"In passing."
"Good. Then what you're about to witness won't shock you."
I watched as she kicked on one of the NEC desk stations and loaded in a program. Next she walked over, flipped a switch on a little box, and a drawer glided out. In went Mori's shiny disk. Another button was pushed, the drawer receded, and the disk was spinning silently.
Well, I thought. You want peaches, you shake the tree, right? Maybe she's about to kick hell out of the orchard.
"I'm going to dump this into the memory of the mother ship downstairs." She did some fiddling, then typed in her password to sign on the mainframe on eleven. "Beam us down, Scottie." In moments she and all those silicon cells below us were beeping away at each other. She didn't look up, just kept typing away, the hollow click-clack that's become the signature sound of our computer age. Finally she leaned back and breathed. "Okay, it's reading the disk. After it's in memory down there, we can pull up the contents here on the screen and see what we've got."
I don't know how long it took to read the thing. Probably no more than a minute or so, though it seemed forever. Finally something flashed on the screen and told us the disk had been dumped. Tam took it out of its little player and passed it to me.
"Here, put this back in her case. While I start pulling up the file."
I'd just finished snapping it shut when I heard an expletive from out on the floor that would not be judged suitable for family audiences.
"Watch your language."
She was sitting there staring at the screen. Finally she turned and looked at me. "So close, yet so far. It's encrypted'."