The Sensory Deception

by Ransom Stephens

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2013 Ransom Stephens

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North

  PO Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781611099195

  ISBN-10: 1611099196

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012951774

  For Grace June Lee Ransom Stephens Hannon, aka Mom.

  CONTENTS

  PART 0: NOW

  1

  2

  PART 1: TWO YEARS AGO

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  PART 2

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  PART 3

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  PART 4

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  PART 5

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  PART 0: NOW

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  PART 0: NOW

  Gloria sees blue sparks emerge from the rifle and watches mud splash at the feet of the woman and the little girl, but she doesn’t connect the bullet cause to the splashing effect. The heat, smoke, encroaching fire, and even her blistering skin are mere sensory inputs that saturate her mind without context.

  The woman pulls the girl along a path, and they maneuver through the burning forest. Ducking beneath a branch, they twist away from a shower of sparks. The girl cries out when the sparks extinguish themselves in the moisture of her skin.

  The woman lifts the child onto her hip.

  This simple movement strikes something in Gloria: a hint of humanity’s context, something about life, love, and death. The sway of the woman’s hips is timed perfectly with the shift of the child’s weight. A single action that settles the child against her waist, giving comfort to the mother and security to her offspring. Though Gloria sees this, in her mind the vision is processed as sound. A song. The song of mammals: warm flesh and blood wrapped in skin and nourished with milk and love.

  The woman rushes deeper into the forest. A table-size leaf drifts down, sways between tongues of fire, levitates over the flames for an instant, and then evaporates in a hiss of steam. The heat shoves the woman aside. Her ankle catches in a bramble and she loses her balance.

  As Gloria watches, context takes shape. A shred of concern now accompanies her absorption in sensory data.

  The woman tries to cradle the child but fails. The child falls into the mud and the woman crashes down on top of her. She succeeds in landing on the girl with the soft impact of her belly and breasts but in so doing buries her face in the embers of a fallen branch. The skin and cartilage of the woman’s face erupt in steam just as the leaf had a second before.

  Her scream penetrates Gloria’s heart and the shift is complete.

  It’s a feeling akin to waking from a dream, except that rather than dissipate into her subconscious where it belongs, the sensations of this dream resolve into reality: unyielding heat, dense smoke, green and black forest, red and blue flames, steam popping and crackling from wood fuel, branches collapsing to the ground. In this waking instant, the sounds are no longer as loud, nor the scents so bitter nor the fire as bright. A flame licks away the leaves of a branch not ten steps ahead. It is just as hot as before—in fact, the heat hurts more now than it did seconds ago. Still, it seems farther away even as it closes in.

  That’s it, she thinks: everything seems farther away. Farther away, yes, but it’s a conceptual distance.

  The volume has been turned down. Everything is quieter, even the colors and smells. There’s room in her mind to think—that’s the difference: She can think now. She can reflect. Where seconds before everything was response, now there is an instant of reflection between her mind and her senses. Her thoughts are now formulated in words as well as impressions.

  The realization takes her to her knees. Images, scents, and sounds combine into random-seeming words, but they align themselves into sentences and the sentences form a story. Her story.

  She wonders if she’s going into shock. The very act of wondering feels delightful and scary.

  Wait, I’m good at this, she thinks. I can solve problems.

  Another blue flare emerges from the rifle. This time she’s capable of correlating the flare to the crack of igniting gunpowder, but she’s not yet ready to recognize the shooter. Bullets hit the woman and she stops screaming.

  A bolt of panic straightens Gloria’s spine. The girl struggles beneath her mother’s body. Gloria wraps her arms over her head and rushes into the flames. As she runs up the path, straight toward the man with the rifle, recognition dawns but, as she dodges the sparks and flames, can’t take hold. She drops to the ground and pulls the child out from under the mother.

  The girl sprints back in the direction from which Gloria came. Gloria follows, leaving the body of the woman to burn.

  The gun fires again. Gloria glances back. The bullets have herded two more women and a man into the flames now behind her. Their long black hair withers to smoking clumps. The women shriek and the man bellows. Gloria realizes they’re headed to the river. It feels good to attach an image to a purpose.

  A vine snags in her hair. No, not in her hair—the vine snags against her headband. She remembers, and the realization almost stops her. She passes her hands along the straps running over her head, across her back, and around her waist. The headband holds the all-important wide-angle video cameras to her forehead and the binaural microphones just behind her temples. The straps hold the transmitter against her back. She tugs on the chin strap, starts to unfasten it, but changes her mind. This equipment is her best hope for survival.

  She rips the vine from the strap and runs.

  The girl, about six years old with long black hair, dark skin, and the same high cheekbones as the other villagers, looks back, and Gloria lifts and hugs her. The child smells familiar, like the most comfortable pillow in the world.

  Gloria knows this child, has held her a hundred times, but doesn’t know her name.

