"Well, we kept the pressure on. Molecular Dynamics is breathing down our necks. We've got our fab up and running, and we've got patent applications by the truckload. But those guys at MolDyne and NanoTech can't be far behind us. A few months. Maybe six months, if we're lucky."
"So you're doing molecular assembly at the plant now?" I said.
"You got it, Jack. Full-bore molecular assembly. We have been for a few weeks now."
"I didn't know Julia was interested in that stuff." With her background in psychology, I'd always regarded Julia as a people person.
"She's taken a real interest in the technology, I can tell you. Also, they're doing a lot of programming up there, too," he said. "You know. Iterative cycles as they refine the manufacturing."
I nodded. "What kind of programming?" I said.
"Distributed processing. Multi-agent nets. That's how we keep the individual units coordinated, working together."
"This is all to make the medical camera?"
"Yes." He paused. "Among other things." He glanced at me uneasily, as if he might be breaking his confidentiality agreement.
"You don't have to say," I said.
"No, no," he said quickly. "Jeez, you and I go way back, Jack." He slapped me on the shoulder. "And you got a spouse in management. I mean, what the hell." But he still looked uneasy. His face didn't match his words. And his eyes slid away from me when he said the word "spouse."
The conversation was coming to an end, and I felt filled with tension, the kind of awkward tension when you think another guy knows something and isn't telling you-because he's embarrassed, because he doesn't know how to put it, because he doesn't want to get involved, because it's too dangerous even to mention, because he thinks it's your job to figure it out for yourself. Especially when it's something about your wife. Like she's screwing around. He's looking at you like you're the walking wounded, it's night of the living dead, but he won't tell you. In my experience, guys never tell other guys when they know something about their wives. But women always tell other women, if they know of a husband's infidelity.
That's just how it is.
But I was feeling so tense I wanted to-
"Hey, look at the time," Ricky said, giving me a big grin. "I'm late, Mary'll kill me, I've got to run. She's already annoyed because I have to spend the next few days at the fab facility. So I'll be out of town while the maid's gone ..." He shrugged. "You know how it is."
"Yeah, I do. Good luck."
"Hey, man. Take care."
We shook hands. Murmured another good-bye. Ricky rolled his cart around the corner of the aisle, and was gone.
Sometimes you can't think about painful things, you can't make your mind focus on them. Your brain just slips away, no thank you, let's change the subject. That was happening to me now. I couldn't think about Julia, so I started thinking about what Ricky had told me about their fabrication plant. And I decided it probably made sense, even though it went against the conventional wisdom about nanotechnology.
There was a long-standing fantasy among nanotechnologists that once somebody figured out how to manufacture at the atomic level, it would be like running the four-minute mile. Everybody would do it, unleashing a flood of wonderful molecular creations rolling off assembly lines all around the world. In a matter of days, human life would be changed by this marvelous new technology. As soon as somebody figured out how to do it.
But of course that would never happen. The very idea was absurd. Because in essence, molecular manufacturing wasn't so different from computer manufacturing or flow-valve manufacturing or automobile manufacturing or any other kind of manufacturing. It took a while to get it right. In fact, assembling atoms to make a new molecule was closely analogous to compiling a computer program from individual lines of code. And computer code never compiled, the first time out. The programmers always had to go back and fix the lines. And even after it was compiled, a computer program never ever worked right the first time. Or the second time. Or the hundredth time. It had to be debugged, and debugged again, and again. And again.
I always believed it would be the same with these manufactured molecules-they'd have to be debugged again and again before they worked right. And if Xymos wanted "flocks" of molecules working together, they'd also have to debug the way the molecules communicated with each other, however limited that communication was. Because once the molecules communicated, you had a primitive network. To organize it, you'd probably program a distributed net. Of the kind I had been developing at MediaTronics. So I could perfectly well imagine them doing programming along with the manufacturing. But I couldn't see Julia hanging around while they did it. The fab facility was far from the Xymos headquarters. It was literally in the middle of nowhere-out in the desert near Tonopah, Nevada. And Julia didn't like to be in the middle of nowhere. I was sitting in the pediatrician's waiting room because the baby was due for her next round of immunizations. There were four mothers in the room, bouncing sick kids on their laps while the older children played on the floor. The mothers all talked to each other and studiously ignored me.
I was getting used to this. A guy at home, a guy in a setting like the pediatrician's office, was an unusual thing. But it also meant that something was wrong. There was probably something wrong with the guy, he couldn't get a job, maybe he was fired for alcoholism or drugs, maybe he was a bum. Whatever the reason, it wasn't normal for a man to be in the pediatrician's office in the middle of the day. So the other mothers pretended I wasn't there. Except they shot me the occasional worried glance, as if I might be sneaking up on them to rape them while their backs were turned. Even the nurse, Gloria, seemed suspicious. She glanced at the baby in my arms-who wasn't crying, and was hardly sniffling. "What seems to be the problem?"