Читать книгу Skyfisher - Dan Dowhal - Страница 9
ОглавлениеArticle updated Sunday 2 November 17:21
I thought I was done writing for the day, but the weather has turned nasty, and there’s not much else to do in this trailer. All that stuff I wrote earlier about Fisher’s eventual orgiastic lifestyle spawned vivid remembrances of the sexual scraps that came my way (at least for a little while) and made me horny, so I knocked off to masturbate and take a nap.
When I woke up, it was snowing, and I went out into the surrounding bush to gather some more firewood before the stuff got too deep. I doubt if a few inches of snow would deter any Phasmatian death monks from coming to get me, and the odds are it would in fact be easier for them to sneak up on me, but somehow that white blanket covering everything makes me feel a little more secure here in my snug, warm little hideaway. My strategy to conserve energy seems to be working, so I’m going to spend the evening plugging away at my own version of Revelations.
The next night, the three of us got together at Stan’s apartment, which would be our headquarters for the next several months. Fisher had already converted the living room into an office, complete with a big whiteboard for sketching out ideas. Stan was hard at work, poking away at the keys of his computer, while Fisher and I began methodically to lay out the guts of Phasmatia.
I don’t imagine any other person alive today can say he created an entire religion from scratch, certainly not one that would eventually rival the other major faiths on the planet—almost a billion card-carrying members at last count, and growing. Yes, as I’ve already told you, Fisher was the one who gets the lion’s share of the credit (blame?) for directing the eventual outcome, but I confess freely (and, damn it, to some extent proudly) to having had the major role in crafting the dogmatic details.
We began by coming up with a name for our religion. Here, Fisher, as a marketing expert, was in his element, even though our budget didn’t allow for high-priced brand consultants and focus groups. He stood in front of the whiteboard, writing down and crossing out possible candidate names, and you would have thought he was in a boardroom full of a dozen high-powered clients, not a cluttered apartment with two lowly accomplices. We must have poured through a thousand possible ideas, always cross-indexing them against trademarks and registered web domains, before settling on “Phasmatia,” derived from phasmatis, Latin for “spirit.” I’m positive, especially seeing as I studied Latin for four years in high school, that I’m the one who originally uttered the word. Fisher blessed it, added the more feminine “a” ending, which also made it unique, and proclaimed it his idea. I kept quiet. Homines libenter quod volunt credunt. Men freely believe what they want to.
Next, we drafted God into our cause. I was adamant, and Fisher readily concurred, that it was necessary to have a supreme deity at the core of all things. He was hell bent at first, however, to give Him/Her/It a unique name, physical incarnation, and personality, arguing that this would give our religion a uniquely recognizable spin.
I disagreed, feeling this would work against us, and became quite vocal on the subject. “You’re crazy!” I remember shouting. “If you tell people, for example, that the universe is run by some giant purple dragon with a million legs, they’ll just laugh at you.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of a sentient galaxy,” Fisher countered, and he rose to the whiteboard to again sketch out the stylized spiral symbol we had unanimously agreed earlier was the best of all the logos he had come up with. He was quite proud of it, I could tell as he doodled it over and over again—and judging by the number of people who now wear that symbol around their necks, it seems it was indeed a brilliant piece of design.
“But the universe has billions of galaxies,” I said. “Are you saying that it’s our own galaxy that’s alive? Are they supposed to worship the Milky Way then? And doesn’t that technically mean there just might be a pantheon of competitors out there? Not to mention the possibility of a higher intelligence that created those galaxies.”
“What do you suggest, then, an old man with a beard?” Fisher shot back sarcastically.
“But why have anything corporeal at all? Isn’t it better to keep it vague? ... some nebulous, but benign, all-pervading intelligent force transcending space and time ... ”
“A Universal Spirit! I like that.”
“Well, it’s hardly an original concept,” I admitted, “but maybe that’s a good thing. It would sound familiar.”
Fisher was already ahead of me. “No, no, you’re right. That would work in our favor. We don’t necessarily try to compete directly with the other religions. Rather than condemn them as false ideologies, we endorse them as facets of the same great ultimate truth. That would make it harder for them to slam us.”
