DAY 1 10:04 A.M.
Things never turn out the way you think they will.
I never intended to become a househusband. Stay-at-home husband. Full-time dad, whatever you want to call it—there is no good term for it. But that’s what I had become in the last six months. Now I was in Crate & Barrel in downtown San Jose, picking up some extra glasses, and while I was there I noticed they had a good selection of placemats. We needed more placemats; the woven oval ones that Julia had bought a year ago were getting pretty worn, and the weave was crusted with baby food. The trouble was, they were woven, so you couldn’t wash them. So I stopped at the display to see if they had any placemats that might be good, and I found some pale blue ones that were nice, and I got some white napkins. And then some yellow placemats caught my eye, because they looked really bright and appealing, so I got those, too. They didn’t have six on the shelf, and I thought we’d better have six, so I asked the salesgirl to look in the back and see if they had more. While she was gone I put the placemat on the table, and put a white dish on it, and then I put a yellow napkin next to it. The setting looked very cheerful, and I began to think maybe I should get eight instead of six. That was when my cell phone rang.
It was Julia. “Hi, hon.”
“Hi, Julia. How’s it going?” I said. I could hear machinery in the background, a steady chugging. Probably the vacuum pump for the electron microscope. They had several scanning electron microscopes at her laboratory.
She said, “What’re you doing?”
“Buying placemats, actually.”
“Where?”
“Crate and Barrel.”
She laughed. “You the only guy there?”
“No ...”
“Oh, well, that’s good,” she said. I could tell Julia was completely uninterested in this conversation. Something else was on her mind. “Listen, I wanted to tell you, Jack, I’m really sorry, but it’s going to be a late night again.”
“Uh-huh ...” The salesgirl came back, carrying more yellow mats. Still holding the phone to my ear, I beckoned her over. I held up three fingers, and she put down three more mats. To Julia, I said, “Is everything all right?”
“Yeah, it’s just crazy like normal. We’re broadcasting a demo by satellite today to the VCs in Asia and Europe, and we’re having trouble with the satellite hookup at this end because the video truck they sent—oh, you don’t want to know ... anyway, we’re going to be delayed two hours, hon. Maybe more. I won’t get back until eight at the earliest. Can you feed the kids and put them to bed?”
“No problem,” I said. And it wasn’t. I was used to it. Lately, Julia had been working very long hours. Most nights she didn’t get home until the children were asleep. Xymos Technology, the company she worked for, was trying to raise another round of venture capital—twenty million dollars—and there was a lot of pressure. Especially since Xymos was developing technology in what the company called “molecular manufacturing,” but which most people called nanotechnology. Nano wasn’t popular with the VCs—the venture capitalists—these days. Too many VCs had been burned in the last ten years with products that were supposedly just around the corner, but then never made it out of the lab. The VCs considered nano to be all promise, no products.
Not that Julia needed to be told that; she’d worked for two VC firms herself. Originally trained as a child psychologist, she ended up as someone who specialized in “technology incubation,” helping fledgling technology companies get started. (She used to joke she was still doing child psychology.) Eventually, she’d stopped advising firms and joined one of them full-time. She was now a vice president at Xymos.
Julia said Xymos had made several breakthroughs, and was far ahead of others in the field. She said they were just days away from a prototype commercial product. But I took what she said with a grain of salt.
“Listen, Jack, I want to warn you,” she said, in a guilty voice, “that Eric is going to be upset.”
“Why?”
“Well ... I told him I would come to the game.”
“Julia, why? We talked about making promises like this. There’s no way you can make that game. It’s at three o’clock. Why’d you tell him you would?”
“I thought I could make it.”
I sighed. It was, I told myself, a sign of her caring. “Okay. Don’t worry, honey. I’ll handle it.”
“Thanks. Oh, and Jack? The placemats? Whatever you do, just don’t get yellow, okay?”
And she hung up.
I made spaghetti for dinner because there was never an argument about spaghetti. By eight o’clock, the two little ones were asleep, and Nicole was finishing her homework. She was twelve, and had to be in bed by ten o’clock, though she didn’t like any of her friends to know that.
