The Sensory Deception (21 page)

Thirty minutes later, her desk phone rang. It was an admin from Marvel, ready to discuss trademark licensing. He quoted a rate 20 percent below what she’d found out on her own—still way too high, and, since they based the price on the number of uses, it would never go away. She started to negotiate, asking for a block rate for the first hundred thousand uses, with one “use” defined as one exposure of the copyrighted character to one person. It seemed like the admin wasn’t listening. He countered with an offer of an unlimited license in exchange for 10 percent ownership of VirtExArts. That stopped her. Bupin had talked to them, all right.

That deal would mean that Farley would own less than 51 percent of the company and lose the ability to veto contracts for licensing VR software to other developers. He’d never agree to it. Ideas ran through her mind. She could put a veto clause in the contract, she could push for Sand Hill to provide its shares so Farley could retain control, and she could negotiate down the per-user price. The main thing, right now, was knowing that Plan B was possible. Contract details could wait, provided that a contract was in play. She asked the Marvel admin to send a contract, thanked him, and hung up.

She took her time composing an e-mail message to Farley explaining how they could help Sayyid Hassan by telling his story. By the time she finished, things looked better than they had that morning.

T
he pod drifted through a feeding ground at the edge of the continental shelf. Farley hung underwater microphones, hydrophones, below the surface from lines on both sides of the ship and hooked them up to the ship’s intercom. For four weeks they listened to the whales’ clicks and whistles. At one point, half a dozen immature bulls surfaced. Each of them took a great breath and spouted steam straight at Farley. The spouts smelled fishy, fresh, and vital—like whale puppy breath.

Sperm whales are easily distinguished by their huge, rectangular, box-shaped heads, the profile favored by cartoonists. The forehead is filled with a waxy substance of uniform density called spermaceti, which controls the whale’s buoyancy. In diving, the spermaceti condenses until it is denser than water and helps the whale sink. In surfacing, it becomes less dense and increases buoyancy. Farley believed that the whales controlled the process, but his marine biologist colleagues said there was no evidence to support that hypothesis.

The spermaceti had a second purpose. To produce visual images with sonar, the transmitted bursts of sound have to be tightly focused—the tighter the focus, the better the resolution. Whales generate their clicking sounds by blasting air through liplike structures inside their heads. The initial focus is performed by bones in the skull; the sound is then further refined
into a tight beam within the spermaceti in a process similar to how the trajectory of a bullet is controlled by the rifling of a gun’s barrel. The clicks are directed over a wide angle, and the returning echoes are detected through the connection of the lower jaw to the inner ear. The combination of data from the transmitted and received sounds is processed into visual information by the largest brain of any animal ever to roam Earth, on land or sea.

Sperm whales have a third use for their terrific foreheads: fighting. Bull sperm whales ram their enemies at high speeds. In 1820 a gigantic sperm whale sank the
Essex
, a whaling ship off Nantucket, giving birth to the legend that Herman Melville crafted in
Moby-Dick
.

Curiosity and what Farley could only interpret as male-mammal peer pressure brought the boy-bulls closer to the ship. One dove right off the bow. Another swam alongside, but before it got close, a smaller whale, identifiable as a female by the proportionally smaller size of her forehead, surfaced between it and the ship and pushed the young bull away.

Captain Gaynes had assigned them a Zodiac where they stowed the equipment that would be attached to Moby-Dick. He and Chopper went out each day in the Zodiac. The plan was for Chopper to administer Moby his cocktail with a hypodermic needle outfitted in an easy-to-throw device that that looked like a lawn dart. He practiced by throwing them from the Zodiac through a life ring while Farley maneuvered the boat. They also spent a few hours each day scuba diving. The water was clear enough to monitor the larger females and get an idea of the pod’s social structure.

Mostly, they waited.

Due to their long dive times, sperm whales are not the ideal whale-watching species, but every hour or so, if you happen to be looking in the right direction, you can see a mound forming
in the water over an area about ten meters wide, disrupting the swells. Then bubbles foam to the surface, and finally a group of huge gray foreheads emerge, causing a rippling circular wave with its own whitecaps. A few minutes later, after a series of steamy blasts, the whales dive back in, pausing for an instant with their great flukes silhouetted on the horizon.

Farley wasn’t certain which of the dozen mature females were pregnant, but three of them spent much less time in dives than the others. With a gestation period of fifteen months, pregnant cows need a lot of food. Farley was certain that the other females in the pod must be supplementing the pregnant cow’s diets but couldn’t determine the mechanism. All but the three cows were nursing calves. This was consistent with his understanding: sperm whales nurse for their first few years and suckle from any lactating female in the pod.

The adolescents played games together, a sort of tag where one would dive, the others would follow, and all would surface at about the same time. He couldn’t help but recall summer days in Santa Cruz playing Marco Polo with the neighborhood kids. A male sperm whale’s adolescence lasts a decade. Where females reach sexual maturity in less than thirteen years, males take at least eighteen. The six immature bulls in this pod varied in size from fifteen to forty feet. Bulls usually leave the pods of their mothers just before they mature. The largest of the young bulls in this pod was bigger than any of the mature females—Farley figured this one was about ready to leave. If no mature bull arrived soon, this youngster would have to do.

When he dove with the whales, Farley perceived wisdom emanating from the pod. Though he couldn’t hear the clicks and whistles as well with his bare ears as with the hydrophone, he could feel them against his skin. He realized that, since whales have to project sonar transmissions in order to see, whales always
know when another whale looks at them. Not only that, but since the transmissions penetrate the skin, whales can see into each other’s bodies. They know who is pregnant and can probably even “see” tumors as they grow.

