Cult Fiction

      Two weeks ago, just after 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult killed themselves in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., Tera Gemmil-Mugrage received five e-mail messages and a phone call from people -- seriously, not as a joke -- wanting to make sure she wasn't dead.
      The family, friends and acquaintances knew that Gemmil-Mugrage was an owner of a Web design firm and lived in Southern California. People wanted "to make sure I was alive" or to ask, at the very least, if she knew any of the Heaven's Gate members, she said.
      "I'm not alone in this," Gemmil-Mugrage added in a phone interview from her Fullerton, Calif. office. "A lot of us had this experience. People think you're connected (to others in the industry), so you must somehow know these people."
      Talk about bad timing. Just when the stereotype of the antisocial, off-kilter, downright weird computer geek begins to fade as computers become as common to the average American as microwave ovens or VCRs, a group of religious cult members who just happen to work as Web-page designers decide to commit one of the oddest mass suicides in recent memory.
      However, several Southern Nevadans who work or play in the computer field say people hereabouts seem to be treating the Heaven's Gate suicides as more of a religious-inspired tragedy rather than anything that might reflect upon people who use computers.
      That might be surprising, given the emphasis early news reports of the Heaven's Gate suicides placed on the fact that the group supported itself by designing sites for the World Wide Web, the multimedia portion of the Internet.
      "(Initially) the reports I saw had less to do with the cult. The big thing was, computers were found inside the (cult's) mansion," Gemmil-Mugrage said. "I mean, I heard an early report that there was a smell inside the house, and they weren't sure it wasn't coming from the computers,"
      Among friends and colleagues in the business, "the frustration level was very high," Gemmil-Mugrage added. "I think the straw that broke the camel's back was when it was reported as a `computer cult.' "
      It's not only inaccurate but unfair, she said. "If they had been construction workers, nobody would have been saying `a construction worker cult.' "
      Nick Reese, president of both Century 23 Computers and Technology and Intermind, a Las Vegas-based Internet service provider, said that, among just about everybody he's talked to, the computer-Heaven's Gate connection is "pretty much not a big deal."
      The consensus seems to be that "they were just crazy people, nut cases, that were following somebody, and wherever he went they followed," Reese said.
      "It's talked about here almost every day," Joe Kendall, owner of the Cyber City Cafe, said last week. "You see it on the news, and some people find it unbelievable, some tragic."
      Anthony Saxton, an officer of the Las Vegas Macintosh Users Group, said the reaction he's heard locally has been of "concern, and surprise that they were into computers -- that they were intelligent enough to be computer geeks and still do something that stupid. They're just saying it's another cult that committed suicide."
      "Everybody's talking about it," Saxton added, "but nobody's really linking it with the computers."
      Joe Corbino, a hotel employee, part-time English teacher and Cyber City Cafe regular, doesn't think the cult and its actions influence one way or another the general public's image of computer users.
      "To be honest, there's weirdos anywhere," Corbino said. "So people, at this point, with things we see every day reading the newspaper and seeing on TV, we just shrug it off. It's just another day at work."
      Cults and groups holding out-of-mainstream religious or political beliefs have always been around. What Heaven's Gate members had that generations of similar groups didn't was the ability to disseminate -- via the group's Web page -- their beliefs to anybody in the world who has a computer and a modem.
      "If you go stumbling around the Internet, hitting the search engines, you're going to pull up some weird stuff," Corbino said.
      But, just as in the nonvirtual world, people find, explore and then accept or discard the countless ideas floating around on the Internet.
      "For the most part it's like walking down the street," Corbino said. "You see something, and you either choose to examine it or disagree with it, and your actions follow."
      "The fact (Heaven's Gate) used the Internet doesn't matter. Everybody uses the Internet now," Saxton said. "I'm sure Jim Jones would have used the Internet if he had it available."
      In 1978, more than 900 men, women and children, all members of the Rev. Jim Jones' Peoples Temple cult, died in a mass murder-suicide in Guyana. However, unlike Jonestown, an explanation of why Heaven's Gate members did what they did could be found right on the group's website.
      Kendall said business at his cafe -- which rents computers and Internet access on an hourly or monthly basis -- has increased since the Heaven's Gate suicides, largely because of computer newcomers seeking a firsthand peek at the group's website and, sometimes, finding other interesting sites along the way.
      One woman who came in to check out the Heaven's Gate website found that the Christian Science Monitor -- to which she subscribes -- also maintains a website, Kendall said. "She read it online and she was so excited. She actually didn't get to the Heaven's Gate site. She found that there are other things on there, too."
      By early last week, Kendall began to notice another twist in the Heaven's Gate suicides: Customers, he said, are "saying, `Is our government letting out all the information about exactly what has happened down there?'
      "They don't think so," Kendall said. "They think there is more to this story than what the media is throwing out."
      Meanwhile, Gemmil-Mugrage and some of her friends and colleagues have responded to the media's coverage of the Heaven's Gate suicides with their own parody website, called highersource.org, located at http://www.highersource.org.
      "The purpose of the site was never to make fun of the cult," Gemmil-Mugrage said. "None of us find the fact that 39 people killed themselves the least bit funny. What we we're trying to get across was that the reporting of it had been irresponsible."
      Further, Gemmil-Mugrage said, the site is intended to make, through humor, the point that "the only thing that ever gets reported in the major media tends to be the lady who ran off and left her husband because she met somebody in a chat room."
      The site and the group's news release even makes the disclaimer that "no one involved in the creation of highersource.org is a known pedophile or religious-cult member."
      The site made its point soon after it was put up, even if it was in a way not quite envisioned by its creators.
      According to Gemmil-Mugrage, moments after some of the page's designers were interviewed about their website by CNN Headline News "explaining how the site was a parody and a critique of press coverage, I flipped over to regular CNN and they were running a story about the cult."
      The story showed the website and referred to its creators as a "splinter cult group," she said.
      "We've gotten more funny jokes about that than about anything," Gemmil-Mugrage said. "We're finally thinking, `They're getting it,' and then something like that happens."