Free The Sensory Deception by Ransom Stephens Page B

she sat on a damp wet suit, she posted household rules on the whiteboard. Farley obeyed them without comment, Ringo pretended to be afraid of the dishwasher, and Chopper ignored them completely.
    The typical day started with a meeting in the family room over Ringo’s caffeinate and oatmeal. Farley ran the meetings by looking at each person in turn and asking, “What have you got?” The gazed-upon would give a short status report, Farley would put the report in perspective by commenting on how it fit in the overall project schedule, and then he would move on to the next person. His summaries were always positive, but never so positive that each person couldn’t hear the clock ticking down on the deadline. When a milestone was completed he’d tug his beard in a slow nodding motion that conveyed satisfaction and affection. When someone was still stuck on the same problem they’d had the day before, he’d brush it off with a confident reference to some other problem that the person had conquered in the past, but an hour later he’d be seated at that person’s side determining what was needed to move forward.
    Two months into development, software lagged hardware.
    “We need a programmer,” Ringo said.
    Farley turned to Gloria, who said, “A full-time hire? No way.”
    “How about an intern or a grad student?” Farley asked.
    “Maybe,” Ringo said. “I need someone to code up simple bits and pieces I’ve already designed. I need time to concentrate on algorithm development.”
    “I can do it,” Gloria said.
    Ringo rolled his eyes and Chopper snickered. Farley said, “You think?”
    “They made me take a C programming class at Stanford. I was pretty good…”
    Farley turned to Ringo and said, “If you define the pointers and do the memory allocation for her, it’s worth a try.”
    “All right,” Ringo said. “I guess.” A week later, Gloria was cranking out some impressive C code.
    They stayed on schedule, meeting every milestone for the first six months. The Soaring Eagle VR featured extensive interactive capabilities so that users could fly over a dozen possible terrains and hunt for small animals and snakes. You just had to catch them before the system crashed.
    At the nine-month point, the transducer processing chip was debugged and ready for production at a Silicon Valley foundry. A month later, the helmet design was complete. Ringo switched his focus to building the prototype while Farley and Chopper went to work on the jumpsuit and converting the old sensory deprivation chambers into new VirtExReality chambers.
    The schedule slipped by weeks, but not months. Gloria said that the VCs would tolerate it. Meanwhile, she knocked out the promotion milestones and determined the best zip codes in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco for VirtExReality Arcades. The demographics had to be high in first adopters of technology, and she wanted areas with plenty of tourism to keep the word spreading. She finally decided on the East Village in New York, Union Square in San Francisco, Michigan Avenue in Chicago, and smack between Venice Beach and Santa Monica in Los Angeles. None of these sat on discount real estate.

    In the morning meeting on their one-year anniversary, Chopper took his usual position on the couch where he could see the oceanas well as the whiteboard. He stretched his legs out on the coffee table, nudging his yellow tackle box to the side. Farley stood next to the whiteboard, looking at a column of milestones. Most were checked off. Gloria sat at the edge of the couch to Chopper’s left, facing the whiteboard but looking at some inane corporate software she used to track progress.
    Chopper closed his eyes and experienced one of the stranger symptoms of migraine headaches. The world looked brighter with his eyes closed than with them open. The pain had just started, a steady thumping behind his left eye.
    Across the room, Ringo’s customary spot on a stool next to the counter that