The Sensory Deception

by Ransom Stephens

In that instant, Farley forgot what she’d just experienced, and he said “Wow,” too. But then he realized what she must have meant and added, “The cold and hunger will disappear in a minute, unless you’re genuinely hungry.”

  She wrapped the blanket around her legs and then sipped from the mug. After swallowing, she said, “Oh, I am hungry.”

  “Good. Chopper’s cooking lasagna.”

  She looked quizzical, nodding to herself. Then she kicked off the blanket and started to stand. “How did you do that?” she asked. “How long was I gone?”

  “Take it easy, Gloria,” Farley said, encouraging her to stay seated. “It was the length of a feature film, less than two hours.” Farley stroked his beard. She didn’t look stable yet, so he added, “We’ll talk in a minute. Just relax.”

  Ten minutes later, Farley guided her out of the demo area. He replaced her empty mug with a glass of red wine and proceeded into the family room where Ringo and Chopper waited. The two of them sat on the couch, and Gloria kicked off her shoes and curled her legs under her.

  Farley watched how she made herself at home. The act of familiarity spoke of her self-image. Farley liked women who assumed respect. She lifted the guitar from the coffee table and strummed a chord, dragging her fingers across each string in a gentle melody, and Farley felt a wave of confidence. She would be a good fit—businesswise, of course. He caught himself staring at her and repeated the thought to himself to set it in the stone of self-discipline.

  He looked across the room to Chopper and Ringo. Ringo responded with an approving smile and nod. Farley could see him staring at Gloria, evaluating.

  Chopper brought plates of lasagna into the living room and they ate quietly. Then Gloria set her not-quite-clean plate on the driftwood coffee table, wiped her mouth on a napkin, and said, “Okay, how did you do that?”

  Across the room, Chopper was waiting. Over the years, Farley had come to rely on him. The two of them had been close since the day they met in a Berkeley dormitory. Farley usually needed distance between himself and his colleagues. He knew that the more people relied on him, the more important that distance was, but with Chopper it was different. From the day they met, Chopper had shown an uncanny ability to anticipate Farley’s thoughts and an amazing knack for questioning only those decisions that Farley also doubted. Their resulting closeness had been so immediate it was almost eerie. Chopper felt more like an extension of Farley’s will than just a friend. So it was that as Farley formulated the thought that he needn’t so much sell the idea to Gloria as recruit her, Chopper stood and left the room. Farley knew what he was doing as certainly as Chopper understood it was what Farley wanted him to do.

  Farley set his plate next to Gloria’s, leaned forward, and turned to face her. He took a breath, and just as he began to speak, Chopper returned with a tablet computer.

  “It started with a mockingbird.” Farley enunciated each word with purpose, the way his grandfather had done when Farley was a boy. He tapped the screen and a picture of a bird appeared. The bird was wearing a little hat. “We recorded two days of video and audio—everything the bird saw and heard, and every note he sang. The experiment yielded data on what he ate, and where, when, and how long he flew. One night, when these guys were here, I played the video on the big-screen TV. With the lights out and the sound cranked up, it was like a roller coaster ride. We all got vertigo. Ringo almost hurled.”

  Gloria asked, “Have you submitted a patent for the data acquisition technology?”

  “The documentation is in the packet we sent.”

  He swiped the screen, bringing up a picture of a polar bear. The bear was sitting up, propped against an ice shelf, its eyes open and paws hanging at its sides. In the photo, Chopper knelt next to the bear with a stethoscope, and Farley leaned against it, his face close enough to smell the bear’s breath. The picture still thrilled Farley, like an adolescent daydream: partying with a polar bear. When he felt Gloria turn to him, he swiped again.

  In the next picture, Ringo was fitting a harness over the bear’s head and neck. “This is how we recorded the reality you just experienced,” Farley said. “Equipment on the harness recorded 3-D video, binaural sound including supersonic and subsonic frequencies, and temperature; it also had a satellite communications link for data acquisition.”

