“No. They just had patents. In Japan, patenting is a form of war. The Japanese patent like crazy. And they have a strange system. It takes eight years to get a patent in Japan, but your application is made public after eighteen months, after which royalties are moot. And of course Japan doesn’t have reciprocal licensing agreements with America. It’s one of the ways they keep their edge.
“Anyway, when I got to Japan I found Sony and Hitachi had some related patents and they had done what is called ‘patent flooding.’ Meaning they covered possible related uses. They didn’t have the rights to use my algorithms—but I discovered I didn’t have the rights, either. Because they had already patented the use of my invention.” He shrugged. “It’s complicated to explain. Anyway, that’s ancient history. By now the Japanese have devised much more complicated video software, far surpassing anything we have. They’re years ahead of us now. But we struggle along in this lab. Ah. Just the person we need. Dan. Are you busy?”
A young woman looked up from the computer console. Large eyes, horn-rim glasses, dark hair. Her face was partially blocked by the ceiling pipes.
“You’re not Dan,” Sanders said, sounding surprised. “Where’s Dan, Theresa?”
“Picking up a midterm,” Theresa said. “I’m just helping run the real-time progressions. They’re finishing now.” I had the impression that she was older than the other students. It was hard to say why, exactly. It certainly wasn’t her clothes: she wore a bright colored headband and a U2 T-shirt under a jeans jacket. But she had a calm quality that made her seem older.
“Can you switch to something else?” Sanders said, walking around the table to look at the monitor. “Because we have a rush job here. We have to help out the police.” I followed Sanders, ducking pipes.
“Sure, I guess,” the woman said. She started to shut down units on the desk. Her back was turned to me, and then finally I could see her. She was dark, exotic-looking, almost Eurasian. In fact she was beautiful, drop-dead beautiful. She looked like one of those high cheek-boned models in magazines. And for a moment I was confused, because this woman was too beautiful to be working in some basement electronics laboratory. It didn’t make sense.
“Say hello to Theresa Asakuma,” he said. “The only Japanese graduate student working here.”
“Hi,” I said. I blushed. I felt stupid. I felt that information was coming at me too fast. And all things considered, I would rather not have a Japanese handling these tapes. But her first name wasn’t Japanese, and she didn’t look Japanese, she looked Eurasian or perhaps part Japanese, so exotic, maybe she was even—
“Good morning, Lieutenant,” she said. She extended her left hand, the wrong hand, for me to shake. She held it out to me sideways, the way someone does when their right hand is injured.
I shook hands with her. “Hello, Miss Asakuma.”
“Theresa.”
“Okay.”
“Isn’t she beautiful?” Sanders said, acting as if he took credit for it. “Just beautiful.”
“Yes,” I said. “Actually, I’m surprised you’re not a model.”
There was an awkward moment. I couldn’t tell why. She turned quickly away.
“It never interested me,” she said.
And Sanders immediately jumped in and said, “Theresa, Lieutenant Smith needs us to copy some tapes. These tapes.”
Sanders held one out to her. She took it in her left hand and held it to the light. Her right hand remained bent at the elbow, pressed to her waist. Then I saw that her right arm was withered, ending in a fleshy stump protruding beyond the sleeve of her jeans jacket. It looked like the arm of a Thalidomide baby.
“Quite interesting,” she said, squinting at the tape. “Eight-millimeter high density. Maybe it’s the proprietary digital format we’ve been hearing about. The one that includes real-time image enhancement.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know,” I said. I was feeling foolish for having said anything about being a model. I dug into my box and brought out the playback machine.
Theresa immediately took a screwdriver and removed the top. She bent over the innards. I saw a green circuit board, a black motor, and three small crystal cylinders. “Yes. It’s the new setup. Very slick. Dr. Sanders, look: they’re doing it with just three heads. The board must generate component RGB, because over here—you think this is compression circuitry?”
“Probably digital to analog converter,” Sanders said. “Very neat. So small.” He turned to me, holding up the box. “You know how the Japanese can make things this way and we can’t? They kaizen ‘em. A process of deliberate, patient, continual refinements. Each year the products get a little better, a little smaller, a little cheaper. Americans don’t think that way. Americans are always looking for the quantum leap, the big advance forward. Americans try to hit a home run—to knock it out of the park—and then sit back. The Japanese just hit singles all day long, and they never sit back. So with something like this, you’re looking at an expression of philosophy as much as anything.”
He talked like this for a while, pivoting the cylinders, admiring it. Finally I said, “Can you copy the tapes?”
“Sure,” Theresa said. “From the converter, we can run a signal out of this machine and lay it down on whatever media you like. You want three-quarter? Optical master? VHS?”
“VHS,” I said.
“That’s easy,” she said.
“But will it be an accurate copy? The people at JPL said they couldn’t guarantee the copy would be accurate.”
“Oh, hell, JPL,” Sanders said. “They just talk like that because they work for the government. We get things done here. Right Theresa?”
But Theresa wasn’t listening. I watched her plugging cables and wires, moving swiftly with her good hand, using her stump to stabilize and hold the box. Like many disabled people, her movements were so fluid it was hardly noticeable that her right hand was missing. Soon she had the small playback machine hooked to a second recorder, and several different monitors.
“What’re all these?”
“To check the signal.”
“You mean for playback?”
“No. The big monitor there will show the image. The others let me look at the signal characteristics, and the data map: how the image has been laid down on the tape.”
I said, “You need to do that?”
“No. I just want to snoop. I’m curious about how they’ve set up this high-density format.”
Sanders said to me, “What is the actual source material?”
“It’s from an office security camera.”
“And this tape is original?”
“I think so. Why?”
“Well, if it’s original material we want to be extra careful with it,” Sanders said. He was talking to Theresa, instructing her. “We don’t want to set up any feedback loops scrambling the media surface. Or signal leaks off the heads that will compromise the integrity of the data stream.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I got it handled.” She pointed to her setup. “See that? It’ll warn of an impedance shift. And I’m monitoring the central processor too.”
“Okay,” Sanders said. He was beaming like a proud parent.
“How long will this take?” I said.
“Not long. We can lay down the signal at very high speed. The rate limit is a function of the playback device, and it seems to have a fast-forward scan. So, maybe two or three minutes per tape.”
I glanced at my watch. “I have a ten-thirty appointment I can’t be late for, and I don’t want to leave these…”
“You need all of them done?”
“Actually, just five are critical.”
“Then let’s do those first.”
We ran the first few seconds of each tape, one after another, looking for the five that came from the cameras on the forty-sixth floor. As each tape started, I saw the camera image on the central monitor of Theresa’s table. On the side monitors, signal traces bounced and jiggled like an intensive care unit. I mentioned it.