The Sensory Deception (27 page)

There was a ridge at the north edge of camp that villagers were discouraged from approaching. Farley knew the area was well guarded and wasn’t surprised when Sy told him to wait at a fence.

A few minutes later, Sy returned with four other men and a lantern. He hung the lantern from the fence. The four men carried weapons and wore the guarded look of veterans.

Sy said, “Your mate, Chopper, prefers to travel alone.”

Farley then recognized the four as Chopper’s entourage. For an instant he wondered if they had taken Chopper outside of camp, killed him, and returned. Then a smile carved itself between his mustache and beard.

Chopper. How he loved Chopper. He said, “Yeah, you got it right, Sy; my buddy Chopper does like to travel alone.”

“Well, then,” Sy said, “I shouldn’t expect to see him alive again—between the jihadists, thugs, and lions, I rather think he has little chance.”

“Actually,” Farley said, “the jihadists and criminals are the ones in trouble—but he won’t hurt the lions.”

G
loria moved into a cheap Santa Monica motel so she could remodel what had been a souvenir shop into a VirtExReality Arcade.

Accessible from three freeway off-ramps, one block from the beach, and visible from the Santa Monica pier, the arcade shared a strip mall with a dozen boutiques and restaurants and a cinema multiplex—ideal SoCal turf. The Beautiful People populated the sidewalk, some of them fighting the battle against time with large surgical budgets. There were surfers, skaters, and occasionally a movie star.

She got e-mail from Farley less than once a week now, and it made her realize how much she missed him and worried about him. It bothered her that she worried more about Farley than about her father. To get them home, she had to get the documentary out. Someday she’d have her own contacts, but right now she needed help. She sighed and, trying not to think of her father and Farley as kidnapped and the documentary as their ransom, took her phone from her purse and made the call.

“Hollywood!” Bupin said. “You must make me VR of Hollywood lifestyle after you pay ransom for your executives and father.”

“Plan A is on track; the software for Plan B, the superhero apps, is written and mostly debugged; and I’ve got the details for Plan C if we need them. I’ve done everything you’ve asked.”

“Yes, you have rubbed my lamp and I am ready to grant you one wish.”

“This documentary has to be good. Really good. Earth-shatteringly good.”

“Because you have no room for error,” Bupin said. “Somali pirates have excellent reputation for this one thing. You pay ransom, they release hostages.”

“Bupin, they aren’t that kind of pirate, okay?”

“Think what you will. Documentary must generate hive-worth of buzz. Leverage.”

“Can you please help me get the best possible documentary producer and editor? Farley has recorded dozens of nature videos, but—”

“I will call my friend George Lucas, and then my admin will talk to his admin and they will connect you to finest documentary people on earth. Expect a call. Like planets in gourmet horoscope, things must align.”

Then, in smooth, unclipped English, with no twisted clichés, Bupin said, “Do you understand the danger that those three men face?”

“They aren’t pirates. Farley and—”

“Break out of your fantasy. You need to have contingency plans. Since you haven’t asked, let me just tell you: if you do ask, I will pay the ransom to liberate your people. Do you understand?”

“Farley insists on paying this stupid debt!” Gloria realized that she’d stood. Her hands shook. She wanted Bupin to return to his role as a VC clown.

And he did: “Very good, then, we will hold your house of cards together.”

She had to focus.

The key was timing. The grand opening date would determine the promotion schedule. It would take more than a month
for even a genius to produce a documentary from raw footage. The longer it took, the longer Farley and Tahir had to stay in Somalia. She began planning how to make the documentary go viral so it would provide a ton of free publicity.

She set the date for the VirtExReality Arcade Grand Opening: fifteen weeks from that day. She sent e-mail to Farley that gave him a deadline for returning footage.

Bupin’s metaphor of a house of cards seemed accurate. Business ventures like this one usually are, but this time the stakes were greater than profit and loss.

Ringo was on a debugging rampage. The virtual reality software library was huge, not even counting the experiential database inputs. The whiteboard in the family room was covered with the most brilliant flowchart he’d ever created.

With his first cup of morning caffeinate in hand, Ringo walked from the kitchen to the family room and glanced out the picture window. The sun was just about to peek over the hills and illuminate the foggy coast. At first he didn’t think anything of it when he saw a familiar figure sitting out on the bluff smoking a cigarette. Then he spilled his coffee.

He started for the door but thought better of it. Chopper didn’t like to be interrupted. Ringo stared for a while, amazed. How could anyone be that cool?

He took his phone out of his pocket and called Gloria. “He’s sitting on the bluff smoking a barch.”

She said, “Ask him what happened.”

“No way. I can be just as cool as Chopper.”

“No, you can’t,” Gloria said. She sighed. “Okay, Ringo, have him call me once he’s settled in.”

Ringo hung up and waited. When Chopper stood and started walking up to the house, Ringo took a seat on the couch, grabbed a comic, and tried to act nonchalant. Then he laughed at himself. He’d never felt so chalant in his life.