Stan meanwhile hadn’t so much as murmured a single syllable for the past hour—he was concentrating so hard on his programming that we had forgotten all about him. But suddenly he lifted up his head from the keyboard and inquired, “How do I code that?”
“What do you mean?” Fisher asked.
“Well, our web site is supposed to be a place where people come to worship, right? If God, or The Universal Spirit, or whatever you want to call it, is this invisible cosmic force, what exactly then do our users see?”
That had Fisher backsliding. “He raises a good point. If our religion is going to be an immersive online experience, maybe we should have some visible representation of the deity ... you know, something for the advanced practitioners to aspire towards. It could still be ethereal ... say a sort of hovering, glowing, shifting shape.” He wasn’t really sold on the idea, though, and (Lord forgive me) turned to me for advice. “What do you think we should do, Brad?”
I groaned. “Sure, that’s fine ... if you want this to end up being some kind of video game—God Quest: The Battle for Your Immortal Soul—and frankly, with our budget, it’ll be a lame-ass game compared to the multi-million-dollar titles the big boys are cranking out.” I went over to the stack of religion texts and spilled them over the table. “Don’t you get it? All of these religions do. God needs to be invisible. That’s why they call it faith. As soon as you start depicting your deity as some hokey special effect, you open yourself up to the critics who’ll claim you stole the idea from Star Trek. Not to mention, if you’re trying to convince people this is the real deal, they’ll want to see God in real life.”
It has dawned on me more than once that the whole thing likely would have fizzled if I hadn’t been so brilliant with my ideas. Yes, Fisher ultimately brought it all to market and, like I said, he was an advertising genius, but I personally don’t believe Phasmatia would have worked without the real spiritual substance I gave it.
Stan, however, was still having trouble visualizing the virtual world he was being asked to build. “But if they don’t see God, then what’s in it for them?”
“You don’t come to the church, synagogue, or temple actually expecting to see God,” I pointed out, “yet they’ve been packing them in for millennia.”
Fisher jumped right in. Give him credit, he always caught on quickly. “Geez, Brad, you’re right. How could I have been so stupid? Of course we can’t let them see God ... that would ruin everything. It has to be the ultimate tease–the payoff you never have to deliver ... ”
“Until the next lifetime, that is,” I interjected with a smirk.
He smiled too, and turned to Stan. “What they’ll see are the priests, and a beautiful church, where they can acquire their own personal pew. And they’ll come to get the answers they seek—guidance for their everyday problems, answers to the great mysteries of life, and, most importantly, they’ll come to buy their way into a happy afterlife.”
Fisher was back in control. He began scrolling through his cellphone’s address book. “We’ll need to hire someone first rate to design the Church space and furniture,” he explained, “and a big-name fashion house for the priests’ robes.” He turned to me. “We’re going to need a creation myth, and a treatise on the fundamental nature of the human soul in relation to The Universal Spirit.”
Now there’s something a writer doesn’t hear every day, I told myself, but before I could bitch about the heavy demands suddenly being made of me, Fisher was on the phone, even though it was past 11 p.m., busily making arrangements.
It was a slack time for me at work, and with Stan taking a month’s vacation, there were few distractions. As long as I appeared busy at my computer screen, the powers-that-be let me be, and I surreptitiously got most of the writing Fisher demanded of me done on the job. Stan had warned me that my computer could be monitored by management, so I worked from a portable flash drive, and was very careful about what files I stored on the firm’s network drives. And, if they ever checked up on what web sites I was browsing, all they would have found was a predilection for comparative religion—pretty squeaky clean compared to all the porn and online games the rest of the company was secretly into.
In the evenings, after work, I would stop off on my way down to Tribeca and grab supper for the three of us. My arrival, and the meal break it precipitated, became something of a cause for celebration for the hardworking shut-ins. Still, as welcome as they made me feel, I couldn’t help but notice the bond that was strengthening daily between Stan and Fisher, who were, after all, spending virtually every waking hour together. I began to wonder if I had been purposely allowed to remain on the job, not for financial reasons, but to exorcise my former influence over Stan Shiu.
