IS DENNY REALLY DEAD?

By MICHAEL KRANTZ

So I'm sitting in the office minding my own business when this E-mail pops up from some guy named Denny Reikert. "The following accounts have reference numbers way out of sequence," his note says. "Do these need to be updated in some way?" Then he lists them: Warren Road, Rexx, the Ogden Group, Ladybell Textiles.

Rexx? Ogden? Ladybell? I don't know what this character is talking about, and I've never heard of his outfit, the Dysson Foundation. I E-mail him back to say just that. His quick response: Oops. Could I delete the errant message?

Then another E-mail arrives, this one from Vicky DeBice, Dysson's director of human resources. "Yesterday you mistakenly received E-mail from one of our employees...I would like to assure you that Dysson does not buy or sell electronic address lists."

No sooner has this crossed my screen than Reikert writes again, asking me to hold on to his first E-mail. "I don't mean to sound like a weirdo," he says. "I'm just trying to prove certain discrepancies, and I seem to have been locked out of my computer."

Already I can smell trouble. Then the second E-mail arrives from DeBice. "For reasons yet to be understood," she says, "you received messages from one of our members, Denny Reikert. Denny Reikert was found dead yesterday afternoon..."

Now all hell breaks loose. In rapid order I hear from Mendiero Barrett, Dysson's V.P. of Pan-Pacific Integration ("Dysson is currently conducting a private inquiry into the suicide of Denny Reikert...") and from a recruiter who offers me, of all things, a job at Dysson and guides me to its Website www.dysson.com) which is written in creepy corporate prose and looks just as one would expect a "global telecommuting consortium" to look, complete with geeky employee photos and a client list that includes Time Warner, the parent company of this magazine. I hear from an anonymous employee. "Don't let them snow you," he or she writes. "Denny was no suicide."

Was Reikert murdered? Is Dysson for real? And what's all this got to do with me?

That's what 40 high-tech executives, two journalists and one Monty Python alumnus had to decide. After receiving a similar sequence of electronic messages last month, Microsoft executive Marty Behrens referred the matter to in-house counsel. Software entrepreneur Moses Ma called the cops. MGM executive Ken Locker dashed off a formal memo to Dysson: "If there is any type of investigation in this matter, it is my fiduciary responsibility to inform MGM corporate security."

Finally, two weeks after Denny Reikert's original note, the beans were spilled. "You were helpful," began the final E-mail message. "You were amused. You were spooked. You were hooked.

"You were pitched..."

Dysson, it turns out, is the brainchild of LaFong, the Bay Area team of writer Michael Kaplan and director John Sanborn, who had already created one CD-ROM (Psychic Detective) and two Web-based fictions and were seeking new ways to push the envelope of the Internet. Their vision for Dysson was to turn a simple E-mail exchange into an "immersive" experience in which the audience helps create the story by becoming characters in an ongoing drama. "My desire is for the Internet and television to merge," says Sanborn. "What could be better than a TV show where you start getting E-mail from the characters?"

How about knowing they're only characters? Several Dysson pitchees had taken the suicide reports quite seriously and were not amused to learn that someone had been playing with their head. "You should be ashamed of yourself," wrote New York Times technology columnist Denise Caruso. "This is the most unbelievably crass thing I've ever seen." Former Python actor Eric Idle posted a lengthy anti-Dysson manifesto on the Website PythOnline. "This was simply exploitation," he told TIME. "If I came barging in your door threatening you and then told you it was just entertainment, how would you feel?"

Not good. Kaplan and Sanborn, now seeking the backing of a giant like Microsoft or America Online to develop Dysson and offer it to the public, may be evolving a new interactive art form. But they've also retold the Internet's oldest cautionary tale: Online exchanges may be virtual, but the emotions they provoke are quite real.