by Various
For the finale, he stepped to a display stand where something flat and rectangular was hidden. With a flourish, he whipped off the cover to reveal a logo. Four concentric circles, radiating spokes, orbiting clusters of dots. All blue, of course. Caribbean-island-resort blue, private-jet sky blue. We applauded with startling sincerity.
Vik and I were trying to decode the logo's symbolism when Reed approached. "What do you think?" He beamed.
"It reminds me of a mandala," Vik said.
"A what?"
"A religious symbol to Hindus and Buddhists. A kind of circuit diagram of the cosmos. Reed, my friend, does your bishop know you are promoting a non-Mormon religion?"
Reed sniffed. "I think he'll understand. You okay with solid blue? We could make it madras instead."
Vik winced. His degrees were from Madras University, which wasn't as prestigious as the Indian Institutes of Technology. It was a sore point with him.
To retaliate, Vik coaxed Reed to explain what the logo represented. Reed had no clue. He tried to wing it. Big mistake. Neither of us corrected him, but Vik's smirk made it obvious that Reed didn't know a photon from a proton. He blushed, stammered an excuse, walked away.
I thought Vik was being mean. Reed was an ambitious accountant, not a technology guy. But when Vik held out his glass to clink, I clinked.
Our very own logo. How cool was that?
Then complaints started coming in.
A chromator made quasi-crystals out of N 2 molecules, which amount to about three-fourths of air. You might wonder: what happened to the unused O 2 molecules? Did they vanish? No. The O 2 remained as an oxygen-enriched zone around the blue mist. Which was generally not a problem—until an open flame entered this zone. Cigarettes, lighters, candles, bongs, fondue-pot heaters…a lot of open flame occurs in our high-tech world. Flame + O 2 -> burns and bad publicity.
I felt we should apologize. Silly me. Reed unleashed the lawyers, ordered them to deny all claims. He said people with personal injuries were con artists. MatSciCo had a few tough weeks when the tabloids called us "MatPsycho."
The controversy blew over. We added a warning label and kept shipping products. It's amazing what you can get away with behind small print. It reminded me of a tent my Scout troop bought once. It came with a label that said, "Not for use outdoors."
Still, I felt guilty.
I went to Vik's office. Success had earned him a real office rather than a cubicle like mine. To nurture his genius, one wall sported a set of shelves holding expensive orchids; a gardener misted them twice a week and removed wilted blossoms that might impact Vik's creativity.
"What if someone really gets hurt?" I said.
"People shouldn't smoke. It's a disgusting habit."
"But suppose someone put a ColorSpring in the kitchen, next to a gas oven—"
Vik waved his hand as if my fears were gnats to be brushed away. "You worry too much, Jimmy."
"What if—"
"What if the inventor of the laser pointer had been afraid people would point it at commercial aircraft? He would have suppressed his idea, and civilization would not have the marvelous and versatile laser pointer." He plucked one out of the pen holder on his desk and made a red dot travel around the walls. It came to rest on a tabloid front page he'd had framed; it showed Vik as Dr. Frankenstein, with lightning bolts coming out of his fingers. The bright red dot made a high-tech caste mark on his forehead.
I worked with Vik every day, so I had many rides on the Karmarkar emotional carousel. Vik believed in ghosts, Pilates, and moisturizer. In the span of minutes he could go from a riff on kinetic diameter to how to determine a lucky number (his was nine). He would prepare for an important presentation by obsessing over what cufflinks to wear. He could burn up an hour trying on gold, silver, gold again, asking my opinion, then waltz in and wing the presentation. Sometimes I felt like his valet. I suppose there are worse jobs than being valet to a capricious physicist, but were the skills I was learning transferable?
Also, it bugged me to be treated like a pair of gloves in a clean-room wall. Vik acted like he was the brain and I was the hands carrying out the brain's orders. He had no clue how hard it was to translate his theories into material structures. He liked powerful math, and if the math said jump, matter was supposed to say, "How high?"
