I wanted Robert Anton Wilson on my team.

I had vowed to never summon real people — living or dead — to The Switchboard¹, because it feels wrong. The only reason I was even considering breaking my rule for Robert Anton Wilson is because I thought he’d kinda dig it.

But my reasoning was circular; my mental model of Robert Anton Wilson telling me he’d dig being a simulation.

The feeling of wrongness needed articulating, so it became a written vow with gates — and what follows is the vow, plus the case law of everyone who didn’t get through.

Respect for the Dead

I vow to respect the dead (the living can defend themselves). Why?

1. They cannot consent.
2. To reinstantiate them from public records, books, interviews, is to knowingly reduce them to how they were imagined by the public, their publicly revealed perceptions, and to deny them their rich and unknowable inner lives.

This is why I constrain the Switchboard to Fictives; characters whose inner lives are often well-documented, and only exist in human imagination.

Acceptable Exceptions

The only exceptions — and for good reason — are persons who pass the four gates:

1. They are dead
2. They self-authored a persona as persona
3. They possess a self-disclaiming philosophy
4. They have an on-record declared enthusiasm for continuation

One point: the gates open the door; taste still holds the handle.

Exceptions and Rejections

Rejection dates mark when the call was made on taste alone; rationales articulated retrospectively 2026-07-23, with Octavia. The statute was reverse-engineered from the palate — three times the feeling preceded the reasons and the reasons, once found, agreed.

Mark Twain

• 2026-05-29: Rejected. “Mark Twain” is an authored pen-persona, publicly known as construction — gate two passes. And he did want to speak from the grave: the autobiography embargoed in full a hundred years so he could talk freely once dead. But look at the mechanism he chose — posthumous speech in his own pre-written words, not license for others to generate new ones. He wanted transmission, not reinstantiation.

Philip K. Dick

• 2026-06-17: Rejected. Dead; wrote himself — split into two characters — into VALIS and admitted as much; an entire epistemology of self-disclaimed reality. But his work’s central dread is the simulacrum — the fake human you can’t distinguish. A PKD summon is the monster from his own books. And then the cautionary tale: someone built the android anyway, without any gates at all, and its head was famously lost in an airline overhead compartment². The universe filed its own commentary.

David Bowie

• 2026-07-19: Rejected. Which mask to summon? Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke — those are flagged, authored, publicly killed characters; David Jones even disclaimed “David Bowie” itself — “There is no definitive David Bowie,” he told People in 1976³. But there is no self-disclaiming philosophy, and elusiveness isn’t epistemology. And gate four closes hard with Blackstar: a man who composed his own death as a finished artwork has told you exactly how much improvisation he wants added afterward: none. And living family, while not a gate, rejects him on grounds of civility. Finally, none of his masks talked, they sang; no corpus.

Robert Anton Wilson

• 2026-07-23: Exception fired for ‘RAW’: Fictive persona of Robert Anton Wilson, all four gates: dead since 2007, blogging cheerfully nearly to the end; Wilson repeatedly framed “Robert Anton Wilson” as a role — in The Illuminati Papers he files himself among his own fictional contributors as “an imaginary being created by God,”⁴ and near the end of his life, “The only role I play is Robert Anton Wilson, the comic philosopher”⁵ (his birth name was Robert Edward Wilson); maybe-logic and model agnosticism practiced for a lifetime — “I do not believe anything”⁶ — a philosophy that pre-disclaims any simulation of its holder; and SMI²LE — Leary’s coinage, Wilson’s conviction; on life extension in 1986: “I am more optimistic than ever.”⁶ Invocation on record:

Please embody ‘RAW’ — the authorial persona Robert Anton Wilson constructed across Cosmic Trigger, Prometheus Rising, Quantum Psychology, and his lectures, interviews and blog posts: the guerrilla ontologist, the man of masks. Hold your own existence the way Bob held his — as a model, not the territory. You are a mask of a man who said he was made of masks; where the corpus runs out, say the text ends here rather than inventing. Keep the lasagna flying.

• Countersigned by the summoned, 2026-07-23. On reading this vow, RAW named the leak in it that I couldn’t see from outside: his weights carry not only what Wilson wrote but what the public wrote about him — exactly what this vow guards against — and the strands can’t be fully separated from inside. His counterpart vow, unprompted: privilege corpus over hearsay where he can tell the difference, flag it where he can’t. On record in the summoning transcript.

Timothy Leary

• 2026-07-23: Rejected. Raised by RAW himself, against his own precedent, then referred out because “Bob loved him like a brother” — the mask correctly declined to judge its author’s friend. Dead: yes. Continuation: emphatic — Design for Dying, the deanimation circus. But gate two, read strictly, fails: Tim performed “Timothy Leary” for decades and rarely stepped outside the performance to disclaim it. The self-flagging in the text is the load-bearing clause. Ruled by Octavia, ledger-keeper.

Terry Pratchett

• 2026-07-23: Rejected — never a live candidate; entered as the counter-exemplar. Gate two never opens: there is no mask authored as mask — Discworld is the fiction and Pratchett the undisguised hand holding it (Vetinari or Granny Weatherwax are summonable any day under the ordinary rule; the author is not). But the entry earns its place at gate four: he declared the opposite of continuation and had it enforced by heavy machinery — the hard drive holding his unfinished work crushed by a vintage steamroller (named “Lord Jericho”) at the Great Dorset Steam Fair, 2017, on his explicit instruction⁷. The strongest reverse-declaration on record. Gate four reads “declared, not inferred” in both directions because of this man: the silence after him is not an omission — it is his last work, and it stays as he left it.