good place. From Corregidor you can shoot a line-of-sight microwave transmission across the bay to downtown Manila.'
'So you are extending the North Luzon coastal festoon from Subic Bay down to Corregidor,' she says.
'Uh-two things about what you just said,' Randy says, and pauses for a moment to get the answer queued up in his output buffer. 'One, you have to be careful about your pronouns-what do you mean when you say 'you'? I work for Epiphyte Corporation, which is designed from the ground up to work, not on its own, but as an element in a virtual corporation, kind of like-'
'I know what an epiphyte is,' she says. 'What's two?'
'Okay, good,' Randy says, a little off balance. 'Two is that the extension of the North Luzon Festoon is just the first of what we hope will be several linkups. We want to lay a lot of cable, eventually, into Corregidor.'
Some kind of machinery behind Amy's eyes begins to hum. The message is clear enough. There will be work aplenty for Semper Marine, if they handle this first job well.
'In this case, the entity that's doing the work is a joint venture including us, FiliTel, 24 Jam, and a big Nipponese electronics company, among others.'
'What does 24 Jam have to do with it? They're convenience stores.'
'They're the retail outlet-the distribution system-for Epiphyte's product.'
'And that is?'
'Pinoy-grams.' Randy manages to suppress the urge to tell her that the name is trademarked.
'Pinoy-grams?'
'Here's how it works. You are an Overseas Contract Worker. Before you leave home for Saudi or Singapore or Seattle or wherever, you buy or rent a little gizmo from us. It's about the size of a paperback book and encases a thimble-sized video camera, a tiny screen, and a lot of memory chips. The components come from all over the place-they are shipped to the free port at Subic and assembled in a Nipponese plant there. So they cost next to nothing. Anyway, you take this gizmo overseas with you. Whenever you feel like communicating with the folks at home, you turn it on, aim the camera at yourself and record a little video greeting card. It all goes onto the memory chips. It's highly compressed. Then you plug the gizmo into a phone line and let it work its magic.'
'What's the magic? It sends the video down the phone line?'
'Right.'
'Haven't people being messing around with video phones for a long time?''
'The difference here is our software. We don't try to send the video in real time-that's too expensive. We store the data at central servers, then take advantage of lulls, when traffic is low through the undersea cables, and shoot the data down those cables when time can be had cheap. Eventually the data winds up at Epiphyte's facility in Intramuros. From there we can use wireless technology to send the data to 24 Jam stores all over Metro Manila. The store just needs a little pie-plate dish on the roof, and a decoder and a regular VCR down behind the counter. The Pinoy-gram is recorded on a regular videotape. Then, when Mom comes in to buy eggs or Dad comes in to buy cigarettes, the storekeeper says, 'Hey, you got a Pinoy-gram today,' and hands them the videotape. They can take it home and get the latest news from their child overseas. When they're done, they bring the videotape back to 24 Jam for reuse.'
About halfway through this, Amy understands the basic concept, looks out the window again and begins trying to work a fragment of breakfast out of her teeth with the tip of her tongue. She does it with her mouth tastefully closed, but it seems to occupy her thoughts more than the explanation of Pinoy-grams.
Randy is gripped by a crazy, unaccountable desire not to bore Amy. It's not that he is getting a crush on her, because he puts the odds at fifty-fifty that she's a lesbian, and he knows better. She is so frank, so guileless, that he feels he could confide anything in her, as an equal.
This is why he hates business. He wants to tell everyone everything. He wants to make friends with people.
'So, let me guess,' she says, 'you are the guy doing the software.'
'Yeah,' he admits, a little defensive, 'but the software is the only interesting part of this whole project. All the rest is making license plates.''
That wakes her up a little. 'Making license plates?'
'It's an expression that my business partner and I use,' Randy says. 'With any job, there's some creative work that needs to be done-new technology to be developed or whatever. Everything else-ninety-nine percent of it- is making deals, raising capital, going to meetings, marketing and sales. We call that stuff making license plates.'
She nods, looking out the window. Randy is on the verge of telling her that Pinoy-grams are nothing more than a way to create cash flow, so that they can move on to part two of the business plan. He is sure that this would elevate his stature beyond that of dull software boy. But Amy puffs sharply across the top of her coffee, like blowing out a candle, and says, 'Okay. Thanks. I guess that was worth the three packs of cigarettes.'
Chapter 11 NIGHTMARE
Bobby Shaftoe has become a connoisseur of nightmares.
Like a fighter pilot ejecting from a burning plane, he has just been catapulted out of an old nightmare, and into a brand-new, even better one. It is creepy and understated; no giant lizards here.
It begins with heat on his face. When you take enough fuel to push a fifty-thousand-ton ship across the Pacific Ocean at twenty-five knots, and put it all in one tank and the Nips fly over and torch it all in a few seconds, while you stand close enough to see the triumphant grins on the pilots' faces, then you can feel the heat on your face in this way.
Bobby Shaftoe opens his eyes, expecting that, in so doing, he is raising the curtain on a corker of a nightmare, probably the final moments of Torpedo Bombers at Two O'Clock! (his all-time favorite) or the surprise beginning of Strafed by Yellow Men XVII.
But the sound track to this nightmare does not seem to be running. It is as quiet as an ambush. He is sitting up in a hospital bed surrounded by a firing squad of hot klieg lights that make it difficult to see anything else. Shaftoe blinks and focuses on an eddy of cigarette smoke hanging in the air, like spilled fuel oil in a tropical cove. It sure smells good.
A young man is sitting near his bed. All that Shaftoe can see of this man is an asymmetrical halo where the lights glance from the petroleum glaze on his pompadour. And the red coal of his cigarette. As he looks more carefully he can make out the silhouette of a military uniform. Not a Marine uniform. Lieutenant's bars gleam on his shoulders, light shining through double doors.
'Would you like another cigarette?' the lieutenant says. His voice is hoarse but weirdly gentle.
Shaftoe looks down at his own hand and sees the terminal half-inch of a Lucky Strike wedged between his fingers.
'Ask me a tough one,' he manages to say. His own voice is deep and skirted, like a gramophone winding down.
The butt is swapped for a new one. Shaftoe raises it to his lips. There are bandages on that arm, and underneath them, he can feel grievous wounds trying to inflict pain. But something is blocking the signals.
Ah, the morphine. It can't be too bad of a nightmare if it comes with morphine, can it?
'You ready?' the voice says. God damn it, that voice is familiar.
'Sir, ask me a tough one, sir!' Shaftoe says.
'You already said that.'
'Sir, if you ask a Marine if he wants another cigarette, or if he's ready, the answer is always the same, sir!'
'That's the spirit,' the voice says. 'Roll film.'
A clicking noise starts up in the outer darkness beyond the klieg light firmament. 'Rolling,' says a voice.
Something big descends towards Shaftoe. He flattens himself into the bed, because it looks exactly like the sinister eggs laid in midair by Nip dive-bombers. But then it stops and just hovers there.