  Now she loses track and has to bear down and concentrate to force the images and memories to reassemble themselves into thoughts.

  Gloria knows the way to the river, has walked it every day for weeks, usually following the girl she now holds. She recognizes the flowers with their giant, bugle-shaped blossoms. One is filled with rainwater. It brings to mind a sweet drink, and with that thought comes thirst. The thirst derails her mind again.

  She looks back up the trail. The man who just murdered the girl’s mother jogs along behind them. She knows this man. She knew him well. She has made love to this man.

  Her grip on reality loosens. Chopper wouldn’t do this.

  She coughs and s
hakes her head but the vision doesn’t clear. “No!” It’s the first word she’s spoken in weeks, and it comes out thick and hoarse, but her next words emerge at full volume: “Chopper, stop!”

  The rifle rotates toward her, and Gloria drops into the river.

  More than six thousand miles away, Farley Rutherford wakes from a light slumber. It’s dark and silent. His first thought is of the men and women who depend on him. They are always his first thought, and right now they seem okay. He sits up and wonders what woke him. He can distinguish the direction of the cave’s opening by the slight breeze. If it were morning, there would be a hint of light in this cave-prison.

  He hears a faint clinking behind him, like a distant chain being lowered to the ground. It’s just loud enough to distinguish from the snores and groans of the men and women still suffering through nightmares on the dirt floor around him. The clinking stops. It’s replaced by another sound, a whisper.

  He rises and navigates about the sleeping bodies of his team toward the sound at the rear of the cave. As he passes them, he feels the decaying remnants of hope within each person’s heart. Sensibility, compassion, empathy, logic—the prerequisites for civilization decomposing from the body of civility. His foot nudges someone. He steps gently over. It is Farley’s responsibility to comfort the others, to balance their fear and anger on a fulcrum of purpose, even as that purpose recedes. It is this role that forces him to retain his sanity.

  The whispering starts again. Now he can make out words: “Farley, get Farley.” They’re spoken in the well-worn English of someone with roots in the Middle East.

  The voice adds, “Can anyone hear me?” The accent is common here on the Horn of Africa, though spoken English is not. Farley pushes back hope for another few seconds. The whispering is replaced by more of that clinking sound.

  Farley stands in the largest of the caves that form this prison. It’s farthest from the opening and has the smoothest floor, providing both relative comfort and privacy from the guards. The air is dank, and the occasional breeze from the gated opening carries the stench of raw sewage.

  Farley now stands against a wet wall at the end of the cave.

  He discerns the sound: pebbles and dirt cascading from the ceiling down the rocky outcropping, clinking from rock to rock and then disappearing into a puddle.

  “Damn it, Farley, are you there?” The volume of the voice surpasses a whisper.

  “Tahir?” Farley whispers back. “They said you were dead.”

  He hears a sigh resonate from the same hole in the ceiling from which the dirt and pebbles fall. “I’ve been reported dead many times, and to the best of my knowledge the reports have so far been false.” The whisper relaxes into the familiar clipped cadence. “What delays your escape?”

  “A steel gate, for one thing,” Farley whispers. Then, with more intensity, he adds, “Can you access my lab?”

  “What?” Tahir sounds angry. “Your lab? Now?”

  “If you can get some data acquisition equipment down here, we can record—”

  Tahir interrupts in a voice well above a whisper. “Here’s the only data you need. Catch!”

  In the infinite dark of this dungeon, the lit display of a cell phone looks like a bolt of lightning as it falls into the cave, jolting from one rock to the next. Farley catches it with both hands a foot above the puddle.

  The display shows a bonfire with people dancing.

  “Hurry,” Tahir whispers, as though he can see Farley from above. “We have no way to recharge it.”

  Farley presses the Play icon. It’s not a bonfire and the people are not dancing. It’s chaos. People scream as they try to flee the fire, but panic drives them in every direction. A woman carrying a child struggles into a wall of flames. A voice grows audible above the cacophony. The voice sets Farley’s heart racing. It’s Gloria. Gloria, whose voice always quickens Farley’s pulse. He concentrates on the voice, trying to decipher words. The first comes out as a gasp, unintelligible. The next are clear: “Chopper, stop!”

  The display pans over a scene of destruction—exploding sparks, flames, and smoke—and then settles on the image of a man, Farley’s closest friend, Chopper. The video’s final image is that of Chopper with a rifle poised at his shoulder. The camera that captures this image stares straight up the rifle barrel.

  “Shut it off,” Tahir whispers.

  Farley presses a key until the image mercifully disappears. Darkness once again reigns over the cave, but the image is burned into Farley’s mind. He’s aware that several of the other prisoners are awake, some sitting up, others standing.

  Farley whispers, “Where did this come from?”

  Tahir says, “Farley, Gloria needs us.”

