The Sensory Deception

by Ransom Stephens

  Chopper had disappeared with Gloria a week earlier. Ringo had been in the lab the night that Chopper picked up the sensors and recording equipment. That Gloria had gone with him was the surprise. The weird thing was that she hadn’t sent one of her ubiquitous memos announcing her departure. She hadn’t even set her e-mail auto-response.

  The data amazed him. He rigged the live feed directly to a VR helmet and let the steamy jungle scenes mesmerize him. There were crazy-looking birds wearing feathers of every color; some looked plaid, others striped, and the few that wore monotones looked formal. They sang birdsong-jazz fusion. One song sounded like a child screaming “mine, mine,” and another sounded like witch laughter. Gargantuan petals of every color interrupted the dense green of the foliage.

  The idea of a deforestation application had presented a terrific software puzzle. Ringo hadn’t understood how an obviously political VR would generate business or recruit volunteers until now. Walking through a jungle in ultra-resolution 3-D with localized, binaural sound convinced him. Leaves as big as trucks blocked the path, and pushing them aside revealed ever more intense feats of nature. Waterfall splashes cast permanent rainbows. Insects the size of mice crawled along paths and up stems, and across a creek, a pair of alligator-like caimans lounged in their own personal sunbeams. It started to rain. Then he heard Chopper’s voice saying “Slow down” and saw an arm slide past the video sensor. The rain avalanched through the foliage, and by the time it reached the ground, the drops were so big that, even in the helmet, Ringo dodged them.

  He caught sight of Chopper walking behind whoever wore the sensors, then realized that what he’d thought were either weird shadows or defective sensor pixels was black hair, Gloria’s black hair. Kicking back and watching the rain forest from Gloria’s point of view was pleasant, but it would take some major software innovations to produce the effects of sensory saturation from these data.

  Another “character” in this VR experience danced in and out of the video. A pretty little girl with the high cheekbones of a Mayan princess and the charming smile of a Disney star ran alongside Gloria. Sometimes she blazed the trail, helping Gloria avoid the million tiny dangers—biting insects, poisonous flowers, and obvious snake hideouts—that a California girl couldn’t possibly understand but were second nature to this darling of the jungle. This was the move of a Hollywood producer, not a tough naturalist like Chopper. It changed the arc of the story he was telling. The little girl became the star. The VR software would have to accommodate playing with the child, combing her hair, carrying and hugging her, chasing and dancing with her—even wiping away her tears when she fell and scraped her knee. Genius.

  Now Ringo had something to work with. He put three engineers to work on the human VR application. He needed a prototype so he could do the fun part: installing the sensory algorithms and decision break points.

  The live data feed was like meditation. Ringo spent hours under the helmet. He watched the villagers work their way along paths upriver, deeper into the jungle. He didn’t understand Spanish, but there was obvious tension between Chopper and the village patriarch.

  The weird thing was that Gloria didn’t say a word. She made soothing sounds to the girl, hummed with the river, and chirped with birds, but said not a single word. At first Ringo thought it was another brilliant move by Chopper. The VR experience relied on sensory stimulation; conversation would require an artificial intelligence library that would take years to build. Still, Gloria not saying a word? She was the most talkative one of them.

  He put it off to grief until he no longer could.

  On the fourth day of data acquisition, the walk through paradise merged with a walk through what mankind does to paradise. Instead of mist rising from the river with a pristine botanical aviary on all sides, Ringo saw the jungle filling with smoke. And more eerie than that, the sound track changed. The insect, bird, reptile, and mammal symphony lost its harmony. Instead, intermittent blasts of noise interrupted dead silence as teams of screaming monkeys swung past and tight-knit flocks of birds shrieked away. To the side of the path, through the trees, he glimpsed a desecrated moonscape.

  Then everything changed.

