“Hey, Kate,” he said, holding her gaze. Nothing else appeared.
Kate’s head shot round accusingly. “What the hell are you looking at?”
“Nice. You don’t seem to be in much of a rush. What’s so special about you?”
“I’m the last pitch,” she explained, turning back to the mirror. “I can sneak in at the end of the row anytime after the contest starts. Like it’s any of your business.”
Occupation undisclosed. The last pitch. “So you’re the SycaPhone girl,” he realised aloud. “Best of luck out there.” A look of horror crossed Kate’s face. Kurt winked at her via the mirror. “Don’t worry, I’ll warm them up for you.”
Kurt exited the changing room pleased to know what he was up against. The corridor was still empty and a bell began to ring. He opened another door, this one marked CONTESTANTS. It brought him to the side of the stage. He excused his way past his rivals to take his seat.
The Renaissance-style auditorium was an imposing building inside and out. Its domed structure was iconic and the interior harked back to a lost age of artistic decadence with murals aplenty joined by an inscribed reading from Proverbs. Having recently graduated in the palatial building, Kurt enjoyed the advantage of not being overawed by his surroundings. And, after all that worrying about being late, he was in position with a full seven seconds to spare. He even had time to tighten the knot in his tie before the lights suddenly died, taking the audience’s chatter with them.
Darkness. Silence. Showtime.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” boomed a smooth baritone voiceover, “please welcome to the stage Sycamore’s founder and CEO: Isaiah Amos.” The style of introduction befitted a heavyweight title fight and the audience reacted accordingly as Amos rose from his front-row seat to ascend the stairs and assume his role as MC. Everyone around Kurt stood for the welcome. He was comfortable sitting down.
Amos loved the limelight like the limelight loved him. Kurt had never seen him in person and was surprised by how youthful he seemed. In interviews Amos’s face always showed its 54 years, but tonight his dynamic stage-presence drew all of the attention. From a distance he could have passed for 30.
“This is an occasion to be savoured,” Amos began, lowering both hands in front of his stomach to encourage a resumption of the silence, “and savour it we shall. Tonight we welcome millions of viewers on TVBytes, available on-Lens through any internet device and apparently also on channel 43 of those quaint little teleboxes.” Most of the audience laughed, mainly out of social obligation. “We welcome them to our Sycamore UltraLenses Talent Search, brought to you by Lexington, in which we aim to unearth a talented innovator and give him — or her! — the opportunity to realise their potential at Sycamore.
“Each contestant will be judged primarily on their innovation but also on the quality of their pitch. There are thirteen contestants in all, twelve of whom have been selected as the best of over 9000 online entries. The field is rounded out by a wildcard entrant selected by Professor Dale Walker; our way of thanking this famous university for hosting the Talent Search in its magnificent auditorium.
“They will each be given five minutes to pitch and a further five minutes to answer questions from the board. The board will choose three finalists and I will personally select a winner after interviewing those final three onstage at the end of the evening. And now, without further ado, allow me to introduce our first contestant... Kevin Chang.”
Kurt watched with interest as Kevin took the stage and Amos returned to his seat. Kevin’s proposal was purely hypothetical and took less than a minute to explain. He had decided that the UltraLenses should allow people to see as well underwater as they could on land. If the Lenses could do that then everyone would buy them, he reasoned. Amos asked how Kevin proposed this be achieved, to which he replied: “I’m not clear on that yet.”
The audience applauded politely at the end of Kevin’s pitch and he sat down at the far end of the row. Kurt was pleasantly amazed that the next few pitches saw no increase in quality and that his rivals’ ideas were either tiny modifications of existing services or utterly impossible pipe dreams. The first reasonable suggestion was that Sycamore develop commercial lie-detection software. 100% accuracy wasn’t beyond modern facial-recognition services, the contestant claimed, but he failed to capture the board’s imagination.
