The Sensory Deception

by Ransom Stephens

  Tahir said, “The guards would be more comfortable if you were more subtle.”

  Farley lowered his hand. “You suppose they have prisoners?”

  “Where there is a prison and guards, there are prisoners,” Tahir said. “But it wasn’t guarded yesterday.” Tahir maneuvered toward the ridge, never actually facing it but getting closer. Finally their path intersected that of a guard.

  Sy’s guards or warriors or police force—Farley didn’t know what to call them; Sy referred to them as his “men”—wore tan canvas shorts and tunics that looked as though they’d been dyed by the dirt that composed the plains. Each carried a knife in his belt; some had machetes. Most of them bore AK-47 automatic rifles with their signature long, curved magazines.

  In the month Farley and Tahir had been there, Sy’s men had carried their rifles slung over a shoulder by the strap that ran from barrel to stock. The guard who now approached held his rifle in its business position.

  Tahir spoke to the guard in a few languages to find one he understood. The man did not respond and his gun didn’t waver. Farley and Tahir headed back to the lab.

  Tahir said, “Something has changed.”

  Farley loaded the video they’d just recorded onto the computer.

  One of Sy’s men, complete with AK-47 hanging from his shoulder, leaned into the room and said something in Arabic. Tahir followed him out.

  Farley organized the new video recordings in a database he’d configured for the project. They’d recorded hundreds of hours. He checked the log and reviewed all of his subcategories: boring video of Somalis working in fields, tending livestock, eating, praying, and sitting around fires laughing and talking. He put a fresh memory stick in the camera and started to make his way to a classroom.

  As Farley stepped out the door, Tahir appeared and said, “Attach your equipment to me the way you did to the whale.”

  Farley asked, “What’s going on?”

  “There’s trouble. All the men have been called to the central guard station, and weapons are being distributed.”

  Farley equipped the old soldier with Ringo’s custom high-resolution, high-sensitivity, broadband video cameras.

  “Farley, they are preparing to defend this camp.”

  Tahir hadn’t felt this much adrenaline since the last time he crossed the Iraq-Iran border, in 1991. He jogged to the guard station where weapons were being distributed; some men were assigned AK-47s and others machetes. He stood in the line. When it was his turn, the guard handing out weapons asked a higher-ranking guard for instructions. Tahir was given a machete and assigned to one of eight groups of men.

  The smell of fear and sweat on the guard next to him, the look of control in the eyes of Sayyid Hassan as he indicated how he wanted his men distributed—it all came back to Tahir. Finally, here was something he could do well.

  The camp’s obvious weakness was its low-ground location. An offensive could be directed from the ridge to the north. The north was also suspect because it was the direction of the nearest Al-Shabaab compound. Sy had assembled two hundred men, far more than served as guards in the daily life of the camp. About half of them carried AK-47s. As it had been since the dawn of culture, every man capable of running, shooting, and executing orders was on hand to defend his home.

  The usual number of guards paced back and forth over the ridge as they did every day. Sy concentrated his troops below the ridge. The makeshift army waited, hidden by shadows as the sun sank toward the horizon.

  Tahir faded to the rear of the assemblage, easing the few hundred meters toward what he had earlier surmised to be a prison. By positioning himself in shadows, below the glare of the sun, he was all but invisible to anyone more than ten meters away. He waited and, when a line of troops ran past, he fell in with them just long enough to clear the prison-cave. Then he jogged south toward the camp and back west, inland toward the sunset. Tahir understood Sy’s logic in concentrating his troops below the ridge. He’d probably do the same thing, but it left the southern border exposed.

  At the southwest edge of camp, farthest from the ridge and ocean, Tahir sprinted across the fifty-meter clear zone, then another fifty meters into the cover of some shrubs. He paused to breathe. The last time he’d crossed behind enemy lines, he’d been in his thirties, and now he was past fifty. From here he was more impressed by Sy’s strategy. Fifty men were approaching from above the ridge to the north, right into the jaws of Sy’s little infantry.

