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