And so it begins.

I realized that @visiblebelfast is following me on Twitter and has created a list, following just me, called "The Protagonist," and has been making comments about the ‘start of the journey’ and ‘the mazes of the network’ and a lot of other weird stuff in the past few days.

And now today, an email was sent out, and it seems like this might be the beginning.

The email I received contains a scanned piece of text from inside a book, and some cryptic sentences, including this one:

"the way the city grows: from a single point of human contact, relationships emerge and unravel, and labyrinthine paths spread over hills and valleys, through space and time."

For some reason this got me thinking about a book I read by Mackenzie Wark last year, and something he was saying about a news broadcast on Berlin. Let me go see if I can find it.

Here we go, on page 50:

"The caption ‘Berlin,’ placed underneath by NBC, was not actually referring to the physical space of Berlin itself. It referred to an electronic space constructed in the studio, which mixed images made on the East and West sides of the wall into a single vital center."

This just links in my head to the whole “over hills and valleys, through space and time” thing. Is a city made up of physical space, or of some other kind of space?

The email also said something about the number marking the beginning of Belfast, or the start of the tale … Don’t know what it means.

Already some people are helping me to solve what's happening here--people with more of a sense of mystery than I will admit to having myself. At the moment, all I can say for sure is that someone is definitely setting up an interesting course of events, and these seem to have something to do with me.

More soon.