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To: "Tom" tom32techiemail.comFrom: "John Yoshiro" Yoshirohakware.cjb.net
Subject: Idea
X-Mailer: sendmail
MIME-version: 1.0
Message Start
Hey, tom. I have an idea that could be really awesome, but it's kind of radical, so bear with me.
After watching Chobits for the nth time, something clicked. It all came into my brain at once, the AI, the machine vision, and the physical design. I figured out how to build a persicom. Or rather, more like a normal robot with persicom-style intelligence.
It involves Bayesian nets, confidence matrices, and heuristic database evaluation subroutines. I'll tell you all about it later.
But my idea also involved something separate from tech. If we're going to do this, we need to have a way of distributing it, and for that we need a company. Now, I understand if you're a little weary of startups due to the dot-com bubble bursting, but I'm weary of my job at PCW, and you don't have a job to begin with, so I think a startup might be good for both of us.
If we're going to do this, we need some funding, however. And we also need some more developers. I know you are a little short of cash after that whole ordeal with your family, but I could really use your coding skills.
I'll put an ad online for finding more coders. If you know anybody, ask them too. We can use all the help we can get .
Sincerely,
John
John lied back on his office chair, the email finally finished and sent. The radio was blasting an old Police song, redone by a rapper whose friend died. Hearing the hip-hop rhythm, John instinctively shut off his stereo and called up http:di.fm in xmms, calmed by the trippy lyrical synthesizer beeps and earth-shaking bass.
He glanced across his room, seeing instantaneously in his broad sweep various signs of the inherent geek. His eyes glided past his stack of CD-R's, onward across stacks of printouts, motherboards, hard drives, and boxes upon boxes of 3 ½" floppy disks in rainbow colors. He stopped on a poster, hanging on the far wall. It was of Rene Descartes, the revolutionary Renaissance philosopher and mathematician, and it said, "I think, therefore I am." He idly considered this long-standing concept, while staring at the various spots of color used by the printer that had originally created this poster. When one looked closely, it appeared as if Monet had suddenly taken to using tiny colored pencils, and that his subject was some duke of Germany from the early 19th century. He had almost gotten used to the overwhelmingly erratic trance-techno playing in the background when his computer sputtered out "Mail received". He turned around and typed, "pine" at the command prompt. Damn Tom is fast. It's like he has it hooked up to his brain or something.
He opened up the mail, lime-green text flashing away on his xterm, exemplifying the need for a better windowing system for UNIX.
It said, simply:
John,
Sure, I'm in. It's not like I have anything better to do. Hey, what are the chances that there'll be some chicks answering that ad?
Typical Tom, always worrying about the girlfriends he'll never get. John corrected himself; I shouldn't be talking since I'm not such hot stuff myself.
He quit pine, and started up emacs. He began working on his intelligence engine code, writing source in C and inline assembler without looking at the time, although added to the time he had already been up, the total of his waking hours had been over 30 by the time he finally saved and went to bed.
Tom walked down the dimly lighted street, rain wetting his shoulder-length brown hair. He tried to focus his eyes beyond the bright neon lining the 2 lanes ahead of him, but failed. He heard a few normal urban noises; sirens, cats meowing, someone listening to jungle music a few blocks away, likely dancing like an idiot and doing some "hip" antics with his equally "hip" friends. His brain was not phased by a crash in an adjoining alley, or at least not at first. It took him a few seconds to notice that the quiet sobs he was hearing were coming from the same place as said crash. When he realized what this meant, he quickly located the source of the sound, and ran into the alley.
At the end of the alley, kneeling in loose trash and the detritus of society's daily refuse was a girl about his age. She, like him, had shoulder length brown hair, however the similarity ended there. She was wearing a baggy nightshirt, and holding a large knife in her hand.
"Are you alright?" The girl didn't answer. Tom looked again at the position of the knife, which glinted eerily in the distant yellow light of the streetlight on the main road. He didn't know why he couldn't see it before. She was holding the knife close to her wrist, shaking with her whole body and staring off into space with blank, glassy eyes. He read the name embroidered on her lapel.
"Chihiro, huh?" The girl nodded.
"Don't do it. You look much cuter when you're alive." Tom let out a forced smirk, and Chihiro chuckled at the inappropriate joke.
"Why don't you come with me?" The girl nodded and stood up, dropping the knife and taking Tom's outstretched hand.
"Hai, moshi moshi?" John rubbed his eyes with the hand not being used to hold up the telephone.
"John, it's Tom," came the reply.
"What the fuck, Tom. Why are you calling me this early?"
"It's noon, dude."
"Well I pulled 30 hours last night with this MI control code, so give me a break please." John's annoyance was replaced with calm apologies.
"Speaking of, dude, I've got someone to help you out." Tom's statement came to a pause as his enthusiasm came to a climax. "And it's a chick, man!"
John scratched his head and yawned. "Good for you. Can she code?"
"Yeah, man. She's pretty damn good."
"Great."
"You wouldn't believe how I found her, man. I'll tell you the whole exciting story when I bring her over later."
"Cool. About that, I think we need to get a headquarters before my parents get too sick of me doing all my business in the house."
"Sure, I'm on it. Tom out."
"Jaa mata, Tom."
"Sayonara." John hung up the phone and turned on his desktop's CRT monitor, ready for some more coding.