Pierce sat on the couch.
'What is your job title at Amedeo Technologies?'
'What do you mean? You know what it is.'
'I want to see if you know what it is.'
'Personal assistant to the president. Why?'
'Because I want to make sure you remember that it is personal assistant, not just assistant.'
She blinked and looked at his face for a long moment before responding.
'All right, Henry, what's wrong?'
'What's wrong is that I don't appreciate your telling Charlie Condon all about my phone number problems and what I'm trying to do about it.'
She straightened her back and looked aghast but it was a bad act.
'I didn't.'
'That's not what he said. And if you didn't tell him, how did he know everything after he talked to you?'
'Look, okay, all I told him was that you'd gotten this prostitute's old number and you were getting all kinds of calls. I had to tell him something because when he called I didn't recognize his voice and he didn't recognize mine and he said, 'Who's this?' and I kind of snapped at him because I thought he was, you know, calling for Lilly.'
'Uh-huh.'
'And I couldn't make up a lie on the spot. I'm not that good, like some people. Lying, social engineering, whatever you call it. So I told him the truth.'
Pierce almost mentioned that she was pretty good at lying about not telling Charlie at the start of the conversation but he decided not to inflame the situation.
'And that's all you told him, that I had gotten this woman's phone number? You left it at that? You didn't tell him about how you got her address for me and I went to her house?'
'No, I didn't. What's the big deal anyway? You guys are partners, I thought.'
She stood up.
'Can I please go?'
'Monica, sit down here for one more second.'
He pointed to the chair and she reluctantly sat back down.
'The big deal is that loose lips sink ships, you understand that?'
She shrugged her shoulders and wouldn't look at him. She looked down at the stack of magazines in her lap. On the cover of the top one was a photo of Clint Eastwood.
'My actions reflect on the company,' Pierce said. 'Especially right now. Even what I do in private. If what I do is misrepresented or blown out of proportion, it could seriously hurt the company. Right now our company makes zero money, Monica, and we rely on investors to support the research, to pay the rent and the salaries, everything. If investors think we're shaky, then we've got a big problem. If things about me -true or false -get to the wrong people, we could have trouble.'
'I didn't know Charlie was the wrong people,' she said in a sulking voice.
'He's not. He's the right people. That's why I don't mind what you said to him. But what I will mind is if you tell anybody else about what I am doing or what's going on with me.
Anyone, Monica. Inside or outside the company.'
He hoped she understood he was talking about Nicole and anybody else she encountered in her daily life.
'I won't. I won't tell a soul. And please don't ask me to get involved in your personal life again. I don't want to baby-sit deliveries or do anything outside of the company again.'
'Fine. I won't ask you to. It was my mistake because I didn't think this would be a problem and you told me you could use the overtime.'
'I can use the overtime but I don't like all of these complications.'
Pierce waited a moment, watching her the whole time.
'Monica, do you even know what we do at Amedeo? I mean, do you know what the project is all about?'
She shrugged.
'Sort of. I know it's about molecular computing. I've read some of the stories on the wall of fame. But the stories are very… scientific and everything's so secret that I never wanted to ask questions. I just try to do my job.'
'The project isn't secret. The processes we're inventing are. There's a difference.'
He leaned forward and tried to think of the best way to explain it to her without making it confusing or treading into protected areas. He decided to use a tack that Charlie Condon often used with potential investors who might be confused by the science. It was an explanation Charlie had come up with after talking about the project in general once with Cody Zeller. Cody loved movies. And so did Pierce, though he rarely had time to see them in theaters anymore.
'Did you ever see the movie Pulp Fiction?'
Monica narrowed her eyes and nodded suspiciously.
'Yes, but what does it -'
'Remember it's a movie about all these gangsters crossing paths and shooting people and shooting drugs, but at the heart of everything is this briefcase. And they never show what's in the briefcase but everybody sure wants it. And when somebody opens it you can't see what's in it but whatever it is glows like gold. You see that glow. And it's mesmerizing for whoever looks into the briefcase.'
'I remember.'
'Well, that's what we're after at Amedeo. We're after this thing that glows like gold but nobody can see it. We're after it -and a whole bunch of other people are after it – because we all believe it will change the world.'
He waited a moment and she just looked at him, uncomprehending.
'Right now, everywhere in the world, microprocessing chips are made of silicon. It's the standard, right?'
She shrugged again.
'Whatever.'
'What we are trying to do at Amedeo, and what they are trying to do at Bronson Tech and Midas Molecular and the dozens of other companies and universities and governments around the world we are competing with, is create a new generation of computer chips made of molecules. Build an entire computer's circuitry with only organic molecules. A computer that will one day come out of a vat of chemicals, that will assemble itself from the right recipe being put in that vat. We're talking about a computer without silicon or magnetic particles. Tremendously less expensive to build and astronomically more powerful -in which just a teaspoon of molecules could hold more memory than the biggest computer going today.'
She waited to make sure he was done.
'Wow,' she said in an unconvincing tone.
Pierce smiled at her stubbornness. He knew he had probably sounded too much like a salesman. Like Charlie Condon, to be precise. He decided to try again.
'Do you know what computer memory actually is, Monica?'
'Well, yeah, I guess.'
He could tell by her face that she was just covering. Most people in this day and age took things like computers for granted and without explanation.
'I mean how it works,' he said to her. 'It's just ones and zeros in sequence. Every piece of data, every number, every letter, has a specific sequence of ones and zeros. You string the sequences together and you have a word or a number and so on. Forty, fifty years ago it took a computer the size of this room to store basic arithmetic. And now we're down to a silicon chip.'
He held his thumb and finger up, just a half inch apart. Then he squeezed them together.
'But we can go smaller,' he said. 'A lot smaller.'
She nodded but he couldn't tell if she saw the light or was just nodding.
'Molecules,' she said.
He nodded.
'That's right, Monica. And believe me, whoever gets there first is going to change this world. It is conceivable that we could build a whole computer that is smaller than a silicon chip. Take a computer that fills a room now and