We fell into a groove, and it was really amazing how much we managed to accomplish in the first few weeks of development. Every night Fisher would critique the writings I brought home from the office, and then we would brainstorm and debate the next section in The Sacred Text. Steadily our dogma grew, and in hindsight, I have to say it was some of the best stuff I’ve ever written. And, with each day, my appreciation for Fisher’s creative genius only increased. I also feel I impressed him too, not just with my ability to turn a phrase, but with the metaphysical depth and soulful insight I brought to the exercise.
One point of thorny debate that arose again, however, was over the degree of morality that we would espouse for our followers. It was the same problem we had wrestled with, right here in this trailer, on that seminal night. Fisher again brought up the goal to attract young people with the web site, and wanted to offer an edgy, anything-goes sort of doctrine.
“Nothing’s going to turn a kid off more than a bunch of ‘Thou shalt not’ commandments,” he insisted. “They’re at the age where they want to cut loose ... to rebel against society.”
To my own surprise, mine was the rather vocal dissenting opinion. Fisher may have bought that stack of religious research texts, but I’m the guy who actually read them.
“Every successful religion has a moral code at its heart,” I said. “We have to do the same if we’re going to be taken seriously.”
“Come on, Brad, think outside the box,” Fisher chastised me (it was one of his favorite put-down clichés). “We’re going to be the alternative religion. People are lazy, greedy, horny, selfish hedonists by nature ... let’s give them what they want.”
“Come off it, you’re preaching spiritual nihilism!”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Well, for starters, how are we going to stay in charge of things if there are no rules?”
“By being in control of the good times they’ll be having. We’ll be the ringmasters ... the pushers that regulate their next fun fix.”
“Then why even try making it a religion? We’ll be just another online entertainment site and, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, we just don’t have enough money to compete with the dozens that are already succeeding out there.”
Fisher screwed up his face and began tugging at his left eyebrow—a sign, as I had learned by then, that my argument had hit home. He sighed. “Then what do you suggest?”
“I don’t think you’re giving kids enough credit,” I said. “Sure, they may be eager to break some laws, like the ones governing soft drugs and underage drinking, but overall I believe they’re generally decent ... well, except for the screwed-up freakazoids that bring an automatic rifle to school and open fire in the cafeteria. Look, within their own social groups, there are codes they follow, and follow willingly. They don’t typically rip one another off, or betray their friends.”
“That’s right,” Stan chimed in, ungluing his eyes from the computer screen for the first time in hours. “Even the most successful social networking sites lay down firm rules their users have to follow. It’s part of what prevents the bad apples from spoiling the experience for everyone. But, dammit, in order to program the logic, I need to know what those rules are going to be.”
Now that I had the reins again, I plunged on. “Remember that religion is first and foremost about your immortal soul, and about earning your way into heaven, or achieving nirvana, or whatever we choose to call it. After all, without a payoff in the end, there’s no real incentive to follow the rules or grant authority to the priests. We don’t want free-thinking nonconformists. We want unquestioning, obedient sheep.”
“It still sounds boring to me,” Fisher said. I began to realize, despite the fact he’s now become a bigger spiritual leader than the Pope and the Dalai Lama combined, that part of the reason Fisher didn’t get it was that he lacked any fundamental beliefs of his own. He never talked about his own religious upbringing, nor revealed anything to do with his own childhood, but from the few unguarded comments he let slip during the time we worked closely together, I don’t think he had ever truly believed in anything. Well, other than looking out for himself.
“Then let’s put some fun into it,” I suggested. “We’ll tell them that partying hearty and having sex is beautiful, and not a sin.”
“Within limits,” Fisher said, with a smug grin, “as long as they don’t harm others, or themselves.” As I’ve said, he was a quick study.