  “That really happened?” Gloria asked. “They shot her?” Her voice quivered.

  “Yes. It really happened.” He lowered his voice in both tone and volume. “Just as you experienced at the end of that long, painful swim, she went ashore in Iceland and the police shot her.”

  Gloria trembled. “Oh my god.”

  “What you experienced in two hours, that animal had to endure for fourteen days. Fourteen days.”

  He let it sink in before continuing: “Without ice, polar bears die and, as you now know, polar bears don’t give up. She swam almost four hundred miles. Remember the confidence you felt when you first slid into the water? How certain you were after the first day that you’d find another iceberg? And the second day? Remember the feeling of disappointment when there was no ice?”

  Gloria’s eyes, now filled with emotion, caught his. He forgot what he was going to say. A tear dripped down her cheek, and before he realized what he was doing, he wiped it away.

  In a quiet, breathy voice, she said, “Yes, that was it. I was disappointed. Not angry, not disillusioned, just really disappointed.” She turned back to the picture and her voice trembled. “It just—the whole thing, like the world broke my heart.”

  The next picture showed Farley and Chopper walking across an ice sheet with the polar bear outfitted in the data-collection harness. The next was of the bear resting in a snowdrift with Farley leaning against her, and the one after that showed Farley comparing the size of his palm to the bear’s.

  “It all really happened?” Gloria whispered.

  “It really happens every day.”

  “But after swimming all that way, how come, when she finally made it”—she took a deep breath—“why did they shoot her?”

  “If you were a cop walking along the seashore and you saw a starving bear stalking a group of scuba divers, what would you do?”

  Gloria covered her face with her hands.

  The room was silent but for the ticking of a clock.

  Chopper stood, stepped to the center of the room, and, looking down at Gloria, asked, “Do you consider yourself an environmentalist?”

  Gloria sipped her wine. When she looked up at Chopper, his eyes widened as though impressed that she would meet his glare. He turned to Farley and gave a barely perceptible nod of approval.

  She cleared her throat and said, “I’ve never thought of myself as an environmentalist.” She paused between sentences. “I think that I appreciate how nature works. How every piece of an ecosystem plays a role. But no, I’ve never donated money to an environmental organization or volunteered.” She looked away from Chopper, toward the window and the ocean beyond it, and mumbled, “I don’t know.”

  Chopper refilled her wineglass and said, “Walking in another animal’s skin changes your perspective.”

  Gloria took a long sip, stretched her legs out on the coffee table, and asked, “When you recorded the data to make your, umm, reality show, did you hurt the bear?”

  “You mean, how did we cuddle up to one of nature’s most aggressive carnivores without being eaten?” Farley let a warm, satisfied smile consume his face. A smile that he knew would shift the tension in the room back to business. “The experiment with birds taught me that the animal needs to be awake when we fit the harness. If she’s unconscious, it’s impossible to put it on in a way that’s comfortable, and if it’s not comfortable she’ll just paw it off. The last thing we wanted was to make her uncomfortable. No, of course we didn’t hurt her. In fact, the bear really had a nice time with us. You see, Chopper designed a tranquilizer…”

  Without a pause, Chopper finished the sentence: “…to give the bear a nice, happy buzz.” He cont
inued in a clinical tone. “Every animal likes to get high, not just people. So instead of knocking the bear out, I made her relaxed and euphoric. She never lost consciousness, and my brew left no hangover, no lingering weakness.”

  “Okay,” Gloria said, “but it was so real. That was more than a 3-D movie from the front row…”

  Farley took another sip of wine, a small sip because the wine buzz was getting a little too comfortable. He swallowed and cleared his throat. Farley was aware of the modulation of his speaking voice. He had learned it from his grandfather, who had used it to address the people who worked for him. Farley would begin with a deep, booming voice to grab your attention, and then his volume would diminish so you had to strain to hear. When you have to work at something, you put a higher value on it. The result was that people paid attention when Farley spoke.

