Within the secret Mac Pro Engineering Room, two neglected interns talk:
Abe: “Here’s that envelope addressed to you. It was apparently mislaid for a while.” He turned to their work and, with pride tinged with mocking, said: “The internet will melt with the news! The all-new Mac Pro!”
Beth played along: “Yes, just look at it float!”
It was indeed visually mesmerizing. The gloss-black sphere precessed slightly as it wafted, suspended in mid-air, on its magnetic cushion. What genius! The very electrically-generated magnetic fields that held it up also provided the power it used! Of course, limited power did mean reducing speeds and the use of smaller and slower memory.
Abe sighed. “Still rotating! After three years of work, I wonder if we’ll ever succeed? You keep saying the fan causes it to turn, and not induced eddy currents. But now we tried your counter-roating fan idea.”
“And it mostly worked!”
“Yes, it reduced the spin’s speed, but it’s still there, and You-Know-Who said it can’t ship until it hovers absolutely motionless.”
Beth expressed bitterness: “We turned an absolutely-pure piece-of-art sphere into a computer, completely port-free, powered and suspended and communicating in mid-air by freaking engineering magic! But no, a little gentle hypnotic motion is enough to hold back shipping a new Mac Pro, after this many years!?”
Wearily, both of them shrugged, knowing the ordained answer.
“Maybe your new three-axis actively-controlled motion-stabilization system idea will pan out.”
Betty winced: “Yes, we could actually try some stuff when they give us a budget!”
Abe grimaced with pain too, and commiserated: “Yeah, I hear you.”
But Betty wasn’t paying further attention. The knot of hunger she knew so well had appeared with her unpaid intern’s belly again. She looked about the closet-sized Mac Pro Engineering Room in despair. Where had she saved that last little soup cracker?
Putting away thoughts of a paid position, Betty now opened the strange old letter, looked it over with growing incredulity, and howled: “We’ve been re-assigned as of three years ago!”
Abe: “Here’s that envelope addressed to you. It was apparently mislaid for a while.” He turned to their work and, with pride tinged with mocking, said: “The internet will melt with the news! The all-new Mac Pro!”
Beth played along: “Yes, just look at it float!”
It was indeed visually mesmerizing. The gloss-black sphere precessed slightly as it wafted, suspended in mid-air, on its magnetic cushion. What genius! The very electrically-generated magnetic fields that held it up also provided the power it used! Of course, limited power did mean reducing speeds and the use of smaller and slower memory.
Abe sighed. “Still rotating! After three years of work, I wonder if we’ll ever succeed? You keep saying the fan causes it to turn, and not induced eddy currents. But now we tried your counter-roating fan idea.”
“And it mostly worked!”
“Yes, it reduced the spin’s speed, but it’s still there, and You-Know-Who said it can’t ship until it hovers absolutely motionless.”
Beth expressed bitterness: “We turned an absolutely-pure piece-of-art sphere into a computer, completely port-free, powered and suspended and communicating in mid-air by freaking engineering magic! But no, a little gentle hypnotic motion is enough to hold back shipping a new Mac Pro, after this many years!?”
Wearily, both of them shrugged, knowing the ordained answer.
“Maybe your new three-axis actively-controlled motion-stabilization system idea will pan out.”
Betty winced: “Yes, we could actually try some stuff when they give us a budget!”
Abe grimaced with pain too, and commiserated: “Yeah, I hear you.”
But Betty wasn’t paying further attention. The knot of hunger she knew so well had appeared with her unpaid intern’s belly again. She looked about the closet-sized Mac Pro Engineering Room in despair. Where had she saved that last little soup cracker?
Putting away thoughts of a paid position, Betty now opened the strange old letter, looked it over with growing incredulity, and howled: “We’ve been re-assigned as of three years ago!”
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