Before long the seventh entrant was introduced and Kurt felt his nerves building. He had been using the time during the previous pitches to finalise his own and knew that it was as polished as it was going to get.
The seventh pitch was by far the strongest so far. It was the first specific and plausible idea, and Amos seemed interested. The concept was for a home and workplace security system. A user would set a six-digit combination as normal, but the twist was that the pressure-sensitive keypad fitted on their door would have no visible numbers. Only the appointed user’s UltraLenses would reveal the numbered zones (0-9), which would shuffle their position every few minutes. In the contestant’s words, “it doesn’t matter if someone learns your passcode; to get in, they need your eyes.”
It wasn’t the kind of Hollywood idea that would excite the viewers but Amos appreciated its simplicity. “I like that,” he said. “It would sell.” His fellow board members nodded their agreement and the man seemed sure to reach the final three.
Him, me and Kate.
“And now for the wildcard entrant... Kurt Jacobs.”
There was more cheering than there had been for any of the previous contestants because many of the audience were students and faculty who knew Kurt, or at least knew that he was a former student. When he had graduated on that very stage only two weeks earlier, Randy had been there. Kurt searched the room for a friendly face and eventually found Professor Walker near the middle. The professor mouthed “it’s yours” and Kurt’s nerves evaporated.
Because Professor Walker was right: it was his. Kurt had been working on this idea for years and it was galactically superior to the best anyone else had offered. His pitch would be the most polished, too. Confidence bordering on arrogance convinced Kurt that only the SycaPhone could stand in his way, so all he had to do was make it impossible for Amos to justify choosing Kate over him.
One deep breath and away he went.
~
“I’m here to tell you that the UltraLenses are capable of far more than we use them for. These Lenses have the ability to change the way we interact with the world, and each other, on every level. The question we should be asking, therefore, is not, “What kind of device can make the most of the Lenses?” but rather, “What kind of system can the Lenses make possible?” The answer? Let’s find out.”
Amos looked at Kurt with an intensity that was simultaneously frightening and encouraging. Whatever he was thinking, he was interested.
“When you look at something like a QR barcode for a few seconds and end up seeing a movie trailer in your Lenses, what’s really happening there? Basically, the Lenses are capturing the image and sending it to the server, where it’s recognised as a link. Whatever content is hosted at that link is then displayed. As soon as I got my hands on the UltraLenses, I went to work on passing the images they were taking in over to a computer. Obviously that required intercepting the communication between my Lenses and the server, but that wasn—”
Less than a minute into the pitch, Amos interrupted Kurt. “Do you mean to say that you illegally discovered and exploited a vulnerability in Sycamore’s transfer protocol?”
“No,” said Kurt. “The word exploit implies something black-hat, and I wouldn’t call what I found a vulnerability.”
“So what would you call it? A hole?”
Kurt shook his head and tried not to smile. “Try canyon.” His audacity silenced Amos and engendered disbelief throughout the audience. “Anyway, let’s just say it wasn’t as difficult as it should have been. Before long I worked it out and managed to send images to my computer instead of the server.”
Randy’s a
dvice about the present tense came to Kurt’s mind and he put it to immediate use. “So while I’m in my room playing around with everything, the Lenses are recording my field of vision and sending it to the computer. But rather than a single frame I’m capturing 60 of them per second. And rather than analysing the images for linkable content, the computer is storing them. Everything I see is being recorded. I’ve turned the Lenses into the streaming video camera they should have been from the start.”
A cry of “that’s impossible!” came from one of the contestants who had already pitched. Kurt couldn’t remember what his innovation had been, so it couldn’t have been anything good.
Amos turned to the complainer sternly in an appeal for silence. “Please.”
“No,” he said, “I won’t be quiet. How come Mr Wildcard is allowed to make these baseless claims? It’s easy to win people over with fantasy.”
“How come no one else was interrupted like this?” Kurt asked.
Amos answered. “No one else was making claims like yours. I hope you can back them up.”