  He began: “We have five senses. Most animals also have five senses. Of course they’re not the same—nocturnal animals see some infrared, birds have better resolution, a dog’s sense of smell is four hundred times more sensitive—but the essential equipment is pretty standard. The big difference is that most animals only have enough brainpower to process the data into immediate conclusions built from algorithms that are hardwired by instinct. In other words, most animals cannot deconstruct their sensory data and speculate on cause-effect relationships. Without the ability to reflect and a language with which to formulate thoughts, their entire lives consist of immediate interaction with the world. People, on the other hand, process and ponder.” He stopped and regarded Gloria. She was paying close attention, but he couldn’t tell if she was following.

  He resumed at full volume, “Now, here’s the trick. We call it sensory saturation.”

  “Have you trademarked that?”

  “Umm, no,” Farley said.

  She raised her eyebrows. “There’s an action item.”

  He nodded and continued. “The reason you so fully believed you were a bear for those two hours is that we overwhelmed your senses—saturated them. We believe there is a threshold beyond which the brain is so overwhelmed by sensory data that it switches gears. It shifts from reflective thinking to the primitive type of immediate process-and-response that animals experience. It worked, too—didn’t it?”

  Gloria furrowed her brow and nodded slowly.

  “You experienced the life of a polar bear until you saw the guns, got a blast of adrenaline, and came out of it. Imagine what it would be like with total immersion.”

  “You did all this just with video and sound?”

  Farley stood and offered a hand to Gloria. “Let’s go back to the lab. I’ll show you.”

  As Gloria approached the room with the big-screen TV and plush chair, feelings of passion and trepidation mixed in her belly. She had been a venture capital scout since getting her MBA four years before and had seen plenty of new technologies. This was different. She felt an intimate relationship with this strange product.

  She took a sip of wine and stepped in. Farley stood next to her as though spotting her on exercise equipment. She drank the rest of her wine. Farley took the glass and set it aside. She said, “I’m going to need a refill.”

  Farley motioned to Ringo, who turned on an overhead light.

  “This is our virtual experience lab.” He ran his hand along a wall, encouraging her to do the same. It was covered in a black screen-like fabric. The tension of the cloth varied over the hollow spaces of speaker cones, air-exchange gratings, and solid plywood. “There are transducers in the walls, the ceiling, even embedded in the chair. Transducers are devices that convert electrical signals into outputs that stimulate different senses. Speakers transduce electricity into sound. Video monitors transduce electricity into light and images. Heaters and coolers transduce temperature. We have scent transducers that convert an array of chemicals into smells. We’ve submitted patents for every transducer that’s not an off-the-shelf part.”

  He guided her back to the reclining chair. As he pushed the huge monitor out of the way, she felt both a desire to sit in the chair and a fear of what could happen if she did. Selling this thing would take some innovative marketing.

  She ran her hands along the leather, but couldn’t feel anything except padding.

  Ringo returned with a bottle of dark red wine and refilled her glass. She was starting to really like this quiet, pleasant black man. She caught herself wondering if he experienced the same type of prejudice as she did: rarely negative or positive, but a constant reminder that she was different from the typical Silicon Valley technologist.

  Farley reached down to the side table and clicked the mouse. A familiar image appeared on the screen: the polar bear’s point of view as she slid across the ice just before entering the water. It looked blurry and unnaturally colorful. Farley offered her the heavy glasses. With the glasses on, the image seemed unrealistically vivid. Image boundaries jumped out; the edges of the ice and the color of the sky were vivid like black-light posters.

  Farley magnified the image and said, “Our video has ten times the resolution of standard high-definition TV. We use the extra pixels to embed more information for your optic nerves to process.” He zoomed in on the image until it became pixelated. “See how we mix in bright, fluorescent colors? We use similar tricks with sound. First, we use binaural audio, which is recorded with multiple microphones so you can decipher where a sound comes from—three-dimensional sound. We also mix the recording with certain frequencies amplified to control mood. We even mix in music. Classic themes from movies are sort of melted over the natural sound—we might have to pay royalties to John Williams. The music, soothing colors, and scents also prevent the irritation of sensory overload—which was a big problem in our first prototype.”