  As darkness fell, Gloria walked alone along the interface between jungle and Armageddon. The silence gradually lifted. She walked toward the orange glow. By twilight, flames just steps in front of her leaped from branch to trunk, consuming the forest fuel. Ringo yelled for her to turn around. A tree burst into flames and its huge leaves evaporated in a heartbeat. Wood cracked, and jets of steam whistled from the mess of death as loud as the sound of life had been back in paradise. The villagers worked their way along the path to get away from the fire.

  Something was wrong. They were too close to the flames. A shower of sparks missed a family by inches. Why would these people get so close to a forest fire? It almost seemed as though Chopper were herding the villagers into the flames.

  The VirtExReality Helmet’s ultrahigh-resolution video permitted Ringo great latitude in choosing where to look but was ultimately limited by the orientation of Gloria’s head. So it was that when the crack of a rifle caused Gloria to whip her head around, Ringo’s view shifted to an unimaginable sight: Chopper standing against the background of jungle-devouring fire, with a rifle at his shoulder, firing into the dirt at the girl and her mother. The mother grabbed the child’s hand and ducked beneath a branch. Trying to keep up, the girl rushed into a blast of sparks and screamed. The woman reached down and lifted the child into position against her hip.

  With the child on her hip, the woman tried to run along the path, but tripped before she could take three steps. The girl went down first, safe on the muddy path, but as the mother came down, in trying to protect the child, she buried her face in the embers of a burning log.

  Ringo started to push the helmet off his head to get away from the image of the woman’s scorching face and the sound of her screams turning hoarse and ragged, to get away from this nightmare. But he stopped and let it slide back on his head. It was a nightmare, and in the way of nightmares, he couldn’t quite wake himself to safety.

  Chopper raised the rifle and fired again, and the woman’s screaming misery came to an abrupt stop.

  The video went haywire for an instant. Gloria must have shaken her head. It was the sort of thing that offline processing software could fix in the conversion of raw data to a VR application.

  From that point, Gloria’s actions made a 180-degree shift. Where she had been meandering through this nightmare with neither direction nor intent, she was now Gloria again. She moved with purpose, fighting her way through the flames to the girl. She pulled the child from under the body of her mother, hugged her, and then sent her running through a window in the flames to safety.

  Now, instead of staring at the monkeys above as though they were an apparition, Gloria seemed to be gauging their direction and following them the way that people have used animals’ primitive instincts since the dawn of civilization to guide them out of danger.

  A thought came to Ringo. He remembered how Farley used to describe the “sensory saturation” point as a phase transition, a shift like water turning to ice. Whatever had been going on with Gloria had just changed. The ice had melted and she was back.

  She snatched up the child and took off at full speed, dodging flying cinders, juking around flames.

  Tahir had been navigating the ruined streets of Mogadishu for more than two weeks. Experience gave him a knack for recognizing fresh rubble, beneath which he was likely to find food or money. He accumulated a rifle, a few rounds of ammunition, enough canned goods—mostly beans—to fend off hunger, and enough money to acquire coffee on his forays into other neighborhoods.

  About the time that his neighbors began ignoring him, he found what he’d been searching for: a cell phone. The case was scratched and the battery dead, but the LCD display looked sound. Of course a cell phone has no value without base stations. He located half a dozen, but like everything and everyone
in this miserable, lawless city, the base stations were victims of the vandalizing force of crossfire. Just two of them looked like they might be operational during the rare occasions of steady electrical power. Both were located in the well-guarded section of the city where the nominal, UN backed government resided. Like every “nominal government” Tahir had known, this one showed all the signs of being composed of the best-fortified thugs.

  Concrete barriers with armed guards defined this island of para-civilization. The distinction between the soldiers here and those waging war in the outer neighborhoods was that these guys had uniforms and sunglasses.

  Wearing a turban he’d stolen from a dead man, Tahir worked his way into the green zone. The trick was not to avoid the guards but to stick with them while staying in their blind spots. Trouble tended to come when the location of the adversary was unknown. He crawled along a concrete barrier behind a patrol. When they stopped to confer, he wedged himself in the gaps between barriers. He worked his way through the ruins two blocks into the green zone and then waited for another patrol—or anyone, for that matter—whom he could follow into the relative civilization. Riding the tail of one group, then another, never appearing to be alone, he emerged into the war-torn city center without drawing attention.

