Sabbatical...

Within two weeks, Cavett and I had finished our proposal and fully stocked the laboratory food prep unit and the coffee, tea and liquor cabinet. Cleo said my shielding would be good enough, if I didn’t meet the council members’ eyes too much, and if I went quickly. We had come up with a proposal so tantalizing that I didn’t think approval would take long at all. I apologized to the council at the end of my presentation for having read it almost entirely from notes. Approval was given, a few handshakes and we were on sabbatical.

Cavett’s and my work on the improvement for the automatic nutritional units was going well. The ANU’s were an older line, and one of our most popular. We had both been on the team that developed the prototype back when Cavett first came to town. In retrospect, the ANU’s were designed almost too well, though, seldom needing service. Since they had been out for a while, the profits from new unit purchases were down to almost nothing. It was definitely time to offer another upgrade.

The original units calculated nutritional requirements for maintenance or weight loss when the user stood on the platform and inserted his or her arm up to the elbow in the sensor shaft. Without any form of invasion (the extraction of a drop of blood, etc), the units were able to read percentage body fat, blood chemistry, metabolic rate and more…enough to perfectly calculate the caloric and nutritional needs of the user, then provide a list of meal options based upon recipe library and regularly updated individual preferences. The selected meal was appetizingly presented, heated precisely to user specifications, usually by the time the user had withdrawn his arm, rolled down his sleeve and stepped off the platform. We offered both a stand-alone model and ones designed to tie in with an existing food-prep system. On the stand-alone, there was even a slot into which used dishes could be returned for automatic cleaning. Each unit could support up to a dozen user profiles. The limit was only programmed in to sell more units. Immensely popular.

The ANU’s had been designed with the capability of offering selections and preparing meals on a log-in basis without any physical contact with the user. The user could dial up a meal to have waiting at a specified time or in response to a docking signal from her transpod. The ANU’s could even upload meal specs to public or private remote units, useful if the user were traveling, dining out, etc. The only hitch was that the units worked from the user’s last live contact readings, so if other variables such as illness, snacks, alcohol or other substance consumption or changes in level of physical activity were introduced, all the calculations would be off. The user’s weight or well-being might consequently fluctuate in proportion to time spent physically separate from her or his ANU.

The last upgrade had been the addition of a remote monitoring module designed to be worn on the user’s wrist or ankle to solve this problem, allowing the cuff-wearing user to submit a current reading any time, any place. Admittedly, the cuff modules were somewhat bulky and had to be worn for at least 6 consecutive hours prior to meal preparation in order to get completely accurate calculations…but they were portable!

Sales were initially brisk, but dropped off very quickly. Turns out our timing in getting the product to market coincided almost perfectly with a rebellious trend amongst the non-tech youth AND business demographics. Large segments of non-tech society were casting off all sorts of body-based personal monitoring and communication devices in a mass show of independence from scientists and all our "faulty wares." I’m not sure I can fully explain their thinking, because their dependence on all non-body-based models never flagged. It was something about the actual, physical wearing of technology on the body that came to repel the majority. Whatever the supporting philosophy, we suffered enormous financial disappointment when the remote monitors failed to take the market by storm.

We hoped our new system would offer the same convenience, while taking the desired unobtrusiveness and detachment to credits-garnering new levels. Our new module, if everything went as we hoped, would be able to gather the necessary stats from 6 meters, 15 seconds exposure. Keep it in the transpod, tell the waiter your code, and order with confidence. It would be the size of a commercial cred-chip. Pocket-able, purse-able, utterly portable and invisible! Absolute convenience with no telltale visual signs. Radio waves would seek out the retinal data to which a module was coded, then home on that to submit the individual’s metabolic readings. We were really quite proud of this.

By the third week of programming and testing, Cavett, Kaitlyn and I were all wearing works-in-progress. Kaitlyn’s experimental module, from what we could tell, gave the most accurate readings at the shortest distance…for SOMEONE in the room. The third time she came home from school to find her meal prepared double-portioned and extra spicy, we figured out her module must have been picking up her trigomometry tutor’s signal. Cavett’s test module read him fairly precisely, but only if he physically touched it once a day. We didn’t know what mine was doing, yet, as we were struggling with basic upload on it, but the programming looked sound. Overall, progress was good. Our biggest regret was not having more recipes on hand. We had designed the ANU’s themselves, but the recipes were programmed elsewhere and sold in small, usually thematic packages of 6 to 10 . They were fairly costly and we’d never successfully obtained any “professional courtesy” samples. We had one recipe chip containing 8 classic Chinese dishes. After three solid weeks, we were weighing the merits of throwing out perfectly good food and subsisting on nutritional packets vs. blowing the money on a “best of” Mediterranean cuisine chip.

I was still working with Cleo a couple nights a week so the load was tough, but things seemed to be leveling off somewhat. I was always a little off-balance the mornings after Cleo’s and my encounters in non-world. On those days, Cavett’s silence was a bit difficult to bear. I talked more than usual to fill the void, and just to keep myself awake. I had a lot on my mind and was grateful for my quiet, trusted confidant. Truthfully, in retrospect, I seemed to recall getting a lot off my chest during our sabbaticals every year. I told Cavett so and promised to take him out to dinner to cover all the free counseling sessions when we were done – anything but Chinese!

As comfortable as I was with my partner, I was more than a little hesitant to explain the changes in my world to him. I knew he knew things were very different, but it would have been difficult to share what I was experiencing even with him, as there was so much I had barely begun to figure out myself. By the fourth week, though, I was calm enough, clear enough... and had burned through all other possible topics of conversation. I was considering where to begin, egged on by an aching readiness for his perspective on some of this madness.

I was both startled and somewhat relieved when he provided the perfect excuse to open the dialog.

“Who was the woman you got off the train with yesterday evening?” he asked one morning in his deep, steady tone, never lifting his eyes from his work.

Fortunately, his pace of conversation seemed to invite a pause before answering. I used the time to finish rummaging loudly and at unwarranted length through a box of parts, composing my response as I stirred the small, metal components. “Well, she’s somebody new I’ve met and we’re talking about doing some work together, maybe.”

This time his eyes met mine with a twinkle. ”Just work? She’s pretty. And young.”

I made no response to his suggestion, but wondered exactly what he had seen. It was true we had ridden back together, and not specifically to continue any work. More and more, Cleo’s and my conversation wandered from our projects to matters more mundane and amusing. In truth, I’d laughed more with her than I could remember laughing in years…which served to mitigate my exhaustion somewhat.

He continued as he deftly pulled a piece from a board with tiny tweezers, ”What sort of work?”

Deep breath. O.K., revelation time. “Cavett, what did you think of Kathryn’s research?”

He glanced my way for a split second, then returned his attentions to the microcircuitry before him. His single arched eyebrow begged more data before he would settle upon an answer.

Still cautiously inclined to understate the situation, I proceeded with just a hint of the strange, crushing sensation of my heart rising into my throat. “I’ve been thinking about getting involved in something related to what Kathryn was working on before she died. I just have a feeling Kaitlyn will want to know more one of these days. She’s so empathetic, anyway. It’s risky, I know, and I know I can trust you not to say anything to anyone. I’ve been thinking about why Kathryn may have been killed and it scares me to death…but I think not being able to answer the questions Kaitlyn may have would leave her open to wander into worse danger. And, who knows? Kaite may not ever ask, in which case, what would I have lost in having pursued this carefully, never used it, then moved on?”

“I can’t disagree with your reasons, but be careful. I was happier when I thought you just had a girlfriend.”