By Riley Keene – Contributing Writer, The Underground Mirror
HILL COUNTRY, TX — There’s no cell service along the last six miles of Farm-to-Market Road 2769, and the last message I received before losing bars was a blinking push alert:
Are you still watching?
The only roadside sign is a weathered plank nailed to a cedar fencepost. It reads, in faded hand-brushed letters: “Welcome to Offline”
I expected more.
A checkpoint, maybe. A compound. A suspicious guard in mirrored checking me for cameras. At minimum, a creepily smiling lunatic with pamphlets.
Instead: a simple wooden box holding a hand-drawn map, and a note beneath it, scribbled in smudged pencil:
“You’re here. We see you”.
I half-laughed out loud. I’d driven four hours on back roads chasing what I was sure was a cult dressed in linen and off grid hashtags. Thinking I would get some dirt from the locals, I stopped at the gas station nearest to the ‘compound’ to ask questions. No luck, all of them said the community was quiet, the members polite and often shared vegetables they raised. Yeh right, that sounded like a well hid mystery ready to be uncovered. It’s always the quiet ones.
The crude map had no names, just drawings, icons for cabins, gardens, what looked like a goat pen, river and a house with a sun in the corner, drawn like a child would.
I checked my phone again. No signal. I thumbed open Instagram out of habit anyway, then closed it like a door I’d walked through by mistake.
I was here to meet Cass.
Offline has become internet mythology and spawned at least one true crime styled podcast. Reddit threads with titles like “My Cousin Disappeared into Offline—AMA”, Substacks calling it a new-age off-grid cult, TikToks speculating about groupthink and eco-terrorism. The kind of place people whisper about in forums but can’t quite prove exists. There was an article in the Dallas Tribune that State Troopers came to ‘investigate’ a couple times after parents called in that their kid had run away and was probably being abused by a cult leader ‘groomer’. In the end, no harm was found, no laws broken, just people happy to not live in their former suburban communities. No law against that.
The story I’d built in my head was clean: A former Meta ethics engineer burns out, vanishes, and re-emerges as a soft-spoken prophet or guru to disillusioned Zoomers. Just another charismatic manipulator, maybe more dangerous for not charging for ‘enlightenment’.
But walking the grounds, it didn’t feel like that now.
There were no followers in robes and sandals. No sermons or symbols. No Koresh Waco Compound vibes. No padlocked sheds. No weird rituals. Just a woman feeding goats and chickens under a Mesquite tree who looked like she’d forgotten what it meant to hurry. When I asked her why she came, she paused to think, not out of suspicion but out of sincerity.
“I didn’t want to be angry anymore,” she said. “I didn’t want to feel wired all the time. I was just vibrating with judgment all the time.”
I asked if she missed anything.
“Heh, sometimes fast food… Jack In The Box tacos for some reason. We make better ones here but there was just something about them” she said. Then she laughed, not at me, but with the ease of someone who didn’t need to impress. “But then again, I don’t miss feeling alone while being ‘connected’ to everyone.”
They don’t call him a leader. They call him Cass. Or, sometimes, Woken One, apparently half in jest.
Born Aaron Castillo, he coded his way out of a rough North Texas upbringing and straight into Silicon Valley stardom. Stanford. Meta. Made head of a high-level ethics team, back when Meta still believed in that sort of thing.
In 2020, he was tasked with creating an algorithm to review content and flag posts as violent, extremist, or misinformation. It was a firehose of shocking imagery. One of his coworkers found him catatonic and twitching on the office floor one morning.
Then, he vanished.
Now he lives in a sun-drenched cabin at the edge of the community. I found him stacking firewood. He looked exactly like the last person who would found a movement: humble, barefoot, quiet, faded t-shirt and a long-sleeved flannel with a rip in the sleeve. But then again, there was something deep in those brown eyes.
I greeted him. He agreed to speak.
INTERVIEW EXCERPT
RILEY: I appreciate you agreeing to this.
CASS: Sure thing, I’m not hiding.
RILEY: Most people called ‘cult leaders’ tend to.
CASS: Nah, I didn’t start anything. I just stopped participating. Others did too. (gesturing to some members chatting in the nearby garden)
RILEY: So, you’re not telling people to give up their phones? Their social media accounts? Their entire lives? You’re not a preacher, an anti-digital prophet?
CASS: No. They choose that. By the time they’d arrived, they’d identified the problem. You don’t come here unless the noise gets too loud to live with.
RILEY: What broke you?
CASS: Oh, not one thing. It was… (His eyes drifted, like he was watching something I couldn’t see.) …It was too many things at once. Screens that screamed. Algorithms that casually served pain with breakfast. Every post a pulse of panic, terror, animosity… inhumanity. I watched people’s lives turned into content… and I stopped being able to filter it. I snapped. I went deaf. Literally blind, deaf and dumb. My body shut down to… save itself.
RILEY: Sounds like some bad trauma.
CASS: It was like drowning. But slow.
RILEY: So what happened?
CASS: Well, they tell me I sat in a dark room for a couple of years. And then… He shrugged.
It sounds silly but I heard birdsong again. That was the first sound back. Then water. It was elemental. Then people. One at a time, it came back. Different from before.RILEY: Enlightenment?
CASS: No, not like you’re thinking of it. Just a stillness. A deeper connection. I disconnected from the other and… the terror stopped.
The rest of my time in Offline passed in fragments. I have pleasant memories of shared group meals, served without phones or rush. Kids painting on a wall. A teenager quietly demonstrating to an older woman how to bind a book by hand. Not as a lesson as such. Just… doing it.
No one tried to convert me. No one asked me to stay. They weren’t performing peace. They were just living.
One afternoon, I found myself checking my phone again. Not because it had signal but because my fingers needed the movement. The reflex. My fingers twitched against the dead glass of my phantom appendage, like I was looking for a pulse.
I’d been there three days.
Later, I asked a boy, maybe fifteen, if they wanted to change the world.
He blinked at me like I’d asked something silly.
“The world has already changed,” he said. “We just noticed.”
As I rolled past the cedar fence and the crooked “Welcome to Offline” sign, I glanced in the rearview mirror. Cass was standing by the gate, one hand resting lightly on the post. He wasn’t waving. He wasn’t smiling. Just watching, calm as ever.
For a moment, our eyes met.
No nod. No knowing smirk. No farewell.
Just the quiet exchange of people who understood something had shifted without needing to say what.
I blinked, looked away, and kept driving.
I didn’t find what I came for.
There was no doctrine. No scandal. No minders. No missing people locked in cabins. Not even a phone burn pit. Just a place that functioned without surveillance or status, and people who seemed more… ‘there’ and less distracted than anyone I’d ever met.
I left without my takedown. Without a quote I could twist. Without a story that would go viral.
As I drove back toward the signal, my phone buzzed to life and the number “312” appeared in red over my unread messages app icon.
I didn’t open a single one.
The whole drive home, I felt the notifications, buzzing against my thigh, like an nagging wound trying to get attention. For the first time I can remember, I just focused on driving. Nothing but me and the golden brown and green Hill Country landscape all the way home.
Be First to Comment