A World Without Secrets (20 page)

"Simply because you can't crease it?"

"No, that's only a miniscule part of its value. But rather than me telling you about it, why don't you tell me what you surmise."

"I can't tell you anything until I can hold it," he said, scowling.

"Okay, here," I said as I placed it into his grasping fingers.

Morris took the sheet over to a workbench where he turned on a light so excessively bright I had to turn away for a second until I got used to it. He ran his fingers over the surface of the gizmo for several minutes, feeling for either imperfections or creases, then folded it repeatedly and allowed it to open again. "There's not a sign of a crease," he said as he held it up to the brightest light in the lab to see how much light passed through. "And it's
totally
opaque," he said. "It might as well be made of tin. It's incredible," he said as he shook his head gently. "What else does it do?"

"You tell me."

"I'll have to examine it."

"Then examine it. Just don't damage it."

"I'll have to cut a small sliver off the edge for the test that determines composition."

"No slivers. I said no damage."

"I can't do a proper test if you're going to hamstring me."

"No damage!" I said loudly and forcefully. Taking the gizmo from his hand, I said, "Forget it, Morris. I'm sorry I bothered you."

As I began to fold the gizmo so I could store in the matchbox, Morris said, "Okay, Colt. No damage. I promise."

I looked at Morris for a couple of seconds, then unfolded the paper and held it out. "If you damage it, I'll shoot you."

Morris scowled and sighed, then carried the paper to another workbench. Removing a large magnifying glass from a desk drawer, he bent over to examine the paper under another bright bench light.

"What the hell?" he suddenly said to himself.

"What is it?"

"I must be imagining things. Let me look at it under the microscope."

Morris slid the paper onto the stage of a compound microscope and aimed the light to shine down at the paper. He twisted the revolving nosepiece or turret that held the objective lenses until he got the magnification power he wanted, then put his face to the two eyepieces. He made no sounds for several seconds as he adjusted the focus, then said, "What the f—." He stopped and changed the magnification and stuck his face up against the microscope eyepieces again. As he slid the paper around the stage slowly, I could tell he was getting more and more excited. After changing the magnification to the highest setting and then staring through the eyepieces again as he shifted the paper, he quickly uttered, "Holyshit, holyshit, holyshit." Morris pulled away from the microscope to turn and face me. "Okay, level with me. Where did you get this?"

"It's need-to-know."

"What?"

"It's need-to-know business, and you don't need to know."

"I need to know if you want answers to your questions."

"You don't need to know where I got it to evaluate it. Just tell me what you can deduce."

"All I can state with absolute certainty so far is that you have a piece of paper that isn't made from the ordinary wood and cloth fibers normally used to create paper. And since nobody is going to spend millions of dollars to develop ordinary paper that removes creases, there must be another purpose."

"And what do you think that other purpose might be?"

"Well— back around 1955, a researcher named Jim White at DuPont noticed some strange polyethylene fluff coming out of a pipe in an experimental lab. The company began working with the material, and around ten years later they trademarked the name Tyvek as they began to market it."

"Yeah, I'm familiar with it. It's used for shipping envelopes and construction products because of its impermeability and strength."

"Yeah, that's right. It has all sorts of uses. A couple of countries even used it to make currency for a while, but it's certainly not creaseless. Anyway, imagine if you took a sheet of something like Tyvek and covered it with flexible microdots that could heal creases, then added all the nanocircuits you could fit on the paper, each of which could perform thousands, or even millions, of calculations per second. Can you imagine what you'd have? A flexible, paper-thin computer made with trillions of nanocircuits. Maybe even trillions of trillions of nanocircuits."

"So you're saying that this might be a supercomputer?"

"More than a supercomputer. From what I saw under the microscope, this could be the most powerful computer ever built. It could reduce a supercomputer to the equivalent of an abacus in a comparison of capability. And it's in a completely portable form that you can fold up and put in your pocket. If it works, all you need is an interface device, like a keyboard, or perhaps just a VRT and a monitor."

"VRT? You mean Voice Recognition Technology?"

"Yeah. With the right instruction set, the world's most powerful computer would be able to understand English as well as you or me. Perhaps it would understand every language ever spoken or written."

I nodded slowly as I thought about the gizmo's capabilities. It made sense that it would take a super powerful computer to do those things. But I still had no idea
how
it did them. There had been a lot of talk and speculation about nanoscience and nanoelectronics during the past decade. Recently, scientists had been speculating about nanobots that could be injected into a person's bloodstream to seek out and find dangerous organisms or cells like cancer and destroy them. It was an exciting time for scientists working in that field, and it appeared that someone had made a significant breakthrough.

Like many of his co-workers, Morris thought of himself as smarter than most other people on the planet simply by virtue of his job title. He was a
scientist
, after all, and looked down on others not in his field. In the reception area, Morris had told the security guard that I was
just
an IT guy. But I had a BS in Computer Science, and I wasn't a dummy in anyone's eyes except people like Morris.

"You don't look surprised," Morris said. "What are you holding back?"

When I didn't answer, Morris said, "Come on, Colt. Give."

"Who do you think made it?" I asked.

"I have a few ideas, but I'm not sharing if you won't." Morris turned, walked over to his desk, and sat down.

I took a deep breath and released it slowly. I didn't want to tell Morris, but I needed more information, and if I didn't share a little of what I knew he wouldn't say another word about his speculations. I'd already shown him the device, and I hadn't wanted to trust another person with even that basic information.

"Okay, I'll show you what I've learned," I said. "But before I do, I want you to swear you'll never tell another living soul. I'm serious about this. It could mean your life and mine. I haven't told
anyone
else in the world about this."

"Stop grandstanding," Morris said as he came back over to the workbench. "I know how important this issue is."

"Okay. Watch."

