Chapter 7 Contact

Chapter 7 Contact

I'd expected something way cooler than a card table, a small and not very detailed posterboard model of Paperson, and a roll-down screen for an lcd projector. Jan, Peter (the technical director), and I were the only three people in this cross between a room and an equipment closet. Even if Luke Howard’s Virtual Reality Project happened to be stuck in the back of the warehouse known as the Illusion Factory, this was not necessarily a sign of disrespect for the project in the odd culture of special effects wizards.

On the drive over, Jan had warned me, "At a money meeting, the man or the woman in the most expensive suit is the one you listen to. In a production meeting, you look at the sunglasses and the keychains. At the Illusion Factory, the guy with the most pizza stains on his t-shirt and the mismatched pair of running shoes is gong to be the heavy hitter. It’s almost always guys too. We’ve had a couple female technicians, but they’re still very rare. After a couple weeks here, even the women start wearing baseball caps and t-shirts after a couple weeks. It’s just the culture.”

“As in the culture of illusions?”

“Yeah, it’s one of those weird things. Years ago, Luke wanted to do away with coats and ties. He hates uniformity. He would wander around his production facilities in jeans, a Pendleton, and a pair of clean work boots just to make his point. In two years, everyone on the business and production end was dressing exactly like Luke and there was a whole status thing about the color and models of work boot and whether you ran the laces all the way to the top or not.”

There was, however, only so much that Jan could explain verbally about Luke Howard’s kingdom. I’d had the tour of the Turkey Farm, the company’s official headquarters, that included a gym, a pool, and three restaurants. The name “Turkey Farm” was a movie joke, of course, but the site had also really once been a Turkey breeding farm. When Luke bought it fifteen years ago and turned it into his alternative to a Hollywood studio, he’d insisted on keeping the name. The Turkey Farm still honored its roots in various ways. A set of pens housed a variety of domesticable livestock stayed in place behind the red brick editing building, although Luke had added llamas and peacocks to the mix. On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Luke’s employees would line up to drive by what had once been the barn where Luke and his assistants would personally pass out twenty pound organic turkeys for the holiday, though these were thoughtfully packed in a white cardboard box rather than dressed and hung from hooks.

Luke’s own office was in a five story Victorian at the Turkey Farm complete with glass-enclosed gazebo, hidden elevator, and theater in the basement. Luke had insisted that the structure appear period authentic which meant that all the light switches and wiring remained hidden and the door and window hardware looked retro even though they were cast from stronger more modern alloys. This might have seemed an odd choice for a man who had made his fortune popularizing images of intergalactic life in the distant future, but this kind of contradiction was, according to Jan Grady, one of the keys to dealing with Luke Howard, the man.

“Luke likes to turn expectations on their head,” Jan had told me. “It’s something you have to be ready for, but you won’t really get how it works with him until you experience it some.”

For the last decade, Luke’s real income hadn’t come from making movies. In fact, he hadn’t produced a movie of his own in seven years. “The RCA in the Parlor” had homaged radio mysteries of the thirties, but it didn’t even make it to general theatrical release. “In the Parlor’s” main virtue was that the movie had been shot entirely without sets of any kind. The actors would sit in a chair and special effects would backfill the scene with period details. Instead of making the extraordinary happen on film, this had been an attempt to use special effects to recreate the ordinary and the expected details of a movie set, items like bookshelves, upholstered sofas, floor lamps, and even wardrobe in a couple instances. Instead of noticing the clever special effects, the challenge was for viewers not to notice the presence of CGI at all. The handful of reviews that the movie did get mentioned that it looked surprisingly like a movie made in the thirties only the script and the acting both sucked.

In any case, the Howard company now made most of its money in two ways. The bulk came from licensing toys, cereal box promotions, soda cups, and what could best be described as branding cultural junk. The second more active source of Luke’s income came from doing contract special effects for other film companies. A logo saying “Special Effects by the Illusion Factory” could actually enhance a popcorn movie’s gross receipts by up to twenty million dollars. Even the digital film editing, the sound editing, and Foley effects done in the faux 19th century factory across from the Victorian accounts for nearly as much revenue as whatever comes from Luke’s movie residuals

“That’s sort of sad. Don’t you think?” I told Jan.

