The Sensory Deception (29 page)

The usual number of guards paced back and forth over the ridge as they did every day. Sy concentrated his troops below the ridge. The makeshift army waited, hidden by shadows as the sun sank toward the horizon.

Tahir faded to the rear of the assemblage, easing the few hundred meters toward what he had earlier surmised to be a prison. By positioning himself in shadows, below the glare of the sun, he was all but invisible to anyone more than ten meters away. He waited and, when a line of troops ran past, he fell in with them just long enough to clear the prison-cave. Then he jogged south toward the camp and back west, inland toward the sunset. Tahir understood Sy’s logic in concentrating his troops below the ridge. He’d probably do the same thing, but it left the southern border exposed.

At the southwest edge of camp, farthest from the ridge and ocean, Tahir sprinted across the fifty-meter clear zone, then another fifty meters into the cover of some shrubs. He paused to breathe. The last time he’d crossed behind enemy lines, he’d
been in his thirties, and now he was past fifty. From here he was more impressed by Sy’s strategy. Fifty men were approaching from above the ridge to the north, right into the jaws of Sy’s little infantry.

Tahir sprinted north to another shrub, then to a rock outcropping, and in this manner worked his way up the ridge well west of the troops. Age frustrated him. He pushed himself, trying to get a decent vantage point from which to record the imminent battle. Though the sky was still blue, the sun had just set and the land was under shadow. He invested blind trust in Farley’s equipment, that it could pick up more light, more images than he could see.

In a single motion, the fifty men on the ridge swept east toward the coast. The land above the ridgeline was a simple plateau. Like the plain below, it was arid land, bare for miles except along the creek. He was in exactly the wrong position to record the battle. He had to get to the other end of the ridge, and he had to do it without being seen by either side because both sides would assume he was the enemy. He scanned the horizon and smiled to himself. It was just as it had always been. Tahir was alone. He sprinted from cover point to cover point, now heading due east to the coast, a good quarter mile above the ridgeline and Sy’s camp.

He saw flashes from muzzles before hearing the reports of gunfire. From this distance, he couldn’t imagine how the cameras could pick up useful video. He rushed forward again, still several hundred meters from the front.

At full speed, wheezing, fighting pain from the arches of his feet through his ankles and every joint in his legs to the cramps under his ribs, he ran toward the violence. He crossed the tiny river that fed the camp’s crops below the ridge. Well beyond the trickle of water, he came to a dead, upended tree and dove for
cover. He wrapped his body in the branches and roots. The aged wood crackled and broke as his limbs joined those of the tree. With the length of his torso against the trunk, he resisted the urge to gasp for breath.

Tahir did not know why he had taken cover. He just knew that it was time.

From his hiding spot, Tahir couldn’t discern what had forced this decision. He scanned the horizon—nothing. He unlatched the belt of one of the cameras so that he could hold it up like a periscope to record what he couldn’t see. Then another shot of adrenaline froze him.

Three men dressed in black strode toward him. They stopped less than six feet away. Tahir’s lungs still burned, but the discipline that had saved his life and that of his wife and daughter so many times before held fast.

He rotated the camera toward them. One of the men lowered himself to a knee and held binoculars to his eyes. More than binoculars—greenish light leaked from the eyepieces—they were infrared-sensitive binoculars, too high-tech for pirates. He was watching the battle, waiting for a specific event.

Their boots shone in the dim light. Tahir would know them anywhere. He’d worn those boots for a decade: black, waterproof, steel-toed, military issue.

The man stood, indicated something on the horizon, and spoke to his comrades—in French. French is one of the five most prominent languages in the world. It was common enough in the Middle East that Tahir had picked it up, but it was not common in Somalia.

A few minutes passed without the sound of gunfire. Then the three men dropped to the ground as shots whizzed overhead. The men scuttled, running away from the battle with their heads and shoulders held low. They stopped at what Tahir had mistaken for
an outcropping on the plain. Then he heard the engine start and saw the profile: a pickup truck.

Tahir watched the truck ease toward the coast. It was dark now, but he pointed the camera at it anyway. When the truck was a few hundred feet ahead, Tahir jogged after it. At the beach, it turned south toward camp. As it made the turn, Tahir took a deep breath, readying himself to run to the heart of camp to give warning. He was about to vault into a full-speed sprint but instead dropped to the ground. This time it was no mysterious intuition that stopped him. This time he’d been about to run straight into the onslaught of retreating troops. The mock-raid complete, the “pirates” were backing out at full speed.

But the truck continued along the beach. Tahir waited until he was certain the retreating pirates were headed inland, then resumed following the truck. It was now a good mile ahead. Still, Tahir kept the lens of the camera pointed in its direction.

The truck stopped on the beach between the camp and where Sy’s fleet was tethered. Tahir could see the men get out of the truck but couldn’t see what they were doing. If they were going into camp while every armed resident was recovering from a battle on the other side, they’d have free rein.