The littlest one, Amanda, was just nine months. She was starting to crawl everywhere, and to stand up holding on to things. Eric was eight; he was a soccer kid, and liked to play all the time, when he wasn’t dressing up as a knight and chasing his older sister around the house with his plastic sword.
Nicole was in a modest phase of her life; Eric liked nothing better than to grab her bra and go running around the house, shouting, “Nicky wears a bra-a! Nicky wears a bra-a!” while Nicole, too dignified to pursue him, gritted her teeth and yelled, “Dad? He’s doing it again! Dad!” And I would have to go chase Eric and tell him not to touch his sister’s things. This was what my life had become. At first, after I lost the job at MediaTronics, it was interesting to deal with sibling rivalry. And often, it seemed, not that different from what my job had been.
At MediaTronics I had run a program division, riding herd over a group of talented young computer programmers. At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person’s job. So I managed the team, and it was a full-time job; like most Silicon Valley programmers, my team seemed to live in a perpetual crisis of crashed Porsches, infidelities, bad love affairs, parental hassles, and drug reactions, all superimposed on a forced-march work schedule with all-night marathons fueled by cases of Diet Coke and Sun chips.
But the work was exciting, in a cutting-edge field. We wrote what are called distributed parallel processing or agent-based programs. These programs model biological processes by creating virtual agents inside the computer and then letting the agents interact to solve real-world problems. It sounds strange, but it works fine. For example, one of our programs imitated ant foraging—how ants find the shortest path to food—to route traffic through a big telephone network. Other programs mimicked the behavior of termites, swarming bees, and stalking lions. It was fun, and I would probably still be there if I hadn’t taken on some additional responsibilities. In my last few months there, I’d been put in charge of security, replacing an outside tech consultant who’d had the job for two years but had failed to detect the theft of company source code, until it turned up in a program being marketed out of Taiwan. Actually, it was my division’s source code—software for distributed processing. That was the code that had been stolen.
We knew it was the same code, because the Easter eggs hadn’t been touched. Programmers always insert Easter eggs into their code, little nuggets that don’t serve any useful purpose and are just put there for fun. The Taiwanese company hadn’t changed any of them; they used our code wholesale. So the keystrokes Alt-Shift-M-9 would open up a window giving the date of one of our programmers’ marriage. Clear theft.
Of course we sued, but Don Gross, the head of the company, wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again. So he put me in charge of security, and I was angry enough about the theft to take the job. It was only part-time; I still ran the division. The first thing I did as security officer was to monitor workstation use. It was pretty straightforward; these days, eighty percent of companies monitor what their workers do at terminals. They do it by video, or they do it by recording keystrokes, or by scanning email for certain keywords ... all sorts of procedures out there.
Don Gross was a tough guy, an ex-Marine who had never lost his military manner. When I told him about the new system, he said, “But you’re not monitoring my terminal, right?” Of course not, I said. In fact, I’d set up the programs to monitor every computer in the company, his included. And that was how I discovered, two weeks later, that Don was having an affair with a girl in accounting, and had authorized her to have a company car. I went to him and said that based on emails relating to Jean in accounting, it appeared that someone unknown was having an affair with her, and that she might be getting perks she wasn’t entitled to. I said I didn’t know who the person was, but if they kept using email, I’d soon find out. I figured Don would take the hint, and he did. But now he just sent incriminating email from his home, never realizing that everything went through the company server and I was getting it all. That’s how I learned he was “discounting” software to foreign distributors, and taking large “consultant fees” into an account in the Cayman Islands. This was clearly illegal, and I couldn’t overlook it. I consulted my attorney, Gary Marder, who advised me to quit.
“Quit?” I said.
“Yeah. Of course.”
“Why?”
“Who cares why? You got a better offer elsewhere. You’ve got some health problems. Or some family issues. Trouble at home. Just get out of there. Quit.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You think I should quit because he’s breaking the law? Is that your advice to me?”
“No,” Gary said. “As your attorney, my advice is that if you are aware of any illegal activity you have a duty to report it. But as your friend, my advice is to keep your mouth shut and get out of there fast.”
“Seems kind of cowardly. I think I have to notify the investors.” Gary sighed. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Jack,” he said, “the investors can look out for themselves. You get the fuck out of there.”