The next few weeks are a bit of a blur, but based on what came out of them, I’d have to call that time the single most productive period of my life. I was surviving on a couple of hours of sleep a night, and pretty much writing non-stop the rest of the time. I’d get as much done at work each day as my Warren & McCaul duties allowed, and then I’d crank it up even more every evening, and on weekends, at Stan’s apartment, where I had my own designated corner filled floor to ceiling with religion books. Often I just put down my head and slept there, with the Bible, or Koran, or Upanishads as my pillow.
Initially, Fisher would look over what I’d written and offer some token suggestions, but I guess he soon realized he had little of substance to contribute to the arcane minutiae, and let me plunge ahead on my own. Besides, he and Stan had plenty of work of their own as the web site moved closer to its big reveal.
Normally, my output isn’t so good when I’m tired, but in this case I felt inspired and uplifted, despite the ongoing sleep deprivation. The stuff just seemed to write itself. Oh, and what beautiful words they were. Firstly, there was the metaphysics, and I personally feel I did a brilliant job walking the fine line between the novel and the familiar, so that the religion would seem new and exciting, but ring true in an archetypal way.
Any Phasmatians who are reading this will recognize it all, of course. Your body is merely a vessel and an incubator for your soul, which is a microcosmic manifestation of the great Universal Spirit—a positive and sentient all-pervading life force whose brightness counters the destructive darkness of intrinsic entropy. That’s right, boys and girls, it’s all about light versus dark. Now that’s hardly original, I know, but I’m especially proud of the modern touches I added to bring that ancient plot line up to date.
I had roomed with a physics major during my first year at Columbia, and remember him going on and on about dark energy, the hot new topic in astrophysics. You can’t see dark energy, and it’s all purely hypothetical, but it always stuck in my mind that these physics geeks had nevertheless established that dark energy accounted for seventy-four per cent of the total mass-energy in the universe, and was propelling its accelerating expansion. So, dark energy became the bad guy in our dogma, and The Universal Spirit is the heroic cosmological force resisting it.
A piece of The Universal Spirit is within you. Like a fire that needs tending, your own spirit must be nurtured and fed. With cultivation (and the guidance of the Church, of course) your essence can achieve a divine state of spiritual energy that transcends space and time, and persists beyond the death of the body. But if you neglect your essence, or allow it to become besotted with negative energy, then it will shrivel to a state where, once your body can no longer sustain it, your spirit will be swallowed up and extinguished by the dark force.
That brings me to Part Deux, our moral code. In setting down these basic rules for a fit and healthy soul, I borrowed the best from Aquinas to Zoroaster, with choice bits of Aesop, Mark Twain, Nietzsche, Gandhi, and Tony Robbins thrown in for good measure. I’ll be honest, there’s absolutely nothing original there (other than the rewording, so I couldn’t be accused of outright plagiarism). After all, how do you improve on “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “Do the right thing”?
I think my only stroke of genius was to point out to the young adults, who were our prime audience, the shortcomings and hypocrisy of previous generations, so that the young would feel rebellious and revolutionary by being good. It wasn’t much of a sell to convince them their parents had screwed up the planet, and were morally and socially impotent. Each new generation always feels like it’s invented sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. I just added virtue to the list.
So, out with greed, and destructiveness, and violence, and hypocrisy, and misogyny, and excess. Embrace creativity, and charity, and compassion, and tolerance, and patience, and love, and kindness. Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s the same old litany of sins and virtues that have been preached for millennia, mixed with self-improvement clichés. What can I say? The classics never go out of style. But even though we were shamelessly ripping off ideas from just about every credo that ever existed, I felt it important to be fresh and inspirational. That’s why (you’re welcome) music and parties and consensual sex are formally endorsed. Just remember to protect the environment and meditate twice a day first.
Maybe I was merely responding to an aching and emptiness within myself, but I wanted to create something uplifting that would give people hope and make them want to be better, happier human beings. So, even if the trappings and mythology of Phasmatia are all pure fiction, I believe the fundamental code of personal conduct I created absolutely rings true. It is a distillation of everything that is fine and decent in the traditions of human spirituality, updated for the realities of our modern times. I guess what I’m really saying is that I hope this exposé doesn’t cause a backlash amongst all of you who have believed and followed your faith. Yes, I want you to take down and punish that evil megalomaniacal monster, Sky Fisher, and his murderous inner circle, but that doesn’t mean we have to undo the good that has come out of Phasmatia.
