and looked wearily at him. He was a perfect example of why she was worried right now. DuBois had done good research, she had to admit that. He’d tied together disparate groups in his field, resolved hanging questions, and written a rigorous study to which there was not yet any rebuttal.
It wasn’t the quality of his work or ideas that had sunk him. Rather, it was someone who didn’t want their profits to suffer and who could pay to make sure that wouldn’t happen. If DuBois, with a full slate of researchers and the backing of American University, hadn’t managed to get past them, what hope did PIVOT have?
The door banged open and she heard Jacob and Nick talking excitedly to one another as they came down the hall. A quick glance showed that DuBois had not even stirred, and Amber shrugged before she headed to the kitchenette to see what was going on.
“So?” She was surprised to see the happy looks on their faces.
“He wants to do it,” Jacob reported.
“He’s talking to his wife,” Nick tempered.
Jacob rolled his eyes. “This guy? He’s not all salesman, turns out. He tried un-selling the thing once we’d already made the sale.”
Amber’s eyebrows raised and her mouth twitched when Nick gave a soft moan and put his head in his hands. She’d seen many arguments between these two over the years, during which they went round and round with increasingly implausible suggestions of each other’s parentage and what the other one could consider doing with a cactus, and the theater of it never got old. Now, she pulled a chair out and leaned back to watch.
“You didn’t meet this guy,” Nick told Amber. “He eats lobbyists for breakfast. He doesn’t want to be oversold, and we’ve never had a coma patient in one of these. I gave him the facts, which”—he held a threatening finger up to stave off Jacob’s protest—“ended up getting us the contract. He liked that we weren’t selling him some pie in the sky dream.”
Jacob rolled his eyes. “It will work,” he said to no one in particular. “I don’t know why everyone is so worried. It will work, and the sooner we get it on the market, the better.” He shook his head and wandered into the lab, muttering something about upgrades.
His companions exchanged a glance.
“I didn’t expect to be the voice of reason,” Nick admitted. He lowered his voice slightly. “Buuuut let’s say Jacob oversold a little.”
Amber tilted her head to look and make sure their friend was out of earshot. “Are you surprised?” she asked Nick.
“Well…yeah.” He waved his hands. “The dude’s not a salesman.”
“No,” she said patiently, “but he is someone who just lost his grandmother and has an awful lot invested in this working.” She rolled her eyes at the slow-dawning comprehension on Nick’s face. “Yeah. This isn’t coming out of nowhere, and we’ll need to be real careful when we hit snags.”
“If,” he said warningly. “Don’t tempt fate.”
“Nick, you’ve been an engineer how long? When. There’s a reason it’s taken us four years to get here on this project. Jacob likes to talk about brains being computers, but they’re so far beyond the computers we have that it’s a miracle the two can even talk.”
“I don’t see why,” a new voice said.
Amber and Nick both jumped and turned to where Dr. DuBois wandered sleepily into the kitchenette. He rummaged around in the cupboards, opened each one in turn to see what was inside, and turned to look at the two of them. “A laptop could understand a calculator,” he said, as if that solved the whole problem, then wandered into the laboratory and left several boxes of tea and coffee on the counter and the cupboards open.
“What does he mean?” Nick mouthed at Amber.
She shrugged as she began to put the tea away, frowned, and went to lean in the doorway. “You’re saying the problem isn’t the human brain understanding computers, it’s computers understanding what the brain says in response. Right?”
DuBois didn’t bother to give a yes or a no. “The brain will fill in as much as it needs to. The computer says ‘sky,’ the brain builds a picture. But what happens when the brain says something that’s beyond the computer’s knowledge?”
“Nothing,” Jacob said. “If you tell a computer to do something it can’t interpret, it does nothing.”
“If you’re lucky,” Nick argued. He came to stand in the doorway beside Amber. “If you’re unlucky, you used language it knows and it tries