The Sensory Deception

by Ransom Stephens

  In midsentence, Sy’s voice was drowned by gunfire and the collage of injustice switched to action-packed images of raiders coming down the ridge and firing on Sy’s troops. It switched to three men dressed in black jumpsuits, standing clear of the action, discussing the battle in French with a detached attitude. Then the video became a jerky reality adventure of the three black-clad men retrieving the barrel of toxic waste. As their pickup drove away, the video switched to a scene of skiffs bristling with firepower.

  The image then appeared to move from above the surface to below, as though the camera itself had been lowered underwater. It showed the sonar-visualized underwater field of toxic waste, barrel after barrel. The video concluded with families in a circle eating and laughing, with a final focus on Sy. He said, “We appreciate your good thoughts and prayers but believe we can solve this problem ourselves.”

  “If Farley can put that together from a refugee camp,” Gloria said, “think of what a professional can do with it.”

  Bupin’s lips folded into a serious frown. He said, “This can do great deal of our work, perhaps even gravy our cake.”

  “Did you catch that resolution?” Ringo asked. “Even in the dark, that image was razor sharp. I designed those cameras with ten times HD resolution, dude, and that’s not all, you know.” Ringo rambled on despite the fact that no one was listening. “Each pixel is a charge-coupled device, a CCD. When light hits a CCD it generates a current. That’s how the image is converted to an electric signal. Not only did I use more densely packed CCDs than any camera you can buy, I designed the CCDs with multiple dopants. Check this out.” He rewound the video to the scenes after dark. “My CCDs cover the infrared and operate on such a low leakage current the batteries last forever.” He looked around. Chopper was snoozing on the couch, and Gloria and Bupin were huddled over a pad of paper. He said, “I am awesome,” but not loud enough to interrupt anyone.

  He went into the server room and got back to work. Stepping through the initialization sequence, the experiential database populated the parameters and cache memory of each transducer’s processor. He observed a strange lag, as though the e-db were choking on something. Great, he thought, now I have to go all the way back to start.

  One of Ringo’s innovations had been automated processing of incoming data. That is, the data acquired by the sensors attached to Moby went into the e-db without any human intervention. The result was that the Moby app improved without any work, up to a point. They’d reached that point weeks ago, or so Ringo had thought.

  He closed the Moby app and dug into the guts of the e-db. He’d last been in there the previous day. A big chunk of new data had since arrived, but the automated processor had coughed it up. So much for taking that seventh day off.

  He went and got a cup of coffee. Bupin and Gloria sat on the couch arguing. Chopper was outside smoking a barch.

  Back in the server room, Ringo isolated the new data and brought up the Daredevil software to see what good old Moby had experienced that screwed up the e-db.

  After the disappointment of the focus group, Gloria had accepted Bupin’s invitation to dinner. At the table, the two of them had sketched a whole new product road map on napkins—a new road map for a superhero VR release, right down to cutting Marvel in on royalties and employing its graphics team to help Ringo. If she had signature authority, she might have gone for it.

  She’d had so much confidence in Ringo and Chopper, but now, without Farley to run the show, Moby didn’t work and everything was floundering. Buried in that disillusion, the sounds of her father’s and Farley’s voices and images of the place where they’d spent the past few months made Gloria feel exhausted and irrelevant.

  All she wanted was to get her father and Farley home. She also wished she’d been less professional. Every time she thought of Farley she questioned the price of professionalism. He’d been right next to her for a year—an amazing man who challenged and respected her—and she’d kept him at arm’s length. She told herself that she’d never blow an opportunity like that again. Life was too short.

  Bupin had the napkins laid out on the couch between them. He ran his finger along the time line he’d sketched.

  “Did you see that place?” Gloria said. “My strategy had been to delay the documentary release until the week before launch, but we have to get them home.”

  “Now you have two documentaries?”

  “They have a rough cut at Universal, or they should. I haven’t heard from them in a while.” Weighing priorities was easy. “I’m putting out Farley’s cut. You said to be flexible. We have to get that ransom paid.”

  “Where will you show your movie? Leverage, Gloria. You can pry more than one problem loose.”