  Tahir sprinted north to another shrub, then to a rock outcropping, and in this manner worked his way up the ridge well west of the troops. Age frustrated him. He pushed himself, trying to get a decent vantage point from which to record the imminent battle. Though the sky was still blue, the sun had just set and the land was under shadow. He invested blind trust in Farley’s equipment, that it could pick up more light, more images than he could see.

  In a single motion, the fifty men on the ridge swept east toward the coast. The land above the ridgeline was a simple plateau. Like the plain below, it was arid land, bare for miles except along the creek. He was in exactly the wrong position to record the battle. He had to get to the other end of the ridge, and he had to do it without being seen by either side because both sides would assume he was the enemy. He scanned the horizon and smiled to himself. It was just as it had always been. Tahir was alone. He sprinted from cover point to cover point, now heading due east to the coast, a good quarter mile above the ridgeline and Sy’s camp.

  He saw flashes from muzzles before hearing the reports of gunfire. From this distance, he couldn’t imagine how the cameras could pick up useful video. He rushed forward again, still several hundred meters from the front.

  At full speed, wheezing, fighting pain from the arches of his feet through his ankles and every joint in his legs to the cramps under his ribs, he ran toward the violence. He crossed the tiny river that fed the camp’s crops below the ridge. Well beyond the trickle of water, he came to a dead, upended tree and dove for cover. He wrapped his body in the branches and roots. The aged wood crackled and broke as his limbs joined those of the tree. With the length of his torso against the trunk, he resisted the urge to gasp for breath.

  Tahir did not know why he had taken cover. He just knew that it was time.

  From his hiding spot, Tahir couldn’t discern what had forced this decision. He scanned the horizon—nothing. He unlatched the belt of one of the cameras so that he could hold it up like a periscope to record what he couldn’t see. Then another shot of adrenaline froze him.

  Three men dressed in black strode toward him. They stopped less than six feet away. Tahir’s lungs still burned, but the discipline that had saved his life and that of his wife and daughter so many times before held fast.

  He rotated the camera toward them. One of the men lowered himself to a knee and held binoculars to his eyes. More than binoculars—greenish light leaked from the eyepieces—they were infrared-sensitive binoculars, too high-tech for pirates. He was watching the battle, waiting for a specific event.

  Their boots shone in the dim light. Tahir would know them anywhere. He’d worn those boots for a decade: black, waterproof, steel-toed, military issue.

  The man stood, indicated something on the horizon, and spoke to his comrades—in French. French is one of the five most prominent languages in the world. It was common enough in the Middle East that Tahir had picked it up, but it was not common in Somalia.

  A few minutes passed without the sound of gunfire. Then the three men dropped to the ground as shots whizzed overhead. The men scuttled, running away from the battle with their heads and shoulders held low. They stopped at what Tahir had mistaken for an outcropping on the plain. Then he heard the engine start and saw the profile: a pickup truck.

  Tahir watched the truck ease toward the coast. It was dark now, but he pointed the camera at it anyway. When the truck was a few hundred feet ahead, Tahir jogged after it. At the beach, it turned south toward camp. As it made the turn, Tahir took a deep b
reath, readying himself to run to the heart of camp to give warning. He was about to vault into a full-speed sprint but instead dropped to the ground. This time it was no mysterious intuition that stopped him. This time he’d been about to run straight into the onslaught of retreating troops. The mock-raid complete, the “pirates” were backing out at full speed.

  But the truck continued along the beach. Tahir waited until he was certain the retreating pirates were headed inland, then resumed following the truck. It was now a good mile ahead. Still, Tahir kept the lens of the camera pointed in its direction.

  The truck stopped on the beach between the camp and where Sy’s fleet was tethered. Tahir could see the men get out of the truck but couldn’t see what they were doing. If they were going into camp while every armed resident was recovering from a battle on the other side, they’d have free rein.

  Tahir smiled to himself. There was no question in his mind. Even with just a machete, he outmatched them. He worked his way inland to stake a position between the three men and the camp.

