Michael Crichton - Disclosure

"I'm sorry," Nichols said. "I thought you've been in production for two months."

"Yes, that's true."

"Two months doesn't sound like `the early stages' to me."

"Well-"

"Some of your product cycles are as short as nine months, isn't that right?"

"Nine to eighteen months, yes."

"Then after two months, you must be in full production. How do you assess that, as the principal person in charge?"

"Well, I'd say the problems are of the order of magnitude we generally experience at this point."

"I'm interested to hear that," Nichols said, "because earlier today, Meredith indicated to us that the problems were actually quite serious. She said you might even have to go back to the drawing board."

Shit.

How should he play it now? He'd already said that the problems were not so bad. He couldn't back down. Sanders took a breath and said, "I hope I haven't conveyed the wrong impression to Meredith. Because I have full confidence in our ability to manufacture the Twinkle drive."

"I'm sure you do," Nichols said. "But we're looking down the barrel at competition from Sony and Philips, and I'm not sure that a simple expression of your confidence is adequate. How many of the drives coming off the line meet specifications?"

"I don't have that information."

”Just approximately."

"I wouldn't want to say, without precise figures."

"Are precise figures available?"

"Yes. I just don't have them at hand."

Nichols frowned. His expression said: why don't you have them when you knew this is what the meeting was about?

Conley cleared his throat. "Meredith indicated that the line is running at twenty-nine percent capacity, and that only five percent of the drives meet specifications. Is that your understanding?"

"That's more or less how it has been. Yes."

There was a brief silence around the table. Abruptly, Nichols sat forward. "I'm afraid I need some help here," he said. "With figures like that, on what do you base your confidence in the Twinkle drive?"

"The reason is that we've seen all this before," Sanders replied. "We've seen production problems that look insurmountable but then get resolved quickly."

"I see. So you think your past experience will hold true here."

"Yes, I do."

Nichols sat back in his seat and crossed his arms over his chest. He looked extremely dissatisfied.

Jim Daly, the thin investment banker, sat forward and said, "Please don't misunderstand, Tom. We're not trying to put you on the spot," he said. "We have long ago identified several reasons for acquisition of this company, irrespective of any specific problem with Twinkle. So I don't think Twinkle is a critical issue today. We just want to know where we stand on it. And we'd like you to be as frank as possible."

"Well, there are problems," Sanders said. "We're in the midst of assessing them now. We have some ideas. But some of the problems may go back to design."

Daly said, "Give us worst case."

"Worst case? We pull the line, rework the housings and perhaps the controller chips, and then go back on."

"Causing a delay of?"

Nine to twelve months. "Up to six months," Sanders said.

`Jesus," somebody whispered.

Daly said, `Johnson suggested that the maximum delay would be six weeks."

"I hope that's right. But you asked for worst case."

"Do you really think it will take six months?"

"You asked for worst case. I think it's unlikely."

"But possible?"

"Yes, possible."

Nichols sat forward again and gave a big sigh. "Let me see if I understand this right. If there are design problems with the drive, they occurred under your stewardship, is that correct?"

"Yes, it is."

Nichols shook his head. "Well. Having gotten us into this mess, do you really think you're the person to clean it up?"

Sanders suppressed a surge of anger. "Yes I do," he said. "In fact, I think I'm the best possible person to do it. As I said, we've seen this kind of situation before. And we've handled it before. I'm close to all the people involved. And I am sure we can resolve it." He wondered how he could explain to these people in suits the reality of how products were made. "When you're working the cycles," he said, "it's sometimes not so serious to go back to the boards. Nobody likes to do it, but it may have advantages. In the old days, we made a complete generation of new products every year or so. Now, more and more, we also make incremental changes within generations. If we have to redo the chips, we may be able to code in the video compression algorithms, which weren't available when we started. That will enhance the end-user perception of speed by more than the simple drive specs. We won't go back to build a hundred-millisecond drive. We'll go back to build an eighty-millisecond drive."

"But," Nichols said, "in the meantime, you won't have entered the market."

"No, that's true."

"You won't have established your brand name, or established market share for your product stream. You won't have your dealerships, or your OEMs, or your ad campaign, because you won't have a product line to support it. You may have a better drive, but it'll be an unknown drive. You'll be starting from scratch."

"All true. But the market responds fast."

"And so does the competition. Where will Sony be by the time you get to market? Will they be at eighty milliseconds, too?"

"I don't know," Sanders said.

Nichols sighed. "I wish I had more confidence about where we are on this thing. To say nothing of whether we're properly staffed to fix it."

Meredith spoke for the first time. "I may be a little bit at fault here," she said. "When you and I spoke about Twinkle, Tom, I understood you to say that the problems were quite serious."

"They are, yes."

"Well, I don't think we want to be covering anything up here."

He said quickly, "I'm not covering anything up." The words came out almost before he realized it. He heard his voice, high-pitched, tight.

"No, no," Meredith said soothingly. "I didn't mean to suggest you were. It's just that these technical issues are hard for some of us to grasp. We're looking for a translation into layman's terms of just where we are. If you can do that for us."

"I've been trying to do that," he said. He knew he sounded defensive. But he couldn't help it.

"Yes, Tom, I know you have," Meredith said, her voice still soothing. "But for example: if the laser read-write heads are cut of sync with the m-subset instructions off the controller chip, what is that going to mean for us, in terms of down time?"

She was just grandstanding, demonstrating her facility with techtalk, but her words threw him off balance anyway. Because the laser heads were read-only, not readwrite, and they had nothing to do with the m-subset off the controller chip. The position controls all came off the x-subset. And the x-subset was licensed code from Sony, part of the driver code that every company used in their CD drives.

To answer without embarrassing her, he had to move into fantasy, where nothing he could say was true. "Well," he said, "you raise a good point, Meredith. But I think the m-subset should be a relatively simple problem, assuming the laser heads are tracking to tolerance. Perhaps three or four days to fix."

He glanced quickly at Cherry and Lewyn, the only people in the room who would know that Sanders had just spoken gibberish. Both men nodded sagely as they listened. Cherry even rubbed his chin.

Johnson said, "And do you anticipate a problem with the asynchronous tracking signals from the mother board?"

Again, she was mixing everything up. The tracking signals came from the power source, and were regulated by the controller chip. There wasn't a mother board in the drive units. But by now he was in the swing. He answered quickly: "That's certainly a consideration, Meredith, and we should check it thoroughly. I expect we'll find that the asynchronous signals may be phase-shifted, but nothing more than that."