Trading Reality (12 page)

I didn’t understand any of that. A salesman then.

‘But I found IBM stultifying. I could see which direction the company was going, so I went to B-school. Harvard.’ A pause for the impact of this to sink in. ‘My goal was always to become an entrepreneur. So, when I left Harvard, and I saw the opportunity to join FairSystems, I jumped at it. I’m a natural entrepreneur, a money-maker. Richard and I made a good team. There’s no doubt that he’ll be badly missed, but I can take this firm a long way.’

Rachel blew smoke towards the ceiling. David and I turned towards her. She looked impassively back.

‘Any more questions?’ David asked, hopeful for a chance to explain his talents further.

‘No, thank you. That was very helpful,’ I said. ‘Do you have a hard copy of the presentation?’

‘Here you are.’ David pushed one over to me. ‘Now, perhaps I can show you the factory?’ David gestured towards the door, and Rachel got up to leave.

The computer world is not the only one with slick salesmen. We have them in the bond markets, too. I did not want my view of FairSystems to be entirely determined by David Baker.

‘Just a moment,’ I said. ‘I wonder if it would be possible to talk to Rachel? Perhaps she could show me round.’

David frowned. ‘Rachel’s our top technical person. She’s very busy right now. Right, Rachel?’

We both turned to Rachel.

She paused for a moment and looked me over. Through her round glasses she had deep, brown, intelligent eyes. She was making some sort of assessment of me, and it made me uncomfortable that I had no idea what it was.

Finally, she sat down and said, ‘No, that’s all right, David. I’d be happy to talk to Mark.’

We both turned to look at David. He paused, couldn’t immediately think of any way of keeping me in his grasp for the afternoon, and reluctantly gave up. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Drop by when you’ve finished, won’t you, Mark?’ He smiled and left the room.

Rachel stubbed out her cigarette. She was sitting upright in her chair, poised but relaxed. ‘What can I tell you?’

I guessed she was about my age, but I felt very little empathy with her. Like David, I was clean-cut in my City suit; she was wearing a baggy grey jumper over black leggings. She wore no make-up and her hair kept drifting in front of her eyes. I had been told that she had a great technical brain, and, looking at those eyes, I could believe that she was frighteningly clever. I was scared of asking her any questions about FairSystems because of the inevitability of them seeming stupid.

I pulled myself together.

‘An impressive presentation,’ I said.

‘Ah ha. David’s a good salesman,’ said Rachel.

She paused. It looked as if she wanted to say more. I waited. She lit another cigarette, took an initial puff and blew smoke towards the ceiling in the same dismissive way she had done during David’s presentation. ‘It’s a shame he can’t program a calculator. Let alone a computer.’

I leaned over the table. ‘Well, I can’t program a computer either,’ I said slowly but firmly, ‘but I am very interested in FairSystems and its future, and I pick things up quickly. So tell me about the company.’

Rachel grinned. It was a surprisingly wide, warm smile, but in a moment it was gone. ‘Sorry. He gets up my nose sometimes. It’s not his fault. We’re just different people. Do you want to have a look around?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘I’ll show you the assembly areas first. We buy in most of our components. What we do here is put them all together to build a system to our design and specification.’

We went downstairs and into the large area I had noticed before. There was no obvious production line as such. FairSystems was not yet at the stage of mass-producing machines. To the untutored eye, the production floor seemed to consist of groups of young men, and some young women, strolling around, fiddling with the bits and pieces strewn all over the place. Rachel sorted out the areas of activity for me. The first section was where circuit boards were assembled. They were fascinating, each one a tiny, bustling city of roads, bridges and buildings on a bright green field. Most of the power lay not in the boards, but in the little integrated circuits, or ‘chips’ – thin wafers of silicon, some containing millions of transistors, more computing power than had sent man to the moon.

Next to it was a section where the headsets were put together from miniature circuit boards and tiny liquid crystal displays. Then came the assembly of the computers themselves, and finally a complicated array of testing equipment to make sure the whole thing worked. There was no noise of working machinery, just the ubiquitous babble of a radio.