  The three men were now returning to the truck. Struggling under a heavy burden, they worked something into the cargo bed. The truck’s headlights came on, and the vehicle careened back in the direction from which it had come, now at full speed. It passed within ten feet of Tahir, close enough for him to see that it carried the barrel of toxic waste that Farley had recovered.

  In the process of transforming the souvenir shop into a VirtExReality Arcade, Gloria paid “two big guys and a truck,” as they advertised themselves, to help her dismantle the counters, rip out the carpeting, and haul away the remaining touristy junk. She had just returned from the hardware store with five gallons of paint, brushes, rollers, and buckets, but the drywall specialist hadn’t finished his work, so she took her laptop to a café at the other end of the strip mall.

  E-mail from Ringo said: “Glo, don’t you hate e-mails that begin with ‘Everything turned out okay, but’? Me, too. So anyway: Everything turned out okay, but your dad’s a hero again. Wait ’til you see the video he got with the help of the cameras I designed—do you know how awesome my CCD chips are? So all hell broke loose, bad pirates invaded the good pirate camp and stole Farley’s barrel of toxic waste. The documentary is going to rock. Yes, I said it. Rock. And everyone’s fine, no hits, no runs, no injuries. I put all seventeen terabytes of the documentary video Farley recorded on a couple of drives and exped-doodled them this morning, and you should get them about…now. —Ringo, Engineerman.”

  Sitting in a chair near the front of the café, Gloria leaned to the side so she could see out the window. Sure enough, the FedEx truck had just pulled up to the arcade. She jogged over and got the package, texted her thanks to Ringo, and returned to the café. With her caffeinate and laptop, she opened the documentary road map. Four weeks earlier Bupin had connected her to a producer at Universal Studios, “the finest documentary people on earth.”

  She’d gotten a call from Tiff White, the producer’s assistant. Tiff had warned her that documentary teams hated working with footage that they didn’t record themselves. Gloria explained that the documentary was about a Somali pirate camp. Tiff said to get back in touch when some video was available and she’d see what she could do.

  Gloria called Tiff and arranged to drop off the disks.

  Chopper knew he had to hurry. The deadline came in a memo from Gloria.

  She’d already decided on the opening date for the VirtExReality Arcade. A date. And they didn’t even have a prototype of the Moby-Dick experience. She’d explained in the memo that the “market window” required a product release date and that she’d made a “business decision” that they would release a product. The phrase “business decision” turned Chopper’s stomach. That phrase had become the Western world’s excuse for raping Earth. The corporate bullshit got even thicker: “At the end of the day,” she had written, they would just have to make do with what they had.

  “Did you notice the ‘end of the day’?” Ringo asked. “That cracked me up.”

  Chopper said, “She set a date and we don’t have the Moby App.”

  “They do that crap at Intel all the time,” Ringo said, shrugging. “You have to understand that business types have no concept of reality.”

  “We don’t even have a prototype.”

  “Sure we do. It’s buggy, but we’ll have it ready for Gloria’s focus group in a few weeks. I can’t believe she got a focus group. Nothing like using a statistically insignificant sample to make decisions.”

  Chopper couldn’t fault Ringo’s efforts; he spent every waking hour refining the Moby-Dick app. Moby had finally eaten some reasonably large squid. Octopi, actually, that he found near Madagascar. The interpolation algorithm operated the way that the brain compensates for the eye’s blind spot. Data from each side of the blind spot are combined with the viewer’s expectations to complete the image. Ringo’s software needed work; the “colossal” squid either looked like a cartoon or required so much processing power that the servers bogged down, causing the VR experience to proceed in slow motion or crash altogether.

  Ringo became fixated on the Moby app and spent the next seven weeks building up to the focus group tests in a vicious debug cycle. First he’d improve the interpolation rendering efficiency, then increase the bandwidth of the connection between the helmet and the experiential database. When the result didn’t meet his specifications, he’d think of a more arcane interpolation technique that demanded even greater processing power and bandwidth. Then he’d be back to work improving efficiency and bandwidth. The cycle repeated with just tiny improvements in each iteration. He worked insomniac hours until he got the flu.

