Читать книгу Skyfisher - Dan Dowhal - Страница 11

Article updated Tuesday 4 November 9:31

Oh my God. They may have found me. At least, someone walked by here yesterday while I was passed out, and checked the place out. When I stepped outside to fetch some more wood, I saw footprints in the snow, leading right up to the window, where it looks like my visitor peeked into the trailer before circling around once and walking out again to the road. It’s a good thing I’d thrown a tarp over my motorcycle when I first arrived, because it was well hidden under a mound of snow. Or buried, I should say. As excellent a choice as the bike may have been for escaping Manhattan, I don’t think it’ll get me very far in all this snow.

Of course, it might only have been a passing hunter, or a nosy neighbor. But if it was one of the Phasmatians, then it looks like the weather (and being under it) may have saved my life. The heavy snowfall would have covered my earlier tracks, plus, whoever peeked into the trailer wouldn’t have seen me huddled up top in the sleeping berth, and there would have been no lights on, or smoke coming from the chimney.

I’m not sure what to do next. My fresh tracks and the wood smoke from my fire are a dead giveaway if anyone comes back, but if I wanted to make an escape now, I’d have to walk out–not that I have anywhere to go. So, I guess I’ll just stay here and hope my visitor doesn’t come back. Meanwhile, even if I don’t know yet how I’m actually going to get it distributed to anyone, I’m going to keep relating the truth behind Sky Fisher.

With the addition of The Chosen One as our cyberprophet, plus a few gigabytes of software revisions Stan had added to make the web site perfectly attuned to a visitor’s profile and activities, Fisher felt it was time to open the doors of our virtual church to the public. Not only did he want to shake out any bugs our own internal testing may have missed, but he also wanted to amass a significant base of users before launching any full-scale media blitz.

That strategy made perfect sense to me and Stan, not that we really had a say in the matter. Although our respective programming and writing activities never seemed to end as we tweaked and fine-tuned the web site, we were now pretty much taking a back seat as Fisher assumed control. While we took him at his word that he could use his advertising genius to fan the flames of interest in our web site into a full-out internet conflagration that would make us all rich, that first initial spark was still vital. But I had more than a few doubts about Fisher’s ability to make it a go. I’ve always had a fatalistic (some say pessimistic) view of life, and was fully expecting our scheme to fail.

By now, Stan had finished his month’s vacation (which he had stretched out by an extra couple of weeks with some unpaid leave) and had returned to work at Warren & McCaul. Each night the two of us would take the subway down to Tribeca and rejoin Fisher at the apartment, although Stan would inevitably be working on his laptop computer the whole way, and I felt like our former closeness had disappeared. I guess the emotional (and financial) investment in the Phasmatian project weighed heavily on us, and had altered the nature of our relationship forever.

In the beginning, the faithful certainly did not come flocking to us. Each night, under a gaggle of aliases, we would log on to other social networking web sites and try to induce people to come check out our virtual church. The skepticism and resistance was palpable. It would have been easier to convince people that the Queen of England was secretly pregnant with an alien’s baby.

Fisher had also hired a dozen college students to help us with our online solicitations, although he kept them as much in the dark about our project as possible. The students had some marginal success, but of everyone it was me who proved by far to be the most effective at making converts. My technique was simple. I pretended to be an attractive teenage girl, posting fake photos of myself I’d lifted off the web, and Photoshopped just enough so they wouldn’t be recognizable. I’d drop subtle hints I might be promiscuous, and soon had the young bucks chatting with me—salivating and eating out of my hand. Then I’d leave, saying I was off to join my girlfriends on the Phasmatian site. Voilà! A few minutes later, one or two of the young males would inevitably show up there, having first dutifully registered in order to gain access.

We each kept tabs on our progress–sort of the equivalent of a salesman’s call sheet–and my superior success rate soon became evident. A few nights after our soft launch I was watching over Fisher’s shoulder as some guy flamed him after being told to go visit the Phasmatian site in order to seek salvation.

Fisher looked up at me sheepishly. “I don’t have your knack at convincing them, and me a card-carrying master of persuasion.”

I shrugged, although the act of surpassing Fisher at something always gave me a warm glow. “Your problem is that you’re trying to grab them by their souls,” I explained. “Me, I lead them by their dicks.” I explained my technique to him.

