We sit down on opposite sides of a marble-slab table. As we sit Jalena wipes her arm in a semicircle over the section nearest her. Where she touches the marble is displayed at eight times the resolution and picks up some subtle points of luster that give it a much more translucent appearance. It’s quite handsome, actually, but it doesn’t match the rest of the table now.
I yell at her, “Do you mind! This is my office.”
“Excuse me, cheri.”
“And don’t call me Shirley. My name’s Ron, Ron Stevens.” God, these cybertypes get so affected!
“If I may, dear, the resolution in this environment is so low I feel like I’m on TV. Would it be okay with you if I clean up my section a little? No cost to you, of course, I’ll take this out of my resource.”
“Please … set it up as you like, and I’ll cover the resource.” I guess I am the host in this. When in Rome …
I have a good imagination; I like my cyberstuff. But when Jalena gets her side of the room “tidied up” it is truly sumptuous. I try not to show it, but she sure has made the grass greener on her side of the simulation. I’ll discreetly save a copy of it when she leaves.
As she finishes I bring up the bag animation so it hovers over the table between us. Jalena brings up some of the CAD displays of the bag. They show dimensions, internal objects, and placements of the objects.
“A natural fiber bag with metal and plastic parts in it. Whoopie-do!” I say.
“The CAD description has already been run, that’s the display you brought up. And here, I’ll turn on the materials analysis. … We’re done. We’ll know what all the contents look like and what they’re made of. What else is there to do?” I slap my hands together as if I’m shaking work dust off.
Jalena sighs slightly as if to an impatient child. “You know, cheri … Ron, there may be more to this bag than you or Jackson are giving it credit for. Look at where it was located in the tomb.” She brings up the whole tomb display. “It was here, behind this back panel. There is nothing else like it behind this panel. There are wires and racks there but no place to store anything like this bag. What does that say to you about this bag?”
“Nothing!” I admit it, I’m sulking.
“Come, come, cheri.” Jalena frowns, but in an amused way.
“Don’t call—”
“I will, if you don’t start researching. What did you want to do on this project, dear?”
“I wanted to pore over terabits of binary code. That would take some time and there was enough information there that I was sure to find something meaningful.”
“You’d find something and the results would be terribly dull. Don’t you see? What you have in this bag is an oversight. This was left behind by accident. It wasn’t meant to be left in the library.”
“So?”
“So it could be anything or it could be nothing. It could be a secret we weren’t supposed to learn or ten thousand-year-old trash. The point is, we won’t know until we research—do real research, not just take on a cryptology assignment that someone set up for us ten thousand years ago.
“And don’t think those terabits of code will last that long! They were designed to be deciphered. I would anticipate a complete code breakthrough by this afternoon. After that it becomes a matter of looking at pictures and anyone can do that.
“Wait … did you pick this bag?”
“I did, as soon as I heard of its existence.”
“Then why am I here with you?”
She smiles at me again looks me up and down. “That fine body of yours, cheri. I can’t touch the bag. You can.”