Advanced Mythology (7 page)

Chapter 6

Keith was almost buzzing with nerves by the time he followed Dorothy into the boardroom. He was excited to be back at Perkins Delaney Queen. The suite of offices hadn’t changed much since Keith’s last day as a student intern several months before, except perhaps to replace the modern art sculpture made of tiny pieces of brass and steel in the glass-walled foyer with another equally weird abstract construction of colored aluminum cut into elongated zig-zags. Keith thought of the graceful, curved lines of the Little Folk’s carvings and thought how well they could do in the mass market. Perhaps later he could drop in on a few galleries and feel them out. He had a few photographs in a portfolio of some of Enoch’s and Tiron’s latest creations. The works would sell themselves; all he would have to do is hold up the pictures and take orders. At the moment, though, Keith felt his mind sliding into “ideation” mode, ready to pop creative notions out one after the other. He hoped he could come up with something that would stick. Dorothy was counting on him.

Dorothy Carver, her chic suit-dress of coral-red picking up warm highlights in her medium-dark complexion, introduced Keith to the men and women around the table. She deferred to the plump man at the head of the table. His very black hair was tousled, and his small mouth was framed by a neatly trimmed Van Dyke beard. “Bill Mann, president of Gadfly Technology Corporation. Jennifer Schick, vice-president in charge of sales,” was the slender, brown-haired woman with intense, blue eyes beside him. The tall man with the domelike head fringed with the remnants of bronze hair was “Theo Lehmann, head of engineering. Mr. Mann, you’ve met W. Jason Allen, our president,” she nodded toward the elegant, bearded, strawberry-blond man wearing an Ungaro suit and a collarless shirt at the other end of the table, “and Peggy Gilmore, our executive creative director; Doug Constance, creative director; Rollin Chisholm, art director and Janine Martinez, copywriter. Keith Doyle, one of our … freelance copywriters. And you know Paul Meier, who will be the group director for your account.”

Keith grinned at Paul, a medium-sized man with black-brown hair and sallow-tan skin who had been Keith’s supervisor during his semester there. Doug Constance, about Paul’s age, had thick blond hair and a pale gray silk Italian jacket, both elegant and expensive-looking. By contrast, Peggy, a slim woman with light-brown hair, Rollin, a burly but muscular dark-skinned African-American, and Janine, tall and heavyset, were casually dressed. Everyone shook hands. Keith sat down in the empty seat beside Dorothy, perching on the edge of the chair, ready for whatever was to come. She gave him a warm smile, looking poised and ready. In the several months since the two of them had worked together she had grown in confidence. Out of a soft leather briefcase she took a sketch pad and a pencil, and Keith remembered that her artistic ability was one of the skills that had qualified her for the internship. She doodled when she was nervous. She didn’t touch pen to paper; instead she waited patiently for everyone to settle down.

“Gadfly?” Paul asked.

“All the good names were taken,” Ms. Schick said with a wry grin. Everyone chuckled. That was a good sign, if the client was willing to break the ice so soon. One of Paul’s current crop of interns from the boardroom up the hall took orders for coffee. Keith, who liked his very sweet, was glad to see no one watched him while he poured four packets of sugar into the cup.

Bill Mann nodded politely as his coffee was set down before him, but he kept his arms folded while Ms. Schick dealt out sheets of paper to everyone.

“Just a reminder that we can’t proceed until we have nondisclosure agreements from everyone,” Mann said. After a glance, most of the others pushed the sheets away or tucked them into their notepads, but a couple of the PDQ executives joined Keith in filling out the form. Keith read through the paragraphs above the lines asking for his name, address, and date of birth. The language of the document alarmed him with its threats of penalties, fines, legal fees and so on if he broke any of the clauses therein contained. He looked up. Paul caught his panicky gaze and nodded slightly, understanding his concerns without having to ask.

“Standard boilerplate,” Paul said very casually. “I see the same thing every day.” Gratefully, Keith scrawled his name and pushed the paper toward Ms. Schick.