Fisher’s eyebrow shot up, and he spun in his chair. “Hey, Stan, did you hear that?”

Stan grunted acknowledgement from his computer without skipping a keystroke.

“Can you write a program to do the same thing Brad here is doing?” Fisher asked.

That brought Stan’s fingers to a halt as he contemplated the challenge. “I dunno, Lou, it’s not the same thing as when we’re on our own server ... you know, where we have total control over every single piece of the data being trafficked back and forth. I mean, Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Twitter, Yahoo—each one of those sites is totally different, and we’re strictly limited to what we can access via a browser.”

Fisher said nothing. He understood Stan well enough by now to know the propeller on his head just needed to spin a few more times in order to start crunching out possible solutions. “Then again,” Stan mused, “I could write a custom plug-in that would automatically cut and paste data to the chat from a special inferencing engine that’s running in parallel under the covers.” His face brightened as the light bulb over his head went on. “Yeah, yeah ... that would do it, and of course we already have all the code for natural language processing and for simulating human dialog, including variations on dialect, age, gender, etc.” He turned to us and tried to look stern, but you could just see how he was busting out with pride at his own cleverness. “Naturally, I would need an exact set of rules to follow.”

“No problemo,” said Fisher, jerking a thumb my way. “Brad’ll write down the steps he follows ... and while we’re at it, let’s see if we can figure out a way to make this work on women too. I don’t want a congregation that’s nothing but horny teenage males.”

Fisher needn’t have worried. We soon discovered lures and come-ons that worked even better on women, although unlike the one-track sex-obsessed minds of the boys, the algorithms Stan had to program for chicks were much more complex. They didn’t follow boys into Phasmatia, for instance, but they did follow other girls. I think in general women are more spiritual than men, and that explains why today a majority of the Phasmatian priesthood and general membership are female. Of course, I like to think the gender-neutral and egalitarian dogma of The Sacred Text helped—the one place where my skills for writing ad copy really paid off. In fact, once we saw the groundswell of female supporters, we soon took to referring to The Universal Spirit as “She.” That’s why I find it so ironic that all my pro-feminist efforts only ended up helping to stock Sky Fisher’s harem with willing sex-slaves.

Within a week we had launched the equivalent of a robot army, crawling all over the internet and creating an artificial buzz about the Phasmatian web site. Initially the growth, although steady, was still slow. The amount of time people were spending on the web site was sparse, and most dropped out and never returned. But then, shazam, things seemed to reach some kind of critical mass, and abruptly our popularity began to grow exponentially. I won’t pretend to fully understand how exactly we caught on, even with the crystal-clear vision of hindsight. I mean, why do hula hoops and Texas Hold ’em Poker suddenly become international crazes, while other ideas, better designed or more intrinsically appealing, fall by the wayside? Naturally, Fisher was quick to puff up his chest and start pontificating about the psychology of viral marketing, but I know for a fact the bastard didn’t really have a clue either.

Nor did we have time to start pondering and analyzing what had inexplicably gone right. Having caught the wave, all of a sudden we were being pulled along at breakneck speed on the ride of our lives. The demands on our time became huge. Stan was constantly debugging code, upgrading functionality, and expanding his racks of servers to keep up with the growing numbers of users. And I was now being asked a thousand questions by our burgeoning flock of cyberfollowers about the esoterica of the Phasmatian dogma. Well, usually not me specifically—the questions were being directed to our virtual priests (although I would regularly assume the role of a priest and wander amongst the faithful, so to speak, chatting directly with them.)

Stan’s software was good—brilliant really—but in the end there are real limitations to so-called artificial intelligence. Don’t misunderstand me, the behavior of our synthetic characters was more than adequate for staging canned rituals, and in simple meet-and-greet scenarios they were brilliant. I felt we even held up well when troubled people really started to open up their aching souls to us. The programmed responses weren’t quite as sleazy as the old psychiatrists’ trick of asking, “And how did that make you feel?” when someone has just admitted to wanting to screw their kid brother. Our replies were full of flowery Phasmatian platitudes, but were equally vague. When you’re asking hard questions about the nature of the universe, the limitations of the programming became evident. I mean, cryptic answers like, “seek the shining light, and in its reflection you will find yourself,” will only get you so far when someone has just asked, for example, where The Chosen One came from.

