Since its earliest days the Web has been a feeding ground for the bizarre and the fetishistic – with communities devoted to extraterrestrials, Charles Manson and bestiality. Seasoned Web surfers aren't surprised by much they encounter.
But stumbling upon a series of recent websites devoted to robotic emancipation can make anyone do a double take. And to make it even more out there, these websites record events that take place in the year 2142.
Nearly 40 websites are devoted to a robotic revolution or the related murder of a man named Evan Chan. But the sites aren't linked to a cult or militia group.
They're part of one of the most complex viral movie marketing campaigns ever created.
"If you read all the Web pages (more than 700 so far), it's so much more intelligent, in terms of written style, and the research is far more intensive, than anything I've ever seen," said Harry Knowles, head of Ain't it Cool News, the movie-insider website. "Everything has been calculated so well to throw people like me off."
The websites are promotions for the upcoming film, A.I., which stands for artificial intelligence. Starring Haley Joel Osment and directed by Steven Spielberg, little is known about the film other than the fact that Osment plays a boy robot.
The connection between the film and the websites was first noticed when a fan watching the credits at the end of the second A.I. trailer saw the name "Jeanine Salla: Sentient Machine Therapist." A Google search ensued, and a multitude of websites devoted to a robotic world appeared.
Another fan noticed that the words "Summer 2000" appeared on the trailer with notches in the letters. The number of notches in each letter seemed to spell out a telephone number. When fans called the number, a strange robot known as "Mother" directed people to e-mail it at thevisionary.net.
This led to more clues and more pages, and at one point, fans of the strange Alice and Wonderland-like world were asked to enter their telephone number.
"A disguised, robotic voice began calling people who gave out their phone numbers," said Dan Hon, a student at Cambridge University who has helped create a Web page devoted to uncovering the meaning of the websites.
"As soon as they (some of the 1,300 people who are part of a listserv trying to solve the mystery) got the call, people got scared. One of the first messages on the lists were, 'Holy shit, they just called me at home.'"
From a fictional university, to a website devoted to crimes involving robots, the marketing scheme is extremely complex and is estimated to have cost upwards of $1 million to produce.
But why create such an extensive and enigmatic Web community?
At this point, that's anyone's guess. A spokesperson at Warner Bros. declined to comment, but Knowles thinks it's due to Stanley Kubrick's involvement at the beginning stages of the project.
"Kubrick gave Spielberg the (A.I.) project before he died," Knowles said. "Kubrick, whenever he went into a project, created a huge marketing campaign around a movie because (to him) the movie experience didn't just begin with the movie. He often hid little Easter eggs all over his films and press releases to give obscure clues as to what the movie was about."
The A.I. Web marketing campaign is not the first of its kind to fool people with its authenticity. Websites devoted to the The Blair Witch Project caused such a stir that record numbers of moviegoers turned out for the opening of the film. But nothing to this extent has ever been created.
"The fact that no one had done this before is what really got me hooked," Hon said. "But what's so amazing is that the websites seem to be changing their narrative to interact with us. They're watching us, and they know what we're doing."
Knowles said despite Kubrick's involvement, he is surprised that Spielberg has been able to keep quiet about the project.
"Spielberg is traditionally awful at leaking out information about a movie," he said. "But I have no idea what this movie is, or how these websites relate to it."
"It's like an iron door has closed."
All will be known on June 29, when the film opens in theaters.