Mann reached over to take the paper off the table, leaving the wide expanse of shining black marble open. Once the papers were collected and put away, Dorothy stood up and faced the clients with the same anxious expression she might have if she was about to dive off the high board into an unfamiliar pool. More than just her job was at stake. A big campaign for a big client could mean millions of dollars for PDQ. Failure might mean half the staff in the room could be looking for work within days. Keith found he was holding his breath, and let it out silently, not wanting to be the one to attract attention. Dorothy smiled at the visitors.

“We want to thank Gadfly for giving us this opportunity to offer our services. We understand that your company’s primary focus is personal technology. That’s an exciting field. We have the experience you’re looking for to promote your product, and we have the numbers to prove it. We know that if you hire us we will give you the best possible exposure, and bring in the maximum number of customers in the demographics. PDQ can present advertisements in any medium, and we welcome customer involvement. You tell us what you want, and we’ll do it.”

Mann and the others nodded. Keith knew from Dorothy’s hasty briefing that PDQ was only one of a dozen or more agencies that were being given an audience, and almost certainly not the first to present that day. The primary approach had been made to Gadfly by the upper management of PDQ. The real test that determined whether they got the account would come later.

“So …” Allen said when the silence went on too long, “what
is
the product?”

“One thing at a time,” Bill Mann said, his resonant voice slow and unhurried. “You know the old saying about how you only get one chance to make a first impression. We want your first impression of our baby.”

Mann gestured with one large hand to Lehmann, who lifted a box to the tabletop. “In there is the prototype of the GF Mark One. It doesn’t have a name yet. Name it. Give us one we really like,
the
one, and the account’s yours. Believe me, we’ve heard from a dozen agencies already. You can’t believe how many wrong ideas we’ve heard already.”

Peggy smirked, tossing her long hair. “Yes, we can.”

“Well, Gadfly was founded by people who like to work by the seat of their pants. So, we want to know if you’re like us. That’s why your creative people are here. We don’t want a big-time production until we’re sure we can work with you. I promise you, we’ve thought of as many dumb names on our own as anybody can. We don’t like one of them. We want to see how you think.”

The PDQ staff shifted uneasily. Keith, who was already quivering with nerves, had to sit on his hands to keep from springing up.

“Usually,” Dorothy said carefully, “you give us the details of what you want, and we bring it to you later, for your approval.”

“Nope. Not this time. We want more. No, we want
now.
That’s how we work. It’s a test. We make up our minds very quickly. Inspiration’s usually the best indicator of how people think. I speak for the rest of the guys—guys being a unisex term in our office,” he said, reaching out to touch the table before Dorothy and Peggy, “so what I like here today goes. Got it?”

“Whatever you say,” Dorothy said, looking at her fellow employees. The customer was always right.

The PDQ staff nodded warily. Keith didn’t want to say out loud that brainstorming and quick inspiration were pretty much how he had been taught to work on ad campaigns, but the staff wasn’t used to doing it in front of the client. Though they were all seasoned professionals in their field, such a challenge put them under a kind of pressure they weren’t accustomed to handling. They accepted Gadfly’s terms, then waited as the cardboard box was passed from Theo Lehmann to Jennifer Schick.

Keith leaned forward in anticipation. He saw some of the other, more experienced execs sitting back, seemingly cool and disinterested, but it was a pose. Were they frightened of making a bad impression, or did they really not care any more after so many years in the business? Keith hoped he’d never become that jaded.

No such ennui plagued the people from Gadfly. They were up about their product, almost bouncing in their seats with excitement. They could hardly wait as Ms. Schick opened the box.

“All right, ladies and gentlemen,” Bill Mann intoned proudly, “Gadfly presents the GF Mark One, the next great step in personal electronic technology. This is the One-Dee version. We’ll probably be in One-Eff by the time we go to market, but it will look just like this. Jen?”

“This” was a small blue-gray box, about six inches long by two and a half wide by an inch high. Jen Schick turned it in her hands. One flat side of the unit was mostly made up of screen. The other had a small keypad, earpiece, and mouthpiece. “As you can see, it’s a personal digital assistant. And a cell telephone. But it has dozens of other uses. You see the modular design. It’s amazingly versatile. It can do just about anything you want it to.”