  Finally, with no one around, he stood, crossed a street, and walked into a small store. Every surface was covered. It had been decades since he’d been in such a sincere shop. Few of the cans were labeled, and many were empty. There were bags of flour, spices, sugar, and nuts. Fruits and vegetables lined a few baskets just inside the door.

  The proprietor sat behind a counter with an unlit brown cigarette dangling from his mouth. Tahir went to the counter and asked to buy a calling card, the sort that provides a phone number with a certain number of credits for long-distance phone calls. The man asked for what region of the world Tahir would need the card. At that point, Tahir had to guess. If he said the United States, he’d be marked. In this part of the world, it was impossible for an American to be undercover. Better to appear strange but harmless. Guessing that long-distance cards would cover distinct geopolitical categories, he said, “Japan.”

  The man shuffled through a deck of yellow cards and set one on the counter. Sure enough, the stars and stripes were mingled among the flags of other faraway countries, including the red sun of Japan. As Tahir had anticipated, his odd request generated a conversation. He explained that his son was in the employ of an Indian transport company aboard a ship due to land in Okinawa. The man dug into a shelf behind him and pulled out an atlas. The two studied Japan and the man talked about places he’d like to go.

  An hour later, Tahir emerged from the store. People walked with purpose along cracked sidewalks. Mopeds, bicycles, buses, and a few old European cars mixed with armed transports—mostly beat-up pickup trucks mounted with machine guns and rocket launchers—clogged the streets.

  He walked until he saw the antennas of an undamaged cell-phone base station. Half a block farther, he went into a café. The men wore traditional Muslim gear: light-colored, loose-fitting tunics, called thobes, and pants, sirwals. Some were in turbans, others in low-profile, cylindrical headwear, tagiyah, or scarflike ghutra, which were held to the head with rope coils. They sipped strong black coffee, played dominoes, and smoked tobacco from hookahs. Tahir walked to the counter. He bought a Turkish coffee and a big piece of pita bread draped in tahini. He asked about business, and made the same dumb wisecracks at the expense of the local military that he’d made in Baghdad and before that in Tehran. They brought the same result, too: even the soldiers laughed.

  He sipped his coffee, ate the bread, and read an old Lebanese newspaper. An hour later, he got another cup of coffee. This time, as the man poured, Tahir pulled the scratched-up cell phone from his pocket. He flipped it open, held down the button, looked at it with disgust, and, when the man passed the coffee across the counter, said, “This phone is the devil. When the battery is alive there is no signal. There must be a perfect signal right here, for the battery is dead.”

  The man across the counter shook his head in commiseration and said, “Inshallah, a signal will come.” He then pulled a phone from under the counter. A newer phone, the kind with a large screen and no buttons. The man said, “Aah, you are right, we have a signal today. If you would be so kind sir, as to give me a few shilin, you may use my phone.” He handed Tahir the phone and, with a smile, added, “Maybe a signal, my friend, but don’t expect clarity.”

  Tahir took the phone and stared at it. He laughed and asked, “How does one use this fancy phone?” The man showed him how to make a call. Of course, the phone was useless to him at that moment. He could hardly stand in a café in Mogadishu and have a conversation in English without raising suspicion. But he had discovered the location of an operable phone and, equally important, had learned how to use it. He pretended to make a call and then handed the phone back. “You have fancy new phone and barely a signal?”

  The man accepted the phone, zipped his fingers across the screen, and suddenly it was a tiny television. Tahir shook his head. The man said, “A smartphone! When I call my son, I can barely hear him, but he sends me movies of my granddaughter. It is upside down.”

