The Sensory Deception

by Ransom Stephens

  In the morning meeting on their one-year anniversary, Chopper took his usual position on the couch where he could see the ocean as well as the whiteboard. He stretched his legs out on the coffee table, nudging his yellow tackle box to the side. Farley stood next to the whiteboard, looking at a column of milestones. Most were checked off. Gloria sat at the edge of the couch to Chopper’s left, facing the whiteboard but looking at some inane corporate software she used to track progress.

  Chopper closed his eyes and experienced one of the stranger symptoms of migraine headaches. The world looked brighter with his eyes closed than with them open. The pain had just started, a steady thumping behind his left eye.

  Across the room, Ringo’s customary spot on a stool next to the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room was empty. Gloria looked up from her coffee and set aside her laptop. She and Farley both watched the kitchen. Chopper heard the familiar rustle of Ringo emerging from the garage-lab. He set something on the counter and struggled with something else that sounded like a newspaper falling to the floor.

  Farley asked, “Okay, Ringo, what have you got?”

  Ringo stepped around the counter with the VR helmet prototype in one hand and a full-color poster of the finished product in the other. Wearing a wide grin, he said, “I give you the first complete VirtExReality Helmet.” He set the prototype on the coffee table and held up the poster.

  Gloria got up and embraced Ringo. Farley gave him a high five. Chopper examined the helmet.

  Built from the shell of a red metal-flake motorcycle helmet, this was the first prototype with every design feature: accelerometers to sense motion, binaural audio with subsonic and supersonic speakers, scent transducers with fans and baffles, and temperature control. The faceplate was split into two screens to provide genuine 3-D video that over-covered the user’s visual range, so that flashes of light outside the field of view could be used to draw attention in a specific direction. When users turned their heads, the view changed appropriately. It looked like Iron Man’s head. Chopper smiled at the thought. No coincidence there. Ringo littered his work area with comic book superhero swag.

  Ringo. Chopper had met him that first day of college at UC Berkeley. The same day he’d met Farley. At first, he had ignored the quirky, diminutive black man with the narrow face and easy smile. When he realized that Farley saw something in Ringo, Chopper had accepted him. It would be incorrect to say that Chopper liked Ringo. Accepted, that was the word; Chopper accepted Ringo’s talent, skill, and willingness to work hard in support of Farley’s noble goals. Whether or not Ringo shared those goals was still an open question in Chopper’s mind.

  He leaned back on the sofa, staring at the helmet. Would it work?

  The neurology of sensory saturation had seemed sound a year earlier, when the polar bear app had convinced Gloria. Technology-wise they’d come a long way, but no matter how refined the sights, sounds, scents, and tactile stimulation, the transducer-driven technology was still a one-sided, external approach. The ideal system would stimulate the senses by applying currents directly to the brain’s own DAQ wetware, directly to the nerves themselves without the intermediate step of producing images, sounds, and so on.

  Would this one-way approach generate sensory saturation in a reasonable fraction of users? Every thought that went through Chopper’s mind landed at the same conclusion: one-way is half-assed. Ringo had done his part; the mix of hardware and software would excite every sense. But Chopper didn’t think it was enough. It was Chopper’s fault: he was the neurologist.

  Farley asked, “What do you think, Chopper?”

  Chopper looked back at him. They stared at each other for a few seconds, brown eyes meeting blue. Chopper understood how thoughts work, knew that telepathy was as absurd as clairvoyance, but he also knew without fail what Farley needed and when he needed it. Right now he needed Chopper to build up Ringo and keep his focus on the problem at hand.

  “I think it’s amazing,” Chopper said. “Ringo, you’ve built world-changing technology in one year. You blow me away.”

  Ringo responded to Chopper’s manipulation with an even broader smile.

  He held the poster higher. The depiction of the finished product looked even more like superhero headgear than the prototype.

  Chopper held up his fist, and Ringo leaned forward and bumped his knuckles. Chopper envied Ringo his joy and the simplicity of his life.

