The Sensory Deception

by Ransom Stephens

  Chopper liked making a difference. He liked being a part of this village and looked forward to coming back. He’d learned something valuable here, and, fortified by this knowledge, he felt renewed confidence that VirtExArts held the solution to Earth’s biggest problem—because he had the solution to VirtExArts’ biggest problem in his tackle box.

  Ringo grew up in a tough Oakland neighborhood, the only child of an auto mechanic and a librarian. He inherited a passion for craftsmanship from his father and academics from his mother. Always the smallest and smartest kid in his class, he was also a preferred target of bullies. He developed an abstract appreciation, but a visceral distaste, for violence. Ringo was an ardent follower of Spider-Man, Batman, and Daredevil, but in his heart, physical contact that wasn’t born of affection felt perverse. Why touch someone you don’t like? So when Ringo liked someone, he tended to lean toward them. He wasn’t free with hugs but went out of his way to bump into you. When he laughed at something you said, he’d push you in the chest or pat your shoulder or knee. The result was the endearing, gentle, eccentric genius, Reginald “Ringo” Hayes.

  Ringo hadn’t been in an airport in more than a year, since he’d worked for Intel. He liked that everyone around him was on a mission. Ringo’s mission was taking him northeast to Minnesota, where he would work with a contract manufacturer’s engineering team to set up production of the VirtExArts helmet, jumpsuit, and gloves.

  He caught himself envying the people at the gate who were participating in conference calls; working on a big team meant lots of positive feedback. But after four hours sitting in a coach window seat, twenty minutes standing in line for a rental car, checking in at an overpriced hotel situated between industrial parks in a Minneapolis suburb, and eating at a mediocre chain restaurant seated at a table for one, any nostalgia for his Intel days had evaporated.

  In the morning, the two-hour time difference made his eight o’clock meeting feel like six o’clock. He’d forgotten that, too.

  He decided to stick with his Silicon Valley uniform. Shorts and flip-flops spoke eccentric genius, something that a principal engineer could get away with but a mere tech couldn’t. It made for a chilly walk from the hotel to the manufacturer’s sprawling one-story building. With no sidewalks, as though they seriously expected him to drive the hundred meters from the hotel, he walked across a wide expanse of dewy grass. Ringo didn’t think of himself as an environmentalist in Farley’s or Chopper’s league, but this absurdity offended his sense of design.

  He walked through the big glass door chilled to the bone with his feet dripping wet. The receptionist looked him up and down without any indication that she recognized him as an eccentric genius. He half expected her to assume he was a janitor. She wouldn’t be the first person to mistake an African-American engineer for a member of the labor pool.

  Just as he prepared to put the big-haired, round woman in her place, she said, “You must be the Californian!” She stood and said, “I just put a fresh pot on let me get you a cup you must be freezing.” There was a nasal tone that lent a pleasant whine to her rapid-fire speech pattern. It occurred to Ringo that speech recognition software would have a hard time with her.

  She asked how he liked his coffee and Ringo said, “What are you brewing?”

  “This is a dark one!”

  He walked around the counter to the coffee station and she offered him a cup. He sipped it under her scrutiny and lied: “Good stuff.”

  Then he told her about the Santa Cruz Coffee Company’s Morning Blast roast. He was writing its web address on a pad next to her workstation when a man walked in wearing a blue lab coat.

  “Rosalee, stop flirting with Dr. Hayes.”

  The receptionist blushed, and Ringo leaned toward her, rubbing his elbow against her shoulder. “You were, huh?”

  She whispered, “I wouldn’t.”

  “But you were, huh?”

  The man in the lab coat said, “I’m Bernie McGuire. Let me a get a cup, and then we can get to work.”

  “Call me Ringo.”

  Rosalee printed out a visitor’s pass and fixed it to Ringo’s T-shirt. A minute later, Bernie swiped his badge at a wide door and directed Ringo into the plant. They entered a huge room with people hustling about in blue lab coats. Some attached parts to circuit boards, others put circuit boards into fixtures, still others examined each part, and, at the end of the line, the products were tested.

