Michael Crichton - Disclosure

Entering VIE, the first thing Sanders heard was laughter. When he walked into the equipment room, he saw that Don Cherry's team had two of the Conley-White executives up on the system. John Conley, the young lawyer, and Jim Daly, the investment banker, were both wearing headsets while they walked on the rolling walker pads. The two men were grinning wildly. Everyone else in the room was laughing too, including the normally sour-faced CFO of Conley-White, Ed Nichols, who was standing beside a monitor which showed an image of the virtual corridor that the users were seeing. Nichols had red marks on his forehead from wearing the headset.

Nichols looked over as Sanders came up. "This isfantastic."

Sanders said, "Yes, it's pretty spectacular."

"Simply fantastic. It's going to wipe out all the criticism in New York, once they see this. We've been asking Don if he can run this on our own corporate database."

"No problem," Cherry said. `Just get us the programming hooks for your DB, and we'll plug you right in. Take us about an hour."

Nichols pointed to the headset. "And we can get one of these contraptions in New York?"

"Easy," Cherry said. "We can ship it out later today. It'll be there Thursday. I'll send one of our people to set it up for you."

"This is going to be agreatselling point," Nichols said. `Just great." He took out his half-frame glasses. They were a complicated kind of glasses that folded up very small. Nichols unfolded them carefully and put them on his nose.

On the walker pad, John Conley was laughing. "Angel," he said. "How do I open this drawer?" Then he cocked his head, listening.

"He's talking to the help angel," Cherry said. "He hears the angel through his earphones."

"What's the angel telling him?" Nichols said.

"That's between him and his angel," Cherry laughed.

On the walker pad, Conley nodded as he listened, then reached forward into the air with his hand. He closed his fingers, as if gripping something, and pulled back, pantomiming someone opening a file drawer.

On the monitor, Sanders saw a virtual file drawer slide out from the wall of the corridor. Inside the drawer he saw neatly arranged files.

"Wow," Conley said. "This is amazing. Angel: can I see a file?… Oh. Okay."

Conley reached out and touched one of the file labels with his fingertip. Immediately the file popped out of the drawer and opened up, apparently hanging in midair.

"We have to break the physical metaphor sometimes," Cherry said. "Because users have only one hand. And you can't open a regular file with one hand."

Standing on the black walker pad, Conley moved his hand through the air in short arcs, mimicking someone turning pages with his hand. On the monitor, Sanders saw Conley was actually looking at a series of spreadsheets. "Hey," Conley said, "you people ought to be more careful. I have all your financial records here."

"Let me see that," Daly said, turning around on the walker pad to look.

"You guys look all you want," Cherry laughed. "Enjoy it while you can. In the final system, we'll have safeguards built in to control access. But for now, we bypass the entire system. Do you notice that some of the numbers are red? That means they have more detail stored away. Touch one."

Conley touched a red number. The number zoomed out, creating a new plane of information that hung in the air above the previous spreadsheet.

"Wow!"

"Kind of a hypertext thing," Cherry said, with a shrug. "Sort of neat, if I say so myself."

Conley and Daly were giggling, poking rapidly at numbers on the spreadsheet, zooming out dozens of detail sheets that now hung in the air all around them.

"Hey, how do you get rid of all this stuff?"

"Can you find the original spreadsheet?"

"It's hidden behind all this other stuff"

"Bend over, and look. See if you can get it."

Conley bent at the waist, and appeared to look under something. He reached out and pinched air. "I got it."

"Okay, now you see a green arrow in the right corner. Touch it."

Conley touched it. All the papers zoomed back into the original spreadsheet.

"Fabulous!"

"I want to do it," Daly said.

"No, you can't. I'm going to do it."

"No, me!"

“Me”

.

They were laughing like delighted kids.

Blackburn came up. "I know this is enjoyable for everyone," he said to Nichols, "but we're falling behind our schedule and perhaps we ought to go back to the conference room."

"All right," Nichols said, with obvious reluctance. He turned to Cherry. "You sure you can get us one of these things?"

"Count on it," Cherry said. "Count on it."

Walking back to the conference room, the Conley-White executives were in a giddy mood; they talked rapidly, laughing about the experience. The DigiCom people walked quietly beside them, not wanting to disrupt the good mood. It was at that point that Mark Lewyn fell into step alongside Sanders and whispered, "Hey, why didn't you call me last night?"

"I did," Sanders said.

Lewyn shook his head. "There wasn't any message when I got home," he said.

"I talked to your answering machine, about six-fifteen."

"I never got a message," Lewyn said. "And then when I came in this morning, you weren't here." He lowered his voice. "Christ. What a mess. I had to go into the meeting on Twinkle with no idea what the approach was going to be."

"I'm sorry," Sanders said. "I don't know what happened."

"Fortunately, Meredith took over the discussion," Lewyn said. "Otherwise I would have been in deepest shit. In fact, I-We'll do this later," he said, seeing Johnson drop back to talk to Sanders. Lewyn stepped away.

"Where the hell were you?"Johnson said.

"I thought the meeting was for eight-thirty."

"I called your house last night, specifically because it was changed to eight. They're trying to catch a plane to Austin for the afternoon. So we moved everything up."

"I didn't get that message."

"I talked to your wife. Didn't she tell you?"

"I thought it was eight-thirty."

Johnson shook her head, as if dismissing the whole thing. "Anyway," she said, "in the eight o'clock session, I had to take another approach to Twinkle, and it's very important that we have some coordination in the light of-"

"Meredith?" Up at the front of the group, Garvin was looking back at her. "Meredith, John has a question for you."

"Be right there," she said. With a final angry frown at Sanders, she hurried up to the head of the group.

Back in the conference room, the mood was light. They were all still joking as they took their seats. Ed Nichols began the meeting by turning to Sanders. "Meredith's been bringing us up to date on the Twinkle drive. Now that you're here, we'd like your assessment as well."

I had to take another approach to Twinkle,Meredith had said. Sanders hesitated. "My assessment?"

"Yes," Nichols said. "You're in charge of Twinkle, aren't you?"

Sanders looked at the faces around the table, turned expectantly toward him. He glanced at Johnson, but she had opened her briefcase and was rummaging through her papers, taking out several bulging manila envelopes.

"Well," Sanders said. "We built several prototypes and tested them thoroughly. There's no doubt that the prototypes performed flawlessly. They're the best drives in the world."

"I understand that," Nichols said. "But now you are in production, isn't that right?"

"That's right."

"I think we're more interested in your assessment of the production."

Sanders hesitated. What had she told them? At the other end of the room, Meredith Johnson closed her briefcase, folded her hands under her chin, and stared steadily at him. He could not read her expression.

What hadshetold them?

"Mr. Sanders?"

"Well," Sanders began, "we've been shaking out the lines, dealing with the problems as they arise. It's a pretty standard start-up experience for us. We're still in the early stages."