There is a point where biography stops behaving like history and begins to act like myth.
I did not know this when I first saw him walking the halls of the music department, dressed as if he had wandered in from another century, or perhaps from a diplomatic function I had not been invited to. He moved slowly, deliberately, the way men move when they have rehearsed the choreography of being seen. Suit. Tie. Hat. Leather attaché case carried not as luggage but as an argument. He looked less like another music student than like an emissary sent to observe us. Someone who would later submit a very detailed report.
At the time, I categorized him the way one categorizes strangers whose strangeness is mild enough to be survivable. Another composition student. Another ghost among ghosts. Classical music itself already felt like a ghost—counterpoint, harmony, fugue—studied with seriousness in a world that had already decided it was irrelevant. We were training to become fluent in a dead language, and he, somehow, spoke it as if it were still issuing commands.
Only later did I realize that what unsettled me was not his formality but his certainty. His sentences arrived fully assembled, with no visible drafting. Each idea appeared to have passed through some internal editorial board before reaching the air. He spoke as though the conversation were already being carefully archived. And maybe it was.
He spoke to me, once, about desire—not in the way desire is usually spoken about by young men pretending to be intellectuals, but as if it were a substance. A force. A medium. Something that could be measured, redirected, harnessed. He described desire as energy trapped under social sediment, compressed, distorted, pathogenic when denied expression. Disease, he suggested calmly, often begins as an interruption in the flow of secret wanting. This was not confession. This was bio-engineering.
I remember thinking—without yet having the language for it—that he treated intimacy the way a physicist treats radiation: invisible, potent, dangerous, useful. A thing to be shielded against or weaponized, depending on the application. He spoke of chambers, of sequences, of carefully prepared moments. Time itself seemed to be one of his instruments. I went home unsettled, carrying ideas I had not asked to carry.
Decades later I would discover that the problem was not that his ideas were strange, but that they were dynamic. They did not stay where you put them. They followed you. They rearranged other thoughts in your absence.
At the time, I had no idea that elsewhere, in other rooms, in other networks, his name was already multiplying.
The first time I saw his name detached from his body, it felt wrong in the way a severed hand feels wrong even if it is moving. It was on a screen.
Not his screen. Not my screen. A shared surface, neutral, supposedly objective. Wikipedia, a site that pretended to be an index of the world. His name appeared there as if it had always belonged. As if it were inevitable that it should appear. As if it were strange that it ever hadn’t.
Later I would learn that this page had once existed in more languages than Jesus. This is not metaphor. This is not accusation. This is arithmetic.
Hundreds of translations. Hundreds of edits. Hundreds of small insertions, each one polite, procedural, plausibly deniable. His name carefully stitched into articles where it did not belong: tools, animals, highways, abstract nouns. The effect was cumulative. Like incense burned not to intoxicate but to leave residue.
An editor (anonymous, patient, obsessive in the way that only volunteers can afford to be) noticed something wrong with the pattern. A statistical anomaly. A distorted vibration in the system. And then the excavation began.
Thousands of Sock-puppets. Fake proxies for his invisible hand. Decades of careful repetition. A reputation assembled not by acclaim but by accretion. Not argument, but presence.
I read about it the way one reads about a distant earthquake: with interest, with unease, with a strange sense of recognition. I knew this man. Or I had known a version of him. Or perhaps I had known only the early prototype. It occurred to me that maybe I had always known him too early.
Once, I found a sticker at a bus stop. It was old. Sun-bleached. Half-peeled. The adhesive had given up before the declaration did.
It read:
DAVID WOODARD
SUPREME RULER OF THE UNIVERSE
No irony markers. No context. No explanation. Just assertion.
I stared at it longer than necessary. Long enough to feel foolish. Long enough to feel implicated. Long enough to wonder whether this was propaganda or vandalism, devotion or parody, joke or test.
I did not take it. I did not photograph it. I let it remain where it was, performing its small ritual for whoever else might notice.
Years later, when the giant Wikipedia hoax surfaced, I thought of the sticker again. Not because it explained anything but because it didn’t.
