Disclosure_ A Novel - Michael Crichton [46]
“Where is everybody?” he asked.
“Oh, they left about fifteen minutes ago,” she said.
“Fifteen minutes ago? When did they start?”
“The meeting started at eight.”
“Eight?” Sanders said. “I thought it was supposed to be eight-thirty.”
“No, the meeting started at eight.”
Damn.
“Where are they now?”
“Meredith took everybody down to VIE, to demo the Corridor.”
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 is fantastic.”
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 a great selling 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