I didn’t think that was right. I had been annoyed when my code had been stolen. Now I found myself wondering if it actually had been stolen. Maybe it had been sold. We were a privately held company, and I told one of the board members.
It turned out he was in on it. I was fired the next day for gross negligence and misconduct. Litigation was threatened; I had to sign a raft of NDAs in order to get my severance package. My attorney handled the paperwork for me, sighing with every new document.
At the end, we went outside into the milky sunshine. I said, “Well, at least that’s over.”
He turned and looked at me. “Why do you say that?” he said.
Because of course it wasn’t over. In some mysterious way, I had become a marked man. My qualifications were excellent and I worked in a hot field. But when I went on job interviews I could tell they weren’t interested. Worse, they were uncomfortable. Silicon Valley covers a big area, but it’s a small place. Word gets out. Eventually I found myself talking to an interviewer I knew slightly, Ted Landow. I’d coached his kid in Little League baseball the year before. When the interview was over, I said to him, “What have you heard about me?” He shook his head. “Nothing, Jack.”
I said, “Ted, I’ve been on ten interviews in ten days. Tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Ted.”
He shuffled through his papers, looking down at them, not at me. He sighed. “Jack Forman. Troublemaker. Not cooperative. Belligerent. Hot-headed. Not a team player.” He hesitated, then said, “And supposedly you were involved in some kind of dealings. They won’t say what, but some kind of shady dealings. You were on the take.”
“I was on the take?” I said. I felt a flood of anger, and started to say more, until I realized I was probably looking hotheaded and belligerent. So I shut up, and thanked him. As I was leaving, he said, “Jack, do yourself a favor. Give it a while. Things change fast in the Valley. Your résumé is strong and your skill set is outstanding. Wait until ...” He shrugged.
“A couple of months?”
“I’d say four. Maybe five.”
Somehow I knew he was right. After that, I stopped trying so hard. I began to hear rumors that MediaTronics was going belly up, and there might be indictments. I smelled vindication ahead, but in the meantime there was nothing to do but wait.
The strangeness of not going to work in the morning slowly faded. Julia was working longer hours at her job, and the kids were demanding; if I was in the house they turned to me, instead of our housekeeper, Maria. I started taking them to school, picking them up, driving them to the doctor, the orthodontist, soccer practice. The first few dinners I cooked were disastrous, but I got better.
And before I knew it, I was buying placemats and looking at table settings in Crate & Barrel. And it all seemed perfectly normal.
Julia got home around nine-thirty. I was watching the Giants game on TV, not really paying attention. She came in and kissed me on the back of my neck. She said, “They all asleep?”
“Except Nicole. She’s still doing homework.”
“Jeez, isn’t it late for her to be up?”
“No, hon,” I said. “We agreed. This year she gets to stay up until ten, remember?” Julia shrugged, as if she didn’t remember. And maybe she didn’t. We had undergone a sort of inversion of roles; she had always been more knowledgeable about the kids, but now I was. Sometimes Julia felt uncomfortable with that, experiencing it somehow as a loss of power.
“How’s the little one?”
“Her cold is better. Just sniffles. She’s eating more.”
I walked with Julia to the bedrooms. She went into the baby’s room, bent over the crib, and kissed the sleeping child tenderly. Watching her, I thought there was something about a mother’s caring that a father could never match. Julia had some connection to the kids that I never would. Or at least a different connection. She listened to the baby’s soft breathing, and said, “Yes, she’s better.”
Then she went into Eric’s room, took the Game Boy off the bed covers, gave me a frown. I shrugged, faintly irritated; I knew Eric played with his Game Boy when he was supposed to be going to sleep, but I was busy getting the baby down at that time, and I overlooked it. I thought Julia should be more understanding.
Then she went into Nicole’s room. Nicole was on her laptop, but shut the lid when her mother walked in. “Hi, Mom.”
“You’re up late.”
“No, Mom ...”
“You’re supposed to be doing homework.”
“I did it.”
“Then why aren’t you in bed?”
“Because—”
“I don’t want you spending all night talking to your friends on the computer.”
“Mom ...” she said, in a pained voice.
“You see them every day at school, that should be enough.”
“Mom ...”