I met the production manager, Jock, a forty-year-old who looked as though he had been on some factory floors in his time. He seemed intelligent and capable.

‘One good thing about being located in Glenrothes is that we can get some excellent people,’ said Rachel. ‘There are whole families who work in the electronics industry, and the recession brought some very good people on to the market. They’re reliable and they work hard.

‘Take a look at this,’ she continued. She pointed to a cluster of electronic equipment: an ordinary-looking computer, a terminal, a headset not much bigger than a pair of sunglasses, an electronic glove and a mouse. Everything had the orange FairSystems logo stamped on it.

‘This is our current system. As you can see, many of the components are made by other people.’ She tapped the grey plastic casing of the computer. ‘This is just a standard IBM PC. It takes the messages it receives from the headset, the glove and the mouse, does all the millions of calculations necessary to create a virtual world, and transmits the results back to the devices. And it has to make these calculations twenty times per second.’

‘That sounds like a lot of number crunching.’ I picked up the headset. It was the same model I had used for Bondscape, and weighed only a few ounces.

‘That’s our own design,’ said Rachel. ‘We call it “Virtual Glasses”. But once again it’s made up of components from other manufacturers. The liquid crystal displays, which generate the images in each eye, are made by Horiguchi Electronics in Japan. The sound system is from Crystal River of California, and this,’ she pointed to a small black plastic cube embedded in the headset, ‘this is a head tracking system, which monitors where the user is looking. It’s made by a company called Polhemus, from Vermont.’

She then showed me the electronic glove, and a ‘3–D mouse’, which was not a particularly lifelike model rodent, but a small plastic gizmo that fitted comfortably in a hand, and could be used to point things out in the virtual world.

‘Now, let me take you up to Software.’

On the way to the stairs we passed a door that opened into a kitchen. Three or four people sat round the table in the centre of the room chatting while they ate burgers out of polystyrene containers. What really impressed me, though, was the row of fancy vending machines. They sold drinks of all types, hot and cold, chocolate, crisps and chips, and even hot-dogs and burgers.

Rachel saw me pause. ‘A dietician would have a heart attack over some of the people here. This is the fuel that keeps them going all night. Personally, I think it’s all crap,’ she said wrinkling her nose.

‘So what keeps you going all night?’ I asked.

Rachel gave me a look that suggested I was crazy, or a pervert, or both, and climbed the stairs.

Software turned out to be a room about half the size of the production floor, but it looked very different. There were about fifteen smooth black desks, each manned by a programmer with his computer. So much for the paperless office – it was everywhere: printouts, newspapers, food wrappers, cuttings, photographs, and dozens of little yellow stickers. But each programmer ignored the paper around him, and stared at his screen in total concentration. The effect was spoiled by a group at one end of the room who were laughing loudly as they tried to hit a cup, perched on a filing cabinet, with a frisbee.

‘What are they doing?’ I asked as innocently as I could.

‘Uh, it’s a wee bit difficult to explain,’ said Rachel, embarrassed

One of them saw my suit and the game stopped.

I looked round the room. I suppose I’d expected rows of regulation nerds, stunted twenty-two-year-olds with acne, glasses and greasy hair. Well, there were some of these, but what struck me was the diversity of people. Most were in their twenties, but there were a couple of schoolmasterly types in their forties. There were two or three Asians. Some wore T-shirts and jeans, but others wore ties and hung jackets on the backs of their chairs. There were no women. The overall atmosphere was relaxed, and with the exception of the frisbee throwers, hard-working.

On the far wall was a window. It was about six-feet square, and blue and white curtains hung on either side. Through it I could see a wild moorland, with dark mountains rising up in the distance. Sheep grazed in the foreground.

‘Nice view,’ I said.

‘Good, isn’t it?’ Rachel said. ‘It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes. It’s a screen left over from a demo we did a year ago. They change the scenery every week. I think that’s the Isle of Skye. You’ve got to admit, it looks better than what ever is really on the other side of that wall.’

