An email from Ryan and Jacob

I just got an odd piece of email (full text). The email, sent by a person named Otello Danism (anagram?) starts out thusly: “There is something extremely wrong with every single person in this world. They seem to be part of a pointless simulation.” The email then goes on to say that everyone in the world is a fake…except for the author of the email and a friend (Ryan and Jacob) and details a way to get in touch with them by searching for certain combinations of words on certain search engines.

A bit of research reveals that other folks have gotten similar emails: Jonah, Cam, Alexander West, and a bunch of people searching on Lycos.

After more digging, I came across Ryan and Jacob’s Web site: eternalambition.com. More wackiness about logic and aimless existence. The site is hosted at Yahoo! and is registered by an Anthony Bourov, who appears to work for a Web hosting company called addr.com.

So what’s going on here? A few possibilities:

- It’s a hoax. This is probably the most likely explanation, a person or a group of people playing around with email.

- Ryan and Jacob actually exist and they actually write this stuff and mean it. This explanation is less likely, but still possible.

- It’s part of a larger online game, perhaps for a movie or television show, a la last year’s AI game. This is the least plausible explanation, but the one I want most to be true.