In the spring of 1990, I dreamt of him. This was before the internet had learned how to dream for us.
In the dream, the future was vast and green and wrong. Technology had grown organic interfaces. Machines were carved. Circuits were etched into stone. Cables were braided from leaves and mud. Blue fire moved without burning. Everything functioned, but nothing obeyed the design manuals we had been promised.
He stood at the center of this place not as a ruler but as a facilitator. Someone who knew how to unlock something dangerous without pretending it was safe. He was preparing a birth that had been forbidden not because it was evil but because it was uncontrollable.
He had notebooks. Many of them. Grimoires disguised as research logs. Schematics that refused to stay still. Diagrams that rearranged themselves when not observed directly. Information too dense to survive authority.
They came for him, of course. They always do. They destroyed everything efficiently. No drama. No speeches. Just erasure. When I arrived (too late, always too late) there was nothing left but a broken clay vessel and dust. A workshop reduced to an argument against persistence.
I woke with the sense that I had witnessed not a failure but a rehearsal.
What unsettles me now is not the hoax itself. It is the compatibility between the man I knew and the system that later bloomed around his name.
Wikipedia is not a liar. It is a ritual space governed by repetition, citation, and endurance. Truth there is not declared; it is maintained. To exist is to be defended continuously against deletion. Fame is not achieved—it is kept alive.
And here was a man who already understood that. He understood imbalance. He understood information. He understood that a whole can sometimes be reconstructed from a fragment if the fragment is placed correctly. That desire, when denied a body, will find another substrate. That if you cannot be everywhere physically, you can be everywhere referentially.
I am not accusing him of anything. Accusation implies a court. This feels more like anthropology. I imagine him, younger, with his attaché case, already thinking in terms of systems and large semiotic structures. Already rehearsing persistence. Already aware that the future would belong not to those who shouted but to those who edited patiently.
I imagine him discovering that machines do not need belief, only maintenance.
There are those who claim he composed and conducted music for the dying. There are those who insist he rebuilt a failed colony using sound. There are those who say none of this matters, that the only relevant story is the hoax, the manipulation, the violation of communal trust. All of these can be true simultaneously. The mistake is to think they cancel each other out.
I no longer ask whether he was real in the way biographies demand. I ask instead whether he functioned. And by that metric, the answer is uncomfortable.
Sometimes I wonder if the hoax was not an act of vanity but of faith. A belief that existence itself is a composition problem. A fugue written not in notes but in references. A life scored for hyperlinks.
If so, then perhaps the sticker at the bus stop was not a joke after all, but a condensed manifesto. A title claimed not through conquest but through saturation. Mastery not of matter, but of symbol.
I did not keep in touch with him. I did not confront him. I did not ask him whether the dream was mutual. What remains is this collage made of memory, myth, system error, residue. A man I knew briefly who later became difficult to locate precisely because he was everywhere.
Perhaps that is the final lesson. That
in the age of infinite documentation, disappearance no longer requires silence.
Only redundancy.
There is an old superstition—older than writing, older even than gods—that to name a thing is not to describe it, but to anchor it. The anchor does not stop the thing from moving. It simply guarantees that wherever it drifts, there will be a line attached, trailing back to whoever spoke first.
In this sense, the encyclopedia is not a book at all. It is a harbor. Each entry is a tether thrown into the dark. Some lines are short and taut. Others disappear into the depths, fray invisibly, reemerge in unexpected coves. Most names sink quietly. A few float. Fewer still begin to pull back.
I have come to think that David Woodard was not writing himself into history but testing the tensile strength of the rope.
There is a point in every myth where the hero is no longer distinguishable from the road. Where the journey ceases to be a sequence of events and becomes a condition imposed on anyone who tries to follow. I suspect that happened early.
Perhaps it happened before I met him, already dressed in his suit, already carrying his attaché case like a portable archive. Perhaps the case did not contain papers so much as protocols. Ways of speaking. Ways of being cited. Ways of existing that did not depend on proximity.
