The Sensory Deception

by Ransom Stephens

  Chopper pulled out a VirtExArts credit card and the man introduced himself: Van O’Reilly, an American expat. O’Reilly led them to a table outside a cantina across a road from the airstrip. He spread a map on the table as Chopper positioned Gloria. Chopper then described how to get to the village by land. O’Reilly described landmarks, and Chopper recognized enough of them to isolate the village’s location on the map. He proposed a simple flight path. Chopper waved it off and asked about the terrain along the deforestation boundary. O’Reilly sprinkled salt from a shaker to mark the pristine from the spoiled, and Chopper dictated his desired flight path. O’Reilly didn’t ask what business they had in the forest, and Chopper didn’t volunteer it.

  As the two men planned, Gloria sat at the table, her eyes darting back and forth, tracking anything that moved.

  They spent the night at a small inn. All the buildings were constructed of thick bricks the same color as the soil and had far-reaching awnings. The whole town looked sun-beaten.

  The next morning, Chopper loaded the big duffel bags and backpack on the plane. It seated four: pilot, copilot, and two behind them on a plywood bench. The plane rose over the forested Amazon drainage basin. A million tributaries fed and drained these forests of broad-leaved trees. From the sky, the canopy spread across the horizon and steamy mist rose and dissipated in the open sky.

  Except for the cancer.

  Chopper sat on the bench behind the pilot and held Gloria. She stared out the window and he spoke gently, his mouth inches from her ear. “Remember Los Angeles? The slime mold of concrete? Remember that alley? Now look at the forest. See how the leaves reach for the sky? The creeks, the rivers, each one is a limb of the Sea. Watch him caress Earth. Do you feel the affection? Los Angeles was once green and brown, a rocky, sterling place ruled on the high ground by mountain goats and rams, and on low ground by bear and deer—and now it’s a putrid mess of concrete scum. Humanity lives in its own shit. Do you want to teach them?” With each question, her chin dipped slightly in recognition. Her other features were relaxed, her forehead unruffled, her eyes open wide, but Chopper could feel emotion coursing through her as he added paint to the picture.

  He turned to the pilot and said, “Head over to those clouds.”

  “You want me to fly around that baby thunderhead at three o’clock?”

  “Can you?”

  “Yee. Haw.”

  Chopper whispered in Gloria’s ear, “Look, Sea is raining on Earth, loving Her. See how She responds? The trees reach out to Him and guide His affection to the ground, to Her body, and She blooms at His touch.”

  O’Reilly gave the thunderhead a wide berth but approached close enough that the plane bounced along a path of atmospheric potholes. It was the sort of small thunderhead that passes over plains on lazy summer days, towering into the sky from a base of cotton fluff, fluorescing white against a royal blue canvas. They worked their way around it. The sun cast shadows that defined the roiling cloud structures, swollen with moisture.

  “Hold on tight,” O’Reilly said. He looked back with the kind of smile you see on skiers and sailors and drag racers when they’re about to test their skill.

  The plane dove for the base of the thunderhead. Every window rattled, the wings shook, and the bench where Gloria and Chopper sat came loose. Chopper wrapped one arm around Gloria’s waist and pressed his other hand against the ceiling, bracing the two of them as well as he could. He had to yell above the racket even with his mouth against her ear: “The thunderstorm is passion.”

  They passed into the gray base, and mist covered the windows until they couldn’t see the tips of the wings. A few seconds later they broke through into a rainstorm. Now windy gusts shoved them this way and that. Chopper held strong, gritting his teeth behind a wide grin. Then, as if riding a wooden roller coaster, when they bottomed out it felt like the plane was falling apart, but it started another climb back into the cloud and, a minute later, emerged into clear blue sky.

  O’Reilly leveled out, flicked a few switches, leaned forward to see landmarks, and accelerated back to cruising altitude. Chopper and Gloria settled onto the bench.

  A few minutes later the rising mist gave way to tendrils of smoke that didn’t dissipate so much as clump over the treetops.

  “There it is,” Chopper said, gently rotating Gloria’s head. “Do you see the cancer?”

