The Sensory Deception

by Ransom Stephens

“Take it easy, mister. If we offer to develop them ourselves, we control the schedule.”

  “You mean we could agree to it but not do it at all?”

  “Not quite. If we agree to it, they’ll require progress.”

  “Either way, it buys us time.”

  “One other thing, Farley.” She looked up at him. He put his hand on top of hers. She gripped his thumb. “I know you don’t like to think of contingencies, but if the Moby-Dick app is a flop, you’ll have to negotiate. Better to negotiate when you have something to offer than when you’re desperate.”

  “You’re right, of course.” He sighed and sat up straighter. “Okay, but this is just between you and me. I don’t want to distract Ringo and Chopper. We’ll go all-in with Moby-Dick. If we have to negotiate, I’ll do what you suggest.”

  She looked at the spreadsheet and said, “We were all-in two months ago.”

  Chopper stood on the bow of Farley’s sloop, the Captain’s Tooth, in a wet suit. He grabbed the jib sheet, the rope that controls the sail that stretches over the bow. Half a beat later, Farley said, “Take the jib sheet.” Then, recognizing that Chopper already had, he added, “How do you do that?”

  Chopper shrugged. He felt a warm sense of security every time Farley recognized the synchronicity of their friendship.

  As Chopper pulled on the jib sheet, Farley set the main sail and positioned the rudder. Both sails caught the wind simultaneously and the sloop vaulted into Monterey Bay. Each man locked his rope in a cleat at the same time. The tell-tales, small ribbons attached up and down the height of the sails, stood horizontal, indicating wind and sail in harmony. Farley relaxed on the starboard gunwale next to Chopper and let loose one of his long, full-body sighs. The sloop cut a wake through the swells. At the peak of each wave they picked up an increment of speed and at the troughs got a light, salty shower.

  Chopper leaned over and organized the sensors: tiny ultra-HD video cameras, coin-size accelerometers, and a handful of homing devices, each with sticky rubber straps designed to hang on to the slick surfaces of fish scales and rubbery squid and octopus tentacles for at least a few days.

  Through the trip, they adjusted the sails in silence and synchronicity. An hour later, they reached Greyhound Rock. Farley dropped the sails while Chopper put on fins and a mask. After Chopper jumped into the water, Farley stepped onto the bow and eased the anchor down to him, and Chopper guided it to the ocean floor so that it wouldn’t hurt anything.

  A few minutes later they were both ten feet below the surface, touring the lower side of Greyhound Rock. Chopper netted a California two-spot octopus nearly three feet from mantle to tentacle, huge for this reef. Both men floated to the surface. Chopper struggled with the octopus, balancing gentleness and purpose as he held it steady if not still for Farley to attach a video camera to its mantle just above its eyes and accelerometers to six of its tentacles. The octopus would manage to squirm out of the straps in a day or two and the sensors would drop off.

  They equipped a couple of fish and a smaller octopus before beginning their search for sensors that they’d attached to other cephalopods and fish in previous trips. Since seawater is a conductor, the subsurface transmitter range was just a few meters. Skimming the murky water of the ocean floor, they collected equipment by seeing the flash of an LED or catching a faint signal.

  At the surface, treading water, Chopper said, “Seventeen cameras and twenty-three accelerometers.”

  Farley said, “How many are still missing?”

  Chopper repeated, “Seventeen cameras and twenty-three accelerometers.”

  “It’s kind of spooky sometimes, you know.”

  “Farley, that one was obvious. What else were you going to ask?” Chopper loved these exchanges. The only thing that would make them better would be saying nothing at all.

  The two men climbed into the boat. One on each side, they boarded at the same time, their weight steadying the platform for each other, though it listed to Farley’s side because of his greater mass.

  With Farley at the rudder and mainsail and Chopper in his place as crew, they sailed back toward the Captain’s house. Chopper thought about the data they’d just collected. He knew that Farley had doubts, too. Even Ringo would have a hard time scaling up battles between cephalopods and fish to Moby-Dick versus a colossal squid.

  They made eye contact.

