The Sensory Deception (44 page)

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.

Chopper had disappeared with Gloria a week earlier. Ringo had been in the lab the night that Chopper picked up the sensors and recording equipment. That Gloria had gone with him was the surprise. The weird thing was that she hadn’t sent one of her ubiquitous memos announcing her departure. She hadn’t even set her e-mail auto-response.

The data amazed him. He rigged the live feed directly to a VR helmet and let the steamy jungle scenes mesmerize him. There were crazy-looking birds wearing feathers of every color; some looked plaid, others striped, and the few that wore monotones looked formal. They sang birdsong-jazz fusion. One song sounded like a child screaming “mine, mine,” and another sounded like witch laughter. Gargantuan petals of every color interrupted the dense green of the foliage.

The idea of a deforestation application had presented a terrific software puzzle. Ringo hadn’t understood how an obviously political VR would generate business or recruit volunteers until now. Walking through a jungle in ultra-resolution 3-D with localized, binaural sound convinced him. Leaves as big as trucks blocked the path, and pushing them aside revealed ever more intense feats of nature. Waterfall splashes cast permanent rainbows. Insects the size of mice crawled along paths and up stems, and across a creek, a pair of alligator-like caimans lounged in their own personal sunbeams. It started to rain. Then he heard Chopper’s voice saying “Slow down” and saw an arm slide past the video sensor. The rain avalanched through the foliage, and by
the time it reached the ground, the drops were so big that, even in the helmet, Ringo dodged them.

He caught sight of Chopper walking behind whoever wore the sensors, then realized that what he’d thought were either weird shadows or defective sensor pixels was black hair, Gloria’s black hair. Kicking back and watching the rain forest from Gloria’s point of view was pleasant, but it would take some major software innovations to produce the effects of sensory saturation from these data.

Another “character” in this VR experience danced in and out of the video. A pretty little girl with the high cheekbones of a Mayan princess and the charming smile of a Disney star ran alongside Gloria. Sometimes she blazed the trail, helping Gloria avoid the million tiny dangers—biting insects, poisonous flowers, and obvious snake hideouts—that a California girl couldn’t possibly understand but were second nature to this darling of the jungle. This was the move of a Hollywood producer, not a tough naturalist like Chopper. It changed the arc of the story he was telling. The little girl became the star. The VR software would have to accommodate playing with the child, combing her hair, carrying and hugging her, chasing and dancing with her—even wiping away her tears when she fell and scraped her knee. Genius.

Now Ringo had something to work with. He put three engineers to work on the human VR application. He needed a prototype so he could do the fun part: installing the sensory algorithms and decision break points.

The live data feed was like meditation. Ringo spent hours under the helmet. He watched the villagers work their way along paths upriver, deeper into the jungle. He didn’t understand Spanish, but there was obvious tension between Chopper and the village patriarch.

The weird thing was that Gloria didn’t say a word. She made soothing sounds to the girl, hummed with the river, and chirped with birds, but said not a single word. At first Ringo thought it was another brilliant move by Chopper. The VR experience relied on sensory stimulation; conversation would require an artificial intelligence library that would take years to build. Still, Gloria not saying a word? She was the most talkative one of them.

He put it off to grief until he no longer could.

On the fourth day of data acquisition, the walk through paradise merged with a walk through what mankind does to paradise. Instead of mist rising from the river with a pristine botanical aviary on all sides, Ringo saw the jungle filling with smoke. And more eerie than that, the sound track changed. The insect, bird, reptile, and mammal symphony lost its harmony. Instead, intermittent blasts of noise interrupted dead silence as teams of screaming monkeys swung past and tight-knit flocks of birds shrieked away. To the side of the path, through the trees, he glimpsed a desecrated moonscape.

Then everything changed.

As darkness fell, Gloria walked alone along the interface between jungle and Armageddon. The silence gradually lifted. She walked toward the orange glow. By twilight, flames just steps in front of her leaped from branch to trunk, consuming the forest fuel. Ringo yelled for her to turn around. A tree burst into flames and its huge leaves evaporated in a heartbeat. Wood cracked, and jets of steam whistled from the mess of death as loud as the sound of life had been back in paradise. The villagers worked their way along the path to get away from the fire.

Something was wrong. They were too close to the flames. A shower of sparks missed a family by inches. Why would these people get so close to a forest fire? It almost seemed as though Chopper were herding the villagers into the flames.