  “Are the production designs ready?” Gloria asked.

  Ringo said, “Oh, please.”

  “Terrific,” she said. “I’ll book your flight to Minnesota to visit our contract manufacturer.”

  Ringo set the poster on the table and sat next to Gloria, with Farley on her other side. The three of them looked through his designs for the helmets, gloves, and jumpsuits. Farley glanced across to Chopper now and then. Each time, he pulled his lips together and gave that subtle nod that brought Chopper peace and confidence. Farley wouldn’t be talking about manufacture if he didn’t believe that Chopper could solve the remaining problems. That confidence was both infectious and addictive. Chopper recognized his own codependence and waded in it.

  When Farley was satisfied, he turned to Chopper and asked, “What have you got?”

  Chopper said, “The whale tranquilizer is ready to test, but I’ve got something more important.” He stood and walked through the kitchen and into the garage. There, on a little shelf above the door, waited the bottle of champagne that had collected dust over the past year. He took it down and wiped it off.

  Back in the kitchen, he removed the little wire cage from the cork. Taking careful aim, he popped the cork in such a way that it flew over the counter, across the room, and bounced off the prototype helmet.

  Chopper brought the bottle into the room, held it up, and said, “Toast to Ringo.”

  “Wait,” Gloria said. “We should all have glasses.”

  “Glasses? We don’t need no stinkin’ glasses,” Ringo said.

  Everyone looked at the bottle Chopper held up. “Here’s to Reginald Hayes.”

  Ringo took the bottle to his mouth and upended it. Foam dribbled down his neck. He handed the bottle to Farley, who took a drink and passed it to Gloria.

  After the meeting, Chopper took his yellow tackle box and went up to his room. He pulled the blinds and closed the curtains. The pain wasn’t as bad in the dark.

  It had started that morning. He’d been sitting at his usual spot on the bluff as the sun rose. When he looked out over the ocean, then up to the sky, he’d seen an aura. As though the white phosphorescent sea foam had burned an image onto his retina, he saw its outline everywhere he looked. A few hours later, just before the meeting, a drumstick started tapping away behind his left eye, and by the end of the meeting it had ramped up to a ball-peen hammer.

  He was as accustomed to pain as to lack of sleep. Insomnia had never slowed him down. On the contrary, it had taught him a key life lesson: Turn your weaknesses into advantages. Chopper’s insomnia put more waking hours in his day, more time to work.

  To solve this problem he had to think in a whole different direction.

  Ultimately, every process of the mind, the essence of sentience, is a biochemical process. Concepts, feelings, sensory data, and our responses to them, whether instinctive or considered, result from cells’ reactions to different chemicals controlled by the complex feedback loop called thought. Ringo had developed the technology to excite the senses with external stimuli from electrical transducers. The internal biochemical equivalent of a transducer would be a substance that could target specific senses. Thinking back to the original challenges—imposing the feeling of acceleration, converting sonar data to visual images, and generating scents strong enough to fool the mind into thinking they were tastes—he realized that the problem was not exciting the senses; it was deceiving them.

  Chopper took a deep breath. As oxygen filled his blood, his pulse rose a few beats per second and ramped up the pain from ball-peen to claw
hammer. To achieve sensory saturation, he could administer a drug that would make the sensory processing components of the brain overlap in such a way that, for example, an audio input would generate a visual response, and certain images and colors would generate sounds, tastes, and scents. Several drugs induce random synesthesia. Chopper would develop one that produced precise sensory deception.

  He settled at his computer. This problem was more difficult than giving Moby a laid-back buzz, but entailed the same techniques. He used software to model the psychoactive effects of different compounds. The simulation had models for cattle, pets, and people. Development of the whale tranquilizer had required him to create a leviathan model. The simulation should work well for sensory deception drugs, but the chemistry of those drugs would require a whole new invention.

  By midnight, with the room lit only by his computer monitor, he’d simulated hundreds of permutations of dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, acetylcholine, and oxytocin enhancers and inhibitors. He was getting nowhere.