  She looked at him. Bupin’s head was cocked to the side, his eyes in a vertical line. He had that condescending look that meant he knew the answer to a question and expected her to figure it out. She didn’t care what he thought. “I’m putting it on YouTube and pumping up a hashtag.”

  He said, “Hollywood builds blockbusters with foundation of promotional juice before release, maybe just a trailer?”

  “No. We’re Silicon Valley. Hollywood is last-gen tech. I’m not playing by their antiquated rules. Farley’s video will be viral in a week, people will be ready for the full-length professional version.”

  “Hollywood producers want control.”

  “When I’ve got a million hits, I can ask for anything I want.”

  Bupin rotated his head back to its normal orientation. His cowlick relaxed along his skull. “And you will get it.”

  But Gloria didn’t hear what Bupin said because Ringo screamed: “HE DID IT! MOBY FUCKIN’ DID IT!”

  He dashed out of the server room, dropped to his knees, and pumped both fists. “That’s right, bitch! You want a Moby-Dick VR? You want sensory saturation? Woot!”

  Chopper had been examining test tubes of his sensory deception drug when Ringo started yelling. He put the test tubes back in his yellow tackle box.

  His first reaction was disappointment in himself. He’d lost faith. He should have trusted Earth and Sea, should have trusted that grizzled veteran of life on earth that they called Moby-Dick. They should have been patient. Another one of Homo sapiens’s greatest sins, lack of patience. Of course Moby had fought a colossal squid. It’s the only way he could save this planet.

  With genuine colossal squid data, Ringo removed all of the interpolation code that he’d sweated over the previous seven weeks. Hitting the delete button never felt so good.

  He and Chopper cranked out a new beta version in four days and then switched to test mode. With the experiential database brimming with genuine Moby data, the rendering code ran faster, but now it seemed like every move the user made caused the sonar-visualization routines to gag as that big chunk of data was shuffled into RAM. Software testing usually means exercising every choice available to the user, but the VirtExReality program had to respond to every possible decision a user could make. Every decision—changing direction, eating, breathing, diving, attacking—required the software to respond with the correct consequences. Since it was impossible to record every conceivable effect, the software mixed the recorded experiential data based on a continuum of likelihoods. This patented feature made the software a peculiar challenge to debug.

  As Ringo and Chopper fixed bugs, Bupin helped Gloria tune the business plan to embrace whatever political upheaval the documentary could generate. The scale of Bupin’s thinking opened a whole world to Gloria. He gave her free access to a company that had gotten seed funding from Sand Hill Ventures: Infernal Racket, the hottest promotion firm in the world and pioneers of targeted marketing based on data-mining social media. They posted Pirates at the Plank of Life on YouTube, and even muddied up the video to give it the ideal amateurish feel. They used the hashtag #PirateVid and scheduled thousands of social media posts asking open-ended, attention-drawing questions about the video. They placed short articles in a huge variety of blogs: nat
ure, games, world news, ecology, climate change, zoology, nuclear watchdogs, African heritage, weapons, social justice, poverty—any blog that routinely drew more than five thousand hits. The trick was to leave unanswered questions like “What was this man doing in Somalia in the first place?” and to drop hints so that curiosity would peak on the day of the grand opening. Nothing gets more attention than that which is withheld. All the bloggers had to do was edit the five hundred words of copy to suit their styles. Some pasted it in verbatim.

  Seven days after Gloria uploaded Farley’s documentary to YouTube, it got its millionth hit. She chose that moment to contact Universal Studios.

  Tiff White said, “We contracted with Givmey Studios—I did all the paperwork for you.”

  Gloria said, “Our cut just got its millionth hit. We need yours now.”

  “The rough cut was almost ready, but the producer quit when he got the YouTube link from Infernal Racket. Universal is pissed. We’re the distributor! You can’t leave us out of promotion; we don’t work that way.”

  “Tiff,” Gloria said, “NBC/Universal lost the DVD wars, blew the music industry, and now they’re trying to impede video on demand. Do you know any documentary producers willing to work in the twenty-first century?”

