I carefully shook it again and listened. "Tam, there's something in here."
Which is what we did. No harm, right? I mean, the darned thing was just lying there. No "break and entry."
Guess what was inside. Not paper. Not a MITI report. Not lunch. Nothing in fact except for a shiny little compact disk, a CD.
"What the hell is this doing in here? Did she bring along some Beach Boys?"
"Matt, that's an optical disk, a CD-ROM." She suddenly seemed very pleased.
"Compact disk, read-only memory. Except this one looks to be erasable and writable. This is the latest thing in computer storage technology." She held it up to the light, which reflected a rainbow of colors off its iridescent surface. "Maybe we've found what we came for. Let's take it and go."
"Is this like the CDs in record stores? The ones you play back using some kind of laser gizmo?"
"Same technology, only this is for text and data, not music. These can hold five-hundred megabytes, about one hundred and fifty thousand pages."
"Then I have some disquieting information to impart. I saw somebody come in here one day after shopping at Tower Records, and a CD he'd bought tripped the metal detector out there in Yamada's anteroom like he was wearing sleigh bells. Down inside this shiny plastic must be aluminum or something. We can't take it out." I turned it in my hand. "And besides, what would we do with it anyway? Stick it in a Walkman and listen to all the little digits spin by? In hi-fi?"
"I've got a reader at home . . . but wait, there's a better way." She lifted it from my grasp and headed out onto the floor. "Ever hear of computer crime?"
"Good. Then what you're about to witness won't shock you."
I watched as she kicked on one of the NEC desk stations and loaded in a program. Next she walked over, flipped a switch on a little box, and a drawer glided out. In went Mori's shiny disk. Another button was pushed, the drawer receded, and the disk was spinning silently.
Well, I thought. You want peaches, you shake the tree, right? Maybe she's about to kick hell out of the orchard.
"I'm going to dump this into the memory of the mother ship downstairs." She did some fiddling, then typed in her password to sign on the mainframe on eleven. "Beam us down, Scottie." In moments she and all those silicon cells below us were beeping away at each other. She didn't look up, just kept typing away, the hollow click-clack that's become the signature sound of our computer age. Finally she leaned back and breathed. "Okay, it's reading the disk. After it's in memory down there, we can pull up the contents here on the screen and see what we've got."