  He advanced the image to the point when the bear emerged with the seal in its mouth.

  Gloria pulled the glasses to the top of her head and said, “I can’t believe I ate a seal. And really enjoyed it.”

  “It’s not enough for us to just dump data into your brain. To excite your senses we have to monitor what works and what doesn’t. We use biometric feedback to drive the transducers in a way that optimizes your response.” He took the glasses from her head and inverted them under the light. “Here, near the hinges, you can see the sensors. They measure pupil dilation, which tells the system your level of excitement, fear, and attraction. Temperature monitors are embedded through the bridge. They measure blood flow in your nose to gauge your response to scents. The headphones have similar sensors to track your audio response, and of course the band we wrapped on your arm tracks your pulse, blood pressure, and perspiration.”

  He set the glasses on the table and said, “Lean over the chair.”

  She did. He clicked the mouse and, in a flash, the smell of roast beef surrounded her. It reminded her of horseradish again, and her mouth watered.

  Farley said, “If you hadn’t responded to roast beef, you’d have gotten fried chicken in the next instant—quickly enough that with everything else going on, you wouldn’t have noticed the change. Scents are difficult.”

  He sat on the arm of the chair. “The combination of sounds—including ultralow frequencies that you feel more than hear—with blasts of brightness and drafts of hot or cold air affect your comfort level. The combination puts the sensory-processing part of your brain into overdrive.” He held out his arms and concluded, “That’s how it works.”

  Gloria leaned against the wall. She still hadn’t shed the disappointment of all those sunrises with no ice in sight and the shock of awakening with rifles leveled at her. She looked around. Farley looked confident, as though he’d closed the sale.

  Ringo leaned toward her, cupped her elbow in his hand, and asked, “Do you need to sit down?”

  “No, no,” she said. “It’s an amazing experience.” She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, preparing to do her job. She assembled a skeptical question involving profit and loss and marketability. “I just wonder—” she began, but as she did sh
e found the sentence bitter on her tongue, cynical. She stopped and looked at each of them. It occurred to her that Farley and his team had created something special from all these transducers.

  “Dr. Rutherford,” she said, “this will be difficult. Venture capitalists don’t like funding academics. You’ll have to show them a clear path to profitability. I’m not taking three PhDs into the boardroom without a professional marketing and product-release road map.”

  Farley nodded slowly from his waist, and as he leaned over he bit his lip, which pulled the left side of his mustache into his mouth. The intensity of his focus was cute, in a way, this bear of a man sucking on his own mustache. He continued nodding, rocking slowly back and forth.

  He asked, “Can you help us with the business plan?”

  “We’ll see,” she said, but she already had a vision of how to present the idea to Sand Hill Ventures. “No one is going to buy all this equipment.”

  “We can implement much of the technology in a virtual reality headset and gloves. It will look like supercool motorcycle gear and should be reasonably spectacular.”

  “Reasonably spectacular?” Maybe it was the wine, but she couldn’t help giggling at the phrase, and then her giggle became a yawn.

  He laughed with her. “It’s okay; you just swam hundreds of miles. Of course you’re tired.” The warmth of his hand comforted her shoulder. He applied a tiny bit of pressure, a simple suggestion to leave the room. It too was comfortable. She caught herself looking up at him, hoping that she hadn’t preened her hair aside but certain she had.

  They walked out of the lab/garage, back through the kitchen to the family room.

  Chopper sat, strumming the guitar. A yellow tackle box was on the couch next to him. Ringo leaned against the counter that separated the kitchen from the family room. Farley guided Gloria to the couch.

  This time she tried to look professional, didn’t curl her legs under her or rest them on the coffee table. She said, “You play beautifully.” Chopper nodded toward her but kept those amber-brown eyes on his guitar. The guitar was scratched up and dull, its lacquer worn away, but it sounded bright. He switched to a long cresting wave of blues. She realized he was now staring at her.