The Sensory Deception (33 page)

The space looked good. Gloria had taken the idea of a video-game parlor and converted it into a fresh, trendsetting spot. The paint sparkled and the carpet was perfect. The TV screens high on the walls showed loops of VR video, and in the center of the room, the drink bar offered everything from Vitaminwater and fresh-squeezed guava nectar to house-trademarked energy drinks and triple shots of espresso.

In the course of debugging, Chopper and Ringo had been through the Moby-Dick VR hundreds of times. After fighting the colossal squid, the whale had undergone another battle—a surprise ending. Gloria had recruited another focus group from people out on the pier, a combination of surfers, students, and two fishermen who were veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Every one of them had emerged from the VirtExReality chambers ashen-faced, some trembling, but each with a look of unmitigated awe. They were impressed and dazzled but, in Chopper’s judgment, insufficiently altered. Chopper knew that saving Earth required a fundamental shift in perspective. And he knew the mechanism for that shift, right down to its chemical structure.

Chopper focused on Bupin. A clump of gray hair at the peak of Bupin’s part always seemed out of place. Or was it? Perhaps that small lock served a purpose. Nothing else ever seemed beyond Bupin’s control. Leaning against a VR chamber while talking to Ringo and Gloria, he assumed the center of attention. As he peered into the chamber, the lock of hair dangled over his head like an antenna. He pushed it back with his left hand, a motion that lent the impression of human sensitivity, almost vulnerability. Chopper knew better.

Chopper walked to the center of the room, lifted a section of the countertop, and entered the oval area behind the drink bar. He opened a cabinet and took out his tackle box. He spun the combination lock, opened it, and removed a single vial. Then he relocked the box. He fixed a cappuccino for Gloria and a frothy mug of hot chocolate for Ringo, and poured boiling water over a bag of jasmine tea for Bupin. He let the tea steep for five minutes before adding the contents of the vial. As jasmine tea steeps, it gets bitter and becomes an excellent flavor mask.

Drinking a glass of water, he waited for the smell of coffee to draw the others to the bar. A minute later, Gloria sat across from Chopper and took the cappuccino. Sipping the steamy milk from the top of the mug, she set a balance sheet on the bar to her right. The sheet showed the required arcade traffic for the company to realize different profit levels. The model was scalable, and with Series B VC funding they could open more arcades and realize more profit.

Chopper slid the jasmine tea next to the sheet.

Ringo was almost finished showing Bupin the company’s patented technology and describing the roles of each transducer. Bupin’s eyes were glazing over.

Gloria sipped more foam. She called Bupin to the bar and asked him to look at the balance sheet.

“Hang on,” Ringo said. “Let him demo Moby-Dick first.”

Bupin was wearing an indulgent, tight-lipped smile, and as Ringo spoke, he raised his right index finger. “I attend to one thing first, the balance, and then I try your product.” He walked to the bar, sweeping his hand in a gesture to Gloria that she owned his attention.

He took the seat next to her, nodded thanks to Chopper for the tea, and raised the mug.

Gloria ran the projected numbers by him, and he asked her a few questions. Questions whose answer he clearly knew. It was all a quiz. This man seemed to believe that he controlled the universe.

At last, his mug empty, Gloria’s presentation complete, Ringo guided Bupin to the jumpsuit and helmet next to the chamber.

Bupin ran the numbers through his head. He didn’t see it. Without mainstream applications, the business plan didn’t add up; it was that simple. But there was a more important ingredient to start-up success: the passion of the directors, employees, and executives. Gloria had crossed over. She was an executive now, no longer a VC, and she had that passion. The passion might be enough to get the company off the ground. If it could, and if she’d alter the business plan, Bupin estimated the company’s intellectual property at hundreds of millions, maybe even the magic B.

Bupin lowered his head to Ringo like a bishop indulging an acolyte. Following Ringo’s instructions, he kicked off his shoes and stepped into the VirtExReality jumpsuit. The jumpsuit and helmet were perfect marketing flair. Another piece to the puzzle that screamed for a mainstream application. He had a vision of taking customers into a secret room, even a phone booth, to
suit them up. He stopped the process and explained to his three apprentices that preparing the customer for the experience should be a ceremony with extensive descriptions of the purpose for each cable, each button and belt. The equipment had to be treated with reverence so that tension would mount with every step toward the VirtExReality chamber. He concluded with “You must increase perceived value.”

Ringo gave an exaggerated explanation of how Bupin would soon experience not a mere simulation but the actual sensory input—the touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste—of the world’s largest predator locked in evolution’s most epic battle. “You will be strength and intelligence fighting agility and stealth.” Then he helped with the helmet and Bupin climbed into the chamber. Slipping into the water, his field of vision showed the ocean’s surface. The sound of waves slowly built in volume and so did their effect on his body. He was steady in the water, solid but buoyant. Wisps of the fresh, salty scent of the ocean combined with warm breezes as swells rose and fell around him.

Bupin knew that the VR chamber door must have closed, but he didn’t know when and he didn’t experience even the slightest claustrophobia—how could he? He was in the middle of the ocean with the horizon on all sides and waves breaking over him. The water was warm, a little too warm, and he felt a rising hunger.

