The Tryst Temptation
a short story (2000)
Later I regretted taking the job at Sony, because I can never tell anyone about it. I signed non-disclosure agreements before they showed me any of the good stuff. They quickly put the fear in me, casting in to the shadows any thought I had about breathing a word about their secrets to anyone. I believe every word of the threats of dire repercussions if I talk. They probably still have someone periodically checking up on me and my friends, checking for traces of me blabbering about things I shouldn't have.
But at the time I didn't know any better and I was excited as all hell about landing the job. I wanted to snag a spot in the super-elite industrial design department, known to insiders as ID. Those are the folks who figure out what the product is going to look and feel like. They are artists in metal and plastic, toying with scraps of composites and Styrofoam, making prototypes and testing them out for good curves, clean closures, and smooth textures.
I responded to an ad on my school's job board. Software developer wanted to work on industrial design prototyping at Sony. I sent them my resume with its subtly curved lines and high-tech font. They responded by flying me to Japan for the interview. As I walked into the steel and glass building in downtown Tokyo with an escort from the airport, I realized just how much money Sony really had. I rose on the elevator to the 23rd floor of the building.
More short Japanese businessmen greeted me and led me into a small conference room for the interview. It at least was a little homier — it didn't actually have windows overlooking Tokyo. The interview was pretty standard. "Describe one thing about your last job that was challenging for you."; What I said: I found it challenging to understand how the new employers' systems worked. Real answer: hatred of the morons I worked with. "What accomplishment at work are you most proud of."; What I said: Creating a finished system that works well as a unit and that I can point at and say, I made that. Real answer: slacking off and not being noticed. Needless to say, I'm good at doing interviews.
The Japanese boys seemed satisfied after an hour and told me to wait in the room while they went and fetched the person who would be my new boss for the second stage of the interview.
While I waited I played with the tiny teacup they gave me, the only furnishing in the entire room.
Pretty soon a tall, lanky American swarmed into the room. He shook my hand firmly and introduced himself as Jim McGee. "Good lord, I hope Yanaka-san hasn't bored you to death,"; he said, sweeping his eyes across the barren table. "Let's get out of here. I'll show you up to our offices. Want to see them?";
Later in the afternoon it became clear that I was being offered a job. Over sushi dinner with McGee and his colleague Sara Okawa, they made the official pitch: start tomorrow, seventy thousand a year American, free housing and food. Sounded pretty damn good to me.
Needless to say, I went through a bit of culture shock getting used to Japan. For one thing, I was never a natural with languages and despite the classes they forced me to take, I just never caught on. Fortunately I lived in an isolated world of mostly American industrial design team so it didn't matter much.
After I signed the dreaded non-disclosure agreements, the next day McGee took me into his office.
"Before I tell you anything about what we're doing, first I have to give you a run down of how security works around here,"; he said. "First of all, you don't talk about the projects outside of the offices on this floor. You don't even say the code-name of the projects outside of the offices on this floor. Don't even talk about them to other people in the company. Don't let anyone into the labs except yourself. Make sure everyone who comes with you is authorized and uses their card. Prototypes and finished products don't leave the lab. Is everything clear?"; he asked.
He must have read my mind, because he answered my question even though I was too frightened by the sudden tirade to ask it. "You're probably wondering why we're so secretive,"; he said with a frown. "This department is the life-blood of the company. Our business is founded on producing products that shock and amaze the world. If the products we're working on in here become public before we release them, we lose control of our edge. Worse, our competitors might pre-empt us with a copycat product and steal our thunder. Or, our customers and the media might work themselves into a tizzy over perceived flaws and ruin the big shock of seeing such amazing products. What we want when we unveil the product is slack-jawed awe, not cynical recognition. That's what sells products and builds industry leadership. So, if you or anyone else in this department goes and blabs, it ruins the product and damages the company, as well as hurting the consumers who would have bought the product. Besides the fact that we'll fire you and make sure that you never get a job in industrial design again.";
I have to admit that I was scared shitless. He put the fear in me, alright. But then he a hand on my shoulder and said, "Look, I'm not trying to scare you. I just want to make you understand the seriousness of the information you're going to have access to here. It's very important to us that you can handle knowing details about our products that you can't — ever — share with anyone. Are you in?";
I nodded numbly and hoped that he didn't notice my faintly shaking hands.
