The Sensory Deception (30 page)

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 offshore. 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.”

The guards stepped forward, raising their AK-47s. Farley froze.

Sy said, “Farley Rutherford, we are not here for your glory.”

Farley walked back to the quarters that he used to think of as his lab. These days, he shared it with Tahir and two other men.

He understood that the documentary would take time and he appreciated Gloria’s plans to use it to promote VirtExReality, but he had to do something to affect his own destiny. He started spending most of his time at the generator, getting whatever charge he could for his laptop so he could edit his own version of the documentary. He titled it
Pirates at the Plank of Life
and worked on it at night when he could turn the screen brightness way down to extend battery life. His experience making zoological instruction videos helped.

It took another three weeks to create a story from all the raw footage. The edits were too sharp, the audio needed to be mixed and blended, much of the footage needed enhancing to fix the lighting and effects, but he finally had something. Reinvigorated, he brought the laptop to Sy’s tent, where he showed the thirty-minute encapsulation of life and trials in Sy’s kingdom. It played well on the king’s ego, and Sy agreed to narrate the film and give Farley extra time at the generator. Farley came back the next day with a script and cameras.

Farley overlaid the audio and integrated the new video that night. When he finished, he still had enough charge to transmit the whole thing to California. He connected the satellite phone and started the upload. While waiting, he succumbed to the old habit of checking up on the Moby data.

Without a GPS chip, which Ringo had left out to simplify circuitry and extend battery life, they used a simple satellite triangulation calculation, accurate to about a kilometer, to track Moby’s path. Farley checked the map and saw that Moby was well off Africa’s continental shelf, heading south on the open sea, into deeper and colder water where the Indian Ocean gives way to the Antarctic.

Again, out of habit, Farley brought up the latest log file. The file showed nothing but empty headers. No data was being transmitted.

Farley stared at the screen, thinking that he could really use a lucky break about now. The obvious answer was that the sensors or the transmitter had used up their battery power. The other possibility was that Moby had tired of the equipment and managed to scrape it off, and the sensors were lying at the bottom of the ocean.

He counted the number of weeks since they had equipped Moby; the charge should last another month. Moby had stayed with the pod for two weeks and then traveled for two and a half months.

Farley switched back to check progress on the documentary upload. For a while it streamed along at a few megabytes per second, but then it bogged down. He checked the network connection. It was blazing. Something was sucking up his bandwidth. He found the guilty process and reopened the Moby data log file.

Farley kicked himself for being such a pessimist. The sensors and transmitter were fine. Moby was fine. He’d just surfaced
from a long dive, and the sensors were overflowing with data. He disconnected the laptop from the Moby data. It would all be collected in Santa Cruz, and he couldn’t do anything with it, anyway. With full bandwidth, it only took a few more minutes to finish uploading
Pirates at the Plank of Life
.

C
hopper and Ringo packed the transducers for the sensory saturation chambers—that is, the VirtExReality chambers, plus two racks of computer servers, peripherals, and cables, lots of cables—in Ringo’s VW Microbus. They arrived in Santa Monica in the afternoon. The focus group would be there the next day, and they had to get everything in place.

The VirtExReality chambers had already been delivered, and their sleek fiberglass facades would arrive the next day.

Chopper followed Ringo inside, his yellow tackle box in hand. Gloria called out their names and pranced over. She poked Ringo in the belly with an index finger, hugged him, and said, “How can a black man have a pasty complexion? You need to get outside, get some exercise, meet a nice girl.”

He poked her back and said, “Yeah, so do you.”

Then she greeted Chopper, engulfing him in a light fog of her jasmine-scented perfume. With his right arm fixed in place by a sling, she wedged her hands around his waist and squeezed him. Then she ran her hands along his healing shoulder. Her hand lingered on his right bicep. She looked up at him. When she spoke, her breath smelled like coffee and happiness. Her eyes were huge, and her smile emphasized the density of her lips. In the overwhelming rush of Gloria, Chopper realized something.
These were Farley’s feelings—the residue of how Farley felt, but in Chopper’s mind. He smiled at her—a real smile, not the one that spelled trouble. A smile that reflected feelings he rarely had and almost never shared. In that instant, he felt very close to his friend Farley.

Gloria said, “Are we ready for the focus group?”

“It runs and swims and doesn’t crash,” Ringo said. “The wisdom of an insignificant sample size isn’t going to tell us anything.”

She glared at him.

Chopper wanted to tell Ringo the true value of the experiment but couldn’t, of course. He’d decided not to administer his sensory deception drug to the focus group. Instead, he’d use the focus group results to find out if sensory saturation could be obtained with only external stimuli. He set his yellow tackle box in a corner.

There was another reason that Chopper didn’t spike the focus group. Bupin, the greedy VC, had denied their Series B funding and, in so doing, had earned the privilege of being the first recipient of the tlitliltzin-prime formulation.

Ringo enjoyed the physical labor. Sometimes software felt too ethereal. With Chopper’s injury, Ringo had to do most of the heavy lifting, and Gloria had been right: he was totally out of shape. The two of them worked overnight so that the chambers would be ready when the fiberglass facades arrived. They ran cables, set up the computing/data processing room—the real guts of the VR—and rewired the entire store.

Since he and Chopper had been working side by side the past few months, Ringo had grown closer to Chopper. Without Farley
around, Chopper seemed to loosen up a little, didn’t seem to take things as seriously. Ringo felt as if the reality of Chopper was more pleasant than the concept. Chopper said no more than necessary, didn’t even banter, but he always seemed to know what Ringo was trying to do.

The facades arrived the next morning. Done in sparkling metal-flake blues, purples, reds, and greens, the covers swung up like the gull wing doors of an exotic sports car. They looked like a cross between a small racing boat and a UFO. A U-shaped drink bar surrounded by fixed stools took up the center of the arcade. Three suede couches lined the back wall, forming a lounge where customers could relax before and after their VirtExperiences. Video screens that lined the walls at ceiling level would show live video feeds of ongoing VR experiences.

Once the new hardware was installed, after thirty straight hours of work, Ringo had a good accomplishment buzz going and decided to go crash at the hotel rather than sit around and watch Gloria’s focus group criticize everything he’d worked on for the better part of the last two years.

Ringo packed away his tools and walked back to the hotel. He kicked back on the bed for a while but couldn’t sleep. He tried watching TV but ended up pacing. He couldn’t even focus on a video game.

Ringo walked back to the strip mall. On his first pass, he walked right by the storefront and continued down to the pier. As he watched the sunset, he kept visualizing Gloria’s focus group, seven people unqualified for much of anything judging his work. What bullshit.

He walked back to the arcade. He stopped on the curb and saw a guy about his age emerge from one of the chambers. The guy looked excited. That was good, but then he started talking to Gloria and she looked less psyched, so Ringo walked down to
Venice Beach. He sat at a bar and watched the people go by until he couldn’t sit still. Back at the strip mall, he bought a ticket to a movie and managed to sit in the theater for two hours. As he walked out, he couldn’t even remember what movie he’d seen.

From across the parking lot, it looked like they’d finished. He walked into the arcade. Chopper stood behind the drink bar.

Ringo said, “Where’s Gloria? What’s the verdict?”

“Gloria’s having dinner with Bupin.”

“When did he get here?”

“Right after you left.”

“Great. Another unqualified judge. It makes my day.” Ringo took a Vitaminwater from behind the bar and sat at one of the couches with his tablet computer. “All right, Chopper, I’m ready. Let me have it.”