I removed the paper from the microscope and carried it to the nearest wall. Morris followed along behind me eagerly and watched with curiosity as I placed the paper against the wall and then removed my hand.

"Yeah. So what?" he said, as he stood at my side. "It sticks to the wall. I can buy a hundred balloons for a dollar that will do that trick."

I had preset the gizmo before I left the house in case I had to demonstrate it. I touched the spot that turned on the gizmo and an image of the Statue of Liberty appeared. Morris jumped back at least two feet and backpedaled a bit more before falling to the floor, just as I had when I first experienced the effect.

"It's a viewer," I said nonchalantly.

"A viewer?" Morris echoed as he stood up and moved back to a position next to me. He was as breathless as I had been the first time. "What's its power source?"

"You tell me."

Morris placed his hand against it. "It's not hot. The flow of electrons always generate heat. All supercomputers generate massive amounts of heat. How can it not do that?"

"You tell me."

"Well, the size of the nanocircuits helps substantially. The less distance electrons have to travel, the less heat that's generated. But 'no heat' is virtually impossible— unless the heat is somehow recovered and used to further power the viewer."

"You mean as in a perpetual motion machine."

"That same principle, yes. And if the energy requirements to begin the process are miniscule, I suppose the power could come from the light in the room."

"You mean like solar energy?"

"Sort of. It's incredibly less powerful, of course. We also have to consider EM fields as an initial energy source. We're all constantly bombarded by electromagnetic radiation these days. I'm sure you've heard of the possible danger from constant cell phone usage."

"I thought that was all debunked."

"The jury is still out on that one. The telecom companies all say no danger, while doctors and unbiased researchers have differing opinions that say there are some health risks even if the phones don't cause cancer. Uh, what does it view?"

"Anything you want. Keep watching."

I took Morris on an excursion of New York harbor as if we were on a tour boat, but several times I stopped and performed a quick three-hundred-sixty-degree turn to show this wasn't a pre-recorded event. However, I don't think he really bought the fact that it was live until I provided irrefutable evidence. Withdrawing a piece of paper from my pocket on which I'd earlier written down the GPS coordinates of the lab, I brought up the keypad and entered the numbers as Morris looked on. The exterior of the building suddenly jumped into focus. Months of experimentation with the gizmo had made me an expert of sorts, and I slowly moved the image into the building, right past Gus the guard, and down the corridor we followed to get to the lab, all without entering a single security password. I stopped when an interior view of the lab where we were standing filled the screen. I positioned the event window behind us, looking at our backs.

Morris had been genuinely intrigued by the image and justifiably excited until he realized the image of him on the gizmo was a live picture. Up to that point, he might have thought I had secreted a tiny video camera on my person and was playing back a recording I made as we entered, although he should have realized that I was behind him the whole time as we walked to the lab and that he would have been in every frame. He turned to see the camera, but when he saw nothing, a wild-eyed look came over his face, and he started hyperventilating. His body was shaking as if he were cold.

I grabbed him and shook him to get his attention. "Morris, get a grip," I said loudly. "Breathe slow and easy."

He looked at me and nodded, but it was a couple of minutes before his breathing stabilized and his lower lip stopped trembling. And he was still far from being calm and composed when he walked towards where the event window was positioned. He waved his arms gently as he drew closer, passed through it, and then slowly returned. When he estimated that he was just behind the window, he waved his arms up and down and from side to side for a full minute before returning to where I was standing.

"Incredible," he said as he stared at the gizmo. "I couldn't hear or feel a thing. No one would ever know the camera was there."

"I think of it more as an event window than a camera," I said.

"An event window? Yes, perhaps that's more apropos." Turning very serious he added, "Now level with me. You found this in a government lab, didn't you?"

"Did I?"

"Who else would have something like this? It has to be some special project the government is working on. It might even be alien technology from a crashed UFO. My God," Morris said, getting more excited by the second as he speculated about possible uses, "can you imagine a spacecraft where the interior surface is covered with this technology— no more clunky instrumentation taking up every square inch of usable space? They line the interior with these nanoboards and the rest of the space is usable for living area, food storage, and oxygen regeneration."

"Take it easy, Morris. I don't think we're ready to head for Alpha Centauri just yet."

Morris stared at me for a second as he reoriented his thinking. "Level with me, Colt. You stole this from a government research lab, didn't you?"

"I've never stolen anything from the government or anyone," I said. "I've never even cheated on my income taxes."

"Then where did you get it? Who made it?"

"I was hoping you could tell me who made it."

"As far as I know, technology like this is still only being
dreamed
about. Oh sure, scientists have been working in nanotechnology for years, but comparing the current state of the art to this is like comparing the Wright Brothers' first paper-kite plane to a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. The basic principles of flight that apply to each might be the same, but the level of technology isn't even close."

"I can't tell you any more than I already have. I was hoping
you
might be able to give me clue as to its origins. Apparently not."

As I took the gizmo from the wall, Morris became noticeably agitated.

"Look Colt, leave it with me for a few weeks, and I'll devote every minute to it that I can. I have access to an electron microscope in the city. I'll examine every last nanometer of the gizmo. If there's any clue to its origin on the device, I promise I'll find it. Believe me, I want to know as badly as you do. If there's somebody out there who can produce this kind of board, there's millions to be made. I'll mortgage my house and buy every share of stock I can get."

"Careful, Morris, that might be called insider trading," I said jokingly. But Morris wasn't in a joking mode.

"What inside? I'm not inside anything. It's called careful analysis of available technology and economic feasibility, then gambling on the outcome. That's what buying stock is all about."

"Sorry, Morris, I can't leave it."

"Two weeks then."

"No."

"One week."

"Nope," I said as I finished folding the gizmo and putting it into the matchbox."