  He leaned back, and pushed the palm of his right hand against his left eye. The pressure reduced the pain for a second. He took a breath and got back to work. An hour later, the claw hammer gave way to a sledge that wailed away at his left temple in perfect rhythm with his heart. It was then that sounds—not just the constant crashing of waves, but even the unwarranted nighttime cry of a seagull—concentrated the pain into rhythmic explosions.

  Chopper had started getting migraines as a child. In Vito Vittori’s household, pain unaccompanied by obvious illness had not been an acceptable excuse for evading responsibility, whether that responsibility was as simple as taking out the trash or as essential to family status as making the football team. Hitting drills in the Las Vegas sunshine with a jackhammer behind his left eye had made Vito’s youngest son, Romeo, his toughest. Vito hadn’t liked that name any more than Romeo had. When he was eight years old, his father started calling him Chopper. It was a proud moment in both of their lives.

  It happened on a Sunday morning after Mass. On the drive home, his brothers had been calling him Juliet. In the backseat with twelve-year-old Vito Junior on one side and the ten-year-old twins, Enrico and Nino, on the other, eight-year-old Romeo sat motionless as his brothers punched his arms, shoulders, legs, and ribs with increasing severity. With every punch, Vito Junior said, “Juliet is toughening up. If he can take this next one…” Then the three boys hit him until Vito Junior said, “…he’s still a girl.” The torture ended when the car stopped and the boys piled out of the backseat. Romeo lagged behind. As his three brothers climbed the stairs to the front door, Romeo sprinted up and hurled his eight-year-old body at the backs of their knees—a classic chop-block. Vito Junior collapsed over him, somersaulting down the stairs and landing with a separated shoulder. The impact knocked Enrico into a wall and chipped his tooth. Nino crashed into and over the banister and landed with a broken arm. That was when Vito Senior christened Romeo “Chopper.” Not only was it the last time his brothers picked on him, it was the last time he tolerated disrespect from anyone. It was also the first time that Chopper disappeared.

  He ventured into the desert east of their Las Vegas home with nothing but a Swiss Army knife in his pocket. He returned famished and sunburned three days later. No one asked where he’d been. He could see the relief in his mother’s eyes, but instead of talking to him, she’d looked to the side and taken direction from his father, who either respected Chopper’s desire for isolation or refused to encourage attention-getting behavior.

  Chopper liked the solitude he’d found in the desert but didn’t like being scared and hungry. His Cub Scout handbook only hinted at solutions to these problems, so he sought help from other books. At the library he found texts on wilderness survival that led him to other questions. Why are some things poisonous, and what does poisonous really mean? If animals are as afraid of you as you are of them, why do they attack? And if they live out in the heat and sand, miles from water, why don’t they dry up and shrivel away?

  The payoff for scraping food and moisture from cacti, suffering scorpion stings, and hiding from the sun under boulders was that wandering through starlit nights to the chorus of coyotes in the distance shut off the migraine jackhammer. The pleasure of being released from the pain built a desire to be left alone.

  His drive to understand the essence of survival grew. He spent more time in the library studying botany and biology, zeroing in on the fundamental processes of biochemistry that enable life. His interests didn’t involve friendship.

  In high school, his solitary behavior created an air of mystery. The combination of apparent disinterest and desert-hardened good looks attracted the only attention he coveted. Girls approached him, and he was quietly straightforward and explicit with them. Not once did his unvarnished desires discourage the objects of those desires. He knew the word no and, had he ever heard it, might have respected it. But Chopper wanted more than to quench his physical hunger. He wanted to understand what made people do the things they do. He didn’t understand how people could deny the reality that they are animals. To Chopper, Homo sapiens wasn’t the most developed of animals, just the most arrogant.

  Now, after a year without a break, the migraine pain was constant and accompanied by auras so bright that he could only see objects on the periphery of his field of vision.