Tahir smiled to himself. There was no question in his mind. Even with just a machete, he outmatched them. He worked his way inland to stake a position between the three men and the camp.

The three men were now returning to the truck. Struggling under a heavy burden, they worked something into the cargo bed. The truck’s headlights came on, and the vehicle careened back in the direction from which it had come, now at full speed. It passed within ten feet of Tahir, close enough for him to see that it carried the barrel of toxic waste that Farley had recovered.

I
n the process of transforming the souvenir shop into a VirtExReality Arcade, Gloria paid “two big guys and a truck,” as they advertised themselves, to help her dismantle the counters, rip out the carpeting, and haul away the remaining touristy junk. She had just returned from the hardware store with five gallons of paint, brushes, rollers, and buckets, but the drywall specialist hadn’t finished his work, so she took her laptop to a café at the other end of the strip mall.

E-mail from Ringo said: “Glo, don’t you hate e-mails that begin with ‘Everything turned out okay, but’? Me, too. So anyway: Everything turned out okay, but your dad’s a hero again. Wait ’til you see the video he got with the help of the cameras I designed—do you know how awesome my CCD chips are? So all hell broke loose, bad pirates invaded the good pirate camp and stole Farley’s barrel of toxic waste. The documentary is going to rock. Yes, I said it. Rock. And everyone’s fine, no hits, no runs, no injuries. I put all seventeen terabytes of the documentary video Farley recorded on a couple of drives and exped-doodled them this morning, and you should get them about…now. —Ringo, Engineerman.”

Sitting in a chair near the front of the café, Gloria leaned to the side so she could see out the window. Sure enough, the FedEx truck had just pulled up to the arcade. She jogged over and got the package, texted her thanks to Ringo, and returned to the
café. With her caffeinate and laptop, she opened the documentary road map. Four weeks earlier Bupin had connected her to a producer at Universal Studios, “the finest documentary people on earth.”

She’d gotten a call from Tiff White, the producer’s assistant. Tiff had warned her that documentary teams hated working with footage that they didn’t record themselves. Gloria explained that the documentary was about a Somali pirate camp. Tiff said to get back in touch when some video was available and she’d see what she could do.

Gloria called Tiff and arranged to drop off the disks.

Chopper knew he had to hurry. The deadline came in a memo from Gloria.

She’d already decided on the opening date for the VirtExReality Arcade. A date. And they didn’t even have a prototype of the Moby-Dick experience. She’d explained in the memo that the “market window” required a product release date and that she’d made a “business decision” that they would release a product. The phrase “business decision” turned Chopper’s stomach. That phrase had become the Western world’s excuse for raping Earth. The corporate bullshit got even thicker: “At the end of the day,” she had written, they would just have to make do with what they had.

“Did you notice the ‘end of the day’?” Ringo asked. “That cracked me up.”

Chopper said, “She set a date and we don’t have the Moby App.”

“They do that crap at Intel all the time,” Ringo said, shrugging. “You have to understand that business types have no concept of reality.”

“We don’t even have a prototype.”

“Sure we do. It’s buggy, but we’ll have it ready for Gloria’s focus group in a few weeks. I can’t believe she got a focus group. Nothing like using a statistically insignificant sample to make decisions.”

Chopper couldn’t fault Ringo’s efforts; he spent every waking hour refining the Moby-Dick app. Moby had finally eaten some reasonably large squid. Octopi, actually, that he found near Madagascar. The interpolation algorithm operated the way that the brain compensates for the eye’s blind spot. Data from each side of the blind spot are combined with the viewer’s expectations to complete the image. Ringo’s software needed work; the “colossal” squid either looked like a cartoon or required so much processing power that the servers bogged down, causing the VR experience to proceed in slow motion or crash altogether.

Ringo became fixated on the Moby app and spent the next seven weeks building up to the focus group tests in a vicious debug cycle. First he’d improve the interpolation rendering efficiency, then increase the bandwidth of the connection between the helmet and the experiential database. When the result didn’t meet his specifications, he’d think of a more arcane interpolation technique that demanded even greater processing power and bandwidth. Then he’d be back to work improving efficiency and bandwidth. The cycle repeated with just tiny improvements in each iteration. He worked insomniac hours until he got the flu.

With Ringo caught up in his own obsessions, at least Chopper didn’t have to worry about their goals being derailed by superhero apps.

Chopper worked on everything else: converting the sensory deprivation chambers into VirtExReality chambers and testing communication between the experiential database and the helmet, jumpsuit, and gloves, as well as his most important
contribution—producing a stockpile of sensory deception drugs. The plants had been leggy and dry when he got back from Somalia, but while the decrease in moisture had retarded their growth, it had also caused them to produce more concentrated LSA. At night he improved his hydroponic system and, though no one was likely to enter his room, installed invisible locks on his closet. He determined the ideal light and moisture levels for maximum yield and configured a small-scale drug production process in his lab/bathroom.