Our new project was to create bubbles in more colors. Blue bubbles were discovered first because small bubbles formed relatively easily. We never did achieve purple, because aggregations that would have refracted purple light were so tiny that intermolecular collisions knocked them apart too quickly. But in a few months, by adjusting the microstructure, I managed to create slightly larger bubbles, big enough to refract green light. I made bubbles sized to appear leprechaun emerald green, primeval-forest moss green. The project stalled for a while. Then I achieved yellow. School-bus yellow, Inca-gold yellow. Orange bubbles existed so briefly they were barely perceptible and red was downright impossible. Red light, which starts at a wavelength of about 625 nm, isn't that much longer than the 475 nm of blue, but since bubble volume increases by a cubing factor, it was impossible to channel airflow into large aggregations that would hold together.
Trying to make Vik's ideas work was getting harder. An electron beam doesn't remove material very quickly, so to make a bigger groove the beam has to stay on a spot longer. Even though that was happening in a vacuum, aluminum atoms that ablated off the target formed a pseudo-gas that got in the way. So I made Beemer strafe the target like a Messerschmitt, to give the gas time to disperse between bursts, which resulted in grooves with scalloped edges, which required more machining.… The struggle to balance all the variables reminded me of a joke a professor told once: engineers don't solve problems, they replace old problems with new ones.
Reed pushed everyone in our group to work faster, harder, longer. Some people he motivated via money. With others he talked aesthetics, or scientific achievement, or defeating a rival company. Somehow he figured out that I regretted not making Eagle, and pitched what I was doing as part of the citizenship requirement. Better late than never, right? He even gave me the Scout salute. I hated being spun, but he was so enthusiastic I couldn't help saluting back.
I know, I know. I could have resisted. To tell the truth, I liked the intensity. The MatSciCo building felt like a spaceship on a mission. Artificial light. The omnipresent hum of machines meditating at 60 Hz. Pure air. Despite terrible stress, I could go for a week without puffing on my inhaler. My chest had never felt so clear. There were nights when I slept on an inflatable mattress in the lab rather return to my apartment, because going home would mean stepping outside MatSciCo. California was having a bad drought, and inhaling dust made my lungs feel like vacuum cleaner bags.
Too bad our spaceship was going in circles, getting nowhere.
One Monday there was a staff meeting with yelling, attacks, defensiveness, threats. Vik and Reed, leaders of opposing forces, glared at each other from opposite ends of the long conference table in an Engineering versus Marketing standoff. I don't like conflict. Normally in that situation I would just sit and hope no one noticed me. But I couldn't stand the fighting. I had to speak up.
I slapped the table to get their attention. "We need to appeal to a higher power," I announced.
Everyone looked at me in surprise. Jimmy could speak?
Back in Scout days, when we were in a bind, we were not ashamed to bend our heads in prayer. I knew that wouldn't play at MatSciCo. Too many different creeds, some militant atheists, plus engineers who claimed they were Jedi.
Fortunately, there was an alternative higher power everyone could accept.
We still had the Karmic Avenger promotional figure propped up in a corner of the conference room, a silent presence at our meetings. I knelt before it.
"Karmic Avenger, we need your help." I extended my arms and pressed my head to the floor. "Use your blue power ray to dispel the evil forces that cloud our minds! Please, help us work together!"
&nb
sp; No one said anything.
Then two more people who were sick of the bickering came over and knelt beside me. "Karmic Avenger, help us," they pleaded.
Others joined in. When the corner became too crowded, people threw coins, bowed their heads to the table. Someone began to sing the theme song and everyone joined in. Vik and Reed stayed hunkered down at opposite ends of the table, acting stern, but you could see them struggling not to smile. Finally they shrugged and held out a hand to each other, as if to say, "Crazy kids." The animosity evaporated.
The next day in the cafeteria, I was about to tuck into a sandwich: wild boar ham, Gruyere cheese, on sourdough bread—MatSciCo had excellent chow, another reason not to leave the spaceship. Suddenly, inspiration hit. Make TWO flat surfaces etched with matching patterns and mate them with the flat substrate on the outside and the grooves on the inside. N 2 molecules forced into the channels would have to interact. Even if the outer shells tried to repel one another, they couldn't get away. I fired up Beemer and made a test structure. Tiny tunnels with larger chambers at the right spacing—the sucker made red mist like Santa's magic wand.