  Bernie said, “I can’t tell you anything about the other products, but…” Then, true to the spirit if not the letter of his word, he described the production challenges on this line. Ringo realized that everything Bernie said had some relation to the helmet and glove designs. By the time they made it to Bernie’s cubicle, Ringo had a good idea of the design changes Bernie would recommend.

  In addition to the circuit boards, cables, and test equipment on his desk, Bernie had a life-size poster of Wolverine over his computer monitor and a framed cover of Daredevil, Volume 1, Issue 1, hanging on a wall.

  “Virtual reality,” Bernie said. “This is the coolest project I’ve ever worked on.” He pushed his computer mouse and Ringo’s designs came up on a monitor.

  “Bring up the helmet graphic,” Ringo said.

  The red and gold helmet came up on the screen.

  “Love it, love it, love it,” Bernie said. “Can I please be the first person to do your Iron Man VirtEx reality?”

  “What?” Ringo asked.

  “When are you going to do Spidey or the Dark Knight? Can you do one that’s not so commercial?” He motioned to Wolverine.

  “Actually,” Ringo said, feeling painfully uncool. Not uncool in a global sense, but uncool in a room with Wolverine staring at him and Daredevil Issue 1 on the wall. He picked up a circuit board from the desk. “We’re doing endangered animal VR.”

  “Endangered animals?” Bernie sounded like a kid being forced to eat broccoli instead of ice cream.

  “What? The animal VRs are awesome.” Ringo tapped his unlimited reserve of optimism. “They put you right in the mind of a polar bear, or a bird of prey, and the killer app will be a sperm whale fighting a colossal squid.”

  “Jules Verne? That sounds good.” Bernie was less effective at generating enthusiasm. “But why? Superheroes are hot; they’d do a lot better than animals.”

  “It’s kind of an environmentalist thing.”

  “Oh.” Bernie switched back to the CAD diagrams of the transducer circuitry, interconnects, and input/output receiver/transmitters. He said, “I reworked the design a little. If you mount the antenna on the back of the helmet, like this, so it’s closer to the I/O system, you can increase bandwidth and reduce interference.”

  Ringo said, “I can do a Superman app from the bird-of-prey software.”

  “Can you do a wise-cracking blind guy?”

  They both looked up at the framed cover art.

  Ringo said, “Daredevil’s my favorite.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “Something about overcoming blindness.”

  “And he’s the smartest of all of them.”

  “I don’t know about that, but he’s definitely the funniest.”

  Bernie said, “Endangered animals, huh?” He went back to the CAD images.

  Ringo wanted to save the world as much as the next guy, but he didn’t get the visceral buzz from Moby-Dick that he’d get from a Daredevil app.

  Bernie’s version of the helmet had an antenna that looked like the hackles of a lizard. “We’ve never done anything at these data rates.”

  Ringo said, “The antenna communicates with the experiential database, the e-db, a multi-petabyte central server.”

  “I’m worried about crosstalk when you have more than one system in the same room.” Bernie zoomed in on the shielding. “Maybe if you make this copper.”

  Ringo said, “Daredevil will be easy.”

  Bernie raised an eyebrow. “Giving someone the experience of a blind superhero will not be easy.”

&nb
sp; “Once I’ve done Moby-Dick, it will be.” Ringo stepped to a whiteboard on the opposite wall that was covered with circuit diagrams, sketches, and flow charts. “Can I erase this?”

  “Anything but the grocery list in the corner.”

  Ringo described how whales visualize objects by using sonar, delivering essentially the same mini-lecture he’d given at the Sand Hill Ventures meeting, but fortified with technology. Then the two engineers waded into technical minutiae that filled Bernie’s whiteboard with equations, a Moby-Dick data processing flow chart, and a cool little circuit design for background subtraction.

  Staring at the whiteboard, Ringo said, “I could have the superhero apps ready by the time we launch the nature apps.”

