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