The Sensory Deception (39 page)

No way
.

If Farley were dead, Chopper would know. He shook his head as though he could jostle the thought free.

No way
.

Besides, just before Gloria appeared, he’d been thinking about Farley. Their synchronicity had never faded, not even a blink. They needed to have the rain forest data ready to go by the time Farley returned. It was his next task. Farley had said so.

Of course, if Farley had said it in Africa, Chopper wouldn’t have been able to hear him. This thought confused him. Everyone
has models of people living in their heads. The relationship between those models and the reality of the person measures how well people know each other. The synchronicity that Chopper shared with Farley demonstrated how close his model of Farley was to the reality of Farley; it measured their friendship. It was the model of Farley in Chopper’s brain that had told him to have the rain forest app ready.

The rain forest app would change everything. Farley couldn’t be dead because, even now, the details of what Chopper needed to do, in order to record the most important battle between humans on Earth—between those who burn Her and those who love Her—resonated through his mind in the unmistakable timbre and tempo of Farley’s voice.

“Farley, dead?” he said. “No, Farley can’t be dead.” He shut his eyes. It was bright in here, and loud. He worked through the details again. Gloria had to come with him to record the rain forest data. She needed to teach Mariano Tuxauas and the other villagers how to survive capitalism.
See?
he thought.
If Farley’s dead, he couldn’t have told me
.

“What?” Gloria said. “Chopper, what are you talking about?”

“Did I say that out loud?”

“Chopper, they said it on the news. There was video, an explosion. My father, Farley…” Chopper couldn’t understand her through the sobs.

Chopper took a deep hit off his barch. He exhaled and watched the wind carry the smoke away. He let the cigarette fall from his mouth and pulled Gloria close to him. He needed her to believe that Farley was okay. He pressed his forehead against hers and focused on her eyes, less than an inch from his. He focused his thoughts, tried to write them into her mind; he needed her to believe him.

She got hold of herself long enough to describe the television news report. It had come from the scene. Right there. She insisted they were dead. She claimed to know.

Chopper decided that her model of Farley lacked the synchronicity, the accuracy, for her to know. That had to be it.

She collapsed against him, tears leaking from her eyes. He welcomed her warmth. He closed his eyes and the image of her face faded like smoke in the breeze. The toy hammer from a child’s tool chest tapped away behind his left eye. He looked at Gloria again and crushed her against him. As her body converged with his, he inhaled the smell of her unwashed hair. It was thick and flowery like the earth. He tasted the tears drying on her perfect cheek, salty like the ocean. He drank the sour taste of her sleep-laden breath. The toy hammer became a sledge and he didn’t care.

He pulled her onto his lap and she curled into his stomach as though he’d swallowed her.

The pain accumulated until it was difficult to think. He lit another barch. She pressed against him, crying, sneezing, leaking on his T-shirt. He stared at the ocean, felt the sun warm the back of his neck, and let the day start. He inhaled the rest of his barch, flicked the glowing cherry into the sand, stuck the butt in his pocket, and lit another. He concentrated on Farley. The day they met had felt like salvation. All those years of loneliness ended on that day. All those years without purpose, gone the day he moved into that dorm room. Farley had been that guy, the one that men wanted to be and women wanted to be with. And Farley had liked Chopper the best.

Chopper had recognized Farley right off, too. Nailed him. Chopper’s model of Farley had never failed. No disappointment. Ever. Even when Farley didn’t keep his word, Chopper had known in advance that he wouldn’t, so it didn’t matter. No disappointment, just belonging and purpose.

Chopper didn’t mind the migraine pain, the auras, the nausea, the sensitivity to light, sound, and scent. Headaches came on slowly, punished him, and then took a few days to fade away.

This one stopped.

Everything went blank, white, like a revelation. The pain disappeared. He stroked Gloria’s hair and the guilt that had accumulated without his even being aware of it washed away.

Something worse replaced it.

Romeo “Chopper” Vittori, PhD, understood the mechanics of how people know each other. He understood that the synchronicity he shared with Farley had started with serendipity, understood that the model of Farley in his mind was finely tuned from experience, dedication, and affection. Thoughts of models ran through his head. Chopper’s model of his father had never been close to the reality; he’d never known what to expect. His father gave him nothing but surprise and disappointment. Chopper’s model of his mother was a mere template, empty of details because she had none. But Chopper’s model of Farley was thick and rich and real. It gave great speeches that started with a loud voice that tapered off until you had to listen. It tugged on its beard when concentrating. It let loose full-body sighs when it was satisfied or frustrated. And it was Chopper’s friend.

Chopper knew pain. Pain didn’t bother Chopper. When Moby-Dick threw him against the
Cetacean Avenger
, Chopper had reveled in the pain. Pain meant you were alive. Dead people didn’t feel pain. That was the release. Chopper liked the pain.

Chopper thought he’d endured so much pain for so long that he was immune. But this pain didn’t start in his head, didn’t burn him with the internal fireworks of an aura, and it didn’t come from outside, either—didn’t emanate from a broken bone, bruise, cut, or injury. This pain was everywhere. It felt like a void that could only be filled with denial and anger.

