Blind Tasting

by A. C. Houston

  Rob is now remembering a Spyder F430 that he replaced the timing belt of. He thinks he remembers the name of the owner, too. "Does that guy drive a blue Ferrari?" he asks Becca, out of sheer curiosity.

  She beams at him. "Yes! He drove me to lunch in it. Fidelio's, to celebrate joining iPhlox."

  Cory feels a stab of jealousy; he'd been planning to take Becca there for her birthday next month.

  Becca, without forethought, twists the knife a little deeper. "Derek says that Trilobite in the city is even better." Her long-lashed eyes connect with Cory's. "They are supposed to have an amazing wine list. The food is all small plates, molecular gastronomy. And Dominic Downey likes to mingle with his guests and talk about how he does stuff, you know, his ideas about cooking."

  "So when does he find time to actually whip up those calcium-chloride pearls and lecithin foams?" Dawn asks sarcastically, thinking of the chemical party tricks used in making these trendy dishes.

  Becca shrugs incredulously. "He's a celebrity chef."

  Becca's cell phone jingles and she checks it, smiling at something and texting a reply. "Derek," she explains, amusedly.

  Dawn glances at Cory, aware that he looks annoyed. Well, he is the one who chose Becca.

  Stretching unhurriedly, Dawn gets up from the table and looks at her watch. "I'm afraid it's that time. I've got the patent filing due on Monday and microarray output to analyze before then. No rest for the wicked."

  Cory stands up and looks at her. She senses he'd like the party to go on a little longer, but she really has seen enough of his girlfriend this evening.

  "Hey, thanks for coming," he tells her, holding out an arm to embrace her.

  The two friends hug.

  "This was great. I'll call you," Dawn says as she gives Snoots a last fondle.

  She glances at Becca who is still preoccupied with text messages. "Good luck with the new job."

  Rob, seeing that Dawn is really leaving, is also eager to be going. He pumps Cory on the shoulder, "Thanks, man. Excellent dinner."

  Becca looks up from her phone at Rob and he gives her a casual smile. He catches up with Dawn in time to open the front door for her and follow her out.

  Cory picks up his glass of wine from the table, the one he filled for Becca, and finishes it. He carries an empty wine bottle to the kitchen, brushing his free hand across Becca's hair as she continues to text furiously. He scrapes leftovers into Snoots bowl, which the dog happily devours, then returns to the dining table and picks up one of the robots, examining its structure, how the wheels are attached to the chassis.

  Becca looks up from her phone and sees that Cory is becoming engrossed in the toy vehicle. She puts her phone on the table and stands up, retrieving a small card from the pocket of her jacket. She offers it to him.

  "Happy birthday, you."

  He opens the envelope. It's an iStore gift certificate. He flashes a warm smile at her, nodding in approval.

  "Sorry I was so late," she adds, a little flirtatiously.

  He looks directly into her eyes; she likes his attention and intelligence focused on her and he knows it. He takes her face between his hands and kisses her. Hard.

  Rob walks Dawn to her car and, for the second time, opens a door for her. She has learned not to expect this kind of chivalry from men. It's not their fault, they just don't want to seem chauvinistic. The modern protocol has become a vague, tentative avoidance of initiating social gestures of all kinds. She is both surprised and pleased by Rob's nonchalant, unconscious gallantry. He's lingering a little, and she doesn't mind.

  "How do you like this?" he asks her, touching the side of her Mini Cooper.

  Sitting in the driver's seat, she tilts her head, looking at the dashboard. "It gets me around. It gets decent mileage." She smiles at him. "Not exactly the kind of sports car you deal with. And, I bought it with an automatic transmission."

  "Say it isn't so!" He cringes in mock despair.

  She nods her head in solemn affirmation. "Yep. I did."

  This emboldens him. "If you'd like to sometime, I'll teach you to drive a stick. It's really not hard. And you get way better control, road feel. With manual."

  He points his head toward the curb to a low-slung red sports car. "That's my Mazda RX. Rotary engine. Real road hugger."

  She beams at him. "I'd better warn you that when my dad tried to teach me to drive his Z4, he had to get the clutch replaced."