  The smoke grew thicker. Not as thick as the fog inside the thunderhead, but thick enough to convert the sun from a radiant, yellow-white star to a brownish-orange blob. Directly below, flames turned healthy greens and browns to black and gray.

  Chopper massaged Gloria’s neck. “Cancer looks the same in flesh, a spreading black mass of death invading and destroying healthy tissue. Yes, Gloria, it is cancer. They do it for money. Even though the wealth within the forest is far greater than what they will grow, it’s easier for them. Humanity is the same as any disease: invade, destroy, and consume everything.” He shook his head, laughing without humor. “And like a disease, we’ve given our host a fever. She is warming, and She’ll get as hot as it takes to kill the virus before She cools.”

  Over the next hour they passed from heaven to hell and back. On the outskirts of hell, where the land had been cleared, plowed, and planted, crops grew in orderly lines: sugarcane for ethanol production.

  O’Reilly adjusted their path due west toward the jungle below the steppes of the Andes desert. Gloria watched everything. She responded to every bird below them, every ripple in the water, and every breeze through the trees. Chopper found himself watching her with envy. He’d never seen someone, not even a child, so absolutely caught in the instant. She wasn’t plagued with worry. She cared, though. When they caught sight of deforested areas, quiet tears flowed over her cheeks. Chopper was not a compassionate man, but Gloria’s tears got to him. He rubbed her shoulders, brushed her hair back, and when that didn’t help, he kissed her tears away.

  O’Reilly interrupted Chopper. “Is that the village?”

  Chopper looked down. There were no flames here, just leaf-draped huts along the creek. There was smoke, though. The line of deforestation was closing in. Within weeks Mariano would have to decide. He would have three obvious choices: move his people farther upriver, cave in to the forces of change and accept enslavement by the plantation, or make a stand and fight for their patch of paradise.

  Chopper thought of a fourth choice: they could burn.

  The village was on a grassy slope next to a wide, calm segment of river. Villagers ran to the bank as the plane splashed down and came to a stop. Children jumped up and down, women tried to prevent them from getting too close, and men stood back and looked on with little expression.

  Chopper helped Gloria off the plane and walked her up the slope. She looked at the forest canopy, turned about in a full circle, then lowered her gaze and turned again in a slow, data-saturated dance.

  He pulled the duffel bags and backpack off the plane, carried them up onto the grass, and set them down near but still just outside the worn grounds of the village. Children hovered a few steps away. They were dressed essentially the same as the people in Uarini, in shorts and shirts. One had a Yankees T-shirt and a few men wore caps. Those who weren’t barefoot wore sandals. Chopper recognized Mariano Tuxauas with several other men who stood in front of a cabin, arms crossed, faces somber, watching the plane. Mariano was wearing a wide-brimmed leather hat.

  The village looked different. The huts were still there, but the paths that connected them were cluttered with debris.

  O’Reilly called Chopper back to the plane. He wrote down their GPS position on two sheets of paper, handed one to Chopper, and pocketed the other. Then he asked when they wanted to be picked up. Chopper told him not to worry about it. O’Reilly shrugged and restarted the engine.

  Chopper settled Gloria next to their things. Sitting with her legs tucked under her, she stared into the jungle. A little girl in a big red T-shirt walked up and touched Gloria’s shoulder, poking her
as if to see if she were real.

  Chopper approached Mariano, greeted him in Spanish, and asked where he should make camp. The man didn’t appear to understand the question. The two men standing with him looked confused. Other men behind them were shuffling from hut to hut, adding to the piles of debris. Women fussed over the piles, organizing their contents, and covering them in blankets.

  Chopper shrugged, went back, and unpacked the duffel bag. He pitched and staked a two-person tent, draped the solar panels over it, and configured the battery. Then he went back to Mariano and asked in Spanish how things were going. On his last visit, Chopper had given Mariano a crash course in herbal pharmacology. Mariano described how the village had profited, not just by trading tlitliltzin-prime and similar seedpods, but with more traditional staples. He pointed out the new sandals many of the villagers wore and tipped his leather hat.

