"Okay, here."
I saw Julia standing at the monitor again, with the technician beside her. "That's acceptable," onscreen Julia was saying, pointing to the image. "Not great, but acceptable. Now, show me the STM."
"The what?"
"The STM. The electron microscope. Show me the image from that."
The technician looked confused. "Uh ... Nobody told us about any electron microscope."
"For God's sake, read the damn storyboards!"
The technician blinked. "It's on the storyboards?"
"Did you look at the storyboards?"
"I'm sorry, I guess I must have missed it."
"There's no time now to be sorry. Fix it!"
"You don't have to shout."
"Yes I do! I have to shout, because I'm surrounded by idiots!" She waved her hands in the air. "I'm about to go online and talk to eleven billion dollars of venture capital in five countries and show them submicroscopic technology, except I don't have a microscope feed, so they can't see the technology!"
On the bed, Julia said, "I kind of lost it with this guy. It was so frustrating. We had a clock counting down to the satellite time, which was booked and locked. We couldn't change it. We had to make the time, and this guy was a dimbus. But eventually we got it working. Fast forward."
The screen showed a static card, which read:
A Private Demonstration of
Advanced Medical Imaging
by
Xymos Technology
Mountain View, CA
World Leader in Molecular Manufacturing
Then, on the screen, Julia appeared, standing in front of the gurney and the medical apparatus. She'd brushed her hair and tucked in her blouse.
"Hello to all of you," she said, smiling at the camera. "I'm Julia Forman of Xymos Technology, and we're about to demonstrate a revolutionary medical imaging procedure just developed here. Our subject, Peter Morris, is lying behind me on the table. In a few moments, we're going to look inside his heart and blood vessels with an ease and accuracy never before possible." She began walking around the table, talking as she went.
"Unlike cardiac catheterization, our procedure is one hundred percent safe. And unlike catheterization, we can look everywhere in the body, at every sort of vessel, no matter how large or small. We'll see inside his aorta, the largest artery of the body. But we'll also look inside the alveoli of his lungs, and the tiny capillaries of his fingertips. We can do all this because the camera we put inside his vessels is smaller than a red blood cell. Quite a bit smaller, actually. "Xymos microfabrication technology can now produce these miniaturized cameras, and produce them in quantity-cheaply, quickly. It would take a thousand of them just to make a dot the size of a pencil point. We can fabricate a kilogram of these cameras in an hour. "I'm sure you are all skeptical. We're well aware that nanotechnology has made promises it couldn't deliver. As you know, the problem has been that scientists could design molecular-scale devices, but they couldn't manufacture them. But Xymos has solved that problem."
It suddenly hit me, what she was saying. "What?" I said, sitting up in bed. "Are you kidding?" If it was true, it was an extraordinary development, a genuine technological breakthrough, and it meant-
"It's true," Julia said quietly. "We're manufacturing in Nevada." She smiled, enjoying my astonishment.
Onscreen, Julia was saying, "I have one of our Xymos cameras under the electron microscope, here"-she pointed to the screen-"so you can see it in comparison to the red blood cell alongside it."
The image changed to black-and-white. I saw a fine probe push what looked like a tiny squid into position on a titanium field. It was a bullet-nosed lump with streaming filaments at the rear. It was a tenth of the size of the red blood cell, which in the vacuum of the scanning electron microscope was a wrinkled oval, like a gray raisin.
"Our camera is one ten-billionth of an inch in length. As you see, it is shaped like a squid," Julia said. "Imaging takes place in the nose. Microtubules in the tail provide stabilization, like the tail of a kite. But they can also lash actively, and provide locomotion. Jerry, if we can turn the camera to see the nose ... Okay, there. Thank you. Now, from the front, you see that indentation in the center? That is the miniature gallium arsenide photon detector, acting as a retina, and the surrounding banded area-sort of like a radial tire-is bioluminescent, and lights the area ahead. Within the nose itself you may be able to just make out a rather complex series of twisted molecules. That is our patented ATP cascade. You can think of it as a primitive brain, which controls the behavior of the camera-very limited behavior, true, but enough for our purposes."
I heard a hiss of static, and a cough. The screen image opened a small window in the corner, and now showed Fritz Leidermeyer, in Germany. The investor shifted his enormous bulk. "I'm sorry, Ms. Forman. Tell me please where is the lens?"
"There is no lens."
"How can you have a camera with no lens?"
"I'll explain that as we go," she said.
Watching, I said, "It must be a camera obscura."
"Right," she said, nodding.
Camera obscura-Latin for "dark room"-was the oldest imaging device known. The Romans had found that if you made a small hole in the wall of a dark room, an upside-down image of the exterior appeared on the opposite wall. That was because light coming through any small aperture was focused, as if by a lens. It was the same principle as a kid's pinhole camera. It was why ever since Roman times, image-recording devices were called cameras. But in this case-