When I suggested to Stan that we needed to make the replies of our virtual priests and priestesses more specific and believable, I got an earful. He summarily acquainted me with the Turing Test, one of the holy grails of AI. If you’re not familiar with it, you can Google it (as Stan rather testily made me do), but the bottom line is this: nobody has written a program yet that’s good enough to dupe discerning users into thinking they’re talking to a human instead of a computer.

“And here I thought you were a genius,” I quipped to Stan, and was somewhat surprised at how flustered he became at my innocent (I thought) joking.

“Screw you,” he spat back. “If I was that good, I sure as hell wouldn’t be working for Warren & McCaul, would I?”

I had been able to tease Stan about stuff like that back in the day when we were carefree barflies, but now the interminable progression of long, stressful days had soured his mood ... or else perhaps I’d touched a private nerve.

“Whoa, chill, dude ... I was only pulling your leg,” I said, giving him a big man-hug to show I cared. “Your code is fan-fucking-tastic. Most of the people out there haven’t got a clue they’re not talking to a real person ... in fact, I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve gotten as far as we have.” Admittedly I said it to placate him, but I was being perfectly sincere. “If I understand that technobabble you just made me read, then what you’ve done here is, like, totally cutting edge. Hell, dude ... you should publish a paper on the subject.”

You could actually see Stan’s scrawny chest puff up six inches with pride. He gave me a friendly punch in the arm, and for a brief instant it was just like old times. But then Fisher, that cosmic killjoy, who had been working away at his workstation yet eavesdropping the whole time, had to piss all over our parade. “Nobody’s publishing any damned papers,” he yelled, jumping to his feet and waving his arms like a cartoon dictator. “Do you want the whole world to know our secrets?”

“Hey, take it easy,” I said. “It’s not like we’re doing anything illegal, is it? In fact, it might be a neat angle for your PR campaign.”

“Don’t tell me how to do my job,” Fisher screamed. “The problem here is that you’re not doing yours.”

Chip away at a man’s sleep long enough and he gets kind of crazy. I went off like a Roman candle. “What the hell are you talking about? I’ve been working my fucking ass off! I can’t remember the last time I had more than a couple hours of sleep!” I guess in my mind I assumed Stan would be a natural ally, and so I pressed the offensive against the tyrannical Fisher. “Stan and I are both working two jobs, you know. What the hell do you do during the day?”

“A hell of a lot more than you,” Fisher said, and from the spectacular shade of red his face was turning, I could tell he was really angry. “Yeah, you go off to your petty agency job, alright, but I’m the one who’s put himself out there with absolutely everything on the line. Do you want to know what I do during the day? Well, I’ll tell you ... I bust my buns to keep coming up with the cash that’s keeping this thing going, and it’s ten times the money both of you have put up, combined.” He came right up in my face, and as long as I live, I’ll always remember his crazed, twisted-up expression, and the retched breath, which had a brimstone-like smell to it, not necessarily for any demonic reasons, but because he’d been living off nothing but black coffee, and probably hadn’t been inside a bathroom to brush his teeth—or shit—in days. “It’s not Stan’s software that needs fixing, it’s your religion.” (Funny how, all of a sudden, it was my religion.) “Right now, you need to plug up the holes in the dogma ... you need to give all those people the sort of details and answers they’re clamoring for.”

“He’s right, Brad,” Stan said from behind me, and I felt like I’d been kicked in the balls. The poor, brainwashed little prick was actually taking Fisher’s side. Right then and there I was tempted to walk out on both of them—to quit the whole insane endeavor, and go find a decent meal, and get roaring drunk, or better yet (seeing as my credit cards were all maxed out anyway), to just go home and sleep for a week.

I sincerely doubt if my departure at that point would have stopped anything. By then, the huge Phasmatian snowball was already racing uncontrollably downhill, getting bigger by the second. It’s a moot point anyway because, one more time, I threw up my hands and capitulated.

“What do I need to do?” I hated myself the second I saw the smug self-satisfied smile ooze onto Fisher’s face. But it was really Stan I was talking to, and together he and I figured out a way for me to essentially be in a thousand places at once. More accurately, what Stan created was a real-time pipeline for me directly into the knowledge base used by the virtual Phasmatian priesthood in its online conversations. I may be a professional wordsmith, but I quickly learned a whole slew of new words like polysemy and ontology and semantic reasoning that made my poor head hurt (even more).