  “Might as well,” Bernie said. “You won’t need any new hardware, and it sounds like the software is portable. You’ll have to license the characters…”

  “Oh, yeah,” Ringo said. “I’ll talk to our VC; she can do it. We’re funded by Sand Hill Ventures.” As he spoke the words, he wondered what Farley would think. Chopper would absolutely hate the idea. Gloria, though—Gloria might like it. In any case, he had time to figure out the internal politics. At that thought, he groaned.

  “I can change it,” Bernie said, referring to the design for mounting the video display inside the helmet.

  “Huh?” Ringo said. “Sorry, I was spacing out, just thinking about some office politics I’m going to have to deal with.”

  “I thought the whole point of working at a start-up was to get away from that sort of thing.”

  “Me, too,” Ringo said.

  “If you recess the video screens half a centimeter, you can—”

  “The VCs would love a Spidey app, but my partners, I don’t know. Maybe someday, after we’ve accomplished what we’re setting out to do and the market gets up to speed.”

  “At least make one for yourself. And me. Some people play with model trains or collect stamps, right? Creating superhero VR could be a hobby.”

  No one was around when Gloria walked into the Captain’s house for the morning meeting. She dug through Ringo’s extensive stash of caffeinates and pulled out a Hawaiian blend. With the coffee on, she went out on the deck; no sign of Chopper, but she saw Farley carrying his surfboard up the trail. She stepped inside and looked at the list of milestones on the whiteboard. They’d be meeting with the VCs for their annual review after Ringo returned from the contract manufacturer.

  Farley stepped through the sliding glass door, the top half of his wet suit dangling around his waist, exposing his chest and dripping on the rug. The seawater would dry, and the salt would crystallize and contribute to the carpet’s odd texture. He greeted her, leaned his surfboard against the wall, and continued down the hallway. He said, “I’ll be right out.”

  Gloria asked, “Where’s Chopper?”

  “Gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yeah, he needs to sleep,” Farley yelled from down the hall. Stepping back into the living room, barefoot in shorts and a T-shirt, Farley said, “You know he’s an insomniac, right? He takes long hikes. All he brings with him is a knife, or at most that little yellow tackle box he carries around.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “I don’t know. The desert? The mountains? He’ll be back in a few days.”

  “It’s just you and me, then?” As she asked the question, she realized that she and Farley hadn’t spent any time alone since developing the original business road map.

  He went into the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee. “Unfortunately, we have business to do. Otherwise, maybe we could do something inappropriate.”

  “Inappropriate?”

  He laughed that deep bass laugh. “I guess saying that was inappropriate. I apologize.”

  She leaned against the counter and he stood next to her, maybe a foot away. She looked up at him, and he either was blushing or had acquired a sunburn. Several inappropriate ideas passed through her mind. She reminded herself that her career depended on their venture, avoiding the words partnership or relationship even in the privacy of her own mind.

  In her deepest voice, she imitated him: “Farley, what have you got?”

  “There’s a problem with the Moby data.” He explained that the research proposals had all been rejected. “But I have the locations of four pods. The best solution is for us to rent a ship and crew.”

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t make any sense, but I should have anticipated the possibility.”

  “But the bottom line is that we don’t have a whale, right?” Gloria felt her face heat up. “We’re about to manufacture product and we can’t develop the killer app?”

  “I don’t think it’s that bad.” As he spoke he held out both hands, a gesture of openness that conveyed confidence and calm. “A ship and crew for a maximum of two months will cost a small fraction of our Series A funding.”

  “Series A is long gone.” She took her laptop from her briefcase and pulled up the spreadsheet.

  “We shouldn’t need more than a hundred thousand.”

  She pulled herself up on a stool, positioned the laptop in front of her, and ran a macro to calculate the cash available to them. She sighed. “Look, we have five thousand dollars, including every credit card the four of us own and what I got for trading in my Lexus.”

  “What about the mortgage I took out on this house?”