After we set down our fundamental doctrine, and despite all the inspirational prose I wrapped it in, we soon realized something was still lacking. Stan was doing a bang-up job putting together the web site, and Fisher had hired a bunch of hot-shot young game developers out of the New York Film School to build the virtual world where the worshippers would congregate, but when we started preliminary testing the responses we were getting were lukewarm. Everything looked beautiful, and the interaction and performance were smooth as silk, but the overall experience was boring.
That’s when I saw a new side of Lou (soon to be Sky) Fisher, which I now know to be a much more accurate representation of his true nature. He went ballistic, and started blaming the two of us, but especially me, for the shortcomings.
“I should never have listened to a moron like you,” he railed, sweeping papers and office supplies off the table and onto the floor, then kicking them around for good measure. “You’re an incompetent hack.” He came over to where I was sitting in an armchair, and leaned over right into my face, baring his teeth. “Thanks to you, everything is ruined, and I’m bankrupt.”
“Fuck you!” I screamed back at him. “Don’t you dare try to blame this on me!” I leapt to my feet to confront him.
“You’re the one who said we should make it some lame, goody-two-shoes religion. Peace, love, and fucking understanding. Yeah, right.”
“And you’re supposed to be the marketing hot-shot that can sell sand to Arabs. Don’t point your finger at me, asshole.”
I don’t know how long we stood there, toe to toe, trying to stare each other down. It was one of those pivotal moments that you examine in hindsight, and realize how dramatically different life could have been if you’d chosen to act differently. I should have just bitch-slapped the sucker, and walked out the door. If I had, the whole scheme would have died, Stan Shiu would still be alive, and I wouldn’t be hiding in a trailer in the woods waiting to be murdered.
“Look, there’s no point in freaking out,” I finally said, choosing to try to defuse the situation. “Arguing will get us nowhere. I’m telling you, we’re really close. It’s just missing something ... a hook of some sort. I don’t know what it is yet, but we can solve the problem.”
“I’ll tell you what the problem is!” Fisher screamed, knocking over a chair and kicking the wall. “You’re a useless drunk. Hacks like you are a dime a dozen. I don’t know why I ever thought you had what it takes to do something ... something great!”
Oddly enough, my blind rage had subsided by this point, and his latest insults just bounced off me. I was suddenly determined to show him just what I could do. Now I look back and hate myself for it. Christ, where was my backbone? Why did I need so badly to impress a man who was berating and insulting me? It would be easy to lie and say I did it out of pride, or because I had already invested so much, emotionally and intellectually, in the venture. But it seems to me, what I really did was submit to Fisher’s will—I caved in and wimped out in an act of blatant submission, as surely as if I’d lain down on the floor, rolled over, and exposed my throat to the snarling dominant male.
“Just get off my case for a while, and you’ll see,” I said. “I can fix it.”
“Well, I’m not giving up, and so you sure as hell better not either,” Fisher warned, needing to have the final word, even though he was, in essence, acquiescing to my demands. He turned to Stan. “And as for you, if you’re such a genius, then come up with something nobody’s ever done before instead of stealing other people’s ideas.” With that he went off to the bathroom for the next hour to grunt and curse and try to force out another one of his microscopic turds.
When he came out again, his anger seemed to be spent, and although the three of us scarcely exchanged a word the rest of the evening, we threw ourselves back into the work. I stayed up all night, and phoned in sick the next day, just so I could keep at it and figure out what was missing from our online religious experience.
The answer, when it finally came to me, arrived like a thunderbolt from the heavens. I had just been plowing though the pages of those religious texts again, but my revelation actually came as I was staring vacuously at the whole collective stack of books or, more accurately, at the titles on their spines.