  “You’ll get word from Greenpeace,” Chopper said.

  “Oh, I got word,” Farley said. “And the word is no.”

  “What?” Chopper said.

  “I should have told you, but we’ve been busy.”

  Farley shouldn’t have had to tell him. He should have known. And to make it all worse, instead of responding with his usual outward calm, Chopper dropped the jib sheet and the sail flapped in the wind.

  “Take it easy, Chop, I’m telling you right now.”

  “Go ahead, Farley, talk.”

  Farley described his meeting with Walt Howard.

  “So you have four pods to choose from?”

  “That’s better,” Farley said.

  Chopper said, “We need a ship and crew.”

  “Exactly. Gloria’s getting quotes.”

  Chopper went silent. Farley had already shared this with Gloria?

  Farley said, “Without her, we’d still be recording songbirds.”

  Then it came back. That outward calm that accompanied Chopper’s inward fears. He said, “You’ve got it for her, don’t you?”

  “What?” Farley asked, about half an octave too high.

  “Come on, it couldn’t be more obvious. We’ve all seen you two makin’ eyes at each other.”

  “No, no, nothing like that.” Farley’s voice was louder and deeper than necessary. “Maybe after she’s moved on to another project—if she has any interest—I’ll give her a call. Right now she’s kind of our boss. I don’t know much about business, but I think hitting on your boss is a career mistake.”

  “Just keep telling yourself that.” Chopper waited the better part of a minute for Farley to settle down before setting the trap: “It’s pretty obvious she’s into you.”

  “You think?”

  “Ah! I got you. You’re in love.” Chopper stretched the word love into a schoolyard tease.

  Farley cleared his throat. “She’s got too much integrity to risk the business.”

  “It just makes her hotter, doesn’t it?”

  “It really does.” Farley misjudged a swell and a shower of cold, foamy salt water drenched Chopper.

  “Dude, you’re out of control.”

  “But enough about me,” Farley said. “Where did you go on your most recent escape?”

  The question caught Chopper off guard, though the model of Farley in his head should have prepared him for the question. If he told Farley about his research into sensory deception pharmaceuticals, it would be admitting his doubt in VirtExArts. The whole discussion flashed through Chopper’s mind. Farley would reject the suggestion of drugging their customers. No, Chopper had to protect Farley. Besides, Farley kept secrets from him, too. “I went to the Amazon. Spent a week wandering around a rain forest. I slept. Six, seven hours at a time. One day I slept for eighteen hours. There’s nothing like sleeping in a tree, in the mist, with all that sound and life. Total peace.” The forest, life building on life, the rich earthy smells—fungi, mud, animal scat, and his own sweat—the cacophony and the huge white conic tlitliltzin-prime flowers all came together in his mind, dispelling the tension brought on by Farley’s doubts. He said, “I got what I needed.”

  “Someday, I want to come with you.”

  “Yeah?” Chopper said. “Maybe next time. You need to see what’s happening to the rain forest.”

  “Maybe we should do a rain forest app.”

  “See? You do it, too. I was thinking the same thing. You and me, man, we think the same way.”

  Chopper extracted the neuroactive ingredients from half of the tlitliltzin-prime seeds he’d brought back fr
om the Amazon and planted the rest in a terrarium-based growing system in his closet. By nicking the seeds, he got them to sprout in a few days, but it would take months to produce enough seeds to generate an appreciable amount of that peculiar LSA-like component.

  His analysis of the neuroactive ingredients’ molecular structure yielded enough information for the simulation to distinguish the key compounds and how they activated in the brain. Guided by the simulation, he combined them with a carefully calculated combination of other neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and drugs like the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor Prozac and the class of common migraine drugs, triptans, that mimic serotonin.

  Chopper had two pharmaceuticals to test tonight. Moby-Dick’s cocktail would be first.

  He carried his supplies in his ubiquitous yellow tackle box down to the Santa Cruz Pier just after midnight. Stars populated the sky, and the moon in its last quarter emerged over the horizon. The tide was still low but about to rise.