But, since Stan is no longer here to roll his eyes and grumble if I oversimplify things, I’ll explain it this way: What we did was collect all the key theological and liturgical questions that were being asked by our burgeoning mass of followers, and then, as quickly as I could, I would devise an answer for each of them, which was then instantly written into a database of possible responses and reused by the virtual priests and priestesses in our online world.

That was how The Chosen One came to stand on the top of Mount Skylight to receive the directive for Phasmatia directly from The Universal Spirit. By now, The Chosen One’s identity had been revealed as Sky Fisher, since our worshippers had demanded in no small measure to know more details about their human savior. With his marketing savvy, Fisher had effected the name change to a much hipper-sounding and more mysterious Sky, a variant of his middle name, Skyler, but this was one of the few direct contributions he made to the theological content. He was far too busy making random “live” appearances on the web site, when not planning the next big step in the overall marketing plan.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that more people wanted to know what Sky Fisher ate for breakfast than about the virtues that would bring us closer to The Universal Spirit. We had created a religious superstar, and the masses have a bottomless fascination for celebrity. (Just witness the state of today’s television shows.) So, I spent a lot of time inventing little details about Fisher and his holy calling, although at the same time making sure we kept him suitably mysterious.

I purposely chose Mount Skylight as the site of his divine epiphany because I had hiked to its summit, back in my days as a Boy Scout, during a camping trip to Lake Tear-In-the-Clouds, source of the Hudson River. Aside from having a cool-sounding name, I remember having felt a sort of quiet rapture standing on its peak, and thought it would be a nice addition to the growing lore of Sky Fisher. (Besides, even though we were safeguarding Fisher’s anonymity, I felt it prudent to place him somewhere believably local. Sure, the top of Mount Everest would have been much more dramatic, but the records would easily have demonstrated he’d never been there.)

The constant demands of the Phasmatian worshippers and the lack of sleep were taking their toll on me, and I constantly felt like I was inches away from a breakdown. Even when I did crash for a few hours, whatever dreams I managed to have were inevitably haunted by faceless people clamoring after me for answers.

Needless to say, my work at Warren & McCaul began to suffer, and finally one day I was called into my boss’s office and warned that my job was on the line if I didn’t pull up my socks. Given how far in debt I was, I couldn’t afford to lose the income. That night I went back to Fisher and told him something needed to change.

“I can’t keep this up any longer. I swear I’m about to lose it.” I knew the others were working as hard as I was, and financially were in far deeper than me, so I thought it was an opportune time to talk about where the entire out-of-control venture was headed.

“This thing’s grown too big for the three of us,” I continued. “If it’s going to work, then we’re going to have to hire more people to help us out ... talented people we can rely on. And that takes money.” I remembered Fisher’s frequent reminders about the disproportionate amount of his cash already invested in the venture, so I moved to preempt him. “You’ve poured the lion’s share into this thing, Sky,”—we had already started using his new name by then—“so I’d be interested in knowing how you plan on keeping this going ... and getting your money back.” I turned to Stan. “How many users do we have now?”

“Over 250,000 and counting,” he said, although his eyes never left Fisher’s face.

I whistled. “A quarter million! Man, if we could only get, like, two bucks out of each one of them on average, we’d be back in the black in no time.” I let that hang there, and waited for Fisher’s response. I half expected him to take a temper tantrum of some sort, and to start blaming things on me, as per usual. Even with all the effort I’d put into the project at that point, I think part of me was hoping he’d push me too far this time, and finally compel me to quit.

Instead, he smiled benevolently at us (which, in some ways, was scarier than his angry outbursts) and nodded. “Yes, I agree totally. In fact, I’ve been giving all this very serious thought over the past couple of days, and I’ve already taken the next step.” He went over to what had once been Stan’s dining room table, but now had been expropriated as Fisher’s personal desk, and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “Today I filed the forms to have us incorporated as a formal church. With that, I was able to open up a merchant account that lets us start taking donations online. If I’m not mistaken, Stan has almost finished writing the software to start passing around the virtual collection plate, so to speak.” He looked directly at me with that self-satisfied, lopsided grin of his. “I’m pretty sure we can average better than two dollars a head.”