  “It’s company policy. There’s nothing I can do. You’ve stepped on too many toes.”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  Gloria called Bupin.

  “Your timing, it is ideal,” he said. “Like bubonic plague, your viral documentary. Wait. Bubonic plague is bacteria. Your documentary is like the flu.”

  She described her conversation with Tiff White. He said, “Thank you, Gloria. I am like carpenter holding hammer over a nail. Like pig in mud.” She could almost hear him rubbing his hands together. “You will receive one phone call.”

  Twenty minutes later, Gloria’s phone rang.

  “How did you do that?” Tiff said. “Ken Burns called us demanding a shot at your film, and he promised a polished cut in days. Days! We had to turn down Michael Moore. What did you do?”

  “Really?” Gloria said. “Ken Burns? Wow.” It only took a second to think of the answer. “Things happen fast in Silicon Valley. It’s a prototype-release-revise culture. You guys want everything perfect in your first version, but we don’t mind a few bugs as long as the product gets out while the market window is open.”

  Ten days before the opening, Gloria blasted her journalist contacts with a special link to the professionally produced documentary. The story broke on the Huffington Post. The video was shown on CNN within minutes and made news broadcasts worldwide.

  In an interview with Matt Lauer, Gloria explained what her father and business partner, as she referred to Farley, were doing on the other side of the world. She told the story of a start-up company tackling humanity’s biggest problems. She described Farley as a scientist and businessman, a truly self-made man, and her father as an American hero who had fought behind enemy lines for the United States in Desert Storm. The interview triggered feature stories online and in print about Farley in Africa working with pirates to remove toxic waste. Each story generated publicity for the next.

  Billboards went up. Celebrities were confirmed to attend the documentary’s grand opening. Even the seasonal gray whale migration along the California coast participated. Pod after pod of the gentle giants were visible from beaches near the arcade. Whale-watching tours were sold out, and every passenger got a coupon for a Moby-Dick VR experience.

  The product was packaged in red, white, and blue—and the best thing about it, to Gloria, was that it was all true. She believed that this really was the greatest thing about doing business in America.

  Of course, it also generated a media hurricane for VirtExArts on the eve of opening day.

  Chopper stood opposite the entry of the arcade examining the scene from floor to ceiling and front to back. In twenty-four hours this room would be packed.

  The space looked good. Gloria had taken the idea of a video-game parlor and converted it into a fresh, trendsetting spot. The paint sparkled and the carpet was perfect. The TV screens high on the walls showed loops of VR video, and in the center of the room, the drink bar offered everything from Vitaminwater and fresh-squeezed guava nectar to house-trademarked energy drinks and triple shots of espresso.

  In the course of debugging, Chopper and Ringo had been through the Moby-Dick VR hundreds of times. After fighting the colossal squid, the whale had undergone another battle—a surprise ending. Gloria had recruited another focus group from people out on the pier, a combination of surfers, students, and two fishermen who were veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Every one of them had emerged from the VirtExReality chambers ashen-faced, some trembling, but each with a look of unmitigated awe. They were impressed and dazzled but, in Chopper’s judgment, insufficiently altered. Chopper knew that saving Earth required a fundamental shift in perspective. And he knew the mechanism for that shift, right down to its chemical structure.

  Chopper focused on Bupin. A clump of gray hair at the peak of Bupin’s part always seemed out of place. Or was it? Perhaps that small lock served a purpose. Nothing else ever seemed beyond Bupin’s control. Leaning against a VR chamber while talking to Ringo and Gloria, he assumed the center of attention. As he peered into the chamber, the lock of hair dangled over his head like an antenna. He pushed it back with his left hand, a motion that lent the impression of human sensitivity, almost vulnerability. Chopper knew better.

  Chopper walked to the center of the room, lifted a section of the countertop, and entered the oval area behind the drink bar. He opened a cabinet and took out his tackle box. He spun the combination lock, opened it, and removed a single vial. Then he relocked the box. He fixed a cappuccino for Gloria and a frothy mug of hot chocolate for Ringo, and poured boiling water over a bag of jasmine tea for Bupin. He let the tea steep for five minutes before adding the contents of the vial. As jasmine tea steeps, it gets bitter and becomes an excellent flavor mask.

