The Sensory Deception (4 page)

After she lurched forward, she grabbed his hand. He covered her with a blanket and gently pushed her back on the chair. He had expected a pronounced reaction, but not this pronounced. He eased the headphones off and said, “Gloria, you’re in Santa Cruz and everything is okay.”

She was shaking and couldn’t seem to catch her breath.

He pulled off the glasses and pushed the monitor aside. “How do you feel?”

After a few more beats, she relaxed and let go of his hand. He asked, “Any nausea?”

She shook her head, but was swallowing instead of breathing.

It took several more minutes for Gloria to settle enough to accept a mug of herbal tea. Farley held it for her and waited. She looked up at him. He felt guilty that the demo had startled her to this extent, but there was more to it. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand and shook her head as though trying to get her mind into a new place. Then she smiled. That’s when it happened. In smiling, she transformed. Farley had always thought smiles were strange things. To most mammals, spreading lips and showing teeth is a threat. Even among people, smiles expose uncertainty and anxiety as often as joy or mirth; they are telltales indicating the direction of a person’s emotional wind. Indicators that helped Farley guide the people who depended on him.

This smile was altogether different. Two things happened when Gloria smiled. First, as her smile formed, the simple elegance of the curve of her cheek was punctuated by dimples. These two symmetric flaws brought a feeling of warmth to Farley’s stomach. It was the second thing, though, that changed him forever. As she smiled, her cheeks framed her eyes—huge, dark, soft, world-encompassing eyes—and Farley felt a pull he’d never experienced before.

She reached for the mug. Still caught in those eyes, so dark that the pupils were barely discernible from the irises, he leaned too far forward and spilled a few drops of tea on the blanket he’d just provided.

She said, “Wow.”

In that instant, Farley forgot what she’d just experienced, and he said “Wow,” too. But then he realized what she must have meant and added, “The cold and hunger will disappear in a minute, unless you’re genuinely hungry.”

She wrapped the blanket around her legs and then sipped from the mug. After swallowing, she said, “Oh, I
am
hungry.”

“Good. Chopper’s cooking lasagna.”

She looked quizzical, nodding to herself. Then she kicked off the blanket and started to stand. “How did you do that?” she asked. “How long was I gone?”

“Take it easy, Gloria,” Farley said, encouraging her to stay seated. “It was the length of a feature film, less than two hours.” Farley stroked his beard. She didn’t look stable yet, so he added, “We’ll talk in a minute. Just relax.”

Ten minutes later, Farley guided her out of the demo area. He replaced her empty mug with a glass of red wine and proceeded into the family room where Ringo and Chopper waited. The two of them sat on the couch, and Gloria kicked off her shoes and curled her legs under her.

Farley watched how she made herself at home. The act of familiarity spoke of her self-image. Farley liked women who assumed respect. She lifted the guitar from the coffee table and strummed a chord, dragging her fingers across each string in a gentle melody, and Farley felt a wave of confidence. She would be a good fit—businesswise, of course. He caught himself staring at her and repeated the thought to himself to set it in the stone of self-discipline.

He looked across the room to Chopper and Ringo. Ringo responded with an approving smile and nod. Farley could see him staring at Gloria, evaluating.

Chopper brought plates of lasagna into the living room and they ate quietly. Then Gloria set her not-quite-clean plate on the driftwood coffee table, wiped her mouth on a napkin, and said, “Okay, how did you do that?”

Across the room, Chopper was waiting. Over the years, Farley had come to rely on him. The two of them had been close since the day they met in a Berkeley dormitory. Farley usually needed distance between himself and his colleagues. He knew that the more people relied on him, the more
important that distance was, but with Chopper it was different. From the day they met, Chopper had shown an uncanny ability to anticipate Farley’s thoughts and an amazing knack for questioning only those decisions that Farley also doubted. Their resulting closeness had been so immediate it was almost eerie. Chopper felt more like an extension of Farley’s will than just a friend. So it was that as Farley formulated the thought that he needn’t so much sell the idea to Gloria as recruit her, Chopper stood and left the room. Farley knew what he was doing as certainly as Chopper understood it was what Farley wanted him to do.

Farley set his plate next to Gloria’s, leaned forward, and turned to face her. He took a breath, and just as he began to speak, Chopper returned with a tablet computer.

“It started with a mockingbird.” Farley enunciated each word with purpose, the way his grandfather had done when Farley was a boy. He tapped the screen and a picture of a bird appeared. The bird was wearing a little hat. “We recorded two days of video and audio—everything the bird saw and heard, and every note he sang. The experiment yielded data on what he ate, and where, when, and how long he flew. One night, when these guys were here, I played the video on the big-screen TV. With the lights out and the sound cranked up, it was like a roller coaster ride. We all got vertigo. Ringo almost hurled.”

Gloria asked, “Have you submitted a patent for the data acquisition technology?”

“The documentation is in the packet we sent.”

He swiped the screen, bringing up a picture of a polar bear. The bear was sitting up, propped against an ice shelf, its eyes open and paws hanging at its sides. In the photo, Chopper knelt next to the bear with a stethoscope, and Farley leaned against it, his face close enough to smell the bear’s breath. The picture still thrilled
Farley, like an adolescent daydream: partying with a polar bear. When he felt Gloria turn to him, he swiped again.

In the next picture, Ringo was fitting a harness over the bear’s head and neck. “This is how we recorded the reality you just experienced,” Farley said. “Equipment on the harness recorded 3-D video, binaural sound including supersonic and subsonic frequencies, and temperature; it also had a satellite communications link for data acquisition.”

“That really happened?” Gloria asked. “They shot her?” Her voice quivered.

