'd limited our attentions to those electronic communities that could route private messages in addition to group chat.

  The same sentence had been typed at each computer, awaiting only a mouse click to be dispatched. “Let's do it.” We sat, each within easy reach of two computers. “On the count of three. One ... two ... three.” We each clicked two mice.