“That’s it!” I exclaimed. “I know what’s missing. Ah, man, it’s so simple.” And I started laughing like a mad fool (which I probably am).
Fisher came running and looked at me angrily, hating to be left out for even a minute. “What? What? Tell me!”
“We need a prophet,” I said proudly. I expected them both to see the light as brightly and profoundly as I did, but the look on their faces was one of annoyance and disappointment instead. Fisher cursed under his breath and went to walk away. I think he thought I was playing some kind of joke, and was trying to say we needed to find a fortune teller to divine our solution. I grabbed him by the arm and spun him around to face the pile of books.
“Here, look,” I said. “What’s this title say?”
“A History of Christianity,” he read, the impatience virtually dripping from his words.
“And this one?”
“Buddhism Explained. What the fuck’s your point, Brad?”
“Don’t you get it? Those religions are named after a human who espoused them, not after the God being worshipped per se. Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra—the great religions are as much cults of personality as they are about the actual doctrine. We need to offer our followers someone to actually follow.”
Fisher gave that some thought. “What about the Jews?” he said finally. “That religion is named after the people themselves.”
“Maybe so, but it preaches the Messiah will come and walk among them. And meanwhile they’ve had more prophets than you can shake a staff at—it’s as much about Abraham, and Noah, and Moses, and Solomon, and Ezekiel as it is about God.”
“So, what you’re saying is our product needs a spokesperson,” Fisher mused, and I could tell from his facial expression he had not only caught up to me, conceptually speaking, but had shot right by me.
I don’t need to tell you who Fisher eventually arrived at as the figurehead for Phasmatia—he anointed himself—and I want to go on the record as saying I had no hand in that particular decision. In fact, I didn’t even realize he was doing it at first. He went back to our group of game developers and got them to build us a new and very special avatar for our virtual temple. Meanwhile, Stan jumped onto the logistics of how this new, key figure was going to figure in the overall programming.
I was more preoccupied with what to call our new character, and how he (I refuse to capitalize it as “He,” despite the conventional usage) fit into our whole overriding sacred dogma. I didn’t want to name him explicitly, because I thought it would work better if he was somewhat mysterious and nebulous. The Prophet, The Messiah, and The Savior were already branded, so to speak, and so I finally settled on The Chosen One.
In all the test renderings the animators sent us, The Chosen One was clothed in these amazingly beautiful shiny robes, and wore an exquisite ornate headpiece, which Fisher explained proudly had been conceived by a three-time Oscar-winning costume designer, and therefore had not come cheaply. Plus, the figure was always shrouded in a backlit purple aura, so it was hard to make out his face in any detail.
It wasn’t until I was doing some testing of our improved web site that I found out what Fisher had done. In these trial runs, I would register as a new user/worshipper, and try as objectively as I could to put myself in the head of someone experiencing our virtual world for the first time. On this occasion, I had signed up as a seventeen-year-old cheerleader from Idaho named Cindy, and was chatting with a couple of other like-minded online buddies who were complimenting me on my newly posted profile.
Even though I knew both of the people I was apparently exchanging messages with were really synthetic characters generated by Stan’s software (later, as our enrolment grew, there would mostly be real participants), I played along as best I could. And then one of the characters, who was supposed to be a high school senior named Todd from Tacoma, Washington, suddenly interrupted, acting all excited.
Hey wow!! Let’s go check out the special gathering in the Great Hall. The Chosen One’s going to be there himself!!! Todd typed.
Who’s The Chosen One? I replied, playing along.
He’s soooooo cool, my other new (and artificial) friend, Brittany from Texas, jumped in. When I broke up with my boyfriend he like totally helped make me feel better. Come on, let’s go see him.
So I clicked on the appropriate icon, and a new window appeared on my computer screen showing the Great Hall. Even though I’d seen it dozens of times before, the space never failed to impress me (which is a good thing considering how much we’d paid for its virtual architecture). The scene showed hundreds of happy, good-looking kids around my (i.e. Cindy’s) age gathered in front of a stage, where a rock band was playing. (If I’d been portraying a retiree from Florida, the crowd would have looked very different—more like the lawn bowling club from Sunset Acres, only happier and healthier.)