This final pattern took us to the long-wavelength end of the visible spectrum. Once I had a pattern for each color, I combined patterns and made a chromator that put out ribbons of mist like a rainbow. My prototype was rushed to the contractor that did the mass fabrication, and I finally got to relax. Reed slapped me on the back, talked about commissioning a new logo. As a down payment, we all got coffee cups with rainbows.
We were on the top of the world!
For about two weeks.
The catch was, anybody could buy one of our products and reverse-engineer it. Well, anybody who knew how to use an atomic force microscope. Which turned out to be a lot of people. The microstructure was complicated, but replicable.
MatSciCo had applied for a patent. Big deal. Pattern designs circulated on the Internet. Search on YouTube and you could find a hundred how-to videos. High school students built them for science fair projects. Dance clubs ditched their fog machines and installed DIY chromators so people could frolic in colorful clouds. (No smoking!)
Some clever tinkerer realized that instead of moving air over a stationary chromator using a fan, you could achieve the same effect by moving a chromator through stationary air. Small motion-activated products appeared. People put them on cars and skateboards and zoomed around leaving colored trails like in comic books.
Oh, how I wish we had quit at that point. We could have been magnanimous and let the technology pass into public domain. By then, however, even we techies were following the weekly sales reports. Reed was still talking mega buckaroos. When sales started to fall, we could see our IPO going down the drain. People at other high-tech companies were cashing in, and it drove us crazy. I personally was obsessed with F2D2. On my computer screen, a countdown clock told me exactly how many years, weeks, and days remained until I was free from debt. I was desperate to see that happen.
Reed came into the lab one night when I was up late, struggling to make a new idea work. He didn't say anything. Just eased into a chair and watched me program. He had no way to verify what I was really doing; he just took it on faith that I was being a dutiful employee.
Normally that would have been true with a straight-arrow like me. But I was pissed that my name wasn't on the patent application. I had so much control over what happened down in nano-land that I was toying with the thought of signing my name, like the masons who signed the backs of the stones that went into cathedrals. If I signed in an unused area, my signature wouldn't affect the output. It was strange to be contemplating high-tech tagging, since one of my Scout projects was cleaning graffiti off public buildings, but that shows you how mad I was.
"Where's Vik?" Reed inquired.
"At a Giants game. Throwing the first pitch."
"I didn't know he liked baseball."
"He doesn't. He says it's the mutant bastard spawn of cricket, and should be outlawed."
"Then why did he go?"
"TV cameras."
Vik had become A-list in rainbow-loving San Francisco. He rode in the San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade, on a float that left a sparkling trail like a flamboyant comet. Celebrity stuff was way more fun than working. Besides, with chromagenesis on his resume, he was set for life. There was an office pool on what he'd do when his contract expired: pry a huge raise out of MatSciCo, or take a better deal somewhere else?
Sensing my bitterness, Reed told a story about his Mormon missionary days. He spent two years knocking on doors in Nigeria, getting absolutely nowhere. Kids threw garbage. Adults sicced dogs on him. When someone finally took an interest, he was thrilled. Reed was sure he was going to make his first convert. Turned out the guy just wanted free English lessons. I pretended to appreciate his wisdom, but boy was I sick of patience.
Now that I knew Reed better, I figured he would have been content to teach high school math and ride his bike on weekends. But his father and uncles were successful businessmen and he felt obliged to uphold the family tradition. His attempts at different management styles were like Vik trying on jewelry. Eventually he'd find the right one.
Reed thought the next big breakthrough would be making bubbles more durable. An absurd notion, the sort of nonsense you'd expect from a nontechnical person. A durable bubble? That's not a bubble. It was, however, an intriguing challenge.
