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