  In the ambient glow of streetlights and closed shops on the pier above, he climbed down to its skeletal support structure. He stepped around a sea lion cow sleeping on a boat-access platform. Layers of barnacles provided purchase for climbing. It took less than twenty minutes to find a bull sea lion: a huge, sloppy monster sleeping on decking a few feet above water level. Chopper expected waking him to be the problem. Large, angry, territorial mammals pose universal challenges.

  As the beast slept, Chopper draped a tape measure alongside him in different orientations: head to fins, flipper to flipper, girth at the neck and at five points down the torso. In the dark he looked to be all blubber, but Chopper knew that he couldn’t have grown to this size without being hardened by a lifetime of evading sharks.

  The bull snored through the whole process. Chopper climbed back up to the pier and his yellow tackle box. He did the calculations one more time before filling a syringe with the appropriate dose. For the hundredth time in the past hour, he reviewed the ingredients, proportions, and concentration of the drug. It was good stuff, more than merely safe. The sea lion was going to love this. He thought of Walt Howard, his and Farley’s supervisor at Greenpeace. That bastard actually believed that Chopper could harm a wild animal. Someday Chopper would get a chance to teach Walt a lesson.

  He left his clothes and the tackle box in a safe place and climbed under the pier to the rafters where the sea lion slept. He waited a few seconds and then slipped the hypodermic into the fatty tissue near the beast’s neck and pushed the plunger. He hoped that the animal wouldn’t notice the little prick.

  The animal noticed.

  The sea lion reared up. Chopper held on long enough to inject the whole dose and then pushed away from the lunging beast. He dove between rafters but ricocheted against pilings and hit the water bleeding from dozens of barnacle scratches.

  The sea lion landed a second later and a dozen cows followed.

  No stranger to total darkness, Chopper swam with one arm outstretched to navigate the pier’s pilings. When he cleared the pier, he went to the surface for a breath. With the trail of blood and a dozen sea lions surrounding him, he felt like a side dish on a shark menu. The thought filled him with exuberance. This was the state of nature.

  He could have climbed up the pier. He could have swum straight for shore. Instead, he treaded water in the heart of the bull’s territory.

  The bull approached slowly, swam around Chopper, and then relaxed on his back, his flippers driving him in a slow circle around Chopper. Chopper would swear the animal was laughing. He swam to the edge of that circle and, when the bull came by, climbed aboard.

  There was an instant of divine terror. Still on his back like a giant sea otter, the monster raised his head as though about to attack. He was well armed, too, with fangs that could gnash Chopper’s hand from his wrist, destroy his neck, or crush his ribs, but the movement slowed. No, it wasn’t an attack. He’d only adjusted his position so that Chopper wasn’t sitting so heavily on his belly. Chopper laughed out loud.

  It worked. Test confirmed, milestone achieved. He had the ultimate marine mammal tranquilizer. If he could calculate Moby-Dick’s weight to within 10 percent, Moby would cheerfully allow him and Farley to attach sensors and transmitters.

  The bull was vulnerable as it lazed along the surface, and the blood from Chopper’s cuts didn’t make him any safer. If fins appeared, Chopper would roll into the water and give himself up. The numbers demanded his sacrifice: a few million sea lions on earth, at least a thousand times more people—Chopper understood that human life is cheap.

  Finally the sea lion made a gentle dive. Chopper followed until the bull picked up speed and had obviously recovered. The drug worked perfectly. It came on fast, lasted a good hour, and then went away, leaving no lingering lethargy.

  Chopper swam back to the pier. He had another test to perform.

  He took a few minutes to dry off and assess a cut on his side. It wasn’t so much a cut as a scrape. It clotted as the seawater dried. The bruise would come later. He got dressed, took his tackle box, and headed for shore.

  He walked along the beach. A few late-night revelers were scattered around bonfires. He found one with four guys drinking beer and smoking pot, their surfboards lined up next to them. It struck Chopper how much more difficult it was for him to shed his introverted nature and approach these guys than it had been to jump on the back of an eight-hundred-pound sea lion. He shrugged off the thought, walked up, and said, “Dave?”

