"I'm sorry," Peter said. He let go of Byron's hand, and gently patted it.
Byron tugged at his sweater sleeve and flexed his arm.
"But look at this," Peter said. "All of this!" he continued, gesturing in a frenzy now with both hands at the entire table, the scattered parts, the room.
Byron casually fished his tobacco pouch from his shirt pocket.
"Don't you see what's wrong with all this stuff you're talking about?"
"Why don't you tell me," Byron said. He crossed his legs and began packing his pipe.
"First, with all respect to your history," Peter started, "it's too complicated."
Byron took a few glowing tokes from his pipe than shook out the wooden match. His motions were slow, unruffled. He exhaled a plume of smoke, then strolled slowly around the table, eyeing the diagram from over the rim of his glasses. "Well, now that you mention it, she is kind of a little monster, ain't she?"
"Little? Hah! If we were to code this thing as it is we'd need an army of programmers. We need to break it down into smaller, smarter chunks. Objects. Maybe we should snap up that little object system those kids from Cal Poly showed us last week. Hell, looking at this, two million doesn't sound like that much anymore."
"Mmm, that would definitely let us break her down to a more manageable size. And adding features would be trivial. Okay, let's call them back and have another look, make sure it'll do what we want," Byron said.