Chapter 531: Post-Meeting Casual Chat

Evening of Thursday, September 26, 1991.

New York, Waldorf Astoria Hotel, 21st floor.

When Satsuki returned to the suite, it was completely dark outside the window.

After the shareholders’ meeting during the day, she accompanied Buffett to a pre-meeting communication session for a special board meeting.

Then she went over the talking points to be released externally tomorrow with Frank, and finally dealt with a round of reporters downstairs at the hotel who refused to leave after waiting for most of the day.

When the elevator doors opened on the 21st floor, she felt that the smile on her face had probably used up its entire year’s quota.

Chizuru took her coat and hung it in the wardrobe near the door.

"Eldest Miss, the hot water is ready. Does dinner need to be sent up now?"

"Wait a little longer."

Satsuki kicked off her high heels, sank her entire body into the large sofa in the living room, and let out a long breath.

Her heels began to ache faintly again.

Should she just wear the sneakers she bought with Ayako and the others before? Those looked tall too... But wouldn’t sneakers paired with a suit look a bit strange?

Just as she was staring blankly at the chandelier on the ceiling, the phone on the coffee table suddenly rang.

Chizuru walked over and picked it up. After hearing just one sentence, a look of understanding appeared on her face.

She covered the mouthpiece and turned her head.

"Eldest Miss, it’s Miss Suzuki."

Satsuki instantly pulled back her hand, which had been resting on the documents.

Emi?

Come to think of it, it had been a while since she last heard this chatterbox chirping away.

She straightened up from the sofa, took the receiver, and conveniently turned off the television with her other hand.

"Satsuki-chan—!"

The voice coming through the receiver was so loud that Satsuki instinctively pulled the phone a little further away.

Across more than half of America, Emi’s voice was not weakened much at all by the cross-state line.

"Keep your voice down, the next room can hear you."

"No they won’t, the walls of the Waldorf are so thick," Emi said righteously, "Besides, I’ve held it in for several days, I have to call you today."

Satsuki leaned back into the sofa, the corners of her mouth already curving up unconsciously.

"Where are you now?"

"Seattle!"

"Near the University of Washington?"

"Yeah, we just finished our meetings this afternoon. The hotel we’re staying at is right by the lake, and you can see lots of sailboats from the window, but it’s started raining here, gray and gloomy all day."

Satsuki glanced at the clock on the wall.

It was past nine in New York, and just past six over in Seattle.

No wonder this girl had so much energy.

"Have you eaten?"

"Not yet, Mr. Kawakami and the others went to find a restaurant, saying the salmon here is very famous."

Emi paused.

"But let’s put that aside for now."

"Satsuki-chan, let me tell you, these past few days have really—"

Then she went on in one breath.

After parting ways at JFK Airport, the research team’s first stop was Ann Arbor.

That laboratory at the University of Michigan making integrated neural probes was something Emi had previously only seen in the authors’ affiliation columns of papers.

Walking in for real this time, she discovered that their cleanroom was even smaller than she had imagined, and many of the equipment inside were old machines modified by themselves.

"Yet the things they make are just really good."

Emi’s tone carried a hint of unconviction, mixed with a bit of admiration.

"For the processing flow of silicon-based probes, they can explain the reasons for why every step is done that way."

"As soon as Mr. Najafi bumped into his old colleagues there, the two of them stood in the corridor and chatted for over an hour, neither of them thinking to enter the meeting room."

"And then?"

"Later, we negotiated a joint testing project. Their side will produce the design for the new version of probes, and Odaiba’s side will be responsible for the long-term implantation animal data."

"And there was a young postdoc whom I invited to visit Tokyo next spring, and he agreed on the spot."

Satsuki let out an "Mn," signaling her to continue.

The second stop was Salt Lake City.

Professor Norman of the University of Utah personally led them to see that hundred-channel electrode array.

Placed under the microscope, that thing looked like a small, neat bed of nails, with each needle tip so thin it was almost invisible.

"Let me tell you, their engineering school, medical school, and affiliated hospital are all right next to each other."

Emi spoke faster and faster.

"Seeing the array in the lab in the morning, we could go straight to the neurosurgery department in the afternoon to discuss implantation surgery with the doctors."

"The doctors even took us to see where they used to make artificial hearts—you know what, the University of Utah was once the first place in the world to put a permanent artificial heart into a patient’s body!"

"I know."

"You know?"

"I saw it in the news."

She saw it in her past life.

Of course, Satsuki didn’t say this out loud.

"Oh..."

Emi was a bit regretful that her intel hadn’t surprised the other person, but she quickly grew excited again.

"Anyway, it’s just amazing! Besides, Professor Norman’s side is willing to sell us a batch of arrays for comparative testing, and the conditions have been negotiated."

"You negotiated it?"

There was silence on the other end of the receiver for half a second.

Then Emi’s voice rose noticeably, carrying a barely concealable smugness.

"Yeah, I negotiated it."

"The price, delivery time, how to share test data, and what data we can’t let them see—I negotiated all of it."

"At first I was a little nervous, but after sitting down, I found out it didn’t seem that hard after all."

"When he asked about materials, I had the person in charge of materials answer; when he asked about decoding, I had Mr. Kawakami answer. I just had to keep thinking about what things were useful for our project and what things couldn’t be let out, and that was it."

Saying this, she paused.

"Just like what Satsuki-chan told me on the plane."

Satsuki held the receiver without speaking immediately.

At that time she was still worried, wondering what she should do if she couldn’t answer a single question upon meeting those people she previously only knew from papers.

And only a few days had passed.

