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