The Sensory Deception (32 page)

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: nature, 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.

C
hopper 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.