She turned back to face the room. ‘This is where FairSystems’ real strengths lie,’ she said, a touch of pride creeping into her voice. ‘Creating a virtual world requires a number of steps. First, you describe the shape of an object, such as a chair, in terms of mathematical formulae and coordinates. Then you add textures to the image, such as fabric, leather or wood. But then you need software to calculate what the chair will look like when either it, or the viewer moves; this is the essence of virtual reality. We’ve developed our own simulation manager that does this, and does this very well. It’s called FairSim 1.

‘As you can imagine, virtual reality uses up an awful lot of computer processing power. Whenever we want to try something new, it’s always lack of computer power that stops us. There is a whole range of trade-offs a programmer has to make when he is designing a world. He can recalculate the world thirty times a second, which will give the appearance of motion as smooth as television, or he can give his virtual objects realistic textures, or accurate light shading, or precise shapes, or realistic three-dimensional sound, or he can provide a wide field of vision for the user. But he can’t do all this all at once. FairSim 1 makes intelligent choices amongst these trade-offs in real time as the system is running. It makes the most of whatever computer power is available to it. It’s quite simply the best package in the world.’

Rachel made the last statement matter-of-factly, with no hint of arrogance. She obviously believed it.

She caught the eye of one member of the group which had been throwing the frisbee. He stood up and came over to us. He was tall and very thin, and he walked fast. He had long dark hair, and wore black jeans and T-shirt.

‘This is Keith Newall, our chief chip designer. Keith, this is Mark, Richard’s brother.’

‘Good to meet you. Man, I’m sorry about Richard.’

I smiled.

‘Keith used to work for Motorola in California. That’s why he talks funny. But don’t let it deceive you. He comes from Kirkcaldy.’

‘Thank you for that introduction, Rachel,’ said Keith, speaking rapidly, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. He had a barely distinguishable Scottish accent; like David Baker’s, it was tinged with American. ‘Sorry about the frisbee. That’s Matt Gregory, Chief Executive Officer of Chips with Everything.’ He pointed to a young man with a sparsely furry face, twiddling the offending frisbee round his finger. ‘He likes to play when he comes here. But don’t worry, he won’t hurt you. He’s afraid of suits.’ This all came out in a breathless rush.

‘Have you told him about FairRender?’ he asked Rachel.

‘Go ahead,’ she said.

‘We’ve just completed a new graphics chip for our next generation of machines. It’s very exciting. Let me show you.’ He led me over to a large computer screen, plastered with yellow sticky bits of paper. He sat down and clicked his mouse button rapidly. He whisked me through a series of highly complex drawings so fast that it looked like an early animated film. All the while, he was talking about z-buffers, cache-based texture processing, massive parallelism, and Gouraud-shaded polygons, plus a lot else. He gave one final click of the mouse, lent back in his chair, looked up at me and said, ‘So, what do you think?’

I thought a bit, nodded, and said, ‘Very nice.’

‘What do you mean, “very nice”?’ exclaimed Keith. ‘This is fucking brilliant!’

Rachel laughed. ‘Actually, it is quite good. This wee chip represents a totally new way of generating the images you need for virtual reality. It’s much better than any of the competition. At the moment, generating a virtual image requires huge amounts of data to be stored in the computer’s memory whilst it’s doing its calculations. This slows things down. With Fair-Render we can perform all the calculations directly on the chip without storing data in memory.’

‘So?’

‘So, we’ll be able to create virtual images many times faster than anyone else. And we have the patent to the process.’

‘That,’ I said, smiling at Keith, ‘is fucking brilliant.’

‘Now, let’s look at what we do with all this stuff,’ said Rachel.

She led me over to a big man with a tangled black beard, his gut covered by a white T-shirt declaring ‘Fm lost in the Myst’. God knows what that meant.

‘Hi Terry,’ she said.

Terry looked up. ‘Now then, Rachel. How’s things?’ He had a broad Yorkshire accent.

Rachel turned to me. ‘Terry’s working on a project with one of America’s leading retailers. Look.’

I looked over Terry’s shoulder. The screen was filled with an image of the fashion department of a clothes store. Terry pressed some keys, and a slinky black evening dress was highlighted. ‘This one costs five thousand quid. Want to try it on, Rachel?’ asked Terry.