Menlo Park, CA -- Take one sheet of wafer-thin edible fiber card-stock. Insert into a special printer of taste and smell. Download a coded chemical recipe. Print. Shred wine-flavoured part of paper and dissolve in water. Eat remaining wafer. Drink wine. Savour the taste of your saviour. Mmm, Jesus!
The latest in futuristic Catholic science fiction? No. It's the idea behind Telecommunion, one of many Internet start-up firms hoping to capture a piece of the "surf 'n' pray" market estimated to be worth $8.2 billion by 2004, according to a recent report by Jupiter Communications.
At Telecommunion's website, the faithful can choose from a variety of sacramental vintages sure to satisfy even the most finicky sommelier. Once purchased, the recipe is downloaded for printing on a FirstSENX device ($398 from TriSenx) that combines water-based chemicals to create smells and tastes.
"We're offering people the same quality communion they get in church," said CEO Grady Bassard. "But we let them snack on God in the comfort of their own homes any time of day or night. And we have a better wine list -- even Manischevitz, for authentic Jewish-flavoured Jesus."
Digital-to-Spiritual Conversion
But it's not that easy. If it was, anyone with grape juice and crackers could self-administer communion. The missing element, as anyone familiar with the Eucharist knows, is transubstantiation, whereby the bread and wine of the host are transmogrified into the body and blood of Christ.
What Telecommunion and other companies have discovered is how to digitally record religious spells, like transubstantiation, transmit them over the Internet, and restore them to their natural spiritual form -- without losing a single metric unit of holiness.
"It's like in Ghostbusters," explained Brossard. "Remember how Ackroyd, Murray and Ramis caught ghosts in the ectoplasm trap? Well, what we do is a high-tech version of that. Except, of course, the ghosts were just Hollywood make-believe, and the holiness of religious blessings is real."
Telecommunion used spirituality receptors developed by 3M to record a transubstantiation ritual. The technology detects supernatural forces and adjusts an electronic signal that can be saved as binary data on a computer. The result is a file containing a complete record of the spell. When processed by digital-to-spiritual conversion (DSC) software, transubstantiation occurs.
New Services, Products
3M's exciting invention spawned the nascent "surf 'n' pray" industry, which hopes to profit from the do-it-yourself spirit of the spiritually-inclined. Catholics, in addition to communion, will soon be able to make their own holy water for home baptism and vampire defense. Jews could experience split-finger kohanic magic, with surround sound audio effects, without waiting for a holiday. Other services will offer every conceivable religious spell.
Another group of companies is hoping to capitalize on the phenomenon by selling high-end DSC hardware. Insisting that software methods don't provide the same quality of holiness as hardware, they offer devices that plug into a computer's serial or USB port and do a better job.
One DSC outfit, Holier Than Thou Inc., claims that its device's 256-times oversampling recreates the highest quality holiness, and a patented "PureChip" sanctifies the digital signal by removing any evil acquired from the Internet's "dark fiber." According to product literature, "Your soul will thank you."
Although many conservative religious leaders are opposed to this unorthodox use of technology, a few have publicly admitted feeling strangely attracted to it. "I'm just fascinated," said New York's Archbishop-elect, Edward Egan. "I think it's because we can't prove it doesn't work. Somehow, that feels vaguely familiar."