Everyone watched her hands intently as she flipped the small device in her hands. Keith studied it with fascination. It wasn’t really a box, but a stack of very thin panels held together by tiny hinges. The other copywriters were murmuring to one another and making notes. Dorothy drew furiously on her sketchpad.

Ms. Schick turned on the unit. The screen came to life on a crisp, colorful graphic rotating over a black background. Keith was impressed by the sharpness and resolution. So were the others. The technician grinned at their coos and hums of admiration.

“High-res monitor,” Lehmann said. “We got tired of screens where you couldn’t see the small details.”

“User interface is multiply configured,” Ms. Schick continued. “With the stylus,” which popped out of the side of the unit, “you can use it as a normal palmtop. The screen is touch-sensitive, so you can pull down the menus, or doodle on it, write in the character box or touch the character keyboard that pops up. But what sets this little guy apart from the others—among many other innovations—is the keyboard.” Jen Schick held onto the screen and flipped the rear portion down and away from the rest of it, pressed a minute catch, and opened out two of the panels, which turned into four, snapped out flat. “This one is big enough for even a touch-typist with big hands to use. We recessed the keys slightly so you get a slight “reward” action when you press each solenoid. There are several PDA units out there with keyboard peripherals, but they aren’t integral to the unit. Closed up, some of them are bigger than their PDAs.”

Theo Lehmann spread out his hands side by side. “You can use your thumbs across the breadth of the keyboard, but you don’t have to. The majority of the workforce does not need to be retrained for this platform.”

An approving hum rose from the PDQ executives. Even Dorothy was nodding to herself. Keith couldn’t take his eyes off it. He thought it was wonderful.

“Memory?” asked Rollin Chisholm, his voice husky.

“Four hundred gigs running on a 12.8 GHz FlagChip IC, in the original configuration,” said the engineer. “The next generation will have more. It runs real Windows or Linux or any other system you want to install—with its own mini CD-ROM, you don’t need a docking station. It’s an extraordinary device. It deserves extraordinary treatment.”

“We agree,” Dorothy said. “It’s amazing.”

Keith watched the engineer fold and refold into different configurations. Ms. Schick flipped the keyboard shut but left the unit folded out into two panels so the telephone keypad was beneath the screen. She set it down on the desk, where it stood by itself.

“This little ring here,” Jen Schick went on, twisting a stubby cylinder that was mounted along one end of a long edge on the upright portion, “is a camera eye. The GF Mark One will take over 600 pictures on a memory stick or ten times that on a writable mini-CD. It can record an hour of video or more, depending on how much resolution you want. The drive is back here. You can see that we’ve reduced the drive size so that it doesn’t add bulk. The drive is Theo’s baby. We’re ready to license out the patent to seven other companies, but we want to get our own unit to market first.” Lehmann tilted his head with a modest expression.

“Incredible,” murmured Allen. “The disk drive is thinner than a checkbook.”

“The camera lens will swivel in any direction. You can use it as a digital video camera and record on a disk or stick, or send streaming video over either your wireless phone line or the Internet. Of course it’s fully Internet compatible. One of the things we thought the camera feature would be good for is teleconferencing. You just point the lens back at yourself while looking at the person you’re talking to on the screen. Of course there’s a wireless headset so you can set the unit down or have it on your lap. It makes the Mark One’s uses almost infinitely expandable. It’ll share data through the usual modem configuration, but there’s an infrared eye right here,” she pointed to a minute square of dark plastic at the rear of the screen section. “You can make your own videos and send them out on the web in no time. It could revolutionize newsgathering. It’s got clip art and moving clips you can use to customize your video. The character generator works off the word processing system. But look at this.” With the stylus she scribbled out a command, and the image on the little square screen changed to show a pair of spaceships zooming through the black void shooting red laser bolts at one another. “It updates high-res video instantly.”

“That’s beautiful,” Keith said. “Is it real?”

“You mean, is it a working prototype? It is. Here. Look. I’m running a computer adventure game. The processor is very fast, but it consumes very little energy.”

Several of them leaned forward. Doug had his hands stretched out as though he’d like to get them on the little unit, but they let the marketing director continue to demonstrate the device.