The Sensory Deception

by Ransom Stephens

  Copies of the 314-page VirtExArts business plan now sat in front of each person at the table. The board consisted of three men and one woman. The woman looked sharp in every way—not just her features, but even her short hair with every strand in place. In addition to the golfer, Joel McKay, whom Gloria had described as both the most powerful and the most conservative member of the board, there were two other men. The bald man in the nice suit took notes but, other than the occasional wisecrack, spoke little.

  Right now, despite how Gloria had ranked them, Farley found himself addressing the third man, Bupin Nusserwanji. Bupin’s mahogany-colored skin was balanced by his thick gray hair, parted on the side. His suit needed ironing. He ignored the other VCs’ comments, only looking up from the business plan when Farley, Chopper, or Ringo spoke, and his copy of the document was the only one on the table that was creased and dog-eared. These quirks telegraphed the intense air of an absentminded professor.

  Standing at the end of the table with the green-tinted light from the window on her olive skin, Gloria looked poised and passionate as she indicated bullet points in the presentation with a laser beam. She embodied a certain vigor that Farley associated more with wild than domesticated animals.

  She said, “The road map leads to a product release in eighteen months. The first product will consist of a helmetlike device and gloves. The helmet will provide ultrahigh-resolution 3-D video, sound, and scent. As the user moves his hands, clenches a fist, and so forth, the movement will be transmitted to the helmet, which will respond appropriately. Both the Polar Bear and Soaring Eagle VR products will be included in the first release. The Soaring Eagle application allows the user to fly through canyons and over cliffs, and to hunt. A year later we’ll launch the full product line, including”—here she paused for a second—“the killer app: Moby-Dick.

  “Moby-Dick will be a sperm whale experience, the first fully immersive VR app to stimulate every sense and accommodate every possible user reaction in real time. Because of its hardware-intensive nature, we’ll open VirtExReality Arcades in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco that will house VirtExReality chambers developed from sensory deprivation tanks—basically large covered bathtubs. The helmet and gloves will be supplemented with a waterproof jumpsuit designed to look like the fire suits worn by motorcycle racers. Users will be suspended in water. The jumpsuit and headset will integrate the necessary transducer technology to convert the sensory deprivation chambers into sensory saturation chambers.”

  Then she added, “There are technological challenges,” and sat down.

  Farley nodded to Gloria, stood, and made eye contact with each VC. He rolled up his sleeves and said, “The battle between a bull sperm whale and a colossal squid is the culmination of a billion years of evolution. Pitting the greatest predator in history against the most elusive prey, it’s the ultimate battle: power versus stealth. The sperm whale, Physeter macrocephalus, at seventy feet and sixty tons, is the largest hunter on earth. It has the largest brain of any animal and can hunt nearly two miles deep.

  “Whales don’t see with their eyes as much as they visualize from audio data. They emit thousands of tightly directed sounds. When these sounds hit something, they echo back. From the timing of the echoes, whales construct full three-dimensional images, including how hard something is, how far away, and the speed of approach. It’s ultra-sonar. We’ll write software to convert this sonar visualization into video and convey this experience to the human mind.”

  Farley turned to Ringo, who added, “Full-blown, high-resolution sonar visualization is the navy’s wet dream, and I can do it.”

  McKay nodded slowly and said, “Could be a nice spin-off.”

  Farley took up where he had left off. “At the opposite extreme are the colossal squid, giant creatures that live in the most inhospitable environment on earth: the bottom of the deepest oceans, where water pressure exceeds four thousand pounds per square inch. Their body density is very nearly the same as water, like well-contained gel. They’re nearly invisible to sonar.”

  Bupin raised a finger. “I have the one question. You will attach recording equipment to this Muhammad Ali whale, greatest predator of all time?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have such a whale? You will rope-a-dope a whale? This Moby whale will swim to your house in Santa Cruz?”

  “I have many resources for locating sperm whales. I know their behavior. It’s not so much catching one as finding one. Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, the Pacific Whale Foundation, and marine biologists at the Santa Cruz Institute for Oceanography monitor the locations of sperm whale pods. We’ll collaborate with them to acquire the necessary firsthand data of their behavior. It’s an important zoological study. There won’t be a problem finding a whale.” Farley said this with confidence that he didn’t feel. He’d discussed the reality with Gloria, and she’d instructed him to keep a few of the facts to himself. In particular, while sperm whale cows and calves live in cohesive social groups of a few dozen, bulls travel alone and can be difficult to find. Knowing the location of a pod is certain knowledge of where to expect to find a bull. What is uncertain is when the bull will show up.

  “And you are betting your house that this one whale whose life you record will float like a butterfly and sting one of these gigantic colossal squids? Do you have to attach equipment also to squid?”