  She notices his unconscious wince and laughs. "Don't worry. I won't hold you to it."

  He nods slightly, not wanting to completely renege on his offer.

  There's a moment of silence. Dawn starts her engine. "Well, I'm sure I'll see you around. Cory and I try to stay in touch. Maybe we'll have a rematch with the robots sometime. Nice meeting you."

  "Likewise." Rob gives her a farewell smile and watches the Mini Cooper pull away from the curb. Then he heads back up the driveway and bounds up the stairs to his apartment, taking two at a time.

  Chapter Five

  San Francisco Bay. A stiff, twenty-knot breeze is blowing and a dozen sailboats are tacking and maneuvering on the water, tall white sails trimmed against their masts, with the occasional brilliant red, blue or yellow spinnaker flying on a downwind run. The sky is deep blue, but beyond the Golden Gate Bridge out to sea, a thin band of purple fog lies along the horizon.

  At the moment, Richard's sparkling white Beneteau Oceanis is under diesel power, her sails furled. There is some chop to the waves, but the hired captain, standing at the starboard wheel, steers the fifty-four-foot monohull through it with an easy expertise.

  The VisualAxiom team is gathered in the spacious cockpit of the boat. No one is talking except Richard, who currently has a bluetooth attachment on his ear and a cellphone in his hand. Seated nearest the captain, he's wearing a visor and dark glasses that conceal his fine brown hair and gray eyes.

  Trish is next to him, her body inclined a little toward him, her face looking down in concentration, trying to fill in the other side of his conversation in her mind.

  There's a discernible edge to Richard’s otherwise upbeat intonation. "I'm well aware of that. Sure. But, it's a big market, no question about it. What? Absolutely. Sorry, it's a little hard to hear with the wind. I'm out in the bay right now. Yeah, sailing. I've got my principals with me. Okay, we'll definitely chat tomorrow. Terrific."

  He ends the call. Cory wonders what big market Richard is referring to. Does it relate to the pitch on Tuesday?

  Richard now points to a boat some distance away, addressing the captain, a touch of concern in his tone. "You see that sailboat, right?"

  The captain, a young, muscular professional, nods. "We're passing well behind." His voice is rich and low, commanding for his youthful age.

  The answer irritates Richard. "Why behind?"

  The captain keeps his eyes focused on the sea, the boat traffic. "We're under power. They have the right of way. Shall we raise the mainsail?"

  "Why not."

  A deeply tanned sailor, younger even than the young captain, comes midships and unclips the halyard, attaching it to the head of the mainsail which is resting, flaked neatly, upon the massive boom. The sailor deftly removes a hank of halyard, preparing to apply downward tension to it, as the captain eases the main sheet.

  Cory watches with growing interest, wishing he could help. Too bad Rob isn't here; this boat is loaded with mechanisms that Cory is curious about and Rob could explain them.

  Richard looks at the captain. "Will the boat heel a lot?"

  "We'll be beating into a twenty-knot breeze on this tack, so we'll heel some. But she's got a deep keel and a lot of freeboard. She's a fifty-four-foot vessel.”

  Richard surveys the sea in a vague way. "You know what? Let's go ahead and motor there." He shakes his head. "With these winds."

  "Take it down, Sam."

  Sam unhooks the halyard from the head of the mainsail and re-clips it to the safety line.

  Cory unexpectedly gets a qui
ck glimpse of the sailor's expression as he tidies and stows the line he'd been preparing to hoist the sail with. It's private contempt for the kind of guy who doesn't understand the difference between owning a boat and sailing it.

  A second sailor, tall with scandinavian good looks, comes up through the companionway carrying a tray of snacks, Indian food arranged on colorful square plates. He sets the tray down on the spacious teak table which is anchored between the two seating areas of the cockpit.

  Richard encourages them to try the food. "Take-out from Yoginis. My wife's suggestion. It's super organic and vegan."

  Faye, John's girlfriend and a pretty strawberry blond with an analytic gaze, asks, "Your wife practices yoga, doesn't she?"

  Cory wonders why Richard's wife isn't on the boat today.

