To See in the Dark
February 5, 2024 – Cupertino, California, USA
The text message from Henry Lee’s boss said to report immediately to a conference room in the forbidden part of Apple’s headquarters. A summons like that was not a great way to start a Monday morning. Henry traipsed through the wide-open hallways gawking at busy employees in cubicles and wondering if he was in trouble. The optimist in him thought there might be a chance he was being promoted or given an award. He quickly dismissed the idea. Nothing good like that happened to him.
Henry found the designated conference room and heard a muffled conversation happening inside. He knocked on the door and heard his boss’s voice shout, “Come in!” Henry cautiously pushed open the door to find his boss, two unknown people wearing visitors’ badges, and a big boss from the executive suite Henry had only seen in photos. The glass wall on the other side of the room revealed a sweeping view of the circular building’s inner courtyard.
“This is Henry Lee,” Henry’s boss said to the others in the room. Then he turned to Henry and said, “Have a seat. Let me introduce you to our special guests, Alex and Mikayla.”
Henry shuffled to the nearest chair and stared at the visitors. Both were relatively young, probably in their early thirties. The woman wore a dark pantsuit, the man a sports coat with no tie. Henry could not decide if they were business types or engineers. He was not sure if he was supposed to speak, but he asked the visitors, “What company are you from?”
Henry’s boss interjected and said, “That’s not important. We’d like you to show them everything you’re doing with the Moonbeam project.”
Henry flinched and looked at his boss like he might be joking. “Are you sure? Aren’t we supposed to keep all that inside the company?”
Henry’s boss looked flustered. Before he could reply, the big boss at the end of the table spoke up in an exasperated voice. “Yes, we’ve worked very hard to keep this secret, but now you need to show our guests everything. Designs, specs, prototypes. Everything.”
The two visitors, Alex and Mikayla, showed no emotion as the big boss made his pronouncement. Henry looked to his supervisor for direction. His boss replied with a reluctant head nod.
“Then I guess we should start in the testing lab,” Henry said. “We’ve got all the hardware there. A short demo will pretty much show how it works.”
Henry’s boss again nodded his head before turning to the visitors. “Go ahead and follow Henry. When you think you’ve seen enough, have him find me.”
Henry stood up and the visitors trailed him out of the room and down the polished hallway. After a few hundred feet, Henry tried engaging in some small talk.
“You from around here?”
“No. East coast,” Alex answered.
“Oh. February weather can be tough on the East Coast.”
“Uh huh.”
“You spend much time in the Bay Area?”
“I did my Ph.D. here. At Stanford,” Mikayla replied.
“Who was your advisor?”
Mikayla replied with, “You probably wouldn’t know him,” and would not say anything more about her college experience.
Henry used his ID badge to unlock doors as they made their way to a basement level. The surroundings looked more industrial, including shiny concrete floors. The walls appeared temporary and were made from a hard, gray plastic.
“We’re lucky to have the space on site,” Henry said. “They didn’t make this place big enough. Other people have been pushed out to older buildings.”
Henry tapped his badge and pulled open a tall metal door to reveal a room filled with work benches. Electronic parts and flashing screens covered most surfaces. Two engineers who reported to Henry looked up from microscopes and stared at the visitors in the room. Henry walked past his colleagues without an explanation and led Alex and Mikayla to another door and a second room.
While the first room with the benches looked chaotic, the second room was sparse and clean. The walls, floor to ceiling, were painted white and two swivel chairs sat directly in the middle. Shelves extended from two of the walls, holding brightly colored plastic shapes like balls, cubes, and pyramids. Eye-chart posters were attached to another wall.
“Go ahead and sit in the chairs,” Henry said to his guests. He shut the room’s only door with a heavy thud.
As Alex and Mikayla dropped into the chairs and looked around, Henry could not help but talk proudly about the work he did on the Moonbeam project. “It hasn’t been easy justifying the cost and the space. Apple likes to see a return on investment, and we’ve been in top secret mode for over five years. This is all I think about. It started when I was in grad school, so it’s been my entire life for a long time.”
Alex and Mikayla did not show any signs of being impressed. Henry decided it was time for a demo. He pulled two sets of goggles from a cabinet and handed one to each of his guests.
“These are meant to fit tight over your eyes and block light. When I tell you to put them on, tighten the straps. The power button is right here on the side. Most of the hardware was made by our partner company, MaxLux.”
Henry’s guests examined the goggles and practiced putting them over their heads. When they seemed comfortable with them, Henry proudly said, “You won’t believe your eyes when you see what they can do.” He held up a remote and touched a button. The room went dark.
“Can you see anything?” Henry asked.
“No,” Alex and Mikayla said together.
“It’s dark, but it’s not totally dark. In the middle of the ceiling, an LED is emitting photons equivalent to a cloudy night with only stars shining.”
Alex and Mikayla looked up but only saw darkness.
“Not a lot of light for the eye to work with,” Henry continued. “Now put on your goggles and hit the power button.”