With the slightest turn of his hips, he went below the surface, and tendrils of turbulence whirlpooled across his skin. In his head, Bupin expected darkness. He expected it to look the way it would to a scuba diver, dark with shadows from the current above. He didn’t expect to taste the water, to feel it flowing through his mouth, and to hear everything. Everything. He didn’t expect to be able to see so far in the distance—though it wasn’t quite vision. It felt like he was projecting an image, an image that he couldn’t predict. Looking in a direction was more
like thinking in that direction. The tighter he focused, the farther he could see, and he could see for miles. He knew the depth of the water, several times his own length. He knew the location of every fish and the pod of she-whales in the distance behind him. The recognition sent a wave of satisfaction through the core of his being. This was a good world.

He flexed again and vaulted forward. Then, turning oh so slightly, he took a fish. Deep in his mind, he was aware, thrilled, that he had caught the fish, but that part of his mind was falling farther and farther away, drowning. At the forefront of his consciousness, the fish was simply taste and oral satisfaction. Like swallowing popcorn from a bowl, he had a dozen more fish.

Then he surfaced. As he broke into the air, something changed.

Moby-Bupin’s lungs are as large as those of any creature that ever lived, and their evacuation forces a blow of hot, wet air that showers down on his skin. He reinflates them with hundreds of liters of warm, dry air. This water is too warm, the air only slightly cooler. It is a good place, a place to which he will return, but now it’s time to go to another place. To a place where a different type of satisfaction awaits, where the water is dense enough to soothe and tighten the skin. He feels anticipation wash over him. He blows another breath and heads south.

He is alone in the ocean, but not lonely because it is his. If he projects to his right and below, he can see the shelf of the seafloor along the continent and, to his left, the increasing depth of the water. Back at the surface, the all-encompassing medium of his existence gives way to the dry, life-giving atmosphere, and he is comfortable. This boundary is the mattress where he rests but
never sleeps. The air feels foreign the way that heaven must feel foreign to the newly dead.

The sun passes over and behind him. He grazes but doesn’t truly eat, enjoying a building hunger just as he had relished the lust that had built when he traveled in the opposite direction months before. He would satisfy the hunger pangs when they reached their peak.

Moby-Bupin feels his age and strength and certainty. His ego saturates the water no less than does salt. It is his. Everything. The fish, the rocks, the kelp, and the crawling creatures among it, and the scars of previous glory that drape his torso. He passes the hard but hollow bobbing ships. They seem tenuous in their existence. He knows which of these to fear. As certainly as he recognizes the lethal orca who, when his scars have run too deep, his lungs too tired, and his back too worn, will righteously herald his end, he recognizes the whaling ship. They have changed over the decades. When he was a calf, the ships were small and their weapons uncertain. Then came what seemed to be the end of the universe. The death ships were everywhere. They killed in one shot and butchered in minutes the bodies of his mother, his aunts, his brothers and sisters—so many mates and friends.

Moby-Bupin survived those bad times, survived by being fast and strong and lucky. He survived the lonely years, too, when he could swim the length of an ocean, the warm Indian to the endless Pacific, and never see his kind. It is better now. The death ships are rare and he can see the rot in their hulls. And Moby-Bupin has replenished the sea. Now he can’t swim through the period of a tide without coming upon the wake of a son or daughter. Yes, Moby-Bupin feels his age and it feels good.

As he swims, the water cools. He passes the bottom of the continent, where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans shake hands in a fury of disagreeing currents. The currents massage his back as
he rolls into them. At the surface, the swells are strong enough and cold enough to brace his skin.

Finally, there is ice. Brisk air with concentrated oxygen that makes it easier to spout less and swim more. His hunger builds and he scans the depths. Oh, it is deep here. There are no ships in the distance. Just the slow-moving, slow-witted baleen whales—two that are larger than he is, the blue and the fin—swimming tight circles and blowing nets of bubbles to trap their tiny prey. Moby-Bupin feels the oneness of the world in the beauty and grace of these distant cousins. Watching them eat brings his own hunger to the fore. Where they eat the smallest prey, Moby-Bupin will eat the largest of the ocean’s bounty.

He breaks the surface and blows. The mist in his breath freezes before it falls to his forehead. He inhales to capacity and then tosses his flukes in the air. For a moment, as he curls the entire length of his body, his flukes are stationary. When his body lines up with them, he forms a vertical trajectory. There is a thrill in this instant. The thrill of choosing risk in anticipation of reward. The thrill of a warrior going to battle.

He dives straight down.

It is miles deep between the continental shelves of Africa and Antarctica, and as he descends, pressure builds. He feels the water trying to collapse his ribs, feels it examine his body and give a deep-tissue massage that kneads his thick layer of insulation and pushes back the years.

He controls his own buoyancy by tightening the muscles around his jaws, compressing his forehead. The soft spermaceti that fills his bulbous head hardens, denser than water. At the same time, he flexes his chest, clamping down on his lungs, concentrating the volume of air so that he sinks. He needs the oxygen in that air for the next hour or two, maybe three. Past
three and he will drown. There is only one thing that can hold him to this depth for that long. He hopes to find it.

At the bottom, the water is much colder than ice. It is a foreign world, almost as foreign as the world above the surface. He projects among the rocks in the distance. What he seeks is all but transparent. The body of the colossal squid is a thick, coherent gel that hides from his sonar. The rays of sound penetrate the squid body and only faint echoes reply. It makes the game even better.