“Heck no. Luke loves it that way. He thinks it's a symbol of some new age in the entertainment business and he’s the guy at the head of the parade. Anyway, the Illusion Factory is now the production center for Luke’s Empire, so naturally he houses the enterprise in a dump. Anyway, welcome to the gold mine.”

At the time, we were in what appeared to be the back parking lot of Circuit City, a retail store that sold cheap electronics, but whose grand red brick facade and big display windows made it look for more upscale than the warehouse that once housed the retail clerks union before it became the Illusion Factory. If space aliens from one of Luke's movies ever landed beneath the Highway 101 overpass in search of advanced human technology, they would likely never guess that the elaborate building sold hundred dollar televisions and car stereos while the other building held multiple state of the art Silicon Graphics works stations.

After a brief tour of the blue screen where a group of workmen were spending the day cleaning a spot in one of the corners and the server room, we were in the Virtual Reality project room which Jan had told was the key to the future of the Howard Company. Even with her carefully-laid prologue about the anthropology of the action movie business, the room was a disappointment. The room wasn’t a glimpse of the future, it was a thirty year old dungeon's and dragons nerd still living in his mother's basement.

By the way he dressed, Peter, the technical team leader couldn't have been very far up the pecking order. He wore shoes made from actual leather and instead of a t-shirt he was wearing a pressed and clean Pendleton. Also, in a culture generally powered by the younger employees, Peter had to be at least forty. During the small talk, he'd even mentioned picking up his kid from soccer after our meeting. I figured that Jan was doing her best to break me in easy with Peter. Just plopping some kid in front of me who can’t make eye contact and whose idea of dress up is to put on his black Megadeath t-shirt instead of the white Alice in Chains shirt with the holes in it really might have been too much for me to comprehend. On the other hand, Peter did sport a long pony tail that fell well beneath his collar.

I had, at this point, figured out that Peter was a team leader rather than a "specialist". Jan had explained that there was potentially more money in being a "specialist", because the fledging effects union had won them the right to overtime for the ninety hour weeks just before final cut. Team leaders, as management, nominally got a percentage of the gross, but their shares were diluted to near irrelevance because they were always calculated against a percentage of screen time in the film or the DVD release. As much as people came out of the theater talking about the thrills of exploding building, tornadoes sweeping away live cows and camper shells, or talking sharks, the actual scenes were usually surprisingly short.

Peter motioned for me to take a seat on the office chair in front of the table.

"So Jan, did Lucky sign the disclosure?"

"I'm not a confidentiality problem. We're the licensor here," I did my best to sound like a lawyer.

Peter looked over at Jan and shook his head.

"It's not that kind of disclosure. This is just in case you don't return to this reality. We lost two people in France during the Hundred Years War a couple months ago. There's also that woman who had the heart attack during the alien invasion when the doctor with the tentacles put her in the stirrups."

"Uh, Jan didn't mention any of those things."

Peter then flicked his wrist as if he were doing a parry with a fencing foil, did a little hop, and gleefully shouted, "Got another one!... I thought you told me this guy was smart."

"I told you that he went to Harvard with me. That's not the same thing."

Peter then broke out laughing. Jan joined in. Eventually I did too if only not to appear to be a complete idiot. It was clear that this wasn't the first time they'd run this routine.

Peter then flipped open a panel on the arm of my chair. "Lucky, the first thing we're going to do is calibrate. We're going to show you some slides on the screen there. You're going to push the red button if it feels less familiar and the blue button if it feels more familiar. "

"Familiar compared to what?"

Jan tapped me on the shoulder, "Lucky, that's my cue to leave this demo for a bit here. Have fun with Peter. He's a very nice guy, once you get used to the sense of humor. He doesn’t bite."

“Yeah, but does he slice?”