The guests pushed their goggles in place. When they touched the power button, the display in front of their eyes lit up and showed the room looking very similar to the way it had before Henry turned off the lights. The colors of the plastic shapes were clearly distinguishable. The letters on the eye chart were sharp.
“The lights are still off?” Alex asked.
“Yes,” Henry replied with satisfaction.
“Amazing,” Mikayla whispered.
Alex pulled off the goggles to verify Henry’s claim and Henry chuckled.
“No tricks,” he said as he brought the lights back on.
The indifferent looks Alex and Mikayla had worn were gone. They were clearly impressed. Henry launched into an explanation.
“Over each eye is a full HD array of avalanche photodiodes. We aren’t projecting and detecting infrared. We’re collecting every photon available and amplifying the signal.”
Alex and Mikayla asked questions about gain, dynamic range, and resolution. Henry confidently answered and assured them the goggles worked in all kinds of lighting conditions, from sunlight to darkest night.
“We’ve understood the physics for a long time. The big challenge was making a super camera on the production line for regular cameras. MaxLux worked out most of those details. We finally have the yields up and the cost down. The next iPhone will have a camera just like this that can see in the dark. No more flashlights. It’s going to be as revolutionary as Edison’s lightbulb.”
The visitors had more questions about size and battery requirements. They grew more impressed with each of Henry’s answers. And Henry continued to let his guard down and spill company secrets.
“Two years ago, they wanted to put an inferior version into the phones. It was okay, but more grainy and needed more light. I pushed them to wait until the perfect version was ready. I guess I’m a perfectionist.”
“This is far better than any available night vision,” Alex said. “If you put it in a phone, anyone can buy it at a hundredth of the cost of the other gear.”
“It changes everything for the military,” Mikayla added. “Huge advantage if you can fight at night and the enemy can’t.”
Henry quickly pointed out other advantages. “We’ll put them in phones, goggles, glasses. Instead of streetlights, all you need is our camera. Maybe we’ll put less lighting in buildings. It’s the end of darkness as we know it.”
Alex and Mikayla shared a satisfied glance. Alex said, “I think we’ve seen enough. You’ve done amazing work.”
“Not just me,” Henry answered. “We’ve got a whole team here working day and night. And MaxLux has more than a hundred people on the project.”
Alex nodded and said, “We need to speak with your boss again.”
Henry sent his boss a text and was instructed to deliver the visitors to another conference room on the other side of headquarters. During the walk, Alex and Mikayla warmed up and asked Henry about his personal life and plans for the future. When he left them in the conference room, they thanked him and repeated how impressed they were. Then they closed the door and Henry was left outside the room. He returned to his lab wondering what the visit was about. As the day wore on, a sinking feeling filled his chest. Something drastic was about to change his life.
That afternoon, Henry heard from his boss and was told to hurry up to another conference room close to his lab. When he arrived, his boss was the only one inside.
“What’s going on? Who were those people?” Henry demanded.
“Government.”
“What part of the government?”
Henry’s boss shook his head. “Who knows. But somebody way at the top has decided the Moonbeam project and your camera are critical to national security. They don’t want everyone to have it.”
“So, what does that mean?”
“They’re taking it. They’re already talking to MaxLux. They’ll manufacture the cameras and they’ll go exclusively to military units. Completely top secret.”
“What about all the time and money we spent?”
“They say they’ll reimburse the research and development costs.”
“What about the iPhone launch? I was going to be in a commercial. You said I was going to be famous.”
Henry’s boss shook his head. “Not yet.”
“They can’t do this!” Henry shouted in frustration. “What about freedom and innovation?”
“I’m afraid they can do a lot of things if they really want to. The government can make life very difficult if you don’t play along.”
“What do the big bosses think? They can’t be okay with this. We were going to completely dominate the phone market.”
“Things don’t always go to plan. They get messy. We’ll play along for now and earn a big favor for the future. The company will be fine.”
“Then what happens to me? To us?”
Henry’s boss was still thinking about business strategies. “If only we would have put out the grainy version two years ago. It wasn’t so great, but it would have gotten the world used to the idea. Then when we were ready with the perfect version, it wouldn’t have sounded so dangerous and revolutionary. If only you weren’t such a perfectionist.”
“You used to like that I was a perfectionist. So, what happens tomorrow? We close the lab?”
“Nothing that extreme. We’ll put the camera in a phone eventually. We’ll need to be ready. But let’s just say you can take more days off.”
“I haven’t had a day off in five years.”
“You should take a long vacation. Get far away for a while. When you come back, you’ll get to choose your next assignment. You should pick something good. Apple needs to keep you happy and quiet. You can be my boss if you want.”
“You’d want to work for me?”
Henry’s boss smiled. “On second thought, scratch that. I could never work for a perfectionist.”
Henry sighed and said, “I thought I was going to be famous. I was so close.”
“Oh Henry, soon you’ll realize this is all good news for you. You’re about to discover having leverage is much better than fame. You’re going to spend a lot more time in meetings and the rest of us will keep our flashlights just a little longer.”
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