“Don’t look at your father. We already know he’ll do whatever you want. I’m talking to you, now.”
She sighed. “I know, Mom.”
This kind of interaction was increasingly common between Nicole and Julia. I guess it was normal at this age, but I thought I’d step in. Julia was tired, and when she was tired she got rigid and controlling. I put my arm around her shoulder and said, “It’s late for everybody. Want a cup of tea?”
“Jack, don’t interfere.”
“I’m not, I just—”
“Yes, you are. I’m talking to Nicole and you’re interfering, the way you always do.”
“Honey, we all agreed she could stay up until ten, I don’t know what this—”
“But if she’s finished her homework, she should go to bed.”
“That wasn’t the deal.”
“I don’t want her spending all day and night on the computer.”
“She’s not, Julia.”
At that point, Nicole burst into tears, and jumped to her feet crying, “You always criticize me! I hate you!” She ran into the bathroom and slammed the door. That woke the baby, who started to cry.
Julia turned to me and said, “If you would please just let me handle this myself, Jack.”
And I said, “You’re right. I’m sorry. You’re right.”
In truth, that wasn’t what I thought at all. More and more, I regarded this as my house, and my kids. She was barging into my house, late at night, when I’d gotten everything quiet, the way I liked it, the way it should be. And she was raising a fuss.
I didn’t think she was right at all. I thought she was wrong. And in the last few weeks I’d noticed that incidents like this had become more frequent. At first, I thought Julia felt guilty about being away so much. Then I thought she was reasserting her authority, trying to regain control of a household that had fallen into my hands. Then I thought it was because she was tired, or under so much pressure at work. But lately I felt I was making excuses for her behavior. I started to have the feeling Julia had changed. She was different, somehow, tenser, tougher.
The baby was howling. I picked her up from the crib, hugged her, cooed at her, and simultaneously stuck a finger down the back of the diaper to see if it was wet. It was. I put her down on her back on top of the dresser, and she howled again until I shook her favorite rattle, and put it in her hand. She was silent then, allowing me to change her without much kicking. “I’ll do that,” Julia said, coming in.
“It’s okay.”
“I woke her up, it’s only right I do it.”
“Really honey, it’s fine.”
Julia put her hand on my shoulder, kissed the back of my neck. “I’m sorry I’m such a jerk. I’m really tired. I don’t know what came over me. Let me change the baby, I never get to see her.”
“Okay,” I said. I stepped aside, and she moved in.
“Hi, Poopsie-doopsie,” she said, chucking the baby under the chin. “How’s my little Winkie-dinkie?” All this attention made the baby drop the rattle, and then she started to cry, and to twist away on the table. Julia didn’t notice the missing rattle caused the crying; instead she made soothing sounds and struggled to put on the new diaper, but the baby’s twisting and kicking made it hard. “Amanda, stop it!”
I said, “She does that now.” And it was true, Amanda was in the stage where she actively resisted a diaper change. And she could kick pretty hard.
“Well, she should stop. Stop!”
The baby cried louder, tried to turn away. One of the adhesive tabs pulled off. The diaper slid down. Amanda was now rolling toward the edge of the dresser. Julia pulled her back roughly. Amanda never stopped kicking.
“God damn it, I said stop!” Julia said, and smacked the baby on the leg. The baby just cried harder, kicked harder. “Amanda! Stop it! Stop it!” She slapped her again. “Stop it! Stop it!” For a moment I didn’t react. I was stunned. I didn’t know what to do. The baby’s legs were bright red. Julia was still hitting her. “Honey ...” I said, leaning in, “let’s not—” Julia exploded. “Why do you always fucking interfere?” she yelled, slamming her hand down on the dresser. “What is your fucking problem?”
And she stomped off, leaving the room.
I let out a long breath, and picked the baby up. Amanda howled inconsolably, as much in confusion as in pain. I figured I would need to give her a bottle to get her to sleep again. I stroked her back until she settled down a little. Then I got her diaper on, and brought her into the kitchen while I heated a bottle. The lights were low, just the fluorescents over the counter. Julia was sitting at the table, drinking beer out of a bottle, staring into space. “When are you going to get a job?” she said.
“I’m trying.”