  A man to Farley’s left asks, “What’s going on?” Another asks, “Farley, what’s up?” Farley hears them but can’t pry his attention from that image. The voice of a woman asks, “What was that light?” A fourth voice says, “Turn it back on.”

  Farley forces his attention to the surface and says, “Quiet!”

  The others go silent, but the command rings down the tunnel, eventually echoing its way back. The telltale metal-on-metal of a rifle against the steel gate follows a second later and, on its heels, the questioning note of a man’s voice. No one in the cave understands Arabic, but its meaning is obvious.

  Farley whispers up the hole, “Tahir, you still there?”

  “Attention from your captors will not help my daughter,” Tahir responds in a whisper.

  “Where’d that video come from?”

  “They are in Brazil. Gloria is in danger; can you help me, or shall I go alone?”

  “But she’s with Chopper.”

  “Chopper is the source of danger.”

  “No way,” Farley whispers. He waits for Tahir to answer, but when there is no response, he speaks and, though the volume of his voice is below that of a whisper, his words are saturated with certainty. “Chopper will protect her.”

  “Are you coming?”

  Farley closes his eyes and reviews the layout of the prison for the thousandth time, searching the network of half a dozen flood-carved tunnels for strengths and weaknesses. The only opening is blocked by AK-47–wielding guards beyond a steel gate set in concrete. But that’s not true, is it? There is another opening right above him.

  Farley says, “I’m coming.”

  “You’re certain you can escape?”

  Another voice pipes in. Though it’s a whisper, the South Central Los Angeles accent shines through. “No problem, man, we’ll, like, tear down the gate with our teeth, then we’ll eat the fuckin’ pirates for lunch, man—meet you at Starbucks. Dude, what the fuck?”

  PART 1: TWO YEARS AGO

  Gloria stepped out the door onto a path of redwood mulch and walked to the parking lot. Her silver Lexus was parked between a Ferrari and a BMW. She smiled at the three cars, especially hers. Her car payment was more than her rent. She thought of it as part of her wardrobe, the expensive veneer of success required for her to be taken seriously as a female Iranian Jew in the male-dominated culture of high-tech investing. Oh well, she thought, business is like high school, all about fitting in while being different but not too different. Her appearance also worked to her advantage. No one overlooked the most exotic woman in the room. She laughed, got in the car, and set her briefcase on the passenger seat.

  Looking back at the eggshell-white stucco buildings with their red clay roofs snuggled together in the shade of redwood trees, she felt a sense of approaching success. She had the job she’d always wanted. Well, almost. It was definitely where she wanted that job, though.

  She worked at famously cool Sand Hill Ventures at the northern border of Silicon Valley, where the heart of American innovation beats. Where entrepreneurs come for the venture capital nourishment they need to solve the world’s problems. Someday Gloria would be a partner, a mother of invention who could feed the brilliant men and women who came here to create. Right now, though, her business card
said “Research Associate/Junior Analyst.” Her bosses thought of her as a scout, and her clients thought of her as a gatekeeper. She visited would-be start-up companies to determine if they merited the partners’ time. If she judged them to have “high-profit potential” and turned out to be right, she’d get a bonus and take a step up the career ladder—and most pressing of all, she’d be able to keep her fancy car. If she was wrong, she’d have to trade it in for a Corolla.

  She pulled a proposal from her briefcase. She’d read it a week earlier. Some sort of video game company; they called their product “virtual reality.” She zeroed in on the company name: VRts. If they deserved a look, she’d come up with a better name.

  She told the GPS-navigator thing the address and headed for the freeway. Traffic clogged up in San Jose and was stop-and-go all the way over the Santa Cruz Mountains. She opened the sunroof to let in blue sky and turned up the heat to deflect the crisp breeze. She got to the coast just as the fog started flirting with the expansive old homes on the bluff over Monterey Bay. She took a hairpin turn up Cliff Drive, pulled into a driveway, and parked next to a sequoia whose trunk had a diameter larger than her Lexus.

  If one of the would-be entrepreneurs could afford this house, why did they need venture capital? She double-checked the address and stepped out of the car. She took a deep breath and tried to exhale her traffic frustration.

  The porch wrapped around the house, and wide, square columns supported the upper story—a signature of Craftsman architecture—but the driveway and porch were carpeted in pine needles and the house needed paint.

  A tall man wearing shorts and a dark sweatshirt stepped out and held the screen door open. He had a full brown beard that accentuated his blue eyes. “Gloria,” he announced in a resonant baritone that carried across the yard, into the trees, and out to sea. “Welcome to Santa Cruz, and thank you for coming down. I am Farley Rutherford.” As he spoke, his volume steadily decreased until, as he finished, she had to strain to hear. “You’ll understand in the next two hours why we couldn’t have this meeting up in the Valley.” She recalled from the proposal that Farley, a research zoologist at the Santa Cruz Institute for Oceanography, was the leader.