Chương 83: Book 3 - Chapter 13 A

When my emancipation was official a month later, I moved into my new La Jolla, San Diego house.

"This is huge!" Matt said.

"Don't you think it's a little big?" Mom asked.

"He needs room for big parties," Grandma unhelpfully offered. I was so glad I didn't buy the Spanish Hacienda next door, the pool there was known for wild parties in the 1950s. I was thinking it was a mistake to invite them to help me set up my new home, but I smiled.

"It will be an office as much as a home. Matt will be here handling stuff day-to-day while I'm working at GA." The doorbell rang, so I turned and went for the door.

"Excuse me, sir," said my new security chief, "You should leave answering the door to us."

"Okay, but the staff is expected."

"I'll check." An older woman came in and offered her hand to shake.

"I am Angella Limeria."

"Hello, Angella. I'm John."

"It is very nice to meet you, sir. I've been retained as your chef and house manager."

"Excellent. Come meet my Mom and Grandma. They can tell you all about what I like to eat and how you have to feed me vegetables." She gave a soft chuckle and followed me through the house out to the rear deck.

"I thought you said this was beachfront? That's just a cliff below us," Grandma complained.

"It's the tide, when it goes out I have a beach, when it comes in, I don't have beach people camping overnight down below."

"Hello, I'm Mary. I'm John's Mom," Mom said introducing herself to my companion.

"Hello, Ms Cook. I am Angella Limeria, John's new chef and head of housekeeping."

"Grandma, you have to give Angella your brownie recipe."

"I do have a brownie recipe or two myself, sir."

"A brownie recipe you say?" I asked with an eager hungry smile.

"And call me John, please."

"Yes, sir," she said with a smile.

"Grandma, how do you feel about a brownie competition? You can break in the kitchen for me."

"I don't know, John. I don't really cook much anymore," Grandma demurred.

"Come on! It will be fun. While you are in the kitchen you can make sure Angella knows all my favorites," I cajoled. With them diverted I turned back to Matt.

"Stop smirking at me. It is important Mom sees I'm well taken care of. Otherwise she won't go home to Tulsa." He didn't say anything, he just somehow smirked harder, so I continued.

"Let's go check out the office space. If you are good, I'll let you help judge the brownie competition."

"Yes, Boss!" he said with a big smile. It took a week for Mom and Grandma to be satisfied I would be fine on my own. When they left I had Matt, Thomas Franks, two rotating security people and Angella living in the house with me full-time. A part-time maid or two came in to clean, but that usually happened while I was gone, so I rarely saw them. About a month later, I came in a bit tired from a busy day at GA and sat for dinner. Matt and Thomas joined me so we could exchange notes on the day.

"Your Mother wants you to call," Thomas said. Matt nodded.

"Nothing urgent, she is just missing you."

"Okay, what else is going on?"

"We've got a request for a Physics lecture at MIT and this month's shooting competition in Colorado is next week. It'll be a five-day competition but you won't be shooting every day."

"Good. I could use the break in Colorado. When does MIT want me?"

"They were hoping for either after or before your Harvard lecture. They prefer before."

"When is that scheduled?" Thomas checked the calendar he carried with him everywhere.

"September." I ate a few more bites of dinner.

"Probably after but I can't commit right now."

"Those are the important things," Matt said.

"Thanks. I got good news today."

"What was that?" Matt asked.

"The FCC is issuing a permit to allow simultaneous, free over-the-air and digital, encrypted pay-as-you-go broadcasting over the same channel."

"Permanently?" he asked.

"As an experiment for now. The new balloon goes up tomorrow so we will go out to see it launch."

"I can come?" Matt asked excitedly.

"Watching the beach babes out your office window is not exciting enough for you?" I teased.

"My desk faces the wall," he said. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

"If you say so, but yeah. I need you with me tomorrow. Security will need the big vehicle as the road into the launch site in Big Bear is rough," I said.

"Did you solve the transmission problem?" Thomas asked.

"Yeah, a few days ago. We figured out that we can broadcast the signal from Victorville and it is close enough that the balloon transmitter will be able to rebroadcast it."

"So you only need power at the base of the balloon," Matt said.

"Right. But I had a crazy idea on the way home." Matt smiled big.

"Tell me."

"What if the balloon could generate its own power?"

"Like a miniature nuclear power plant?" he asked.

"No way!" I laughed.

"It is really windy at that altitude. If we add a wind turbine up there the generator at the base will only be needed for emergencies."

"When will you start broadcasting?" Thomas asked.

"As soon as it is up and has power. It'll just be an automatic test signal. The Victorville broadcast center and control room won't be ready for at least a month."

"What channel will the test signal be broadcast on?" Thomas asked eagerly.

"We have four channels assigned. They had to be unused throughout the greater San Angeles area. This particular balloon will be broadcasting on 29, 41, 45 and 61."

"I will set the TV in the office so I can see when it comes on."

"Great idea," I agreed.

"When Motorola delivers the receiver they built for us, you can get the digital test signals too."

"When does that happen?" Matt asked.

"Hopefully soon." The next day in the mountains at Big Bear, we gleefully watched the balloon go up. I turned to Dr Como, the head of the wireless cable project at GA.

