PUSH 50,000 U HEPARIN IV AND DO CPR WHILE COOLING WITH ICE TO 10C.KEEP PH 7.5
NO AUTOPSY OR EMBALMING
It is a recipe for freezing a dead, or nearly dead, person. People who wear this bracelet believe that, if this recipe is followed, the brain and other delicate tissues can be iced without destroying them. A few decades down the line, when nanotechnology has made it possible to be immortal, they hope to be thawed out. John Cantrell and Tom Howard believe that there is a reasonable chance that they will still be having conversations with each other a million years from now.
The room gets quiet as all of the men scan the forms, their eyes picking out certain familiar clauses. They have probably signed a hundred NDA forms between them. Around here, it is like offering someone a cup of coffee.
A woman comes into the room, burdened with tote bags, and beams an apology for being late. Beryl Hagen looks like a Norman Rockwell aunt, an apron-wearing, apple-pie-toting type. In twenty years, she's been the chief financial officer of twelve different small high-tech companies. Ten of them have gone out of business. Except in the case of the second one, this was through no fault of Beryl's. The sixth was Randy's Second Business Foray. One was absorbed by Microsoft, one became a successful, independent company in its own right. Beryl made enough money from the latter two to retire. She consults and writes while she looks for something interesting enough to draw her back into action, and her presence in this room suggests that Epiphyte(2) Corp. must not be completely bogus. Or maybe she's just being polite to Avi. Randy gives her a bearhug, lifting her off the floor, and then hands her two copies of the NDA with her name on them.
Avi has detached the screen from his big laptop and laid it flat on the surface of the overhead projector, which shines light through the liquid-crystal display and projects a color image on the whiteboard. It is a typical desktop: a couple of terminal windows and some icons. Avi goes around and picks up the signed NDAs, scans them all, hands one copy back to each person, files the rest in the outer pocket of a laptop bag. He begins to type on the laptop's keyboard, and letters spill across one of the windows. 'Just so you know,' Avi mumbles, 'Epiphyte Corp., which I'll call Epiphyte(1) for clarity, is a Delaware corporation, one and one half years old. The shareholders are myself, Randy, and Springboard Capital. We're in the telecoms business in the Philippines. I can give you details later if you want. Our work there has positioned us to be aware of some new opportunities in that part of the world. Epiphyte(2) is a California corporation, three weeks old. If things go the way we are hoping they will go, Epiphyte (1) will be folded into it according to some kind of stock transfer scheme the details of which are too boring to talk about now.
Avi hits the return key. A new window opens on the desktop. It is a color map scanned in from an atlas, tall and narrow. Most of it is oceanic blue. A rugged coastline juts in through the top border, with a few cities labeled: Nagasaki, Tokyo. Shanghai is in the upper left corner. The Philippine archipelago is dead center. Taiwan is directly north of it, and to the south is a chain of islands forming a porous barrier between Asia and a big land mass labeled with English words like Darwin and Great Sandy Desert.
'This probably looks weird to most of you,' Avi says. 'Usually these presentations begin with a diagram of a computer network, or a flowchart or something. We don't normally deal with maps. We're all so used to working in a purely abstract realm that it seems almost bizarre to go out into the real world and physically do something.
'But I like maps. I've got maps all over my house. I'm going to suggest to you that the skills and knowledge we have all been developing in our work-especially pertaining to the Internet-have applications out here.' He taps the whiteboard. 'In the real world. You know, the big round wet ball where billions of people live.'
There is a bit of polite snickering as Avi skims his hand over his computer's trackball, whacks a button with his thumb. A new image appears: the same map, with bright color lines running across the ocean, looping from one city to the next, roughly following the coastlines.
'Existing undersea cables. The fatter the line, the bigger the pipe,' Avi says. 'Now, what is wrong with this picture?'
