I went back alone on a Tuesday, no appointment Amos knew about, because I'd decided this was mine to solve quietly before I had to report anything. Mara Kestrel met me at the door this time instead of Gideon, and she had the look of someone who ran the actual building while someone else ran the story about it.
"Gideon said you wanted the full tour," she said, and there was something careful in how she said full, like she was already deciding how much that word would end up meaning.
She walked me through a laboratory floor of humming machines, explained staffing levels, pointed out a wall of logos from retail pharmacy chains that had signed on. When we reached the service corridor, the one behind the steel door from my last visit, she stopped walking.
"That's a controlled environment," Mara said. "Contamination risk. I can't bring outside visitors through, even investors. Company policy since the beginning."
"Since 2003," I said, because Gideon had made sure I knew that number.
"Since before I got here in 2009," she said, and something in her voice suggested she hadn't written that particular policy and wasn't entirely comfortable defending it, but she defended it anyway.
What she offered instead was what I'd already gotten the first time. A sample drawn, a door closed, a slip of paper returned with numbers on it. I asked if I could at least see the machine itself, empty, not running.
"I can show you a unit on the display floor," she said. "Not one that's live."
I looked at a motionless box with a touchscreen and company logo and nothing underneath it I could evaluate any better than I could evaluate a locked oven. Gideon joined us near the end, trailing the kind of urgency that salesmen learn to wear like cologne.
"We've got a subscription round closing at the end of the month," he said. "Early investors from our 2003 founding are still with us today, still holding. I'd hate for you two to miss the window over paperwork."
I told him I needed more than paperwork. He told me, not unkindly, that what I was asking to see was exactly the intellectual property that made the company worth investing in, and that no investor anywhere got behind that door, not for liability reasons, not for competitive ones.
I drove home with nothing more than I'd had in September, and a deadline now attached to that nothing. That evening I called Amos from my kitchen phone, the old wall unit I never did replace, and he answered on the second ring the way he always had.
"Well?" he said.
I don't know exactly which second it happened in, whether it was somewhere in my chest or somewhere in my mouth, but I said, "I watched them run a sample, Amos. Start to finish. The machine works."
He let out a breath I could hear through the line, something that had been held since September. "That's all I needed," he said. "If you saw it, I believe it."
I had not seen it start to finish. I had seen a finger pricked and a slip of paper returned. Everything between those two moments I had invented out of nothing but my own need to still be the person who knew how machines worked, and I had handed that invention to Amos like it was a fact I'd carried out of the building in my pocket.