Chopper finished his trek around the planet where it had started, staring at the ocean with the sun rising behind him and the smoke of a Marlboro in his lungs. It was good to be home. The shoulder ached and he was tired of having it immobilized, but he had been through enough injuries in his life to know that a little pain couldn’t hurt him.

With the sun working its way through the morning fog, Chopper went inside. The routine feeling of climbing the bluff, opening the sliding glass door, and walking into that dimly lit family room soothed the rough edges of a fading migraine.

Ringo was sitting on the couch drinking coffee and reading a comic book. Chopper said, “Hey,” and passed through to the stairs in search of a warm shower.

“Chopper!” Ringo said.

Chopper stopped and said, “How’s the data look?”

“What the—” Ringo said. “Tell me what happened. How did you get here? Last I heard you were…”

“How does the data look?”

Ringo fired off another flurry of questions, ending with: “Chopper, is Farley okay?”

That question jarred a chunk of empathy loose in Chopper. He looked in Ringo’s eyes and imagined how hollow the world would be without that special bond he felt with Farley. Ringo didn’t have anyone like that.

“Ringo, get this straight. Farley is fine. And if you have to know, after the doctor set my shoulder, four men were assigned to guide me to a hospital in Kenya. You know that I travel alone. The land between Somalia and Nairobi is desertlike, far more forgiving than the Mojave, and populated with majestic animals and rotten humans. It made for a wonderful trip. After Farley and I equipped that magnificent leviathan, a long, silent walk was like dessert after a fine meal.”

“But how did you get here?”

Chopper’s patience was running thin. He preferred people who exercised more silence and less stupidity. “I carry an American Express Card. They have offices that you call on the telephone. They ask special questions that only you can answer. Having identified you, they check a database. They extended my credit limit. Then they provided a number. That magic number enabled me to obtain a thing called an airplane ticket. An airplane ticket allows one to travel great distances in short periods of—”

“What about your shoulder?”

“I’m getting it fixed tomorrow.”

“Surgery?”

“Yes, surgery is how doctors fix things—in this case, orthopedic surgery.”

Ringo shook his head. Chopper looked away, out the window over the sea.

“Wow. Chopper. Dude.”

“Seriously, Ringo, it wasn’t a big deal—much like most of the trips I take to get away, to get some sleep. It was wonderful.”

“Even with the shoulder?”

“Can we please get to work? How does the data look? What have you got?”

Ringo set his mug on the coffee table with a thud, took a breath, and said, “Actually, it looks really good. Check it out—I’ve outdone myself!”

“How much have you processed?”

“Everything we’ve received—it’s pretty much automatic.”

Ringo described his sonar-processing software. Obviously, he’d been dying to tell someone. He wouldn’t shut up.

Then Chopper told Ringo the story of how he and Farley had equipped the greatest animal on earth. He concluded with “How close are you to finishing the Moby-Dick app?”

“Moby just left the pod. He’s made a few dives but hasn’t done anything interesting. The data’s okay, but hopefully he’ll make a deep dive soon. Even if it’s not genuine colossal squid data, I still need the terrain. Come on, I’ll show you my Daredevil software.”

The word
Daredevil
shot a burst of light through Chopper’s head. Ringo and his obsession with superheroes could combine with the venture capitalists’ greed and destroy everything. Chopper had to keep Ringo focused.

Ringo said, “It is amazing how something that big can move fast enough to catch a fish—but other than some whale porn, we don’t have the data set we need. He’s eaten a few cephalopods, but I need something at least a meter long for the interpolation code to simulate a colossal squid.”

“Whale porn?”

“Oh, yeah, Moby screwed every cow in that pod.”

In the lab, Ringo handed Chopper a VR helmet. Chopper put it on and his field of vision turned a light grayish green.

Then Ringo clicked the mouse and Chopper felt a vague sense of motion, diving straight down. But it wasn’t a dive into darkness. Images of fish, bits of flotsam, seaweed, and other whales far in the distance zipped by. Then he “saw” a large fish to his right. In seconds, seamlessly, his brain had correlated the
Doppler color scheme to the movement of objects—red trails when something was receding, blue when it was closing in. In a pinkish splash, a fish bolted. From deep in the core of his body, the muscles of his chest and thighs, Chopper responded. Flickers of light bounced from the turbulence of the water as he turned and—bam—ate.

In that very instant, though, Chopper was blasted back into his own senses by an immediate pain in his broken shoulder.

“Whoa!” Ringo yelled. He helped Chopper remove the helmet.

As he’d attacked the fish, Chopper knocked his chair over and bumped into the desk.

“Wait,” Chopper said. “Run that on a monitor.”

Ringo sat in the chair next to him, pointed a remote at the big flat screen, and clicked the mouse a few times. The video replayed.

“Slow it down,” Chopper said. “Right there! Stop.”

Ringo did so and said, “Yeah, I see it.” He drew a boundary around the shadow of an object, clicked the mouse, and zoomed in on a pile of cylinders on the ocean floor. “This thing is half a mile away. The resolution of sperm whale sonar is insane—look how clear it is. God, I’m good.”