“Really? I don’t think you’re trying at all. When was your last interview?”
“Last week,” I said.
She grunted. “I wish you’d hurry up and get one,” she said, “because this is driving me crazy.” I swallowed anger. “I know. It’s hard for everybody,” I said. It was late at night, and I didn’t want to argue anymore. But I was watching her out of the corner of my eye. At thirty-six, Julia was a strikingly pretty woman, petite, with dark hair and dark eyes, upturned nose, and the kind of personality that people called bubbly or sparkling. Unlike many tech executives, she was attractive and approachable. She made friends easily, and had a good sense of humor. Years back, when we first had Nicole, Julia would come home with hilarious accounts of the foibles of her VC partners. We used to sit at this same kitchen table and laugh until I felt physically sick, while little Nicole would tug at her arm and say, “What’s the funny, Mom? What’s the funny?” because she wanted to be in on the joke. Of course we could never explain it to her, but Julia always seemed to have a new “Knock knock” joke for Nicole, so she could join in the laughter, too. Julia had a real gift for seeing the humorous side of life. She was famous for her equanimity; she almost never lost her temper. Right now, of course, she was furious. Not even willing to look at me. Sitting in the dark at the round kitchen table, one leg crossed over the other, kicking impatiently while she stared into space. As I looked at her, I had the feeling that her appearance had changed, somehow. Of course she had lost weight recently, part of the strain of the job. A certain softness in her face was gone; her cheekbones protruded more; her chin seemed sharper. It made her look harder, but in a way more glamorous.
Her clothes were different, too. Julia was wearing a dark skirt and a white blouse, sort of standard business attire. But the skirt was tighter than usual. And her kicking foot made me notice she was wearing slingback high heels. What she used to call fuck-me shoes. The kind of shoes she would never wear to work.
And then I realized that everything about her was different—her manner, her appearance, her mood, everything—and in a flash of insight I knew why: my wife was having an affair. The water on the stove began to steam, and I pulled out the bottle, tested it on my forearm. It had gotten too hot, and I would have to wait a minute for it to cool. The baby started to cry, and I bounced her a little on my shoulder, while I walked her around the room. Julia never looked at me. She just kept swinging her foot, and staring into space. I had read somewhere that this was a syndrome. The husband’s out of work, his masculine appeal declines, his wife no longer respects him, and she wanders. I had read that in Glamour or Redbook or one of those magazines around the house that I glanced through while waiting for the washing machine to finish its cycle, or the microwave to thaw the hamburger. But now I was flooded with confused feelings. Was it really true? Was I just tired, making up bad stories in my mind? After all, what difference did it make if she was wearing tighter skirts and different shoes? Fashions changed. People felt different on different days. And just because she was sometimes angry, did that really mean she was having an affair? Of course it didn’t. I was probably just feeling inadequate, unattractive. These were probably my insecurities coming out. My thoughts went on in this vein for a while.
But for some reason, I couldn’t talk myself out of it. I was sure it was true. I had lived with this woman for more than twelve years. I knew she was different, and I knew why. I could sense the presence of someone else, an outside person, some intruder in our relationship. I felt it with a conviction that surprised me. I felt it in my bones, like an ache. I had to turn away.
* * *
The baby took the bottle, gurgling happily. In the darkened kitchen, she stared up at my face with that peculiar fixed stare that babies have. It was sort of soothing, watching her. After a while she closed her eyes, and then her mouth went slack. I put her on my shoulder and burped her as I carried her back into her bedroom. Most parents pat their babies too hard, trying to get a burp. It’s better to just rub the flat of your hand up their back, and sometimes just along the spine with two fingers. She gave a soft belch, and relaxed.
I set her down in the crib, and I turned out the night-light. Now the only light in the room came from the aquarium, bubbling green-blue in the corner. A plastic diver trudged along the bottom, trailing bubbles.
As I turned to go, I saw Julia silhouetted in the doorway, dark hair backlit. She had been watching me. I couldn’t read her expression. She stalked forward. I tensed. She put her arms around me and rested her head on my chest.
“Please forgive me,” she said. “I’m a real jerk. You’re doing a wonderful job. I’m just jealous, that’s all.” My shoulder was wet with her tears.