  Chopper understood the value of patience; he just didn’t have any. He sat through the boring conversation, waiting for the man to say something about the smoke that snaked through the trees and into the clouds. Ashes were evident on every surface and already accumulating on the solar panels.

  When Mariano finally stopped talking, Chopper said, “They’re burning your forest. What are you going to do about it?”

  Mariano sighed. He stood and looked around, said something in Portuguese to his men, and they scattered. He stepped closer to Chopper and placed a weathered hand on his shoulder. He spoke as though he were sharing a great legend. His people had lived in the forest as long as stories had been told. Though they had spent a few generations virtually enslaved at a sugar plantation, they’d resumed this lifestyle when the revolution that drove the Portuguese out of power presented the opportunity. Most of his people had been born here, just as he had, and spent their lives here—except for the young men, of course. He laughed. “Like all stallions, the best men need something to conquer.” Most of them returned later with brides. They fished in the river, hunted in the jungle, and at every full moon the chief and the men who had stood with him earlier canoed down the river to an outpost where they traded food, and now herbs, for medicine, clothes, and weapons.

  On a planet oozing the shame of humanity, these were innocents. Still, the slow rambling monologue tested Chopper. His eyes wandered. Gloria was at the river with the little girl. He looked back at the village. The mahogany bench that had been in front of Mariano’s hut was gone. No, not gone—it was upended against one of the piles of debris.

  Chopper got it. They were packing. They were leaving.

  Mariano was in midsentence.

  “No!” Chopper said. “You are not running away.”

  Mariano looked confused. “But the forest, she is burning.”

  Chopper asked, “What weapons do you have?”

  Mariano cocked his head as though speaking to a child. “We cannot fight them.” Then he pointed up the river and said that they had scouted land in the hills toward the base of the Andes.

  Chopper looked into the forest. One of the big, white, cone-shaped blossoms seemed to look back at him. He took a breath, turned back to Mariano, and said, “No. We can solve this. You and me.” He motioned to the audio, temperature, and video sensors and the satellite transmission equipment in front of the tent. “We can beat them without firing a shot.”

  But then Mariano made a mistake. He’d become a tired old man in the seven months since Chopper’s first visit. As he looked over his shoulder and up at the smoky sky behind him, he smiled. “No, no, amigo, we’re heading for the hills.”

  He said it with a smile. A smile.

  The flames were moving in, but a greater conflagration ignited in Chopper’s belly. He clenched his jaw, and as he did, his cheek pushed against his eye socket, forming a malevolent squint.

  Mariano’s smile flipped into a frown.

  The sensory-processing regions of Gloria’s brain developed more and more overlapping connections among disparate parts with every dose of Chopper’s drug. Her response to stimuli evolved to the point that each sensation triggered responses from every sense—full-blown synesthesia.

  As Gloria watched the river flow, she listened to flickering orange sunlight, her eyes jittering to its rhythm. The chorus of birds squawking and whistling and insects clicking and screeching covered her tongue, tasting alternately sour, then sweet, then salty. The water flowed up her legs in a melody of greens and blues with popping white-bubble percussion. The banks, thick with mud, felt like they were enveloping her. Since she lacked the ability to consider and judge its content, Chopper’s lecture took hold and she felt the sea’s lusty affection fill her loins. The smell of life in every direction, the thick humidity, even mosquito bites combined into a rush of warmth. A gash of pleasure forced her back to arch, her toes to curl, and every joint in her body erupted in a light show.

  A glimpse of fleeting color called to her. A child. A small girl in a red T-shirt that hung to her knees knelt next to Gloria and touched her. The tiny, sticky fingers moved from her shoulder to her cheek. The girl’s smile sang. The sunlight tangoed with her shiny black hair, and then the child spoke and it tasted like ice cream.