After that, things got a lot more relaxed. Although it was always in the back of my mind, the not-talking-to-outsiders wasn't that hard while I actually worked at Sony. I was surrounded by my coworkers on a day-to-day basis who knew all the secrets as well so I could talk freely inside our offices and didn't have to watch my tongue.
At first I was assigned to design ASICs for Nova, a prototype DVD player that was eventually scrapped. That broke me in for another project that I was apparently hired for.
At first I designed ASICs for a prototype DVD player that was eventually scrapped. That broke me in. Then they put me on another project, what I was apparently hired for. The project code-named Tryst, so secret that we didn't even trust the rest of the company with the code-name, and gave them a different one.
Tryst was unbelievable high-tech. I was amazed when I saw it. The concept was so sci-fi that I couldn't even believe they would have the temerity to even think about doing it. It was fantastically crazy.
Basically what it amounted to was several thousand PowerPC processors wired to a microfabrication engine. The supercomputer made up of this processor cluster would churn numbers and every few hours the engine would punch out a design based on the model in the computer.
What made it fantastically crazy was the software running on the supercomputer. What made it ultra secret was the software running on the supercomputer (and perhaps the existence of the computer itself, which was in a class supposedly illegal for export from the United States).
The software was a living cybernetic network of nodes that contained the sum of aesthetic knowledge and sensation that the gurus of industrial design had spent their lifetimes mastering. They would input an crude design into the modeling software, and then each of the 1600 individual nodes would work on at a tiny piece of it, perfecting it in every way it knew how, and then passing that bit onto the next node, and starting on the piece it got from its other neighbour. This process would continue at blazing speed as the supercomputer processed the entire model. Then, it would increase the size of the pieces and start again. Finally, each of the nodes would see the whole model. The supercomputer would then declared its work over and stamp a copy of the resulting design on the microfab engine for the humans to examine and scrutinize.
The room was scattered with three-dimensional polycarbonate models of all kinds of former Sony products in various stages of redesign. The results of the process were impressive. Not stunning, but clearly the system had potential. McGee's eyes lit up when he came into the room and he picked up and turned the shiny models in his hand as he described the new process. Clearly he had high hopes for it.
My job was to refine the system and take it to the next level. To do that, I was to examine the software on a node-by-node basis and make sure it accurately represented the industrial designer's expertise.
I played with the software for a week and didn't think that approach would get me anywhere. How I came up with the solution is one of those strange twists of fate.
To begin with, various factors intervened and I wound up with an out of the way office far from the busy labs and most talkative designers. McGee was reassigned in one of the interminable reshuffles that seemed to plague the ID department. My new boss didn't really seem to know what I was working on and didn't care enough to see if he could figure it out and get rid of me. So, it happened that I had six months during which I was left alone to my own devices and my computer screen.
Sometime during the second month was when I had my breakthrough.
The main problem was trying to figure out what the designers thought was good design. First off, it was hard enough for a junior member like me to corner them and quiz them about what they liked and disliked, round versus sharp, smooth versus rough, shiny versus flat, and so on. Second, it just wasn't that simple. What they liked and disliked varied based on the context of the piece in relation to the entire product, the synergy it had with other elements of the product, and sometimes seemingly the weather or the quality of the coffee they had that morning. Third, it became clear that design wasn't something these people had learned, it was something they were born with and had developed over their lives. The task of building a computer, a finite, unlearning machine, that could master their art, seemed impossible.
So one day I was playing with some silly putty, dreaming, when I suddenly had an epiphany. What, I thought, if instead of giving the computer a static, prebuilt set of aesthetic ideals, instead I let it invent its own. I could get it started with a few easy, fundamental, basic rules of what makes an object look good and let it go about all the refining, learning, developing, and sophistication that makes a truly great aesthetic. I wouldn't have to interview the designers anymore, which was a relief, because they were all kind of crazy.