  “It would be convenient—sort of a miracle, really—if the whale we equip were to hunt a colossal squid, but we’re not counting on it.” He motioned to Gloria, who brought up a PowerPoint image of the cover art for an old copy of Jules Verne’s classic Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. “The odds of equipping a sperm whale that actually encounters a colossal squid can’t be calculated. Although small, medium, and large squid are everyday fare for sperm whales, we have no idea how often they encounter the colossal variety. So far, colossal squid have only been observed in the bellies of dead sperm whales or on the decks of whaling ships—except for one case. A dead colossal squid was found wrapped around a dead sperm whale floating off the coast of Chile. Other than this one draw, it might seem like the sperm whale has the advantage, but any colossal squid victories would remain at the bottom of the sea, as unobservable as the sound of a falling tree in an empty forest.” He looked away from Bupin to the other VCs and added, “We were extraordinarily fortunate that the polar bear we equipped with data acquisition equipment had such an amazing experience, but we’re not going to count on it for the Moby-Dick app.”

  Bupin said, “The success of your Polar Bear comes from plight of your bear. Without big squid, how do you make your app killer?”

  “Ringo? Do you want to take this question?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Ringo said, standing as Farley sat. “Do you know what interpolation is?” He waited two beats before continuing. “Interpolation is what you do when you have two data points and want to predict a value that lies between them. Farley is six and a half feet tall and I’m five foot seven, so if we told you that Chopper’s taller than me and shorter than Farley, you could interpolate between those two points and guess that Chopper is six-one. Pretty close, too. So what I’m going to do for Moby-Dick is take several data sets and interpolate between them. One data set will be from the bull sperm whale and its interactions with garden-variety squid and other cephalopods; the other data sets will be acquired from smaller cephalopods and their predators. The problem in the first case is that the squid will be too small and in the other cases that the predator isn’t a sperm whale, but the data sets corral the desired solution—a full-grown sperm whale against a colossal squid. I’ve got a whole library of video interpolation code, mostly rescaling algorithms, but I did something hella cool with it. Check this out: One of the problems with rescaling is that lengths, areas, and volumes scale totally differently—that’s why shipwreck movies look so cheesy. So I used a continuous fractal model to—”

  “Excuse me,” Gloria interrupted.

  Farley said, “I
f you want to know the details, and I mean all the details, Ringo will be happy to share them.”

  Bupin was buried in the proposal again.

  “That’s the zoological angle of our technical challenges,” Farley said. “The neurological angle is what makes VirtExArts special. Chopper?”

  Chopper stood and stared at Bupin until he looked up. Then Chopper began: “My research focuses on how the brain processes sensory data. The concept of sensory saturation comes from something we’ve all experienced: panic. When you’re in an emergency situation, you don’t have time to think and deliberate, much less reflect on your situation, but you do make decisions. Your awareness focuses on right now, no more than a second before or a second after. Now, if we remove the sensation of panic, you find yourself in the state of mind of intelligent nonlinguistic animals. Mammals and birds are focused on the right now. They make decisions based on past experience, but they don’t have the processing power to contemplate or reflect on those experiences and create elaborate plans like this one.” He lifted his copy of the business plan, held it up for a second, and then dropped it on the table.

  Farley caught Gloria’s eye and they shared a smile. She had argued against having Chopper present to the board, but Farley had insisted. He’d told her that Chopper was a man of great depth, not just intellectually, and that his tough-guy exterior provided acuity to his lecturing style.

  With the proposal on the table and Bupin’s eyes on him, Chopper resumed: “That state of total engagement can be attained through what we call sensory saturation. The majority of the processes that produce reflective thought and self-awareness occur in the forebrain, the area of the brain just behind your forehead. The rest of your brain—that is, the rest of the cortex, the limbic system, and the brain stem—supply automatic commands to the body or process data from the senses. In the normal course of things, that data is channeled to the forebrain for consideration. The sensory saturation threshold is that point where the brain is inundated with so much sensory information that there is insufficient processing power to channel information to the forebrain.

  “Just as panic overloads the brain with neurotransmitters that put the brain in the here-and-now, capable of immediate actions but incapable of contemplation, an overload of sensory information requires so much processing that the brain is flooded with different neurotransmitters that put it in essentially the same state but without the urgency of panic.”

  Farley said, “The mix of recorded animal experiences, graphical interpolation, and excitation of the other senses are our technical challenges. Keep in mind, a lot of what we’re doing is fooling the senses. Most of the audio and video are authentic recordings. Tactile sensations are a whole different matter.”

  Still standing, Chopper went on. “The emulation of abrupt acceleration, increasing speeding, slowing down, and changing direction is our first major technical challenge. Second, the biometric feedback system must respond in milliseconds to user reaction and intent. And sonar-based visualization is third.”

  Chopper took a breath and waited half a beat. Not long enough to allow a question, but long enough to give the impression that he’d accept one. “The data processing centers for each sense are concentrated in specific regions of the brain, but those processing centers overlap. For example, we’ll impart the feeling of acceleration by manipulating the user’s sense of balance, exciting the region of the inner ear called the labyrinth with pressure variations and vibrations. We’ll also embed images in the video that cause the sense of sight to produce the sensation of acceleration.” Chopper paused again.

  Farley looked around the table and said, “Are you following?”

  Bupin raised a finger. Then he wagged his head to the side. A gray cowlick popped straight up at the end of his otherwise neat part. A second passed. His head rotated vertical again and he asked, “The embedded images: You mean subtle, subliminal elements to cause optical illusion of falling?”