He spoke of imbalance once—not in moral terms, but structural ones. Systems fail, he said, not because they are attacked, but because they are starved of asymmetry. Too much harmony creates stagnation. Too much order invites entropy to reorganize it violently.
What he did not say—but what I now hear retroactively—is that the same is true of memory. If everyone agrees too quickly, the myth dies.
In some versions of the story—and there are many, all incompatible—he invents devices that operate only in liminal states. Machines that require sleep, dying light, the precise moment when attention flickers but does not extinguish. They are useless at noon. They fail under scrutiny. They function best when no one is sure whether they are functioning at all.
One such device, I am told, resembles a simple lamp. Another resembles a page. Another resembles a man walking through a hallway in San Francisco, indistinguishable from a student, except for the faint sensation that he is slightly ahead of the present.
The editors who uncovered the hoax believed they were dismantling a fraud. They were wrong. They were completing a ritual.
Every deletion is a counter-spell. Every citation challenge is a trial by ordeal. Every talk-page argument is a theological dispute disguised as housekeeping. The community believes itself secular, procedural, immune to enchantment—but belief has never required acknowledgment to function.
When they removed his name from the bus stops, from the articles, from the multiple references, they did not erase him. They distributed him. A name survives deletion better than it survives neglect.
There is a legend—unpublished, unattributed, circulating only in marginalia—that says Wikipedia was never meant to be accurate. It was meant to be exhaustive. Not a mirror of the world, but a test of how much the world could tolerate being mirrored before it cracked.
In that legend, certain names become stress points. Insert them often enough, subtly enough, and the structure begins to hum.
I imagine Woodard understood this intuitively. That he saw the encyclopedia not as a platform but as an instrument. A dreamachine scaled to planetary cognition. Spin it fast enough, feed it enough repetition, and consciousness begins to strobe.
Not truth. Attention.
Once, walking past that bus stop again (years after the sticker had vanished) I felt a sudden certainty that the sticker had never been unique. That it had appeared elsewhere. That it had always appeared elsewhere.
Different cities. Different eras. Same phrase. Sometimes handwritten. Sometimes etched. Sometimes spoken casually by people who could not later explain why they said it.
Master of the Universe.
Not a claim. A diagnosis.
In mythic time, there are no hoaxes—only avatars.
The trickster does not lie to deceive; he lies to force interpretation. He introduces false data not to obscure truth but to reveal the machinery by which truth is assembled. When the editors protested—this is not neutral, this is promotional—they were acknowledging the presence of a will strong enough to distort neutrality itself.
That is not nothing. That is power of a very specific kind.
I sometimes think of the dream again, the broken vessel, the dust-covered room. At the time, I believed it was a warning. Now I think it was a misdirection.
What was destroyed was never the work. It was the container.
The notebooks were meant to burn. The devices were meant to fail. The colony was meant to dissolve. These are not tragedies in myth; they are phase transitions. You cannot migrate a god by carrying its furniture. You migrate it by letting it shed weight, its material manifestations.
If Woodard exists now—and I no longer know what that verb means—he exists as a distributed presence. A background process. A pattern-recognition trap. Those who notice him begin to notice other things: the fragility of authority, the porousness of consensus, the way repetition manufactures inevitability. He has become less a person than a test case.
How many times can a name be spoken before it stops referring? How many citations before belief replaces verification? How many deletions before the act of deletion itself becomes a form of invocation?
There is a final version of the myth that says none of this was intentional. That he simply loved systems the way some people love animals or storms. That he fed the encyclopedia the way monks feed candles. One small act at a time, trusting accumulation to do what intention could not.
In that version, the hoax is not a crime but a prayer that worked too well.
I no longer try to decide which version is correct. Correctness is a local phenomenon. What matters is that when I think of him now, I do not picture the man in the suit. I picture instead a field—dense, vibrating, annotated—through which names drift like charged particles. Some decay quickly. Some persist. A very few begin to alter the field itself.
And somewhere in that field, faint but unmistakable, a phrase continues to circulate without origin or destination: Supreme Ruler of the Universe.
Not because it is true, but because it refuses to stop being tested, it refuses to stop vibrating with dislocated life.