“I haven’t finished explaining it yet, but if you want a demonstration…?”
Amos looked along his front row then back to Kurt. “I’m sure I speak for the millions watching around the country when I say that we do, Mr Jacobs.”
“Then watch this.” Kurt flipped open the laptop on the table beside him. “Bring that camera in closer,” he said. The cameraman obliged. As well as going out live on channel 43, the pictures appeared on the auditorium’s big screen.
A command line filled the laptop’s display and Kurt typed something too quickly for anyone to read. Seconds later the screen was filled with a never-ending image loop of itself within itself — Kurt’s vision was being transmitted to the computer and replicated in real time. He spun around to the audience and they appeared on the big screen. He welcomed their gasps.
Next he focused on Amos, who smiled at the sight of himself. He had doubted Kurt but was happy to be proven wrong. Kurt had only one word for him: “See?”
“Incredible,” said Amos.
Kurt shook his head with carefully affected nonchalance. “Child’s play.”
Amos whispered something to the man beside him. Kurt tried not to let it distract him.
“We can transfer either the raw feed, like this, or the augmented vista. There are a few extra steps for the latter, but…” Kurt typed away on his laptop. “... Here we go.”
The clock and everything else that Kurt saw through his Lenses was now on the screen. The audience had been amazed by the initial demonstration but this additional step hugely impressed the front row.
“Okay. The purpose of that demonstration was to show that we can record the totality of our visual experience. Fine. But when we start streaming the images to a portable device, well, that’s when it gets exciting. We need something powerful enough to handle the data but portable enough to always be with us. Think of a DVR. Before DVRs, a TV could only display what the antenna was giving it in the same way that our Lenses can only see through to reality and augment it with whatever the server delivers. But if we had a small processor that was always near the Lenses like the DVR is always near the TV, it could record what we were seeing and relay it at our pleasure. We could literally rewind real life.
“Today, ‘portable device’ is synonymous with ‘smartphone.’ A system needs a processor, a display, and a control interface. That used to mean a PC, a monitor and a keyboard-mouse combo. Then came the era of the touchscreen: a display and an interface rolled into one. Smartphones housed the processor under that touchscreen to give us portability and efficiency.
“So what did the UltraLenses add? An invisible and unobtrusive intermediary. The Lenses added Lenses.” Kurt paused. “Why are we adding things?”
“Where are you going with this?” asked Amos, unhappy with Kurt’s tone.
“Exactly. Where are we going with this? Sycamore was supposed to change everything. I’ve been wearing these things for the last eight months and my life is the same. So where am I going? Let me finish and you might find out.”
“That’s the idea, Mr Jacobs.”
“I know. Where was I? Okay. I’m not a big fan of glass. Whatever we do, we’re always looking at glass. Families in their living rooms, looking at glass. Children on the schoolbus, looking at glass. Half of you in this room, looking at glass.” A man in an aisle seat near Professor Walker looked up from his lap. “Put your phone down for five minutes,” said Kurt. “We both know your life isn’t that important.”
Some of the audience laughed. Amos smirked. Kurt saw.
“I’m not a fan of glass screens because we no longer need them. We don’t need TVs now that we have these excellent Lenses, so why do we persist in carrying smartphones around? Some of the cool kids don’t — they use smart watches. But what’s the difference? They still have to wear a bulky watch and look down at it to see their data. I can’t accept that. I won’t accept that. Obviously the UltraLenses lack a sufficient interface and processor to fully replace phones and watches, but I’m sure we can all agree that they represent the best means of displaying data. The UltraLenses are our system’s display.
“Now, onto the interface.” Kurt turned to his laptop, still relaying his vision, and began performing gestures on its trackpad. “Something like this. Look how easily it controls the zoom of my UltraLenses; having this with me all the time would be like having binoculars with me all the time. I’m not suggesting we carry around a trackpad in place of a smartphone or watch because that wouldn’t achieve anything. What I’m suggesting is that we turn something else into a trackpad.