Jan poked me on the shoulder with her finger flirtatiously then closed the door behind her and the lights in the room went out. The slide projector started and an image of a circle appeared on the screen mounted on the wall.

"So how do I know which button is red and which one is blue in the dark like this?"

Peter jumped onto a ledge just to the side of me, "Such a silly question, just feel the two buttons."

"Whoa, I get it. So which one is the smooth one and which one is the bumpy one."

"Red is smooth or less familiar."

"Okay...."

"But I still don't get this familiar, not familiar thing. All I see on the screen is a circle."

"So impatient ! What's happening to kids today, they can't wait for anything? Reality should never be in a hurry, even when it’s virtual."

I waited and then I noticed that the circle was subtly pulsing as the edges went light then dark. After a couple minutes, it occurred to me that the circle was starting to approximate the rate at which my eyes were blinking. I felt for the rough-edged button and pushed.

"Lucky, this time can you close your left eye. "

The circle then shifted to the right side of the screen and I repeated the process for each eye.

"Peter, what happened to the helmet and the gloves."

"Man, you've been watching too many movies. Helmets are totally old school."

"What's the matter with helmets and gloves?"

"Astronauts wear helmets, pest control guys wear helmets, deep sea divers dress like that., but who dresses like that in their real life? That sort of stuff is great if you want to fake a three dimensional environment, but we're talking "reality" here not special effects. Other companies are obsessed with “objective” virtual reality. This project is a little different, we take a person's subjective experience of events and more or less try to clone it. A helmet would only get in the way of that because it feels unnatural to the subject. Unless, of course, you happen to be a deep sea diver."

This time, Peter slashed at the far wall with his imaginary sword.


I noticed that the bottom of my chair had a heating source and that when I flexed my knees that the stem of the chair rose and fell with my movement. I shifted around, then pushed with the soles of my shoes against the floor and found that the mechanism in the chair was so reactive that the pressure between my feet and the floor itself stayed exactly the same. I then tried to lift my feet up, but it was as if the floor came with me.

"In case you were wondering, you're sitting in a five million dollar chair. It's worth more than the Queen of England's throne, give or take a couple circuit boards."

“Is it true that she's actually a cyborg who died in 1987?”

“Naw, that's just one of those urban legends. We haven't gotten that far yet....Besides, if you were going to fake someone why would you replicate someone as boring as members of the British royal family? I'd do Mr. T, Jose Canseco, maybe Grace Jones....”

“How about Annie Lennox?”

“No Way....” Peter's voice turned into a chirp. “Did someone tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“About the Eurythmics being cyborgs.”

“What?”

“You remember when she blew out her voice?”

“Not really?”

“Well, never mind.”

Peter then dropped into silence for several moments then said casually, “Did you know that your pulse rate jumps when you ‘re confused?”

“So Annie Lennox and the queen were just a way of calibrating me?”

“I’m good….I’m damn good.”

Peter held his pony tail out like a prize. I was starting to like the guy.

“For five million dollars, you'd think they would have gotten the coffee stains out of the upholstery."

"What can I tell you Lucky, the techs around here are total slobs. I spend half my time here keeping them in line."

We then went through a series of pictures of different sensory glands, nose, mouth, heart, then fingers and ears. I hadn't really noticed how much my fingers moved even when I thought I was being perfectly still, but I was nervous.

The next item on the screen was a picture of an old trailer.

“That looks familiar.”

“It should be, you saw it less than an hour ago on your way in here.”

“Why do they keep an old trailer outside the main building?”

“It's the model shop. Old school stuff. It's actually where I started.”

“Wow. History doesn't count for much here I guess.”

“Time and 27 frames per second march on. The model guys and the matte painters, the ones who did it on glass with real paint, used to be the stars of this place. CGI started taking over in the last half a dozen years or so and now they’re like carriage builders. Digital is just cheaper, but the old stuff was truly glorious. Digital’s really sort of a brute force thing, doesn’t take nearly as much imagination.”

“So you've been here a while.”