“I understand,” I said, holding her. “It’s okay.”
I waited to see if my body relaxed, but it didn’t. I was suspicious and alert. I had a bad feeling about her, and it wasn’t going away.
She came out of the shower into the bedroom, toweling her short hair dry. I was sitting on the bed, trying to watch the rest of the game. It occurred to me that she never used to take showers at night. Julia always took a shower in the morning before work. Now, I realized, she often came home and went straight to the shower before coming out to say hello to the kids. My body was still tense. I flicked the TV off. I said, “How was the demo?”
“The what?”
“The demo. Didn’t you have a demo today?”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, yes. We did. It went fine, when we finally got it going. The VCs in Germany couldn’t stay for all of it because of the time change, but—listen, do you want to see it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I have a dub of it. Want to see it?”
I was surprised. I shrugged. “Okay, sure.”
“I’d really like to know what you think, Jack.” I detected a patronizing tone. My wife was including me in her work. Making me feel a part of her life. I watched as she opened her briefcase and took out a DVD. She stuck it in the player, and came back to sit with me on the bed.
“What were you demoing?” I said.
“The new medical imaging technology,” she said. “It’s really slick, if I say so myself.” She snuggled up, tucking herself into my shoulder. All very cozy, just like old times. I still felt uneasy, but I put my arm around her.
“By the way,” I said, “how come you take showers at night now, instead of in the morning?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Do I? I guess I do. It just seems easier, honey. Mornings are so rushed, and I’ve been getting those conference calls from Europe, they take so much time—okay, here we go,” she said, pointing to the screen. I saw black-and-white scramble, and then the image resolved.
The tape showed Julia in a large laboratory that was fitted out like an operating room. A man lay on his back on the gurney, an IV in his arm, an anesthesiologist standing by. Above the table was a round flat metal plate about six feet in diameter, which could be raised and lowered, but was now raised. There were video monitors all around. And in the foreground, peering at a monitor, was Julia. There was a video technician by her side. “This is terrible,” she was saying, pointing to the monitor. “What’s all the interference?”
“We think it’s the air purifiers. They’re causing it.”
“Well, this is unacceptable.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“What do you want us to do?”
“I want you to fix it,” Julia said.
“Then we have to boost power, and you have—”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I can’t show the VCs an image of this quality. They’ve seen better pictures from Mars. Fix it.”
Beside me on the bed, Julia said, “I didn’t know they recorded all this. This is before the demo. You can fast forward.”
I pushed the remote. The picture scrambled. I waited a few seconds, and played it again.
Same scene. Julia still in the foreground. Carol, her assistant, whispering to her.
“Okay, but then what do I tell him?”
“Tell him no.”
“But he wants to get started.”
“I understand. But the transmission isn’t for an hour. Tell him no.”
On the bed, Julia said to me, “Mad Dog was our experimental subject. He was very restless. Impatient to get started.”
On the screen, the assistant lowered her voice. “I think he’s nervous, Julia. I would be, too, with a couple of million of those things crawling around inside my body—”
“It’s not a couple of million, and they’re not crawling,” Julia said. “Anyway, they’re his invention.”
“Even so.”
“Isn’t that an anesthesiologist over there?”
“No, just a cardiologist.”
“Well, maybe the cardiologist can give him something for his nervousness.”
“They already did. An injection.”
On the bed beside me, Julia said, “Fast forward, Jack.” I did. The picture jumped ahead.
“Okay, here.”
I saw Julia standing at the monitor again, with the technician beside her. “That’s acceptable,” onscreen Julia was saying, pointing to the image. “Not great, but acceptable. Now, show me the STM.”
“The what?”
“The STM. The electron microscope. Show me the image from that.”
The technician looked confused. “Uh ... Nobody told us about any electron microscope.”
“For God’s sake, read the damn storyboards!”
The technician blinked. “It’s on the storyboards?”
“Did you look at the storyboards?”
“I’m sorry, I guess I must have missed it.”
“There’s no time now to be sorry. Fix it!”
“You don’t have to shout.”
“Yes I do! I have to shout, because I’m surrounded by idiots!” She waved her hands in the air. “I’m about to go online and talk to eleven billion dollars of venture capital in five countries and show them submicroscopic technology, except I don’t have a microscope feed, so they can’t see the technology!”