"Dr Como, is this balloon three or four?"

"Balloon four," he responded. I turned to Matt.

"One and two were laboratory versions, three was tethered here first to demonstrate the warning lights and tether system for the FAA. This is the first one with broadcast ability." I turned back to Dr Como.

"Why did you move to number four?"

"We developed a better laser welding process. It let us reduce production time and increase the payload."

"Don't throw number three out, I've got an idea I want to try and it'll make a good test bed," I told him.

"Okay."

"What's the broadcast range?" Matt asked.

"The digital signal is estimated at one hundred twenty-five miles. The analog signal will go further but not by much," I told him.

"We still need to confirm that," Dr Como's assistant added.

"My team will be driving the signal mapper all this week. We will have an excellent signal strength map in about two weeks," Dr Como said.

"Perfect. This is going to take a while. Let's head to the office, Matt."

"Drive safe. I'll see you tomorrow," Dr Como offered.

"I will have the TV on in the office to see when the test signal starts," I told him in farewell. When I got to the office, people from Motorola were there and they were very excited.

"Dr Cook, we have the first complete prototype!"

"Excellent. Let's check it out," I told them. They unveiled the black box by pulling off the silk sheet that it had been hiding under.

"Here is the new digital receiver."

"It's kind of ugly, but that doesn't matter," I said.

"Form follows function, Dr Cook," a Motorola engineer defended.

"Agreed. It is the function that matters. Let's get it hooked up to the antenna and the TV." He handed me the remote control.

"Here is the remote." The Motorola guys quickly had it hooked up to a TV and antenna.

"It connects to the TV with a component cable, carrying stereo and video. It also has a coaxial output on channel 4, either for another TV in a different room, or in case component connections are not available on the TV. The antenna input is a standard coaxial cable connection." The machine started with a beep.

"It's using the custom decryption and decompression algorithm you designed on our ASIC chips and the 68000 processor to manage the system," he explained. The Motorola splash screen displayed on the TV as the device booted up, then the screen went blue. I looked over at the GA team that was with me watching the device.

"Two things: someone go turn on the test broadcast equipment so we can send a test signal to the receiver and someone else make a note that on customer installations we need to use RG6 cables from the antenna to the box." Two people scurried away.

"Oh, third thing!" I added.

"Someone grab me a Dr Pepper and see if the guys from Motorola want anything." The screen changed to display 'no signal found' then 'signal found' then 'scanning.' I smiled as the local PBS station came up.

"Where is the signal coming from?" the guy from Motorola asked.

"We have a small digital broadcast system we built for testing. It takes the feed from the local cable company, digitizes it and rebroadcasts it."

"I wondered because I only connected a small receiving antenna," he said.

"We will be doing professional installation," I told him.

"Setting up the receiving antenna correctly is critical to the digital signal strength. We'll include that in the install fee." I flipped through the local channels and the few cable channels available, smiling as I watched the digital conversion, broadcast and decryption work flawlessly. I turned to one of my assistants as he brought me a Dr Pepper.

"Go plug in the CD player and set it to music channel number one." I hit the music button on the remote and twenty channels appeared on the screen. Using the directional buttons, I selected channel number one. A few moments later the Brothers in Arms album began to play in crisp stereo sound.

"Beautiful," I said.

"The system is programmable remotely and will receive updates to the channel names, an automatically updating TV guide system and the clock on the front will set itself using broadcast data."

"I don't like the red LED numbers on the clock. Looks like and alarm clock. Can you make it green instead?" I asked.

"Sure."

"The addressable system, that will let people buy movies, right?" I asked.

"Yes. They call the call center and request the movie. The signal releases the channel playing the movie, which will unlock for twenty-four hours."

"Excellent but I plan to automate that step."

"Oh? How will you do that?" he asked.

"There will be a phone number for each pay per view movie channel. They call the number and put in the code on the screen. Then they put in their credit card number and it unlocks."

"Interesting. Are there any other features you wanted?"

"I think we're good. We'll test it for the next few weeks but get ready to start making them. I'm going to need five hundred thousand by the end of the year, and a million more by this time next year." He got an excited look in his eye.

"Will you be reselling the boxes?"

"We are still working that out. We'll need to subsidize some of it. Eventually we'll give them out for free. What was the final build cost for this machine?"

"Seventy dollars each receiver," he said with a smile.

"You had to pay upfront for the ASIC chip designs for encryption and digital video decoding. That cost you $200, 000 up front, but it's saving you on the machine build cost. You could have done it all with the 68020 processor."

"That would have made the receiver cost nearly $300. The customers are going to be paying twenty dollars a month so at $70 my $99 installation fee covers almost everything. Plus the 68000 gets cheaper every year." He just shook his head and smiled, thinking about the size of the order. I decided to shock him some more.

"My numbers are the lowball estimates. Expect that we will need more than two million delivered by this time next year."

"We will be ready," he promised.

"Oh, one last change," I told him, handing him a sealed packet.

"What is this?" he said looking it over.

"That's for the CEO. It is a minor change to the hardware but I want to keep it a secret. It shouldn't add more than $5 to the final delivery price."

"Understood."