“Since the beginning. I was a high school kid with a talent for blowing things up…on a small scale of course. Luke rescued me from a life sentence of video games, red bull, and paint ball.”

The slide of the trailer then gave way to a bunch of images of classic special effects, only the shots were pulled back enough or close enough so you could see the wires, the matte screens used for land or space scapes, and the actual scale of the models.

“When we do the calibration for this stuff, I like to make sure everyone sees this. I don't know that anyone's going to remember how we used to do it. When I started, they had a guy Harry Houdini (that's what we called him) who could do in camera effects that you wouldn't believe. It took years before you could do digital slow motion to match what he could do by hand and I still say that his jump cuts are smoother and more elegant than anything you can do with an Indigo.“

“Harry Houdini, never heard of him.”

“You remember those tv shows during the black and white era where the main character always had magic powers to make things appear and disappear, walking through walls, be identical cousins,that sort of thing, Martians, witches, genies.”

“Yeah, I loved that stuff.”

“That was Harry Houdini or people who studied under the guy. We used to have film editors who would hand paint the frames just to get a color shift. They used to use like the single hair from a brush and magnifying glass. We’re talking hands like a brain surgeon’s.”

“Wow.”

“Anyway, that was the real Illusion Factory. Luke still lets a couple of the oldtimers, who won't learn the new ways build models and stuff in that trailer. Every other movie, they get a few frames to do their thing. We can't charge what it costs in man hours of time and the film companies could give a shit, but it’s his way of honoring the past.”

“Well, thanks for the lesson.”

“Before you start on this thing, I just want you to know that your town isn't the only history that matters around here.”

“Sure.”

I reached towards the paper model of Paperson on the table in front of me.

“I take it that this wasn't made by the old time model guys.”

“No shit.”

Peter took an imaginary slash at the model and then quickly cut it into sixteenths.

“This one was done through some sort of computer program. It's similar to the way they make children's pop up books. No refinement. If this were a real craftsmen's work, even the shadows would be right. You'd think that you were just oversized all of a sudden not the other way around.”

My office chair suddenly was starting to feel like a dentist's chair. I could see Peter as one of the three musketeers only with a dentist’s smock replacing that Musketeeers blouson thing with the fleur de lys print.

“So, we ready to get going here?”

I nodded.

There was a clicking sound, the screen went dark and before I knew it Peter was stabbing at the keyboard.

“What the fuck? Must be a memory overrun.”

The next image on the screen was a picture of a man. As it slowly came into focus, it looked increasingly familiar. I pushed on the blue button repeatedly.

“That's not supposed to be up there. Lucky, do me a favor. Please don't touch anything for now. It might be some kind of virus.”

I recognized the picture immediately. It was a photo of my grandfather in a dark suit, from some time well before I was born.

“Peter, that's amazing.”

“What's amazing?”

“I know that picture, where'd you guys find it.”

The next picture was a dragon. That was quickly followed by what looked to be Chinese food and some sort of gun. I pushed the blue button out of instinct despite Peter’s warning.

“Shit.”

“This is really cool Peter.”

“It might be, but something’s not right. It's the ghost in the blue screen again.”

“The what?”

“You need to ask Jan about it. I'm going to have to hard boot the system here. You're going to have to come back another time.”


“Are you telling me that there's some sort of ghost wandering the Illusion Factory?”

“Let’s just say that things happen here from time to time that defy explanation.”


I followed the fog into the back room this morning and naturally, he was there. Is this what I would have looked like? Is this how I would have sounded? I hope not. It's better to be an ethereal than some middle-aged loser.

It's a pity the swordsman with the pony tail turned off the work station. We were just starting to communicate. I never learned English and this Lucky never learned on Chinese, maybe on purpose so he wouldn’t have to pay attention to me. I could feel that he was beginning to understand what I was trying to show him, maybe just a little bit, through this machine of theirs. Does that hot rodder, Luke Howard, have the faintest idea what he just made possible? I now know why I left Paperson to come to this Illusion Factory.