Chopper also knew the biochemistry of friendship and death. He couldn’t hide from it.

It felt like his guts were contracting, collapsing into themselves.

Farley was dead.

The thought crashed into Chopper and he accepted it. He looked down and realized that Gloria was staring at him. She touched his cheek as though trying to dab up his tears. Tears? Chopper didn’t cry. His cheeks were dry. Chopper never cried.

He said, “The reason that people have so much trouble accepting the death of friends is that we never truly know anyone. We just build models of people in our brains. We know our models, but not actual people. Misunderstandings occur when our models aren’t true to the reality of another person.” He wrapped his hands in her thick mane of black hair. “The thing about death is that when someone dies, our models are stranded in time. They don’t go away or change. We know the dead person just as well as we knew the live person. It’s a rational inconsistency. Death contradicts our feelings and beliefs.”

Chopper’s mode of Farley was so accurate that Chopper knew Farley’s thoughts just as Farley acquired them. To keep the model of Farley alive in his mind, Chopper would have to do everything. Everything. He had to finish Farley’s mission, had to rescue Earth and Sea.

Chopper knew that Farley loved Gloria. He’d have to do that, too.

Ringo heard the news when he arrived at the new offices of VirtExArts. The whole engineering team, now in double digits, was in the break room watching the newscast on TV.
Ringo watched it from his office, alone. He stayed there all day, paralyzed.

More details filled out the story as the day progressed. The evening broadcast described it as an act of terrorism in an unstable region of the world.

A representative of Terre Mer Gestion SA spoke in a gentle French accent; he was forlorn but had all the answers. “This is a great tragedy, a huge mistake. If only Farley Rutherford had brought his suspicion of a toxic dump directly to us, this horrible, horrible waste of life could have been prevented.” The man wore a black suit as though in mourning. “If he’d just talked to us,” he said, shaking his head as though he wanted to go back in time to prevent the misfortune. “We could have shown him our files. He’d have seen that the barrels released on that stretch of coast are perfectly legal. They were set there with the permission of the central Somali government in Mogadishu. It is inert waste. Totally harmless. It’s even configured in a reef-like structure, part of our project to bring the fisheries back to Africa’s eastern coast.”

The news anchor asked how certain they could be that no one from the VISHNU team had survived. The Terre Mer Gestion SA representative said, “Our reports indicate it was a terrorist act—a tragedy.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “We all saw video of the explosion. How could anyone survive?”

The anchor concluded the segment with this: “Al-Shabaab has already claimed responsibility.”

A government official came on to say that not everyone could be protected, especially when they traveled to dangerous regions of the world outside the view of the State Department. An undersecretary of state lamented the tragedy but said, “We can’t protect renegade environmentalists any more than we can protect extreme adventurers.”

Radio and TV talk show hosts as well as some newspaper columnists wrote the whole tragedy off as environmental do-gooders in the wrong crowd. One went so far as to say, “What were a bunch of tree-huggers doing in a pirate camp? They deserved what they got.”

Ringo responded to the loss of his friend, the man he admired more than any other, the way Ringo responded to everything: he analyzed the crap out of it. He knew the spokesman was lying about the waste. The last transmission recorded on the DAQ system was a map of the radioactivity of the seafloor. The positions of individual barrels from the sonar-visualized images matched the radioactivity measurements. Ringo plotted the data two different ways, with a sonar-visualized photo of the barrel positions and a three-dimensional graph of radioactivity on the seafloor. They correlated perfectly. He sent it to Bupin for dissemination to the media.

A
week had passed since the attack, enough time that Bupin could confront the immediate problems. He knew of no other start-up that had survived the loss of the entrepreneur who had brought the company to life, and this company had only just now climbed to the steep slope of its growth curve. It had momentum, and the attack had contributed to that momentum. The old adage was true: there is no bad publicity. He had assistants list candidates, but he knew there was only one person capable of replacing Farley Rutherford.

To assume Farley’s role, Bupin would have to resign from Sand Hill Ventures. It was time. He stared out his office window. He wasn’t particularly religious, but ten years earlier, when he moved into this office, he had placed a wood carving of Vishnu in the arms of an oak tree out the window. Now a single sunbeam worked its way through the branches of the tree, like a spotlight on Vishnu. Was his entire career meant to bring him to this point? A breeze shifted the leaves of the tree, strobing the spotlight. It looked like Vishnu was winking at him.

Bupin swiveled his chair and stared at the documents on the monitor. The business had momentum but was now coasting rather than accelerating. Gloria had all but stopped working.

Every member of his foundation’s first mission was dead. He could solve that problem, though. The environmental fervor of
VISHNU Foundation volunteers had religious intensity. Those first twenty-five were martyrs for the cause.

He appointed himself to Farley’s role, director, effective thirty seconds earlier—the instant he had seen that sunbeam. He sent an e-mail to his admin: “Arrange a meeting here on Sand Hill Road for Ringo, Gloria, Chopper, and me.”