“Yes. It really happened.” He lowered his voice in both tone and volume. “Just as you experienced at the end of that long, painful swim, she went ashore in Iceland and the police shot her.”

Gloria trembled. “Oh my god.”

“What you experienced in two hours, that animal had to endure for fourteen days.
Fourteen days
.”

He let it sink in before continuing: “Without ice, polar bears die and, as you now know, polar bears don’t give up. She swam almost four hundred miles. Remember the confidence you felt when you first slid into the water? How certain you were after the first day that you’d find another iceberg? And the second day? Remember the feeling of disappointment when there was no ice?”

Gloria’s eyes, now filled with emotion, caught his. He forgot what he was going to say. A tear dripped down her cheek, and before he realized what he was doing, he wiped it away.

In a quiet, breathy voice, she said, “Yes, that was it. I was disappointed. Not angry, not disillusioned, just really disappointed.” She turned back to the picture and her voice trembled. “It just—the whole thing, like the world broke my heart.”

The next picture showed Farley and Chopper walking across an ice sheet with the polar bear outfitted in the data-collection harness. The next was of the bear resting in a snowdrift with
Farley leaning against her, and the one after that showed Farley comparing the size of his palm to the bear’s.

“It all really happened?” Gloria whispered.

“It really happens every day.”

“But after swimming all that way, how come, when she finally made it”—she took a deep breath—“why did they shoot her?”

“If you were a cop walking along the seashore and you saw a starving bear stalking a group of scuba divers, what would you do?”

Gloria covered her face with her hands.

The room was silent but for the ticking of a clock.

Chopper stood, stepped to the center of the room, and, looking down at Gloria, asked, “Do you consider yourself an environmentalist?”

Gloria sipped her wine. When she looked up at Chopper, his eyes widened as though impressed that she would meet his glare. He turned to Farley and gave a barely perceptible nod of approval.

She cleared her throat and said, “I’ve never thought of myself as an environmentalist.” She paused between sentences. “I think that I appreciate how nature works. How every piece of an ecosystem plays a role. But no, I’ve never donated money to an environmental organization or volunteered.” She looked away from Chopper, toward the window and the ocean beyond it, and mumbled, “I don’t know.”

Chopper refilled her wineglass and said, “Walking in another animal’s skin changes your perspective.”

Gloria took a long sip, stretched her legs out on the coffee table, and asked, “When you recorded the data to make your, umm, reality show, did you hurt the bear?”

“You mean, how did we cuddle up to one of nature’s most aggressive carnivores without being eaten?” Farley let a warm,
satisfied smile consume his face. A smile that he knew would shift the tension in the room back to business. “The experiment with birds taught me that the animal needs to be awake when we fit the harness. If she’s unconscious, it’s impossible to put it on in a way that’s comfortable, and if it’s not comfortable she’ll just paw it off. The last thing we wanted was to make her uncomfortable. No, of course we didn’t hurt her. In fact, the bear really had a nice time with us. You see, Chopper designed a tranquilizer…”

Without a pause, Chopper finished the sentence: “…to give the bear a nice, happy buzz.” He continued in a clinical tone. “Every animal likes to get high, not just people. So instead of knocking the bear out, I made her relaxed and euphoric. She never lost consciousness, and my brew left no hangover, no lingering weakness.”

“Okay,” Gloria said, “but it was so real. That was more than a 3-D movie from the front row…”

Farley took another sip of wine, a small sip because the wine buzz was getting a little too comfortable. He swallowed and cleared his throat. Farley was aware of the modulation of his speaking voice. He had learned it from his grandfather, who had used it to address the people who worked for him. Farley would begin with a deep, booming voice to grab your attention, and then his volume would diminish so you had to strain to hear. When you have to work at something, you put a higher value on it. The result was that people paid attention when Farley spoke.

He began: “We have five senses. Most animals also have five senses. Of course they’re not the same—nocturnal animals see some infrared, birds have better resolution, a dog’s sense of smell is four hundred times more sensitive—but the essential equipment is pretty standard. The big difference is that most animals only have enough brainpower to process the data into immediate conclusions built from algorithms that are hardwired by instinct.
In other words, most animals cannot deconstruct their sensory data and speculate on cause-effect relationships. Without the ability to reflect and a language with which to formulate thoughts, their entire lives consist of immediate interaction with the world. People, on the other hand, process and ponder.” He stopped and regarded Gloria. She was paying close attention, but he couldn’t tell if she was following.

He resumed at full volume, “Now, here’s the trick. We call it sensory saturation.”

“Have you trademarked that?”

“Umm, no,” Farley said.

She raised her eyebrows. “There’s an action item.”

He nodded and continued. “The reason you so fully believed you were a bear for those two hours is that we overwhelmed your senses—saturated them. We believe there is a threshold beyond which the brain is so overwhelmed by sensory data that it switches gears. It shifts from reflective thinking to the primitive type of immediate process-and-response that animals experience. It worked, too—didn’t it?”

Gloria furrowed her brow and nodded slowly.

“You experienced the life of a polar bear until you saw the guns, got a blast of adrenaline, and came out of it. Imagine what it would be like with total immersion.”

“You did all this just with video and sound?”

Farley stood and offered a hand to Gloria. “Let’s go back to the lab. I’ll show you.”

As Gloria approached the room with the big-screen TV and plush chair, feelings of passion and trepidation mixed in her belly. She had been a venture capital scout since getting her MBA
four years before and had seen plenty of new technologies. This was different. She felt an intimate relationship with this strange product.

She took a sip of wine and stepped in. Farley stood next to her as though spotting her on exercise equipment. She drank the rest of her wine. Farley took the glass and set it aside. She said, “I’m going to need a refill.”