  With Ringo caught up in his own obsessions, at least Chopper didn’t have to worry about their goals being derailed by superhero apps.

  Chopper worked on everything else: converting the sensory deprivation chambers into VirtExReality chambers and testing communication between the experiential database and the helmet, jumpsuit, and gloves, as well as his most important contribution—producing a stockpile of sensory deception drugs. The plants had been leggy and dry when he got back from Somalia, but while the decrease in moisture had retarded their growth, it had also caused them to produce more concentrated LSA. At night he improved his hydroponic system and, though no one was likely to enter his room, installed invisible locks on his closet. He determined the ideal light and moisture levels for maximum yield and configured a small-scale drug production process in his lab/bathroom.

  A few days after the raid on Sayyid Hassan’s kingdom, a small ship along with two skiffs began patrolling the coast where the barrels of radioactive waste lay. They didn’t even bother to conceal their identity; the words Terre Mer Gestion SA were stamped on the hull of each skiff and along the portside bow of the ship. The lack of respect seemed to annoy Sy just as much as their appearance. He set a watch and, as weeks passed, the patrol kept to itself.

  With the raw documentary footage delivered, Farley’s access to the electrical generator was down to a few minutes each day. He only had enough power to download e-mail once a week.

  For Tahir and Farley, time passed slowly in Sayyid Hassan’s village.

  Tahir integrated himself into camp life. He helped teachers, did his part in the fields, and indulged his habit of scouting the camp and monitoring the guards, preparing for what he couldn’t anticipate.

  As Farley felt more and more like an uninvited guest who’d overstayed his welcome, he led an ever more solitary life. He cataloged 233 bird species, 144 mammals from lions to mice, 89 fish or crustaceans, and 987 different plants, including land and sea species. He helped care for sick livestock, but most sick animals were slaughtered rather than healed. He spent lots of time in the water, bodysurfing.

  The tedium finally got him in trouble after ten weeks in Sy’s camp.

  Pirates to the south hijacked the sailboat of an English couple who had been touring the coast. It brought the attention of a British warship that anchored o
ffshore. Its presence stopped Sy’s tariff-levying activities, slashing the village’s income. A couple of weeks later the warship left. Presumably the ransom had been paid and the British citizens freed, but the sailboat remained. Useless as an interceptor, it drew no interest from the pirates. Farley swam out to it one afternoon. The words Lazy Sod, Cardiff Wales were painted on the stern. Just sitting on deck made him feel better. The next day he stood in line at Sy’s court and asked if he could have it.

  It was a symptom of his boredom that he overlooked the obvious.

  Sy said, “It’s not mine to give—you would invite a raid on my people?” Their business concluded, he began to motion Farley to the door—but stopped. “Didn’t you find it odd that the presence of the warship had no deterrent effect on the well-armed skiffs guarding the waste?”

  It was another symptom of his boredom: Farley hadn’t noticed. He nodded anyway.

  “This documentary you promised may be more problem than solution,” Sy said. “You realize that the dump is permanent and that the patrol is a knock-up until a more permanent solution is implemented?”

  His mind lethargic, Farley didn’t respond.

  Sy repeated the last few words: “A permanent solution—you understand?”

  Those words woke Farley. He said, “The documentary will air soon and expose Terre Mer Gestion SA. That’s our solution.”

  “With exposure comes vulnerability,” Sy said.

  “The eyes of the world will be focused on this village and that company.” Farley shook the cobwebs out of his head. How had he wasted so much time? “We can set up a live video feed. Anything they do will be seen worldwide in real time.”

  Sy frowned and motioned to the door, a gesture that, here in his court, indicated their business had concluded.

  Farley took a step forward. “The documentary will generate interest, and from that interest we will recruit the resources we need to remove that waste.”