"Julia," I said, "this is pretty amazing."
Beside me, Julia snuggled closer and smiled. "I thought you might be impressed." Onscreen, Julia was saying, "We've entered a vein, so the red cells are not oxygenated. Right now our camera is moving toward the heart. You'll see the vessels enlarging as we move up the venous system… Yes, now we are approaching the heart… You can see the pulsations in the bloodstream that result from the ventricular contractions…" It was true, I could see the camera pause, then move forward, then pause. She had an audio feed of the beating heart. On the table, the subject lay motionless, with the flat antenna just over his body.
"We're coming to the right atrium, and we should see the mitral valve. We activate the flagella to slow the camera. There the valve is now. We are in the heart." I saw the red flaps, like a mouth opening and closing, and then the camera shot through, into the ventricle, and out again. "Now we are going to the lungs, where you will see what no one has ever witnessed before. The oxygenation of the cells."
As I watched, the blood vessel narrowed swiftly, and then the cells plumped up, and popped brilliantly red, one after another. It was extremely quick; in less than a second, they were all red. "The red cells have now been oxygenated," Julia said, "and we are on our way back to the heart."
I turned to Julia in the bed. "This is really fantastic stuff," I said.
But her eyes were closed, and she was breathing gently.
"Julia?"
She was asleep.
Julia had always tended to fall asleep while watching TV. Falling asleep during your own presentation was reasonable enough; after all, she'd already seen it. And it was pretty late. I was tired myself. I decided I could watch the rest of the demo another time. It seemed pretty lengthy for a demo, anyhow. How long had I been watching so far? When I turned to switch off the TV, I looked down at the time code running at the bottom of the image. Numbers were spinning, ticking off hundredths of a second. Other numbers to the left, not spinning. I frowned. One of them was the date. I hadn't noticed it before, because it was in international format, with the year first, the day, and the month. It read 02.21.09.
September 21.
Yesterday.
She'd recorded this demo yesterday, not today.
I turned off the TV, and turned off the bedside light. I lay down on the pillow and tried to sleep.
DAY 2
9:02 A.M.
We needed skim milk, Toastie-Os, Pop-Tarts, Jell-O, dishwasher detergent-and something else, but I couldn't read my own writing. I stood in the supermarket aisle at nine o'clock in the morning, puzzling over my notes. A voice said, "Hey, Jack. How's it hanging?" I looked up to see Ricky Morse, one of the division heads at Xymos. "Hey, Ricky. How are you?" I shook his hand, genuinely glad to see him. I was always glad to see Ricky. Tanned, with blond crewcut hair and a big grin, he could easily be taken for a surfer were it not for his SourceForge 3.1 T-shirt. Ricky was only a few years younger than I was, but he had an air of perpetual youthfulness. I'd given him his first job, right out of college, and he'd rapidly moved into management. With his cheerful personality and upbeat manner, Ricky made an ideal project manager, even though he tended to underplay problems, and give management unrealistic expectations about when a project would be finished. According to Julia, that had sometimes caused trouble at Xymos; Ricky tended to make promises he couldn't keep. And sometimes he didn't quite tell the truth. But he was so cheerful and appealing that everyone always forgave him. At least, I always did, when he worked for me. I had become quite fond of him, and thought of him almost as a younger brother. I'd recommended him for his job at Xymos.
Ricky was pushing a shopping cart filled with disposable diapers in big plastic bundles; he had a young baby at home, too. I asked him why he was shopping and not at the office. "Mary's got the flu, and the maid's in Guatemala. So I told her I'd pick up some things."
"I see you've got Huggies," I said. "I always get Pampers, myself."
"I find Huggies absorb more," he said. "And Pampers are too tight. They pinch the baby's leg."
"But Pampers have a layer that takes moisture away, and keeps the bottom dry," I said. "I have fewer rashes with Pampers."
"Whenever I use them, the adhesive tabs tend to pull off. And with a big load, it tends to leak out the leg, which makes extra work for me. I don't know, I just find Huggies are higher quality."
A woman glanced at us as she pushed past with her shopping cart. We started to laugh, thinking we must sound like we were in a commercial.
Ricky said loudly, "So hey, how about those Giants?" to the woman's back as she continued down the aisle.
"Fuckin' A, are they great or what?" I said, scratching myself. We laughed, then pushed our carts down the aisle together. Ricky said, "Want to know the truth? Mary likes Huggies, and that's the end of the conversation."
"I know that one," I said.
Ricky looked at my cart, and said, "I see you buy organic skim milk…"
"Stop it," I said. "How are things at the office?"
"You know, they're pretty damn good," he said. "The technology's coming along nicely, if I say so myself. We demoed for the money guys the other day, and it went well."
"Julia's doing okay?" I said, as casually as I could.
"Yeah, she's doing great. Far as I know," Ricky said.
I glanced at him. Was he suddenly reserved? Was his face set, the muscles controlled? Was he concealing something? I couldn't tell.
"Actually, I rarely see her," Ricky said. "She's not around much these days."
"I don't see much of her either," I said.
"Yeah, she's spending a lot of time out at the fab complex. That's where the action is now." Ricky glanced quickly at me. "You know, because of the new fabrication processes."
The Xymos fab building had been completed in record time, considering how complex it was. The fabrication building was where they assembled molecules from individual atoms. Sticking the molecule fragments together like Lego blocks. Much of this work was carried out in a vacuum, and required extremely strong magnetic fields. So the fab building had tremendous pump assemblies, and powerful chillers to cool the magnets. But according to Julia, a lot of the technology was specific to that building; nothing like it had ever been built before. I said, "It's amazing they got the building up so fast."
"Well, we kept the pressure on. Molecular Dynamics is breathing down our necks. We've got our fab up and running, and we've got patent applications by the truckload. But those guys at MolDyne and NanoTech can't be far behind us. A few months. Maybe six months, if we're lucky."
"So you're doing molecular assembly at the plant now?" I said.
"You got it, Jack. Full-bore molecular assembly. We have been for a few weeks now."
"I didn't know Julia was interested in that stuff." With her background in psychology, I'd always regarded Julia as a people person.
"She's taken a real interest in the technology, I can tell you. Also, they're doing a lot of programming up there, too," he said. "You know. Iterative cycles as they refine the manufacturing."