The largest cows directed the youngest calves away from him, but other than that, none of the whales went out of their way to avoid Farley. At one point the matriarch, an old-lady whale with scars and wrinkles on her back and across her head, came within twenty feet of him. He wondered how long she had been swimming the seas. The life span of sperm whales isn’t well known because no study of their behavior from birth to death has been completed. It’s generally believed to be about seventy years, but could be twice that.

One morning, about a month after Farley, Chopper, and Tahir left Santa Cruz, the behavior of the pod changed. Farley watched from the bridge. The mature females shepherded the pod into a tight formation. Gaynes brought the
Cetacean Avenger
within fifty meters, and Farley saw that the largest male had separated from the core. He figured it was a separation ritual for the maturing bull to strike out on his own. Another possibility was that one of the pregnant cows was giving birth. Since whales are air-breathing mammals, midwives are necessary for successful delivery. Whales emerge tail first, and the instant the infant is free of its mother, the midwives push it to the surface, where it takes its first breath.

Farley went down to the deck, pondering the idea of diving in. It looked like Chopper was about to dive in. Tahir provided the necessary tidbit of wisdom. “They’re wild animals and they look busy.” Farley and Chopper remained on deck.

Farley had watched the bubbles that precede a surfacing sperm whale dozens of times by now. This was different. A mound formed, the water boiled, and then a gray wall emerged.
His blow was a geyser compared to that of every other whale in the pod. He exhaled three times, each a greater blast than the previous one. As he glided along the surface, parting the water between the pod and the ship, V-shaped waves preceded him, as they would a rising submarine, and a wake rose behind him.

Farley couldn’t think of the animal as Moby-Dick, though. Moby-Dick had been a malevolent beast. This regal creature was curious without being suspicious—a king that had been granted divine right by Father Sea himself.

Leaning on his side with an eye above the surface, this royal leviathan stared at Farley. His head made up a third of his length—at least twenty-five feet from snout to eye. His body was covered in scars, perfect black circles overlapping along his back, some over a foot in diameter—souvenirs from battles with large, giant, or perhaps even colossal squid. Near his dorsal ridges, a series of evenly spaced white triangles demarked an elliptical shape no less than six feet wide where either a shark or a killer whale had once tried its luck. Not a fleck of his skin was untattooed by combat.

Whereas Farley had perceived wisdom while swimming with the pod, he was now overwhelmed by steadfast perspective. This monarch had swum these seas since Farley’s grandfather was a boy.

Chopper ran the length of the ship, shouting numbers: “Eighty feet, seventy tons if he’s a gram! Probably the biggest sperm whale on earth. Farley, get in the Zodiac—he’s close enough for me to throw the dart from the deck.” He knelt in the shadows with that yellow tackle box, measuring drugs into cylinders attached to darts. Once the dart hit, the drugs would take effect within ten minutes, and then he and Farley would have almost an hour to attach the equipment. Chopper prepared three equal doses—one would be enough, but the chance of making a clean injection was no better than fifty-fifty.

The Zodiac hung over the side of the ship on a chain attached to a crane. Three sailors steadied it while Farley climbed in. As the boat was lowered, he pulled the backpack holding the sensors and transmitters from the gunwale and put it on. He pulled on fins and a mask but no snorkel or scuba gear. He would need freedom of movement to attach the sensory acquisition equipment.

The whale swam parallel to the ship but would soon pass it by. He’d been on the surface for a few minutes already. Another great spout, this one showering the bow of the ship, indicated that he was preparing to dive. When he dove, they would lose him.

With one dart in hand and the other two in the pockets of his shorts, Chopper sprinted from the poop deck of the
Cetacean Avenger
toward the bow. Where the gunwale curved inward toward the apex of the bow, he vaulted overboard.

Farley started the Zodiac outboard just as the boat touched water and released it from the chain. In the process he lost sight of Chopper. The boat rose on a swell and he caught a glimpse of the whale less than forty feet away. The boat sank back into a trough. A few seconds later, Farley manipulated the Zodiac onto the crest of another wave to get a complete view.

Chopper had launched himself off the deck with enough momentum to clear the distance between the
Cetacean Avenger
and the whale. In that instant, Farley could read Chopper’s mind. It brought an intimate understanding of what Chopper must experience with him on a daily basis. It made Farley feel both empowered and vulnerable, as if he had the strength of two minds but lacked the privacy of one.

He also felt a great pride. Chopper wasn’t just Farley’s closest friend, he was Farley’s best student. Almost two years earlier, months before they’d sought venture capital support, Farley had given a lecture on the behavior of cetaceans with a special focus
on sperm whales. He’d quoted Melville, of course, and emphasized those aspects of the legend that were either confirmed or contradicted by actual sperm whale behavior. Chopper clearly remembered his words. Strictly speaking, what Chopper was attempting was stupid. You don’t get in the water and wrestle a seventy-ton opponent. But in that instant, with their thoughts in unison, Farley finally understood Chopper.

Chopper didn’t care about his own well-being. After all, the man spent most of his waking hours in pain anyway. He understood pain, knew that it was just a neural response to physical trauma. To Chopper, pain wasn’t something to be overcome or respected but a constant, annoying companion to be ignored. The idea of allowing pain to interfere with the pursuit of his goals simply didn’t occur to Chopper.

As he flew at the whale, Chopper spread his arms and legs. In the instant before impact, he stretched out and belly-flopped on the layer of water just covering the whale. Despite the loud smacking sound, he landed gently on the whale’s back, a body length from the tip of its forehead. Still, the whale responded to Chopper just as Farley had described in that lecture so long ago.