This was not something we had discussed among ourselves ... or that they’d talked about with me, at any rate. I snatched the papers from his hands and began to scan them quickly.

“Us ... a formal church? We can do that? I know there are hundreds of weird-ass congregations out there, but how do we qualify? I mean, it’s really just the three of us and a web site!”

“Ah, but we do have hundreds of thousands of worshippers. The Supreme Court has already set a precedent ... I believe it related to recognizing the Wiccans.” He shuffled around the papers on the table and found what he was looking for. “Ah, yes, here it is: Members of the Church sincerely adhere to a fairly complex set of doctrines relating to the spiritual aspect of their lives, and in doing so they have ultimate concerns in much the same way as followers of more accepted religions. Their ceremonies and leadership structure, their rather elaborate set of articulated doctrine, their belief in the concept of another world, and their broad concern for improving the quality of life for others gives them at least some facial similarity to other more widely recognized religions.”

Fisher was starting to get a glint in his eye that I had spotted once or twice in the past, and would become all too familiar with in the years to come. I call it his Almighty Look. “I’ve already talked to a lawyer friend of mine,” Fisher continued, “and she’s totally confident we can make an identical argument for Phasmatia. And, trust me, if the government resists, we’ll get our followers to stage a massive protest they won’t be able to ignore ... plus, the publicity from it will guarantee tens of thousands of new recruits.”

He went to take the papers back, and although he did it casually, I got the distinct feeling he was trying to hide something from me. I squeezed down and jerked the forms back to scrutinize their contents more closely. My own action was not performed as subtly as his, and must have betrayed my suspicion. Fisher’s face squeezed into a frown, but he let me look. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t get what he was doing, but I saw it immediately.

“Stan and I aren’t listed here,” I said. “We don’t have an active interest.”

“I know. It’s for your own good, Brad. As a church—and, really, that’s just another form of a charitable organization—none of the net profits are allowed to go to private shareholders. I know how hard up you are for cash ... I wanted to make sure you were in a position to take out money freely, without it creating an issue about our tax-exempt status.”

“Makes sense,” Stan chimed in, and I could have walloped him. How could anyone so smart be so stupid? Sure, it made perfect sense–if you were standing in Fisher’s shoes. Maybe Stan still worshipped the ground Fisher stood on, but I could see what the devious prick was up to.

“But you’re the only one of us who’s a director,” I pointed out.

“Well, naturally, we have to make sure we keep control, don’t we? And I’m already the official face of the Church anyway.” He finally managed to slide the papers out from my fingers, and waved it casually in front of my face. “Honestly, Brad, all this means is we’re able to start collecting money on the web site. That’s the important thing, right? After all, you’re the one that just stormed in here demanding an end to our current dilemma ... well, here it is. Our troubles are over.”

“And what about you, Sky? Aren’t you worried about conflict of interest and fallout from the IRA when you start trying to get some of your own money back? I mean, you’ve got a couple hundred thousand invested in this.”

“Closer to a half million ... I cashed in my pension fund two weeks ago ... but that’s not the point. Hell, we’ll be pretty much pouring every penny back into the Church anyway. But now we’ll finally have the kind of money we need to hire staff and launch a proper marketing campaign. Oh, sure, we’re starting to take off ... but we can really make this baby fly!”

As he spoke, and got all worked up, I noticed something odd about his mannerisms. By nature, given his former position in the ad agency, he was a talented speaker. But now his style had changed somewhat, becoming more deliberate and theatrical. There was something familiar about it, and it took a few minutes to sink in. He was starting to emulate the style of Sky Fisher, The Chosen One, from the online experience. The motions of that virtual character had been choreographed by the original crew of animators, and I seem to recall they’d actually put both a dancer and a magician in their motion-capture suit in order to come up with just the right hybrid body language. I never knew whether it was deliberate, or if Fisher had subconsciously picked up the habits from all the time he spent online shadowing his virtual alter ego, but now he was starting to speak and behave the same way.

I’m going to knock off the writing for today. Actually, I’m surprised I’ve gotten as much down as I have, given that I’ve been getting up every few minutes to look out the windows for anyone who might be trying to sneak up on me. I’m running low on firewood too, and it’s going to be a lot harder to round some up with all the snow covering everything. Who would have expected this kind of weather in the first week of November, even in New York? I also need to inventory my food supply, and figure out what I’m going to do next.