"What do you see?"
She started to reply herself, then realized he was talking to the lens.
This time the answer took about ten seconds. Finally a voice in passable simulation of the Tokyo dialect emerged from a gray speaker beneath the lens. "That is a human hand."
"How many fingers does this hand have?" he continued.
Again the eerie, disembodied voice. "The normal human hand has five fingers. This appears to have only three."
"Thank you." He punched a button and turned back. "That came off the mainframe here. Can you imagine the amount of memory and logic processing required to achieve what you've just witnessed: the data base and the computational power and speed? Not to mention the recognition of my voice commands."
"How does it do it?"
He paused. "Tam, this is proprietary, top secret, but what you've just witnessed is an example of parallel processing with MITI's new, still classified 256-megabit dynamic RAM's."
"A quarter of a billion bits of data on a chip." She just stared. "Are they writable?"
"Of course." He again settled himself behind his desk. "The test versions have circuits only a hundred or so atoms wide. And this is only the beginning. Within five years, maybe no more than three, MITI fully expects to have a desktop machine that will pass the Turing test."