“I shouldn’t have to say that this is possible, but just in case: this is possible. A small chip can attach to the bottom of all sorts of surfaces and turn them into virtual trackpads. I couldn’t afford to buy a chip like that to demonstrate, but it’s real. They sense pressure and vibration to determine the nature of the gesture and, as long as whatever the chip is attached to isn’t too thick, it works as well as a physical multitouch trackpad like this one.
“With touchscreens, we used to use styluses. People said a finger would never be accurate enough. Those people didn’t consider the infinity of human ingenuity; all we needed was a different kind of screen. We used to walk around with a device in one hand and a stylus in the other: hand to stylus to device to hand. The stylus fell in the wake of progress. The device is about to join it.
“And I haven’t forgotten about the processor, in case you were wondering. It’s the chip that lives under our virtual trackpad. I say ‘chip’ for ease of understanding. We have a microprocessor and a vibration/pressure sensor. Both are very, very small and can be contained within a bubble of sorts, no larger than a few grains of rice. Think of the bubble as a chip.”
Kurt looked down to Amos and saw him tracing a circle in his left palm. He was following.
“Everything I’m saying tonight is important, but this is the most important part: the day of the handheld device has passed. All we need is a display, a processor and a control interface. The UltraLenses are capable of both full-immersion and composite imaging, so we already have the best possible display. All we need now is a processor and an interface.
“The processor need only be a microchip, and a multitouch trackpad is the best interface we have. The display is in your eyes and the rest doesn’t have to be any further away. You don’t have to carry anything around. There’s nothing in your pocket. The chip sits underneath the trackpad and the trackpad is…”
Kurt swallowed hard and wondered whether the words he had rehearsed were the best way to deliver the final piece of his puzzle, the piece that would either delight the judges with its ingenuity or disgust them with its recklessness. He searched for support in Professor Walker’s direction but found only bulging eyebrows which suggested that his deliberative pause had lasted longer than he realised.
“So, as I said, the chip sits underneath the trackpad...”
He sw
allowed again and found himself falling into a familiar pattern. Professor Walker silently shouted the word “speak” and Kurt managed to choke it out.
“… and the trackpad is the palm of your hand.”
The crowd, previously leaning forward as one, sat back in shock. Kurt looked only at Amos, who began to pensively itch his nose. Kurt was sure he could see a grin trying to escape.
“We need a microchip, and we need it under our skin.”
The grin broke free.
“We calibrate our right hand’s fingers to our new palm-based trackpad and that’s it. The display is in our eyes, the chip is in our hand and the trackpad is our hand. There’s nothing else. We are the device. Gesturing on your palm will bring up the operating system on your Lenses, exactly like you were looking at a smartphone or a tablet’s screen. It can take up as little or as much of your visual real estate as you like, at whatever level of transparency you desire. Think of the chip as the computer that it is and you’ll realise what all of this means. The chip does everything that your existing devices can do and so much more. Your chip will function as your ID, your credit card, your keys. And it’s not like a barcode scanner or something that has to be lined up perfectly — just hold it against your car and the door opens.
“Someone earlier on suggested a security system. The thing is, we don’t need to play any games or press any invisible buttons in a special order.” The man who had pitched the magic keypad looked offended. “Don’t look at me like that,” Kurt continued, “your idea was better than the rest. At least you were asking good questions... there’s no shame in being wrong about the right things. But all you need to do is fit a scanner in your door handle and it will open when an authorised hand touches it.
“The potential uses are limited only by our imagination. The first smartphones seemed amazing, and think of all the apps that have been developed since then that we already take for granted! It’s infinitely easier to develop for this chip than a smartphone and the display is of infinitely higher quality. Developers can play with location and movement in the same way that they do when working on smartphone apps but with the added bonus of complete visual input.
Sycamore (Near-Future Dystopia) Page 3