We had been manipulating the outer shell of N 2 molecules by using the triboelectric effect to strip an electron. Aluminum is very conductive; it's a great place to stash electrons. Now, suppose I built tiny "wires," grounded to the aluminum substrate, using a material with even higher conductivity? Silver would be best, but it was expensive. Copper was almost as conductive, yet cheap. So I experimented.
An electron beam is not the right tool for constructing a wire. However, if I started with an aluminum alloy that contained copper, I could zap the lighter aluminum atoms and send them flying away, leaving the heavier copper atoms behind to gradually form copper-rich structures by subtraction. Structures like tiny electron traps, to swipe more electrons from N 2 molecules. If I could strip a second electron, the N 2 molecules would interlink more tightly as they attempted to maintain octet stability, and consequently last longer.
Chemistry, I must confess, is not my strong suit. In engineering school I did the absolute minimum to satisfy the requirements, then never looked back. Now I was so immersed in the minutiae of N 2 molecules that I dreamed I was running through a tunnel, being chased by a swarm of carnivorous N 2 molecules like blue Pac-Men. Gnashing jaws coming closer, closer—
I awoke sweating, with an idea for a configuration that might work.
My demo occurred late one Saturday night. Vik and Reed came to the lab, to hover and fret while I adjusted the prototype. I had labored over the goddamn pattern for days. I was running poor Beemer so hard that dead cathode cartridges were piled on the testbench. From a weary distance, my entire body numb, I watched my hands make the final tweaks to the prototype as if they were two little men acting on their own. Was this how a robot would feel? A tool with awareness, but still a tool?
Reed and Vik had obviously been arguing about something before they came into the lab, and were trying to hide it, like parents who don't want to fight in front of the children. An odd couple, those two. Rivals for power. But when threatened from the outside, they closed ranks and protected each other. I had heard Vik tell an outright lie about physics to back up some bullshit Reed had fed to the venture capitalists. Did I bust him? Of course not. I thought we were moving too fast, but I wanted that IPO. My shares of founder's stock would make F2D2 come before I was twenty-five.
When I was ready, I turned to Reed and Vik. "Wanna do the honors?" I mumbled.
They glanced at each other. They both wanted to, but came to the same conclusion: Jimmy is about to snap. Placate Jimmy.
"You do it," Vik said. "You have the magic touch."
Oh, you noticed ? Angrily, I punched th
e power button. A fan began to purr.
No pretty packaging at this stage. The prototype looked like a hockey puck with a silver chimney soldered on. Air was sucked in from vents in the periphery of the disk and whirled up inside the aluminum tube where my new pattern was engraved.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then a puff of blue vapor emerged from the "chimney."
I'd gone back to blue, glacier-ice blue, drowning-man blue, because smaller bubbles were easier to manipulate than the large red ones. If my approach worked with blue, it would scale across the spectrum.
Blue fumes rose from the chromator, which puffed like a Smurf factory. The blue cloud hit the ceiling and spread out. Vik's lips moved as he counted the seconds. As the blue cloud thickened instead of dissipating, a grin split his face. Reed's jaw hung open in a goofy smile. None of us said anything. It was too perfect a moment. I turned off the chromator and we watched the blue cloud snuggle against the ceiling. Minutes ticked by with minimal evaporation. Wearily I accepted high-fives.
Looking back, I suppose we should have thought about the consequences of truly durable bubbles. What would happen if they didn't pop in a few minutes? Suppose they lasted for hours. Or days. Or…
But we didn't do enough testing. We were in a rush to fulfill the promises Reed had made to investors. The new product looked like a planter, like a fancy urn for growing artisanal bamboo. Sit it in your yard and turn it on, and it generated a tall rainbow spray like an alien fern from Planet Crayola. We priced it absurdly high to appeal to nouveau-riche techies, the alpha consumer in Silicon Valley. For the rollout, the MatSciCo building had searchlights in the parking lot, like a Hollywood premiere, each beam a different color. I had to work, but I saw Vik on the TV news, riding down Market Street on a fire engine, throwing rainbow bead necklaces to the crowds as if it were Mardi Gras.