So, I gave the computer some basic concepts, like curves are good, balance is good, some basic color balance scales and some rules about weight and size. Then I put those basics into each node, and allowed them to communicate between each other with tiny variations of the basic set over time. Now, when a variation arose that raised the overall aesthetic value of that nodes' rule set, it would propagate through to its neighbours. They would adopt the successful changes and spread them to their neighbours, and so on. Pretty the soon the cluster would be seething with good design ideas spreading from node to node with all the veracity of a computer virus.
At first it didn't seem to do much. No one was using the Tryst computer system, with all its 1600 processors and microfabrication engine, since it had been forgotten in the turf wars. I let it go for a few days on the original Walkman to see what would happen. Out popped a vaguely globular shaped design that didn't look like anything much to look at. On a whim, I loaded up an extra batch of silver substrate for the microfab engine, left the system on and went to work on a side project my new manager had been harassing me to do.
In retrospect I'd asked too much of the system to hope that it would come up with anything useful with only a few days to go with. After all, the human brain takes years to master the arts, and this supercomputer had only a fraction of our brain power, even though it was all dedicated to the sole purpose of designing nifty products. Leaving it on was a stroke of good luck, leaving it on for a month even more so.
Actually I forgot all about it until one day McGee came into my office holding a silvery blob of pure art. He was clearly excited. There was a large coffee stain on his shirt. He placed the blob on my desk and said,
"Guess where I just was.";
I had no idea, so I told him so.
"The Tryst lab. Do you have any idea what that thing's been doing for the last month? It's insane.
"I just went in there because I was going to scavenge some of the parts for a new prototype, and I discovered a pile of these,"; he said, waving at the silver blob, "lying beneath the microfab engine. Apparently, the thing's been punching them out for months. All of them based on the original Walkman design. Look at it. I mean, look at it!";
I picked it up and really looked at it for the first time since he'd come into my office. It was sleek and beautiful. It wasn't just beautiful, it was gorgeous. It wasn't just gorgeous, it transcended gorgeousness. It left gorgeousness behind and swam off into the heavens of true unearthliness. Simple and elegant, clearly based on the original walkman design, but so much more, like each individual line had been stretched out to infinity and made into a path to heaven, like each corner had been beveled by angels until it had the perfect curve to pronounce grace, power, solidity, and coolness. I couldn't take my eyes off it.
After a long time, I looked back at McGee with the same wild-eyed wonder.
"This is incredible,"; I said.
"It's crystalline,"; he said.
We ran together to the big boss's office.
I guess that the power that the silver blob had over McGee and I was tempered by the work we had already done with design. The boss, an executive with little artistic training, had no such protection. He sat in awe at his desk, arms and jaw slack, staring at the silvery object we had placed in front of him. After a half an hour it became clear that he wasn't going to move on his own, so he pulled the object away and out of sight. His eyes cleared and he looked at us uncertainly.
"I don't know if I could bear to sell that,"; he said at last.
We ran a few more tests with even more spectacular results. Too spectacular. Eventually the designs arrested even the most hardened industrial designers in their tracks for hours at a time with their beauty, their angular grace, the way they seemed to flow and move even as they stood still. The objects no longer simply represented tape players and recorders, they took on a life of their own and became beauty itself, a nectar squeezed from the essence of the aesthetic and made real in our lab.
Clearly we couldn't let the designs out of the building. The less design experience the viewer had, the less protection they had from the pure essence of the Tryst designs. One kid we brought in off the street stood in a stupor for two days staring at a design before we dragged him away, made him sign twenty sheets of legalese and paid him tens of thousands of dollars to disappear and forget he'd even seen us.
Finally our boss half-heartedly announced what we'd all known in our hearts from the first day we'd seen the silver drops of beauty. We could not release these product designs, now, or ever. They were too pure. They were too much for the casual consumer. The world would not survive them.
So, the system was mothballed and moved to a basement storeroom, the designs were melted down, and the team was reassigned. I lost interest in the work and quit a few months later. Sony kept all of the software and ideas that had gone into the system.
The curse is, I can't tell anyone. When I left I signed another non-disclosure agreement and took an awful lot of money as compensation. I guess that I should just forget about and move on.
But in the middle of the night, the designs still haunt my dreams. Sometimes I see them hanging before me, tempting me, calling to me. Dying to be made real.
Someday I won't be able to stand it anymore. Beauty will be made solid, again.