Make sure your sound’s turned on, Brittany advised me, and so I obliged. My speakers were flooded with a catchy pop ditty as the band strutted their stuff on stage. The real me knew the band was a talented, but unknown, bunch of musicians from New Jersey recruited by Fisher, but I tried to stay in Cindy’s naïve little mind and enjoy the experience, although also fully prepared to drop out the minute I felt we’d exceeded her short little teen attention span.
The song wrapped up, and the band simply faded away in a dancing whirl of smoke. (You’ve got to love virtual worlds, where the laws of physical reality can be suspended at will.) A resonating voice then came out of thin air, and my jaw dropped, because I recognized the speaker immediately.
“We can make life better,” the voice—Fisher’s voice—said, and despite my indignation and incredulity, I have to admit it was slick and soothing. “There is a great force all around us. The Universal Spirit of love and harmony.” A shimmering glow appeared in mid-air and then solidified into the figure of The Chosen One, in all his costumed splendor, as he glided down to the stage. He had a beatific smile on his face, and I recognized instantly that Fisher had modeled the face after his own.
I spun in my seat, ready to launch a verbal tirade at Fisher, who earlier had been sitting and scribbling notes in Stan’s armchair. But he was suddenly standing right there behind me. The smug sneer on his face was a far cry from the saintly smile of his virtual doppelganger.
He chuckled. “So, what do you think? Pretty fucking good, eh?” He leaned over me to turn up the volume on the speakers, so he could hear his own sermon better, and I had to resist the urge to grab him by the throat.
“Who the hell said you could be The Chosen One?”
“Hey, easy Brad,” Fisher said patronizingly, “you were the one who insisted we needed a spiritual leader. I just figured it was too important to entrust to an outside actor. And then imagine the extra cost. On top of a repertoire of sermons, we’re going to need thousands of hours of voice recordings to cover all the possible things The Chosen One can say to users one-on-one when he appears at appropriate times. If this thing catches on the way we hope, any actor we hire would have us over a barrel in the future.”
“But why you?”
“Who else? Stan? Or you?” He had a point. Stan was an insecure introvert who habitually stumbled over his words if he talked anything other than technospeak. Although he was born an American, Cantonese had been his first language, and there was an oddity to his speech—not quite an accent, but something that made his English sound imperfect. As for me, I’m fine when communicating via my keyboard, but I’m no public speaker. My voice can get a little high-pitched and I have a tendency to forget what I was about to say, especially when I get flustered. Back at Columbia, my professors had discouraged me from any career choice that would entail appearing on camera.
Fisher, on the other hand, was an accomplished pitchman who made a living out of persuading people. His voice was a mellow baritone, and he had an actor’s gift of controlling emphasis and cadence. I also recalled from his bio, which I’d once edited for the W&M corporate web site, that he was much in demand internationally as a speaker at conferences and symposia.
“Okay, I get it,” I said, my voice instantly getting squeaky to prove his point, “but why does he look like you?”
Fisher shrugged. “He had to look like somebody, and this way we’re covered in case we ever have to make the jump to the real world.”
In case we ever have to make the jump to the real world. Those simple words, said so nonchalantly at the time, now speak volumes in hindsight. And, in truth, Fisher wasn’t a bad-looking man. He had thick brown hair, a strong chin, piercing hazel eyes, and a dazzling smile that was a testament to the art and technology of cosmetic dentistry. He was a little on the short side, and that might explain his need to overachieve, but there is no shortage of successful height-challenged politicians and actors. I had no choice but to admit Fisher was perfect for the job.
Mind you, I should have heeded my own writing. I was, after all, the one that put down in The Sacred Text that we should not be deceived by the appearance of the vessel outside, for what’s truly important is the quality and quantity of spirit burning inside. Amen. In Fisher’s case, the glib tongue and photogenic smile hid a scheming, greedy, and power-hungry sociopath. And that, folks, is the bottom line on the top dog.
