Unleashed

by Patrick McLaughlin

  Chapter 3

  A warm breeze brushed the ocean’s surface beyond the reef signaling the afternoon trade winds. Shawn knew the sun would soon swing behind the surf and Drake Powers, now nineteen and undoubtedly the world’s best surfer would disappear against the dark green shadow of the wave which would make it impossible to shoot any usable images. He squeezed the bill of his Deep Surf cap to communicate with Drake, barely a dot a half-mile out.

  “Drake Brah, drop in on a few more, then paddle your scrawny ass in. We are cool with your performance today, much to show the herds in Huntington.”

  He released the button, grateful for the two-way radio Sally helped him devise to speak with Drake in the line-up.

  Sally, despite being married to her research work, was always eager to contribute, and she stayed in touch much more than he expected after their break-up two years ago. When they first met near Dana Point, California, Deep Surf had not yet suggested he become Drake’s personal photographer. Drake’s skills and standings in the pro surf circuit had made him the most popular surfer of all times and Deep Surf felt they needed to do everything to protect his image. Shawn had driven up to Salt Creek to spend a few days working with Drake on their future travel itineraries. When they took a break one afternoon, they headed down to the great lawn just above the beach to play with Frisco, Drake’s cool-ass Australian Sheppard.

  While Frisco put on a show for some passersby’s, Sally approached the three of them with little notion of who they were, pretty much ignoring Shawn and Drake, but digging the hell out of Frisco. And it was no wonder. Frisco “the biscuit of the Nabisco Clan” was quite famous on these beaches. Frisco shunned an Aussie’s traditional love of Frisbee play for multi-colored, squeaking tennis balls. When Drake was not surfing, he had plenty of time on his hands to teach Frisco radical ball tricks and as a result Frisco was the true Salt Creek celeb, with his master Drake trailing in popularity only by a hair.

  While Sally played with Frisco, Shawn was blown away when he got a good look at her. When Sally finally noticed him, their attraction was instant. Sally suggested coffee; Shawn countered with dinner and by week’s end, every available moment was spent together.

  Shawn couldn’t believe the coincidence when Sally told him she was a research scientist at Photon Corporation, the company who recently offered a Sentient prototype for Deep Surf to test. Sally had recommended Deep Surf because she recognized the standard of high quality images they maintained in their magazine and online galleries; images which captured long-range, high-speed motion, a perfect test bed for her invention. Destiny had once again paid Shawn a favor.

  But Sally was also on life’s changing track and, upon completing her PhD at Cal Poly; she accepted a research position from Stanford. So began Sally’s dawn-to-dusk lab hours and as Shawn’s assignments continued to take him around the globe, their time together was sporadic at best. As Sally once told Shawn “we’re like comets passing in the heavens, close and fascinating, but we will never collide.”

  Shawn knew Sally was the best thing to ever happen to him, and then un-happen to him when after Stanford, she accepted her current position at a Cal Poly satellite research facility. All Shawn knew about the place was that besides receiving financing from Deep Surf, her work was also secretly funded by DIA and hosted at a Photon Corporation facility on a sprawling industrial campus near San Luis Obispo.

  Photon often enlisted companies like Deep Surf to mask the real purpose of their projects where they designed weapons and surveillance devices for Defense Intelligence. And although Sally was passionately opposed to violence, she thinly justified her work by telling herself she developed imagery, not weaponry. Besides, her desire to apply cutting-edge theories and convert them into hard science was an opportunity she could not pass up. She figured, so long as she didn’t help make something that killed someone, she was doing good work.

  In the wake of their break-up, Shawn eventually took Deep Surf up on their offer to relocate him to Kauai, the Hawaiian island where he now lived. His move drove them even further apart, but in spite of the distance, the spark never died. Their connection was based on love of life, light, and the potential in the beauty around them and it never severed.

  It was odd, Sally and Shawn were scholastic polar opposites and yet somehow they both ended up in some ways working for the same company within the discipline of photography. Sally was gifted beyond intellect as a rare individual whose passion was applied science, but she just as well could have been a painter, artist or musician. To her, the overlap of physics and natural beauty was more than apparent, it was undeniable and to her, she and Shawn bisected at this intersection of color and light, and parted at the crossroads of reality. It was simply too painful to continue their relationship from such distances, so they agreed to stop seeing each other.