The VirtExReality Helmet’s ultrahigh-resolution video permitted Ringo great latitude in choosing where to look but was ultimately limited by the orientation of Gloria’s head. So it was that when the crack of a rifle caused Gloria to whip her head around, Ringo’s view shifted to an unimaginable sight: Chopper standing against the background of jungle-devouring fire, with a rifle at his shoulder, firing into the dirt at the girl and her mother. The mother grabbed the child’s hand and ducked beneath a branch. Trying to keep up, the girl rushed into a blast of sparks and screamed. The woman reached down and lifted the child into position against her hip.

With the child on her hip, the woman tried to run along the path, but tripped before she could take three steps. The girl went down first, safe on the muddy path, but as the mother came down, in trying to protect the child, she buried her face in the embers of a burning log.

Ringo started to push the helmet off his head to get away from the image of the woman’s scorching face and the sound of her screams turning hoarse and ragged, to get away from this nightmare. But he stopped and let it slide back on his head. It was a nightmare, and in the way of nightmares, he couldn’t quite wake himself to safety.

Chopper raised the rifle and fired again, and the woman’s screaming misery came to an abrupt stop.

The video went haywire for an instant. Gloria must have shaken her head. It was the sort of thing that offline processing software could fix in the conversion of raw data to a VR application.

From that point, Gloria’s actions made a 180-degree shift. Where she had been meandering through this nightmare with neither direction nor intent, she was now Gloria again. She moved with purpose, fighting her way through the flames to the
girl. She pulled the child from under the body of her mother, hugged her, and then sent her running through a window in the flames to safety.

Now, instead of staring at the monkeys above as though they were an apparition, Gloria seemed to be gauging their direction and following them the way that people have used animals’ primitive instincts since the dawn of civilization to guide them out of danger.

A thought came to Ringo. He remembered how Farley used to describe the “sensory saturation” point as a phase transition, a shift like water turning to ice. Whatever had been going on with Gloria had just changed. The ice had melted and she was back.

She snatched up the child and took off at full speed, dodging flying cinders, juking around flames.

T
ahir had been navigating the ruined streets of Mogadishu for more than two weeks. Experience gave him a knack for recognizing fresh rubble, beneath which he was likely to find food or money. He accumulated a rifle, a few rounds of ammunition, enough canned goods—mostly beans—to fend off hunger, and enough money to acquire coffee on his forays into other neighborhoods.

About the time that his neighbors began ignoring him, he found what he’d been searching for: a cell phone. The case was scratched and the battery dead, but the LCD display looked sound. Of course a cell phone has no value without base stations. He located half a dozen, but like everything and everyone in this miserable, lawless city, the base stations were victims of the vandalizing force of crossfire. Just two of them looked like they might be operational during the rare occasions of steady electrical power. Both were located in the well-guarded section of the city where the nominal, UN backed government resided. Like every “nominal government” Tahir had known, this one showed all the signs of being composed of the best-fortified thugs.

Concrete barriers with armed guards defined this island of para-civilization. The distinction between the soldiers here and those waging war in the outer neighborhoods was that these guys had uniforms and sunglasses.

Wearing a turban he’d stolen from a dead man, Tahir worked his way into the green zone. The trick was not to avoid the guards but to stick with them while staying in their blind spots. Trouble tended to come when the location of the adversary was unknown. He crawled along a concrete barrier behind a patrol. When they stopped to confer, he wedged himself in the gaps between barriers. He worked his way through the ruins two blocks into the green zone and then waited for another patrol—or anyone, for that matter—whom he could follow into the relative civilization. Riding the tail of one group, then another, never appearing to be alone, he emerged into the war-torn city center without drawing attention.

Finally, with no one around, he stood, crossed a street, and walked into a small store. Every surface was covered. It had been decades since he’d been in such a sincere shop. Few of the cans were labeled, and many were empty. There were bags of flour, spices, sugar, and nuts. Fruits and vegetables lined a few baskets just inside the door.

The proprietor sat behind a counter with an unlit brown cigarette dangling from his mouth. Tahir went to the counter and asked to buy a calling card, the sort that provides a phone number with a certain number of credits for long-distance phone calls. The man asked for what region of the world Tahir would need the card. At that point, Tahir had to guess. If he said the United States, he’d be marked. In this part of the world, it was impossible for an American to be undercover. Better to appear strange but harmless. Guessing that long-distance cards would cover distinct geopolitical categories, he said, “Japan.”