‘Mr Ma, I hope that our product will not only impress you, but will indeed far exceed any preconceptions you may have been harbouring about it.’ She spoke quickly but smoothly, and her words were backed by a slick confidence and a depth of conviction that seemed to radiate energetically from her small frame. ‘As my colleague has just informed you, we have been researching dreams, and most especially the phenomenon of lucid dreaming – that is, where the dreamer is aware that he or she is in fact dreaming, and can control his or her actions in the dream. In conjunction with this research we have, as also previously mentioned, been researching the myriad possibilities inherent in the DNI field. Also, another thing we’ve been working extremely hard on since the nineties is the field of nanotechnology. Now, almost two decades after we began, we’ve managed to finally combine our findings in all three of these areas and develop a product. A revolutionary product, in every sense of the word, sir. To put it plainly, we’ve made a breakthrough. An incredible, game-changing breakthrough.’
‘And what might this product be, Ms Fang?’ Mr Wang asked.
Ms Fang smiled, exuding confidence and pride.
‘What we’re proposing is going to totally rewrite the way people connect with technology and each other. We’ve found a way to induce a semi-conscious, lucid dream state at will. We have—’
Mr Wang raised a sceptical eyebrow and interrupted her.
‘Wait a second – you’ve basically made it easier for people to have lucid dreams? Forgive me if I fail to see the significance of this in relation to current sales patterns and demand trends in mobile technology markets.’
‘With all due respect sir, you didn’t allow me to finish. Let me show you.’ She picked up the little glass vial with its chrome capsules. ‘The working title for the product, which is contained in one of these capsules, and I’m going to use the English name for this, is “D-Immz”, a slang term which we hope will catch on in the global canon of the English language. The name is a direct reference to what we like to call our “dream immersion experience”. You can explain to Mr Ma, that if you translate that phrase into English, it sounds—’
‘Mr Ma does understand more than a few words of English,’ Mr Wang responded dryly.
‘My apologies,’ Ms Fang said, looking uncharacteristically flustered.
‘Don’t waste your time and mine with empty apologies, Ms Fang. Please, continue.’
She nodded and continued, instantly regaining her cool and efficient slickness as if she had never stumbled at all.
‘If you’ll all have a look at the holographic projection, I can explain how the product works via this short presentation.’
Everyone focused on the hologram. Ms Fang clicked a button on the remote control and the holographic projection began to move, as an animation showed the capsule being swallowed by the transparent human head. The camera then zoomed out and revealed the entirety of the subject’s body, showing the passage of the capsule as it travelled toward the stomach.
‘The major current limitation with DNI technology, in terms of a mass commercial application, is that you need to physically get inside the skull and wire a computer chip to an area of the subject’s brain. This of course requires expensive and invasive brain surgery – which is simply not an option the casual consumer would even begin to consider. The costs would be astronomical, and of course the thought of having one’s skull cut open and then having surgery performed on your body’s most vital organ is enough to put most people off. This is why it has only seen development in what we would consider extreme and essential cases – massively damaged accident victims, people suffering from debilitating diseases or syndromes, and other such cases. We, however, have found a way to access and get a chip inside and attached to the human brain without invasive surgery.’
In the holographic animation, the pill was in the process of being digested inside the subject’s stomach. Inside the pill were three tiny, insect-like robots.
‘This is where the nanotechnology aspect comes in. The field of nanotechnology has also had a large focus on medical applications – nanobots designed to kill cancer cells, to clean arteries from the inside, to fight viruses, and to combat cellular degeneration, among other things. What we have done is to combine nanotechnology with DNI; inside this pill are three nanobots. Each is programmed to make its way to a specific area of the brain. They travel via the blood vessels, through which they swim with the flow of blood. Once there, each nanobot will attach the computer chip necessary for DNI to the required area of the brain; specifically, those areas that our research has shown are behind the phenomenon of lucid dreaming.’
Mr Ma held up his hand to temporarily halt Ms Fang’s presentation, and he spoke a few words in sign language, which Mr Wang translated.
‘Mr Ma is impressed with all this, but he cannot yet understand how this could become a commercial hit on the global stage.’
Ms Fang pressed a button, and the hologram zoomed in on the nanobots, which had now attached themselves to the prescribed sectors of the subject’s brain.
‘Allow me to finish please, sir. Inside the nanobots are microscopic wifi, RAM and processor chips. Using the human body itself as both a battery and an aerial simultaneously, the areas of the brain which control lucid dreaming can now also be connected to a computer network. Any kind of computer network … including a social network.’
Ms Fang paused for a few moments to allow this information to sink in. Mr Wang stared intently at her and spoke in a slow and deliberate tone as he did.
‘Are you saying that you can get Facebook, Twitter, Instagram … all of these social networks directly inside your mind?!’
Ms Fang allowed herself a
