The Sensory Deception (31 page)

Chopper said, “It’s going to be fine.”

“You mean it’s not fine?”

“It was all right.”

“What happened? Did they like it? Were they suitably blown away? And—you know the question I want to ask—did it work?”

Chopper leaned on the counter. He squinted and said, “We’re close to sensory saturation.”

“Oh, shit.” Ringo stood. “So it didn’t work.”

“No. But it will.”

“You’re damn right it will.” Ringo tossed the tablet computer on the couch and marched into the server room. Four huge monitors filled a table. He took a keyboard and mouse and brought up the software library and editors. He began stepping through the Moby-Dick app. He yelled out the door, “God, Chopper, I’ve been through this code so many times. I don’t know what to do.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Chopper said. “It’s going to be fine.”

Ringo went back in the arcade.

Then Gloria opened the door and walked in with Bupin. She averted her eyes from Ringo.

“How bad was it?” Ringo asked her. “Chopper’s being weird.”

Bupin stood by the door.

Gloria took a breath. “I think we’re close.”

“That’s what Chopper said. Just tell me how bad it is.”

She looked at Bupin, who wagged his head and said, “There is good news, too.”

“I suppose,” Gloria said. “Okay, Ringo, you’re a bad-news-first type. Moby-Dick doesn’t quite measure up. We might have to postpone the opening. The good news is that the polar bear app dazzled them. Totally dazzled. The before and after questionnaires show that the system can work.”

“
Can
work? So you mean it doesn’t work.”

“We’re not postponing the launch,” Chopper said. “The two veterans in the focus group got off on Moby. It’s going to be fine, you’ll see. We’ll fix a couple of bugs and Moby will get over the sensory saturation threshold. Trust me. We’ve got twenty-seven days.”

Gloria looked as confused as Ringo felt.

“So Moby worked for a hundred percent of people who have fought in wars,” Ringo said. “What’s with Mr. Positive over here?”

She said, “Chopper, are you drunk?”

He squinted again, as though he were staring into sunlight.

She waved a hand in front of him and asked, “Are you okay?”

Chopper spoke with vehemence: “We are not postponing the launch.” He rubbed his eyes and then stared at the ceiling. Ringo had seen this look before. It meant that Chopper was going to be stubborn. “Gloria, you’ve got everything prepared,” Chopper continued. “There’s no reason to postpone your grand opening.”

Ringo said, “I’m ready for the good news now.”

“Bupin liked some of what he saw. He’s offered us some funding to finish development. See? That’s pretty good news.”

“Except for the
but
.”

“What?”

“The
but
.” Ringo turned to Bupin, who still stood at the door. “Everything Bupin does comes with one. You’ll grant us funding, but…”

Bupin said, “Ringo my friend, you will find this the best news of all. Your
but
is that you get to develop superhero apps first. Congratulations. Gloria tells me that she has a contract with Marvel ready to sign. You can develop any hero you like.”

“No!” Chopper said at full volume. “We’re not caving in yet. The launch goes as planned.”

The room went silent.

Chopper set his tackle box on the counter. “Farley isn’t here to sign anything. Ringo and I won’t agree to changing our goals, at least not until Bupin experiences the Moby app.”

Bupin stepped forward. “I don’t matter. The focus group is your demographic. No one cares for opinion of old technocrat.”

“I care,” Chopper said. “Let me fix you a cup of tea and then we’ll suit you up and you can do the demo.”

Bupin spoke to Gloria. “There is no point to putting me in your chamber.”

Ringo said, “Just hang on, everyone. Chopper’s got a point. Give me a chance to look at the focus group results and a couple of days to work on Moby. Sensory saturation is tricky. The tiniest distraction kills it. Chopper’s the expert. If he thinks we’re close—it’s his call.”

Chopper was pouring water into a cup. His yellow tackle box sat on the counter next to him. He stirred Bupin’s tea and said, “I think he’d be pretty impressed right now.” Then he closed the tackle box and set it under the counter.

“If Moby isn’t dazzling within one week,” Gloria said, “I’m going to postpone the opening. Too many things have to happen in the month prior to launch. If we have to postpone, we’ll run out of money and won’t have any choice but to switch to Plan B.”

Ringo stepped back into the server room. “One week? I can create an entire world in one week. I’ll even rest on the seventh day.”

Bupin said, “Very well. But I will take the tea.” He walked over to the bar.

Ringo looked back at them and saw something strange. As Chopper handed Bupin the cup of tea, he tripped and dropped the cup to the floor. With anyone else, it would have looked like an accident. It did look like an accident, except that Ringo had known Chopper for fifteen years and in that time had never seen him drop anything. The man had perfect manual dexterity. Weird.

He shut the door behind him and settled behind the monitors. He’d been staring at this code for months. It was like returning to the scene of an accident. He stepped through the initialization routine to remind himself of the parameters. He groaned. What was Chopper thinking?

He closed the development windows and brought up his e-mail. He just needed a minute, and deleting junk e-mail always soothed him.

Farley had sent him a note. He read the first few lines. It woke him up. There was a link in the message to a file Farley had uploaded to the DAQ system. Ringo clicked on the link. It was a video, Farley’s cut of the documentary.

He stood and opened the door.

Gloria was showing Bupin one of the VR chambers across the room.

“Holy shit,” Ringo said. “Check this out.” He ducked into the room and configured the display on the huge video screen at the rear of the arcade.