  The guys shook their heads. This was the hard part. Chopper sat in a gap, held his hands to the fire, and said, “I guess he bailed…What’s up?”

  They mumbled.

  Chopper combed his brain for something that would interest these guys. “Pretty windy yesterday.” None of the others replied. “Should make some decent waves…”

  One of the guys said, “They were blown out.”

  “And mushy,” another one added.

  In the firelight Chopper could see that they were ideal subjects: healthy young men, probably students at the university. He said, “Wind died an hour ago; should have smooth five-footers at high tide.”

  A guy said, “Coupla hours?”

  Chopper nodded. Words like cool, sweet, and sick worked their way around the fire.

  Chopper said he was stoked and opened his tackle box. This wasn’t so much a test of the drug as a test of the simulation. The simulation predicted that this particular blend would extend the brain’s sound processing center to the motion sensation center and act as a cranial vibration-to-motion transducer. If this test confirmed his calculations, then he could perfect the sensory deception drug in the privacy of his lab.

  The doobie worked its way around the fire to Chopper. He coughed and made a face. “Whoa, dude, please, this is Santa Cruz. Why are you smokin’ rag weed?”

  Two of the guys laughed, one didn’t seem to hear, and the fourth looked offended. Chopper took a joint from his tackle box that carried a generous dose of the tlitliltzin-prime concoction, tossed it to him, and said, “Fire up this number. Best local bud, man.”

  When the joint came to Chopper he went through the motions but didn’t inhale.

  The effect was immediate. In sync with the waves breaking, a perfect low-frequency stimulus, each surfer leaned in as though in a car taking a turn. Chopper took a small wooden flute from his tackle box and played a little ditty. The flute, generating only audible frequencies, had no effect. Good. The next set of waves came in and caused the guys to fall backward, as though they were in a car taking off from a dead stop. As time passed, the effect grew more intense. The surfers lauded the “killer bud.”

  Chopper stood and left the circle. He took a seat in the shadow of the bluff and watched. He slapped a rhythm against the sand with the palm of his hand. Instead of turning to look, the surfers leaned as though into a wind. One of them reached for his baseball cap as though it would fly away. Chopper found that each rhythm elicited the very responses predicted by the simulation.
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  He thought about warning them. He could have told them that his wicked bud didn’t mix with the low frequencies of ocean waves. It wouldn’t be unprecedented in surfer culture to admit that the grass was loaded with special effects, but that would mean he’d have to talk to them again. Talking to strangers was hard for Chopper. Besides, he rationalized, what was the worst that could happen?

  He’d targeted and deceived a specific processing center in the brains of four test subjects. With the simulation confirmed, he could now determine the exact blend of sensory deception drugs that, when combined with certain external stimuli, would vault the brain of almost every user over the sensory saturation threshold.

  Satisfied, Chopper walked back to the house. He spent the rest of the night moving between his computer and the chemistry lab/bathroom, developing and simulating compounds.

  Later that day, the bodies of four surfers washed up on shore. Four perfectly healthy, experienced surfers drowned on the same day with no sign of a predator, and with toxic-screen levels of marijuana and hallucinogens consistent with the local culture. The mystery brought the community together. Farley, Gloria, Ringo, and Chopper joined the memorial on the beach that night. People lined up as the sun set.

  A police officer sought out Farley and asked what might have happened.

  “It’s a tragedy,” Farley said. “I hate to lose guys like that. Only thing that makes any sense is a sleeper wave.” Then he explained the concept. “A rogue or sleeper wave results from the random interference of a large number of regular waves—a one-in-a-million event.” The police officer wrote it down, and as the explanation spread it brought a level of solace to the community.

  Farley seemed torn up about it. Chopper didn’t get it. Four people isn’t even round-off error on seven billion. Why the fuss?

  Bupin leaned back in his chair at the head of the glass and stainless steel table in the Sand Hill Ventures conference room. To his left, a window framed the calm beauty of redwood trees swaying in the breeze. A second reason he had taken this seat: there was also a window behind him oriented toward the southwest parking lot so that anyone looking at him would have to fight the glare.