Alchemical work required "patience, diligence, and perseverance" (Albertus Magnus, quoted by Ramsay, 22): as we have seen from the alchemcial symbolism, the texts do not offer themselves up to understanding but demand the reader’s interaction and effort. This is one of the arguments against hypertext fictions, and depends on two widespread lies: firstly, ‘computers aren’t immersive’; secondly, ‘people don’t like looking at a screen’. Anyone who uses computers regularly will know how addictive they become, and how easy it is to waste hours fiddling with layout, designing, programming, and gaming. The important word is fiddling: active, and interactive. One can spend hours immersed in the screen if one is interacting with the computer, and not just scrolling down an endless column of dead text. Well-authored hypertext fiction provides both interaction and reward, and demands investment on two levels.

The first level of investment is cost-benefit calculation: reading pages, choosing links, and clicking. This decision-making is more complex than the metaphor ‘surfing’ gives credit for, as Johnson notes (107-110). For example, a link leading to too much text means too long spent passive, and the user loses interest; too little text means insufficient reward for the effort expended in clicking, and the user is frustrated. (On occasion, a small amount of text can be used to good effect, if other pages are more substantial.) The user, however, must select links without being certain of what she will receive. Other considerations include:

the number of steps required before reaching the desired payoff … the amount of reading required, the lagtime (latency) for loading each page, … the reduced continuity of the authorial 'voice', the danger of disorientation, the confidence in reversibility, and confidence that the search will move closer to the goal rather than farther away. (Barger)

The second level of investment is more conceptual, closer to one’s investment in a poem than in a movie or book. Whereas movies or books seem to "carry" us and we experience our enjoyment as passive (often we are unaware of the cognitive effort required, when a medium is familiar), hypertext is experienced as more active. This is the "Performance, Participation" I mention in Hypertext fiction: the user must make creative, conceptual links between the pages she receives, drawing connections between the elements.

In both cases, the interaction must be balanced with the reward. Suck and Urban Diary are extreme examples of this: both, on the surface, are enigmatic and opaque; they give nothing away. If, however, one is prepared to work – to click on links, to relate the new page to other pages in the site – one is rewarded with what Johnson calls "latent content" (135). Moreover, working for information, producing the conceptual links in one’s own mind rather than having them dished out, "emphasises understanding such symbols as a slow process of integration into the psyche, rather than just the tidy, easy work of assigning definitions" – as I said of alchemical symbolism. This commitment presupposes a certain amount of trust in the web-site; hence, the other aspect of preparation is prayer.

Although the Great Work required the alchemist’s own energy and dedication, it could not so much as begin without God. As Le Livre des Figures Rieroglyphiques says, God reveals the Metallic Principles "to whom he pleases", and without knowledge of this first agent, one "will doubtless make mistakes and never understand anything" (Nataf, 8). The alchemist did not abdicate to God, but nevertheless showed extreme reverence. In other words, at first, one should respectfully relinquish one’s preconceived understanding, but one should also slowly – intuitively – seek to understand the deeper workings and structure of the created world. I have deliberately worded the previous sentence to straddle both alchemy and hypertext. In the paradigm of the hypertext, the creator’s will is finally superior to ours: she is the God of the hypertext fiction, and I am a creature with free will – free to choose among the paths that she offers, or to refuse all paths by "dying" to her world – leaving the site. This is in striking contradiction to Roland Barthes’s "death of the author", which has become a vexed question – The Author has been buried, dug up6 revived, buried again and is currently not exactly dead per se but… a zombie. Certain sectors of hypertext theory have leaped to conclusions about the place of the author in hypertext. In The Electronic Labyrinth Home Page, Christopher Keep and Tim McLaughlin enthuse, "disseminated through phonelines and electronic bulletin boards, the electronic word has no author, has no point of origin, has no meaning except that of its transmission, of its devotion to the possibilities of dissemination itself." Barger is calmer: "No matter how constrained the medium – and simple HTML is very constrained – the layout remains a stubborn witness to the mind of the provider." I have already outlined the rôle not only of perception but of context in generating meaning, and pointed out to what degree hypertext – apparently surprisingly – is able no make use of context. A quick visit to Hegirascope II illustrates this:

O  B  E  Y

In the original, Remote, Monitors, and Voice are also links, but to allow you to go travelling when I’m talking to you would not suit my purposes at all.

On the one hand, the author seems to be in control: she designs the structure, and she decides the content. On the other hand, the user is in control: she navigates the structure, and interprets the content. The author can only hope the user will travel as she intends; if you didn’t choose to "obey", and clicked on "begin" instead, my voice would now be shouting helplessly into a void. Guilt persuaded me to offer you "begin"; I could have withheld it until you’d done everything I told you to, but then - what if you didn’t? You would not begin the Process of Transformation - my favourite part of the website, the most disorienting and controlling, a veritable process. However controlling I am, I must try to allow for the choices you make, and yet the options that you have are those I have given you. Who’s in control?

We can approach this question better by differentiating between the paradigms and the experience: the paradigms of meaning and structure being created by the author; the experience of meaning and structure, by the user. This division into opposites is temporarily useful; we differentiate to understand, but must be suspect both from a post-structural / deconstructionist and from an alchemical point of view. I spoke earlier of how the conscious mind is necessarily one-sided to adapt to its environment and how the opposites that it separates must return to one another, for adaptation to progress. This conscious, abstract explanation simplifies the complex process of transformation, better understood symbolically. It begins with the coniunctio, the conjunction of opposites.