  But the decision to break up did not stop them from showing they cared and this communications gizmo was her latest FedEx to him he received in Kauai. Inside the carton, on a yellow sticky note with hearts playfully drawn across the bottom, she instructed him: Shawn, the mic switch is sewn into the cap and yes, I CAN sew! Instruct Drake to carefully place this in his ear. Don’t worry, it is waterproof, and you guys can communicate from the beyond! No more jumping up and down on the beach waving your arms like an idiot — although a cute one!

  God I miss her, he thought.

  The ball cap partially shaded Shawn’s face and made him look younger than the thirty-five that he was. Sally had embedding the mic in the cap bill, making it even easier to quickly call to Drake.

  Drake’s final wave was a perfect two-stroke take off with rapid turn positioning in which Drake locked in his sweet spot along the top crest of a twenty-footer. If most pro surfers devise a new stunt, it never takes long before more than a handful of amateurs are knocking it off. But Drake’s moves were the exception to this rule. His shit was so good, way more complex, and no one even ever came close to copying Drake’s signature maneuvers.

  In one of his trademark moves, Drake floated along the crest of a razor-sharp wave with his knees level with the top ridge. Then only inches behind his board’s tail the very top of the wave cascaded away and Drake simply shouldn’t have been able to stay up in that position, along that ridge, but he did.

  Standing on the beach and capturing the move, Shawn bracketed the moment with three exposures, confident the photo he would use was snuggly tucked between shots one and three. Shawn anticipated the exact moment the subject would present the image he wanted and knew shooting in this manner yielded the best results. He had learned this as a kid from a couple of Navy SEALs who came to surf Rincón. They called it their “double tap,” or their method to be sure they finished their job. After that, Shawn called this practice his triple tap. A very big difference in the net result for sure, but the analogy fit. It worked for him.

  Thinking back to his first DSLR from kindly gear dude back in Puerto Rico, Shawn recalled how he used to blast through twelve to twenty exposures at a time, giddy with his power to capture so many high-resolution images in sequence so quickly it was almost like shooting a movie. But with time and experience, Shawn eliminated this obsessive habit when a fellow surf photographer pointed out with each shutter release, the lifespan of a camera was shortened. He went on to show Shawn how to check the number of photos his camera had captured and how Shawn’s camera already indicated 47,000 out of 100,000 actuations which meant he was near the halfway point before it needed an expensive rebuild, which he could ill afford. Another more practical reason was it was a pain in the royal ass to work through 2,500 plus raw images, selecting and deleting along the way, when he only needed thirty to keep the sponsor happy.

  From the corner of his eye he noticed one of his backup storage devices now began to flash a yellow alert, indicating it was near maximum data storage capacity. The day’s shoot was wrapping up just in time. When the researchers working to develop surfing holograms for Deep Surf first loaned Shawn an or
iginal Sentient camera, he was shocked to find one image could be as large as one to five gigabytes. Now, one image from the newest generation Sentient VI camera used the same amount of storage drive space as the last Sentient used in an entire day’s shoot. Thanks to Sally, no other world photographer had access to the Sentient camera; likewise, no other pro had the problems Shawn encountered as he tried to manage these immense files and keep them secure until he was back at Kauai in his editing room.

  Enter Sally, of course, with a solution. Sally rigged the camera with a unique memory card which held onto the most recently captured photo until it confirmed the image had been replicated back to two wireless storage units in his pack. It reminded Shawn of a favorite comic in which an office door sign read, “The Department of Redundancy Department.” Both funny and telling at the same time, he swore his professional life on the words as two calamities freak the shit out of any serious photographer: missing the shot you should have had, and capturing a perfect moment only to lose it in a memory card malfunction. It had happened once, but never again for Shawn P! No siree Bob! He operated and adhered to a strict equipment operating philosophy or “two is one, and one is none.” He would never again get caught with his pants down and never again lose a photo.

  Shawn sometimes thought about all that captive data crammed into those external storage units. He continually asked Sally about it and she always did her best to explain the zeroes and ones data conversion processes and other related computer science stuff he could never wrap his head around. He understood the basics of sensors, pixels, and memory cards, but when Sally described tiny particles of electrons and photons, he could not help but imagine all these little data bits banging around erratically against each other in the storage cases. If they were all crowded in there together, then why did they stay together as an image when he pulled them back out into his software to work on the photos? His ever-repeated question for Sally was, “I mean, I capture the light, light is energy, so what is all that energy doing inside those storage devices when we’re not looking? And how do all those little particles know where they belong when they come out?”

  Shawn disconnected the three drives he had attached to his camera, unplugged the power unit, then headed down to the water’s edge to grab Drake’s board and give him a smack on the ass.