  Richard nods, taking a handful of roasted lentil mix. "She teaches Hatha and Vinyasa classes. She named the boat. Prana. In yoga-speak that means 'life force'."

  Pradip scoops up tamarind chutney with a pita chip. "It's an ancient Sanskrit word. And 'pranayama' means the control of the life force."

  Richard nods, munching his lentils. "Right. This boat could take me anywhere on the planet. I could point her through the Golden Gate and sail to...Vanuatu."

  "Sure, Richard. If you had the time." Jo's alto voice achieves the tone of highlighting the boss's importance, without sounding fawning. As an experienced office manager, she knows exactly how to play that card. He smiles appreciatively at her.

  John points past the Golden Gate Bridge. "About fifteen degrees south, you would be sailing on a course to Hong Kong."

  The scandinavian sailor returns with bottles of water and white wine, and expertly opens the wine, pouring it into clear plastic glasses that are secured in a teak drink holder.

  Cory takes one and tries the wine. It's a mass-produced California chardonnay, cloyingly over-oaked. He's sorry he didn't just choose a bottle of water. It's probably not okay to just toss the liquid overboard into the sea, even though it's what this wine deserves.

  Becca also takes a glass of the wine. In her white nautical gear, Dolce and Garbana sunglasses and long braided ponytail, she looks ready for a fashion shoot. She wants to toast, so Cory touches his glass to hers, deciding to go ahead and drink the swill.

  Richard picks up a wine glass and sips from it. He seems to actually like it.

  Cory decides to ask Pradip how the reenactment tournament went last night. Pradip laughs.

  "We had to work with only two megabytes of memory. Can you believe it? Two. The processing was probably moving like a microsecond per instruction."

  "Wow." Cory is impressed.

  "No way could I go parallel with that and accomplish a thing. I was mapping my neural net data structures into assembler in my head, just to bootstrap a bare-bones functionality."

  "What was the problem?"

  "Write a program to simulate the neo-cortex of a rodent."

  "No shit!" Cory and John both laugh.

  "Nobody really got it." Pradip shakes his head.

  "Could you use directed bipartite graphs?" John wonders aloud.

  "Petri nets. Yeah one guy tried that approach." Pradip smiles. "His code sucked, though. I mean, it just didn't run."

  Richard looks at the hackers, wanting to regain the conversational center. "So, I had lunch with Ray Bishop on Thursday. His guys are working on an enterprise solutions app for mobile devices that connects to the cloud to do the heavy lifting. Walker and Random Partners on Sand Hill have signed on."

  Trish nods emphatically. "Ray Bishop is a maverick and a visionary. Cloud computing is where everyone is moving." She glances at Cory, inviting him to comment on the new technology, a little disappointed that he showed up with a girlfriend today.

  Cory is underwhelmed by her assessment of visionary technology. Cloud computing is the latest buzzword for how distributed, remote computations are performed nowadays. There were thin clients; before that, there were client-server configurations. Now, with the Internet so large, it seems more empowered to not even know where your computation is being done...out there. In the clouds. It sounds like magic, which the marketing guys find appealing. More fun than referring to server farms with mirrored backups located in geographically-dispersed large, drab facilities. Less difficult to think about than optimistic concurrency logic or network routers.

  Ray Bishop is a successful entrepreneur, meaning he has made money and is discussed in the technology gossip circles. Cory imagines the new Bishop app is probably using some ten-year-old resource allocation algorithms coupled with wireless connectivity and a fancy layer of graphics slapped on top. The graphics is made possible by the ever-increasing power of the hardware that runs underneath. Maybe it'll make money for the guy, but it's not the kind of challenge that will advance the fundamental understanding of computational complexities, or push the envelop of science. The kind of technology that VisualAxioms is pursuing.

  Two hours later, Prana is docked at a fashionable marina in Sausalito north of San Francisco. Other expensive sailboats are tied up in nearby slips. Richard, Trish and Becca step onto the dock and immediately place calls on their cellphones, while John, Faye and Pradip examine the various winches and standing rigging of the boat and watch the two crew members throw a turquoise-colored canvas cover over the mainsail, securing it with snaps. Jo goes below deck to check for bags and jackets left behind. She also wants to admire the high-end teak trim in the boat's expansive salon.