There are several fat lines running east from places like Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Australia, presumably connecting them with the United States. Across the South China Sea, which lies between the Philippines and Vietnam, another fat line angles roughly north-south, but it doesn't connect either of those two countries: it goes straight to Hong Kong, then continues up the China coast to Shanghai, Korea, and Tokyo.
'Since the Philippines are in the center of the map,' John Cantrell says, 'I predict that you are going to point out that hardly any fat lines go to the Philippines.'
'Hardly any fat lines go to the Philippines!' Avi announces briskly. He points out the one exception, which runs from Taiwan south to northern Luzon, then skips down the coast to Corregidor. 'Except for this one, which Epiphyte(l) is involved with. But it's not just that. There is a general paucity of fat lines in a north-south direction, connecting Australia with Asia. A lot of data packets going from Sydney to Tokyo have to be routed through California. There's a market opportunity.'
Beryl breaks in. 'Avi, before you get started on this,' she says, sounding cautious and regretful, 'I have to say that laying long-distance, deep sea cables is a difficult business to break into.'
'Beryl is right!' Avi says. 'The only people who have the wherewithal to lay those cables are AT&T, Cable & Wireless, and Kokusai Denshin Denwa. It's tricky. It's expensive. It requires massive NRE.'
The abbreviation stands for 'non-recoverable expenses,' meaning engineering work to complete a feasibility study that would be money down the toilet if the idea didn't fly.
'So what are you thinking?' Beryl says.
Avi clicks up another map. This one is the same as the previous, except that new lines have been drawn in: a whole series of short island-to-island links. A bewilderingly numerous chain of short hops down the length of the Philippine archipelago.
'You want to wire the Philippines and patch them into the Net via your existing link to Taiwan,' says Tom Howard, in a heroic bid to short-circuit what he senses will be a lengthy part of Avi's presentation.
'The Philippines are going to be hot shit informationally speaking,' Avi says. 'The government has its flaws, but basically it's a democracy modeled after Western institutions. Unlike most Asians, they do ASCII. Most of them speak English. Longstanding ties to the United States. These guys are going to be big players, sooner or later, in the information economy.'
Randy breaks in. 'We've already established a foothold there. We know the local business environment. And we have cash flow.'
Avi clicks up another map. This one's harder to make out. It looks like a relief map of a vast region of high mountains interrupted by occasional plateaus. Its appearance in the middle of this presentation without any labels or explanation from Avi makes it an implicit challenge to the mental acumen of the other people in the room. None of them is going to ask for help anytime soon. Randy watches them squint and tilt their heads from side to side. Eberhard Fohr, who is good at odd puzzles, gets it first.
'Southeast Asia with the oceans drained,' he says. 'That high ridge on the right is New Guinea. Those bumps are the volcanoes of Borneo.'
'Pretty cool, huh?' Avi says. 'It's a radar map. U.S. military satellites gathered all this data. You can get it for next to nothing.'
On this map the Philippines can be understood, not as a chain of separate islands, but as the highest regions of a huge oblong plateau surrounded by deep gashes in the earth's crust. To get from Luzon up to Taiwan by going across the ocean floor you would have to plunge into a deep trench, flanked by parallel mountain ranges, and follow it northwards for about three hundred miles. But south of Luzon, in the region where Avi is proposing to lay a network of inter-island cables, it's all shallow and flat.
Avi clicks again, superimposing transparent blue over the parts that are below sea level, green on the islands. Then he zooms in on an area in the center of the map, where the Philippine plateau extends two arms southwest toward northern Borneo, embracing, and nearly enclosing, a diamond-shaped body of water, three hundred and fifty miles across. 'The Sulu Sea,' he announces. 'No relation to the token Asian on
No one laughs. They are not really here to be entertained-they are concentrating on the map. All of the different archipelagos and seas are confusing, even for smart people with good spatial relations. The Philippines form the upper right boundary of the Sulu Sea, north Borneo (part of Malaysia) the lower left, the Sulu Archipelago (part of the Philippines) the lower right, and the upper left boundary is one extremely long skinny Philippine island