  Gloria’s engagement with reality and Chopper’s disengagement with humanity didn’t change over the next few days. Gloria followed the girl in the red shirt around the village and into the jungle. When the girl rejoined the village for meals, Gloria stayed at her side like a pet, and the child’s family welcomed her, tolerant of the defects that they perceived as stunted growth. When the girl went to her parents’ hut for the night, Chopper brought Gloria to his tent. Since the entire village participated in caring for their offspring, no one minded the girl’s preoccupation with Gloria. It looked to Chopper as though the village had adopted Gloria. Her integration into their society gave him an idea.

  Chopper spent his time mapping the path of destruction, planning how and where and by whom the rain forest VR data should be acquired. Since Ringo had been unable to interpolate the battle between Moby-Dick and the colossal squid in software, Chopper understood that the recorded experiences had to be decisive. Simple, mundane, everyday life in the dying forest would not do.

  On the day that Mariano and his village assembled everything they would take with them in the move upriver, Chopper made his decision. Except for a few minutes in the morning and evening when he administered her doses of sensory deception drug, Gloria abandoned him for the villagers. He sat at the river and watched Mariano lead his people away from the home of their grandfathers’ grandfathers. He saw Gloria holding the child’s hand, being led away.

  Chopper did something for the second time in a month that he hadn’t done since, well, since before he was dubbed Chopper. Romeo Vittori cried.

  He tried to shake off the tears with a cough. The tears fell to the ground and pooled together in the mud. He stood and jogged over to Gloria. Her eyes flitted up to his and held them for an instant. Her nose quivered. The little girl offered to hold his hand, too. The child’s mother said something and the girl let go of Gloria’s hand and stepped away. Chopper took Gloria’s hand and pulled her out of the crowd, back to the riverbank and his tent.

  He started with the satellite uplink. He fit the harness over Gloria’s shoulders and locked the belt around her waist with a cable tie that couldn’t be removed without a sharp blade. He placed his hand on the back of her neck and she leaned forward. Her hair fell in front of her eyes. He connected the headband and checked the angle of the sensors just above her forehead. He repeated the process over her ears, then affixed a third sensor, a larger one for temperature and scents, to the back of her head above the buckle. The headband was stretched tight, but not so tight that it would be uncomfortable.

  He touched her chin and she looked up. He tucked errant hair into the headband so it wouldn’t interfere with the sensors. Her cheeks tightened the slightest bit. He loosened the Velcro attachment and she relaxed. He locked it in place with another cable tie. His fingers lingered on her cheek. The only flaws o
n her skin were the faint signatures of the dimples that formed when she smiled.

  The earthy taste of her breath pushed him away. Away from the decaying feeling of loss, and the mess of sensations so entangled that he couldn’t recognize them as the core of his own humanity—loneliness, guilt, love, shame, anger, and one wholly foreign feeling—surrender.

  Chopper double-checked the sensors and transmitter and broke their seals. They would acquire and transmit data to Silicon Valley for Ringo and his team of engineers to create the greatest VR experience ever, Rain Forest Destruction. He hoped enough data would be collected before the equipment and the woman who carried it burned. Chopper didn’t care whether Gloria burned or not. Her life didn’t matter any more than his did, and to get the VR experience right, she had to burn.

  Well up in the canopy, a family of monkeys fleeing the flames screamed outrage at their eviction. Gloria’s head bobbed up and oscillated to and fro until she spotted them. Her pupils dilated and she tracked the swinging brown creatures. Chopper had to look away. Most of them would soon die.

  Eventually the fleeing cries receded far enough that other jungle sounds drowned them out. Squawking parrots, jazz-singing frogs, the bass line of groaning crocodiles, and the individual monotones of cicadas, crickets, wasps, and even the beating of dragonfly wings contributed to the harmonics that compose the insect heavy-metal chord.

  Gloria looked at something behind Chopper, down the path that led into the forest. A smile flirted with her dimples and, with no sign of thought or decision, her eyes focused and she stepped forward.

  Chopper hefted the rifle, chambered a round, and jogged along behind.

  Ringo was in VirtExArts’ Silicon Valley lab. Development of new applications and the production of more VirtExReality chambers and jumpsuits with expanded features were in the works, but Ringo knew this job was ultimately about the data. And the DAQ system had just started humming.