On the bed, Julia said, “I kind of lost it with this guy. It was so frustrating. We had a clock counting down to the satellite time, which was booked and locked. We couldn’t change it. We had to make the time, and this guy was a dimbus. But eventually we got it working. Fast forward.”
The screen showed a static card, which read:
 
A Private Demonstration of Advanced Medical Imaging by Xymos Technology
Mountain View, CA
World Leader in Molecular Manufacturing
 
Then, on the screen, Julia appeared, standing in front of the gurney and the medical apparatus. She’d brushed her hair and tucked in her blouse.
“Hello to all of you,” she said, smiling at the camera. “I’m Julia Forman of Xymos Technology, and we’re about to demonstrate a revolutionary medical imaging procedure just developed here. Our subject, Peter Morris, is lying behind me on the table. In a few moments, we’re going to look inside his heart and blood vessels with an ease and accuracy never before possible.” She began walking around the table, talking as she went.
“Unlike cardiac catheterization, our procedure is one hundred percent safe. And unlike catheterization, we can look everywhere in the body, at every sort of vessel, no matter how large or small. We’ll see inside his aorta, the largest artery of the body. But we’ll also look inside the alveoli of his lungs, and the tiny capillaries of his fingertips. We can do all this because the camera we put inside his vessels is smaller than a red blood cell. Quite a bit smaller, actually. “Xymos microfabrication technology can now produce these miniaturized cameras, and produce them in quantity—cheaply, quickly. It would take a thousand of them just to make a dot the size of a pencil point. We can fabricate a kilogram of these cameras in an hour. “I’m sure you are all skeptical. We’re well aware that nanotechnology has made promises it couldn’t deliver. As you know, the problem has been that scientists could design molecular-scale devices, but they couldn’t manufacture them. But Xymos has solved that problem.”
It suddenly hit me, what she was saying. “What?” I said, sitting up in bed. “Are you kidding?” If it was true, it was an extraordinary development, a genuine technological breakthrough, and it meant—
“It’s true,” Julia said quietly. “We’re manufacturing in Nevada.” She smiled, enjoying my astonishment.
Onscreen, Julia was saying, “I have one of our Xymos cameras under the electron microscope, here”—she pointed to the screen—“so you can see it in comparison to the red blood cell alongside it.”
The image changed to black-and-white. I saw a fine probe push what looked like a tiny squid into position on a titanium field. It was a bullet-nosed lump with streaming filaments at the rear. It was a tenth of the size of the red blood cell, which in the vacuum of the scanning electron microscope was a wrinkled oval, like a gray raisin.
“Our camera is one ten-billionth of an inch in length. As you see, it is shaped like a squid,” Julia said. “Imaging takes place in the nose. Microtubules in the tail provide stabilization, like the tail of a kite. But they can also lash actively, and provide locomotion. Jerry, if we can turn the camera to see the nose ... Okay, there. Thank you. Now, from the front, you see that indentation in the center? That is the miniature gallium arsenide photon detector, acting as a retina, and the surrounding banded area—sort of like a radial tire—is bioluminescent, and lights the area ahead. Within the nose itself you may be able to just make out a rather complex series of twisted molecules. That is our patented ATP cascade. You can think of it as a primitive brain, which controls the behavior of the camera—very limited behavior, true, but enough for our purposes.”
I heard a hiss of static, and a cough. The screen image opened a small window in the corner, and now showed Fritz Leidermeyer, in Germany. The investor shifted his enormous bulk. “I’m sorry, Ms. Forman. Tell me please where is the lens?”
“There is no lens.”
“How can you have a camera with no lens?”
“I’ll explain that as we go,” she said.
Watching, I said, “It must be a camera obscura.”
“Right,” she said, nodding.
Camera obscura—Latin for “dark room”—was the oldest imaging device known. The Romans had found that if you made a small hole in the wall of a dark room, an upside-down image of the exterior appeared on the opposite wall. That was because light coming through any small aperture was focused, as if by a lens. It was the same principle as a kid’s pinhole camera. It was why ever since Roman times, image-recording devices were called cameras. But in this case—
“What makes the aperture?” I said. “Is there a pinhole?”