  “That’s how we’re paying for product manufacture. Ringo is handing the CMs a check today.”

  “A hundred thousand is still a tiny fraction of our Series B request.”

  “This isn’t happening. My career—and you could lose this house!”

  “I’m not going to lose the house that the Captain built. And your career is going just fine.” He put his hand on her arm, looked her in the eyes, and said, “You’re a VC. Taking risks is your career.” Then he stepped into the kitchen to the coffeepot. “We’ve come this far. We’ll find a solution. Let’s work through our options and see what we need to do.”

  “This is exactly the wedge issue that Sand Hill has been waiting for.” Gloria leaned back and added, “You know, if we sold development licenses, we’d have plenty of money for a ship and crew.”

  Farley shook his head.

  Gloria said, “Reinvesting profit is standard practice at most businesses.”

  “I’m not against profit.”

  “You’re going to have to give up something. What will it be?”

  “I don’t think we’re at that point yet.”

  “Well, if we can’t create the killer app, it seems to me that we are exactly at that point.”

  “Let’s put together a request to fund a ship first.”

  “I’m telling you, it will be rejected. You need a backup plan.” As she spoke, he stroked his beard and looked away. “Farley, what are you holding back?”

  “Well, in the interest of full disclosure, one of the sperm whale pods is being monitored by a radical environmentalist.” He sat on the stool next to her. “I used to work with the guy, but he’s all wrong for us. Seriously, working with Randy Gaynes on the Cetacean Avenger would be worse than developing mainstream apps.” He explained how Gaynes would stop at nothing, commit any crime, perpetrate violence, even sink a fully crewed ship, to defend a pod of whales.

  “Out of the question,” Gloria said. “Sand Hill would never go for it. I would never go for it.” She stared out the window and sipped her coffee.

  Farley scrolled through the budget.

  “Does it have to be a male sperm whale?” Gloria asked. “Why not a gray whale? Dozens of them swim by every day. You could row out and equip one. Or why not a singing humpback app?”

  “Talk about too much National Geographic. A singing humpback VR experience?” Farley hung his head. “The top speed of a gray whale is six knots. You jog faster than that. They’re slow, gentle beasts that eat tiny creatures, krill and plankton. Moby-Dick needs to be Moby-Dick.”

  “You should take the mon
ey from licensing.”

  “Gloria, please. Is that what you want? You want us to compromise?”

  “Negotiation is compromise, and business is negotiation. You can walk away or you can negotiate; that’s all I have to offer.”

  “I thought you were on our side.”

  “On your side? What do you think I’m doing here?”

  “If you think I’ll compromise on our mission, you don’t know me very well.”

  “If you think I’m not on your side, you don’t know me at all.”

  Farley looked away.

  She’d never seen him like this. Everyone else had gotten frustrated at some point. Ringo threw tantrums over circuit designs, Chopper screamed at a seagull for interrupting his concentration, Gloria cried the day she traded in her Lexus, but even when Farley mortgaged his house he was upbeat and encouraging, steady and strong. Farley had also been reserved, never high and never low, and he had never, ever, taken anything personally—until just now.

  It was her turn. “I know this is difficult,” she said, putting her hand on the back of his neck. The muscles across his shoulders were tense, and she kneaded them. “I will get a cost estimate for a ship and crew and run the numbers. We’ll be ready with a proposal at the annual review next week. It will be a perfectly reasonable request, and they will turn it down. What we have to decide right now is what we are willing to sacrifice and what we are not willing to sacrifice.”

  He arched his back. “Keep doing that. I must have pulled a muscle in the waves this morning.”

  “No, you’re just tense, like every other start-up CEO in the valley.”

  “Okay, Gloria, I mean, Ms. Baradaran, what do I have to sacrifice?”

  “That’s better,” she said. “Negotiation is about managing information. We’re not going to permit licensing. You’ve made that clear. The only other thing we have is the ability to produce our own mainstream apps.”

  “Damn it. No.”