At the click of a mouse, in a cyberworld made of pixels, on a Web site where time stops, Tyler Ugolyn lives.

He smiles at you.

On a computer screen.

"Yesterday was history,” his grandma says, the words written in her loving script on Ugolyn’s still-active personal Web site. "Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift from God!”

Today, of course, turns out to be difficult for those who knew the 23-year-old Ridgefield man who perished at the World Trade Center. But even as Ugolyn’s parents, Victor and Diane, and his many Ridgefield High School and Columbia University friends pray for him, they have another option. They can send a message express mail to heaven with the touch of a button.

And so they do.

One year later, the Internet has found new purpose. It is a shrine to the lost ones of Sept. 11. Most of the Web sites are communal and include small biographies for dozens of victims. Other people have their own sites for tributes longer and more personal.

Tyler Ugolyn has two.

Log on to www.tylerugolyn.com, set up by friends in his memory, and see a guest-book with no last page. It is a solemn site with a gray background and a flowing American flag. On Oct. 3, 2001, his brother said hi to him again.

"T.Y. you’re my best friend in the world,” wrote Trevor Ugolyn. "I will never care for anyone as much as I care for you bro. Hope you’re visiting this site often and reading the notes.”

People can address the onetime Ridgefield High basketball co-captain and celebrate his college career at Columbia University, his efforts at starting an inner-city youth basketball league and his volunteer work in a Harlem soup kitchen.

Lynnsey Eakin, a Ridgefield High classmate, needed only a few words for her old friend on Aug. 7, 2002.

"Happy birthday Ty.”

They talk about him in the present. And why not? Go to www.columbia.eda/~tvu2, and it never happened. He was never on the 93rd floor, working as a research associate for Fred Alger Management. The plane never came. The towers never fell. The tears never flowed.

Time marches nowhere.

Tyler "just started this (Web page) the other day,” he tells you. He is 6-foot 4, 205 pounds. He offers you several color photos of his ‘92 Typhoon, a black SUV with bulging rear tires. He offers you a "Car and Driver” magazine review of Typhoons. He updates you on an increasing array of performance upgrades to his car. He tells you his license plate says "PHOON.”

He is not finished yet.

"Every waking moment I am at home, I am working on this truck,” Tyler tells you. "More pictures are soon to come.”

Kirk Cassels wishes that were so. He is one of many people from various periods of Ugolyn’s life who talk to Ugolyn now — by logging on.

"You may have left this earth, but you are alive and well in my heart,” Cassels says in a Sept. 27 e-mail entry in Ugolyn’s guest book. "Thinking about you every day will help me do the right thing.”

Cassels and other friends agreed to continue their online conversations about Tyler by exchanging e-mails with a reporter.

"I had a dream once that I saw him in the distance but could not run to him,” said Cassels. "And it destroyed me.

"There was another dream that was better. I was in a crowded club, feeling stifled. As I pushed my way through the crowd, I opened the doors and still did not feel relief until I saw him, standing there, arms open wide and big smile on his face.”

Cassels, who now lives on Long Island, was one of Ugolyn’s good friends. They played tennis as kids, graduated from Ridgefield High School together and hung out often.

"I am jealous,” said Cassels, "of all those in Heaven who are laughing it up with him and embracing him as we speak.”

This year, a cadre of college buddies made a pilgrimage to the blackjack tables of Atlantic City, one laugh short. They brought Ugolyn’s favorite shoes — Italian leather loafers — with them. "As good luck,” said Bill Brunner, 24, of Philadelphia.

In November, Brunner sent an e-mail to Ugolyn. In it, he recalls meeting Ugolyn as a Columbia freshman in the dorm where they both lived. He talks of their fun in Atlantic City and Cancun.

"I apologize for not making it to your service, but funerals for close friends were never easy in the past, and you are no exception,” Brunner tells Ugolyn. "My only regret is that I did not get a chance to know you any better.”

And Brunner says jokingly to his buffed, basketball-playing friend, "hope you are still flexing those biceps in the big gym upstairs.”

In her messages to her old friend, Kristina Napolitano reminds Ugolyn of the nights out on the town when they were Columbia freshmen. "Ty,” she says in a March e-mail, "you’ll always be in my heart.”

Napolitano works in a building across from the World Trade Center and ached when she learned Ugolyn had gone to work that morning. Sometimes she looks out her Manhattan window now, out into the emptier distance, at what was once the Twin Towers.

"I think of Tyler,” she said. "He had this smile that was phenomenal. It could light up a room.”

He is still smiling.