  Certain drugs could delay the pain, and darkness helped, but only sleep relieved the pain, and for Chopper to sleep for longer than one hour at a stretch, he had to disappear. But he was the only one who understood the sensory saturation problem, the only one who could create a sensory deception solution. He was Earth’s only hope. More than that, he was Farley’s only hope. If he didn’t deliver, he would disappoint Farley. It would mean failure, defeat. That the word had worked its way into his consciousness humiliated him. The humiliation increased his heartbeat, which increased the sledgehammer frequency.

  He worked nonstop to simulate how each compound affected the senses. He combed through the literature, and when the answer eluded him, he kept reading older and more obscure neurological journals. The sledgehammer yielded to the jackhammer on his fourth straight night without sleep. Now smells, along with light and sound, became pain. Breathing through his mouth didn’t help. Just as the migraine demon amplified faint sounds into explosions, it intensified smells into tastes. Barely able to think, Chopper pushed on, more like a drunk staggering through the night than a scout on the trail, and he knew it.

  When he stumbled on the answer, he hit himself, back of the hand to his forehead in perfect time to the pain.

  Stupid. It wasn’t just right in front of him, it was inside him, a part of him. Stupid! But he had it.

  A paper in a neurology journal several years old presented a revolutionary theory of migraine headaches derived from experiments with functional magnetic resonance imaging. With fMRI, researchers can watch the electrical activity of a subject’s brain as it happens. Thoughts form when neurons fire currents to each other. The currents flow though parts of the neuron called axons that connect to other neurons at synapses—like a tissue version of Ringo’s circuits. This electrical activity is evidence of thought, all kinds of thought, conscious and subconscious, reflective and instinctive.

  A migraine headache begins with a spreading wave of electrical silence that begins in the back of the brain where sight is processed. The “cortical spreading depression” migraine theory suggests that, at the crest of the wave, chaotic signaling among the neurons responsible for processing visual data causes the auras. As the wave propagates across the brain, it affects the processing of other senses. Hearing follows sight, then touch, and as it disperses in multiple reflections within the skull, the coupled senses of smell and taste are corrupted. Some migraine sufferers lose their senses altogether, their pain accompanied by blindness or deafness. The paper suggested that the pain results from neurons spitting nerve-irritating chemicals in response to the electrical wave. The interior of the brain itself has no n
erve endings and so experiences no pain, but the chemicals accumulate at the brain-skull interface, where there are plenty of nerve endings.

  In Chopper’s brain, triggered by a year of sleep deprivation, the waves had built with the inexorable force of a tsunami. Hence the visual aura, followed by the equivalent audio and scent/taste phenomena as the pain intensified and waves cascaded back and forth over the different sensory processing regions of his brain.

  In that epic moment, Chopper realized that if he could duplicate and control the ultimate cause of migraines, he could produce the biological effect necessary to selectively deceive and amplify the senses.

  He turned from the paper back to his computer screen. The first few heartbeats in the new position converted the jackhammer to dynamite. When the explosion dissipated back to pulses, he opened a file on the computer, a paper published in an obscure journal that described a potential migraine treatment beyond the triptan compounds that relieved millions of migraine sufferers but served only to annoy Chopper.

  The paper revised the antiquated migraine treatment called cafergot, a mixture of ergot alkaloids and caffeine. Ergot alkaloids are compounds found in rare fungi and flowers in the morning glory family. They affect the vascular system and can be targeted to change the chemical makeup of synapses, the part of neurons that generate, transmit, and receive electrical signals to and from other neurons. The ergot alkaloid in morning glory seeds includes the hallucinogen lysergic acid amide, LSA. The most famous synthetic alkaloid is lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD. The paper showed the chemical structure for a hypothetical alkaloid that the authors claimed should be capable of targeting specific synapses. In other words, this drug could target specific senses. The reason the paper hadn’t been published in a prestigious journal, like the Journal of the American Medical Association, was that the authors had no data; they hadn’t been able to synthesize these particular ergot alkaloids and knew of no naturally occurring sources.