“This is Farley’s cut of the pirate documentary.”

The video began with sunrise illuminating the silhouettes of Sayyid Hassan’s skiffs and speedboats. “These are the ships of a pirate,” Farley’s voice intoned at its lowest timbre. The scene changed to four young men swimming to shore and being greeted with hugs by a woman who could only be their mother. “These are pirates.” Then it showed the same boys standing in line at the village well. After three minutes of placid scenes of the pirates tending their vegetable gardens, classrooms with children studying arithmetic, families sharing meals, and Sy arbitrating trivial disputes—“not exactly Captain Hook”—the video changed tempo.

Sy’s dozen-strong fleet converged on a fishing trawler as it lowered nets into the sea. One of the skiffs came alongside the trawler. A stout man with a bullhorn stood in the bow of the skiff: Sy. Speaking English, he quoted the tariff for fishing in his water. Weapons were pointed at the trawler. The message was clear: pay or surrender. Sy stood, arms crossed, at the bow of the skiff, waiting. The camera zeroed in first on the Somali flag that Sy flew and then the flag flying from the stern of the fishing boat: white with a large red disk, the Japanese sun. It panned out to show the rest of Sy’s fleet corralling the seine nets.

The scene faded to one of Sy sitting on a rug explaining how foreign fishing fleets had all but eliminated coastal fishing stocks since the collapse of the Somali government in 1991. Sy recounted the history of his fisherman ancestors. Since the eighth century these pious people had led peaceful lives, fishing and growing crops, hunting and trading. He painted a picture of a rugged, self-sustaining people whose greatest challenge had been finding ways to be ignored by foreign antagonists—slavers and Italian
and then British colonists. He explained how they had survived the Cold War by playing the Soviets against the Americans, all the while wanting nothing but to be left alone.

The scene switched back to the ocean standoff. The nets had been rolled up and left floating in a single pile. The trawler collected it and sailed into the horizon. The video switched to a woman watching over a dozen children playing. Then back to sea and the video of the pirates raising the barrel of toxic waste. As the scene unfolded, the video periodically cut to Sy describing how European toxic waste was dumped along the intertidal zone and explaining that he was the only coast guard. He raised his voice, and hints of his African heritage colored his English accent. He described how real pirates, the ones who hijack yachts and commercial freight ships, accept bribes from commercial waste dumpers. As the barrel was unloaded from a skiff, the video zeroed in on the fragment of the label, the fragment whose edge contained the triangular symbol warning of radioactivity. It also showed a trademark: Terre Mer Gestion SA. With the label lingering like a video watermark, the scene moved back to children playing, zeroing in on the boy who lacked an eye and a hand, kids with club feet doing their best on a soccer field, and a crying mother cuddling a deformed baby.

Now speaking in a resigned but angry monotone, Sy described the real pirates: renegade criminals who raided the village every few months in pursuit of women and children to kidnap and sell into slavery, and militant Islamic factions who tried to conquer Sy’s village and submit the camp to strict Sharia law. Finally, he explained that he had to protect his nascent civilization from covert attacks from the West.

In midsentence, Sy’s voice was drowned by gunfire and the collage of injustice switched to action-packed images of raiders coming down the ridge and firing on Sy’s troops. It switched
to three men dressed in black jumpsuits, standing clear of the action, discussing the battle in French with a detached attitude. Then the video became a jerky reality adventure of the three black-clad men retrieving the barrel of toxic waste. As their pickup drove away, the video switched to a scene of skiffs bristling with firepower.

The image then appeared to move from above the surface to below, as though the camera itself had been lowered underwater. It showed the sonar-visualized underwater field of toxic waste, barrel after barrel. The video concluded with families in a circle eating and laughing, with a final focus on Sy. He said, “We appreciate your good thoughts and prayers but believe we can solve this problem ourselves.”

“If Farley can put that together from a refugee camp,” Gloria said, “think of what a professional can do with it.”

Bupin’s lips folded into a serious frown. He said, “This can do great deal of our work, perhaps even gravy our cake.”

“Did you catch that resolution?” Ringo asked. “Even in the dark, that image was razor sharp. I designed those cameras with ten times HD resolution, dude, and that’s not all, you know.” Ringo rambled on despite the fact that no one was listening. “Each pixel is a charge-coupled device, a CCD. When light hits a CCD it generates a current. That’s how the image is converted to an electric signal. Not only did I use more densely packed CCDs than any camera you can buy, I designed the CCDs with multiple dopants. Check this out.” He rewound the video to the scenes after dark. “My CCDs cover the infrared and operate on such a low leakage current the batteries last forever.” He looked around. Chopper was snoozing on the couch, and Gloria and Bupin were
huddled over a pad of paper. He said, “I am awesome,” but not loud enough to interrupt anyone.

He went into the server room and got back to work. Stepping through the initialization sequence, the experiential database populated the parameters and cache memory of each transducer’s processor. He observed a strange lag, as though the e-db were choking on something.
Great
, he thought,
now I have to go all the way back to start
.

One of Ringo’s innovations had been automated processing of incoming data. That is, the data acquired by the sensors attached to Moby went into the e-db without any human intervention. The result was that the Moby app improved without any work, up to a point. They’d reached that point weeks ago, or so Ringo had thought.

He closed the Moby app and dug into the guts of the e-db. He’d last been in there the previous day. A big chunk of new data had since arrived, but the automated processor had coughed it up. So much for taking that seventh day off.