  A few minutes later Tahir crossed the street and entered a building. He went up a flight of stairs and moseyed down a hall holding the newspaper as though reading it, but actually taking in every sound of the building to determine its baseline. He repeated this up the next three floors. From the roof, he watched the entrance of the café, familiarizing himself with the rhythm of the block so he could behave in a way that the locals would think of as normal and therefore invisible.

  He went back to the café that evening. The hookahs were out and dominoes covered every table. He joined a game, played well enough not to draw attention, spoke rarely enough to conceal his accent, and when the proprietor was engrossed in a game, took it upon himself to reach across the counter for a bowl of honey. He brought the honey to the proprietor’s table and parceled out tiny spoonfuls to each man according to his desire, then returned the honey to its spot.

  As he set the earthenware bowl behind the counter, he felt along the shelf, passed over some keys, a leather pouch, and then felt the man’s cell phone.

  He finished the game of dominoes, stood, yawned, and walked out. Fifteen minutes later, he sat down on the roof across the street from the café. He took out the yellow card and deciphered the number to call for a US connection. To his left, a few buildings down the block, he could see the cell phone base station. He prayed for good coverage.

  As a crescent moon set over Mogadishu, Tahir made his call.

  Ringo’s world was built around abstract realities. He simulated things; he didn’t live them. As Gloria sprinted through the burning jungle, he watched until he had to act.

  It took an hour to get Bupin on the phone. Bupin asked a laundry list of questions aimed at determining the level of danger. Ultimately he brushed the whole thing aside. All Ringo had seen were the data necessary for reproducing the experience of paradise being transformed into a nightmare. It was supposed to look like that.

  Ringo skimmed through the data as it accumulated, hoping for evidence that Bupin was correct. He wasn’t. The video showed Gloria running, and when she looked back, it showed Chopper chasing her with a rifle. All evidence indicated that he was herding Gloria, the child, and as many villagers as he could into the conflagration.

  Ringo set the helmet aside and turned off the video. He stared at the monitor in front of him, a software editor and debugger covered in C code. He would call Bupin again, right after he figured out exactly where Ringo and Gloria were. He cursed himself for designing a DAQ system without a GPS chip. It had been a battery-lifetime decision. The fewer the processors, the longer the battery life. Instead he’d written software that calculated the position of the sensors based on the length of time it took the data to travel from to the satellites and the DAQ systems. With the position of the satellites and
Chopper’s DAQ PC, he could calculate the position of the transmitter to within a few miles. Sufficient accuracy to isolate Moby-Dick swimming from the Indian Ocean to the Antarctic, but not good enough to find Gloria. He knew he could do better; he’d just never had the time or reason to improve the original software.

  Ringo was knee-deep in source code when the call came. The admin buzzed him and he didn’t answer. The door opened and the admin told him Tahir was on the line.

  “Tahir? What? But he’s dead.” He grabbed the phone. “Is it really you?”

  Though the line crackled with digital errors and analog noise, Tahir’s steady Middle Eastern enunciation, mixing vowels into consonants, convinced Ringo that it was him.

  Ringo said, “What about Farley?” But the question got lost in the noise. He repeated himself but it was pointless. Of all the things Ringo believed he deserved, adequate technology topped the list.

  Tahir spoke slowly, telling Ringo that they would exchange facts one at a time, chronologically, confirming reception of each before moving on to the next. Tahir would go first: Farley and most of the volunteer team were imprisoned. Ringo couldn’t believe it, so Tahir repeated himself, word for word. Ringo whooped and swung his fist like a relief pitcher throwing the ninth straight strike of an inning.

  Tahir said, “Now you will provide your facts; I will then provide instructions to remedy the situation.”

  Ringo explained that Tahir and Farley had been reported dead and that the TV news had provided plenty of visual evidence. Tahir repeated the information, confirming their transmission through the noise. Ringo described Gloria’s reaction, waited for Tahir to confirm, and then explained that Gloria had accompanied Chopper to Brazil in order to record data for the next VR application.