  Cory approaches the captain who is putting a cover over the starboard steering wheel. "This must be nice work. Spending so much time on the water."

  He looks at Cory through dark wraparound sunglasses. "Sometimes."

  Cory watches him zip up the canvas wheel cover. He's curious. "Why does this boat have two wheels?"

  "She's big enough that it helps a lot with visibility. When the jib's up and you're beating, you can see ahead much better. It wasn't an issue today with the sails down." He reaches into his pocket and hands Cory a business card. "Call me when you want to go for a real sail some time." The card is pale blue, with a white sailboat embossed on it.

  Cory smiles at the captain and puts the card in his wallet as Jo touches his arm. He turns to face her; her cropped black hair and ripped muscles look natural on a boat. Those muscles are the result of hundreds of hours of triathlon training -- her real passion.

  She speaks in a low, slightly confidential tone. "Some of us are going to dinner. A place in the city John knows. Coming?"

  He nods. He knows Becca will enjoy it, and he's pretty sure that 'some of us' means 'not Trish and not Richard'.

  As Cory steps off the boat to join Becca, he is approached by Richard. "So what do you think of her?" Richard begins, admiring his high-priced trophy on the water.

  Cory turns to look at Prana again. "That's one beautiful boat. She must look amazing with her sails unfurled."

  Richard laughs in agreement and moves on to his real topic. "Listen, I think it would be great if you would join us on Tuesday for that meeting. Trish is fantastic, but she's just joined us and it would be nice to give her some additional support, backup. In case she needs to field some technical questions."

  He is surprised by the request. "No problem. Maybe John should be there, too? His ideas are manifest in all the work we've done."

  Richard gives a tiny sigh. "We all know John is brilliant. But, he can be a little testy at times with people who don't...mm, catch on as quickly as he'd like. I want this to go very smoothly on Tuesday."

  Cory is pretty sure John will be delighted not to sit in the conference room for three hours and listen to repetitions of marketing catch phrases such as 'leveraging the Internet', 'best of breed' and, now, very probably, 'cloud computing'. Cory agrees with John, an equation is worth a thousand words.

  He looks at Richard. "Pradip and I are coming in tomorrow to put together a demo for Trish. To make our technology more concrete for her, the fundamental issues, the benefits."

  "That'
s fabulous, Cory! Great idea. Let's plan to all spend time together on Monday to iron this thing out. Get our ducks lined up. It could be a long day, but worth the effort."

  Cory nods. He'd better start figuring out what he's going to say, in case Trish freezes up in front of the media guys. Or worse, starts spouting nonsense.

  Chapter Six

  San Francisco. Fog has rolled in off the ocean and the night air has a bite to it, so Cory has his arm around Becca as they amble through a fashionable district near Russian Hill that is populated with chic bistros and wine bars.

  "So, how'd you like that French-Vietnamese place?" Cory asks, referring to the dinner spot where the group, sans Trish and Richard, had dined.

  She frowns at him. "I thought you would never stop talking about work."

  "Sorry. We're in the middle of some new stuff. It's pretty exciting actually."

  He's about to launch into an explanation of their newest algorithm when he gauges her expression and stops himself. He's learned that the formidable challenge of how to enable a computer to disambiguate the overlapping visual patterns that the human eye is so good at resolving, is not high on Becca's list of interests.

  They are now walking past the famous Trilobite restaurant run by a celebrity chef. They stop to have a look.

  Becca admires the dark wooden panels that conceal the interior from the street. "Philippe Lourdes did their decor. Some kind of Precambrian-Postmodern fusion, you know, to go with the name."

  "Actually, trilobites were late Cambrian, not Precambrian."

  She is annoyed. "You always have to be so precise."

  He smiles at her. "I'm a geek, Becca. What can I say. I want to know how the world actually works."

  He sees that his remark has not made things better. He grazes his cheek against her silky head. "I think it's cool that you know about the interior design here."