  Drinking a glass of water, he waited for the smell of coffee to draw the others to the bar. A minute later, Gloria sat across from Chopper and took the cappuccino. Sipping the steamy milk from the top of the mug, she set a balance sheet on the bar to her right. The sheet showed the required arcade traffic for the company to realize different profit levels. The model was scalable, and with Series B VC funding they could open more arcades and realize more profit.

  Chopper slid the jasmine tea next to the sheet.

  Ringo was almost finished showing Bupin the company’s patented technology and describing the roles of each transducer. Bupin’s eyes were glazing over.

  Gloria sipped more foam. She called Bupin to the bar and asked him to look at the balance sheet.

  “Hang on,” Ringo said. “Let him demo Moby-Dick first.”

  Bupin was wearing an indulgent, tight-lipped smile, and as Ringo spoke, he raised his right index finger. “I attend to one thing first, the balance, and then I try your product.” He walked to the bar, sweeping his hand in a gesture to Gloria that she owned his attention.

  He took the seat next to her, nodded thanks to Chopper for the tea, and raised the mug.

  Gloria ran the projected numbers by him, and he asked her a few questions. Questions whose answer he clearly knew. It was all a quiz. This man seemed to believe that he controlled the universe.

  At last, his mug empty, Gloria’s presentation complete, Ringo guided Bupin to the jumpsuit and helmet next to the chamber.

  Bupin ran the numbers through his head. He didn’t see it. Without mainstream applications, the business plan didn’t add up; it was that simple. But there was a more important ingredient to start-up success: the passion of the directors, employees, and executives. Gloria had crossed over. She was an executive now, no longer a VC, and she had that passion. The passion might be enough to get the company off the ground. If it could, and if she’d alter the business plan, Bupin estimated the company’s intellectual property at hundreds of m
illions, maybe even the magic B.

  Bupin lowered his head to Ringo like a bishop indulging an acolyte. Following Ringo’s instructions, he kicked off his shoes and stepped into the VirtExReality jumpsuit. The jumpsuit and helmet were perfect marketing flair. Another piece to the puzzle that screamed for a mainstream application. He had a vision of taking customers into a secret room, even a phone booth, to suit them up. He stopped the process and explained to his three apprentices that preparing the customer for the experience should be a ceremony with extensive descriptions of the purpose for each cable, each button and belt. The equipment had to be treated with reverence so that tension would mount with every step toward the VirtExReality chamber. He concluded with “You must increase perceived value.”

  Ringo gave an exaggerated explanation of how Bupin would soon experience not a mere simulation but the actual sensory input—the touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste—of the world’s largest predator locked in evolution’s most epic battle. “You will be strength and intelligence fighting agility and stealth.” Then he helped with the helmet and Bupin climbed into the chamber. Slipping into the water, his field of vision showed the ocean’s surface. The sound of waves slowly built in volume and so did their effect on his body. He was steady in the water, solid but buoyant. Wisps of the fresh, salty scent of the ocean combined with warm breezes as swells rose and fell around him.

  Bupin knew that the VR chamber door must have closed, but he didn’t know when and he didn’t experience even the slightest claustrophobia—how could he? He was in the middle of the ocean with the horizon on all sides and waves breaking over him. The water was warm, a little too warm, and he felt a rising hunger.

  With the slightest turn of his hips, he went below the surface, and tendrils of turbulence whirlpooled across his skin. In his head, Bupin expected darkness. He expected it to look the way it would to a scuba diver, dark with shadows from the current above. He didn’t expect to taste the water, to feel it flowing through his mouth, and to hear everything. Everything. He didn’t expect to be able to see so far in the distance—though it wasn’t quite vision. It felt like he was projecting an image, an image that he couldn’t predict. Looking in a direction was more like thinking in that direction. The tighter he focused, the farther he could see, and he could see for miles. He knew the depth of the water, several times his own length. He knew the location of every fish and the pod of she-whales in the distance behind him. The recognition sent a wave of satisfaction through the core of his being. This was a good world.