  “Correct,” Chopper said.

  “Let me ask you, please: This is called synesthesia?”

  Chopper did a double take. “Yeah,” he said. His customary squint opened up for an instant. Farley started to relax. Bupin had just earned a penny of respect—a currency Chopper rarely spent.

  Chopper turned to the other partners and said, “Synesthesia is a neurological condition where one sense evokes the perception of another, essentially cross talk between the brain’s processing centers. An abrupt noise can bring an image of fireworks; certain words are associated with tastes or colors. In extreme cases sounds can generate hallucinations. The effect can be triggered by hallucinogens like LSD.”

  The bald VC said, “I didn’t see LSD sales in the business plan.” He laughed louder than the crack warranted. McKay joined in the laughter. “Didn’t the Pink Floyd guy Syd Barrett have synesthesia?”

  Ringo added, “Nikolai Tesla had it.”

  “Synesthesia effects are too unpredictable,” Chopper said. “I’ve researched selective sensory deception, where images or sounds generate the perception of a specific taste or the feeling of acceleration, like leaning into a turn or free fall, but at least for now, that technology is out of our scope.

  “For scent, taste, and to control temperature as well as to simulate wind, we’ll rapidly inject and remove air through the helmet and jumpsuit—these are key elements for the Soaring Eagle and Polar Bear apps. In addition to the biometrics, low-voltage electrodes will be integrated into the jumpsuit to give the sensation of muscle contraction. With the other senses overwhelmed, the smallest emulation of muscle twitching should suffice.”

  Chopper stopped and sat down.

  Gloria looked both relieved and surprised. She advanced the projector to an image of the schedule. “That’s it.”

  The bald man clapped as she took her seat. Farley caught her eye and nodded. She released a covert sigh.

  McKay thumbed through the business plan for a minute, found the budget page, and pressed on the spine so the document would stay open. He steepled his fingers over it. Farley recognized the tactical silence. Finally, McKay said, “From fairy tales and minstrels spreading gossip around a campfire to books, movies, TV, video on demand, and video games, the next step in entertainment is virtual reality. There have been a lot of starts and stops, but since video games have become more interactive with Wii and Kinect, I think the market is ready.

  “However,” he said, “we fund businesses, not ecological concerns. Strike one: you’re academics. Strike two: you haven’t had a real-world job in over a decade, since…” He flipped to the front of the document, to the résumés. “Since you spent a summer at a cannery in Alaska.” He stared down at Farley for a few seconds and added, “But I don’t see a strike three. Gloria thinks you have something. I think it remains to be seen, but the patents the three of you are accumulating impress me.”

  McKay motioned to the sharp-looking woman, who said, “Your audience is too small. Now, this isn’t a criticism; it’s advice we deliver at this table every day: You need to think bigger.” She opened the business plan to pictures captured from the bird and polar bear VR prototypes. “Too much National Geographic, not enough Disney. See what I mean? You own intellectual property that can disrupt an industry, but your road map lacks the killer application.”

  Farley could feel the “I told you so” from Gloria. She’d ranted this point to death. He said, “Experiencing nature at its most wild is the greatest story possible.”

  “But not the most profitable.” The golfer leaned to the side, still carrying himself like the wise stag offering advice to the young buck. “I want you to rework your business plan to include more mainstream topics. Study the top-selling movies and video games. A full-blown sports VR would be a huge release: NFL, NASCAR, hockey, Navy SEALS—you could license James Bond.”

  Farley looked around the table. Bupin was still marking up his copy of the business plan. Ringo had perked up. Farley didn’t need to look at Chopper. Farley exhaled and leaned for
ward, sending a message only Chopper would understand. It might annoy Gloria and would certainly offend the partners, but nothing is born without making a mess.

  Chopper said, “Or pornography.” It was a challenge, not a question.

  The VCs twisted their heads at him, except for Bupin, who glanced up and then returned to the document.

  Flames blasted from Gloria’s eyes, directed at Farley, not Chopper.

  Farley slid his copy of the business plan off the table and under his arm. Then he pushed his chair away from the table and rose. At six and a half feet tall, even from across the room, he towered over Joel McKay. Next to him, Ringo stood, too. Chopper didn’t move.

  Bupin looked up.

  Farley said, “Gloria worked very hard to devise a profitable plan under the constraints that I laid out. This is a nature experience. We have to agree on that, or we can’t continue.”

  “This could be a huge opportunity. You’re showing a lack of business acumen.” McKay sighed. “But we’re here, and we have the conference room booked for the whole hour. Let’s work through what you have. We can talk about spin-offs later.”

  “Thank you,” Farley said, tipping his head in a slight bow to McKay. He pulled his chair back to the table.

  Gloria cleared her throat like an indulgent kindergarten teacher. She waited for each person’s eyes to turn to her, and as they did, she rewarded them with a gentle smile.

  Farley said, “The battle of a sperm whale and a colossal squid is definitively the greatest competition on earth. Comparing this epic battle to a NASCAR VR is like comparing Call of Duty to Pong.”