Michael Crichton - Rising Sun

"Maybe at U.S.C."

"Trust me. Everywhere. They all watch television."

He swung another door open. Still another corridor. This one smelled moldy, damp.

"I know, I know. I'm old-fashioned," Sanders said. "I still believe that every human being stands for something. You stand for something. I stand for something. Just being on this planet, wearing the clothes we wear, doing the work we do, we each stand for something. And in this little corner of the world," he said, "we stand for cutting the crap. We analyze network news and see where they have been fucking around with the tape. We analyze TV commercials and show where the tricks are– "

Sanders suddenly stopped.

"What's the matter?"

"Wasn't there someone else?" he said. "Didn't you come here with someone else?"

"No. Just me."

"Oh, good." Sanders continued on at his same breakneck pace. "I always worry about losing people down here. Ah, okay. Here we are. The lab. Good. This door is just where I left it."

With a flourish, he threw the door open. I stared at the room, shocked.

"I know it doesn't look like much," Sanders said. That, I thought, was a serious understatement.

I was looking at a basement space with rusty pipes and fittings hanging down from the ceiling. The green linoleum on the floor curled up in several places to expose concrete beneath. Arranged around the room were battered wooden tables, each heaped with equipment, and drooping wires down the sides. At each table, a student sat facing monitors. In several places, water plinked into buckets on the floor. Sanders said, "The only space we could get was here in the basement, and we don't have the money to put in little amenities like a ceiling. Never mind, doesn't matter. Just watch your head."

He moved forward into the room. I am about a hundred and eighty centimeters tall, not quite six feet, and I had to crouch to enter the room. From somewhere in the ceiling above, I heard a harsh rasping sizzle.

"Skaters," Sanders explained.

"Sorry?"

"We're underneath the ice rink. You get used to it. Actually, it's not bad now. When they have hockey practice in the afternoon, then it's a bit noisy."

We moved deeper into the room. I felt like I was in a submarine. I glanced at the students at their workstations. They were all intent on their work; nobody looked up as we passed. Sanders said, "What kind of tape do you want to duplicate?"

"Eight-millimeter Japanese. Security tape. It might be difficult."

"Difficult? I doubt that very much," Sanders said. "You know, back in my youth, I wrote most of the early video image-enhancement algorithms. You know, despeckling and inversion and edge tracing. That stuff. The Sanders algorithms were the ones everybody used. I was a graduate student at Cal Tech then. I worked at JPL in my spare time. No, no, we can do it."

I handed him a tape. He looked at it. "Cute little bugger."

I said, "What happened? To all your algorithms?"

"There was no commercial use for them," he said. "Back in the eighties, American companies like RCA and GE got out of commercial electronics entirely. My image enhancement programs didn't have much use in America." He shrugged. "So I tried to sell them to Sony, in Japan."

"And?"

"The Japanese had already patented the products. In Japan."

"You mean they already had the algorithms?"

"No. They just had patents. In Japan, patenting is a form of war. The Japanese patent like crazy. And they have a strange system. It takes eight years to get a patent in Japan, but your application is made public after eighteen months, after which royalties are moot. And of course Japan doesn't have reciprocal licensing agreements with America. It's one of the ways they keep their edge.

"Anyway, when I got to Japan I found Sony and Hitachi had some related patents and they had done what is called 'patent flooding.' Meaning they covered possible related uses. They didn't have the rights to use my algorithms – but I discovered I didn't have the rights, either. Because they had already patented the use of my invention." He shrugged. "It's complicated to explain. Anyway, that's ancient history. By now the Japanese have devised much more complicated video software, far surpassing anything we have. They're years ahead of us now. But we struggle along in this lab. Ah. Just the person we need. Dan. Are you busy?"

A young woman looked up from the computer console. Large eyes, horn-rim glasses, dark hair. Her face was partially blocked by the ceiling pipes.

"You're not Dan," Sanders said, sounding surprised. "Where's Dan, Theresa?"

"Picking up a midterm," Theresa said. "I'm just helping run the real-time progressions. They're finishing now." I had the impression that she was older than the other students. It was hard to say why, exactly. It certainly wasn't her clothes: she wore a bright colored headband and a U2 T-shirt under a jeans jacket. But she had a calm quality that made her seem older.

"Can you switch to something else?" Sanders said, walking around the table to look at the monitor. "Because we have a rush job here. We have to help out the police." I followed Sanders, ducking pipes.

"Sure, I guess," the woman said. She started to shut down units on the desk. Her back was turned to me, and then finally I could see her. She was dark, exotic-looking, almost Eurasian. In fact she was beautiful, drop-dead beautiful. She looked like one of those high cheek-boned models in magazines. And for a moment I was confused, because this woman was too beautiful to be working in some basement electronics laboratory. It didn't make sense.

"Say hello to Theresa Asakuma," he said. "The only Japanese graduate student working here."

"Hi," I said. I blushed. I felt stupid. I felt that information was coming at me too fast. And all things considered, I would rather not have a Japanese handling these tapes. But her first name wasn't Japanese, and she didn't look Japanese, she looked Eurasian or perhaps part Japanese, so exotic, maybe she was even—

"Good morning, Lieutenant," she said. She extended her left hand, the wrong hand, for me to shake. She held it out to me sideways, the way someone does when their right hand is injured.

I shook hands with her. "Hello, Miss Asakuma."

"Theresa."

"Okay."

"Isn't she beautiful?" Sanders said, acting as if he took credit for it. "Just beautiful."

"Yes," I said. "Actually, I'm surprised you're not a model."

There was an awkward moment. I couldn't tell why. She turned quickly away.

"It never interested me," she said.

And Sanders immediately jumped in and said, "Theresa, Lieutenant Smith needs us to copy some tapes. These tapes."

Sanders held one out to her. She took it in her left hand and held it to the light. Her right hand remained bent at the elbow, pressed to her waist. Then I saw that her right arm was withered, ending in a fleshy stump protruding beyond the sleeve of her jeans jacket. It looked like the arm of a Thalidomide baby.

"Quite interesting," she said, squinting at the tape. "Eight-millimeter high density. Maybe it's the proprietary digital format we've been hearing about. The one that includes real-time image enhancement."

"I'm sorry, I don't know," I said. I was feeling foolish for having said anything about being a model. I dug into my box and brought out the playback machine.

Theresa immediately took a screwdriver and removed the top. She bent over the innards. I saw a green circuit board, a black motor, and three small crystal cylinders. "Yes. It's the new setup. Very slick. Dr. Sanders, look: they're doing it with just three heads. The board must generate component RGB, because over here – you think this is compression circuitry?"

"Probably digital to analog converter," Sanders said. "Very neat. So small." He turned to me, holding up the box. "You know how the Japanese can make things this way and we can't? They kaizen 'em. A process of deliberate, patient, continual refinements. Each year the products get a little better, a little smaller, a little cheaper. Americans don't think that way. Americans are always looking for the quantum leap, the big advance forward. Americans try to hit a home run – to knock it out of the park – and then sit back. The Japanese just hit singles all day long, and they never sit back. So with something like this, you're looking at an expression of philosophy as much as anything."