“I thought you knew,” she said. “You’re responsible for that part.”
“Me?”
“Yes. Xymos licensed some agent-based algorithms that your team wrote.”
“No, I didn’t know. Which algorithms?”
“To control a particle network.”
“Your cameras are networked? All those little cameras communicate with each other?”
“Yes,” she said. “They’re a swarm, actually.” She was still smiling, amused by my reactions.
“A swarm.” I was thinking it over, trying to understand what she was telling me. Certainly my team had written a number of programs to control swarms of agents. Those programs were modeled on behavior of bees. The programs had many useful characteristics. Because swarms were composed of many agents, the swarm could respond to the environment in a robust way. Faced with new and unexpected conditions, the swarm programs didn’t crash; they just sort of flowed around the obstacles, and kept going.
But our programs worked by creating virtual agents inside the computer. Julia had created real agents in the real world. At first I didn’t see how our programs could be adapted to what she was doing.
“We use them for structure,” she said. “The program makes the swarm structure.” Of course. It was obvious that a single molecular camera was inadequate to register any sort of image. Therefore, the image must be a composite of millions of cameras, operating simultaneously. But the cameras would also have to be arranged in space in some orderly structure, probably a sphere. That was where the programming came in. But that in turn meant that Xymos must be generating the equivalent of—
“You’re making an eye.”
“Kind of. Yes.”
“But where’s the light source?”
“The bioluminescent perimeter.”
“That’s not enough light.”
“It is. Watch.”
Meanwhile, the onscreen Julia was turning smoothly, pointing to the intravenous line behind her. She lifted a syringe out of a nearby ice bucket. The barrel appeared to be filled with water. “This syringe,” she said, “contains approximately twenty million cameras in isotonic saline suspension. At the moment they exist as particles. But once they are injected into the bloodstream, their temperature will increase, and they will soon flock together, and form a meta-shape. Just like a flock of birds forms a V-shape.”
“What kind of a shape?” one of the VCs asked.
“A sphere,” she said. “With a small opening at one end. You might think of it as the equivalent of a blastula in embryology. But in effect the particles form an eye. And the image from that eye will be a composite of millions of photon detectors. Just as the human eye creates an image from its rods and cone cells.”
She turned to a monitor that showed an animation loop, repeated over and over again. The cameras entered the bloodstream as an untidy, disorganized mass, a kind of buzzing cloud within the blood. Immediately the blood flow flattened the cloud into an elongated streak. But within seconds, the streak began to coalesce into a spherical shape. That shape became more defined, until eventually it appeared almost solid.
“If this reminds you of an actual eye, there’s a reason. Here at Xymos we are explicitly imitating organic morphology,” Julia said. “Because we are designing with organic molecules, we are aware that courtesy of millions of years of evolution, the world around us has a stockpile of molecular arrangements that work. So we use them.”
“You don’t want to reinvent the wheel?” someone said.
“Exactly. Or the eyeball.”
She gave a signal, and the flat antenna was lowered until it was just inches above the waiting subject.
“This antenna will power the camera, and pick up the transmitted image,” she said. “The image can of course be digitally stored, intensified, manipulated, or anything else that you might do with digital data. Now, if there are no other questions, we can begin.” She fitted the syringe with a needle, and stuck it into a rubber stopper in the IV line.
“Mark time.”
“Zero point zero.”
“Here we go.”
She pushed the plunger down quickly. “As you see, I’m doing it fast,” she said. “There’s nothing delicate about our procedure. You can’t hurt anything. If the microturbulence generated by the flow through the needle rips the tubules from a few thousand cameras, it doesn’t matter. We have millions more. Plenty to do the job.” She withdrew the needle. “Okay? Generally we have to wait about ten seconds for the shape to form, and then we should begin getting an image ... Ah, looks like something is coming now ... And here it is.” The scene showed the camera moving forward at considerable speed through what looked like an asteroid field. Except the asteroids were red cells, bouncy purplish bags moving in a clear, slightly yellowish liquid. An occasional much larger white cell shot forward, filled the screen for a moment, then was gone. What I was seeing looked more like a video game than a medical image.
“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.