She was growing up properly.

"Satsuki-chan?"

"Listening."

Satsuki smiled slightly.

"Well done."

"...Really?"

"When have I ever lied to you?"

"Not on research funding," Emi seriously corrected, "Other places aren’t so sure."

"Hey."

A burst of giggles came from the receiver.

"Anyway," Emi finished laughing, her tone turning uncharacteristically serious, "This time I really feel a bit like a person in charge."

"Didn’t lose face for you, did I?"

"No."

Satsuki leaned back against the sofa, looking at the dotted lights of Manhattan outside the window.

"Not at all."

...

Emi’s itinerary over there wasn’t finished yet.

What she saw in Seattle today was the University of Washington’s laboratory researching closed-loop neural control.

The other party had already conducted experiments more than twenty years ago allowing monkeys to learn to actively regulate single neuron firing through reward feedback, making them one of the earliest in the entire field to prove that "the brain can in turn adapt to machines."

"We talked about closed-loop training all afternoon," Emi said, "Their ideas happened to connect with Mr. Kawakami’s decoding model. Mr. Kawakami kept writing things down in his notebook on the way back, not even taking a glance at the lake outside the car window."

"What about tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow morning we have to go back again to see their primate center. Then fly to Baltimore, and finally Atlanta."

Emi counted on her fingers.

"The time in Baltimore hasn’t been completely finalized yet; they have a meeting next week. Atlanta is already scheduled though."

"No rush, take your time," Satsuki said, "If you need to stay a few more days, stay a few more days."

"Mm!"

Emi agreed readily, then abruptly changed the subject.

"Oh right right, Satsuki-chan, you were on TV today!"

"...You saw it?"

"As soon as the hotel TV was turned on, there it was! CNN played it several times, and it was also on the evening news."

Emi’s voice became excited again all at once.

"It was that segment where you stood on stage and spoke. There were hundreds of Americans sitting below, all those uncles wearing suits, looking very rich and with stinky faces."

"And then Satsuki-chan stood right at the front and said ’I requested this sentence to be deleted’—"

She deliberately lowered her voice, imitating Satsuki’s tone on stage.

It wasn’t very similar.

"And then the crowd below exploded with a ’bang’!"

"Mr. Kawakami and the others were watching from the side, all of them silent. After watching, Mr. Najafi asked me, ’Is your boss usually like this?’"

"How did you answer?"

"I said, she’s even fiercer usually."

"Suzuki Emi."

"Just kidding, just kidding!"

Emi couldn’t stop laughing on the other end.

"But it’s really so cool, Satsuki-chan."

"Standing in front of so many American bigshots without stage fright at all, and in the end everyone stood up and applauded... it’s simply extremely cool."

Satsuki listened with the corners of her mouth slightly upturned.

"What’s there to have stage fright about? Not having stage fright is the most basic requirement for acting."

She thought for a moment and added another sentence.

"Besides, all those bigshots you mentioned combined aren’t worth as much as me, you know?"

"...Eh?"

"So, Emi, sometimes you have to learn to think about your own advantages. You’re the same; when it comes to brain-computer interface research, not many people can make you feel inferior now, right?"

"But..."

Emi instinctively wanted to retort.

"Many people’s research is deeper than mine, especially coming to the US this time and meeting so many scholars I previously only knew from papers, only to find out there are still so many things I don’t understand."

"Then how long have you been researching?"

"Mn?"

"And how long have they been researching?"

Satsuki reminded, "If you take your accumulation of less than two years and compare it with their achievements of over a decade or decades, of course you’ll feel like you’re not awesome enough."

Emi was stunned for a moment.

It seemed... that was indeed the case?

Previously, she only focused on what things she couldn’t yet do in those papers, rarely thinking about how many years were actually spent behind those achievements.

"Ooh... thinking about it this way, I seem to be pretty awesome?"

"Drop the ’seem’."

"Hehe..."

"That’s right."

Satsuki nodded with satisfaction.

"However, Satsuki-chan."

"Mn?"

"How have you been in New York these past few days? I saw on the news that Salomon seems to have had a lot of things going on."

"Yeah, today alone meetings took up most of the day, and I didn’t even want to wear shoes after coming back."

Satsuki lowered her head and glanced at the high heels she had kicked aside next to the sofa.

"But I wasn’t working the whole time either, Mr. Buffett also introduced me to quite a few interesting people."

"Eh? Tell me quickly!"

Emi instantly became interested.

These past few days she had been busy running around laboratories; although she could see Satsuki on the news every day, she really didn’t know what else Satsuki had been doing in New York besides Salomon’s affairs.

Satsuki thought for a moment, then started from that steak meal.

Buffett treated her to steak, and having learned the lesson from last time, only ordered the smallest six ounces, only to be gravely evaluated by the old gentleman as "an investment that overestimated one’s own digestive capacity."

And that yacht cruising on the Hudson River for an entire afternoon. Several men downstairs were arguing endlessly over card games, so Mrs. Graham and Mrs. Astor simply pulled her up to the upper deck, saying that those stinky men should play by themselves this afternoon.

"Mr. Buffett was also counted among the stinky men?"

"Counted."

"Does he know?"

"Probably not, he was losing at cards right then."

Emi laughed for a while again.

"Rich people in America seem a bit different from those in Japan."

"How are they different?"

"I can’t quite put my finger on it," Emi thought for a moment, "It just feels... when they argue it’s more like they’re playing, and when they’re playing it’s more like they’re arguing."

Satsuki seriously pondered this sentence.

It seemed that was indeed the case.