Malachi’s not the most common of names. But on the net so many of us use pseudonyms (and even multiple identities) that it wasn’t a huge surprise to see someone posting under that name on the university christian union message boards. It was probably when it first claimed that Malachi was its real name that I was rather surprised and perhaps a little suspicious.

It claimed to be from Tallahassee in Florida and to have applied to study at Southampton University next year. It claimed that it was an agnostic interested in the Christian faith and asked some interesting (and a lot of not so interesting) questions. It was nearly believable. There was just the right level of knowledge of VeggieTales and Left Behind to suggest a familiarity with church PR in the US. But I was suspicious. It offered no explanation for its presence on our little set of boards and why on earth it would want to join the infighting and stereotyping that typify so many of the exchanges.

It was its ‘conversion’ which really convinced me that it wasn’t who it claimed to be. Maybe there were things going on behind the scenes that I wasn’t aware of, and maybe my personal theology isn’t quite ready for public conversions over http but it just didn’t ring true. Particularly the overnight switch from self-described ‘concerned agnostic’ to hellfire-and-brimstone fundamentalist. It could be that I was offended by its insistence that Harry Potter was of the devil, but this one I couldn’t quite take seriously. I told it I preferred it as an agnostic.

Offline analysis quickly began. A few of us listed off our chief suspects, but none quite fitted the profile we’d built up. The internet equivalent of handwriting comparisons didn’t get us anywhere. Other tracing methods had so far been blocked.

In the end though, it was the claim that there were no buses and no taxis in Tallahassee which convinced those who still held onto the shreds of their belief in Malachi. Another poster quickly found a list of taxi companies, to which it replied that they’d all shut down. So this poster started phoning them. Initially just checking if they were open. They were. A few more denials and I was asking the taxi operators about their competitors and general taxi services in Tallahassee {not quite believing what I was doing} and discovering that they were plentiful. Its insistence that there were only 20,000 people in Tallahassee also irked me. Even acknowledging Florida’s history with counting important numbers that left 130,000 people unaccounted for according to State Census results available online.

This information was all posted.

Malachi disappeared.

Some days passed.

Malachi reappeared. No longer agnostic or fundamentalist, it was now claiming to be a New Ager but still laying into the same (vaguely open to the New Age) people. This time it claimed to have knowledge from a spirit guide called Dave. I’d always presumed spirit guides would have more exotic names. As the posts mounted, it was clearly the same Malachi. Still self-contradicting. Still a contradiction. Today Malachi has claimed to be from hell and suggested we’ll all meet it there. I think that’s a farewell.